Frank grimaced. ‘I’m really sorry, Cyril, but I just don’t think I could say those things.’
Cyril sniffed and looked Frank in the eye. He sensed that Frank was softening. ‘Frank, look, if you’re not comfortable doing jokes, I’ll give you really subtle lines – those that aren’t looking won’t even notice them, but those that miss Phil’s gags will appreciate the odd little play on words, just a hint. Not every day, just once a week, on a little story, tucked away somewhere, just enough so that I can still say I write.’
Frank said nothing.
‘Please, Frank. I won’t make you look a fool.’
That had been fifteen years ago. Since then co-presenters had come and gone, the studio set had been transformed by various makeovers and just six months ago Phil Smethway had died, but the jokes remained. If anything, they were even more noticeable than when Phil used to drop them in as they were now only occasional and Frank appeared so ill at ease with them.
Shortly after he started inserting the occasional joke, Frank’s producer discovered through a friend of his son’s that Frank was developing a cult status amongst students in the city – the bad jokes were actually pulling in more viewers. Eventually a website was dedicated to him – www.unfunniestmanongodsearth.com – with clips of Frank delivering his more excruciating one-liners. One forum thread focused on his ‘anti-timing’ and some contributors thought that Frank must in fact be a comic genius to be able to misplace the beat so unfailingly in every gag. Frank went from a dull but credible newsreader to a bit of a joke in a matter of months and the increased viewers meant his bosses had no intention of letting him make the step back. He started being asked to do more public appearances, and he found it hard to say no. He’d managed to develop a persona that fitted him as poorly as the cheap suits he’d worn as a reporter, but neither the suits nor the persona ever really bothered Frank. He held on to the belief that people saw beyond the surface.
5
Frank had started working on Heart of England Reports in 1989. Since then he’d learned to smile patiently at the remarks about cats stuck up trees, presenters in bad toupees and roller skating ducks. He knew there was an assumption that anyone who spent their working life in regional news was either unambitious or had suffered thwarted ambition, but he knew also that neither was true of him. Local news was where he had always wanted to be.
His mother always maintained that it was something in his father’s dedication to the large-scale and concrete that had pushed Frank in the direction of the small-scale and human. It was true that as a boy, surrounded by plans and drawings, what had fascinated him wasn’t the shape of the windows or the relationship of the interior to the exterior spaces, but the people who might live and work in those buildings, of the potential stories they might contain.
Frank thought he’d made a good local news reporter. He had met many of the great and good of the city as a child through his father’s work and because of that link many of them had trusted him alone amongst local journalists. His promotion when Phil moved on made him the youngest presenter in the programme’s history. He knew he should be proud of the achievement, but part of him always missed reporting.
After twenty years in regional TV, though, he was no longer the bright-eyed enthusiast he once was. He appreciated that the small-scale and the local often equated with the banal and the inconsequential. He started to question the choice of what was featured in the news and what was omitted. It seemed to him that it was often the stories that didn’t make the broadcasts that said the most about the region and its people. In this too he sensed the shadow of his father. As his buildings were bulldozed one by one, Frank began to suspect that often what vanished revealed more than what remained.
In May 1991, around the same time as the first of the demolitions, Frank reported on the death of Dorothy Ayling. He was used to the ways in which news stories could creep up on him. The murdered women, abandoned babies and teenagers caught in the crossfire would not affect him whilst at work. In the preparation and delivery of his report, caught up in the adrenalin pulse of the newsroom, his mind was all on the job. It was later in the evening, having a drink with colleagues, or at home with Andrea, his mind spooling of its own volition through the events of the day, that something would snag. He would feel himself suddenly anxious, a small panic that something was terribly wrong, and then he’d remember the story, hearing the words of his report for the first time and finding himself affected by the details. He was used to this, and dealt with it as his audience did, by trying to think of something else. But Dorothy Ayling was different.
She was found nineteen days after her death. As often happened, the neighbours reported a bad smell. When the police broke in, they found her lying in bed. In the years to come he would find it strange how often the isolated were discovered in positions of repose – sitting in an armchair, lying in bed or on a couch. Their deaths had not surprised them in the middle of making a cup of tea or watering a plant. They seemed instead to be ready, waiting perhaps to see if anyone would notice their absence from the world.
He presented the report live from the studio itself. Just a few words into the report he felt an unbearable lump in his throat and for a horrifying moment thought he was going to cry. He managed to disguise his emotion with a coughing fit, and was able to compose himself enough to continue. Afterwards, though, his mind would not move on. As he read the item, he was overcome with a powerful sense that he was uttering the last record of her existence, that no one would speak of Dorothy Ayling again. A death so isolated and solitary that it seemed less like death to him and more like extinction. As the autocue scrolled and her name disappeared, so, Frank felt, did she.
