A Game For All The Family (29 page)

When Donna Lodge saw Ben Lourenco claim his award at the BAFTAs, she leaned over her champagne glass and said to Justine, “Ben Lourenco would be
perfect
.” Silently, Justine thought, “Perfect for what? A lead role in a drama about a man who mooches around?” To make it worse, the setting of the drama and its title remained unchanged from the original idea that Justine had loved, so this show was set in a place that everyone associates with lots of amazing stuff happening, and this made it even worse that nothing amazing was going to happen. The title was suggestive of upheaval, mayhem and redemption, all three of which had been removed from the “treatment”* (*synopsis). Imagine a movie set in the world’s most notorious prison, called
The Cells of Horror and Hope
, in which the inmates are quite content and civilized and the guards are suspiciously lenient and humane, and you might begin to perceive the scale of the problem.

Justine Merrison was pessimistic, to put it mildly. But Donna Lodge was her boss, and she couldn’t think what to do. Most people who had fallen out with Donna had not subsequently fared well in the TV industry, and Justine suspected this was no coincidence. She didn’t want to have to leave her job, and couldn’t think of a way to discuss her unhappiness with Donna that wouldn’t involve screaming at her to stop being such an imbecile.

Ben Lourenco was the first good idea Donna Lodge had produced for a long time, so Justine said yes, hoping this might be the beginning of Donna coming to her senses. The lead role in the drama-free drama was duly offered to Ben and he accepted it, though he humbly asked if he could have some creative involvement in the idea’s evolution. “Of course!” Donna gushed.

Justine was astonished when Ben voiced her concerns, almost word for word. “We need a stronger hook, I think,” he said. “I mean, we’ve got six hours of drama to fill. I think my character’s potentially interesting, but something needs to be driving him. I mean, ideally we’d have a strong story of the week and an overarching narrative as well.”

“What a fantastic idea, Ben,” said Donna, to Justine’s astonishment.

Justine cleared her throat and said, “You mean like . . . ,” and then she described her and Donna’s original idea, the high-concept drama, as if it were entirely new and had only just occurred to her.

“Yesss!” said Ben. “That’s
wonderful.
Exactly that sort of thing.”

“Well, let’s go with that, then,” said a radiant Donna. “Justine and I were thinking of something along those lines at first, but we worried it was too high risk. But actually, we should pitch what we’re passionate about, not what we think they want, right?”

“Right,” said Ben.

“Right,” said Justine.

And in a flash, everything was back on track. Justine hated Donna more than ever, but in a way she knew she would enjoy and make a fun hobby out of, not in a seriously problematic, miserable way. The main thing was that the show was back on—the proper show, in its ideal form. Or, rather, the pitch was back on. Who can tell what the channel controllers will say yes to?

As it turned out, the pitch never made it to the inbox of the head honcho of any channel. Why? Because of Freddii Bausor. Or, it might be more accurate to say, because of Freddii Bausor’s enemy, the woman who used to be the wife of Fred Bausor, as Freddii was known before her operation. This former spouse, an American historian called Carine Hartwell who had dumped Freddii after her surgery, went to the police and claimed that Fred had frequently battered her and done all kinds of other unsavory things to her during their six-year marriage. Several of her close friends said they had known about the abuse. But just as many other people who had also known the married couple said that it was absolutely untrue. One friend said that Freddii had once tearfully confessed to being violent and unable to help it. Another said Carine Hartwell had announced many times that she was going to break Freddii if it was the last thing she did. Yet another claimed to have heard her verbally draft a plan that involved pretending Freddii was a wife-beater and rapist. In the end, it boiled down to everybody’s word against everyone else’s.

With all these contradictory accounts buzzing around, the press and the public, who all wanted to be able to bray in a particular direction and had no idea which one to pick, were obliged to look further than what everyone was saying, so they looked at the work of Freddii Bausor and Carine Hartwell. Here is what they found:

Freddii: detective shows featuring grotesque murders and psychopaths who pretend not to have committed them. One TV movie about a woman who believes seven pounds of extra weight renders her unloveable, and who lies about having once had an abusive partner.

