Nobody’s Child Chapter Two

In Atlantic City the victory party began at breakfast. A series of pre-party premonitions had shaken New Jersey, like tremors before an earthquake – a celebration dinner the night after the show was taped, ending with every table in the restaurant joininga conga dance … a theatre trip to see The Sound Of Music, with Terry and Col and half a dozen friends dressed as the family Von Trapp … a night at the Lincoln’s roulette wheel, where Terry kept a promise to stake $1,000 dollars on one turn and won with red, then staked the lot on black and won again.

The big party outdazzled all of those. The whole of the Neptune Vista apartment block was invited, from the security men on the front desk upwards. The entire executive team at Outland Agricultural, where Colin Lord was a vice-president, was invited. Everyone at Niemark Deskware, the software house which employed Terry Impey as its public relations face, was invited. And everyone rolled up, even the CEO of Outland, who lived in Manhattan, and Sig Niemark, who lived in his office. Col’s parents came from Chicago, and one of his sisters drove up from New Orleans. Terry’s mother was never expected to make it, but she phoned in her congratulations from Orlando, and all four of his sisters were there – the youngest had taken command of their kitchen on Thursday night and was organising enough canapŽs to feed a casino.

Every TV in the block was switched on. Wherever Terry went, and he was flying between the floors, goading everyone to dance bigger and party louder, he didn’t have to miss a second of the show.

He ran into Col in the penthouse above their apartment, where they had lived for four years, and flung his arms around his partner.

“Eight twenty-eight and counting!” he yelled above the jazz soundtrack. “Has everyone got their phones? I have two!” He brandished a mobile in each hand above his head.

The room cheered. Everyone had mobiles.

“Now you know you can’t vote more then once. So get it right! We are couple number nine. Number nine, number nine. Who are we voting for?”

Nine! they chorused, and then someone yelled, “Six!”

“Four!”

“Three!”

“Eleven!”

“Anybody dials it wrong, I will find out!”Terry shouted. “And you will be first on dirty diaper duty!” He hugged Col again and turned to run into the corridor, just as big sister Rebecca was coming in with more crispbread boats with sails cut from slices of Leerdammer cheese.

One of the trays leapt out of her hand. Terry caught it at knee level.

“Great catch!” Rebecca laughed. She had a giggle like a ripple at the top of a piano keyboard, lots of little high notes that wriggled up and down. “You are so wired.”

“I’m a superhero tonight, I’m a comicbook character. I am the Incredible Hunk. See, I ripple my muscles and they burst through my shirt. Almost.”

Rebecca giggled and then put on her serious face. She was the oldest of the five Impey kids, and ten years older than Terry. Making sure he didn’t get hurt when he was over-excited had always been one of her jobs. Now Dad was dead and Mom wasn’t so well, Rebecca took her responsibility even more seriously.

“Terry, you remember what I told you. This is fantastic fun, and you and Col are famous for fifteen minutes and everything. If that’s as far as it gets, I don’t want you to be disappointed. OK?”

“Yeah, yeah. You know we’re a foregone conclusion.”

“Don’t tempt the gods, Terry. Just because you won on Monday, there’s no rule that says tonight’s vote is going the same way.”

“We’re the only gays on the show,”said Terry simply. “Of course we’re going to win. Every homo from Alaska to the Alamo will vote for us.”

“How do you know? All the viewers could be respectable married people, they might think you’re outrageous and nobody will vote for you at all.”

“Rebecca, Col and me will make wonderful parents. Double daddies, any kid would be thrilled.”

“I know that. But most people don’t know you. They’ll just vote on their prejudices. I’m just being realistic. I don’t want you to be heartbroken if you don’t win.”

“Don’t worry about me. Go and do the sensible sister act for Col. He’s the broody one. He wants to be poppa again so much, he’s already bought the baseball mitts. And a little scooter. Hey, whaddya mean, famous for fifteen minutes? I thought I’d always been famous.”

Rebecca giggled and, because she was still holding the bread roll boats and couldn’t hug him, she kissed the end of his nose, like a fairy godmother. “You’re our superstar.”

