by Lilly Miles
‘SPRITZER.’
‘Splitsy?’
He rolled his eyes, leaned in and shouted in my ear. ‘Steve. Steve Packer. They call me Spacker.’
‘Oh, Spacker. I see.’
Luckily Beamy came over to talk to us, and I was rescued from having to make scintillating conversation while he engaged Spacker in chat about who’d had how many runs that afternoon. With attention diverted from me, I had time to look at my target. He was not that tall, but well-muscled under a tight white T-shirt, with very red lips and long coal-coloured eyelashes. Maybe not such a bad pick after all.
As the wine wore on it was a relief to be with people who had never met Twatface and didn’t want to talk to me about him. They wanted to know about my job, how long I’d known Fi, and what bra size did I take, 34B or C? It had been a long time since anyone had tried to chat me up, and I found their oafishness amusing. They were as unlike Twatface – who prided himself on being a metrosexual and having sensitive skin – as it was possible to be. It was a big sea of testosterone, laced with white wine, and I threw myself in.
Which is how I found myself at 2 a.m., sat on a plastic bench at a shiny Formica table in the chip shop, singing along to some rude song I can’t remember, sandwiched between Bazzo and Spacker.
Spacker’s tanned arm rested against mine, and I could smell a slight hint of fresh sweat through his tight white T-shirt in the humid night. As I looked at the muscles of his bicep, it flexed and he turned towards me. He bent his head and kissed me with those red lips, which tasted like raspberries. Oh, all right then, raspberries dipped in beer.
A cheer went up around us, and someone shouted: ‘Go on, son!’ I looked up and saw Fi on the other side of the table, dipping a chip in some ketchup and winking at me. Spacker grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the shop into the cool air, and walking to the corner he drew me into his arms and kissed me again.
It occurred to me that I was kissing a man called Spacker on a street corner while drunk and smelling like a chip shop – a journalist’s ability to sum up situations succinctly is not always welcome – and I pulled away.
‘So where’s your place?’ he said, smiling and lowering those eyelashes at me.
Suddenly my husband loomed, even though he was scowling and saying, ‘You threw it away?’ Much as I fancied him, I knew Spacker was going no further. Twatface might be with Fatty, he might have finally found a ladder and climbed up to do the deed, he might be doing it right this instant, but I was married and that was kind of that. The kiss made me feel better, but anything more would make me feel worse.
‘My place is this way. And the taxi rank is that way,’ I told him, smiling. ‘Goodnight.’
I reached up to kiss him on the cheek, breathing in the scent of his clean sweat one last time, then turned and walked away. I felt him stand and watch me go, toying with the idea of following me for a second before deciding it wasn’t worth it. But still, as I walked back home in those tight white jeans, I felt as though my heart had just restarted.
DAY FOURTEEN
THERE was only one way to survive going back to the office – getting to the pub as soon as humanly possible.
But first, the newsroom. I was nearly as scared as on my first day at a local paper years ago, when I’d been a nervous eighteen-year-old who’d turned down university for the offer of a job covering one country town and a dozen villages. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, forgot to bring a notebook or ask the right questions, made a mess of covering a parish council meeting on my patch, and crashed the borrowed office car. Going back to work the second day was more nerve-racking than the first, but after a quick bollocking it was business as usual, and with the glory of seeing my first bylines I realized I was born for the job – a person who observes more than they take part, who asks questions you don’t want to answer and notices things no one else sees.
Now I do the same sort of thing for a national tabloid. My patch is a whole country, and sometimes others, too, but the questions I ask are of national statesmen rather than local councillors, TV and film stars instead of the carnival queen, and I’ve learned always to have a notebook and pen and never, EVER, admit it was my fault when I crash a car.
I’m still a person who notices too much, and when I walked into the newsroom at 10 a.m. I was dreading the silences, sympathy and crinkly, concerned foreheads of my friends.
‘Thank FUCK you’re back,’ said Harry Porter, the gayest straight man you’ll ever meet. ‘I need a cup of tea and someone to answer my phone while I go for a dump.’
He sashayed off to the bogs with a copy of the Daily Wail, leaving me in the clutches of crime reporter Bridget Jones and a work-experience boy called Tom.
