Bella's Christmas Bake Off (12 page)

When she eventually finished the ‘ham scene’, someone off camera offered her ‘a post-coital cigarette’, which made the Silver Fox and Fliss roar with laughter.

But Bella didn’t laugh, she was still engrossed in her performance, holding the huge ham in a tray against her bosom and promising faithfully it would be ‘moist... very...
very
moist.’

Suddenly, with the ham barely in the oven, the Silver Fox announced abruptly that he was ‘exhausted’ and off to bed.

I wondered if it had all been too much for him. Bella was a beautiful woman and men get lonely in war zones, he was probably very aroused and needed to get out of there before his lust got the better of him.

‘Oh sweetie, stay a little longer?’ Bella asked, eyes wide, pelvis against his.

But he kissed her on the forehead. ‘Too tired, baby,’ he smiled and we all watched as he slowly wandered out through the kitchen. Like a bloody rock star.

‘Dahling, get a room,’ Fliss said when he’d left and the cameras were off.

Tim tutted at Fliss.

‘My husband likes me to be seductive,’ Bella breathed, ‘and so does Tim... on screen anyway, don’t you, Timmy?’

‘Yes, and that last scene was so orgiastic I wonder if either of you listen to anything I say,’ Fliss sighed. ‘Tim, Bella, we’ve talked about this my dahlings...we need to calm it down a little... with the sex,’ Fliss said. ‘I mean all the innuendo, the hedonism. It’s family Christmas dinner on daytime TV not a bacchanalian feast,’ Fliss barked. ‘We need to think about your branding, dahling,’ she said in a more soothing voice.

Bella looked from Felicity to Tim, surprised. ‘But it’s my trademark, sex
is
my branding, you said.’

‘Yes, but that was in 1998, nowadays people are bored of sex and serious shopping. The damned economic crisis ruined things for everyone and the plebs now want more substance with their cookery shows...it’s less “Bella’s Breasts” and more “Bella’s Benefits”.’

‘Damn the economic crisis!’ Tim suddenly shouted, banging his fist against the nearest wall and making everyone jump.

‘Calm down, Tim, you’re not in panto yet!’ Fliss called over her shoulder. ‘Now, Amy’s suggestion has been a wake-up call and has got me thinking – times are tough out there.’

Finally, someone was agreeing with me, my voice was being heard.

‘Homeless hostels, poor little children starving on the streets and food banks popping up like brothels in Amsterdam. It’s time to think of the bigger picture, the world has changed, Bella, and you shouldn’t be doing... that... with a big
moist
ham.’

‘Rubbish, people love to see glamour, sex, and moist hams in the kitchen at Christmas.’ Bella was angry.

‘I disagree. You don’t see lovely Mary Berry massaging syrup into meat like it’s a man’s buttock, do you? The evidence is in front of you... look at poor little Amy starving, dressed like one of the Waltons while her husband’s trawling the streets looking for loose women...’

‘He’s not...’ I tried. ‘He left me for a bedroom pole dancer...’ I started.

‘Thank you, Amy, this isn’t about you,’ Bella snapped.

Crimson cackled from her corner, her face lit only by the iPad in front of her, lighting her white make up and giving her black and green hair an eerie glow.

Then Fliss started again, ‘Bella, dahling, it was all very well doing sex and soufflés and giving it to us like a page 3 wannabe ten years ago when you were nubile and Nigella was on her throne. But now Mary Berry’s back you’re not competing with sensuality over the salsa any more. Mary’s a grown woman who knows her spices and doesn’t feel the need to share her drives and juices with the world while her dough’s proving. Mary’s coming for you Bella – and brace yourself because she’s baying for blood, and waving her rolling pin.’

I wasn’t entirely convinced by this image of lovely Mary Berry, who I was sure would never wave her rolling pin... or bay for anyone’s blood.

Bella looked close to tears, which I guessed was more to do with the fact the Silver Fox had just gone to bed without her rather than anything Fliss was saying.

In that moment I actually felt quite sorry for Bella. Her wonderful husband was back from a war zone and all she wanted to do was strip off and leap all over him on the stairs leading to a three-day sex and chocolate marathon in their big bed. But while he slept like Adonis upstairs she had to stay in the kitchen and get her kicks from maple roasted ham and pastry pillows. For the first time I could see a drawback to being Bella, she couldn’t even welcome her husband back because she had a houseful of people and a programme to make.

Meanwhile back on planet Bella, Fliss was now holding her by the shoulders and shaking her firmly.

‘Look my love, wake up, smell the coffee, brace yourself and step up to the plate.’