Terry ran into the hallway, glanced at the three men waiting for the lift and called out, “Race you to the bottom,”and started bounding down the stairs, two at a time.

Swinging round a corner he almost collided with Col’s parents.

“Hi George, hi Connie! Phones at the ready?”

“Terry.” Col’s mother always spoke his name carefully, Terry felt, as if she was barely able to say it. As if she wanted to say ‘Terence’, to criticise him for being a man and not a woman.

“You know, we’re so glad you came tonight.”

“We’re here to give Colin our support.” Just Colin, not the two of them. But Terry would never let them fight with him. He’d been with Col for six years – and it was Col who had first proposed sharing an apartment, who wanted his parents to understand he’d left his wife and was living with his boyfriend.

Terry had always told Col, “Your parents don’t have to love me, but I’m always going to make them like me. Against their better instincts.”

Once Col replied: “Liking you is the easy part. How do I stop them from hating me?”

But George and Connie couldn’t hate Col, Terry knew. He was their only son, and all their dreams were nestled on his shoulders.

“You are wonderful parents,” Terry said. He took Connie hands, because he saw she was trying to edge away from him, towards the stairs. “And if it all goes right tonight, you’ll get the chance to show everyone what wonderful grandparents you are.”

Terry wasn’t in public relations by accident. He could make Liberace look insincere.

On the next floor he found his sister Edie with one arm draped over Nollie, this year’s girlfriend, and the other hand fingering the denim jacket of Terry’s boss, Sig Niemark.

If Nollie moved suddenly, Edie was going to fall over. She was very drunk. Big surprise.

Edie was saying, “All geeks have to wear this stuff, right? It’s geek uniform. So that nobody guesses you’re a multi-multi-mega-millionaire. But I know … I know …”

Terry understood that Edie had forgotten what she knew, and also that Sig didn’t know how to deal with a drunk lesbian criticising his evening wear. Sig didn’t really know how to deal with anybody.

Terry took his sister’s hand and pulled it over his own shoulder. “She needs to sit down,” he told his boss, and helped Nollie carry her into the apartment behind them. All three of them fell backwards onto a sofa.

Edie was laughing. Nollie wasn’t. She looked like she didn’t need this, Terry thought.

“Edie, you are not to go looking for trouble with my employer. Or anybody else. This is Atlantic City, this apartment belongs to the Mafia, all these people you see are gangsters. It’s Mobland. And if they decide to sober you up they will pop your feet in a bucket of concrete and take you swimming with the fishes.”

“Is he in the mob?” Edie asked, flopping an arm at someone.

“Yes.”

“Are you in the mob?”

“Yes. Don’t tell anyone.” Terry winked at Nollie. He hoped she realised he was joking.

“Is this sofa in the mob?” slurred Edie.

“It’s part of the Comfy Cosi Nostra,”Nollie told her seriously.

Terry burst out laughing. She was much too clever to be hanging out with his dumb drunk sister.

“Good luck,” he told her, and struggled out of the cushions.

“You too. Good luck,” Nollie smiled.

She was a nice kid. “Got your phone? Don’t forget, number nine!”

In Philly May’s bar, Buffalo, they had all the couples worked out. Philly May’s son was holding the book, but all the odds had been fixed by an argument that involved the whole bar.

The book wasn’t giving better than than 3-1 on any couple making the final because, as Jim Creally kept on saying loudly, there were three winning places, and this was America, and anyone could make it.

Andy and Mouse were 4-1 odds-on favourites, but only because everyone in the bar had money on them, just to show support. The book knew they were 3-1 outsiders, that no decent tax-paying American was going to vote to condemn one more baby to a life of poverty in the trailer parks.

The real favourites were Terry and Col. Everyone knew they’d won the studio vote, and they looked wealthy and fun and they could count on the support of gay America.

“This country’s flag now, it’s the pink, white and blue!” Jim Creally warned. “And there’s a lot of weirdos out there.”

“It ain’t right,” Mouse’s step-mother told her. “Baby’s gotta have a mother. Which one of those men is going to be a mother to it? Maybe they’re very nice, maybe they’ve got money, but you’ve got a natural-born mother’s instinct and that ought to count for something.”

“I think people are gonna understand that,”her brother Rickie said. “You gotta think, the people putting this show together, they’re not stupid. They’ve gotta be thinking, which of these people is gonna make the best TV, every day for the next four weeks. They don’t want three couples all the same. Like couple one, and couple six, and couple seven, how’re you gonna tell them apart?”

“Couple six are pretty big,” Jim said. “Lot of people got money on them.”

“OK, six are the best of them three,” Rickie conceded. “I seen the way she was crying there. People are gonna vote for six, just to stop her from crying. And she’s pretty nice-looking. But all them women got blonde hair, black dresses, all them husbands got good jobs and smart suits.”

“Sounds like they have the perfect requirements,” said Mouse.

“For good TV? That’s what I’m thinking of, and you bet the producers are thinking the same.”

“Reckon the vote is fixed already, don’t ya?”said Jim.

Rickie shook his head. “They can’t do that,” he said slowly. “If they rig it, the other channels will find out. And that’ll kill the whole show dead. No one’ll watch if they believe it’s fixed. But they can influence the votes.”

“Rickie, you are a dumbass know-nothing,”his father told him. “How many million people do you think are gonna dial that number? How is anyone going to start spreading vote-money across the whole of the US of A?”

“I don’t mean bribes, Pop. I mean psychology. Like you said, that girl who’s crying. They make pretty sure we all seen her. Camera’s right close in on her face. Got her tears in focus, bigbright lights shining in them. That’s one million votes, right there. And the way they gave Andy a big long run, that was to show his character.”

“Andy’s got a character?”

Mouse glared angrily at Jim. “Andy’s real brave, Pop. He was fighting for me. That asshole McClean was trying to make him look stupid, but everyone could see, he wasn’t afraid.”

“That’s the psychology, Pop,” said Rickie. “Those producers, they’re taking a gamble. They think voters would better have a brave father than a smart one or a wealthy one.”

“OK professor, who else is the camera sucking up to? And if I lay some money where your brains say the winner is, then you’d better be right. Or I’m gonna knock your brains down in your boots.”

“Couple four,” said Rickie carefully.

“Four? The black ones? No way.”

“They’ve got money,” said Mouse.

“And he came over real strong,” said her step-mother. “Like you’d trust him with your money.”

“I wouldn’t trust no one with my money.”

“That’s cause you don’t have none, Jim,” roared a neighbour.

“You look out. I’m gonna lay me some betting money where my son’s brains are telling me, and I’ll go out this door richer than I came in.”

Jim Creally prided himself that he had never said a good word to his children’s faces, or a bad word about them to anyone outside the family.

“That’s how I read it,” Richie repeated to his sister. “There’s you, and the two gay guys, and the cry-babies, and the black people from California. Gotta be three of them four. The rest, they’re nowhere.”

In the production suite at Coyote Television in Detroit, Rob Roy McClean was saying: “First place, outright winners, it’s gotta be the queers. Second, Little Miss Cry-Me-A-River. Third, it’s gotta be the Monroes.”

His producer looked away from the Mac G4 screen and glanced at McClean. Luisa Morales had been working with this man for four weeks. She was learning how to read him now. When he said, “It’s gotta be,” that meant he was guessing.

McClean was guessing about a lot of things tonight. Audience reaction, moral majority backlash, phonecall volumes, adoption hold-ups. Stalking the production suite, he sounded more certain than ever:

“This will be the hugest TV event in history. Bar none. Par excellence.”

“The Daughters of the American Revolution can kiss my derriere, because people will see the truth live on TV. Millions of viewers will know that our baby is going to the best home any kid could want.”

“Every time some liberal nut calls me a slave trader or a child abuser, that’s gotta put one million on our figures. Every time.”

“We do not have enough phonelines. You think we do, but we don’t. Maybe enough for tonight, but for the final vote, America’s phone network has gotta melt down. Melt down!”

“There is no way any dope-smoking, tree-hugging, Commie-licking adoption agent is going to stop this show from awarding our baby to the winners. Because tens of millions of people will vote for those winners. If one moron can defy a hundred million voters, then America is no democracy. That’s the day we become a Fascist dictatorship.”

Sig Niemark held out an empty Bud bottle to Terry Impey and said, “I don’t get it.”

“What don’t you get, Sig?”

Terry flipped the top on a full bottle, and exchanged it for the empty in his boss’s hand.

“Why don’t they just give you the baby tonight? I mean, if you’re the winners?”

“Because the point of the show …” Terry stopped. Sig didn’t get a lot of things. He didn’t get what to do when people spoke to him at a party, for instance – he just stood and stared, and answered whatever they asked him with a totally unconnected question.

But the way he failed to understand things usually focused on the kinds of flaws that everyone else tried to ignore. They saw the way things worked – Sig saw the way things ought to work, if the rest of the world could only be rational for a minute.

Of course the world never was rational. So Sig just went ahead and did things the way he saw them. It was a great way to create successful software company, and a bad way to run a life. That was why Sig lived in his office.

“Sig, it’s a TV show, a series. If they give the baby to Col and me tonight, who is going to tune in tomorrow?”

Sig nodded. “I guess it’s called ‘Nobody’s Child’, but no one really cares about the baby.”

“Come on, Sig – I care.”

“Did you get to meet it? Did they let you hold it?”

“We haven’t … we saw photographs. It’s a gorgeous baby. But it isn’t fair to let all the couples see it and cuddle it, when there can only be one winner.”

“You said ‘It’.”

“Sorry?”

“It, you called the baby ‘It’.”

“He’s a little boy. Doesn’t have a name yet.”

“But doesn’t that show you’re thinking of the baby as a product, an ‘It’, instead of a human being?”

“Sig! Are you really telling me you’ve got a problem morally with this?”

“Not morally, no.”

“Because Col and I are going to love that child. Look at the home we’re going to give it. Him. Look at the friends, look at the love.”

“The name is wrong,” persisted Sig. “I don’t get why they called it ‘Nobody’s Child’. I’d call it, ‘Pick The Parents’.”

Rob Roy McClean held his Seiko Kinetic watch around his fist like a knuckle-duster and rapped the screen. “Ninety seconds to phonetime.”

Luisa Morales was sitting back in her editor’s chair, gripping the armrests. There was no work to be done at this moment. All the footage had been assembled and recut during the week. The videotapes were rolling now. All she had to do was watch every moment, and be ready to switch to back-up if any problems occurred.

The next live segment came in two hours, when Rob Roy would announce the results of the phone poll and name the three couples who’d go on to contest for ‘Nobody’s Child’.

Even the footage for that had been largely pre-assembled –McClean would talk to each of the couples by phone, while freeze-frames from the pre-recorded show were screened. Putting ten camera crews on standby for live pictures from the winners’ homes was too expensive to be an option.

McClean had wanted to set up live feeds from Atlantic City, LA and Houston, Texas, where the woman he called Little Miss Cry-Me-A-River lived with her husband, Max. “They gotta be certs. I am not going to let them lose. Who else is gonna give us TV that good?”

“Too dangerous to bank on just those three,”Luisa told him. “What if one of the other couples polls a freak result? Just suppose that. And we have live feeds from two winners, but not the third. What’s it going to look like? It’s going to look like we tried to fix the result, and fouled up.”

“It’s not a fix,” Rob Roy screamed. “Anyone says it’s a fix, I will sue them so far underground they will never see the light of day again.”

“It’s not a fix,” agreed Luisa. “But I don’t even want to be accused of manipulating the viewers.”

“I’m the interviewer! I gotta be allowed to show the couples, the way I see them. That’s not manipulation, that’s viewpoint.”

In the 90-second trailer to phonetime, Luisa and Rob Roy took viewpoint to its outer limit. Images of each couple were spliced so fast that the mind could hardly register them, but every millimetre of footage had been chosen for its effect.

Each couple got nine seconds of trailer-time – except that McClean’s three favourites got closer to ten seconds, and the rest were allotted around eight-and-a-half. No one from Coyote TV or its parent company, TIA, had spotted the discrepancy. But each phone number for voters to ring flashed onscreen as each couple appeared, and that meant the numbers for the contenders from LA, Atlantic City and Houston were visible at least ten per cent longer.

The montages were mainly neutral shots, clear images of the faces as they listened or watched other contestants. But the first four segments were laced with negative flashes – a scowl, a violent gesture, body language that signalled lying. In the Becks’ montage, two moments of Andy’s anger and confusion were prominent.

But the Monroe smiles got big, lingering footage. The couple from Houston clasped hands and nodded in unison, and Little Miss Cry-Me-A-River’s glistening pearldrop tears rolled down her cheek in slow-motion. And Terry’s hilarious giggle, and Col’s shy rub of his hair, and the two of them hugging unabashedly as the studio audiences voted – they looked like winners before the phonelines even opened.

Luisa had spent 18 hours on those 90 seconds. She worried that the manipulation was too obvious. But she’d seen the trailer 100 times, and America would only see it the once – with a pencil in one hand and a phone in the other. Who would detect the trickery?

In the top corner of the screen, the final seconds ticked down to phonetime.

“Eight … seven … six …”

They were yelling it out in Philly May’s bar.

“Five … four … three …”

In Neptune Vista apartments they were leaning towards the televisions like sprinters on the blocks.

“Two … one … now …”

Nat Monroe spoke the words under his breath and pressed the pre-dial button on his mobile. Then he did the same on his landline telephone.

He looked around the table.

“Didn’t anyone bring a phone?”

Every couple’s number was preset on Luisa’s mobile. She tried each of them in turn. McClean was knocking on the back of her chair with his watch – “Is it working? Can you get through?”

She stood. “Isn’t technology wonderful?” She reached behind McClean as if to give him a hug of congratulation, then squeezed his backside.

McClean beamed. “Hey baby!”

“I want to see the analysis,” she said.

“We’ve been taking calls for what, a minute? Less? Is that long enough for analysis?” he demanded.

“We should start to see trends emerging, yeah,” Luisa shrugged.

McClean followed her to the twin-screen Linux PC beside the monitor bank. The monitors were showing ads – the dual computer screens were showing call volumes on all ten phonelines.

“Which is line nine? Where are the queers? Is this them? I can’t read those figures, their changing to fast. What’s this column mean? This stuff is useless.”

“Wait a minute. This is just the raw data.”

“This is no good to me. You mean I’ve got to spend two hours staring at meaningless green numbers? When am I going to start hearing results.”

“Rob, shut up.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t think about this. What’s the use of this? I’m going to go out, kill a cat, read its entrails. That’s more good than these computers.”

Luisa located the menu command which switched the second screen to a spreadsheet graph.

“Hey – that’s more interesting.” McClean was immediately calmer. He stared at the image. “These red pillars, these are the ten couples. Right? Tallest is best, yeah? And there’s number nine, way out in front. Whoo-hooo!”

Luisa was clenching her fists, dancing on the balls of her feet. “Max and Camilla in Houston are polling hard too. Little Miss Cry-Me-A-River.”

“We should have put camera crews out, you should have trusted my instinct.”

“Third place is kind of close.”

McClean ran a fingernail along the middle of the graph. “It’s number five. I told you. The Monroes. I gotta be right.” He kept scrutinising the columns. The fourth pillar was very close to the height of its neighbour. They ebbed and nudged the same fraction of space.

“Too close to call.”

“I’m right, I tell you. But that column’s getting smaller. How can that happen? They can’t lose votes. The computer’s wrong. All these bars should just be getting longer, keep on growing till the tallest wins.”

“The graph measures percentages. Not total calls.” Luisa tapped the vertical axis.

“It ought to be totals.”

“Easier to see the differences this way. Otherwise column nine might grow ten feet high, and column one is still three inches.”

Rob Roy was silent for a few seconds, watching the battle between the Monroes and the Becks for third place.

“I want a print-out. A snapshot.”

The graph that came off the printer was timed at eleven minutes and eleven seconds. That left one hour and 48 minutes plus 49 seconds of polling to go. But the first two places already appeared beyond doubt.

Terry and Col were drawing a steady 19 per cent of the vote. “What’s the queer percentage of the American population?” sneered McClean. “Want to take a bet it’s 19 per cent?”

Their only possible challengers were the tearful Camilla and Max. They were drawing down 17 per cent. “So far, this is very close to the studio vote,” Luisa said.

“But the studio audience didn’t make the Monroes number three. That’s my doing. Originally they scored in sixth.”

“And the Becks were eighth,” Luisa said, “but they’re very close to the money tonight.”

McClean compared. The wealthy black businessman and his beautiful wife were scoring 14 per cent. The poor white boy and his rodent wife were getting 13.5 per cent.

“What is that, do you think? It’s gotta be the trailer trash vote, right? These people shouldn’t be allowed to have mobile phones in their mobile homes.”

“They’re ringing our numbers. At a dollar a minute.”

“OK, we might forgive them. But I don’t want those kids on my show. Bad news. I mean it. They’re no-hopers.”

“Could play well, spy-cams in their trailer,”Luisa suggested. “Rich versus poor.”

McClean shook his head. “No one would want to watch.”

“Plenty of people voting for them.”

“Maybe I roasted that Beck boy too hard. People are voting for him, just to bug me. That’s the problem with being a hate figure. People hate you.”

“It’s between those four, anyhow.”

Luisa was right. The other six couple were polling between 3.5 per cent and 7.5 per cent. The gulf between them and the battle for third place was already too wide to be closed.

“We did a good job,” McClean insisted. “We’re getting our top three. The trailer kids are close, but the black guy is staying ahead. He can’t lose, he’s gotta win. If they were going to muscle over him, they’d have done that by now.”

Nat Monroe put down the receiver. “She wouldn’t give me a straight answer,” he told his wife.

Denny looked up at him as she crouched beside the dishwasher. Her family were outside on the terrace, stretching and relaxing in the cool October air.

“The voting doesn’t end for another ten minutes.”

“I know that. But they must know how the results are looking.”

“I guess we have to be patient.”

“She knew.”

“Who?”

“The producer! We met her, remember? Her name is Morales. Hispanic. She knew. But she wasn’t gonna tell.”

Denny stood up. She held her arms up nervously, inviting him to embrace her if he liked. He didn’t.

“You can’t imagine what it’ll mean if we make the final three,” Nat said.

“It means, maybe we’ll have a baby,”she ventured. “You’ll have a son. He won’t look like us, I guess, but he’ll be ours.”

“Do you really think that’s what it’s about?”

“Isn’t it?” Denny was scared he was about to start shouting at her. She could see he was close to it. She didn’t want Nat to start shouting, not while her family was still here. Later, she could deal with it, even if he got screaming mad, even if he hit her. But not while Martin and Ginette and Caroline were in their home. That would be unbearable.

Nat didn’t shout. He said quietly, “You don’t understand anything. This isn’t about getting a baby. It’s money. Money.”

“Yes,” she said. “I see that.” But she didn’t see it at all.

Andy Beck was asleep, slumped over the table at Mouse’s side. She was shaking him.

“C’mon Andy, wake up. C’mon.”She couldn’t hear herself over the uproar in the bar.

Mouse’s stepmother was watching them. Mouse stared back.

The older woman leant over and yelled, “I’m not surprised you two can’t make a baby if this is how he behaves.”

Terry was leading Col in a tango without music. They were dancing to the sound of cheers. Terry’s head barely came up to Col’s chin, and when the big man arched himself backwards they both tumbled over and lay on the rug, screaming with laughter.

And then the yell went up. “Results! The results are on now! Shut up, everyone shut up! Moment of truth!”

All over Neptune Vistas, televisions began to sing out: “I’m Nobody’s Child, Nobody’s Child, Just like a flower I’m growing wild …”

Luisa cued in Rob Roy McClean with her hands: “Four, three, two, one, go!”

“Welcome back! You’re watching the gameshow with the biggest prize in history. And that doesn’t mean the money side – though there is a lot of money wrapped up in the prize. And I’m not talking about the fame side – though the three couples you have voted into the final round tonight are about to become the most talked about prospective parents in America. The big prize, the unbelievable prize tonight, is a life. A human life. A child. A baby. This baby.”

Luisa cued the fade-in of her baby footage. It had been screened three times tonight already, a 20-second single-camera shot of the baby, zipped up in a light-blue babygro and asleep in a carrycot. The hood of the gro was pulled down almost to his nose. There was no way of telling the colour of his hair or even the shape of his face.

Nothing in the picture gave away where the child was being kept. The rest of the room was out of shot, and the baby lay quiet still. Except for the rapid and tiny fluttering of his lips as he breathed, he might have been a plastic doll in a toystore.

He had no name. Coyote TV was refusing to say where he was living or who was caring for him, other than to confirm the child was not at the TV studios, that he was not with his mother, that he was safe and contented.

Luisa’s response to all press questions was, “No comment.”

Even when reporters asked, “Is this an American baby? Is he in the US right now?” she said nothing but, “No comment.”

Rob Roy McClean was telling the viewers about poll volumes. Almost 10 million people had voted. There were three clear winners, he said. They didn’t match the studio votes, but he hadn’t expected them to. Polling for third place had been close. Now the lines were closed – “Please,” he said, “stop ringing, because you’re just wasting your money” – the outcome was clear-cut.

“Before I announce to you the winners, the three couples who will lay their lives bare for you, who will live the next month in the unsleeping glare of our cameras, visible 24 hours daily on our Nobody’s Child website, and on your TVs again and again for the coming 30 days – before I name those three very lucky, very brave couples … let’s remind ourselves of all the contestants.”

As Luisa cued in the 90-second montage of the ten couples, running this time without the phone numbers, her own mobile rang.

She grabbed at it. If there was a problem, she had to know about it now. But if it was that infuriating SOB from Los Angeles, begging to hear the result before McClean announced it, she would close the phone on him without stopping to speak. Nat Monroe was going to get what he wanted. But he was going to have to wait for it, like the others.

“Yes?” she snapped.

But it was not Monroe.

Luisa jerked upright, away from the monitor, and half turned in her chair. Then she slapped a hand to the top of her head and slumped back.

“You can’t be serious,” she whispered into the mobile. “OK, I’m sorry, I understand what you’re saying. I know you’re serious. I can’t tell Rob right now. Yes, what you’re watching is live. He’s front-of-camera right now. There’s an ad break in about 30 seconds, I can put you on to him then. No, I think I want you to tell him. He isn’t going to like it, OK? We can do what you want. I don’t know how, but we can do it.”

She glanced around the suite at the technicians. Nobody was paying attention to her.

“All right, I understand, OK. I’m going to put you on hold now, but in a few seconds I can hand you over to McClean. I think you should just tell him and ring off. Don’t start arguing, OK? Get me? OK, I have to go now.”

She was already gesturing at the floor manager, drawing circles in the air – wind it up, wind it up. Putting the phone down, Luisa raised her other hand and counted McClean out. The floor manager did the same – “Three, two, one, stop.”

Luisa grabbed a pair of headphones and pressed one can to her left ear as she watched the ads start on the monitors. Dropping the headphones onto her chair she picked up the mobile and walked briskly to the door of the sound-proofed production suite.

McClean was still front-of-camera, a make-up artiste dabbing shine off the top of his forehead where the long black locks had begun to recede.

“Rob – phone.”

He stared at her like she’d left her brain on the monitor desk.

“Rob, you have to take this call. I want you to hear it for yourself.”

“No,” he said, but he reached out for the mobile. “No.”

Luisa was not going to let him start arguing. She said nothing as he raised the phone to his disbelieving face.

“This is Rob Roy.”

Luisa knew what they had to do. There was no way McClean could lie about this on air. That would destroy everything. He had to tell the truth.

Just the truth.

And Luisa did not know if she could trust him to do that.

New Jersey, like tremors before an earthquake – a celebration dinner the night after the show was taped, ending with every table in the restaurant joininga conga dance … a theatre trip to see The Sound Of Music, with Terry and Col and half a dozen friends dressed as the family Von Trapp … a night at the Lincoln’s roulette wheel, where Terry kept a promise to stake $1,000 dollars on one turn and won with red, then staked the lot on black and won again.