Carine: one scholarly tome about Christian missionaries in Malaysia.

Most interested parties decided* (*completely kidded themselves) that the above comparison of works was pretty conclusive. In the television industry, many prominent producers, actors and directors let it be known that they completely believed Carine and would never work with Freddii or partake of her cultural artifacts again. This seemed to be the dominant opinion. Famous stars of screens big and small started to tweet infographics to one another: endless rows of little gray men and then, huddling together for warmth, two small red men in the corner. The gray men were supposed to be all the men accused, and found guilty, of doing unspeakable things to women, and the two red men represented the tiny minority of men who’d been wrongly accused.

Endless heated exchanges took place on the internet about whether it was insulting and transphobic to apply a guilty-and-innocent-men infographic to Freddii, who had never been a man in anything but physique.

Carine Hartwell was informed that there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution of Freddii. This news was greeted with an outpouring of sympathy for her and an even bigger one of hatred for Freddii, who was seen as having gotten away with it, and loathed even more fiercely than she would have been if she’d been found guilty of something—though she would have been heartily loathed in either eventuality. There was so much venom sloshing around that Freddii, being only one person, couldn’t soak it all up. It started to drench all those who made comments in chatrooms and on social media along the lines of “But we don’t know for sure that Freddii did anything wrong,” though the tide receded if the sinners repented with a follow-up like, “Though I personally suspect that she did and want her to die.” The most enlightened folk of all expressed a wish to garrote Freddii with piano wire while making sure to chastise those calling her “him,” because to do that was insensitive and reeking of cis privilege. (“Cis” is a relatively new word and it means “not trans.” You, gentle reader, are probably cis.)

One day, Ben Lourenco could bear it no longer. He tweeted a tweet, which read as follows: “Please stop RT-ing *
that
* infographic, people. I get it. There are only two little red men. What if Freddii’s one of them?”

The floodgates opened, and vitriol poured forth in the form of abusive tweets and savage blog posts. Ben Lourenco replaced Freddii Bausor as Chief Devil Incarnate. This was quite rational: Freddii had only maybe done terrible deeds, whereas Ben Lourenco had unequivocally done two horrendous things: 1) he had tacitly given succor to the violent patriarchy by failing to condemn a possible wife-beater, and 2) he had misgendered Freddii, and, in doing so, shown himself to be a hateful transphobe.

Ben explained that he hadn’t meant to imply that Freddii was a man. He was merely using the metaphor of “little red man” to mean “rare and exceptional innocent person,” and if his use of little-men symbolism was offensive, then surely all the people RT-ing the infographic were guilty of the very same offense.

The unmollifiable hordes remained unmollified.

A few days into this controversy, Donna Lodge told Justine Merrison that she no longer felt Ben Lourenco was right for the hero’s role in their fledgling TV show. Justine was aghast. “He’s clearly a misogynist,” said Donna. “Why else would he choose to defend Freddii when Freddii might be . . . dubious?”

“But Freddii’s a woman,” Justine pointed out.

“Well, yes, but . . . not as much as Carine Hartwell is, let’s face it,” said Donna transmisogynistically. “Don’t worry.” She smiled. “I’m not going to change my mind again about the central concept. You were right about that.”

“You were right to suggest Ben Lourenco,” Justine countered. “And you’d be very wrong to boot him out when he’s done nothing at all to deserve it.”

“Hmm.” Donna pretended to consider this. “I just . . . look, we want to get this show commissioned, don’t we? Do you think having Ben Lourenco as our leading man is going to improve our chances or stymie them?”

“Do you think Ben has done anything wrong?” Justine asked.

“I know that an awful lot of other people do, and I’m worried about how it’d play with Joe Public,” said Donna. “Jo
anne
Public.” She tittered at her own joke. “We have to be pragmatic. We don’t want to work with someone that half of our industry has taken against, Justine. Really, we don’t.”

“Actually, I do.”

“Tough. Ben’s gone. He’s off the table.”

“Then please may I be excused as well?”

“Pardon?” said Donna.

