Playfair

by Jamie Tuck

In the city, and reporter Rick E. Delaney strides across the newspaper’s back lobby with a still warm copy of The Evening Kernel newspaper folded into his armpit. He rams open the door to the alley.

  Screech.

  The teeth-grating scrape of heavy steel door over the metal footplate whips Norman the security guard’s head up from his silver-on-black epaulets

  Screech, screech, scrape.

  It passes three times over the plate; deflecting Norman’s attention away from the wank mag hidden inside his own Final edition. He stares from inside his glass box at the departing powder blue shirt.

  ‘Cunt,’ he says - factually correct on two counts – eyes refocusing on pink openings.

  Delaney emerges into the alleyway, the word ‘Editorial’ hammered into a piece of metal high above his head. He flicks open the folded newspaper, and there it is in black and white – By Rick E. Delaney.

  ‘Front page again, Rickeroo,’ Delaney says, loud enough for the sunburnt female shoulders on the step below to hear. ‘Front page again.’

  The sexy girl from Classifieds turns her head.

  ‘What?’

  Delaney smiles and pulls out his silver plated cigarette case and carefully selects a smoke from under a little piece of elastic rope – Gauloises; because he’d learnt to pronounce the name. He taps it on the box.

  He looks at her, beams her with a smile.

  ‘Turned out nice again.’

  She grunts, flicks her own half-smoked cigarette to the pavement, grinds it under heel and heads back indoors.

  ‘Knob,’ she mutters.

  The door scuffs open, gently.

  ‘Hiya Norman,’ she says.

  ‘Hey doll.’

  Delaney has been an Evening Kernel reporter for eighteen-impatient-months – he awaits world renown; it’s in the post, he just fucking knows it.

  He pauses for a fantasy close up, his best side – the left, always the left - smooth like an English rose. White. China white. The withering sun seems not to have noticed him. Wet shaved every day for no reason other than that’s what men do on the adverts. The same blade has been in the Gilette grip since well before Christmas and is still as sharp as when it left the pack.

  Delaney glances up on cue. He pauses, then cups hands. He lights his cigarette and flicks the Zippo lighter closed.

  Breathes.

  The smoke glances his lungs.

  And he splutters.

  Coughs.

  He doesn’t smoke, not really – his is a delicate chest. His eyes nip as he stands in the alley. He coughs twice more.

  Evening Kernel delivery vans queue single file at the mammoth press hall gates, waiting to fill up on Final editions.

  The alley shakes. The roaring, rumbling beasts spit out ten copies a second.

  ‘By Rick E. Delaney,’ he says.

  He coughs again. Finally itching away the smoke tickle.

  Men way too old to be paperboys struggle out of the Evening Kernel’s womb carrying a slab of newspapers in each hand. The plastic ribbon that binds them slicing into palms like blood brothers.

  Delaney smiles.

  ‘Here come The Spastics.’

  The vendors head up the alley to their pitches across the city. There they stand before a portable stall with a sheet of paper glued to the front.

  COUNCIL TOILET FIGHT

  Words crafted to tempt the reader like an old butt ugly whore showing only a gartered leg round a doorframe.

  Two drunken burghers kicking fuck out of each other in a public toilet?

  Great tale!

  Or a routine council story - elevated to the front page on a slow news day?

  Always the latter.

  Still the men run. Utterly incapable of calling out the simple words ‘final’, ‘newspaper’ or even just ‘Kernel’ – instead, projecting a sound normally accompanied by vomit.

  ‘’The Evening Kernel,’’ Delaney reads the paper’s masthead. ‘’All the news you need.’’

  He steps off the kerb and turns the opposite way down the lane, the old cobbles sliced precisely in half between light and shade. He stays in the shade and is hit by a wave of office girls on their way up to the square seeking alcohol.

  ‘On the drink again girls?’ he smiles. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, eh?’

  Give it eight or so drinking hours.

  A binge, they call it.

  And at least one will be banged in the churchyard or end up with her legs spread in a cheap BnB as a shaven headed moron on a stagdo from Essex delivers five strokes before blowing his load and falling asleep. The Legend of the Geordie Lasses, shared amongst the stags on the train home to wives and girlfriends.

  ‘Little sluts,’ Delaney says.

  But the only parting these girls do for Delaney is around him to walk by.

  He stops under a man with a hammer, a sign hanging high above the door of the Printer’s Pie pub. The two beige curtains of his hair flop into his eyes.

  He looks himself in the eye: Rick E. Delaney – the world’s greatest reporter, all he needs is a trilby with a PRESS card in the band, and he’s fucking there. Complete.

  He flicks his cigarette away and salutes the glass to make shade.

  ‘Excellent.’

  The younger crowd he’s looking for are there; a foursome in the corner. He attacks the saloon door, it whips through its hinge. He steps in, it whips back open to the sunshine.

  Opens, closes, opens to the sunshine.

  Closes.

  His eyes adjust to sepia and his ears to - a pair of lips whistling the theme tune from ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.’

  A live performance.

  He’s heard it before.

  A different voice adds the ‘wah, wah, wah’ refrain.

  Delaney’s Hush Puppies fuse to the floor – it’s a Pie imperative to keep the feet moving over the soiled shagpile.

  A queasy smile scuttles across his face.

  ‘Dick! Old fruit!’ Peter Lee, The Press Agency’s 25-year-old bureau chief shouts across the chairs. ‘How the fuck are ya?’

  Heads turn.

  Trapped, Delaney turns to face them.

