One Day in Cornwall. Zoe Cook

      The production office’s transformation into a fully laid-out dining room marked the end of the Spectrum team’s working duties. There were already ten people scattered around the tables eating plates of roast chicken and vegetables, and pouring large glasses of wine. Lucy walked in with Warren and Sophie, fellow spotters, laughing about the Paul Mulryan confusion, and she placed a concessionary piece of chicken on her plate from the large silver warmer on the buffet table.

      ‘Is that all you’re eating?’ Warren asked, filling his own plate with potatoes, carrots and chicken thighs before drowning it in gravy. Lucy didn’t answer, but just smiled and took a seat at an empty table. Picking up a bottle of white wine that wasn’t quite as cold as she’d have hoped, I deserve this, she thought, and poured out three glasses.

      ‘What the hell happened with poor Dorian?’ Sophie asked, her little brown bob tipping quizzically to the side, like a Cairn terrier, Lucy always thought.

      ‘No idea,’ Lucy took a first blissful swig of wine. It had dawned on her very quickly after the incident that no one else on the production team actually had any way of knowing why ‘poor Dorian’, as she was quickly becoming known, had fallen off her chair. Anyway, Emma had already been overheard rejoicing about what fantastic television it was seeing a national treasure tumbling to the ground in a fountain of red wine, so Lucy didn’t feel too bad about keeping quiet about her role in the scene.

      The room filled quickly with colleagues removing high heels and rubbing their feet between glasses of wine, and exchanging Emma stories in a sort of top trumps game of ‘well you think that’s bad, wait ‘til you hear what she did in the green room when I was working on Catch it, Cook it, in 2010…’

      Lucy retrieved her mobile from her bag and read a message from Scott sent an hour earlier: Hey you, hope it’s all gone well. You coming to mine tonight? Lucy sent a quick reply saying she’d call him later; she half wanted to leave there and then and get back to his place. It would, she knew, be the most sensible thing to do; these nights always got so bloody messy. But the first two glasses of wine had slipped down easily and she was in that early wine daze, where everything felt slightly wonderful and it felt too early to leave.

      Dinner was followed by the traditional ‘sweep’ of the ceremony room for bottles of wine that had been purchased by TV big-wigs to impress their tables, but which hadn’t been drunk. Emma didn’t like wasting money by, say, paying for wine for her staff, and the sweep was one of her ways of ‘winning’, as she saw it. Lucy hung back slightly after the incident last year where she and Natalie from the Entertainment team had swiped a bottle of champagne from the Sherbet TV table only to be stopped on their way out by the purchaser of the bottle on his way back to retrieve the fizz, who accused them of stealing: awkward didn’t really cover it.

      Emma was already deep in the after-party – Lucy kept catching glimpses of her up the stairs though the glass doors. She was working the room like a pro. It was a quality you couldn’t help but admire; she was truly fantastic at making people listen to her and then give her what she wanted. She was also, Lucy knew, notorious for drinking far too much at events, and it looked like she was on her way already. She had changed into the red Donna Karan dress that Lucy had collected two days previously from Harvey Nichols and which Emma had taken great pleasure in telling the whole office the extortionate cost of. ‘I suppose you could say that £1,800 for a dress is too much…’ she’d mused loudly, before asking Lucy to bring it up on the Harvey Nicks website and show everyone just how beautiful it was. And it really was beautiful. Lucy had stroked it when she collected it from the store, before it was packaged with flair and precision into tissue paper, a box and then a bag for transfer back to the office. But Emma had a knack for making really expensive clothes look incredibly tacky. Lucy watched her move over to her next companion at the bar, clutching a glass of champagne in one hand and a fistful of the skirt of her dress in the other, struggling to work with the combination of billowing red fabric at ankle level and the high-heeled Prada shoes she’d opted for. It didn’t look to Lucy as if Emma was wearing a bra, which made the dress sit strangely across her chest and gape slightly at the side. Lucy could already see the potential for another breast-based moment later in the evening. These had become something of a signature for Emma, who had fallen out of more designer dresses in public than Lucy could remember. She recalled the time, a few years ago now, that Emma had conducted an entire conversation with an author at a book launch with her left nipple sitting proudly outside the ridiculously strappy low-cut dress she was wearing. The author’s eye had kept wandering down, and Lucy, standing next to Emma at the time, had wondered just how the hell Emma couldn’t, at the very least, feel the difference between the right side – cloaked in All Saints (God, she was far too old to be wearing All Saints), and the left side – hanging out free as a bird. It had never become clear at what point Emma had finally noticed, and later on everything was back in place, but nothing was ever mentioned.

      It was impressive how much wine could be swept from a room after an awards ceremony; the team was laden with bottles and bottles of red and white, and a few had found the ultimate prize – unopened bottles of champagne. As it was strict hotel policy that no wine should leave the room after the ceremony, the smuggling out to the after-party had to be conducted with confidence and poise to avoid any suspicion amongst the Metropolis’s staff. Lucy considered herself an expert at this and took two bottles from Jenny, one of the runners, slipping one upright into her handbag, and the other under the flap of her black jacket before heading up the stairs and through the huge doors. Inside, the party was in full flow, a few merry authors and agents were dancing in the middle of the room while most people opted to continue their drinking and were gathered in groups around the edge of the dance floor, or sat in the crushed- velvet booths along the walls.

      Lucy, Warren, Camilla and Katie stationed themselves at a booth at the far end of the room. Lucy skimmed across the plush fabric and sat next to the window, looking onto the twinkling car lights and street lamps of Park Lane. A stream of orange beams flowing one way, blinking red the other. An assortment of wine bottles was magicked onto the table and Katie passed around glasses. Lucy settled into the back of the cushioned bench, her back aching in appreciation of the support. Warren began his usual commentary on the scenes unfolding on the dance floor. A well-known screenwriter was performing an elaborate, and puzzling, finger dance, and an ageing agent, who Lucy had earlier seen stroking his neighbour’s leg as she crawled past their table, was now dancing up against her in what was presumably intended to be an erotic style.

      More wine was poured and Lucy shut her eyes briefly, remembering she had promised to call Scott. It was nearly midnight and the drinks were filling her with a warm sense of impending fun, so she pushed away the thought of her boyfriend waiting at home and finished her glass. She’d pop to the toilets in a while with Warren, who’d brought a supply for a few of them who were always ready for a party. She fancied a little pick-me-up.

      ‘Dancing time?’ she suggested, and the group, which had now grown to eight of the Spectrum team, left their bags and coats in ownership of the booth and moved a few yards into the room to start dancing to the R&B set the DJ was playing.

      The noise in the room was growing louder with each song, more and more bodies joining them on the dance floor. Camilla appeared with a tray full of glistening shot glasses and the team expertly applied salt to the base of their thumbs, downed the sour liquid and squealed for lemons, which Camilla had forgotten to bring. Lucy slipped back to the table and downed a large glass of wine to wash away the taste. Her head spun as she turned and made her way back to the group, who were having a dance-off, throwing her hands in the air and shimmying in to join them. She flung her head back, laughing at Warren’s moves, and feeling the rush from the alcohol.

       6

      Hideaway Bay, 2003

      Nina and Kristian were on another break, and Nina could barely stand being in the same room as her on-off boyfriend of two years.

      ‘I hate him, Lucy,’ she whispered in Lucy’s direction, eyes locked on Kristian and loud enough for him