“From the table.” Justine stood up. In her mind, she had already gone. She no longer worked with Donna. From now on, she worked with Ben Lourenco, though the two of them would probably never meet again. She did not work with Ben on any kind of TV project, but on something far more important: remaining rational in the face of frothing-at-the-mouth numbskullery. Be warned, all: this is frustrating work, and it pays badly.

After posting a sequence of tweets sticking up for Ben Lourenco and encouraging his detractors to do rude things to themselves, Justine Merrison walked out of her office and never went back.

Donna Lodge soon replaced her. She replaced Ben Lourenco with another leading man whose tweets were mostly accompanied by the hashtag #istandwithcarine, and she replaced the high concept of the putative drama series with nothing because you don’t need a gimmicky concept if you’ve got multilayered characters you care about, according to Donna.

The show has been “greenlit,” and will air sometime next year.

11

M
um, this is the yummiest breakfast ever,” says Ellen, shoveling another forkful of scrambled eggs into her mouth. Alex eyes her suspiciously, wondering about the identity of this charming visiting diplomat who resembles his daughter.

Light streams in through the window, creating a golden patch effect on the kitchen table.

I haven’t told Alex about Ellen and George’s agreement—I can’t bring myself to call it an engagement. Fourteen-year-olds can’t be meaningfully engaged.

“Seriously, Mum, you’re the Queen of Egg Scrambling. Utterly delish!”

Is this how Ellen will be from now on? Mimicking superpolite George? My heart aches at the thought. I want her to be a typical teenager. Surely we’ll get a few years of “You’re so unfair / You’re such an embarrassing idiot”? I don’t think I can bear the prospect of a charming Ellen-and-George unit jollying me into playing Monopoly in the drawing room for the rest of my life.

Maybe I should provoke a row by demanding to read every word of Ellen’s story about the Ingreys. Until I saw her this morning, I intended to raise it with her first thing, but, coward that I am, I’m loath to do or say anything that might dim her radiant smile.

Having read George’s frighteningly accurate account of why I gave up my career in television and escaped to Devon, I have a theory. I believe that he and Ellen agreed to swap. Each gave the other a true story to tell. George wrote the one that belonged to me, and Ellen wrote about his mother’s childhood. It must have felt like a way of getting to know each other better—strengthening the bond.

Lisette Ingrey—mother of Urban, mother-in-law of Ellen—is Anne Donbavand. When the private detective gets in touch to tell me what he’s found out, I’ll be amazed if it isn’t that. The names might be different—I still don’t believe in three sisters called Lisette, Allisande and Perrine—but the substance is true. Anne Donbavand had a younger sister who murdered a boy and then was murdered herself.

But if only the names have been changed . . .

I remember my conversation with Ellen, after I read those first three pages. I asked her why she’d used our house as a setting, and she said, “Are you thinking Perrine Ingrey’s going to get murdered in my bedroom? She isn’t. Don’t worry. She doesn’t get killed in the house or the grounds.”

Malachy Dodd does. He falls from a great height and smashes his head open on the terrace by the fountain.

What if that really happened—here, at Speedwell House? No family called Ingrey has ever lived here, but others have. One of them could have been Anne Donbavand’s family. Must have been. Why else would Ellen make this house the setting for her macabre story?

If Malachy Dodd fell to his death from Ellen’s window, might that explain the strange feeling I had in her room? Can tragic events leave an imprint on a place that’s still perceptible years later? What does that say about the much stronger strange feeling I had when I first saw Olwen Brawn’s house? Olwen who is coming to visit later today . . .

I don’t want to live at Speedwell House anymore. I don’t want Ellen sleeping in Perrine Ingrey’s old bedroom, or whatever the murderous murdered child’s real name was. It’s all I can do to keep my mouth shut so that I don’t blurt this out.

“You all right, darling?” Alex asks me.

I nod. Now would be too soon to say anything, even to ask more forcefully to see Ellen’s story. I need to know, first, that I’m not wrong. The detective I hired should be able to find out if the family living at Speedwell House during the 1980s had three daughters, one of whom was murdered.

A well-known local secret. Don’t tell the stupid Londoners—let them buy the doomed house so we can laugh at them behind their backs.