The Vanishing Point

fairy, waving a magic wand over their lives to make a narrative that glows with achievement.

‘You know Goldfish Bowl?’

I couldn’t help myself. I groaned. Reality TV. Was this what it had come to? I’d just transformed a former Tory cabinet minister into a dashing, intellectually respectable hero. And my reward was some here-today-gone- tomorrow nobody from a boring market town who would be famous for fifteen minutes. A bestseller for a month, then straight to the remainder table. ‘Christ, Maggie,’ was all I could manage.

‘No, listen, darling, it’s not what you think. Truly, there’s a story to tell. It’s Scarlett Higgins. You must have heard of her.’

Of course I’d heard of Scarlett Higgins. High Court judges and homeless people had heard of Scarlett Higgins. And even if I say so myself, I’ve got a knack for keeping my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. It’s one of the reasons for my success. I totally get popular culture and how to plug into what people want from their celebrities. So yes, I knew the public face of Scarlett Higgins. The Scarlett Harlot, she’d been dubbed by the tabloids. Not because she was particularly promiscuous by tabloid standards. Mostly because it rhymes and they’re lazy.

‘What’s to tell? Hasn’t she already spilled everything to the tabloids and the slag mags?’

‘She’s having a baby, darling.’

‘That’s not news either, Maggie. The pregnancy is what saved her from a public lynching after the debacle of the second series.’

‘Her agent has come up with the idea of doing an autobiography in the form of a letter to the baby. Where Scarlett reveals the tragedy of her own upbringing and the mistakes she’s made. She went to Stellar Books, and they love the idea. And of course, they want you. Biba loved the Maya Gorecka book you did for them, and she’s absolutely convinced Scarlett will love you.’

Sometimes listening to Maggie is like drowning in italics. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t get excited about someone who’s already spilled so much about so little.’

‘Sweetie, the money’s lovely. And frankly, there’s not a lot else around at the moment. The bottom’s dropped out of footballers and WAGs, most of those ghastly rappers and Mercury Prize nominees have no crossover value for the mainstream readers, and nobody’s interested in Tony Blair’s sacked cabinet ministers. I’ve been beating the bushes for you, but at the moment Scarlett Higgins is the only show in town. If you want to hang fire, I’m sure something will trundle along in a few months, but I don’t like to think of you sitting there twiddling your thumbs. You know how twitchy you get, darling.’

Annoyingly, she was right. Inactivity wasn’t an option. If Pete had been free, we could have gone away, taken a holiday. But he wouldn’t have liked it if I’d gone off without him. And to be honest, neither would I. It had taken me a long time to find a man I wanted to make a commitment to, and now I was with Pete, I didn’t relish the solitary trips I’d always enjoyed in the past. These days, I wondered how much of that solo travelling had been me kidding myself. ‘All the same,’ I said weakly, not wanting to give in too easily.

‘It can’t hurt to talk to the girl,’ Maggie said firmly. Wheedling is beneath her. She always prefers assertiveness to supplication. ‘Who knows? You may find you like her. Stranger things have happened, Stephie. Stranger things have happened.’

2

Maggie hung up as soon as she’d extracted a promise that I would at least meet the Scarlett Harlot. She always maintained that one of the secrets of her success as a literary agent was getting out of the door before anyone could change their mind. ‘People are generally too embarrassed to go back on their word,’ she told me early on in our relationship. ‘You might like to bear that in mind with the ghosting. Whenever a client produces a revelation you think they might regret, make your excuses and leave. Don’t make a fuss about it, just act as if it’s no big deal, time for you to trot off home now. Much easier that way.’

I’ve found Maggie’s advice surprisingly effective. It hasn’t made me immune to her tricks, however. ‘Bloody Maggie,’ I muttered at the phone as I replaced it. I finished brewing my pot of coffee and settled at the breakfast bar with my iPad. If I was going to sit down with Scarlett Higgins, I needed to be up to speed with her exploits. And since all the reality-show temporary celebs tend to blend into one amorphous blonde, I had to make sure I knew enough about Scarlett to distinguish her deplorable exploits from the others. There would be hell to pay and no forthcoming contract if I asked about the wrong boy-band lover or soap actor. Or even the wrong drug of choice. I couldn’t help smiling as I recalled Whitney Houston’s notorious interview with Diane Sawyer. All tears and confessional till Sawyer mentioned crack. Then, outraged, the diva bridled and stated sharply, ‘First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let’s get that straight. OK? We don’t do crack.’ OK, lady.

First things first. I wanted to remind myself of the format of Goldfish Bowl, the reality show that had catapulted Scarlett from Yorkshire oblivion into the nation’s living rooms. Wikipedia would do for that.

Goldfish Bowl is an elimination-based reality TV show developed in the UK and first aired in 2005. It takes place on Foutra, a small Scottish island at the outer limits of the Firth of Forth. The island, about a mile from end to end and half a mile across at its widest point, is uninhabited except by the game contestants. The only building on the island prior to the show was a ruined gun battery dating from WWII. This has been renovated and provides the contestants with their only shelter. For the purposes of the game, rabbits and cows have been introduced to the island. There are also areas of cultivated land where the TV company has planted edible crops, if the contestants can find them.The twelve contestants are deliberately chosen for their urban backgrounds and their lack of practical skills. They are taken to the island by boat and left to find shelter and food. Part of the entertainment value of the show has come from the haplessness of the city kids cast adrift on the land.

I groaned at the memory of that opening episode. The gob-struck panic of the contestants when they realised that their urban street savvy was completely redundant. Their disgust at the natural world. Their bewilderment at where food actually came from. It had been simultaneously comic and tragic. Their ignorance was toe-curling. They’d probably have made a better fist of being abandoned on Mars.

The first impression Scarlett had made on the viewers had been when she’d encountered one of the three highland cattle on the island. ‘Fucking hell,’ she’d exclaimed with a mixture of horror and admiration. ‘Who knew cows were that big?’ Well, Scarlett, most of us, actually.

As I skimmed the rest of the article, more memories crystallised. There had been only six narrow single beds in the barracks. So the first challenge had been to sort out the sleeping arrangements. It had also been the source of the first argument. The lad I’d mentally dubbed Captain Sensible had suggested a sleeping rota; since there were no windows in the underground sleeping quarters, there wouldn’t be daylight to keep awake those whose sleeping shifts happened during daylight hours. The others had ridiculed him straight off the bat. The idea of sharing the beds had appealed until they actually tried it and discovered they were so small they kept falling out.

It had been Scarlett who had come up with a solution. Among the supplies they’d been given were bales of hay for the cattle. ‘We can sleep on the hay,’ she’d said. ‘Like in that Christmas carol, ‘the little lord Jesus, asleep on the hay’. They always do that in old films when they’re on the run.’

‘And what are the cows going to eat?’ Captain Sensible objected triumphantly.

‘Well, they’re not going to eat it all at once, are they?’ Scarlett said with a flounce of her thick blonde mane. ‘And one of us gets the bullet every week. By the time we’re running out of hay, there’ll be enough beds to go around.’ For someone who had seemed dangerously dim, it was a surprisingly convincing argument.

It had been a rare flash of brilliance from Scarlett, however. What had struck me most at the time about Scarlett in that first series of Goldfish Bowl had been her willingness to take on whatever