Bridget isn’t her real name, that’s Nicola; but she’s blonde and single, so what does she expect? She is also Australian, and so chippy you wouldn’t be surprised to hear she’d picked a fight with the entire world.
‘Abaht bloody time,’ she said, with her feet up on the desk while she read a copy of the Glimmer. ‘It’s been so boring round here I was thinking of smashing a winder to get arrested, or something equally insane.’ She folded down a corner of the paper and looked over it at me, raising an eyebrow like Columbo used to when he puffed on his cigar; poor Tom just looked confused.
‘Sympathetic as ever, Bridge,’ I said, dumping my bag and shifting a load of old newspapers that had drifted on to my desk. ‘Missed me, then?’
‘Not had the chance, mate. Sky News have been filing updates on you every twenty minutes,’ she said drily. I must have looked worried, because she added: ‘Oim jokin’. Although we have had a team tailing your ex.’
My interest was piqued. ‘Tell me you’re making it up?’
‘Ha, not really. As it happens I was meeting some of the crime pack down at the Stab in the Back last night, and he walked right in on us.’
All journalists gather together for warmth and friendship, more so when they specialize in one subject like Bridget and Harry do. Specialists usually end up talking and acting like the people they write about, so a defence reporter will have shiny shoes and a regimental tie, health writers tend to be hypochondriacs, and political types are fond of telling you they know best. Crime guys, generally, have grubby macs and drink in pubs no one else would patronize. Bridge is no exception.
‘And oi’m sorry about this, but you probably ought to know – she was with him.’
If I hadn’t already been sitting down I’d have fallen over. For Twatface to take Fatty into a pub where all of Fleet Street’s crime reporters hang out is like him paying for a billboard on the M25. It means they’re public. So much for his ‘talking things over’.
Bridget was still speaking: ‘I asked him what the hell he thought he was doin’, and he mumbled something. Then Toxic Tim from the Sunday Person came up. Anyway he’s never met you, has he? He knew Twatface, and said hello, then turned to her, all oozy, and said: “You must be Foxy, I’ve heard sooo much about you.”’
I’d been told Tim was a decent enough chap out of work but one of those guys you wouldn’t trust not to nick your contacts book or sell his own mother for a story. He’d been in Fleet Street nearly as long as Bish, certainly longer than computers, and possibly longer than photographs. Hearing that he’d presumed I was Fatty I didn’t know whether to be outraged or laugh out loud – I settled for a snort and an eye-roll.
Bridge took a deep breath. ‘Well, she had a face like a slapped arse. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Twatface went white and started stuttering, and then she grabbed him by the arm and dragged him into a corner to give him a bollocking. The crime pack pissed themselves.’
At that moment Bish lumbered up like an old tank. He is firmly of the belief that a decent reporter is one who can file flawless copy while three sheets to the wind and taking enemy fire, and that the only place for emotion is in the top six pars of copy about a grieving widow. He has survived fifty years on the street with an unending supply of dreadful jokes
, a regular Woodbine and only the most limited personal involvement with any of the weirdos he works with.
‘Ooh, yer back, then. How’s that coont of ’usband o’yours? What a wanker! Still, never mind. Park yer broomstick and go through this,’ he said, dropping four hundred pages of A4 on my keyboard. ‘It’s the most recent list of party political donations. Find us summat no one else has had yet, can yer? It’ll keep yer mind off things.’ Then he turned and trundled back to the news desk.
Porter stamped back from the loos, saying: ‘Bridget filled you in, has she? Apparently this girl’s much bigger than you. What’s your bloke thinking? Anyway, this is Tom. Say hello, Tom.’ Tom said hello. He looked shell-shocked, as everyone does after ten minutes of listening to journalists speak to each other.
‘Tom is the nephew of the managing editor,’ said Porter, adding more quietly: ‘I only found that out after I called the managing editor a dickless wanker for throwing back my expenses.’
Tom had the grace to look ashamed. I felt an affinity for another lost soul adrift on a sea of journalistic bullishness, got him a cup of tea, and showed him how to get the news wires up on his computer.
