Jonathan Coe - Number 11

DANIELLE: Oh. OK. ( a beat ) Well, thanks for putting me right about that.

When the programme was over, Alison sat for a while on the sofa, staring at the blank TV screen. Watching the show had been one of the strangest experiences of her life. She knew her mother intimately: better — far better — than she knew anyone else in the world. And the woman on the television had recognizably been her mother. And yet, in the very occasional glimpses of her which the programme had afforded, it had also been like watching a stranger. She had seen her as the cameras had seen her, and as the people editing the show had seen her, and these perspectives, she thought, were unforgiving. They were unfiltered by love.

As for Twitter, there was not much love for Val to be found on there this evening.

Omg she is so dull

Get this woman off my fucking tv screen

Join the campaign #getridofVal

Fucksake what a bitch

How many blowjobs did you have to give to get on this show

Grammar nazi!

Lay off Danielle

Correcting Danielle who the fuck do you think you are

How dare you speak like that to Danielle you ugly old sow

Anvil faced mare #getridofVal

Get back to your library and leave Danielle alone #teamDanielle

Fuck off back to ur libary

Squid squib who gives a fuck apart from some dried-up librarian

Fucking bitch the viewers are going to make you suffer for that

Again, Alison spent an hour or two blocking the most offensive people. Again, she felt as impotent as Canute trying to hold back the tide. Her mother’s account had 6,111 followers now, she noticed. Not bad, except that Pete’s had 314,566, and Danielle’s was fast approaching one million.

The odds, she couldn’t help feeling, were stacking up against her.

*

Beneath a dark-blue, starry sky, Val sat in the shadow of a eucalyptus tree, alone. Her hands were clasped tightly around her knees, and her knees were pulled up to her chin. In this position, curled into a ball, she rocked backwards and forwards, eyes closed, allowing herself a few cathartic sobs. She hoped that nobody would see her, although presumably there was at least one camera trained on her, somewhere or other. They were everywhere: hidden in hollowed-out tree trunks, or in secret cavities inside the rocks; mounted on retractable poles sprouting from within the greenery. There was no privacy, none at all. Of course, she had forfeited that when she had agreed to take part. But still, she had never imagined that it would be this hard …

Backwards and forwards she rocked, forwards and backwards. She tried to remember the meditation techniques her yoga instructor had once taught her, but that was a long time ago. They would be no use anyway. The images she was trying to purge were overwhelming, immovable, and made it impossible to call anything else to mind. They were banal images, at first, from earlier in the day: late morning, early afternoon, something like that. Daylight anyway. Bright sunshine. First of all, the clearing into which her guide had led her. The table at which she had been required to sit down. The perspex tank which had been placed on the table, and inside it … Oh God. The insect, the … thing , the … what was it called? A ‘Goliath stick insect’, the programme’s two chortling hosts had informed her. For Christ’s sake, the thing had been at least six inches long. A vivid, sickly green. Six thin, gangly legs, a long torso carapaced in some hard matter, solid and unyielding, and at the end of it … the head , uncannily (save for the two antennae) like a little human head, the beady eyes staring up at her, alert, vital but inscrutable. (The expression of terror she thought she could see there being an example, presumably — at least, please God, let it be so — of pure anthropomorphism.) And then she had been obliged to put on a pair of plastic goggles (she was still not sure why), and then screw her eyes tightly shut, and then the ‘insect wrangler’ (yes, there really was somebody with that job description) had taken the poor, revolting creature, and Val had opened her mouth wide, and then the thing was inside her, inside her mouth, she could feel it, feel it wriggling, struggling frantically, its obscenely long legs flailing against her tongue and the roof of her mouth, her mouth which had become a prison, a cage for this animal … Almost at once she could feel the gorge rising in her throat and she had felt an incredible urge to gag and open her mouth and expel the insect on to the table in front of her, but she knew that for every ten seconds she kept it inside her, her campmates would be given a portion of food, and she didn’t want to let them down. Now it was wriggling and thrashing even more violently inside there, and trying to escape out the back by forcing itself down her throat, but Val just screwed her eyes even tighter — her eyes from which tears of distress were starting to leak — and closed her mouth ever more firmly. Even then part of the insect, one of its legs perhaps, must still have been protruding, because now one of the chortling hosts said, ‘Come on, Val, be a sport, you’ve got to get the whole thing in there,’ and his co-host had giggled and said, ‘Ooh, I bet it’s been quite a while since a fella said that to you, eh, Val?’ and the whole crew had started laughing, but it was only now, in retrospect, that she realized the leering offensiveness of what they had said, at the time she was just training all her energy on to the task of not gagging, not vomiting, of keeping her eyes and her lips closed, trying to ignore the scrabble of long, angular, insectile legs kicking inside her mouth, until, suddenly, the creature became still. And then Val thought, Oh my God, have I killed it? but this thought only lasted for a second or two because then she felt something else in her mouth, something liquid, and a taste — Christ — a taste fouler and more vile than anything she had ever tasted or imagined tasting, and she realized that the stick insect was shitting itself inside her mouth, literally shitting itself with fear, and as she felt the first trickle of liquid excrement sliding down her throat, her stomach heaved and her gorge rose and with a loud, choking gurgle she spat the insect out on to the table, followed by a thin trail of drool, after which she must have … if not passed out, exactly, at least lost all awareness of what was happening around her, because she did not remember the cheers and applause of the hosts or the crew, she remembered nothing until she was sitting up in a chair, wrapped in a blanket, drinking mouthful after mouthful of water and swilling it around and spitting it out in a desperate attempt to get rid of that taste, that hideous taste which was coming back to her even now and making her want to gag again …

Val rolled over on to her hands and knees, crawled towards a clump of ferns and vomited, as quietly as she could. Thanks to her failure at the trial, her dinner that evening had been meagre — just a handful of rice and beans — and now all of it had come back up. Still, she felt better for it. Another few minutes to compose herself, and she might be ready to rejoin the others. The sooner the better, because she needed to talk to Danielle. She had spoken too sharply to her after dinner. Made some comment about her not helping with the washing-up. Val had been in the right, no doubt about that — Danielle was lazy, she never helped out with any of the routine tasks around the camp — but it had sounded snappy, and she didn’t want to upset her: or, of course, to alienate the viewers at home. As soon as she felt better again, she would go and apologize.