A Surrey State of Affairs (32 page)

How could he? How could he?

A phone call from the twelve-year-old
Dungeon
producer with the oscillating accent. Did we want to go to the television studio this evening as VIP guests to cheer Sophie on and meet her if she is given parole? No, we did not. I told her that we had other plans. If Sophie could find her own way into the house, she could find her own way out. My anger overwhelmed me. Then as soon as I had hung up I called back to make sure that she would be put up somewhere safe for the night and looked after. Then I said, “Good, I should think so too,” and hung up again.

  
FRIDAY, JULY 18

A phone call from Harriet. News of
Dungeon
has finally percolated through to Weybridge. She was shocked, and appalled.
“My niece, Constance, my niece,” she kept repeating, a little insensitively. Lowering my voice to a hiss, I told her about Jeffrey’s vote. She went silent, then hissed back conspiratorially, “How could he? How could he?” In such moments, I can forgive all her bragging over her beautiful baby granddaughter.

A phone call from Tanya. “Hiya, Connie, how about we bring some pizzas around to your house for parole night, make a party of it?” I didn’t have the energy to refuse. She and Mark will be here at nine. Feeling too fraught to fight the current, I decided to swim along with it, and texted Rupert to invite him too.

10:30 P.M.

It’s over. She’s out. What a spectacle; what an evening.

Mark, Tanya, and Rupert all arrived around nine o’clock, Rupert giving me a hug and a bottle of Chilean red wine, which I hoped Jeffrey would be able to discreetly lose somewhere in the wine rack.

Mark and Tanya brought take-out pizza; Tanya ate directly from the box, which she balanced on her bump, but I made sure everyone else had plates. The smell was enough to coax Natalia out of her room to join us. She looked a little like a
Dungeon
contestant herself with her tracksuit bottoms and tiny vest top showing a good few inches of Slavic stomach. As the opening music played, Jeffrey leaped up and started pacing back and forth across the rug. I told him to stop or he would erase the paisley.

The scene that opened up on the television screen was flabbergasting. I felt like an anthropologist who had stumbled on some mysterious tribe in a clearing in the middle of a rain forest, leaping about in incomprehensible ritual. There were hundreds, thousands of people, crammed around a walkway screaming and
waving banners, some of which said “Go go SoHa!!!” It took me several minutes—and Rupert’s explanation—for me to understand that they were there for my daughter. “It’s okay, Mum,” Rupert said, patting me on the shoulder, “they’re just a bit bonkers. And if it wasn’t Sophie it would be a football team or a dancing dog or someone from Girls Aloud.” I nodded and looked back to the screen, where the host was interviewing a teenage girl dressed in the same purple minidress that Sophie was wearing, showing off a tongue piercing, which she’d had done “to look just like So, she’s so hot.” I always wanted my daughter to be a role model, but this wasn’t quite what I had envisaged.

The scene cut to the dungeon, where all the cell mates—even those who openly despised one another—were holding hands in a circle. It looked like a cross between an evangelical prayer, a séance, a nightclub, and death row. Sophie had clearly made an effort for the occasion: her eyes were encrusted in emerald eye shadow and she was wearing her gold sequined halter top. The overall effect reminded me slightly of Darcy, although I’m sure this is not what she intended.

Eventually, as the crowd was whipped up into a fury, as a cacophony of shouts rose from a thousand moronic mouths, and as the camera panned over Sophie and Renita, both of whom had small tears welling in the corners of their eyes, the result was announced: Sophie had 53 percent of the public vote; she was out on her ear. Jeffrey kicked over the wastepaper basket in disgust, spilling advertisements for Norwegian fjord cruises and dentures across the floor; Rupert patted my hand and said, “There you go, it’s over.”

But it wasn’t quite. A teary Sophie reappeared on the television to be interviewed about her experience. In such circumstances, I would have advised her to maintain a dignified silence. She did not, preferring to bad-mouth all the other contestants, grudgingly
admit that the Peter Andre impersonator was “quite fit,” accuse Renita of turning everyone against her, and then wail “I should still be in there in the hot tub, not that Mexican slut” and start sniveling. Luckily, the interview ended there. The music started up; her television career was over. I grabbed the phone and began calling. Would she have her mobile on yet? On the sixth attempt, I gave up, having left a long answerphone message that incorporated my shock, anger, and humiliation, but, ultimately, emotional support.

A few minutes later, she texted back, saying:
bummed, stayin with a m8.

