I’m amazing! I’m floating on air. My bum is absolutely refusing to stay in the car seat.
I’m amazing. I bet he says that to everyone.
I pretend I haven’t heard and close my eyes, keen to get some sleep on the short journey back to the Smiths’ house.
I wake up and a young Kevin Keegan is smiling down at me. Where am I? I’m in a single bed with itchy nylon sheets and itchy nylon bedspread. They are brown. Different shades of brown. My worst fear – I’ve screwed someone with bad taste. I hear children laughing in the garden and I look out of the window.
Darren.
And Charlotte and Lucy. It’s a grey, bleak day. Grey grass, grey sky. But Darren and the girls are a remarkable contrast, their clothes and laughter, a colourful relief to the horizon. Impetuously I bang on the window and wave furiously. They all look up and wave back. Then I remember I haven’t got any make-up on, so I dive back into bed before they can see me properly. There’s a knock on the door and, before I answer, Mrs Smith bustles in. She smiles broadly and I bathe in it. Perhaps she’s heard how good I was with the children yesterday and is beginning to approve of me. Not that it matters. I neither want nor need Mrs Smith’s approval.
Much.
She hands me a cup of tea that’s so strong the spoon can stand up in it. I take it from her and thank her.
‘By, you were tired, weren’t you?’
A strange feeling of unease creeps into bed with me; it gets under the sheets and disperses the cosy feeling. Oh bugger, yes, now I remember. Last night I’d been very tired. Too tired to argue my case about the show properly but tired enough to argue petulantly. We were having a laugh. In the absence of wine or gin we decided to raid his parents’ cocktail cabinet. A walnut veneer monstrosity, straight from the Ark, justifiably hidden in the ‘front room’. We agreed that tequila was the perfect accompaniment to cheese on toast (desperate measures for desperate times. The other choices were all fluorescent in colour and likely to have been radioactive). I had the idea of broaching the subject of the show whilst the family were out and we had the house to ourselves. I thought that as he was beginning to warm to me he might be open to discussion. He wasn’t. The conversation had been brief, powerful and cold.
He turned his back to me and concentrated on grating the cheese. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing to attention. I had an overwhelming desire to blow on them.
‘I’m not saying that you should have sex with Claire.’ God forbid. ‘Just find out what would happen. Just let fate take its course,’ I argued to his very wide shoulders.
‘But your programme isn’t about fate or what would happen naturally if everyone was left to their own devices. Your show is designed to distort. To bring out the worst in people.’ He was watching my reflection in the window against the black night sky.
‘The worst in people is the norm.’
He tutted dismissively. But he did, at least, turn back to me. Or was he just turning because he needed to put the bread under the grill?
‘No, it’s not. You just think that the peculiar is normal because it’s prevalent in your life.’
Fucking cheek. What does he know about my life? Well, besides the stuff we’d talked about at the Oxo tower restaurant, on the train and today. But that hardly amounts to revealing insight. He knows little more about me than what my favourite milkshake was when I was a kid. Oh, and admittedly, we had a fairly flirty but extremely coded (due to the presence of minors) conversation about condom flavours this afternoon. But then half the men at TV6 know that I prefer banana-flavour condoms.
None of them know it’s chocolate milkshake.
I glared at him and said, ‘Infidelity is a fact. Disloyalty is a fact.’
‘OK. Maybe. But it’s a horrifying fact and should remain horrifying. By continually showing betrayal as an acceptable form of entertainment you are neutralizing the horror. Are you so damaged that you can’t see that?’
I was tired and sick of his sanctimonious attitude. I found I was shouting. I ignored his question and asked my own instead. ‘You want to shelter who, exactly, from these cultural and moral