Worst. Person. Ever. (25 page)

“If you say so.”

I threw Fiona a shirt. “Did you really have to drag Mother into whatever your game is?”

“Your mother deserves a holiday, Raymond. She’s had a long hard life.”

“She’s had no such thing. She’s been a benefits scrounger as long as I can remember. What she doesn’t scrounge, she wheedles or steals, as you very well know.”

Fi sat up and attempted to take on her domineering stance. “A bit of compassion for the woman, Raymond. Come with me to the production trailers. You may as well see where you’re working.”

We left the tent and followed a path towards a trio of rusted-out trailers like the ones you see in American horror movies in which a family of four is brutally bludgeoned to death, their carcasses picked clean by wild animals and insects, only to be found years later by hillbilly meth makers who use the bones as doorstops while converting the remains of the trailer into an incestuous
copulation den filled with smashed beer bottles, fag ends, misspelled graffiti and bullet holes.

“You still haven’t answered my question, Fi. Why did you bring Mother down here?”

“Oh, very well, Raymond. I did it to torture you. Satisfied?”

“Really? You brought her down here just to annoy me?”

“Yes, Raymond. Yes, I did.”

My heart melted. “That is, in a weird way, kind of sweet, Fi.”

“I’m not a total monster, you know.”

I could see some of the show’s staffers milling about outside the trailers, like the dodgy-looking people you find on Google once you remove “safe search”—not that I’ve ever done that. Many of them were carrying empty plastic cola bottles filled with something resembling dirt. I stopped one particularly slaggy-looking production assistant to ask what was in the bottles.

“These? We’re gathering insects for the bug-eating challenge this afternoon.”

I shuddered. “Bug-eating? Really?”

“Yup. It’s one of our favourite contestant challenges. Unless team members eat a plate of live bugs, they don’t get to read letters from their loved ones back home—or some other prize equally stupid.”

I looked into the PA’s face, hard and sunburned, scoured clean by a lifetime of putting out. I figured this one’s done list must have been at least ten thousand blokes long.

Fiona cut into my reverie. “Raymond, stop ogling her tits and come along.”

I suddenly felt, of all things,
married.

We entered one of the trailers and found a production
team seated on stools staring at a wall covered with screens displaying multiple camera feeds. I felt like I was in a home away from home. Then I heard some familiar voices: “Ray! Welcome to paradise!”

It was Tony and Eli, two cameramen I’d last seen in Damascus when we set fire to cars because we were on deadline and badly needed footage.

“Tony! Eli! I hope you brought the petrol!”

“Ray! You’re just in time. It’s bug-eating day!” Eli exclaimed. He and Tony were delighted to see me.

“So I hear.”

Fiona seemed furious that I had actual acquaintances on set. Through the simmering mirage-like heat waves rising from her inflamed body, I could tell she was planning some sort of accidental-seeming death for both Tony and Eli. Poor fellows.

I said, “Tell me more about bug-eating day.”

Christmas morning glee shone from their eyes. Eli, the older one, filled me in. “Everyone on staff goes out with buckets and bottles and collects as many terrifying insects as they can. Anything will do: grubs, spiders, millipedes, mostly anything you find beneath a stump.”

Tony took it from there. “Stumps are actually the best place to find things, Ray. Things with five hundred legs, six eyes …” He picked up a blue plastic tub. “Think about it. If you saw a prawn walking across your living room floor, you’d shoot it with a handgun, but find one in a Pacific net?
Bon appétit.
” He removed the blue lid from the tub to show me a hairy black spider the size of a Sunday roast. “Look at the hair on this fucker.”

I cooed my approval.

“Not much protein in hair, though. Hair is a bran-like fibre. But in the legs and thoraxes of spiders lie pockets of protein not unlike those found in lobster claws. If this thing lived in the ocean, we’d be making chowder from it in ten minutes. People are dietary hypocrites. Land equals evil. Sea equals good.”

“Beats what you find in a Honolulu vending machine. Any of these things toxic?”

“Oh, probably,” Tony said. “We lost our entomology textbook in transit, and the Internet’s down, so we can’t look them up.”

“Do contestants eat them whole or smoothied?”

“Depends. We start out with live bugs, but if everyone balks, we smoothie a few handfuls and throw some live ones on top as a garnish. Whoever eats the least amount of bugs is kicked off the show and loses their chance to earn a million bucks.”

I was greatly impressed. “Pure genius.”

“Come along then, you two—we’re just about to leave for the big event.”

I could tell this suggestion came at the wrong moment for whatever Fiona had on her agenda for me. But watching a group of brain-dead Americans eating bird-sized insects trumped any plot against me she might have had in the works.

“Sure, let’s all go,” she said. “And Raymond, afterwards you and I can talk. I miss having someone intelligent to banter with.”

Moi?

Intelligent?

Here’s the thing about Fiona: when she’s nice to you, everyone else on earth vanishes and you feel like you’re
melting under a beam of sweetness that erases your memory of, say, the time she used your Visa and PIN number to buy two dozen dildos and had them delivered to a daycare centre in your name.

In any event, earlier, while Fi was temporarily distracted searching for some clothes to put on after her massage, I
did
notice a plastic bag containing my Cure T-shirt peeking out from beneath a stack of modelling headshots in her tent. I pinched it and reached outside and slid it beneath the tent’s front corner. Tonight I planned to return and reclaim my treasure.

