‘See what?’
‘Desks, computers, filing cabinets, phones – all the accoutrements of the modern office. They’re invisible to you, aren’t they? When you walk through those doors, what you see is a gentlemen’s club – with a few absent-minded old duffers sat about just waiting for the first sherry of the day. Donald, I have work to do.’
‘Oh please, don’t make me laugh. The only work you have to do is make sure your wig’s on straight. Do you really not know what the occasion is?’
Frank shook his head. Bucknall sighed and then in a loud voice directed at Mustansar. ‘Unlike some of these leaking glowsticks I respect the achievements of my colleagues, and today, sir, is your turn to be saluted.’
Frank continued to look at him.
‘Because today, God help us, is the twentieth anniversary of your first stumbling lurch into the world of television – a once great institution that you have single-handedly turned into a cheap joke.’
Frank grinned. ‘Is it really?’
‘It is indeed. I remember it well. You did a report on the morning bulletin and were so nervous managed to mispronounce your own name. I realized then I was witnessing the birth of a legend.’
Frank laughed. ‘Well, what can I say, Donald? I’m touched that you’ve followed my career so closely.’
‘Yes, it’s been one long slow-motion car crash I’ve been unable to tear my eyes from these past twenty years, fifteen of those as the almost perfectly named anchor. Come on, let’s get a pint.’
Frank looked at his watch. It was almost lunchtime. Donald looked around at the rest of the team.
‘Anyone else fancy a quick drink? Celebrate twenty years of Allcroft magic? Come on, Julia. Twenty golden years. Think of all the laughs you’ve shared.’
Julia looked at him. ‘I’m wracking my brain.’
‘Come on, Julia – just a little bitter lemon to keep your acid levels stocked up.’
Julia ignored him and looked at Frank. ‘I actually can’t. I need to get to the bottom of this hospital story – it’s a mess.’ She paused and then with an effort added: ‘Happy anniversary, though.’
The pub was located in a former bank, built in the days when banks were made to look like churches rather than cheap hotel lobbies. The epic grandeur was now, though, tinged with shabbiness around the edges. It was easy to marvel at the domed ceiling and not notice the occasional mouse making a dash across the tiled floor, the shrapnel of a stale Pringle gripped in its teeth. Donald ordered a pint of mild and Frank, conscious of needing to return to work, had half a shandy. They sat at a table at the back.
Donald raised his glass. ‘Happy anniversary, then, Frank. Thank God there’s still a few of the old guard about.’
Frank took a drink and then held his glass up again. ‘And to those who went before us.’
They drank to that and Donald shook his head sadly. ‘I fear another comrade is about to bite the dust, though.’
Frank frowned. ‘Don’t say you’re retiring – we’d hardly notice.’
‘Not me, you fool. Why would I retire? I’m still a spring chicken.’
‘Are you actually drawing a pension already?’
Bucknall ignored him. ‘I’m talking about Bosker.’
‘Black Glove Bosker?’
‘Being put out to pasture.’
‘No!’
Donald nodded and sipped his pint. ‘I ran into him yesterday afternoon. He’d just come from a meeting with Martin and the big bosses. They said they were restructuring and there was no place for a special correspondent any more.’
‘But Bosker’s a legend. The correspondent without portfolio. They just sacked him?’
‘They offered him general reporter, but he told them to shove it. They know he’s not going to learn how to use a video camera at his age.’
Frank shook his head. ‘I suppose it’s been coming. He doesn’t really fit in with the programme now, but bloody hell, Steve Bosker. End of an era.’
‘He doesn’t fit in because he has a personality. He’s not just some pretty-boy replicant off the production line.’
‘Those leather gloves were his trademark, those and the tinted glasses – he was the assassin. There was something very theatrical about him.’
‘They’re not interested in that local-colour stuff any more. He said they didn’t want stories about inanimate objects.’
‘What?’