So many instructions in one sentence, no wonder Bella looked baffled. Along with everyone else, I watched, mesmerised, it was yet another performance and I had a front row seat.

‘Stop mooning over Peter and get your pinny on.’

‘Just a few moments... with him?’ Bella said, sounding like some lovesick puppy.

‘No we have no time for that, you have a programme to make – we need you down here raising those ratings, not upstairs raising Peter’s. On screen we need you to be strong and asexual, you’re up against the Queen of cake, the doyenne of doughnuts. Dahling, it’s a case of “operation Christmas Berry”... see what I did there? Mary Berry, Christmas...?’

‘Oh shut up, Fliss. Stop scaring me and telling me to step up, that’s your job... if my ratings are slipping then
you
need to do something, you’re my agent...THIS IS AN EMERGENCY!’ she yelled. Bella had always had a temper and I could see the little girl now with her hands on Fliss’s shoulders shaking them quite firmly as Fliss shook her. They wound each other up and any minute one of them was going to slap the other, claiming ‘she was hysterical’. It was like some weird double act.

What the hell was going on here? Why was Bella shouting, why was her agent barking at the moon, and most importantly why was the gorgeous Silver Fox in bed at ten o’clock in the morning, completely alone?

Bella was clearly upset and cross with Fliss and if memory served me well her temper may soon reach boiling point. I recalled a similar scene in our kitchen at home when at the age of eight I’d suggested my cupcakes were prettier than hers. It hadn’t ended well, when Bella snatched up my plate of cupcakes and threw them on the floor, screaming ‘Whose cupcakes are prettier now?’

Meanwhile, Fliss and Bella were still screaming at each other and only when Fliss told her the truth did she seem to hear her.

‘Bella... when I said the ratings aren’t good, I meant, bad... like dropping... no, dahling, I lied, they are plummeting.’

At this, Bella whipped off her scarlet pinafore, hurled it to the ground and stomped off through the kitchen, and from the thumping noise, I guessed she’d gone upstairs. This was confirmed when a door above us was slammed so hard it nearly took the paint off the ceiling.

Good luck getting any sleep in there now, Peter, I thought, imagining that poor beleaguered war hero in a tangle of sheets desperate for some peace while she banged on about her precious ratings.

I looked around, but everyone seemed to be taking Bella’s dramatic exit in their stride, obviously used to it. Billy, who it seemed was rarely vertical, now lay on the sofa in the living room, while the camera and sound men wandered off for a bacon sandwich, unperturbed. Fliss was muttering to Crimson that ‘we are a man down’ and she was looking vacantly back, which I assumed was her default look.

‘What happens now?’ I asked Fliss, walking towards her and Crimson, who was now sitting on the kitchen worktops painting her nails – black.

‘Hi, Crimson.’ I smiled, she was obviously as crazy as the rest of them, but I was desperate to bond with somebody on this shoot.

‘Hi Amy,’ she monotoned without even looking up from her shiny dark talons. And just to give an indication of how lonely I felt, I was actually pleased to hear those disinterested tones laced with sinister sarcasm.

She finished panting her nails, looked up and seemed genuinely surprised, though it was hard to work out her emotions under the white make-up and eye-shadow. ‘Jeez, what happened to you?’ she said. ‘You looked like a weirdo when you came in this morning, but you look okay now,’ she said this without a smile, but I guessed coming from Crimson this was a compliment, I couldn’t possibly expect a smile too. ‘That red is sick on you...’ she said, looking me up and down.

‘Thank you,’ I smiled, hoping she meant ‘sick’ in the way Year Ten said their favourite bands were ‘sick’ and not in any way a reference to me looking like vomit – it seemed with Crimson one could never be sure.

‘When you walked in before, you looked like you’d just stepped out of ...’

‘Yes I know. I look quite different now,’ I said quickly in an effort to stop any more allusions to the Amish community. I’d arrived with little self-esteem as it was and after the battering I’d taken earlier from Fliss, Bella, Ruth and Billy the last thing I needed was Crimson the Goth researcher/maid giving me her unplugged opinion on my wardrobe.

‘What happens now?’ I asked.

‘What always happens. We wait, the cameramen eat, the world turns...’ Crimson sighed.

‘Yes and the budget goes through the sodding roof,’ Fliss added tightly. ‘At this rate we won’t be finished until midnight.’

‘Do any of the recipes need preparing?’ I asked. ‘Can we save time before she comes back down?’ I was worried hours would be taken up with waiting and there’d be no time left for me to actually talk to Bella properly after filming, which was one of the main reasons for coming here.

