an enormous mortgage. When she had taken it on, she had experienced a moment of panic. But what was the worst that could happen?
She had smiled at that. Her brother had once asked the same thing when they had decided to hit tennis balls for the dog from her bedroom window instead of taking him for a walk. The neighbours had had rather a lot to say on the subject of wrecked greenhouses, and the dog had had to wear a cone round his neck for months to stop him gnawing at the stitches.
She had signed the mortgage document with a flourish, and her years at Hello Britain! had ensured that she’d paid off a fair chunk. Nevertheless …
She lay on the leather sofa and pondered her future. And thought about the reaction of her friends, most of whom would be obviously upset for her, but probably secretly thrilled. Who had said something about it taking a strong man not to see the rise of a friend without thinking it should have been them up there – and not to gloat as that friend fell?
Whoever.
She needed to speak to someone.
Andi. She was in the business yet not. Andi was a producer at Greybeard Television, which made some of the best-known programmes on the box, mostly dramas and serials with style.
‘Andi? It’s me. I’ve been sacked.’
‘God. Why?’
‘Not being funny. Or something. Probably not just not being funny. It was sort of intimated before I went on holiday, and when I was on holiday the sharpened axe fell on my sunburned neck. I was given the option of working out the month left on my contract or taking it as holiday. I chose to work it out. Then they came back and said they’d decided otherwise. So I don’t even get the chance to say goodbye.’
‘Or slag them off?’ asked Andi.
‘As if I’d commit career suicide like that. My replacement is the wicked witch of the north, Keera Bloody Keethley. I bet she’s been putting on that fake poor-Katie face she does so well. It’s amazing she can manoeuvre her toothbrush of a morning, she’s holding so many knives to plunge into people’s backs.’
‘You always said you liked her.’
‘Quite liked her.’
Katie pulled out three eyelashes in a clump. It was a habit that left her with occasional bald spots, but was curiously satisfying. Not top of her list – like tidying. Not up there with sneezing either. But a bloody close third. She selected one and chewed it.
‘Katie?’
‘Yes – sorry. Just thinking about all those bastards who are going to be sooooo happy about this. Colin the news editor for one. He’s never liked me – not since I threatened to report him for fondling the barmaid at the Queen’s Head and Artichoke. Do you know how hard I worked for that bloody job? All those wankers I had to shag? Not to mention all that training. Law, frigging public administration, shorthand. Talking of which, do you remember Don – with the really short arms and small hands?’
‘I don’t know. Erm. Local radio?’
‘No. Don. The editor of the Evening News.’
‘Sorry. There have been rather a lot.’
‘Thanks for reminding me.’
Don had been short, balding, with a few teeth missing at the back, and a round, hard stomach – from endless business lunches and copious quantities of ale – which he was fond of patting as he said, ‘All bought and paid for.’
‘Don,’ Katie had said, ‘you was robbed. Surely you could have got a bigger one for all that money.’ She had given him a smile and raised her eyebrows.
That had been all he had needed to leap on her after a drunken lunch just down the road from the newspaper offices. He’d given her a peach of a job, doing fashion and motoring. Noses out of joint all round because of the freebies.
‘Anyway. He was the one I nicknamed Mr Horse.’
‘Oh, right. The one who liked you to get togged up in jodhpurs and whip him while he whinnied?’ She laughed. ‘How could I forget him? Didn’t you call him “Horse By Name But Not By Nature”?’
‘A veritable nub of a knob.’ Katie smiled. She looked at her elegant feet propped up on the sofa. Would anyone else give her a job? Once she had been young and thrusting. Now there were so many others – much younger. And still capable of thrusting without the hips squeaking.
‘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