‘Haunted houses. Historic stretches of canals. Industrial heritage. Inanimate. The viewers are like panting dogs – they like to follow moving objects. Living, breathing things – kids in hospital waiting for operations, pensioners who’ve had their medals stolen, gang members shooting each other.’
Frank sighed. ‘I suppose that’s understandable.’
Bucknall took a long drink of his mild. ‘Do you remember that phase he went through of always being filmed between branches or partially obscured by leaves?’
‘Yeah – “Citizen Kane” Phil used to call him.’
‘He was wasted on us really. The auteur of local news.’
‘The best Bosker story, though, was the Tamworth child snatcher.’
Bucknall frowned. ‘I don’t remember that.’
‘It was ages ago – maybe early nineties, I’m not sure. Anyway some bloke in a van was hanging around primary schools in Tamworth and making inept attempts to snatch kids – you know, offering them lifts to the sweet shop, that kind of thing. He actually got one, but she managed to jump out at some traffic lights. There were loads of complaints to the police and so we ran the story over a few nights. There was a lot of panic; every parent in Staffordshire thought their kid would be next. I mean, to be honest, I never thought this bloke was much of a threat – he seemed a bit of a joke to me – but you can imagine the hysteria. Anyway, on the second night the police had given us an artist’s impression based on the kids’ descriptions. Do you really not remember this?’
Bucknall shook his head.
‘Well, we showed the artist’s impression and as the report was running Phil turned to me and said, “Did you notice anything about that image?” I hadn’t really looked at it. So I took a look and that was it. Both Phil and I were in bits. It was a real struggle to get our act together back in time for the next item.’
‘What was the joke?’
‘The face of the child snatcher – it was Bosker. The tinted glasses, the wiry hair – I mean it was a striking resemblance. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact we knew exactly where he’d been at the times of the incidents, we’d probably have shopped him. Anyway, as bad luck would have it, the next item straight after that was a Bosker special – a report on some new water-park opening in Coleshill. I swear the moment his face appeared on screen the phones started ringing. I think we had over a hundred calls alerting us to the fact that the Tamworth child snatcher was working for us.’
Bucknall laughed.
‘Luckily they got the bloke in a few days, but Bosker never worked in Staffordshire after that for fear of reprisals.’
‘Those were the days, eh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I mean you wouldn’t get any of those gimps we have reporting now being mistaken for predatory paedophiles.’
‘Sad times indeed.’
‘Talking of sad times, I’ve got to get off to have a chat with Rentaquote Reeves to see what words of wisdom he has to say about the suspension of the regeneration project.’
‘I suspect he’ll be outraged.’
‘I suspect you’re right. If his party was running the council, the local car industry wouldn’t have hit the wall, the global recession wouldn’t have happened and Britain would win Eurovision every year.’
‘Why, you sound jaded, Donald. As if you’ve heard it all before.’
Bucknall finished his pint. ‘Well, we have, haven’t we, Frank. All of the stories, all of the faces. Heard them, seen them a million times.’
35
He was watching what he assumed was Evergreen’s Sing Something Simple
group. He’d seen notices for them pinned about the place and when he’d heard the music in the corridor he’d followed it to the glass door where he now stood.
They sat on a circle of plastic chairs – their walking sticks, newspapers and cardigans scattered about them. Someone he didn’t know played the guitar and the group sang along. Frank recognized ‘Over the Rainbow’. He had heard it a hundred times and it had always been a song that floated past and never stuck to him. Hearing it now, though, Frank felt a soaring sensation in his chest. It was the same reaction he experienced sometimes on catching a glimpse of Mo, or Andrea’s silhouette separating from a crowd, or on seeing a sudden hurtling of vivid yellow leaves along a black road. For a moment he was overwhelmed, the very rhythm of his heart affected by the impact of what he saw and heard. He found the sight now of these few people each holding on to their stapled sheets of song words, combined with the melody and the lyrics, pierced him deeply. Each time the chorus came round the members of the group raised their heads, freed from the need to follow the words, and looked across at each other as they sang the well-known lines. Frank believed that what he was experiencing was not the power of one song, but the power of music itself, the transcendental, transformational magic, and he’d never felt it so purely before.
