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the way, you’ve got to change that answering machine message.’

And she’s gone. He contemplates calling straight back, but feels that tactically he ought to sulk a little longer. They have argued again. She thinks that he doesn’t like her boyfriend, and despite his passionate denials there’s no getting over the fact that he doesn’t like her boyfriend.

He has tried, really he has. The three of them have sat together in cinemas and cheap restaurants and dingy old boozers, Dexter meeting Emma’s eyes and smiling his approval as Ian snuffles at her neck; love’s young dream with a pair of pints. He has sat at the tiny kitchen table of her tiny Earls Court flat and played a game of Trivial Pursuit so savagely competitive that it was like bareknuckle boxing. He has even joined the blokes from Sonicotronics at The Laughter Lab in Mortlake to watch Ian’s observational stand-up, Emma grinning nervously at his side and nudging him so that he knows when to laugh.

But even on his best behaviour the hostility is tangible, and mutual too. Ian takes every opportunity to imply that Dexter is a fake because he happens to be in the public eye, a snob, a fop just because he prefers taxis to night buses, members’ clubs to saloon bars, good restaurants to take-away. And the worst of it is that Emma joins in with the constant belittling, the reminders of his failings. Don’t they appreciate how hard it is, staying decent, keeping your head on straight when so much is happening to you and your life is so full and eventful? If Dexter picks up the bill at dinner, or offers to pay for a taxi instead of the bus, the two of them mumble and mope as if he has insulted

them in some way. Why can’t people be pleased that he’s doing so well, grateful for his generosity? That last excruciating evening – a ‘vid night’ on a decrepit sofa, watching Star Trek: Wrath of Khan and drinking ‘tinnies’ while a curry leaked fluorescent ghee onto his Dries van Noten trousers – that was the last straw. From now on if he’s going to see Emma, then he’s going to see her alone.

Irrationally, unreasonably, he has become – what? Jealous? No, not jealous, but resentful perhaps. He has always expected Emma to be there, a resource he can call upon at any time like the emergency services. Since the cataclysm of his mother’s death last Christmas he has found himself more and more reliant on her at exactly the point that she has become less available to him. She used to return phone-calls immediately, now days go by without a word. She’s been ‘away with Ian’ she says, but where do they go? What do they do? Buy furniture together? Watch ‘vids’? Go to pub quizzes? Ian has even met Emma’s parents, Jim and Sue. They love him, she says. Why has Dexter never met Jim and Sue? Wouldn’t they love him more?

Most annoyingly of all, Emma seems to be relishing this newfound independence from Dexter. He feels as if he’s being taught a lesson, as if he’s being slapped round the face with her newfound contentment. ‘You can’t expect people to build their lives around you, Dexter,’ she has told him, gloatingly, and now they’ve argued once again, and all because she won’t be there in the studio for the live broadcast of his show.

‘What do you want me to do, cancel Oliver! because you’re on telly?’

‘Can’t you come along afterwards?’ ‘No! It’s miles!’

‘I’ll send a car!’

‘I need to talk to the kids afterwards, the parents—’ ‘Why do you?’

‘Dexter, be reasonable, it’s my job!’

And he knows he’s being churlish, but it would help to see Emma in the audience. He’s a better person when she’s around, and isn’t that what friends are for, to raise you up and keep you at your best? Emma is his talisman, his lucky charm, and now she won’t be there and his mother won’t be there and he will wonder why he’s doing it at all.

After a long shower he feels a little better and pulls on a light v-neck cashmere sweater worn with no shirt, some pale linen drawstring trousers worn with no underpants, steps into a pair of Birkenstocks and bounds down to the paper-shop to read the TV previews and check that Press and Publicity have been doing their job. The newsagent smiles at his celebrity customer with a due sense of occasion, and Dexter trots home with his arms full of newspapers. He feels better now, full of trepidation but exhilarated too, and while the espresso machine is warming up, the phone rings once again.

Even before the machine picks up something tells him that it will be his father and that he will screen the call. Since his mother’s death the calls have become more frequent and more excruciating: stuttering, circular and

distracted. His father, the self-made man, now seems defeated by the simplest of tasks. Bereavement has unmanned him and on Dexter’s rare visits home he has seen him staring helplessly at the kettle as if it were some alien technology.