He didn’t understand the anxiety he felt, but it lingered and grew. After Dorothy he started to keep a record of any similar deaths he came across, writing their names, dates and whatever other details he could find in a notebook. Sometimes there might be two in six months and then nothing for another year. Most never made it onto the bulletin, only the few that happened to be discovered on sufficiently slow news days. For the majority, their solitary deaths created no more ripple than their solitary lives. Frank thought they should be remembered, though. Something in him would not accept that people could vanish without leaving some trace. He made a note of all of them, even attending their funerals when he could, or taking flowers to their doors.
Dorothy Ayling’s funeral took place four months after her death, after all attempts to trace a next of kin had failed. The service was short and simple. The vicar recited the twenty-third psalm. Frank would come to know those words by heart. He would learn the different versions, the cups that overflowed and the cups that runnethed over, he would notice the different lines emphasized by the different ministers. He had always thought the words were intended to reassure the flock left behind, but over time he came to believe that their purpose was to comfort the Shepherd himself. A reassurance to him that this sheep had not felt abandoned, had not been lost and scared, that he had not failed in his duty to care and guide. When Frank heard the psalm as he would many times in the years to come, he wondered if the Good Shepherd was consoled. Could he believe that the person lying now in the plain coffin with no one but a stranger to mourn them had truly felt ‘Thou art with me’?
There was one other mourner at Dorothy Ayling’s funeral. A plump woman with blonde hair and an open face. Frank spoke to her afterwards and learned that her name was Jo Manning, a technical support officer at the coroner’s office. She always tried to get to the funerals of such cases when her workload allowed. For her, attendance was a simple mark of respect. Frank found his attendance less easy to explain but Jo seemed to understand. In time they grew used to seeing each other on separate benches in cold rooms. Jo would tell him of small triumphs in the cases of those where a next of kin was located – sisters who had lost touch, brothers who had moved abroad, as well as the sadness of those where no one was found.
Andrea asked him once about the
list of names and dates he had in his notebook and he told her.
‘Is it very weird?’
She hesitated before answering. ‘A little.’
‘I’m not sure why I do it.’
She smiled. ‘Because you have a melancholy disposition.’
‘You make me sound like my mother.’
She looked at him. ‘Perhaps this has more to do with your father.’
Frank put the notebook away and gave a little laugh. ‘I’m hoping I’ll grow out of it.’
Andrea touched his face. ‘You’d say, wouldn’t you, if you ever found the job was getting to you? If it was making you too sad or depressed.’
He told her he was fine.
6
It was a forty-five-minute drive from Frank and Andrea’s home to Evergreen Senior Living. Today an hour had passed already and they remained trapped in the Crufts gridlock around the NEC. Andrea and a Great Dane in the next car stared at each other morosely. The same advert for a carpet showroom had been playing on the radio for what seemed a very long time. Mo sat in the back engrossed in her comic and Frank hummed a tune as the engine idled.
In the advert a sales assistant showed a husband and wife around a showroom. The husband was a reluctant customer. The sales assistant extolled the virtues of different floor coverings to which the husband invariably replied in a dour, no-nonsense Northern accent: ‘Oh aye? And how much is that going to set me back?’
Hearing the amazing low price would cause him to faint and his oblivious wife to say: ‘Come on, Jim, this is no time for a lie down.’
The scenario was repeated over and over again. The final revelation of nought per cent finance was too much for Jim who fainted for the last time and was unable to be revived. It was left unclear whether he was in fact dead, but his wife seemed unconcerned as she told the sales assistant: ‘I think we’d better take the lot.’
The voice-over gave the location of all the stores and then a helium-voiced speeded-up garbling of credit terms and conditions.
Andrea tore her eyes away from the Great Dane and looked at Frank. ‘Do we have to listen to local radio?’
‘I just wanted to catch the news. I want to see if they’ve picked up on the school closure protest.’
‘I can’t take much more.’
‘They’ll play some music soon – it’s not all adverts. It’s golden-oldie hour.’
She sighed. ‘Great – fingers crossed for some Phil Collins.’ A song started and Andrea instantly recognized the pizzicato strings. ‘Oh God, it can’t be …’
Frank beamed and turned the radio up. ‘Amazing! T’Pau! Hey, Mo, this is our song!’
Mo shuffled forward in her seat. ‘What?’
‘Your mother and I – this is our special song.’
Andrea turned round. ‘It isn’t, Mo. Ignore him.’
Frank looked at Mo in the mirror and nodded conspiratorially.
‘Why is it your song, Mom?’
‘It isn’t our song. Your father’s just saying that to annoy me.’
Mo listened to the song for a few moments.
‘How can you have China in your hands?’
‘Who knows, Mo.’
Mo listened for a few more moments and then wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t like it, Mom. It doesn’t make sense.’
Frank shook his head. ‘You two have got no soul.’
