The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox

by Lilly Miles

  Then one day and without telling me Twatface cancelled the mortgage payment. The bank insisted we use only one account to pay off the loan, so we had set it up that I paid my half to him a few days before the payment was due, and then he would pay the bank for both of us. It had been that way the entire time we lived together, and after we split it carried on. Every month I paid him £600 and he paid the bank £1,200.

  One afternoon at work, a week or so after my £600 had gone out of my account, I suddenly had a call from the bank’s debt collectors saying we were £1,200 in arrears. I had to pay both our shares then and there, was left £1,800 adrift and when I phoned him to ask what the hell had happened he said it wasn’t his problem, he wasn’t giving the money back until he could pick up the last of his furniture, and how dare I accuse him of theft.

  Everyone in the newsroom stopped what they were doing as I screamed four-letter words down the phone at him, slammed the receiver on to the cradle and then shouted a bit about what a petulant, pointless little twat I’d married. Apoplectic with rage I stalked to the end of the office to punch the wall (luckily, this is not unusual behaviour in a newsroom). He was holding my money ransom for a bunch of crappy furniture not worth a tenth of it.

  Back at my desk, I decided I’d had enough of constant argy-bargy and £1,800 was something which merited getting the lawyer involved for. What followed was a petty war of words via two dozen legal letters. It was £75 for my lawyer to write to him, and about £125 for his to write to me. Plus VAT. It would have been cheaper to forget it, but I had right on my side and pettiness in my brain. It was a war I could not afford to lose.

  God only knows what fools our lawyers thought we were. But after several weeks and an extra £2,000 on my bill alone, Twatface promised to return the money he had no earthly reason to keep, and a date he could get the very last of his belongings. More importantly, I had victory and it seemed like we were one painful step closer to sorting things out.

  On Wednesday I had the girls over for one of our frequent attempts to drink all the wine before Twatface turned up. I served up bowls full of king prawns with garlic, regaled them with blow-by-blow accounts of our exchanges, and was confident of their continuing, unquestioning support.

  We were six bottles down, and I was mid-rant, when Fifi Jenkins, thinking I was looking elsewhere, rolled her eyes. I stopped and said: ‘I’m sorry, is my agony boring you?’

  Nancy chipped in and said: ‘Don’t be silly – it’s just, you know. We understand how awful it is, but you need to let it go. You’re a bit bitter.’

  I was astonished. ‘BITTER? I’m not bitter. Bitter means you wish you were still with him. There’s not a fibre of my being that wants to be with that toad. What I am is angry. Very. Bloody. Angry. There is a difference, you know.’

  I glared at my wine glass. Silence fell, feet were shuffled, and we talked of other things. My sense of rightness faded not in the least.

  When I told my mum – who I genuinely think is more upset than me at Twatface – he was paying me back and picking up his stuff she insisted I find a way to sabotage everything so he could never use it.

  So I unscrewed the lamp base, cut some wires, and screwed it back together. I couldn’t do much with the bookcase which was already knackered, but I carefully tore one page out of each of his books – a pointless exercise because he never reads them. The chair was an IKEA thing, a canvas cover stretched over a metal frame with a couple of legs screwed on to the sides.

  ‘Take it apart and shove something stinky in the frame,’ said Mum. ‘What right has he got to enjoy sitting down?’

  At this stage even I thought she was taking things a bit far; but she encouraged me, y’honour. So I took the chair apart and washed the canvas. I unscrewed the frame. I picked all the king prawn shells out of the bin and shoved them, one at a time, into the hollow metal tube which formed the main structure of the chair. I left a couple of screws out so there were air holes for the stink, ironed the canvas cover and put it all back together. I quite enjoyed it, and snickered happily to myself throughout. Then I put all of his things on the pavement outside the house and went out for a couple of hours.

  When I got back most of it had gone. The bookcase he had demanded was on the pavement, with a note he had written saying ‘FREE TO A GOOD HOME’. My elderly neighbour, Valerie, who spends all her time sat at her front window watching the street, was watering her flower tubs so I wandered over to find out what she’d seen.

  ‘Did you see anyone take the stuff?’ I asked, after some chit-chat about her knees.

  ‘Ooh yes, dear, your husband came and took it. He was driving a flash little sports car, but it was belching out black smoke, bit of an old banger. He was on his own, dear, and he couldn’t fit it all in, so he left the bookshelf, as you can see.’

  ‘And, er, did you see a canvas chair? Did he take that?’ Please God, let him have taken it. Aha ha ha!

  ‘Oh no, dear, he couldn’t fit that in, either. He left it outside your house. I expect someone walking past saw it and took it for themselves.’

