The Vanishing Point

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 task Big Fish – the voice that represented the controlling TV company – set the contestants, coupled with a shrewd eye for the weaknesses of others. Scarlett had been adept at appearing to offer support while actually undermining her fellow contenders. It was hard to believe this was a deliberate tactic because she seemed remarkably stupid most of the time. Her first attempt at putting together the contestants’ shopping list within a budget demonstrated the literacy and numeracy of a six-year-old. Her grasp of current affairs was pitiful; she was convinced that Prime Minister Tony Blair was the son of dancer Lionel Blair, and that Bill Clinton was still President of the United States. (‘Well, why do they call him President Clinton if he’s not the president, then?’) She demonstrated weepy sentimentality over children, kittens and puppies, while revealing terrifying ignorance about the care of any of them. She was unpopular with her fellow contestants in the Bowl because of her tendency to speak her mind. But the public grew to like her because she had the knack of hitting the nail on the head and saying what the viewers were thinking. They admired her brass neck. And she made people laugh, which is always a winner on reality shows.

She was overweight and nobody’s idea of pretty, but she made the most of herself. She took the same care with her hair and make-up whether she was about to go in search of carrots to dig up or talk to Big Fish in the Aquarium – the glass-sided room at the heart of the complex where contestants were summoned for progress reports, debriefs and instructions.

The punters also gradually came to admire her refusal to give up. When the contestants were low on food, she made a virtue of the opportunity for weight loss. When Captain Sensible dropped their only fishing rod in the sea during the ‘Larder of the Ocean’ challenge, she beachcombed till she found a substitute. Even though she let her guard slip often enough to reveal herself as a foul-mouthed bigot, people warmed to Scarlett. She was nominated for elimination by her fellow contestants a record six times. Every time, the public chose to keep her and ditch the other candidate.

But they didn’t quite love her enough. In the final vote of the series, she lost out to Darrell O’Donohue, an amiable lump of beefcake from Belfast. I reckon he won because there was absolutely nothing to object to about Darrell. He was good-looking, kind and hard-working. He appeared to have no strong views on any subject. And he’d made a fine job of Shania Twain’s ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman!’ in the karaoke challenge. Still, I’d have killed him within the hour if I’d been forced to spend an evening in his company. After the show was over, he had his five minutes of fame, then disappeared back to Northern Ireland, happy to be a C-list fish in a small pond.

Despite being the beaten finalist, it was Scarlett who went on to make the most of her success. I wanted to refresh my memory of her trajectory of fame, so I moved to Scarlett’s own Wikipedia entry. As I read, I remembered how ballsy she’d seemed. Shedding her past in the sink estates of south Leeds, she’d headed straight for the celebrity circuit. She hooked up with an agent and within days she’d become a staple of the red-tops and the slag mags that celebrated drunken women falling into limos or gutters at three in the morning. Slimmed down and burnished by stylists, Scarlett seemed to become almost beautiful and it wasn’t long before she’d landed a boyfriend with a foot on the celebrity ladder.

Scarlett hadn’t quite built up enough superstar Brownie points to snag a Premier League footballer, but she managed the next best thing. Reno Jacuba was a striker with a Champion ship side struggling in mid-table. He’d suffered from a couple of allegations of nasty sexual assaults, he shared the same agent as Scarlett and there was benefit to both of them in a link-up. So, linked they were – for a couple of magazine cycles. Once he was rehabilitated and her stock had risen a little, he ditched her. Or she ditched him, depending on which account you bought into.

Next up was a second division gangsta rapper whose principal claim to fame had been mooning on the MOBO red carpet. A few short months of nauseating lurve were followed by an acrimonious bust-up. Three nightclub fights ended on the front pages of the tabloids and he was history.

And then along came Joshu. A British Asian DJ, titan of the turntables, a strutting bantam of a boy who thought every word that dripped from his mouth was golden. King of the clubs, or so he thought. He never tired of publicly telling Scarlett she should be grateful to have him because he could have any woman he wanted. It was a claim he regularly put to the test. They rowed about it in nightclubs, in bars and in restaurants. They rowed about it on TV chat shows, in press interviews and in the street. The trouble was, it seemed the silly girl was in love with the idiot boy. She kept on coming back for more. Just reading about it made me want to shake some sense into her.

Having very public love affairs wasn’t the only thing that Scarlett was good at. A bright TV producer had understood that she had the gift of communicating with a particular demographic. The chattering classes might sneer, all the papers from the Daily Mail upwards might scoff, but when it came to reaching out to empty-headed young women with enough disposable income to be interesting to advertisers, Scarlett had an unerring instinct. It seemed she knew when to be raunchy, when to be vulnerable, when to be sexy and when to be bloody rude. And because she was pictured out on the lash at least twice a week, her audience really got that she was one of them.