After the song finished there was a brief moment of stillness, a savouring of the suspension of the world, before time and place asserted themselves once more. Song sheets were passed back to the man with the guitar, assorted belongings reached for, cups of tea considered, the difficult business of standing up negotiated. As the circle broke apart, and chairs moved backwards, Frank was able to see figures previously obscured by others. He noticed for the first time that Walter had been sitting on the left-hand side of the group and as he leaned backwards to reclaim his newspaper Frank saw someone else he recognized by his side. It took a split second for him to realize it was his mother. He quickly pulled his head back, and turned and walked away from the room.
He returned to his car without really knowing why and sat with the heater on, looking at the exterior of Evergreen. Damp bark chippings covered the ground and wire cages encircled the skinny trunks of bare sapling trees. A garden intent on suppressing life.
A few nights previously he had spent hours looking through old family photographs that Mo had pulled out when looking for photos of her grandfather. The piles of battered Kodak photo wallets tumbled over the table, a chaos of negative strips spilling out and mingling promiscuously across the packs. Andrea was impressed by the photos of his parents before they were married. The images seemed poised and graceful – of a far higher quality technically and formally than any photos Frank and Andrea took now with a more sophisticated camera. The wallets were in no order and so they zigzagged through time from tiny, white-bordered, black and white rectangles, to gaudier, full-gloss jumbo shots and back again. Frank changing from scowling baby to smiling father to squinting young boy shielding his eyes from the sun.
Andrea had seen them all before but enjoyed seeing them again. Her enjoyment turned to outright hilarity around the time of Frank’s thirteenth birthday as she howled at the photos of teenage Frank with his sensible haircut and jumpers. As the evening wore on, Frank found himself focusing most on the face of his mother. He compared the very old photos of her with later ones and tried to work out what it was that had changed beyond the simple process of ageing. It was something to do with her smile. At some point it had lost its softness, and took on a brittle, artificial quality. Her face showed effort, her eyes squinted. It was as if one day she had forgotten how to smile naturally and was forced to follow instructions from a manual.
He hadn’t expected to see his mother at the singing group, had never expected to see her joining in, but most of all he had not expected to see a brief flash on her face of an open smile. He felt as if he had glimpsed something he shouldn’t. He thought enough time had passed now for her to be back in her room. He gathered his things together once more and headed back towards the front door. He knew already that neither of them would mention it.
36
Sometimes Frank would see a film, usually American, set in and around a news room. He struggled to find any parallels with his own work environment. The journalists were always either hard-bitten cynics, or wide-eyed idealists – never the kind of shuffling unspectacular plodders that he felt himself and many of his colleagues to be. Their patter was fast and littered with one-liners, not the directionless drivel that passed between him and the others on slow afternoons as they asked each other about their sandwich fillings. Their Hollywood counterparts drank black coffee, never milky tea, ate Danish pastries, never Penguin biscuits, and they never seemed to cover stories about controversial new traffic-calming measures.
As Frank looked around at his colleagues in the morning production meeting, he thought wistfully of the kind of glass-sided meeting rooms with large oval tables where these meetings took place on-screen. Never once in a movie had he seen a hard-nosed news team crowded around a stained sofa next to a fridge that smelled of sour milk in a staff kitchenette. He noticed that the science correspondent had taken his usual policy of wearing casual, if not to say palpably dirty, clothes below the waist a step further and appeared to be wearing carpet slippers.
Martin, the producer, was talking about an item on a line of new eco-friendly fire engines being introduced in Coventry. ‘Apparently they’re made of a special kind of plastic, hence much lighter, hence use far less fuel.’
Mustansar chipped in. ‘Plastic? Won’t they melt when they attend fires?’
This was greeted with a few groans and half-hearted laughs, but Martin jabbed the air with his pen. ‘Good one, Mustansar. Frank, could be a nice little joke in there – could you work something up for us for the link? You know – a bit of Allcroft magic to make the item a little less dull.’