‘So – talk to me!’ says the idiot on the machine. ‘Hello, Dexter, it’s your father here.’ He uses his

ponderous phone voice. ‘I am just phoning to say good luck for your television show tonight. I will be watching. It’s all very exciting. Alison would have been very proud.’ There’s a momentary pause as they both realise that this probably isn’t true. ‘That’s all I wanted to say. Except. Also, don’t pay any attention to the newspapers. Just have fun. Goodbye. Goodbye—’

Don’t pay any attention to the what? Dexter grabs at the phone.

‘—Goodbye!’

His father has gone. He has set the timer on the explosives then hung up, and Dexter looks across at the pile of news papers, now full of menace. He tightens the drawstring on his linen trousers and turns to the TV pages.

When Emma steps from the bathroom, Ian is on the phone and she can tell from the flirty, larky tone of his voice that he is talking to her mother. Her boyfriend and Sue have been conducting a borderline affair ever since they met in Leeds at Christmas: ‘Lovely sprouts, Mrs M’ and ‘Isn’t this turkey moist?’ It’s electric, the mutual longing between them and all Emma and her dad can do is tut and roll their eyes.

She waits patiently for Ian to tear himself away. ‘Bye, Mrs M. Yeah I hope so too. It’s just a summer cold, I’ll pull through. Bye, Mrs M. Bye.’ Emma takes the receiver as Ian, mortally ill once more, shuffles back to bed.

Her mother is flushed and giddy. ‘Such a lovely lad. Isn’t he a lovely lad?’

‘He is, Mum.’

‘I hope you’re looking after him.’ ‘I’ve got to go to work now, Mum.’

‘Now, why was I calling? I’ve completely forgotten why I was calling.’

She was calling to talk to Ian. ‘Was it to wish me good luck?’

‘Good luck for what?’ ‘The school production.’

‘Oh yes, good luck for that. Sorry we can’t come down to see it. It’s just London’s so expensive . . .’

Emma ends the phone-call by pretending that the toaster is on fire then goes to see the patient, sweltering beneath the duvet in an attempt to ‘sweat it out’. Part of her is vaguely aware of failing as a girlfriend. It’s a new role for her, and she sometimes finds herself plagiarising ‘girlfriend behaviour’: holding hands, cuddling up in front of the television, that kind of thing. Ian loves her, he tells her so, if anything a little too often, and she thinks she may be able to love him back, but it will take some practice. Certainly she intends to try and now, in a self-conscious gesture of sympathy, she curls herself around him on the bed.

‘If you don’t think you can come to the show tonight—’

He sits up, alarmed. ‘No! No, no, no, I’m definitely coming—’

‘I’ll understand—’

‘—if I have to come by ambulance.’

‘It’s only a silly school play, it’s going to be so embarrassing.’

‘Emma!’ She lifts her head to look at him. ‘It’s your big night! I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

She smiles. ‘Good. I’m pleased.’ She leans and kisses him antiseptically with closed lips, then picks up her bag and pads out of the flat, ready for her big day.

The headline reads:

– and for a while Dexter thinks there must be a mistake, because beneath the headline they have accidentally printed his picture, and beneath that the single word ‘Smug’ as if Smug were his surname. Dexter Smug.

With the tiny espresso cup pinched tight between finger and thumb, he reads on.

Tonight’s TV

Is there a more smug, self-satisfied smart-arse than Dexter Mayhew on TV today? A subliminal burst of his cocky, prettyboy face makes us want to kick the screen in. At school we had a phrase for it: here’s a man who clearly thinks he’s IT. Weirdly, someone out there in MediaLand must love him as

much as he loves himself because after three years of largin’ it (dontcha hate that lower case? So 1990) he’s now presenting his own late-night music show, the Late-Night Lock-In. So

He should stop reading here, just close the paper and move on, but his peripheral vision has already glimpsed a word or two. ‘Inept’ was one. He reads on –

So if you really want to see a public schoolboy trying to be a new lad, dropping his aitches and flirting with the ladeez, trying to stay hip with the kidz unaware that the kidz are laughing at him, then this one is for you. It’s live, so there might be some pleasure in watching his famously inept interviewing technique, or alternatively you could brand your face with a steam iron set to ‘linen’. Copresenter is ‘bubbly’ Suki Meadows, music from Shed Seven, Echobelly and the Lemonheads. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Dexter has a clippings file, a Patrick Cox shoebox in the bottom of a wardrobe, but he decides to let this one go. With a great deal of clatter and mess he makes himself another espresso.