Raymond Gunt: 1; The Gods: 0

Given the fuss involved in getting to this wretched island from London, I’d largely forgotten that there was a TV show we all had to yank out of our collective arse. After driving in a wheezing golf cart through a forest of Venus flytraps, we arrived at a barren patch of land on which rested a dozen picnic tables painted in bright clownish colours. Seated at them were twenty people who all looked, to Fi’s credit, highly fuckable. “My hat goes off to you, Fiona. This is a truly … 
enjoyable
cast you’ve assembled. At the last moment, no less. Bravo.”

At that instant, a brunette with a single rubber band around her breasts and another one bisecting her crotch area vomited onto the white dust behind her. A pigeon-like flock of Pringle-sized winged insects descended on the puddle, while Scott, Sarah’s production assistant, shouted through a bullhorn, “Shovel! Shovel! Shovel of dirt to table seven! Quickly. The bug wagon just arrived!”

An acne-faced pleb ran to shovel grit over the puke.

Fiona, Eli, Tony and I found a vantage point on some small shaded bleachers outside of a predetermined series
of established camera angles. While a PA handed us lemonades, I asked Tony and Eli when their shift started.

“We’re on sunset-to-dawn beginning tomorrow. Join us? I can put your name on the roster.”

“Please do.”

“Oh look!” said Tony, pointing to a jumbo plastic Diet Pepsi bottle full of millipedes being emptied into tiki-style bowls. “The games are about to begin!”

Sigh.

Sometimes life is good.

A bowl full of millipedes, as long as they’re not actually writhing, is a not untasty-looking sight, something like a cross between Kellogg’s Coco Pops cereal and a spicy Indonesian bami goreng. In my enthusiasm, I called out, “Garnish them with a sprig of parsley!” and was roundly admonished to shush up: nobody wanted to hear my voice on tape. I blushed for my lapse in professional standards. I mean I
really
blushed: what the hell was I thinking, breaking the fourth wall? Christ. My mother’s voice from early childhood sprang to mind:
For fuck sake, Raymond, doing random shit like you do is why you’re never going to be allowed to have fancy things in your life. Now nip down to the chip shop and swipe me some fags. If Mr. Bradbury catches you, just blow him. He’s not picky. Just make sure I get my
Rothmans at the end of it. Don’t stand there like your arse is full of bowling balls, boy. Move it!

Ahhh … precious childhood memories.

You’d think I could just sit there for a few hours and watch some wildly attractive semi-naked people eat millipedes, but no—and why? Because from behind the bleachers, in a wail no sound technician on earth could ever scrub from a sound track, I heard my mother heading my way.

“Raymond? Is that you in them seats? Move over, because I’m coming up.” She clumped her way up the rows to settle beside me, Fiona, Eli and Tony.

“Hello, Fiona dear. Hello, boys. You two are Yanks? Good on you. We put out for you something special back in World War II, we did. Shove over, Raymond.”

“So, how was your gourmet meal, as prepared by Tabs and Elspeth?” I inquired.

“Gourmet food means nothing to me at this point, Raymond. I’ve got me a dead colon. May as well ask me to digest a concrete lawn ornament.”

“Lovely.”

“Don’t be such a prig, son. I spent half your childhood trying to coax a poo from you. My God. I may as well have been trying to pry a hooker’s tit from your father’s claws. The way he’d lay into a woman? Jesus and Mary, it was like a peregrine falcon making off with a fluffy little duckling while its mum screams from the reeds. Mind you, that kind of manhandling has its merits—or
you
wouldn’t be here today! Har, har har!” Mother coughed up a fetal pig and horked it off the bleachers into some crabgrass. “Oh, look at me and you, Raymond, a million years later on a glamorous South
Seas island, like two peas in a pod. Nothing like family, I say,
nothing.
”

We all stared down at the contestants. At the purple-coloured picnic table, Tammy [Dental Hygienist, Texas] was about to guzzle a soup bowl full of hostile earwigs—who could object to watching that? Tammy furtively held a wriggling horned thingy up to her starving lips, and suddenly Mother went ballistic, shouting, “Oh, my dear God, Jesus, no! Stop!”

Everybody stared at her as she carried on screaming. “Good God, girl, what are you thinking, putting those nasty creatures down your throat?”

“Mother—”

“This is all part of America’s undeclared war on science! I can tell!”

Time stopped as we all tried to figure out what she was on about.

“Mother, that makes absolutely no sense. The insects here are delicious and protein-rich, raised in hygienic farm-like environments.”

“Eco-friendly and green,” added Tony.

“When Tammy or whatever her name is eats them, she’s actually receiving all the EU-sanctioned daily dietary recommendations,” I said.

Mother looked fed up with me. “Raymond, she’s a ho eating a fucking bowl of bugs. Don’t you talk down to me, son. I’m just saying that the Americans don’t like science anymore and are trying to get rid of it as quickly as they can. That young woman eating bugs over there would have been an astrophysicist if her country hadn’t shipped their entire economy to China. Her life could have had dignity; instead, she’s eating
worms to pay for an endless string of abortions.”

(You’ll note that Fiona stayed silent during all this. And that my mother knew the word “astrophysicist”—who would have guessed?)

“Well, whatever, Mother. This is a TV show. It has endless minutes that need to be filled with endless amounts of footage. If you make any further outbursts, the PAs will drag you off to some forgotten lagoon where those people I mentioned a while back who gave you your brand-new tits will take them back with carpet knives as they squeal with glee.”

“You can’t blackmail me over my implants anymore. Tabitha told me while I was eating that once your implants are in, they’re in forever and can never be removed no matter what, like a band of travellers taking over your backyard while you’re at church.”

“Mother, you’ve never been to church in your life except to pilfer sedatives from the purses of those Presbyterian women who run the thrift sales.”