‘What we need is Bella to actually be down here doing her job for once, I’d take a bloody Bella lookalike right now, someone to stand in for a few shots and… hang on, give me your hands,’ Fliss said, nearly pulling my arms out of my sockets in her sudden desperation to get to my hands then screeching ‘Billy... Billy dahling... emergency treatment needed at the bunker.’

Billy appeared at my side with his bag of tools.

‘Billy, my angel, would you please brandish your magic wand and turn Amy’s fingernails into Bella’s so we can use her hands in a close-up. If we don’t get something in the can the budget won’t take all these people hanging around doing nothing... and I don’t want to be the one to tell them we can’t leave the trenches until midnight.’

‘Erm, shouldn’t we see if Bella’s happy about this?’ I said, worried about the fallout of me filming in her kitchen without her. When I’d offered to help I simply meant by getting the ingredients together, maybe breaking a few eggs, not being the star’s hand twin.

Before I knew what was happening, Billy was working on my nails, filing and buffing and polishing and then covering them in the glossiest reddest varnish I’d ever seen.

‘Wow it’s lovely,’ I said waggling my new scarlet talons as Fliss gathered the crew together for what she called ‘a war cabinet debrief’, but what looked to me like a chat over coffee and fags on the freezing back lawn.

Eventually they all came back in and I still couldn’t quite get over how beautiful my hands were. I kept staring at them. It was as though Bella’s hands had been photo-shopped onto mine. Billy had done a wonderful job, and I was feeling ‘very Bella’ in the scarlet suit and red lipstick.

‘Now,’ Fliss barked and everyone jumped, including me. ‘I want you all in your places we’re going to do a run through with little Amy here.’

With that she stepped back, and a confused Crimson appeared at my elbow and gently pushed me behind the worktop, under the lights, in front of the camera.

‘Oh Amy, you look amazing,’ Fliss was shouting. ‘I can’t believe you have never been in front of a camera before – and so photogenic, the camera LOVES your hands.’

Fliss wasn’t facing me, she was shouting these compliments from the kitchen doorway and up the stairs.

The cameraman was finding his position and the lighting woman was moving around me checking the skin tone on my hands which she said was close to Bella’s so wouldn’t be a problem. I felt like I was slowly morphing into Bella – I could see how easy it might be to slip into this life. Another day at Dovecote and I’d be calling everyone darling, referring to ‘filthy homeless’ and drinking vintage champagne.

Fliss handed me Bella’s discarded scarlet apron and I tied it on over the trouser suit as the cameraman started setting up his camera and zooming in on my hands. Meanwhile Tim was chatting to Ruth the wardrobe mistress. ‘I was offered Dame Judi Dench’s latest stage play,’ he was saying; ‘she said, Tim darling, I need you to direct – I’m no one without you. But I said Jude, I have a commitment... so before you ask, yes I gave up Dame Judi to do this.’ He threw up his hands in horror.

Within seconds, there was a noise from upstairs, a creaking door followed by footsteps on the landing.

‘Bella... is that you, dahling?’ Fliss called in a pantomime voice, her hand to her ear, smiling conspiratorially at everyone in the kitchen. There was no answer, but Fliss winked at us and continued to bustle and boss and shuffle papers while making loud comments in the direction of the hall about how ‘bloody fabulous Amy is’.

Crimson handed me a large bowl filled with cake batter and manoeuvred me along the oasis as the cameraman and Tim were instructing.

‘A little to the left... no more right...’ and so on.

‘What shall I do?’ I asked.

‘Make like Bella and put your hands in it,’ Crimson answered, rolling her eyes at me like I should know this.

Tim nodded. ‘Yes, plunge your hands deep into that world of sweet confection, my darling...’

I did and the camera filmed but bloody Tim didn’t shut up; ‘As you cream that butter and sugar just feel the joy of a million Christmases shudder through you...’ he was saying, dramatically sweeping around behind the camera and distracting everyone.

I tried not to listen, it was quite off-putting, so I concentrated on what I was doing, praying that Bella would come back soon – this wasn’t as easy as it looked on TV.

For a few minutes I kneaded the doughy batter as Tim gave me my ‘direction’. ‘Feel it, my love, give it your everything and baby just go with that dough...’ who thought kneading a lump of dough could be so theatrical? As the camera whirred, focusing only on my hands, Tim built himself into a frenzy, ‘Go on... go on...’ he was saying. ‘Rub it... rub it hard into your fingertips, feel the love and life in that bloody dough, darling.’