Tall poppy syndrome that’s what it is, the British Disease, he thinks. A little bit of success and they want to knock you down well I don’t care I like my job and I’m bloody good at it and it’s much much harder than people think balls of steel that’s what you need to be a TV presenter and a mind like a like a well quick-thinking anyway and besides you mustn’t take it personally critics who needs critics no-one ever woke up and decided they

wanted to be a critic well I’d rather be out there doing it putting myself on the line rather than be some some eunuch being spiteful for twelve grand a year well no-one ever built a statue to a critic and I’ll show them I’ll show them all.

Variations of this monologue run through Dexter’s head throughout his big day; on his trip to the production office, during his chauffeured drive in the saloon car to the studio on the Isle of Dogs, throughout the afternoon’s dress rehearsal, the production meeting, the hair and make-up sessions, right up until the moment when he is alone in his dressing room and is finally able to open his bag, take out the bottle he placed there that morning, pour himself a large glass of vodka, top it up with warm orange juice and proceed to drink.

‘Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight—’

Forty-five minutes to go before curtain up, and the chanting can be heard the whole length of the English block.

‘Fight, fight, fight—’

Hurrying up the corridor, Emma sees Mrs Grainger stumble from the dressing room as if fleeing a fire. ‘I’ve tried to stop them, they won’t listen to me.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Grainger, I’m sure I can handle it.’ ‘Should I get Mr Godalming?’

‘I’m sure it’ll be fine. You go and rehearse the band.’

‘I said this was a mistake.’ She hurries away, hand to her chest. ‘I said it would never work.’

Emma takes a deep breath, enters and sees the mob,

thirty teenagers in top hats and hooped skirts and stick-on beards shouting and jeering as the Artful Dodger kneels on Oliver Twist’s arms and presses his face hard into the dusty floor.

‘WHAT is going on here, people?’

The Victorian mob turns. ‘Get her off me, Miss,’ mumbles Oliver into the lino.

‘They’re fighting, Miss,’ says Samir Chaudhari, twelve years old with mutton chop sideburns.

‘I can see that thank you, Samir,’ and she pushes through the crowd to pull them apart. Sonya Richards, the skinny black girl who plays The Dodger, still has her fingers tangled in the flicked blond bangs of Oliver’s hair, and Emma holds onto her shoulders and stares into her eyes. ‘Let go, Sonya. Let go now, okay? Okay?’ Eventually Sonya lets go and steps back, her eyes moistening now that the rage is leeching away, replaced by wounded pride.

Martin Dawson, the orphan Oliver, looks dazed. Five feet eleven and stocky, he is bigger even than Mr Bumble, but nevertheless the meaty waif looks close to tears. ‘She started it!’ he quavers between bass and treble, wiping his smudgy face with the heel of his hand.

‘That’s enough now, Martin.’ ‘Yeah, shut your face, Dawson . . .’

‘I mean it, Sonya. Enough!’ Emma stands in the centre of the circle now, holding the adversaries by the elbows like a boxing referee, and she realises that if she is to save the show she is going to have to improvise a rousing speech, one of the many Henry V moments that make up

her working life.

‘Look at you! Look at how great you all look in your costumes! Look at little Samir there with his massive sideburns!’ The crowd laugh, and Samir plays along, scratching at the stuck-on hair. ‘You’ve got friends and parents outside and they’re all going to see a great show, a real performance. Or at least I thought they were.’ She folds her arms, and sighs, ‘Because I think we’re going to have to cancel the show . . .’

She’s bluffing of course, but the effect is perfect, a great communal groan of protest.

‘But we didn’t do anything, Miss!’ protests Fagin. ‘So who was shouting fight, fight, fight, Rodney?’

‘But she just went completely ape-shit, Miss!’ warbles Martin Dawson, and now Sonya is straining to get at him.

‘Oi, Oliver, do you want some more?’

There’s laughter, and Emma pulls out the old triumph against the odds speech. ‘Enough! You lot are meant to be a company, not a mob! You know I don’t mind telling you there are people out there tonight who don’t think you can do this! They don’t think you’re capable, they think it’s too complicated for you. It’s Charles Dickens, Emma! they say, they’re not bright enough, they haven’t got the discipline to work together, they’re not up to Oliver!, give them something nice and easy.’

‘Who said that, Miss?’ says Samir, ready to key their car.

‘It doesn’t matter who said it, it’s what they think. And maybe they’re right! Maybe we should call the whole thing off!’ For a moment, she wonders if she’s over-egging it,