Getting Home (20 page)

‘Lightening up,' the producer pleaded. ‘Our audience are hard-working, decent people. They deserve to be entertained.'

‘If they're so hard-working,' Daniel enquired, smirking at his own acuity, ‘how come they're watching TV all morning?'

‘We shouldn't act like it's a crime to be unwaged. And working in the home is a viable life choice for women with small children,' put in Maria.

‘Yes, Daniel, you should really watch your attitude,' Allie endorsed her. ‘Let's not forget the men who choose to be active parents,' she added, trawling the table for eye-contact. ‘I think men who're committed to their role as fathers should have
special
recognition, don't you?'

‘Ah – wit, information, gossip – the very stuff-of life,' recited the senior researcher, with the earnest face h. always put on to camouflage irony.

‘Is that Shakespeare?' breathed Maria, projecting admiration.

‘Mark Twain,' he condescended.

‘Mark Twain! F-a-a-a-b! That is such a great idea. The Skywalker who fell to earth. What has he been doing since
Star Wars?
Do we know who his agent is?' Allie prided herself on being a great motivator.

‘And we need ideas now to work on over the next few weeks,' the producer reminded them. ‘Blood costs, as we know. These bleeding heart features are bitches to set up. There'll be more work in the field. Our first show in the new format has to really knock their socks off.'

‘Aren't we doing those lesbian mothers at sixty?' Allie sat up in alarm.

‘Ricki Lake has them on an exclusive.'

‘Fuck.'

‘In vitro, actually.' Daniel was undeniably demob happy. Allie threw herself back in her seat in a spasm of despair. ‘Your penis will be in vitro if you don't can it, Daniel.' ‘If I can it, will you buy it?' he threw back.

‘I have an idea,' Maria announced, pulling a folder from her neo-Prada document case.

‘Maria's got an idea for the new series,' announced the senior researcher, wondering if this pushy meteorologist would be willing to advance her career horizontally. Shagwise,
Family First
was tundra and permafrost.

Producing a clipping from the
Helford & Westwick Courier
, Maria cleared her throat, her voice rising with nerves. ‘There's this woman – she's thirty-two, one son, sounds very our market and she lives locally – whose husband has been kidnapped in the former Soviet Union…'

‘When was that exactly?' Allie faked vibrant interest.

‘A couple of months ago.'

‘Oh.' Subtly, Allie switched off her vibrancy and sketched a coma of boredom, miming
old story.

‘He was on some trade delegation with four people – Western businessmen – and they were snatched by nationalist guerillas in this remote region and there's been no news, no ransom demand, nothing. The poor woman must be just distraught …'

‘It's not one of those places nobody can pronounce and nobody knows where it is, is it?' The producer gave her a weary smile. ‘Foreign stories are a real turn-off.'

‘But she lives right here,' Maria urged him. ‘Right here in Westwick. And in October, the United Nations commission on terrorism is due to report,' she extracted another newspaper clipping, ‘so I thought why don't we get this woman on the show with the head of the commission, and just have her ask what he's doing to get her husband back?'

‘Great,' said the producer, thinking tabloid.

‘Really great,' said the senior researcher, thinking blow job.

‘Absolutely great,' said the junior researcher, thinking that it might not be totally impossible for him to get a news contract next year after all.

‘Isn't that a little tacky?' Daniel demanded joyfully. ‘Some poor inarticulate housewife fronting up to a UN statesman?'

‘It's putting a human face on international relations,' said the deputy producer, anxious not to be left out. ‘I think that's just what
Family First
ought to be doing.'

‘Melanie Griffiths!' Allie blazed a delighted smile at Maria. ‘That's who you remind me of! I've been trying to think of it all morning – Melanie Griffiths! In
Working Girl.
With the clippings and everything. Isn't that just a f-a-a-a-b thing, everybody?'

But the team had picked up the ball and was running too fast to be distracted. ‘So where exactly does this woman live?' the producer asked.

‘Westwick,' Maria confirmed, rasping her voice down to counter-tenor so she sounded as little as possible like Melanie Griffiths. ‘Somewhere called New Farm.'

