CHAPTER TWENTY-FoUR

By the end of the morning, the nervous energy still bubbles over but in a nice Jacuzzi style rather than as before, when the bubbles were spitting violently and boiling over the edge of the pan. Hearing my dad’s fighting talk and falling into the bath quite ungracefully, legs akimbo, shifted something. There’s a little fighting spirit in me, mostly from the realisation that this hoopla surrounding the situation had mostly been orchestrated by McCoy to get at me and trigger the sort of response that would have me backed on to bathroom doors declaring I never wanted to see the outside world again. The bastard may have got to me just that little bit but I was surrounded by people who would pick me up again, the only people whose opinions I cared about. The kids were a huge pick-me-up as they left with their hugs and declarations of support, Matt even more so. So as people arrived to pluck, wash, and polish me down to within an inch of my life, I suddenly felt like I could take on the day and come out the other end. Maybe.

In the car over to the studio, I can’t tell if Luella feels the same. She’s quiet and seems to have my life down to two purple A4 lever arch files which she scans every so often, not while shouting to the driver to avoid flyovers and high streets because of the shitty traffic. I forget that this day probably means quite a lot to her in terms of getting one over on an ex-love.

Since she mentioned her history with McCoy I’ve let things lie, not wanting to drag the matter out nor bring to mind the fact she might be living vicariously through me. The driver goes over a bump and things fall out of her Mulberry bag, including a wallet and some photos. I help her scoop things up, glancing at her French husband and designer children in their matching Vertbaudet raincoats.

‘In a parallel universe, they’d be named Cinnamon and Fennel.’

I laugh, a little too much, and snort. Sleep deprivation and nerves make me a tad delirious. I look at her as she studies the picture and smiles.

‘Have you met McCoy’s kids before?’

She shakes her head at me, her mouth pointed to a pout.

‘Only Ginger and Kitty when we did This Morning but as the collective happy family? No. Actually, that morning at BBC was the first time I’d seen him since …’

My mouth is open, realising what she’s saying. Since he dumped her, broke off their engagement, and left her for dust to marry a skinnier, blonder vixen. Is this wise? There will be knives in the vicinity. I’m starting to question what scenes of chaos may ensue in between me chopping onions and frying up beef. She senses my unease and laughs.

‘Don’t worry. That ship has sailed. You know there was a time I’d gladly have pickled his balls and given that wife of his a good slap but it’s over … different chapter of my life.’

I nod, the driver wincing a little to hear talk of pickled testicles.

‘I mean, you know how it is with a past love. He’ll always have been a part of my life but the emotion has changed. The story’s moved on.’

I pause to hear her say that. I forget Luella has been witness to every part of my life so far. Up to this point she’s remained impartial, very professional about everything, but sometimes she says a comment like that to let me know she’s had her ear in.

‘Not that you taking him on and kicking his chef arse into next week won’t give me some pleasure, but this is about you today. You’re my lucky horse.’

I hope that’s not a reference to the size of my backside, and smile as she grabs my hand. Luella Bendicks and her pornstar name and her sleek bob. Would I be here if it wasn’t for you? Maybe. But I’d know far less about organic farming and be wearing cheap tights that would stick to my dress and ride up to show the whole world my gusset. I grasp back to thank her. The driver peers over the seat.

‘Oi, oi. Big kerfuffle up front.’

Luella stares out the front window as a sea of people part for the car to pass. At first I don’t register why they’re there. Maybe an accident, a rally. Then the flashes start flashing, people call my name. For me? Luella goes into panic mode tidying all her things away, reminding me to cross my legs and shade my eyes so the flashes don’t make my eyes pop like I’ve got a thyroid condition. Don’t celebs put things over their heads at this point? Or is that only for weddings and unnamed prisoners headed for court?

‘Just get through the gates! We’ll go round the back.’

‘I can’t get through! They’re lying across the sodding bonnet.’

Luella turns to me.

‘Remember, legs together. Follow me. Say hello to everyone, tell them you’re very excited and raring to go. Nothing else. And whatever you do, don’t listen to them.’

