Page 9 of Untether

AIDA

In the corner of my production company’s spacious and achingly hip East London converted warehouse offices, there’s a small room that makes me happy. My production team and I have named it the Paradise Room.

I deal mainly in information. My brain is obsessed with joining the dots until I see the patterns. It’s its own kind of creativity, and it is, of course, storytelling. Because, despite my reliance on facts as the foundations of my reporting, I can’t kid myself that the narratives I present are anything other than just that.Narratives.

If words are my paintbrushes, then the faces of the people I meet are my canvases, and that’s as true for a terror attack survivor as it is for a politician. This is all to say I don’t deal in actualpicturesvery often. And, while I see beauty in life, my job is more often concerned with discussing the darkness.

So it’s with genuine pleasure that I stand in front of the so-called Paradise Wall in the Paradise Room, arms crossed and fingers curved around opposite elbows as I take it in.

The team at Creatrix Productions has added a fewdetails since I was here last week, and the cohesive whole of this giant collage does what I needed it to do since my shit show of a meeting at Alchemy yesterday andget my head back in the fucking game.

Thisis how my programme whispers to me in my head. Especially the second episode,Paradise Found, which will be the racier, more hopeful, more celebratory of the two. Carnal accents of crimson and maroon and blood red amid tasteful black-and-white photos of beautiful people getting it on. Black lace lingerie and intricate eye masks are pinned to the cork-board, too, as are PR shots of Alchemy’s interior and exterior… and ones of me and Cal.

I try not to linger on those too much, because he’s grinning and gorgeous in his headshot, and I now possess the unfortunate knowledge that he’s even more glorious in the flesh.

Fuck my life.

A production company of my own may lie somewhere in my future, but for this project I’m outsourcing to the best. Creatrix is the brainchild of two female founders, and, by a mix of accident and design, the senior members of theParadiseteam are female, too.

There’s Cate, the show’s Executive Producer. It was she who believed in my fledgling vision enough to take me and my show on, and she who closed the deal with Azure. She’s one of those rare people who makes combining details with big-picture genius look easy. She’ll take a step back now that the show is in production, but she’s here today.

Then there’s our director, Lizzy, whose creative vision will inform the final product, just as it’s informed the wall I’m staring at. If this brain dump is any reflection of how the finished article will be, then I approve.

Our producer, Darika, is female, too, which works wellfor me, because her role will undoubtedly involve coordinating “stuff” at Alchemy—stuff I’ll probably feel more comfortable liaising with a woman about.

There’s a whole team at Azure on this, too, from their commissioners to their marketing people. And when you have this many people on a project, let me tell you it makes for a lot of agendas.

Most align with mine; some don’t—or won’t, by the time this process ends. The audience for this programme certainly isn’t the only stakeholder here.

And, just in case I’m not already feeling the pressure from a million directions, least of all from myself, we have Mara.

Mara is my newish publicist. I hired her in haste earlier this year at the insistence of a good friend of mine: the skincare entrepreneur and former TV presenter, Honor Chapman.

Mara has form in helping high profile women navigate the public trauma of having shitty husbands, you see. When Honor’s movie star ex-husband’s cheating ways were dominating the tabloids, Mara helped her turn things around. She’s also been by the side of Oscar-winning actor Elle Hart for years, since before Elle’s ex dumped her on Twitter (he came crawling back five years later after doing a lot of work on himself).

So her résumé is flawless, mainly because she’s so fucking terrifying. She rides an enormous motorcycle, wears brands so cool I’d be scared to touch them, and always has her clients’ best interests at heart.

Even when—orespecially when—we don’t actually know what our best interests are. But we usually fall into line. We’re too scared not to.

Thanks to a panicked voice message from me yesterday,Mara’s invited herself to today’s meeting. It was supposed to be a quick catch-up to get everyone on the same page post my sit-down with Gen and Callum, but I suspect it may end up being a therapy session.

Suddenly, the lack of penises in the room feels extremely reassuring.

‘So, how’d it go yesterday?’ Lizzy asks with a huge smile once we’ve all taken our seats around the glossy white table. Her vision is crystal clear, but she understands that the camera is essentially a pair of eyes observing my very personal journey, and that none of us can really have any clue what’s going to happen along the way.

All of which makes her flexible as hell and a dream to work with.

‘I bombed.’ Mara may know this, but it’s news to Lizzy and Cate. So I give it to them straight.

‘Here we go,’ Mara groans, scooting her chair back so she can put her Off White-clad feet on the table.

Cate shoots her a stern look before turning back to me. ‘How bad was it?’

I straighten my shoulders. I’m not in the habit of making excuses for myself. Years of live reporting have taught me to own my fuckups.

‘I froze, I guess. I sat down with Gen and this super-hot guy who I’m supposed to be fucking sometime soon, and I totally lost my mojo. I gave him the worst pitch of my entire career and madeParadisesound like the driest, dullest old-lady show ever.

‘Gen had to step in and remind me, basically, that when I met her in the spring, I was full of bravado. I was all likeI want great sex!Fast forward to yesterday and I could barely mention the S-word, let alone look this guy in the eye.’

---