  Aaaaaaaah, shiiit! All that for nothing. I was disappointed, but then began to worry. Who had the chair? One of my neighbours? What would they do when it started to smell? Would they bring it back? They would demand to know what I was playing at, leaving a nice chair on the street for someone to take and then stuffing it full of decaying shellfish. They would think I was insane, accuse me of being petty and – almost certainly – bitter. I realized that I had not stopped to think how I was behaving, simply rampaged on and acted like just as much of a twat as him in the race for cheap divorce points.

  So if you ever read this, Twatface – and if you get this far before reaching for the phone to call a lawyer – I’m sorry. Sorry that I crammed a chair full of rotting prawns just to earn some kind of meaningless victory. To be honest, if you’d taken it I would have been highly delighted and had not the tiniest twinge of conscience. The only reason I regret it now is because you didn’t, and there is an innocent third party somewhere who thinks I’m a basket case. It was only seeing how my behaviour would look to strangers that made me realize that although it was funny it also plumbed new depths of pettiness, was motivated purely by vengeance, and made not the slightest difference to the end of our marriage. It was just that I wanted to hurt you, a little bit, like you’d hurt me. So as much as it sticks in my craw to apologize to you for anything – I am sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t the wife you wanted, too.

  She’s still fat, though.

  DAY SEVENTY-THREE

  SOME things never change, no matter how hard you try. The sun rises, the tides turn, and I am always ten minutes late for work. If I get up half an hour early, the universe conspires to block the road or provide an annoying phone call just as I’m going out the door. If I oversleep by half an hour I still, somehow, manage to be at my desk at ten past. I have ceased to question or fight it, and have come to accept it as a force of nature, along with the fact that chutzpah beats skill in almost every situation and that I will always laugh at things that really aren’t funny.

  Evil Elliot, however, still rails. Bish occasionally mutters a sarcastic, ‘Afternoon’ at me as he stomps past the desk, but Elliot takes the 10.10 a.m. start of my day as a personal thorn in his side to be niggled at until the thorn gives up and goes away.

  Last Friday I was hoping to slip under his radar and get to my desk without being seen, juggling several bags, a pair of stilettoes and the previous night’s hangover. But I had barely slumped into my seat, perspiring gently, before he silently appeared beside me.

  ‘I see that investigation I asked you to handle into holiday rip-offs has surfaced in our rival paper,’ he hissed, slapping the offending organ on to my keyboard. ‘Any thoughts?’

  This is Elliot’s most sadistic pleasure. Asking bafflingly open-ended questions that are impossible to reply to, and which are designed simply to give him a good reason to slice you off at the knees with a vicious scythe of his tongue. H
e will say, ‘Your copy’s dreadful – any thoughts?’ Or, ‘It’s been a while since you had a splash. Your thoughts?’ while you writhe at his feet, scrabbling for something sensible to say.

  The best method of dealing with this is head-on. You should state boldly, ‘I’m glad you asked me that . . .’ and deliver a strong line of bullshit too bombastic for him to get a word in edgeways. Chutzpah, you see. I rarely manage it, though, and certainly not when caught in a bit of a flurry with a hangover of 6.2 on my personal Richter scale. So instead I looked at him, mouth agape, while my brain went, ‘click, brrrrrrrrrrrr . . .’ like a phone line that had gone dead.

  It lasted only a couple of seconds, but that was all the time he needed to skewer me. ‘No excuses? How unlike you,’ he oozed.

  I gathered myself and fought a valiant rearguard action, explaining that yes, I had come up with some stuff, and had mentioned it to Bish, but he’d been completely lukewarm on the idea, so it’d rather gone off the boil. In desperation I made a lame joke about staycations being much more the thing these days. Elliot merely raised his eyebrows and said: ‘Oh, so now you’re blaming the news editor for your failings? You should have sold it to him, insisted we spend some time on it. In the current climate, and with your personal problems, I would have thought you’d try a little bit harder to hold on to your job and cease acting the clown.’

  With that, he turned on his heel and stalked off to terrorize some other poor soul, and I slumped in front of my computer despondently. Chutzpah is not always the same as funny, I told myself. Two desks away, Tania Banks smirked at her screen. Next to me, Bridget was on the phone and crinkled her forehead in sympathy. She was dealing with a ring-in – a caller who reckons they’ve got a good story, and needs to be squeezed for all the info before we can take it to Bish and see what he thinks. I listened to the conversation as I dolefully turned my computer on.

  ‘. . . and was he still fingering her at this point, or having sex? Having sex. And was she on top? And what was she doing? Well, of course, you’d want to see what was going on. Were there any pictures taken? I see . . .’

  Two minutes later she hung up. ‘Jeez, the things you see when you’re an air stewardess,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Remind me never to get on the same plane as a bad boy of rock. Afternoon you. Elliot’s in a bad mood, by the way.’

  I laughed. ‘Spotted it, thanks. Any thoughts?’

