After the Break. Penny Smith

       CHAPTER THREE

      In a minimalist flat in Chelsea, the radio alarm clicked. Ten o’clock. It was the most beautiful crisp, wintry morning. The sun was shining in a pale blue sky, there was a light wind, and a bird was chirping somewhere nearby.

      There was no reason for Katie to put an alarm on, but she felt that grown-ups ought to have some sort of structure or things would start to go wrong. Not that she had always believed that. In the weeks and months following her sacking from Hello Britain!, she had relished the shapelessness of her days. Afternoons running into evenings, late evenings running into two days later…the strangeness of looking at her watch and not having a clue whether it was five in the morning or five in the afternoon. But that had become boring in itself. Boring and, much worse than that, it had made her fatter and spottier. Eating outside normal hours resulted in endless snacking from nearby fast-food outlets–and organic chocolate was still chocolate.

      She stretched and eventually pulled herself away from Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 to make herself a pot of tea. She clicked her computer on, and as it hummed into life, she pulled a couple of eyelashes out as she contemplated the day. For some reason, gently pulling on eyelashes until one gave itself up made her feel happy. She examined them closely. Good thick bulbous roots.

      ‘I feel heppy,’ she said out loud, in an upper-crust accent. ‘Oi feel ’appy,’ she said again, using a really bad East End accent. ‘Eye feel haffy,’ she said, stretching her lips really thinly, and keeping her teeth together.

      She spooned loose leaves into the teapot and put a mug, a strainer and a nice milk jug onto a tray. Even at her most slovenly (and slovenly, for Katie, meant socks worn two days in a row), she liked a proper tea tray. She went back to bed, pulled the duvet up and grabbed her laptop as her tea mashed. ‘Je suis heureuse,’ she said huskily, with her head on one side as she clicked on her emails. ‘Ich bin happy,’ she reiterated, with her chin jutting forward.

      A number of little boxes popped up, and Katie (happily) went through them. ‘Hmm,’ she said, as one opened with a job offer, passed on from her agent’s office. She read it thoroughly, then went back to the beginning to read it again.

      On Woman’s Hour, they were discussing wages. ‘Because of the difference in wages for men and women, basically for one month of the year, women don’t get paid,’ someone was saying.

      ‘Oh, yes, they jolly well might,’ Katie said to the radio, getting out of bed to find her phone.

      She called her agent.

      ‘Jim Break.’

      ‘Katie Fisher,’ she announced.

      ‘Well, hello, Ms Fisher. I can only assume you’re calling about the offer from Celebrity X-Treme that I sent you on email last night.’

      ‘That I am,’ she said.

      ‘And what are your thoughts?’

      ‘Well, my first thought is what a lot of money. My second is…what is everyone else being offered? My third is…who is everyone else? My fourth is…has it bloody well come to this? Because we both know that unless I get an offer of a job pretty damn smartish, I’m going to run out of savings. There’s a limit to how many articles I can write about being a woman in her forties on television. Or a woman in her forties off television, to be more accurate. And guesting on shows where they’ve run out of guests.’

      ‘Well, going through those questions in no particular order…I agree that you haven’t exactly been inundated with offers. But you need to think very hard before taking on something like this. It could be the worst career decision you’ve ever made. You know as well as I do what the producers will be hoping to get from you. And they’ll be doing all they can to make sure you either do the things they’re expecting…or look like you’re doing them.’

      ‘If you’re talking about the drinking and the men, I think we can safely say that I’m over that. I haven’t been hammered for months, and I am, of course, going out with the scrummy Adam, thank you very much.’

      ‘Well, my advice–for what it’s worth–is not to do it. Yes,’ he pressed on, sensing her interruption, ‘I know you need the cash and it is a large sum, but is it large enough to live on for the rest of your life? Even if you do get a few things off the back of it, you’ll soon find them drying up if you’ve ruined your credibility’

      ‘That’s all well and good but I need to eat in the meantime. Do you know anyone else they’ve asked? And what they might have been offered in the filthy-lucre department?’

      ‘I think they’re doing a trawl at the moment. I know some of the names. Not people you’d probably want to spend a fortnight with. As for the cash, no idea. It’ll depend on profile, obviously.’

      ‘When do they need to know by?’

      ‘As soon as. But I honestly do think you’d be wise not to. You know, the other thing is that if you go into this, people will think your career’s on the skids.’

      ‘It kind of is.’

      ‘No, it’s more in the doldrums.’

      ‘Doldrums, skids, whatever. The one thing it’s not is on the up.’

      ‘One programme offer, and you’d be on the way up. That’s all it takes,’ he said.

      ‘Which is sounding suspiciously like what actors say. And that is not why I became a journalist.’

      ‘It’s hardly a journalistic job, this one.’

      ‘But I could use it as one. Maybe write a book off the back of it. Or something,’ she said lamely.

      ‘Hm.