It was a blur of light and heat and noise as Becky’s hand was firmly taken by the excitable Emma Willis and she was pulled through the crowd, a camera in front of her, brazenly in her face this time.
There was a gratifying amount of poorly made banners with her name on them or proclaiming ‘Chicks before dicks’. Hands thrust at her. People screaming. Then up another flight of stairs on to a stage and past her former housemates sitting in two rows. Becky hadn’t even made contact with the chair before everyone’s attention was focused on the big screen above them which showed Amelia sitting on the big gold sofa in the Big Brother house with her head between her knees as she tried not to pass out.
Considering that Amelia was a posh girl, proper posh, who’d been torn from the bosom of her loving family and sent off to boarding school at the tender age of ten, Becky had been astounded that she wasn’t made of sterner stuff. In a year out from university, she’d even spent two weeks in Niger working in an orphanage, which had done absolutely nothing to toughen her up.
Maybe the joke was on Becky and Amelia was playing the longest of cons herself. But then Emma tapped Becky on the knee and a producer counted them back from a commercial break and she needed to focus on her own long con.
‘So, hello, Becky Sharp,’ Emma said by way of introduction. ‘The housemate whose shoulder everyone cried on, who had more girl power than all the Spice Girls combined, and who might not have found love in the Big Brother house, but found her way into your hearts with 37.4 per cent of the final vote. It was very close, Becky. Amelia just pipped you to the post with 39.1 per cent of the vote.’
Becky shook her head and smiled. ‘The best girl won,’ she said to approving cheers, because what else could she say?
‘And you had quite the chequered love life while you were in the house,’ Emma continued cheerfully. ‘You seemed fated to never get your man.’
‘Well, I went into the house to find myself rather than find love, though love would have been nice too,’ Becky said, and she caught the eye of Carlo who she’d enjoyed a brief flirtation with, safe in the knowledge that he’d be evicted in week two because he had all the personality of damp cardboard. Carlo smiled and waved back. ‘Even better than love, I made friends that I know I’ll have for the rest of my life.’
The script just wrote itself, really.
‘You even let one of those friends come between you and what we all hoped was going to be a Big Brother romance,’ Emma said, as footage appeared on the big screen of Becky watching Johnny (who called himself an entrepreneur though he was hard pressed to explain what he actually entrepreneured) and Leanne, PR girl (which really meant that she handed out free, flavoured vodka shots in Cheshire nightclubs), frolicking in the hot tub. One single, solitary tear rolled down Becky’s alabaster cheek, because one tear was far more effective than sobbing all your make-up off at least twice a day.
‘Well, I realised that if Johnny and Leanne really cared for each other, then I shouldn’t stand in the way of their happiness,’ Becky explained with another glance over to the housemates. ‘I just never imagined that they’d be put up for eviction because of it or that there’d be a double eviction that week. You guys are still together, right?’
Of course they weren’t. They were seated as far away from each other as possible and, judging from the skin-stripping looks that Leanne was sending Johnny’s way as a muscle pounded in his cheek, they now hated each other with a passion. Even more passion than when Leanne had given him a blow job in the Big Brother toilet.
‘You might have been one of our most popular housemates but you still managed to land yourself in hot water, Becky,’ Emma said urgently, putting one hand on Becky’s knee again. ‘We need to talk about Poolgate.’
Becky made sure her green eyes were especially wide. ‘Poolgate?’ she echoed breathily.
Another scene was beamed up on the screen. Becky and Marie curled up on the big swan inflatable in the swimming pool. It was odd that they were curled up so amicably when Marie had earlier accused Becky of stealing a Chanel lipstick from her, though Becky, with trembling dignity, had insisted that the Chanel lipstick in question was hers and that maybe Marie had simply lost her own one.
‘Now you weren’t miked up here because you were in the pool but Marie swears that you whispered in her ear, “You chat shit about me again and I will wipe you off the face of the earth, bitch.”’
Becky put her hands to her cheeks as if they were burning. She couldn’t even look at Marie and the inevitably outraged expression on the other girl’s porcine and pugnacious face. If she did, she might laugh.
‘Really? She swears that I said that? Wow! Maybe I had a strange reaction to the chlorine in the swimming pool and it gave me a complete personality change and amnesia too.’ Becky shrugged and shook her head. ‘Because I have no memory of that happening.’
Emma went on to mention ‘Slag-gate’ (it had felt like the right thing to do to tell Leanne that Marie had called her a slag), ‘Pubegate’ (and who could blame Becky for nominating Carlo for eviction because of the shocking state he left the shower in each morning?) and ‘Gavgate’ (of course Becky was going to take Amelia’s side when Gav had done her wrong, even though it was Becky who’d told Gav that Chloe fancied him).
‘More gates than a garden centre,’ Becky noted to the approval of the audience, and anyway, she hadn’t been directly involved in any of the incidents. The fact that Primark were now apparently selling ‘Chicks Before Dicks’ T-shirts and the Guardian had labelled Becky as ‘this summer’s most unlikely feminist icon’ was completely beyond her control.
There was just time for Emma to remind the viewers that when Becky had won a task and been rewarded with a phone call home, she’d given her prize to Amelia.
Again, there was Becky’s face on the screen – she really did look so much better from her left side – telling a sobbing Amelia that ‘I don’t have a home or a mum and dad, but you do, so I want you to have the call.’
There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. ‘Is that true?’ Emma gently probed even as Becky could hear the producer telling her to wrap things up. ‘That you don’t have a family?’
If she concentrated really hard, Becky could always get that single, solitary tear to start its slow descent down her cheek. She’d just recall the sting of her father’s hand across that same cheek as he coached her on how to cry on cue. Rich tourist or DWP case worker, no one could resist a whey-faced little moppet crying so prettily.
She felt the tear begin its journey now, let it get level with her mouth before she brushed it away with an impatient hand. ‘My mum and dad died so long ago that it hardly even hurts any more. Anyway, friends are the new family, isn’t that what they say?’
Emma reached forward and gathered Becky into a motherly hug until they both heard the producer snap in their ears, ‘We’re due an ad break, cue her best bits.’
‘Becky, you’ve been one of our favourite housemates of all time and here are your best bits!’
What if the two minutes that comprised Becky’s highlight reel were the sum total of her life’s work? How she’d always be remembered? A slender girl in a white bikini with green eyes, riotous red curls, fair skin and what The Sun called ‘the best boobs in Big Brother’ schooling another girl in a bikini about the ‘most basic rule of feminism. Chicks Before Dicks.’
Was this it? In years to come when Becky was standing in a queue in the Post Office or the supermarket, would someone tap her on the shoulder and say, ‘Excuse me? You are, aren’t you? Big Brother? Chicks Before Dicks? Sorry, I can’t remember your name.’
She’d had a taste of it now: the applause of the crowd, the flash of a hundred cameras. She knew how easy it was to win the slavish adoration of the public and her fellow housemates (apart from Marie, and Marie could just go and fuck herself). But just one taste was never going to be enough.
No, Becky intended to gorge on it all: fame, power, success, as if she was standing in Nando’s with a tapeworm and a black card.
By the time she was done, everyone was going to remember her name.