  
SATURDAY, JULY 19

Another long and eventful day. It began with a trip to the newsagent first thing to buy all the papers for what I hoped would be the last time. It can’t get any worse, I thought, as I crossed the threshold into the cheerily white-lit store, the tins and cans and packets of rice neatly stacked from floor to ceiling for those too disorganized to send their housekeepers to a proper supermarket.

I was completely unprepared for what I saw next. Splashed across all the tabloids, and even some of the proper newspapers, was the headline D
UNGEON RACE ROW
. From the tone of the coverage, Sophie’s admittedly rude and inappropriate “Mexican” comment was some kind of outrage that put her on a par with the worst perpetrators of apartheid South Africa. “But she wasn’t even Mexican!” I muttered to myself, aghast, as I read that channel 4 had been deluged with complaints and that the ambassadors of both Mexico and Brazil had demanded an apology from the British government.

My fingers were shaking as I handed the change to Niral. He smiled at me sympathetically, shook his head, and tut-tutted.

“Your Sophie is not one of these racialists. I remember her playing tag on the green with Mehak when they were little ones. If these newspaper types were not too lazy to come down from London and find out what is really going on before writing their mumbo jumbo I would set the message straight.”

I thanked him sincerely.

“And besides,” he added, leaning toward me across the counter. “That Renita, she WAS a Mexican slut, if you will pardon me my French. I have told Mehak: do not fall for these sorts of girls! Do not fall for them.” He was wagging his finger toward me like a man facing down a wild tiger. “If he dares to bring home a girl like that, he will get the flogging of his life, of that he can be sure. Now, that does not make me a racialist, does it?”

No sooner had I nodded then shaken my head in confusion and left the shop than my mobile bleeped with a text message from Sophie. It read:
yo mo at stashun can u pik me up?? xx.

As you can imagine, it was with mixed emotions that I drove to the station. As soon as I pulled in I saw her there, waiting, one hand on her suitcase, the other punching a text message into her mobile, looking tiny, fragile, so much smaller than the angry photos emblazoned across the newspapers. I felt my anger soften. She stuck her suitcase in the trunk and then hopped in. I looked at her big open eyes, delicate, blue, and bare of makeup, and her baby-soft skin. I reached out to touch her cheek. “Oh, Sophie,” I said.

“All right, Mum, wassup?” she said, before turning back to her text message.

I drove home in silence, a few stray tears blurring my vision. When I got back, there was a Sky Television van parked on the corner of our drive, one wheel crushing our rustic brick border, along with a few other unknown cars and about half a dozen journalists milling around. I gasped; Sophie waved cheerily. I put
my foot to the floor and spattered the hacks with gravel as I sped to the front door.

Both Natalia and Jeffrey were there to welcome Sophie home. Natalia, clearly impressed to be in the same house as a
Dungeon
evictee, volunteered to make her a cup of tea for the first time in living memory, said how much both she and her sister Lydia had enjoyed watching over the Internet, and asked if it was true that there was a camera in the toilet. I felt too weakened to inform her that the correct word was
lavatory.
Jeffrey, for his part, gave Sophie a pat on the back, and said, “Well, well, you’re home. Think tactics, girl, next time you want to form an alliance. You have to unite against a common enemy. That’s the thing.” And with that he went out to tidy the shed.

With Jeffrey gone, I pointedly asked Natalia to go and vacuum the landing upstairs, hoping that I could finally have a proper chat with Sophie and point out the error of her ways. I had only just poured myself a cup of tea, drawn a deep breath, and begun—“Even in this day and age, there are certain rules of thumb that a young lady”—when Sophie’s mobile rang. Her end of the conversation went something like this: “Yeah? Yeah…no…yeah…yep…yeah…yeah…yeah…no…Gotcha, bye.”

“Who was that?” I asked.

“This guy who wants to look after my publicity,” she said, tossing her hair back with a smug look in her eyes. “He said he’s had lots of practice. He told me he’d get me the best deal for my interviews as long as I didn’t go through anyone else, and that if any journos call I’m to tell them that I spent my gap year working in an orphanage in Mexico.”

“But Sophie, who was this man? What was his name?”

“M something or other.”

“M? What’s his full name?”

“He doesn’t have a full name, full names went out with the dinosaurs, just like that top you’re wearing. He said he was called…M Clo. Yeah, that was it.”

  
SUNDAY, JULY 20

You would have thought that Sunday would be a day of rest, but sadly it is not. More journalists arrived. M—I will not, cannot, say M Clo—called Sophie’s mobile and told her to stay inside. He has an exclusive interview and photo shoot set up with
Hot
magazine tomorrow. They will come here at ten. I have half a mind to keep the chain on and the door closed when they knock.

  
MONDAY, JULY 21