I nod as she opens the car door and follow her instructions to the letter. The cacophony of noise is deafening. Where are your kids? Is your hubby/mother/lover coming? What do you think of McCoy? Really? I just smile and wave and bid everyone a good afternoon. Luella pulls my arm along as we get to the doors and I turn to wave goodbye and for some reason curtsey. Luckily, the photographers find that amusing. And then we go inside. If I were a horse, I think that would be my viewing time in the enclosure. All bets are off.

2.39 p.m.

I have a dressing room with my name on. Not since I was twelve have I had a door with my name on so I am a little excited. It’s a strange old room. It’s not lined in orchids, white damask, and bowls of sweets where all the green ones have been removed. But I have a mini fridge with little bottles of water and Diet Coke which Luella tells me to avoid as it might discolour my teeth and she doesn’t think I need the caffeine. Before, Vernon popped by to say hello. He was properly tall. Like basketball player, looking-up-to-the-sun tall. He was nice enough and gave me a hug, which made me feel like a three-foot midget. But for now, I sit here. I’ve had a nice chicken salad sandwich for lunch with posh crisps. I’ve flicked through some magazines and talked to the wall, pretending to chop an onion that isn’t there. I’ve also used my en-suite loo. The toilet paper was even quilted.

A knock at the door sees me jolt out of my seat and I go to answer it, partly glad for the distraction. Another celebrity maybe? Please be Ant and Dec. Or maybe a tea lady with nice biscuits? I’m almost excited until the door opens and I stand there for a good five seconds and stare.

Ambushed. Again. Really?

‘Hi, Jools. How’s it going? Just thought I’d pop by and wish you well.’

At this point, my first instinct is to shout for Luella like when you’re a kid and there’s someone at the door you don’t know. The second is to shut the door really hard and see if I can’t take off a couple of his toes.

‘Tommy. Hi.’

It’s like a stand-off with a chugger. No, get out of my way, I don’t care that every five seconds a donkey dies. Behind him stands a man in a suit carrying a briefcase who gestures a hello with a nod of his balding head.

‘We were wondering if we could come in and have a chat?’

I look down the long and winding halls to find Luella is nowhere to be seen.

‘I mean, are you busy? We can come back later.’

He pops his head through the door to see my empty dressing room, just my handbag and some bread crusts keeping me company. Bastard. This is why people have entourages. I could do with Donna here right now.

‘Well, I’m not but I guess …’

He takes this as his cue to enter and rolls his eyes around my dressing room as he does, judging my lack of view of the Thames and Xbox, no doubt. I invite them to sit down and grab a chair, feeling a little on edge, a little like I want to lay into this man and grab fistfuls of his newly bleached hair. But I don’t.

‘So, this is Roger Kipling, he’s my lawyer and we just wanted to come and chat to you today and see how everything’s going. Feeling ready?’

A lawyer. I have a lawyer. Her name’s Annie. She’s not here yet and she doesn’t have a comb over. One point to me.

‘I guess.’

I eyeball the lawyer and his fancy suit. Annie would wear cashmere. That is obviously from Burton. Another point to me.

‘Well, that’s great. You’re a fighter, I like that.’

I nod.

‘So, I’m good. Is that it? Can I help you with anything else today?’

Maybe he wants to apologise, maybe he wants to have a continued discussion about the benefits of frying salmon. My heart beats out of my chest for some reason. I half expect the lawyer to have a gun in there. Maybe he wants to sue me.

‘Well, I just wanted to apologise for the media. It has gotten way out of hand – all the stories being dragged through the press, it really has been quite upsetting.’

Upsetting for him? I’m sure.

‘In what way?’

‘No one likes to see their family undergo all that scrutiny.’

‘Well, from what my publicist has told me, you had quite a hand in getting some of those stories to press.’

He smirks a little. I spy the fire extinguisher in the corner of my eye and wonder if I can bash his head in with it. I’m sure I’ve seen that on CSI.

‘Your publicist?’

‘Luella Bendicks. She was with me at the BBC thing. I believe you might know her.’

He rolls his tongue over his top teeth and says nothing.

‘She’s been really good in telling me how this media game works. I’ve learnt a lot from her.’

