Coming Up Next. Penny Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ made it to air. He never read the links because he ad-libbed most of them, some so poorly that they were virtually incomprehensible. But people liked his bumbling delivery, and he had discovered early on that as long as you laughed about your mistakes, everyone laughed with you and forgave you pretty much anything. Although God save anyone else who might mention his shortcomings.

      Dee had once suggested laughingly that he might like to read a book without pictures in it after he had said on air that books were a waste of time. He had smiled rather oddly, and tripped her up later by asking if there were any damp patches that morning – a pointed reference to her disastrous one-night stand the week before. The man involved had immediately sold the story to a newspaper, revealing that Dee was obsessed with the cellulite on her bottom and had sent a fan letter to a member of Take That. The papers had used the opportunity to go over the old ground of her divorcing her husband after his long fling with the au pair.

      Dee walked through the newsroom and noted the little knot of people circling round Keera. All the usual suspects, she thought. The editor, Simon, was in early too. He was virtually resting his tongue in her ear. Disgusting. And the director, Grant – the biggest creep of them all. The buttering-up process with some presenters could have taken a whole lorryload of Lurpak. And there was Kent with his gormless smile. Yurk.

      She kept out of everyone’s way as the programme went to air, going into the studio only when it was time for her to point out the fluffy bits sweeping in from the west.

      It seemed that the gallery, the nerve centre of the programme, contained more than its normal quota of people. The director had to keep telling everyone to pipe down – noticeably Heather, who was nursemaiding Keera through the show. The Boss had told her to devote herself to Keera. Heather liked Keera because she liked her job as an executive producer. If The Boss said Keera was to be dressed as a hedge, Heather would ask how high. If The Boss told Heather to hang upside-down and act like a bat, Heather would be squeaking like a pipistrelle before you could say vampire. Heather was long, lanky and grateful to have been given a second chance after a libel case that had almost stymied her career.

      Keera began an interview with a man from a water company who was trying to defend the company’s appalling record on fixing leaking pipes.

      Heather leaned forward and spoke quietly into the microphone on the desk: ‘Keera, ask him how come more of the profits go to shareholders than they do to fixing leaks.’

      She dutifully put the question, then another one about whether the water that flushed the loo was the same as the water that came out of the tap.

      Those in the gallery glanced at each other in confusion.

      Heather got back on the microphone: ‘Keera, ask him when the company plans to fix the old Victorian pipes instead of just talking about it. They’ve had years to sort it out.’

      And Keera could be heard asking exactly that – with a supplementary of her own about what the pipes were made of.

      The bosses were thrilled.

      Keera looked perfect: shiny black hair, tight little pink suit with a hint of cleavage and the highest stiletto heels this side of a massage parlour. Glimpsed, occasionally, in a cross-shot.

      After the programme, as the backslapping began, Dee tried calling Katie again. She had already left five messages on her friend’s answerphone, asking if she wanted company. On a whim, she decided to go round to the flat.

      She rang the doorbell at the white stuccoed building, and suddenly noticed that, considering it was eleven o’clock in the morning, there were rather a lot people hanging about near lamp-posts, behind wheelie-bins and in cars. As she took her finger off the bell, they shouted questions at her about Katie and where she was. She said nothing, but scooted round the corner and took refuge in the porch of a block of mansion flats. Well, that’ll be why she hasn’t answered the phone, then, she thought. And possibly why she didn’t answer the intercom. Which poses a problem.

      She phoned Katie for the nth time and was surprised to get an answer. ‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘I was beginning to wonder how I was going to get hold of you. Don’t you ever answer your phone?’

      ‘Sorry. It’s been on vibrate. I’ve got to the stage where I don’t even bother to look at who’s calling. You caught me between programmes.’

      ‘How are you? Whoops. Silly question. Can’t be feeling exactly wonderful.’

      ‘You ain’t wrong,’ said Katie, ‘and I now look how I feel. I think I may have overdone it on the vodka front. And I’m stuck here until I come back from holiday.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I rather stupidly said I was the house-sitter. I can’t work out how to get out of here without looking like a right twat.’

      A delivery man asked Dee to move so he could get a parcel to the basement flat.

      ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘I’ve got an idea.’

      A few hours later, a pizza delivery-boy rang the flat below Katie’s, accidentally pressing her buzzer at the same time. Katie let him in.

      A few moments later, Dee appeared at her door with a beaming smile, a motorbike helmet in one hand and a delivery bag in the other. ‘Howzat?’ she asked.

      ‘Brilliant,’ said Katie, stuffing a few items into the delivery bag. Pyjama pizza and large tube of toothpaste to go …

      Outside, the reporters and photographers were still keeping an eagle eye out for Katie Fisher. They had had information that she had definitely returned on a Virgin flight from Barbados. She might have gone elsewhere, knowing that there would be interest in the story of her demise as sofa queen. Phone calls to her parents and brother had turned up nothing, and they were now in limbo. Most were hoping to be allocated a different story. Even if she came home, she probably wouldn’t say anything, and they’d just get shots of her letting herself into the flat.

      They had perked up as the delivery-boy had rung the buzzer – but the snappers with their long lenses had told them it was the flat below. They didn’t spot that the delivery-boy who had just left appeared to have grown about six inches.

      Katie popped on to the scooter and let it roll down the hill without turning it on. That she had no idea how to ride it had almost scuppered her and Dee, until they had come up with the idea of getting it to the end of the road where a strategic corner meant she could hop off and wheel it to the pizza joint.

      Within an hour of leaving her flat, she was on her way home to Yorkshire with her brother, and Dee had phoned gleefully to tell her that she had left the building to a cacophony of camera shutters and shouted questions, all of which she had ignored.

      ‘How long are you going to stay with your mum and dad?’ she asked.

      ‘Until I can keep a smile on my face without it falling into Dad’s soup. It’s chestnut and prune today, apparently. He’s being creative. I think I just need to shout a bit, and use my body as a repository for pies. Thanks for all your help.’

      Ben had managed to swap his shift with a fellow doctor at the hospital, in response to her emergency call for help in getting home. She couldn’t face the train. And anyway, someone might alert the media.

      He was looking rather handsome, she thought, like someone out of Young Doctors, wearing jeans and a pale blue T-shirt with a pink logo. ‘Is that some smutty СКАЧАТЬ