‘Oh, and have you heard?’ asked Porter. ‘There was an email went round. Apparently half the staff are being made redundant.’
‘What? Really?’ This was the last thing I needed. Was I going to lose my job, too?
‘’Fraid so. Aforementioned executive says they want to slice a few million off the wage bill. It’s across the board, apparently – journos, snappers, subs, everyone.’ Porter grimaced sympathetically. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll probably be fine. They have these culls now and again, and the staff usually ends up looking much the same as it did before. It’s just how newspapers are these days, shrinking budgets and all that. The worst that can happen is they’ll have to re-employ us all as freelancers on twice the money.’
I knew he was right – an industry which has been around for three hundred years hasn’t found a way to make the internet pay yet, and although it’s run by two students the website is the only bit of the organization gaining readers. People will always want journalists, but I suppose the way we deliver what we do has to change. It’s a shame – and I know this is me being overly romantic – but a warm computer screen does not compare to the smell of hot ink on a fresh front page.
Still, it’s not what someone whose life has just been turned upside down needs to hear on their first day back at work. I tried to put it to the back of my mind and got on with deleting the spam emails which had choked my inbox.
As the day passed, the rest of the staff floated past my desk in dribs and drabs. Fifi came in late from a film premiere the night before, gave me a squeeze, lit a cigarette and got on with writing her showbiz column. Cubby Fox, the health reporter, popped into the office briefly between ‘appointments’, which were probably with his doctor or a fine wine. Our best feature writer, Valentine Lush, wandered in at lunchtime to write 1,500 words on a big interview with the wife of a cheating footballer and file his expenses, tossing me a £50 drinks receipt with the words, ‘I hear you’re a little down in the mouth. Have this one on me.’ Meanwhile Sophia (who writes about handbags and rich people for the magazine and is so posh Bish calls her ‘Princess Flashy Knickers’) and the newsroom’s token ethnic minority, Nancy, were out on the road, but said they’d be back to take me for a drink after work.
While I juggled emails, phone calls and political donations there was an unending supply of jokes about flowerpots, and I began to find my feet.
It was comforting to be surrounded by the black humour with which all journalists protect themselves from the outside world, even if I was the butt of the remarks. Whether covering a brutal child murder, a political scandal, or a cat stuck up a tree, we’d soon break down and weep from the sheer onslaught of human ineptitude and cruelty we witness every day if it weren’t for jokes told in the poorest of taste. The one about missing toddler Maddie McCann, the Fritzls and the European hide-and-seek championships should never be told to her parents, but it still makes us snigger.
By the time 7 p.m. rolled around I’d managed successfully to avoid any serious work, bashed out a couple of picture captions and even raised a rueful smile when Porter suggested I have an extra pie for lunch to entice my husband back. Then Princess Flashy Knickers swung past my desk to drag me to the Gipsy Moth on the river for a catch-up with her and Nancy.
We’d all got married within a few weeks of each other, nearly three years ago. Sophia is quite girly, while Nancy is so hardened a news reporter that she makes Kate Adie look like a wet blanket. Both are much posher and a bit older than me, and I’ve always felt like the junior member of the trio, running to catch up with their exploits and capacity for Pinot Grigio.
Tonight was different: they listened as I told them everything that had happened in the past few weeks. They could not believe that Twatface had met and fallen for Fatty so quickly, but his emails don’t lie, so I knew the dates were right. They’d met him plenty of times, and were stunned to hear of his casual cruelty when we had seemed so happy together in public.
Then Nancy asked if we’d had problems before, and for the first time I told my friends the things I’d found out a year earlier, how I’d left and how he’d begged me to give him a second chance.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell us this,’ said Nancy after I described the past 18 months. ‘It must have been horrible for you.’
I shrugged. ‘It made things quite unpleasant for a while.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well . . . it’s difficult to say. We used to get on perfectly, and our arguments were always good-natured. But more recently every little thing seemed to escalate into a huge row and I didn’t understand why. He never had any money to put towards the groceries, and if I asked him for some he’d scream at me and say I was lying or trying to steal from him. I bought new sheets once, put them on the bed, and he wouldn’t let them touch his skin until they’d been washed in case they gave him cancer. When he was out he would say he’d be home at 10 p.m., I’d be sleeping with one eye open for a couple of hours, then I’d get worried, and he’d wander in at 4 a.m., by which point I’d be about to ring the hospitals. Sometimes he was drunk and sometimes he’d come home at 4 a.m. apparently sober, and they were the times I worried most.
