Page 101 of Untether

Unseemly and staggeringly ill-judged.

That she applauded the concept made it worse. Called itbeyond timely.What she objected to was the crassness (her word) of my decision to craft such a dialogue around my own lived experience and the inevitable tabloid frenzy it would pique, undoubtedly detracting from the importance of the subject at hand.

Fuck, that hurts, and it doesn’t help my PMS and insistent headache. But I’m nothing if not determined, and having one of the most overtly feminist writers among our broadsheets slam my baby right out of the gate has me determined that this will be the most beautiful, elevated, thought-provoking sex documentary ever produced.

And you know what? Watching it makes me feel better, because we’ve crafted something wonderful here, and nothing about what’s playing out on the big screen in front of us feels crass to me.

Last week, we spent a couple days filming additional content at Alchemy. The production team felt the debauched vibe of the Masked Ball was the perfect depravity with which to end my search for paradise—on air, at least—and they hadn’t gotten nearly enough footage on the evening of the actual party.

So The Playroom was re-decorated, and the on-stage acts re-hired, and God knows how many scantily clad extrasemployed to recreate the bacchanalia of the evening. In addition, Cal and I were drafted for reshoots, and I know instinctively as I watch the footage, edited into a riotous, trippy Baz Luhrmann-esque carnival, that this is close to being our climax.

Unfortunate pun not intended.

At the time that most civilised Britons were taking their elevenses last Wednesday, Cal and I recreated the moment he dragged me down Alchemy’s main corridor for our masked tryst.

I wore my original red dress and ornate mask for the shoot. My lipstick was smudged in a far more orderly fashion than it would have been on the night, my hair mussed just so. In short, I was sexily dishevelled, my arms and chest and collarbones daubed with horrifying amounts of highlighter to achieve an alluring sheen for the cameras.

And Cal? Cal was in his trusty balaclava, shirt off, his gorgeous upper body oiled up to create a similar effect and black dress pants as well tailored as always. He looked the real deal: thuggish, terrifying, and sexy as fuck.

The only part they didn’t try to recreate was his enormous hard-on.

I watch my on-screen self as Cal marches me down the corridor, his body towering behind me and his grip firm on my upper arms. TheLacrimosathat was playing that night haunts my ears over distorted voices shouting and laughing and making merry. The artful camera angles and sultry lighting and dramatic shadows ramp up the tension to a level that’s almost foreboding.

The final frames slow right down.

Cal bends his masked head to whisper something in my ear.

My face swings to the camera, mask glittering andsmudged scarlet lips parting in slow motion in what appears to the viewer as a knowing smile.

Acarnalsmile.

I look like a woman who’s well aware she’s about to find paradise.

‘Holy fucking shit,’my publicist Mara says, which is my reaction exactly. ‘That is hot asfuck.’

I stare at my frozen face, over which the wordsSearching for Paradisehave appeared in the show’s classy serif. We must have shot eight or nine takes of that scene, with Lizzy encouraging me to dig deep and recall the heady mix of apprehension and desire I felt that evening, walking to our private room.

It was she who directed Cal to bend and whisper something dirty in my ear, and it worked.

It fucking worked.

‘The footage is great,’ Lizzy confirms. ‘What we’re missing is the central message. That’s what we wanted to brainstorm on today.’ She pulls up a stool at the large white table dominating the room and collapses onto it. ‘You started this journey with a palpable air of vulnerability and apprehension, and I really feel we’ve communicated that in the first episode, not to mention your extreme frustration at all of the limited thinking around female sexuality.

‘Now we’ve upped the ante. This is the point where women start to go,Fuck, yeah, I deserve more than this shit.And in that shot’—she points at the screen—‘you’re the cat who got the cream. No doubt about it. You’re Aida Russell, and you’ve done what you always do, which is to identify a problem and go the fuck after it and find a solution.

‘But is this the story? Aida gets laid in style, Aida can have her cake and eat it, blah blah blah—is that the note you want to end on? Because we have an opportunity here to potentially overlay this with a bigger message entirely.’

She waves her hand around, and I stare at the screen.

However churlish it sounds, I really wish people would stop asking me what I want.

‘I love this so much,’ Mara chimes in. When I turn to her, she’s rubbing her heavily ringed fingers together, and I can tell she’s itching for a vape. She leans back in her chair—she has, naturally, taken the only seat in the room that actually has a back—and puts her Balenciaga-clad feet on the table.

‘The whole world watched you lose your paradise. They stood by while your ex-fucking-husband turned you into a joke. And you never lost your class. You never stooped to his level. But you certainly needed to reframe the narrative.

‘And now look at you. You’ve created a beautiful piece of filmmaking that deals with really important fucking issues, and you’ve done it in a seriously classy way, no matter what Lorna Dickwad Davison says, and you’re having the time of your life getting fucked senseless by a guy giving serious Michele Morroni vibes right there…Youare having the last laugh. And it’s bloody wonderful.’

‘I guess,’ I say unconvincingly.

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