Page 45 of Looking for Group

Coming back to Shropshire had taught her that it hadn’t, and moments like this—looking up a hill at a stately home in the twilight—reinforced the lesson.

But that sense of wonder still felt fragile enough that she regretted having to let it go.

Unfortunately, the alternative was to turn to her teenage companion and say, hey can we just stop and appreciate some quiet beauty because we might never see it again, which might just have pushed her, in Alanis’s eyes, from uncool into irredeemably sad.

“I’m starving,” declared Alanis, substantially less concerned with the ache of the transient and ephemeral than with the buffet, which was being served al fresco outside the main dining hall.

They were just making their way over to join the other contestants when a weaselly-looking man with a clipboard descended on them from somewhere in the small city-state of technical vehicles and trailers that were parked on the less conspicuous side of the grounds.

“I’m terribly sorry to bother you,” he began in the tones of a man who was always sorry to bother you but would never allow his sorrow to detract from his bothersomeness. “Are you the journalist?”

He was looking directly at Alanis when he said it, which Audrey tried to blame on the light but which she suspected was more to do with the fact that serious reporters weren’t meant to get yanked around country estates by actual children.

“I’m the journalist,” she clarified.

“Jennifer wants to see you.”

It had been an abrupt introduction, and Audrey wasn’t sure she wanted to reward abruptness. “Sorry, who are you?”

The man winced as though he’d accidentally taken a vegan to a restaurant that served nothing but veal and foie gras.

Then he held out a shaky hand and said, “Thrimp. Colin Thrimp. Jennifer’s assistant.

Jennifer Hallet. She’s in charge of”—he made an expansive gesture—“well, everything really. And she wants to talk to you especially because of your…you know…”

Audrey should have seen something like this coming. Nobody trusted media people, especially other media people. “Job?”

He nodded.

“Does she think I’m going to write some kind of searing exposé?”

Alanis grinned in a way that Audrey didn’t think she’d have had the confidence to grin, even at sixteen. “You should. That’d be effervescent.”

“Stop it,” said Audrey, trying to sound playful rather than snappish and mostly succeeding.

Colin Thrimp wrung his hands. “Can you just go to see her? She said I had to bring you to her yesterday, which normally means soon and it’s already been a bit longer than soon and she’ll be in a fearful mood if you don’t go and speak to her.”

“How fearful, exactly?” asked Audrey. It had been a long day and an executive in a fearful mood—or really any kind of mood—fell pretty close to last on her list of things she wanted to deal with.

“Fearfully fearful.”

It wasn’t the most helpful of answers, but Audrey had met several Colin Thrimps in her life and didn’t think there was much point protesting further.

After taking a responsible but obviously futile moment to make certain that Alanis would be okay on her own (she was—she was probably okayer than Audrey would have been by a long shot), Audrey set off in search of the fearfully fearful producer.

***

Jennifer Hallet’s trailer was unmarked, which made it mildly awkward for Audrey to find, but only mildly. Her keen investigative instincts told her to try the biggest, swankiest one and the biggest, swankiest one it was.

She knocked on the door and then stood outside waiting. When she’d been waiting for just long enough that she was about to give up, a voice from within called out, “Who the fuck is it?”

“It’s Audrey?” she tried. “Audrey Lane.”

There was the sound of movement and then the door was thrown open by the most intimidating woman Audrey had ever seen.

Jennifer Hallet was tall and cold-eyed, with lips that curled into a permanent frown.

There was something arresting about the sheer concentrated hostility of her, almost a challenge—the most undirected, universal kind of challenge, as if she was telling the entire world to come and have a go if it thought it was hard enough.

And Audrey only realised she’d been staring when Jennifer Hallet asked her, quite pointedly, what she was staring at.

“Sorry, I—you wanted to see me. I’m the journalist.”

“Oh that . Took you long enough.”

“Your assistant only just found me.”

“Then it took him long enough.” Jennifer went back inside the trailer and, suspecting that waiting for an invitation would be an exercise in futility, Audrey followed her.

Inside, she found a setup that looked one step more supervillain than was strictly necessary.

While the wall of constantly shifting monitors was probably a legitimate necessity of the job, and the various keyboards, microphones, and panels of miscellaneous switches likely had their uses, the enormous black swivel chair was a Persian cat away from full Blofeld.

Right in the middle of the functionality-to-evil spectrum were two smaller seats that had been set up at optimal bollocking distance.

“I just thought,” Jennifer said in a voice as smooth and pleasant as honey over razorblades, “that we should have a nice, polite, face-to-face conversation so that we can both be crystal fucking clear how our relationship is going to work.”

Settling herself onto a bollocking chair, Audrey did her best to remain composed. “If you like, but I’m not sure what there is to—”

“I’ve got your number , sunshine.”

“Which number, exactly?”

“Seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and six.”

To anybody else, the number would have been meaningless. But to Audrey it had a very clear, very specific meaning. It was the circulation of the Shropshire Echo . “We get over half a million unique visits on our website as well.”

“And do you know what I do with half a million unique visits?” asked Jennifer Hallet.

Audrey was pretty sure she could tell where this was going, and how this particular TV bigshot liked to express herself. “Do you, perhaps, wipe your arse with them?”

“I do fucking not. Because they’re a fucking ephemeral concept and if I tried to wipe my arse with an ephemeral concept I’d wind up with shit on my fingers.

” Jennifer paused, definitely more for effect than for breath.