‘He was always worse a couple of days after he’d been out on a bender. Sometimes he scratched at his skin in his sleep until his arms bled. Other times he’d fly into a rage at the least thing. He told me I made everything worse when all I wanted to do was help him.
‘He was under a lot of stress at work, and it got bad around the time we moved house about a year ago. That was why it happened.’
Princess Flashy Knickers frowned at her wine, then asked quietly: ‘Did he ever hit you?’
I was shocked. ‘God, no! He’d never hurt me. I mean, all right, a couple of times the rows were a bit heated but he never hit me. He was just angry with me. I suppose it was my fault for arguing back. He said it was, anyway. I can’t even remember what we rowed about now. There were quite a few times I was scared, when I thought we were both unsafe, and afterwards I would curl up in a ball and cry and he’d make me apologize to him.
‘Once or twice, when he came home, I locked the bedroom door. He didn’t like that,’ I laughed awkwardly, and there was a heavy pause.
There is a journalistic trick in interviews of asking no questions at all, just letting someone witter to fill the silence and thereby reveal more than they were willing. It’s a bit like digging a hole in front of someone and watching them fall in. As we sat there none of us said anything, while I gazed into my glass to avoid their eyes and they listened to the things I didn’t say. Couldn’t say, and don’t want to remember.
‘It was just silly rows and stuff, it was the stress. A difficult time.’
I shrugged, having long ago accepted those as the facts, and took a drink of my wine. They both stared at me. Nancy sat
with her mouth open. Princess, with sad eyes, said: ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone?’
I replied: ‘He said I shouldn’t tell any of my friends because you were all journalists and it might affect his career. I was so worried I did whatever he said. I just wanted everything to be better.’
Princess sighed. ‘My ex used to tell me it was my fault.’
‘What? Your ex?’
‘I was with this guy for ten years. Before my husband. Everything was great, and then after a while he started taking cocaine. He would burst in, late at night, make up a row about something, and start a fight. At first he pushed me. Then he slapped me. Then he hit me. Each time it happened, he had to hurt me more than the time before. Eventually there came a night when he had me on the floor and was kicking me in the face and body. He broke my arm and smashed my jaw – look.’
She rolled up a sleeve and pointed out a nasty four-inch scar near her elbow, then pulled her long hair back and turned her face to the light so we could see for the first time a misshapen bump between her cheekbone and her ear, and another scar under her jaw. Nancy and I stared at them silently. We had never heard this story before either.
‘I had loads of operations, and had to be wired back together. I’d told myself for years it was the drugs, and because he was nice some of the time I hoped he’d go back to how he was. It all happened so gradually, so slowly, while he told me it was my fault, that I learned if I said sorry to him and changed my behaviour he would be happy for a bit. But it didn’t last, he just got worse. Whatever I did was never quite enough, so I changed more and more. He cut me off from my friends, and my family despaired. When I finally realized what was happening and left he tried to find me. I moved so many times, changed my phone, everything. I’m still scared that one day he’ll turn up.’
Drugs aren’t my thing – never have been. But I’m realistic enough to know they’re common in all walks of life, and that cocaine is rife in Fleet Street.
As a rule of thumb news reporters like me don’t indulge – or not much – because our lives are exciting enough and we get to see the unpleasant consequences first-hand: the inquests, the court hearings, trying to get reliable information out of someone who will tell you anything for £20 and a fix. Also we don’t get paid very much, and you can’t get a receipt for drugs. Showbiz types are sort of expected to dabble – their job is to party with the rich and famous, and drugs are always going to be part of that. Some even get to claim expenses for it, and most have at least a moment where the fact they can stand next to money and fame makes them think they can be rock ’n’ roll too. The sensible ones know when to stop, and that no story is worth killing yourself for, but most showbiz journos at some point have needed someone to sit them down and straighten them out. Those who don’t listen don’t last.