Once the half hour she’d arbitrarily chosen had elapsed, Rosaline stared into her bowl for a minute or two and then—taking a deep breath—worked her dough into a rough ball as quickly as she could.
There. Done. Committed.
“Well,” Ricky was telling Colin Thrimp, “having no clue came through for me last time so here we are again. The one thing I know about bread is that you can’t be afraid to get your hands in it. So I’m giving it a good hard pounding and hoping for the best.”
Grace Forsythe patted him on the shoulder. “Man after my own heart.”
When the hour was finally up they were dismissed a little informally, probably because this section would involve one of Grace Forsythe’s plummy voice-overs and a clever edit linking it into a continuous sequence with the next. Rosaline hurried out of the ballroom and retrieved her luggage from one of the assistants.
“Look,” she said, “I know this is against the rules, but I need my phone for a bit.”
The assistant shrugged apathetically. “Sorry. It’s like Jennifer said: you’re still in the blind bake, so there’s no phones, no books, no electronic devices.”
“But I need to call my daughter.”
“You can call her tomorrow after the challenge.”
She’d sort of expected this, but that really didn’t help. “She’s eight and she’s expecting to hear from me.”
“Not my rules. Nothing I can do.”
Rosaline opened her mouth to protest but could see no world in which that wasn’t futile. She wasn’t going to get her phone back, she wasn’t going to be able to call Amelie, and then five years from now, her dad would be a dick about something and she’d make a very gentle attempt to call him on it and he’d come back with Well, what about that time you went away for the weekend and couldn’t be bothered to ring your daughter?
“You okay?” Harry, sports bag thrown casually over his shoulder, wandered over from the luggage retrieval pile.
Rosaline did not have time for this. “No. I’m not fucking okay. They won’t give me my phone and I said I’d call Amelie, but they don’t get it or don’t care, and I probably need to talk to Colin Fucking Thrimp, who I know will be useless except what else can I do?”
“Want me to come with you?” he asked, with that quiet steadiness he had that, right now, when she was anything but steady, Rosaline found quite annoying.
“Why would I want that?”
“Moral support?” he suggested. “Might be easier if you’ve got someone backing you up.”
Great. Now a random electrician thought she was incompetent as well as her parents, the boiler guy, and everybody else she knew. “I’m perfectly capable of sorting this out myself.”
He shrugged. “Didn’t say you weren’t. But there’s nothing wrong with getting help sometimes, especially when it’s something important.”
She stared at him for a long moment. Until then, she hadn’t realised how much she’d needed someone to understand that while she might not have been saving lives or making a TV show, her shit still mattered. “Okay. Fine.”
They set off in search of Colin Thrimp—and it did feel just that little bit better to have company. In some ways Harry was the perfect person because, given his reluctance to talk to people in general, she was kind of hoping he would mostly stand behind her and look . . . if not intimidating, then at least more intimidating than, say, her.
Colin Thrimp was semi-hiding in the shadow of a trailer and trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to eat a hot dog. Onions were slipping onto his shoes.
“Oh gosh.” The dog itself followed its toppings to freedom. “Oh no. Rosaline, Harry. Can I . . . do you . . . ?”
“I want my phone back,” said Rosaline.
Colin Thrimp took a sad bite of ketchupy bread. “Ah, well. You see, we have to preserve the integrity of the round. There’s actually quite stringent broadcasting standards regulations.”
“I need to call my daughter.”
“I’m sorry. Is she ill?”
“No.” The truth was out before it had occurred to Rosaline how much more useful it could have been to lie. “But I said I’d ring her, and I don’t want to be breaking promises to my child.”
“That’s very sweet.” Colin Thrimp nodded with an infuriatingly unhelpful helpfulness. “But you did sign a contract, allowing the company to restrict your communications if necessary during filming.”
“Oh come on, mate,” muttered Harry. “She’s not going to get sourdough tips from a primary school kid.”
Colin Thrimp eyed Harry nervously. “I don’t make the rules. The production company makes the rules.”
“Does that mean,” asked Rosaline, “Jennifer makes the rules?”
Dropping what was left of his bun, Colin Thrimp clasped his hands together, half-imploring, half-frustrated. “You cannot go to Jennifer with this.”
Aha. Rosaline knew how this worked. “I want to go to Jennifer.”
“She’s reviewing the footage. She’ll be furious.”
“I’m furious. Get me a phone or get me Jennifer.”
Colin Thrimp got the fleeting calculating look of a yes-man not certain who to say yes to. “I . . . I really can’t. You can phone your daughter tomorrow. It’ll be fine.”
“It’s not fine. I promised I’d call tonight.”
A door creaked open on the other side of the car park. “Colin,” barked Jennifer Hallett. “Get me another six coffees. It’s going to be an unlubed arsefuck of an evening to whisk this chunky diarrhoea you call footage into something approaching watchable television.”
“Please don’t,” whispered Colin Thrimp.
No chance. Rosaline strode across the gravel towards Jennifer Hallett. “I need to talk to my daughter.”
Jennifer Hallet paused, an unbranded brown cup denting in her hand. “Am I your daughter? Do I look like your daughter? Then why the fuck are you bothering me about it?”
“You’ve confiscated my phone like you’ve caught me texting in assembly.”
“You’re under a pissing embargo. Either you live with it, or we’ve got no shortage of ovens for you to stick your head in.”
Rosaline sighed. This was getting circular. Like a saw. And she should probably have stopped pressing her face against it. “Look, she’s eight, I’m a single mother—”
“Yes,” interrupted Jennifer Hallett, “and you’re twenty-seven. Born in Kensington. And now you live in some shitty commuter town. You work at WHSmith’s and look good in a pinny. I know everything I need to know about you, sunshine.”
Oh God. All this time Rosaline had been worried she was the boring one and it turned out she was the pretty one. The one who would get through to week six and who everyone would say was only still on the show because one of the judges fancied her. That didn’t say good things about her career prospects, but maybe she could make it work for her now. “And how good do you think I’ll look in my pinny if I’ve spent the whole night stressing about my child?”
There was a cut-the-red-wire pause.