Julia replied before Frank could. ‘Less dull? How about dropping it altogether? That would be less dull.’
Martin ignored her and carried on to the next story. ‘Obviously Bonfire Night tonight. Now we had a nice feature last year about a lady in Walsall who makes replicas of world landmarks out of clothes pegs and then burns them on the night. Does everyone remember?’
Julia muttered to Frank. ‘Who could forget that scoop?’
‘So I thought we’d do something with her again. Sadly they’re not lighting the bonfire till seven, so we’re not going to be able to get any footage of the actual burning, but can we think of something else to do on her?’
Julia interrupted. ‘Why are we covering her again? We did her last year. Isn’t it enough that we run a weak item once?’
Martin shook his head. ‘The viewers will love a return visit, Joolz. She’s a local character. It’s a nice story. Come on – any ideas?’
A reporter spoke up. ‘How about at the top of the programme we run a little clip of the lady hanging out some washing, focusing on the pegs, and ask the viewers, “What’s going to be keeping her busy tonight?” You know, a little teaser.’
Martin nodded. ‘Yeah. I like it – bit of a mystery to catch their attention. What do we reckon?’
Frank thought it sounded pretty weak. He could feel the indignation seeping out of Julia like heat.
The same reporter spoke again. ‘Or … or – another possibility. At the top of the programme Frank says, “Tonight on the programme the White House” – or wherever it is she’s done this year – “in flames! More later.” ’
‘Great idea,’ said Julia, ‘because (a) obviously it’s funny to pretend the White House is burning down and (b) our viewers would totally expect that kind of story to be covered on Heart of England Reports. Sounds brilliant.’
Martin ignored her again. ‘Nice suggestion, Hugh – I think the viewers would take it in the light-hearted spirit it was intended. By the way, what is it she’s made this year? What’s the landmark? Where’s Sally? She’s the one who suggested this. Sally? Are you here?’
Sally had been lurki
ng towards the back of the group saying nothing. ‘Um – yeah, I’m here, Martin.’
‘Sal, what’s the landmark this year?’
Sally looked awkward. ‘Yeah – I didn’t actually know what it was when I suggested it. I’ve only just got off the phone with her and found out.’
Martin was impatient. ‘Yeah? And?’
Sally grimaced. ‘Well … apparently, this year she’s made a replica of Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām.’ There were a few gasps.
Martin looked blank. ‘What’s that, then?’
Mustansar looked at him with disbelief. ‘That would be the Sacred Mosque of Mecca.’
Martin slumped in his seat and said, ‘Bollocks.’
But Julia looked up. ‘And she’s going to burn an effigy of it? In Walsall?’ She was beaming now. ‘Oh yes, the viewers will certainly take that in the light-hearted spirit it was intended. I take it all back, Martin – you’re a genius!’
Back at their desks, Frank said to Julia: ‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’
‘It was a small recompense for sitting through the rest of that crap. That man is such an idiot. He has such a low opinion of the viewers. He thinks they’re imbeciles.’ She paused, but Frank could tell she was only just getting started. ‘He’s not the only one, of course. I wonder sometimes who we are making this programme for. People who are desperate to hear us repackage press releases from the fire service? People who demand no greater interactivity than an email address on the screen? People who can’t focus on anything for longer than a minute and a half? All we do is bombard people with these random, decontextualized jumbles of facts and faces. Don’t you ever wonder who actually watches this programme?’
‘Well, people do watch us – there are viewing figures.’
‘Watch us? Really watch us? Do you reckon? Okay, maybe older people who’ve always watched us. But the bulk of those figures – we’re just on in the background. A familiar noise while they’re eating their tea.’
Frank shook his head. ‘But regional news is important. The small-scale, the local – that matters to people, it matters to me. Why shouldn’t we be able to see stories that happen here? Why shouldn’t we have a sense of our own identity?’
News Where You Are Page 17