‘Leafy Westwick, eh?' The producer tapped his teeth with his pen. ‘Great. Allie – could you do some networking here? You must be neighbours.'

Twelve stern faces were now accusing Allie of failing to get a story. ‘If I had time to get to know my neigh-bours …' Petulantly, she shuffled papers, playing for time. Then she launched the last offensive. ‘Catch
up
, guys. I mean, come on. We all know her. She's even been on the show – it's that wispy woman who did the dumb garden for children a couple of years ago, remember? The one who got all those complaints about toxic paint and allergic leaves and stuff?'

‘Leggy,' muttered the senior researcher.

‘And of course I've talked to her, but …' she laid one hand to the heart region of her chest, ‘she's so fragile, and just devastated by this whole thing. Really, my instinct is to protect her. I've tried talking to her, of course I have, but she's just not the type, you know what I'm saying? She'd dry. I think she'd be a disaster, frankly.'

‘If she's so fragile, won't she just crack up and cry and stuff?' Daniel was learning the pleasure of settling scores. ‘Make'em cry – isn't that our motto?'

‘She didn't dry when she was doing that garden thing,' the senior researcher remembered.

‘Oh, but I really had to coach her,' Allie parried. ‘She did OK in the end, but not fab. And this is different, she's just all in a heap right now and she withdraws, you know what I'm saying? Withdraws and clams right up. I just can't see it working …' She opened her eyes wider than wide, trying to evoke the terror of inarticulate silence which gave every talk show worker sweaty palms at three seconds to transmission.

Maria braced her shoulders, resolved to seize her day. ‘I hope I'm not out of line saying this, but maybe if she was approached by someone she didn't know …'

‘Good idea,' the senior researcher nodded with vigour.

Allie was cornered. It was clear that she now had only two options: get Stephanie on to that sofa or give away her job. ‘I will try again,' she promised, keeping her hand pressed to her breast. ‘We are kind of friends, you know, the way you are through your children. I can talk to her again – but it ain't gonna be easy. No, no. We should think about this. The child's from a previous relationship, I'm not sure they're even married … Do we want the show to get into that kind of morality?'

‘What we want is for our viewers to know how it feels when terrorists kidnap the man you love,' the deputy producer gave no quarter. ‘I don't see the moral thing matters. Who's to know, anyway?' His implication was that Allie was the only person in the room with a direct line to the gossip magazines.

‘The viewers would really empathise. Serial monogamy's the way of the world.' Three months into his second marriage, the senior researcher smiled down Maria's neckline; yup, Melanie Griffiths it was.

‘Oh, well.' Allie handed her files to her secretary and prepared to leave. ‘If that's everything?'

Outside the building, she waited by her studio car until Maria appeared, on her way to lunch with the senior researcher. ‘Great idea, Maria,' she waved the girl over. ‘Can I say something to you? Kind of a woman thing?'

‘Mrs Parsons, I do hope – I mean, is this kidnap story difficult for you at a personal level …'

‘Not at all. Being professional means you just can't let that kind of stuff get to you. I just wanted to share something with you.' She lowered her voice but kept it cosy. ‘I really believe in mentoring new staff, you know? I haven't had a chance to really tell you how thrilled I am you're joining the team. It's so important to me that we should all be really close and really work together, you know?'

Warily, Maria nodded. Allie put her arm around her shoulders and walked her along past the curious eyes of the queue. ‘I notice you're still doing all that good-girl stuff? Smiling all the time, apologising when you make a point – you did it right then?' Maria wiped off her smile and rearranged her lips in a self-determined crimp. ‘Now, you may have noticed television is still a bit of a boy's club, which is why no one will tell you this except me. That kind of making nice can really poison a woman's career. The boys just won't take you seriously. Forget assertive – hell, in this kind of office, you should really be aggressive.'

‘So – you mean – I don't need to rethink my hair?' Maria copied the senior researcher's irony screen and tried baring her teeth just short of smiling.

‘Humour!' Allie punched her playfully at the shoulder. ‘All right! That's just what I mean!'

She raised her arms to the heavens, what-can-a-poor-woman-do? ‘Be one of the boys, speak out, blow your own horn, don't be afraid to scrap a little. All that good-girl routine went out with padded shoulders. OK?'

