The producer primes us with a series of questions, marking them all on a clipboard to be passed on to the interviewer. The questions are all softball, things we’d already covered with the PR woman. Then a bearded man comes over with mics. ‘Alright, guys, just going to need you to feed this down your top. He hands me a receiver, and I lower it down my blouse, the microphone staying in his hand close to my face so I can smell the cigarette smoke on his knuckles. He clips the tiny microphone in near my mouth and I hook the receiver on to the waist of my jeans. He checks our levels, radioing the producer, ‘Check these levels for me, Bev.’ Then to us, ‘Alright, tell me about your day.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Well, I had a smoothie this morning for breakfast then we went for a wal –’

‘Stop there,’ he says, then into the mic, ‘All good? Great.’

‘Now you, what did you do today?’

‘Same as her really. A quiet day, went for a walk and when we got home we –’

‘Excellent, sounding perfect,’ he says. Then he’s gone. The room is too hot.

‘I get the feeling he didn’t give a shit about our mornings,’ Cain says, and I give a laugh that breaks up the small clots of tension inside me.

Soon the producer comes back through to the green room, grinding her palms together as she approaches.

‘Alright, Lisa is ready for you now. It’s going to be fine, just relax and pretend no one else is in the room. Alright? Follow me.’

She leads us down a short corridor and through a soundproof door into a dark studio. Keep breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

Lisa is smaller than I was expecting. On TV she seems to have this immense stature, as if her power and control in this domain translates to physical size. It’s in the way she smiles, a slight tweaking of her lips, her eyes fixed on the fresh meat before her.

‘Pleasure to meet you both,’ she says, offering her hand. The cameras are already rolling, I know this part of the show. It will show us greeting her as the intro music plays, before anyone can hear our mics, before the coverage cuts and dives right into the interview.

‘Hi,’ I say, taking her hand.

‘Please, have a seat.’

We sit in the two seats opposite her. Stiff backed, not nearly as soft and comfortable as the chairs in the green room. Cain naturally sits erect, core active and head high. His shirt is still crisp but it stretches around his shoulders and chest. Impossibly, he’s both focused and relaxed. It gives me some confidence knowing he’s by my side.