Penny Smith - Coming Up Next

‘You’ll get another, don’t worry,’ said Andi.

‘What? Man?’

‘No. Job.’

‘Who’ll want me after it gets out I’ve been sacked? There’ll be some crap statement about how it was mutual, how I want to spend more time with my microwave, how I’m happy for Keera and wish her all the best, and in ten years’ time, I’ll be invited on to the forty-eighth I’m A Nonentity Get Me Out of Here. I’ll be the first to get voted off. And the only way I’ll get back on air is if I develop some sort of terminal illness or something. Which, let’s face it, would be terminal. And unpleasant.’

She paused. Then: ‘Do you think I should disappear?’

‘Well, I suppose you could go and bury yourself in Yorkshire for a bit, let your parents take the strain. Would your mum and dad mind you hanging round the house like a depressed weather front, all cloud with occasional periods of heavy rain?’

Suddenly Katie thought that might be exactly what she needed. Dad trying out recipes from his Jamie Oliver cookbook, practising the saxophone to drown out the sound of her mum ‘wittering on’ to her friends and relations. ‘Actually, you’re right. Mum’s taken up art. I can paint black canvases, slash them and sell them to the Tate Modern. A new career. And I can get fat on Dad’s food because it won’t matter any more. And eat Jaffa cakes with Mum. And sell the flat and live with them until I get wrinkly. Talk about how I used to be famous, as I pick hairs out of my chin and dribble egg on my saggy jumper.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ murmured Andi.

Katie thought of her bedroom at the back of the house, looking over the orchard and Dad’s vegetable patch-cum-burial ground: three dogs, two rabbits mown down with a rotavator, one inexpertly hibernating tortoise, and a pigeon that had broken its neck by flying into a window.

She put down the phone and burst into tears. She cried as she put the washing on and cried while she was watching television, in the absence of anything more constructive to do.

She ran a bath, put on Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs and cried some more. She cried until the bath was cold. She got out and looked in the mirror. A swollen, red-faced, rubbery-lipped thing gazed back at her. With a clump of lashes missing on the right eyelid. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said with a thick voice. ‘No doubt about it. I’ll get a job just like that. First sign of madness, talking to yourself,’ she added.

‘Right,’ she said, and opened the medicine cabinet. ‘Party time.’ She took out the Benylin for throaty coughs. Went upstairs and got the whisky bottle. Put on a CD by Leonard Cohen. Sank into both bottles and further into misery.

Hours later, she woke up. Not an ounce of moisture in her entire body. She had not felt so wretched since Matt Dougal had dumped her when she was sixteen. She had cried non-stop for three days and sworn she would never let anyone dump her again. And she had held to that promise. Any man who had got close, she had split up with as soon as she’d seen signs of waning interest. One had told her he had wanted to knit his soul with hers and had mapped out a future with her in the stars. He had been the most romantic boyfriend ever. She had arrived at his flat one night to be serenaded by a violin and cello duo in the corner of the sitting room. They had tactfully left and he had led her through to his bed, strewn with rose petals. But one day he had said idly that the new girl at work reminded him of Catherine Zeta-Jones. And that had been it. The end. Many years later, he told her he had been planning to propose to her.

Anyway. No man had dumped her since Matt. But now she had been dumped as publicly as it was possible to be. Or she was about to be dumped as publicly as it was possible to be.

No point in thinking about that now. She’d be better off trying to get some sleep that didn’t involve whisky and Benylin, so that she would look all right if the photographers took shots of her tomorrow.

Tears were leaking again.

She decided to clear out her wardrobes. She cried intermittently as she made an enormous pile of colourful suits in one corner of the room. Her breakfast-television outfits.

The Boss who had employed her to replace the veteran newscaster Beatrice Shah had told her that the viewers wouldn’t care if she fucked up her interviews, but they did like to have a nice bright splash of colour in the morning while their kids were throwing the hamster around. ‘It’s not whether you’re good or not. It’s how good you look. Frankly, we could put a talking gorilla on the sofa as long as it wore nice clothes,’ he had said. ‘But they’re more expensive than humans. Never make the mistake of thinking you’re irreplaceable.’

Maybe she had. She’d felt too secure in her work. She knew she’d done a good job. But Keera was younger, prettier … exotic.

Keera had come to Hello Britain! after losing her job as a radio disc jockey in Devon: she had done a raunchy video that had been featured in most of the tabloids. She had got herself an agent, and the management at the breakfast-television station had agreed to her doing a stint as a reporter in a small civil war they hadn’t been thinking of sending anyone out to – no one from Britain holidayed there so most people hadn’t heard of it. She wouldn’t be paid, but she’d get a little bit of airtime. ‘Nothing guaranteed, mind you,’ The Boss had said.

She had worn tiny little vest tops and combat trousers, which had shown off her lean figure. And a little Tiffany heart necklace … the station had been swamped with replacements when she lost it.

She had come home to a heroine’s welcome and endless pieces in glossy magazines. ‘Beauty and the Beast of War’. ‘My Heart Remains In Africa’. ‘Out of Africa and Into the Top 10’ – that was about how she’d become one of the top ten icons of the year. No one ever revealed that her reports had been written for her and faxed over for her to rehearse.

Katie had been supportive when Keera had started at Hello Britain! ‘You don’t need to be a trained journalist to do this job,’ she had told her, over coffee at the canteen one morning. ‘Obviously it helps. The main thing, though, is to be interested. And as informed as possible.’

In the last few months, she had belatedly recognized the threat Keera posed to her previously unchallenged spot as queen of breakfast television.

Mike, her co-presenter, had told her not to be silly, that she had his unwavering support: ‘You know I could never work as well with anyone else. We’re like an old married couple, you and I. There’d be an outcry if Minnie Mouse pointed her bony arse at the sofa.’ That had been his nickname for Keera ever since she’d squeaked during a live interview when she had mistakenly thought a car backfiring was a sniper.

Katie had laughed, but thought that he would have done more than squeak in that situation: he would have had to wash his little white Calvin Klein pants.

She checked her tear ducts. Almost dry. She took two Nurofen, and went to bed.

She woke up at dawn, and managed to wait until six o’clock before phoning her agent.

Katie had been one of Jim Break’s most lucrative clients – he had bought his house in leafy Surrey almost entirely on the back of her groundbreaking Hello Britain! deal. Although they had fallen out a few times, they had a genuinely friendly relationship.

While Katie was on holiday, he had been called in for a meeting. He had had an inkling as to what it was about, so had gone in to salvage what was left of her contract. Unless they could prove she had done something immoral, illegal or downright unpleasant, she’d get some cash.