*
It was 1988 when Frank met Andrea, but behind the smoked-glass doors of Birmingham FM every day was 1983. The playlist favoured the current top forty, but would squeeze in a power ballad from Tina Turner or Bonnie Tyler every chance it got. The women who worked at the station favoured big hair, and a kind of leather-and-lace rock-chick-gone-to-seed look. The men had blotchy blond highlights, wore large red-framed glasses, sky-blue jeans and colourful knitwear. Andrea soon noticed the uneasy contrast between the dour off-air personalities of many of the DJs and the larger than life clothes they chose to wear.
Frank was a recent graduate in his first job as a reporter; Andrea was still a student doing a work placement at the station. They instantly picked each other out as misfits. Andrea’s clothes and hair had something of the 1950s about them and she seemed to Frank intimidatingly cool and collected. He was incredulous to later discover that Andrea thought exactly the same of him, though less incredulous to subsequently find that this had been based on a mistaken impression.
When he’d got the job at the station, Frank had assumed that he should wear a suit and tie every day. His budget being tight, he bought his two suits at the local branch of Oxfam. As far as he was concerned, a suit was a suit and aside from checking that they didn’t have holes and weren’t outright flares he didn’t notice the width of the trousers or the shape of the lapel. The team at Birmingham FM, merely five years out of date, smirked behind Frank’s back at his ten-years-out-of-date clothes. For Andrea, however, never suspecting that Frank could be as clueless about clothes as he turned out to be, he was cutting edge in his adoption of new-wave retro style.
Like all work placements, Andrea was taken advantage of. Many producers and presenters believed the best experience they could offer her was either to be left ignored and forgotten in the corner of a room ‘observing’ or fetching drinks and lunch for the team. Aware that they should be providing something more enriching for her, but unwilling to take the time to do so, most staff felt irked by her presence and passed her on to another party as soon as possible. She eventually turned up at Frank’s desk. On their first morning together he got her a tea and asked her how the placement had been going. Andrea was surprised by the question; in three weeks there no one else had asked her.
‘It’s been really useful.’
Frank hadn’t expected her to be so positive. He’d observed her regular errands to the shops for coffees and chocolate bars. ‘In what way?’
‘Well, before I came here I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do after university and now I know.’
Frank couldn’t see her as a presenter. ‘Are you thinking of producer?’
Andrea shook her head vigorously. ‘No. A translator. Spanish. My degree is a big mistake. I never want to work here. Or anywhere like here. I’m not interested in working in the media. I’m going to quit and re-enrol on a Spanish degree. I should have done that in the first place.’
Frank nodded. ‘Right. Good. Well, that’s a positive outcome, then.’
*
Andrea worked with Frank for the remaining week of her placement. Despite her decision about her new career direction she appreciated Frank’s genuine efforts to tell her about his job and the way he worked, and she found going out with him to cover stories to be a welcome relief from the studio where the voice of Carol Decker seemed to boom from every speaker. Although younger than most of the rest of the staff, Frank seemed more solid and mature in ways that Andrea couldn’t quite put her finger on. He took his job seriously not just for the sake of ambition and advancement, but because he cared about the work he did and wanted to be good at it.
Frank discovered quickly that Andrea was not as intimidating as she had at first seemed. She had an acute ear for the vocal tics and traits of those around her and was a brilliant mimic of certain presenters. She had a keen sense of the absurd but also appreciated the ways in which the apparently trivial and laughable were often nothing of the kind. By their third day of working together Frank realized that he kept finding new things to like about Andrea. He tried to stop, but still they mounted up, unignorable. He liked her Leeds accent, he liked the way she unwrapped Kit Kats, he liked the perfect clarity of her face. Although it made him slightly nervous he even liked the way that she assumed he knew about the kinds of obscure bands she liked. He had no idea where she’d got the impression that he had a clue about such things, but he couldn’t help but be flattered.
*
Mo shuffled forward on the rear seat again. ‘Mom?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you think is yours and Dad’s special song?’
Andrea thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure that we have one.’
Mo was insistent. ‘I think you should have one. I think it’s important. Try and think of one.’
Andrea thought again and then smiled. ‘Okay. I think maybe something by the Pixies.’
Mo looked happy. ‘Can we listen to them when we get home?’
‘Yeah – you’ll recognize them – I’ve played them before.’
‘Why is that your song?’
‘Oh, your father was a big fan when we met. A big expert on the Pixies.’
Frank shook his head slowly and glanced at Andrea. ‘You’re a regular funny guy, aren’t you?’
Andrea smiled sweetly and hummed ‘Gigantic’.
Frank thought back to the final lunch hour of their week working together. Andrea had been sitting reading a music paper, something Frank always found unnerving. She looked up at him and asked, ‘Have you heard Surfer Rosa yet?’
Frank considered various high-risk strategies in answering this, but decided in the end for the simplicity and honesty of a simple head shake.
Andrea continued. ‘It’s an amazing review, but you know, I don’t want to be disappointed.’
He picked up on the doubt in her voice and thought he could safely venture something here without revealing his ignorance.
‘Yeah, I mean can she really live up to that kind of hype?’
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