‘I’m sure.’

The room is deathly silent for all of ten seconds. The lawyer coughs to break the silence. I get up and retrieve a bottle of water from the fridge. The only thing I can think to do to display my level of anger is not to offer them anything – no Diet Coke for you, tossers. The lawyer whispers something to Tommy and he then looks at me.

‘Jools, we’re here today because everything has been blown out of proportion. I came here because I am genuinely sorry at how big this has become and how I forced you into a corner to cook and participate in this competition.’

I stand there and quietly sip from my bottle before returning to my chair. This is getting better. Apologies. They might be better in a newspaper or on live television but at least here I can gauge their sincerity. The lawyer reaches into his briefcase and retrieves a printed document.

‘So I want to offer you money as recompense for all the embarrassment I’ve put you through.’

They slide the document over to me with a fancy looking cartridge pen. It sits there on my low-lying coffee table and I notice the rectangular piece of paper attached to the front. I choke. Fifty thousand pounds. For me. With my name on.

‘Please, take it.’

They both nod. There’s a catch. There has to be. I pick up the papers and start reading. No, no, no. You must be joking. I read it again.

‘This sort of money could really be good for you and your family. Please consider it.’

I scan through the one sentence to have captured my attention. I read it over and over and over till the words blur.

‘You’re bribing me? It says here I have to lose the cook-off tonight and then the money will be mine.’

They both nod. The lawyer pushes the cartridge pen towards me. Fifty fricking thousand pounds. Bye bye, some of the mortgage, hello, new car! Hello, computer and a shopping spree. Hello, proper fitting shoes and music lessons for the kids. Bye bye, dignity.

‘This is a hell of a lot of money. Do you desperately need me to lose tonight?’

Roger Kipling adds his authoritative five pence share.

‘Mrs Campbell, Mr McCoy is offering this money in goodwill. From reading about your history and familial situation, we sense this money may be of huge benefit to you.’

I sit there open-mouthed, pained by the fact they look down on my family so. Pained that they think a bit of money and my life would be perfect. They look so incredibly smug, so convinced that they have some sort of power over me. All I’m thinking of now is trapping parts of their manhood in that suitcase. The door flies open and Luella stands there.

‘Hello?!’

Tommy and Luella look at each other for a while as I rise from my chair.

‘Jools? Is everything all right in here?’

I nod.

‘Yep, Mr McCoy and his lawyer were just leaving.’

They don’t take their documents. They leave them on the table. I watch as Tommy smiles at me on the way out, a weird smile that a fox might give a farmyard goose before killing it. I don’t smile back.

5.35 p.m.

‘Give me the bloody phone, I’m going to call The Sun now. They can get this on their website before day’s end.’

Matt is not happy. He stands there wrinkling bits of paper in his hands and stomping about as Luella hisses in unison and Annie grabs bits of the document and casts her lawyerly eye over them. Ben and the children play some card game in the corner of the room, feasting on snacks and looking stylish and trendy in GAP and Converse. Adam found a make-up girl he took a fancy to a while back so we’ve lost him to the studio corridors. I go over and sit with the children and Ben puts an arm around me.

‘Well, think about it. McCoy thought you could actually beat him and he was so intimidated he was willing to pay you to lose.’

That’s one idea. Could I seriously win this thing? He thought so enough to pay a visit to a lawyer and have him run up important-looking documents. I think about the money. That money could be so useful to my family right now, my kids most of all would be the chief benefactors and maybe that’s what’s important. Matt, however, thinks it’s shameful – the fact that his ability to provide for his family has been brought into question. He’s stomping in the corner of the room. Luella pours him another plastic cup of champagne (brought by Annie to loosen the place up). Ben has even brought Valium that he got from a flatmate, except I refuse to take them given that he tells me they could possibly be something else, their bathroom cabinet not familiar with a labelling system. I sip my champagne slowly and deliberatively. The twins come over and sniff at cups for drinks. I grab on to Jake sitting in front of me. They gelled his hair before so it’s now all crispy and shiny. I miss his chocolate mound of fluffy hair. Jake always had the best hair even when he was a baby. He knew it as well. He looked over at Ted and his wispy strands of hair and looked very pleased with himself. Ted came back and half smiled, showing off two deep dimples like they’d been carved into his cheeks. I remember thinking nothing. I had a baby in each arm, still high off pethidine. I thought Ted had six toes on his left foot. I just inhaled. It was like a drug. I grab Ted with my other arm and put them both in a headlock and kiss them on their foreheads, which they immediately wipe off.

