The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp: ‘A razor-sharp retelling of Vanity Fair’ Louise O’Neill. Sarra Manning
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.
But first she had to stand down stage, take her place with the other former housemates and watch Amelia be crowned the winner, then fluff and weep her way through her exit interview.
The only gratifying part was when she said, ‘The best bit of my Big Brother experience was meeting Becky, because I know I have a friend for life. More than a friend. She’s my sister from another mister.’
After the cameras stopped rolling Becky and the other losers were herded like cattle into a people carrier to be ferried to an Elstree hotel, while Amelia was whisked off in a limo, as befitted her winner’s status. She was the best of them all and Becky was left to mill about the after party nursing a lukewarm white wine that was all the production budget would stretch to.
Her fellow housemates were surrounded by their families. Not that Becky felt even one pang on that score, having lost her mother when she was eight and her father seven years later.
Poor Becky. Not only had she come from the most broken of homes, but at fifteen she was an actual bona fide orphan, like some poor creature from a Victorian novel waiting to be sent either to the workhouse or to live with a kindly guardian and benefactor.
In the end, her father’s old Soho drinking buddy, Barbara Pinkerton, agent to the stars of stage and screen, had fallen somewhere between the two, and even now was bearing down on her in the same hotel bar they’d waited in before Becky had entered the Big Brother house.
‘Becky!’ Babs boomed once she was within booming distance. ‘My little Becky Sharp.’
She descended in a cloud of Opium to place lips slick with shocking-pink lipstick in the vicinity of Becky’s cheek.
‘I’m surprised a devious little cow like you didn’t go all the way,’ she murmured as she sat down on the leather-look banquette next to Becky. ‘You played a blinder, even had my stony-cold