  The Press Agency double act of Peter Lee and Daniel Evans, far flung sentries for the national press, are sitting in the upholstered corner in their crumpled suits sipping dregs from pints. Lee lifts his glass and wiggles the serum in the bottom.

  ‘Your round?’ Lee says.

  Assorted reporters, printers and sub-editors lounge under a carbonised fog. Rory the landlord had suggested the name The Smoker’s Lung as futile resistance to an imminent revamp by the brewery.

  ‘How are you?’ Delaney says. His is a bland, Home Counties accent – you’d never know, because he’d never tell you - but he grew up plain old Richard Taylor on a housing estate in Hull.

  ‘I see you’ve got the splash tonight,’ Lee says, swallowing the dregs.

  Burp.

  ‘Of course,’ Delaney’s face opens.

  ‘‘Of course’?’ Lee says, shaking his head. ‘Dick.’

  ‘Total Dick,’ Evans agrees.

  Lee gestures towards the copy of that day’s paper wedged in Delaney’s armpit.

  ‘Kev Clarke was in earlier saying how you’d only made one call and knocked his name off his exclusive and put yours on. He says he’s gonna . . . What was it again Ev?’

  ‘He said somethin like ‘if you see that fuckin byline bandit cunt Dick Delaney, tell him I’m gonna kick his fuckin head in.’’

  ‘Aye, that was it,’ Lee says, he raises his empty glass at him. ‘He should be back soon.’

  ‘What?’ Delaney says, glancing over his shoulder to the door. ‘Oh don’t be ridiculous, I did as much on that story as he did. It’s not my fault if The Editor wants his best reporter’s name on it.’

  He smiles.

  Delaney had made one call, added five words - ‘Councillor Sow refused
to comment’ - to the bottom of the district office man’s exclusive and sent it flying solo into print, knowing the sub-editors would be too busy to check Clarke’s name was still on the copy. And, anyway, couldn’t give less of a fuck about either reporter’s ego.

  Delaney turns to the bar and lifts a shoe from the carpet, it resists like a plunger kissed to a window.

  ‘A front page lead, is a front page lead,’ he says.

  Fwup click, fwup click – he heads to the bar.

  ‘Gee and tee please,’ he says, hunting for change in his pocket. ‘Ice no lemon.’

  ‘Sorry love?’

  He stares and moves his lips like the man on daytime TV who moves his hands around for the deaf.

  ‘Gin. And. Tonic. Ice. No. Lemon. Lemon. No. Lemon. Please. Thank. You. No lemon.’

  He smiles at the trainees and pays, collects his drink. He sits where he’ll get the respect he deserves; amongst the new crop of cub reporters from the paper’s in-house graduate training scheme.

  A course Delaney himself completed last year.

  ‘Silly tart,’ he tuts, fishing out half a bruised lemon from his drink. He drops it in an ashtray.

  Ellen Carter, a member of the same year’s intake as Delaney, is also at the table. She’s already doing occasional shifts in London on a broadsheet. A fact that actually physically hurt Delaney, when she’d told him.

  ‘How are you Rick?’ she asks.

  ‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘Fantastic. Top of the world.’

  ‘Front page,’ says one of the bairns. ‘Well done.’

  ‘Of course,’ he says, turning his back on him.

  ‘So,’ Ellen asks. ‘What’s new with you?’

  ‘I got a call from The Sunday Sorted today,’ Delaney tells her, loud – glancing towards Lee and Evans at the next table.

  Neither is looking.

  ‘Really?’ she says, interest and real status-depleting-terror in her voice.

  ‘I’ve been offered a contract,’ Delaney lies. ‘I’ve got to go down next week and sort it all out.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Ellen says. ‘Oh, well done Rick. That’s great news. When are you leaving?’

  The children mutter in awe.

  ‘Soon,’ he says, enjoying the jealous rays.

  But the conversation with The SS news editor worried him. That, and the fact he’d deleted two years off his age and added fictitious Fleet Street shifts to his CV.

  ‘You’ve got a month’s casual work over the summer,’ the voice told him down the line. Germanic. Efficient.

  Delaney had thanked him ever-so-much for his very kind offer.

  ‘And make sure you bring a good tale down with you.’

  ‘Thank you, yes sir. I. . . Hello? Hello?’

  Delaney puffs his chest at the memory.

  ‘Hi Ev,’ Ellen says to the crumpled suit on its way to the bar.

  ‘Hiya Ellen,’ he looks down on Delaney. ‘So you off to join The…’ Evans burps, ‘’scuse me… join the Joy Division then?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Delaney smiles up at him.

  Daniel Evans is short man, 27 – the same age as Delaney. Thick framed glasses under greased down black hair. He looks like an accountant - in a tailored suit he’d blagged on a press junket to a Savile Row tailor.

  ‘You off down to join The SS? I’ve got a few mates worked there, they say it’s like joining a cult. You’re fuckin dead meat mate.’

  ‘I’m sure I can hack it,’ Delaney says, grip on his conviction slipping a notch; ‘bring in a tale’.

  ‘You having a leavin do Tory boy?’ Lee says from the corner.

  ‘Oh? Yes. Yes,’ Delaney shines, looking around at the trainees and Ellen then up at Evans and across to Lee. ‘Of course. Why not? That’ll be fun.’

  He soaks up this unexpected respect, enjoying the rays like he’d never enjoy the sun.

  At last!

  ‘Think anyone’ll come?’ Evans exhales smoke in his face, ‘Dick.’

  Friday