‘Oh yes,' agreed Maria, confidingly, ‘padded shoulders are just so David Bowie, aren't they?'

‘Excellent! You got it,' Allie affirmed, mystified. Then she recoiled into the depths of her car, waving goodbye to the multitude. ‘Have a good summer!'

The sign at the corner of the Broadway and Willow Gardens read: GAIA – Discover The Green World. Stephanie passed it every time she took the 31. In this region of coach-painted, craftsman-lettered shop signs, it was conspicuous, painted unevenly on a blistered board in the. rambling script which is charming on French bistro menus but crazy anywhere else.

An invisible taboo hung over this road. Stephanie had never been to Gaia before, although normally she could never resist an unknown nursery. Even though she ordered her plants from wholesalers, she still cruised garden centres like a New York singleton working parties; the lure of a specimen she had never met before was all-powerful. Subliminally, however, she had received the idea that there were reasons not to buy here, reasons which proceeded from the moral consensus of the neighbourhood, reasons which therefore did not need to be defined. Swimming heedlessly along in the tide of Westwick opinion, she had passed by Gaia until now.

It lay between sports grounds and builders' merchants in the wide strip of dead land alongside the 31. Nobody had ever tried to build here because the road was so close. North of the Broadway the ground sloped up to the derelict Oak Hill site; to the south this disregarded portion extended right down to the river banks. The football fields and running tracks of St Nicholas's High School occupied the riverside half. Adjoining, the Helford Harriers shared a club house with the Old Nicks football team. A golf driving range disfigured the next plot, screened from Gaia by a utilitarian windbreak of poplars.

This pocket of territory had been some kind of nursery as long as anyone could remember. The land had once been part of the New Farm; it was rich and heavy, benefiting from natural irrigation, and as the farm had retreated and the city advanced these fields had been the last to be sold. The farmer had leased them to a commercial seed grower who raised lurid blankets of poppies each summer. Fifty years ago, when the city was still small and the 31 was a generous highway humming with boxy new Fords, the seed grower sold to a market gardener and the poppies gave way to cabbages. Then the county bought it to raise the trees to plant the streets of Westwick, leaving the double row of poplars as a shield against the amplifying emissions from the 31. On good land, and serving a neighbourhood which was garden-conscious and rich, Gaia should have prospered. Stephanie saw as soon as she turned in the gate that something had gone wrong.

The gate itself was propped permanently open and hung from a drunken post by a single rusted hinge. In the weedy gravel car park there were only two other vehicles: a tinny Mitsubishi pickup and a dead-looking grey Lada slumped low on its suspension. A giant willow sculpture of the goddess herself lurched over the entrance, with bindweed racing up her calves.

Inside a ragged hedge, a hand-lettered signpost directed Stephanie through the outdoor beds where the stock straggled in containers between paths of pinkish gravel. This was going to be a waste of time. With rising irritation she took a rusty cart and pushed it down the unweeded paths towards ‘Perennials H-M'. A slime of algae glistened on the ground. Land cress was sprouting lustily in the pots but the growth of the plants for sale was retarded for the season.

Striding impatiently, Stephanie noted that plants had fallen over, plants had lost their canes, plants had taken on bizarre colours, grown twisted leaves on stunted stems. In the tree area the junipers were sickly and yellow; killing a juniper required real talent. She saw stagnation, and neglect and disease; her mood was souring to despair when, at the end of the enclosure, she also saw the mints.

The mint bed at Gaia was storming. Billows of scent rose in the humid air above the rank stems of
Mentha rotundifolia
, already three feet high with velvety leaves as big as babies'feet. Energetic runners had thrust out of the bottoms of the pots and taken root in the ground, fat buds with red-veined leaves sprouting from the nodes. Searing yellow blotched the pineapple mints, and the row of white-striped eau-de-cologrie mints reeked like a new designer fragrance.

The state of the plants in the neighbouring frames seemed even more pathetic next to this herbaceous frenzy. Irregular watering might have been a cause, although a hose lay along the path, and the earth was spongy with moisture.