‘Jools! Don’t mess the hair!’ Luella shouts from across the room. I glance over and she is trying to calm Matt down and pointing at a pair of shiny trousers laid out for him. I don’t have to hear what Matt is saying about them. All I hear is the word ‘guttering.’ Still, I think I like him the way he is, Ramones T-shirt and battered trainers, the right side of trendy dad.

‘Where’s his dressing room? I have a good mind to take this round to him and tell him to stick it where the sun don’t shine.’

I look over and smile. I stuff a whole hand of crisps in my mouth to soak up the champagne as Annie saunters over.

‘He’s done his groundwork.’

‘But what if she loses anyway?’ asks Ben.

Annie gives him a look.

‘Well, she’d get the money anyway but at what cost, Benjamin?’

Ben nods his head from side to side.

‘But the document is saying here that Jools could drop out, forfeit, or simply not show up and still get the money so … the decision is yours. But there is more …’

My ears prickle.

‘He wants you to just go away. Not follow up on this celebrity thing, just fade away and never have existed.’

‘What do you think?’ I ask my sagacious lawyer friend.

‘I think he’s a tit. This is obviously to protect himself and his interests. I think it’s got little to do with recompensing you and is all about him being threatened by someone who is much more likeable and could steal his foodie thunder.’

Ben nods in agreement. Matt still stomps in the corner of the room. I’m not sure if it’s about the money or the guttering trousers any more but I can see that fury, that blind rage in his eyes that surfaces at very few moments: moments when emotions have properly been stirred up by something significant, something of worth to him. I guess that would be me. I stand up, look at the clock, and think long and hard about why I am here. Was it money? Was it pride? Or was it for some other reason – thought up by some raging, braless woman in a supermarket one Monday morning. Because McCoy is not me, he will never be me, and I will never be him. When did I lose sight of that? I get up.

‘Luella, there’s that press call in the studio in five minutes. We’d better get down there.’

Everyone looks at me in surprise. Even I’m surprised. I am calm. Did Ben sprinkle the Valium on the crisps? But I know why. I stroll up to Matt waving the cheque in the air and tear it into four. The room freezes. So do I.

6 p.m.

Fifteen minutes later and my hands are shaking a little from having had a winning lottery ticket and ripping it to shreds. Everyone in that room stared at those four bits of paper on the floor for the longest time as all our dreams of holidays, well-fitting jeans, and extensions faded into nothing. I have my pride, I have my pride. She says. So now, a little shell shocked, we’re all in the studio having our photographs taken. This has been my only demand in all of this. While McCoy was keen to get our clans out in the open, I wanted my kids out of this so bartered with the production company that they could have a couple of photos and that’s it. As we’re led out the twins are obviously the most excited, given their recent school play success, so bounce on to the set. Hannah stays close, Matt holds my hand. The twins notice the other children first: one girl preened like a peacock in a tulle party dress and ballet slippers, the boys in matching Fair Isle jumpers. The boys, who like company, bound over but the children are ushered away by a bosomy woman. I know that woman: the McCoy’s nanny from This Morning. So they must be Basil, Mace, and Clementine. Hannah goes over to ‘Baz’ who’s got a Nintendo DS and looks over his shoulder. He immediately turns his back to her. Matt hurries over and puts an arm around her.

‘Gobshites, the lot of them.’

Hannah laughs in shock while Baz runs off behind a curtain, revealing a melee of people behind it, one of whom strides in, clad in denim, and rushes over to shake my hand. I hear cameras click all the quicker. I see Matt’s foot ready to trip him up.

‘Jools! How are we doing? Are we set?’

I shake his hand and say nothing, turning my head to smile, watching Luella from the side-lines telling me to show some teeth.