Scarlett was living proof of the dream for those young women. She validated their shallow ambition. They saw her hitting the high life, in spite of her terrible childhood, her poor education, her limited looks, and it helped them believe it could happen to them. And that was what got them through the shitty days.

So they devoured her late-night satellite-channel show. The programme charted her life. Scarlett provided beauty tips, fashion guidance and a window on a world slathered in product placement. There was talk of a signature fragrance, a line of clothes in a downmarket high street chain, a monthly magazine column. Thank God that didn’t come off. I shuddered at the thought of the poor subeditor charged with rendering Scarlett’s simplistic yet totally fucked-up world view into a form that would please the readers and satisfy the lawyers.

Still, I had to admit she’d been doing really well for herself, had Scarlett. Well, by her lights, anyway. She was living in a hideous hacienda-style villa on the edge of Epping Forest that had been built originally for some minor East End gangster, according to Yes! magazine. It looked like the house that taste forgot, with its mish-mash of styles and its job-lot furnishings. She’d bought a house for her mum and her sister, but she’d had the good sense to keep them firmly offstage, up north in Leeds. Not much detail had escaped about Scarlett’s family. Which, in my experience, translated as ‘scum’. From my perspective, that was a good thing. It promised piquancy at the very least. Skeletons clattering out of closets like flamenco dancers on speed at best.

So, there was Scarlett, bumping along nicely, comfortably above the bottom of the barrel of fame. When it came to casting the second season of Goldfish Bowl, the producers hit on the bright idea of bringing back two of the participants from the first series. They dressed it up as giving the contestants more of a chance because they’d have a couple of team members who’d been through the experience before and would know how to milk a cow and skin a rabbit. I figured it was more of an insurance policy. Viewers loved them the first time so they’d be more likely to tune in for a second series.

And of course, Scarlett was the first port of call. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t been paying much attention at the time – I’d been in the final throes of my top Tory’s tale, trying to apply positive spin to some of his less attractive achievements. And there were plenty of those to work with.

It had all gone well to begin with, but soon the contestants realised that having previous contenders maybe wasn’t such a brilliant idea. There was discontent in the ranks at what they felt was an unfair advantage. Until they realised that some of the things Scarlett and Darrell thought they knew – such as the locations of food sources – were no longer the case. And then the worms turned, taking the piss out of the so-called Island Experts.

It didn’t take a psychologist to work out that the one thing Scarlett couldn’t deal with was having the piss taken out of her. She’d learned the hard way that she was generally considered to be ignorant and stupid. Even the ignorant and stupid can read a tabloid headline, after all. But she hated being condescended to, and in her eyes, when anyone mocked her, they were asking for trouble. And she was the one to hand it out.

Things got fractious fast. They came to a head one evening on the second week. The islanders had earned a case of wine, thanks in part to Scarlett’s willingness to immerse herself in the freezing Firth of Forth to find crab pots hidden on the sea bed just offshore. They attacked the wine with gusto over dinner, and inhibitions began to vanish. Danny Williams, who called himself a landscape gardener but was actually a labourer for a garden design firm, started holding forth about why Scarlett had got the location of the vegetable beds so wrong. He was smart enough to make his sarcasm cut her, and she wasn’t in the mood to take it.

‘Fuck off back to bongo bongo land, you fat black arsebandit,’ she’d screamed at him. Cha-ching. It’s hard to imagine a line that could cause more offence on prime-time TV. The media lit up like the main drag in Vegas. Jackpot time. And of course, somebody’s tame monkey got up in the House of Commons and did the whole ‘a nation is outraged’ number. Scarlett’s goose was well and truly cooked.

Goldfish Bowl pretended they were just as outraged as the country’s moral guardians and that night Scarlett was summoned to the Aquarium. Big Fish did the whole ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ routine and made her apologise to Danny, the rest of the contestants, the country at large and, really, the entire solar system. He made it sound like she could win a reprieve by grovelling enough, but of course the viewers knew it was nothing but a ritual humiliation. Scarlett was going and everybody knew it except her.

I can still remember the shocked disbelief on her face when, after she’d shed her tears and abased herself, Big Fish told her to pack her bag and make her way down to the dock. Everything went on hold for a long moment. Then Scarlett jumped to her feet and stabbed her finger at the camera. ‘You bastard,’ she said. ‘You were never going to let me stay, were you? Well, here’s the truth. I’m not fucking sorry. Not one fucking bit. So stick that up your arse and spin on it.’

I have to admit, right then it was hard not to admire Scarlett.