“What I do is I look at them and I say well gosh, what a tiny pissing number of unique visits , then I go back to my job making one of the biggest shows on television and then I say to myself I hope no miserable little spunkstain— ”

“Please don’t call me a spunkstain,” replied Audrey with a professional calm that she was, under the circumstances, pretty fucking proud of.

“I’m sorry.” Jennifer Hallet didn’t even blink.

“Am I being demeaning? Let’s try again. I hope no miserable little sack of piss-drenched baby-wipes comes crawling up here from fucking Shropshire to try and wank her ten minutes of relevance out of my years of back-breaking work .

But oh look, it seems Satan has jizzed in my cornflakes again, because here you are. ”

Well, wasn’t this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Clearly the politely-set-boundaries plan had failed, so Audrey shifted to the be-visibly-unfazed plan. “You knew where I worked when I applied.”

“I did. You ticked some boxes and we needed a quirky rural one for this season so I thought I’d take the risk. But I know journalists”— here it comes , said Audrey’s inner cynic—“You’re like the fucking police—”

“Never off duty?” Audrey finished.

“Pricks.”

“I don’t suppose”—Audrey shifted slightly in a chair she was sure had been deliberately chosen to be as buttock-aggravating as possible—“you have a less sweary mode of communication you could fall back on?”

“Fuck off.”

“Thought so.” She adjusted her position again to stop her arse from falling asleep. “In that case, let me just reassure you that I work for a local paper, about local things, and so unless you happen to have a contestant from Cleobury Mortimer, there’s nothing here for me to write about.”

Jennifer folded her arms like a statue of Stalin. “That’s what you say. But I know what you people are like. You get one sniff of—”

Despite not having been told she could go, Audrey stood up. “Look, you’ve warned me not to mess with your program. I’ve told you I have no intention of messing with your program. I’m not sure what more you want me to say.”

It seemed like there was more Jennifer could have said, but it also seemed the get-up-and-agree combo had taken the wind out of her sails.

“So I think we’re on the same page?” Audrey confirmed.

Jennifer Hallet looked like she was about to nod and couldn’t quite bring herself to. “Hang on, there’s no we here.”

The sensible thing to do was to get out.

Because while Jennifer Hallet had a number of qualities that made sticking around a very tempting prospect—like legs for days and dark eyes that felt like they could look right through you if they didn’t always seem to be looking at something else—her temperament wasn’t one of them.

And maybe it was the journey, or just being in a strange stately home, but Audrey wasn’t in a sensible mood.

So, she lingered a moment and pushed her luck.

“We’re having a conversation. That’s a we . ”

“This isn’t a conversation. This is a—”

“A what? A scolding? I’ve not really done anything scold-worthy, so from where I’m standing this is either a conversation or it’s you inviting me onto your show—something you didn’t have to do in the first place—then pre-emptively deciding I’m going to screw you and hauling me into your office to be a dick for no reason. ”

“Is that how you see it?” Unexpectedly, the producer sounded almost defensive. In fact, if Audrey let herself use her optimistic ears, it might even have been defensiveness with an undertone of grudging respect.

Deciding words had done their job, Audrey nodded precisely once.

“I will admit,” conceded Jennifer Hallet in a tone like she was revealing state secrets, “that I could have blocked your application if I wanted to, and I didn’t.”

“Because?” asked Audrey, aware that, if she came across as too curious, she’d confirm all of Jennifer Hallet’s worst suspicions.

“Because this season needs to be perfect and you—from a certain perspective—are perfect.”

Audrey knew better than to be flattered by people in positions of authority saying things that seemed superficially positive. Even if they meant it, they didn’t mean what you wanted them to mean. “Perfect how? ”

“Memorable look, interesting job, ticks a diversity box.”

“The gay box or the heavy box?” asked Audrey, determined not to let Jennifer’s tone affect her in any way.

“Both, but mostly body positivity. Honestly the gay thing counts against you—ginger and sparkly from last season are still looking cute all over fucking TikTok, so the allies— ” she almost spat the word—“are in the bag. We go too queer this year and we’ll lose the middle-England Tory voter market.”

This was still feeling like bait. “Is that a market you want to keep?”

“Do they have money? Then yes. Plus, the fuckers run the country and that includes BBC funding, so we need to reflect the rich and beautiful diversity of these islands while also pretending that we hate immigrants and are very concerned about trans people. That’s public service broadcasting.”

It was a deathly cynical attitude, but one Audrey recognised even if it wasn’t usually stated so openly. “You’re meant to be apolitical, which in practice means agreeing with the Home Secretary?”

Jennifer Hallet nodded. “Would you look at that, she gets it. Welcome to the magical world where Brexit wasn’t a shitshow, the only minorities who exist are charmingly non-threatening, and you can only be fat if you’re also pretty.”

Pretty wasn’t an adjective Audrey would have used to describe herself—although that did make her fatally susceptible to its use by other people. “Fuck, am I here to be one of the good ones? ”

To that, Jennifer Hallet offered a frankly wicked grin. “How’s it feel?”

“Fine,” replied Audrey, still defiantly unperturbed.

A look of genuine dismay crept across Jennifer Hallet’s face. “I hope you’re not going to make me like you, sunshine. I can’t think of anything worse. Now if we’re done, perhaps you could be so kind as to get the fuck out of my sight.”

It was, Audrey thought, about the most literal example of mixed messages she could possibly imagine.

And it left her with the nagging sense that this wasn’t the last time she was going to run afoul of Jennifer Hallet’s highly specific worldview.

Along with the still more nagging suspicion that she couldn’t quite tell if she was dreading their next run-in or looking forward to it.