‘I’m good. These must be your kids.’

The children flutter on, followed by skinny Kitty who gives Matt an evil look. Not in camera shot of course. The children are weirding me out. Before, they had the look of death drones ready to kill. Now they’ve all gone a bit Stepford as they position themselves against their dad. Even little Ginger seems to know how to rest her little head by her dad’s knee.

‘You have one missing. The redhead.’

‘She’s at home with her grandparents. She’s retired from the media. It was all too much for her.’

The photographers laugh a little while Tommy goes stony-faced for a second to think that maybe I was directing that at him and his constant pimping out of his clan. He keeps standing in front of me, knowing I’m much too short to look at him directly in the face, even with heels. It’s like a boxer’s weigh in, without the scales, thank God. Matt just stands behind me and puts his hand on my shoulder. This is the first time he’s meeting the McCoys and unlike them and their media charade, he’s not as good at hiding his true emotions, especially with everything that’s happened in the past hour. I know, as Luella keeps trying to gesture over at him to stop flaring his nostrils. As for my kids, they are less familiar with standing correctly for this picture jigsaw so the twins simply flank me while Hannah bends down by my knees. Kitty keeps smiling, maybe at how unpractised we are. A production crew member strides on to set.

‘Right, let’s finish up now. We still have some things to discuss with our guests.’

Everyone with a camera is ushered away as Luella runs on and the producers dressed like mime artists with clipboards make an appearance as if from nowhere. As soon as the last photographer disappears, so does the Stepford act. The McCoy kids’ shoulders slump and Kitty’s face curls into a snarl. Tommy’s entourage stalk the stage like Stormtroopers, adjusting lights and laying out his organic produce. McCoy just stands there listing demands.

‘So we have some knives we want to use. A German brand who are looking for promotional consideration and I want to wear my chef whites.’

Matt and I look at Luella, who’s shrugging her shoulders. I don’t think I have a problem with fancy knives nor McCoy trying to remind everyone again that HE IS A CHEF. To make a point, he starts stripping in front of us and slips his whites on over his oily torso. It’s the Chippendales, restaurant style. I notice Luella looking a moment too long at his shiny chest, no hair – that means he must wax. Eeks.

‘And we want the kids to be on set when I cook. Kitty too.’

Again, Luella shrugs and rolls her eyes. I look at Matt whose fingers grip mine so tightly I can feel the pulse in my thumb. The producer looks to me for my similar needs for the day.

‘Well, I want to wear a sombrero and have a bottle of tequila on hand.’

Everyone laughs except the McCoy clan, of course.

‘And what about your family? Will they be joining you on set?’

I look over at Luella who always has advice to give me on such matters but knows when it’s down to my family then the ball’s always in my court. I see Kitty give her the once over, no doubt knowing who she is. I turn to the producer.

‘No. I don’t really see the point, to be honest.’

A producer can’t hide his glee at my statement and Matt sniggers under his breath. Luella smiles the biggest smile I’ve ever seen on her as the McCoys are ushered away, out of earshot of my defamatory remarks. Ben, who stands nervously behind Luella, ushers the kids away.

‘I love you. Really fucking love you. Did you see the greasy chest? He’s pulled out all the stops. I want you to go back and jiggle your tits about. Idiots.’

She storms off. Matt’s hand is still in mine as people mill about and we’re left standing in my side of the fake kitchen. I stand at the counter and look into the lens of the still camera, rubbing my hands up and down the pale wood like it might give me luck. Matt stands opposite and looks down at my boobs.

‘They’ll do.’

I grab them and push them up manually. They could do with an inch of hoisting but that is really way down on the priority list. I look up and Matt just smiles at me.

‘Do you remember when you gave birth to Millie? Weren’t we watching McCock on the telly?’

‘Yup.’

‘Didn’t you scream at him that he was a Mockney shite and you didn’t want him to be the first person our child saw?’

I laugh but I don’t answer. That was when it all started. When we became the family we are now, when life got crazy and busy and mental. He gets it. I think I do too. And I just smile as he kisses me on the forehead and we walk off set together.