Elizabeth Place is packing up her life. The protesting screech of duct tape and the thwack and swoosh of folding cardboard corners have been the soundtrack to her day. She’s surrounded by sealed brown boxes. Two muscular men arrived first thing in a white van with its big red boast ‘We’ll Make the Earth Move For You’ and stomped up the stairs to her first-floor flat, Where do you want us, love? Between them they carried a sofa, four chairs, a chest of drawers and her double mattress – up a bit, right a bit, upsy-daisy, there she goes, easy does it – while drinking twelve cups of tea with twenty-four spoonfuls of sugar.
Now only the boxes to go.
She sits and surveys her empty flat. She’s very tired and a little bit queasy if she’s honest (although she has an unfortunate inclination not to be honest, especially with herself). Her entire life has been swaddled, stacked and squashed into eleven cartons: thirty-five years of life, love and loss. Elizabeth isn’t much good at maths, but she knows that thirty-five doesn’t go into eleven without some leftover bits. What’s happened to the rest of her life? Those bits and pieces that might have caused her to tick another ten boxes?
She’s thirty-five and single. It wasn’t meant to be like this.
She reaches for the last empty box into which she’ll carefully stow the few remaining, very personal items. The things she’s left until last. Her National Television Award, still on the mantelpiece, sparkling bronze: Elizabeth Place, Producer: Best Entertainment Programme, Saturday Bonkers; a framed photo of her dear dad waving proudly at her down the years from the deck of a boat that isn’t his; the engraved card from ‘Matthew, Controller, All Channels’ which read ‘Only you could have got us through that show. Well done! X’; a black and white postcard of Paris, on which Hutch had written out an extract from Shelley’s ‘Love’s Philosophy’ along with the words Dear Miss Clumsy, I really miss you bumping into things; Elizabeth and Jamie, framed on their graduation day, carelessly waving their mortar boards in the air. And standing on its spine, propping up the rest, a valuable first edition of Yeats, given to her by Ricky one morning after a terrible night before.
Elizabeth tucks all these mementoes carefully away in the last box and closes the flaps quickly, like a ventriloquist silencing his troublesome puppets. All apart from the Yeats, which she clutches to her chest. She stands for a moment gazing at the empty spaces, thinking of the life she’s leaving behind. A life she has loved. A seductive life: of glamour, of glory, of giddiness. An addictive, adrenaline-fuelled roller coaster of a life, with all its exhilarating highs and exhausting lows. A dangerous life.
She’s independent, she’s strong, she says to herself. She’s really good at her job. She’ll do what her bible says and lean in (she hasn’t worked out exactly what this means, but she imagines it’s a bit like the plank, you just have to practice). She’s done with being caught in tangled webs of secrecy and lies. She’ll heed the warning signs, next time.
Won’t she?
Elizabeth wanders back into the bedroom, avoiding the bathroom. She’ll deal in a minute with the message in there that might change her life, that’s waiting for her in the cabinet, away from the prying eyes of the heavy lifters.
Elizabeth shivers slightly and sinking to the bedroom floor opens up the Yeats, carefully turning the precious pages. And there it is, on the title page, in Ricky’s big black sloping writing: ‘Dearest Elizabeth, I have spread my dreams under your feet’. Crazy, comic, complicated Ricky. His story wasn’t meant to end the way it did, one innocently blossoming day in May.
A Mayday.
Two months earlier
The audience are settling into their seats. They’ve been queueing outside the studio in the May drizzle for an hour and a half, an exercise in patience which might have been more bearable had anyone remotely famous walked by. An Ant. Or a Dec. They weren’t fussy. But one of the regulars, who’d been to recordings of the show at least twice before and had therefore brought a flask of hot chocolate, said that the stars use a secret tunnel entrance at the back of the studio building. Television stars, she explained patiently, don’t use main entrances. ‘Not even the Loose Women?’ asks a girl, shivering in bare legs and high heels. ‘No one,’ says the lady with the flask.
They’ve been herded like soaking sheep into the pens of the audience seating. Their mobile phones have been confiscated and will be returned to them at the end of the show. The lady with the hot chocolate, knowing the form, hangs back a little, watching as they fill the back seats first. She manages to get a seat in the third row from the front and surreptitiously opens up a packet of sandwiches. ‘The warm-up won’t be on for at least another half an hour,’ she whispers to the woman next to her. ‘Cheese and pickle?’
The set is much smaller in reality than it looks on the television. It consists of a shiny steel desk, surrounded by bookshelves laden with leather tomes, and a bright canary yellow velvet sofa. Five wide steps run up to the back of the set which serve as the entrance for the guests of the show. Wrapped around the set are a series of huge screens which display drone-captured scenes of planet earth at night, vast cities pin-pricked with glittering street lights, moonlit oceans and mountain ranges crested by stars.
‘Or tuna and cucumber?’
The audience is mainly female and they’ve come dressed for the occasion, eyeliner and foundation thickly applied, in case, just in case, there’s a fleeting shot of them clapping on camera. They’re hardened, battle-worn fans of the star of the show, the primetime entertainment king, Ricky Clough. They’ve been with him since he was a youthful breakfast DJ, have seen him through his career highs and lows. They’ve grown up through the years of his primetime, live, television show, Saturday Bonkers, watching it faithfully before going out to hit the weekend bars and clubs. But in recent months, Ricky’s audiences have been thinning, along with his hair, and a transplant on both counts has been necessary: he’s now been given his own chat show, The Ricky Clough Show, but not live, not on Saturday nights, and in the graveyard slot of 22.40.
The warm-up guy bounds on to the set, dressed in a tartan suit. He’s carrying a stick mic. ‘Right, ladies – and you few brave gents – are we ready to get this party going?’ he says. ‘ARE WE READY?’ The studio lights blaze on his entrance; for a brief moment he’s king of the court. He parades up and down the set, relishing the spotlight. The sound guys turn up the volume to DJ Fresh and the audience begin to shift in their seats, itching to get up and dance.
‘Okay. Five minutes till we start recording the show! Put your make-up on, ladies! Oh? You already have? Sorry, love. Now then. Take a good look at the person next to you. Is anyone here with someone they shouldn’t be? Because you’re about to be on telly – a television studio’s no place for people having affairs!’
Elizabeth Place, Ricky Clough’s producer, allows herself a small smile at this. She’s watching the warm-up from the comforting shadows of the black drapes that surround the studio. The entire audience is up on its feet, dancing along to ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now’. Middle-aged women have shed their coats and their inhibitions and are dancing like teenagers. Elizabeth likes to watch them; she loves to hear the pre-show excitement build to a crescendo of hysteria. She thinks they might be in for a good night: Ricky was in a better mood than usual when she checked on him in his dressing room earlier. A bottle of white wine was open, but still full, and he didn’t drink at all while she went through his script with him. (Nonetheless, she had taken the precaution of hiding another unopened bottle under the
