Jonathan Coe - Number 11

The news was bad. Terrible, in fact. Her mother’s account was haemorrhaging followers — she was down to just over 3,000 — and the abusive messages now seemed to be coming in at the rate of four or five every minute. Most of them had the hashtag #team danielle , and it was fair to say that the model’s million followers were not happy with what they’d seen on the television last night.

Bitch from hell

Fuck off I want to kill you

You are just a fucking big bully ugly cow

Hello Crabs I hope you get vd youself but that wd mean some1 wd have to fuck you 1st so not very likely haha

You made our angel cry we will make you suffer bitch

Have never hated someone like I hate u. Hope u die of cancer

Fuck you cunt

You big cunt bully. You deserve to be raped till your dried out old gash is sore and bleeding

Alison felt physically sick when she read that: she had to go to the bathroom and kneel in front of the toilet for a few minutes, convinced she was going to throw up. Nothing came, though: just dry retching. After that, reluctantly, out of filial duty and nothing more, she forced herself to do some more quick searching. She looked her mother up on Google Images, and where once she would have found a few ancient publicity shots and grabs from her Top of the Pops routine, there were already hundreds of new pictures. Where had they all come from, and how had they been uploaded so quickly? Most of them were from yesterday’s trial: horrid, grotesque close-ups of her mother’s face, every pore and wrinkle showing, her eyes screwed up behind those plastic goggles and her face contorted in a mixture of terror and loathing as she took the stick insect into her mouth. Pictures from the last few moments of the trial, showing her bent double over the table while retching, with a trail of vaguely green-coloured drool dangling from her lips, seemed to be especially popular. But there was nothing that Val, or Alison, or anybody else, would be able to do about this. This was how her mother was going to be remembered online, from now on.

It was all too depressing to contemplate. Alison glanced briefly at Google News, where she learned that, according to a new poll, her mother was now the most unpopular contestant in the show’s ten-year history, and then she went back to bed.

*

Val warmed her hands at the fire, smiled around at her fellow campers and felt a spreading glow of happiness. Today had been a wonderful day. Really relaxing and enjoyable. First of all, Dino, the handsome and relentlessly macho TV chef from New York who was the show’s token American presence, had been voted to undergo the daily trial. It was something to do with gathering plastic stars from the floor of a water tank filled with eels, and he had done spectacularly well, which meant not only that they’d all had a full complement of food that evening, but after dinner — any minute now, in fact — they were also to be provided with a surprise ‘luxury’ item. Naturally, this had put everyone in a good mood. In the afternoon, chilling out in their hammocks, Val and Roger the historian had struck up a conversation, a proper conversation, which started by being about the British weather but had then somehow turned to the coalition government and whether it really had a mandate from the voters. It had been the first real discussion , the first time anyone in the camp had actually talked about something important, since Val had arrived three (was it three?) days ago, and had proved so interesting that after a while everybody joined in, even Pete and Danielle; both of whom were amazed to hear that Britain had a coalition government at all, since this piece of news seemed to have passed them by last year, and indeed Val still wasn’t at all sure that either of them had really grasped the concept of a coalition despite a good deal of patient explanation from Roger. Anyway, that was by the by. It wasn’t a great victory, maybe, but this conversation had been a small step towards bringing everyone together, creating a more cooperative atmosphere, which Val had decided was her true role in the camp. And now she could see the result: for the first time, all twelve of them were sitting around the fire after dinner, chatting and telling stories. True, it was pretty inane stuff, but she was not really listening. She was content to let the chatter wash over her, becoming one with the other noises of the forest at night: the mysterious rustles in the undergrowth, the chirruping of cicadas, the occasional distant, plangent cry of some unknown inhabitant of the nocturnal jungle. Such a long way from Yardley! Such a privilege, when all was said and done, to be here at all! She knew now that she would always treasure this experience, whatever came of it.

Just then they heard footsteps on the edge of the camp.

‘Hey up, that must be our surprise,’ said Pete, and rose to his feet. He went off to investigate, and came back a few seconds later carrying an acoustic steel-string guitar tied up in pink ribbon. ‘Look at this — brilliant!’ he said. ‘Can anybody play it?’

The guitar kept them entertained for a further couple of hours. Val was the only real musician in the camp, and she was happy to play until her wrist was aching and the tips of her fingers felt as though they were about to bleed. They sang songs by Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Madonna and the Kinks; they crooned their way through ‘House of the Rising Sun’, ‘Scarborough Fair’ and ‘Dancing Queen’. Her only respite came for a few minutes when Danielle insisted on attempting her version of ‘Yellow Submarine’, with Pete on backing vocals. It was hard to say which was worse, her playing or her singing, and neither of them could remember the words to the verses, but everyone was feeling so cheerful by then that the whole thing was just carried through on a wave of laughter. It put them all in an even better mood than before.

Eventually they ran out of songs. At which point, Val asked: ‘Do you mind if I play you something that I wrote?’

Nobody minded. Everyone was eager to hear it.

‘It’s not the song I’m famous for. It’s a new one.’

‘Ooh, lovely,’ said Danielle.

‘It’s not very jolly,’ said Val. ‘In fact it’s quite sad and … sort of introspective.’

‘Stop apologizing and get on with it,’ said Roger.

‘All right.’

She smiled around at them all, nervously, suddenly remembering that she was addressing not just an audience of eleven friends (she thought of them as her friends now) but more than ten million television viewers. This was, in effect, the most important performance of her life. But she felt up to the task. If she could do that thing with the stick insect, after all, she could do pretty much anything. And she knew this song intimately: it was part of her body, by now. Singing it to these people would be as natural as drawing breath.

The fingers of her left hand arranged themselves to form the first chord — an F major seven, with an open A-string as the bass note — and with the thumb of her right hand she struck the six strings of the guitar with firm, tender authority.

Watch the water take me home, absence makes me fonder

Choose a path where you can go, days are getting longer

She knew at once that she had caught their attention. A great stillness had descended on the camp. The music brought everything to a halt: the passage of time was suspended. Val reached for the highest note in the melody, found it easily.

Still I try to do my best but I need your breath

As the moonshine controls the water, I will sink and swim

The two chords underpinning the word ‘swim’ were a D minor and then a darker and more ambiguous F minor sixth. Val had been singing without thinking until this point, vocalizing the words in a semi-automatic state, but with the next lines, she realized that she could almost be reflecting on her current situation: