Page 69 of Such a Good Couple
When they’d arrived the night before, everyone had been given chicken and chips and then shown to their bedrooms in the Family Villa. It was at this point, at 10 p.m. on the first night, that Clara and Ollie realised they’d forgotten to ask a crucial question: what were the sleeping arrangements? The answer? Bunk beds. Their room had cold tiled floors and a window looking on to a row of scenic bins. The boys, who slept in bunk beds at home, were happily leaping on the wafer-thin mattressesas Clara and Ollie had eyed up the last set
‘Top or bottom?’ Ollie had said, which was how Clara was now waking up with her face just inches from a grimy ceiling on the first day of filming.
She slid her phone out from under the pillow and snapped a pic of it to send to Slags For Life.
Clara: The glam life of reality TV: view from my BUNK BED, gals. Ollie’s on the bottom. Fitting. He’s always had bottom energy.
Maggie got back in seconds – she was clearly still up. It was still yesterday there, as LA was ten hours behind.
Maggie: You were born a top, Clara. How are you feeling about it all?
Clara considered how she was feeling.
Clara: I’m feeling like the only option is to completely commit. No regrets. Filming starts today. The first episode airs tomorrow, our filming will be a day ahead of what’s being broadcast all through it.
Maggie: I’ll be watching. One of the staff has set me up with a VPN.
Clara: Amazing. Any feedback on my facial expressions/general demeanour are most welcome. Tell me how we’re coming across. I’m still not sure what emotional mark we should be aiming for. Like, are people more likely to vote for us if we’re non-stop fighting or should we be peddling a sob story. @Annie How are you feeling? How’s the nausea? Tell useverything when you wake up!
At that moment, Clara’s alarm started up. She silenced it quickly and rolled over. Annie was having a baby! It was a week since she’d sent the pic of the positive test and explained that her last ‘period’ must’ve been an implantation bleed. Clara had started crying immediately. She’d never known that you could feel this happy for another person. She’d even gone straight up to the bathroom where Ollie was in the shower to tell him, her joy overriding the strangeness of the fact that it was the most intimate moment they’d had in nearly two months. Ollie had also choked up. Annie had said she wasn’t ready to tell Conor. Her first appointment with the doctor was in two weeks so she had time to figure out what this whole baby thing might look like now that they were no longer together.
Ollie was argumentative on the matter of keeping it from Conor. Knowing such life-changing information about his friend without he himself knowing seemed wrong, and she and Ollie’d had a few tetchy words about it. Clara had managed to talk him down, arguing that Annie was going through a lot and deserved space to process before the conversation with Conor.
‘Muma! Get up for breakfast.’ Tom appeared at the top of the ladder down by her feet.
‘We’ve already had ours,’ Josh called up to her. ‘The yogurt is disgusting.’
‘Coming now.’ Clara, still prone, started to slither towards the ladder – apparently the only viable way to exit the bed. ‘I’ll put honey in your yogurt,’ she told Josh.
Clara found Ollie and Reggie at one of the fold-out trestle tables that had been arranged in a large dining room next to the kitchen. All around them were more tables, where theother competitors sat. The atmosphere was awkward as people collected cereal and fruit from the sideboard in silence.
Beside Ollie’s table were Paul and Liz, who were silent except to occasionally tell one of their kids to inform the other parent of something.
‘Amy, tell your father that wet towels don’t belong thrown on a bed and that, as a forty-three-year-old man, he should really know this by now and maybe if his relationship with Granny wasn’t so smothering and co-dependent, he might have actually become a functioning adult.’
Amy, who looked to be about twelve, rolled her eyes, clearly more than accustomed to this tiresome routine. ‘You catch all of that, Dad?’
‘Tell your mother that flirty messages with ex-boyfriends don’t belong in her DMs.’
Amy swivelled around to her mother. ‘Stop sliding into DMs, Mum.’
Jeez, poor Amy, Clara thought. At least she and Ollie would never make the boys be go-betweens like that.
At that moment, Paul and Liz did actually start speaking to each other, though it sounded more like hissing. Clara did her best to catch what they were saying. Were they talking strategy? Should she and Ollie be figuring out their reality TV personas? Probably. Though the dining room was definitely not the place.
From the other side of the room, Clara heard a cold voice: ‘If you lick your knife one more time, I’m gonna stab you with it.’ It was Rob of ‘Rob and Sean’; across from him Sean was very deliberately bringing his butter knife back up to his lips and running his tongue the full length of the blade.
In the highchair beside them, their daughter Viva began to do the same.
‘Do you see what you’re doing?’ Rob indicated the child. ‘Don’t do that, sweetie, Daddy is just a gross person with nomanners.’
On the other side of Rob and Sean sat Mary and Derek with their three kids. They were staring in opposite directions and Mary in particular looked very morose. From the ages of their kids, Clara guessed that Mary and Derek must’ve gotten started young. She suspected they were one of those couples who forgot to break up with their secondary school boyfriend or girlfriend. Then wound up married with kids before their frontal cortex had finished developing. Of course, admittedly, she wasn’t that much different, having forgotten to break up with her college boyfriend.
Just then, the last couple, Darina and Richie, sauntered in. Late thirties, no kids and no frown lines. They looked irritatingly well-rested. They stood close together and perused the breakfast options.
‘Hey,’ Clara muttered at Ollie, who was cleaning the back of Reggie’s head – somehow there was ketchup back there despite there being no condiments in sight.
Ollie glanced over with a questioning look. He seemed to be rationing the amount of words he was saying to her, so she just continued.