  ‘Ha, I’m glad you asked me that . . . no, seriously! Have you seen the email about Greece from the travel editor? She says there’s a space going on a break next week if anyone wants it and can knock up five hundred words for the holiday supplement afterwards. You’ve got a week off, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I sighed. ‘Twatface and I were going to his cousin’s wedding in the States. There’s no way now, and I think he’s going with Fatty. He even asked me to arrange their bloody flights for them.’

  ‘He’s a twat,’ said Bridge. ‘You need a break. Take this Greece thing.’

  I looked through my emails and found it . . . and my mood sunk even further. A singles holiday at a villa on Rhodes. Oh, God, had it come to this? I emailed the travel editor with a heavy heart, saying I’d take the offer, and on Sunday found myself alone on a Sleazyjet flight from Gatwick, surrounded by stag parties and A-level students.

  Three hours of booze and hell later, I walked out of the arrivals hall and saw a rep holding a big card with my name spelled wrong.

  ‘You must be for us!’ The rep beamed, a friendly woman called Marla. ‘Great! This is Simon and this is Kate, and there’s just the three of you on this flight, so off we go!’

  Kate was a petite woman in her fifties and Simon looked about twenty-five, a giant of a man. On the bus to the villa I discovered Kate had recently lost her husband and Simon had recently lost ten stone. The road wound through the mountains to a hillside just outside Faliraki, where Villa Minerva perched. Why they named it after a woman with snakes for hair is anyone’s guess, but there was a pool and a bar with about a dozen people lazing about, who welcomed us as three interesting new specimens.

  Over dinner we all sat and shared the tales of romantic woe that had led us to a singles holiday. Widow Kate had been married since she was seventeen, and had never done anything on her own. Fat-fighter Simon proudly retold his battle of the bulge and showed us that while he had lost a lot of weight he still had all the skin. Then there was Jilted John, whose bride had dumped him at the altar, and who was supposed to be on his honeymoon right now, a couple of fat ladies, and Slightly Mad Melissa, who was a thirty-five-year-old librarian with a lot of cats and a succession of bad boyfriends. Lastly there was an Irishman called Rory, who made a big point of spelling his name for us – Ruairi, I think – and had been single since the love of his life, Eleanor, had dumped him nineteen years previously. Even Marla had her own story, having found out that her husband was gay only when she walked in on him shagging the pool boy at their Cretan holiday home. I regaled them with my own story of adultery and arrest, laughing loudly throughout, and was probably labelled by each of them as some kind of loon.

  ‘So,’ I thought as I lay in my cheap slatted bed, listening to the bar next door play a crap pop song for the fourth time over a heavy drum ‘n’ bass track. ‘This is, quite literally, Heartbreak Hotel.’

  It was only a four-day break, but at the end of it I would have to write a review for the travel supplement. So I lounged by the pool in the afternoons, and in the mornings signed up to all the activities I could find – waterskiing classes, bungee jumping, pony-trekking – so as not to be brooding on the lesbian wedding, and how Fatty was getting on with all the people who a few months ago were my family.

  And I had fun. I was on holiday with a bunch of rejects who made Heather Mills look emotionally healthy, but it was funny. I have been known to laugh at funerals – and not at the bits you’re supposed to. So when the bungee man asked me in broken English, ‘I buy you beer, you be my wife for week?’ he looked on blankly as I snickered uncontrollably for five whole minutes. When a fat little pony I was riding bolted down the mountainside with me clinging to the saddle, I was so busy screaming and laughing at the same time that I slipped sideways around its barrel-like belly until I was at right angles to the ground and nearly choked to death. Held in place by one leg, I was only saved when the beast became so confused by the noises I was making that it stopped to look at me in amazement.

  It was all stuff that would never have happened if Twatface had still been around. He could never bungee jump – the man could barely cope with going up a stepladder – so I embraced it, and insisted my fellow refugees from romance did the same. I dragged Widow Kate waterskiing, and the Two Fat Ladies pony-trekking (their horses couldn’t bolt), and found myself unofficial court jester, pulling the others along in the hunt for something new to laugh at.

  On the last night our Lonely Hearts Club trooped down to the town for dinner and a bar crawl. Ruairi made a point of sitting next to me and pressing his knee to mine, and as I got drunker I mulled over the idea of a holiday quickie. He was a bit short, not much taller than me, and a good twenty years older. He had spent the entire week lying on a lilo in the hotel pool, baking his skin until he looked like a sultana. I didn’t really fancy him, but after a few cocktails I was starting to think his Irish lilt was quite sexy.

  Suddenly I was tapped on the shoulder by a fat sweaty Mancunian from another table. ‘Your go,’ he said, shoving a microphone in my hand.

  Arsebuckets! I had foolishly put my name on the karaoke list an hour or two earlier, for the sole reason that Twatface would never have let me do such a thing for fear of embarrassing him, and because the others were all too shy. I’d never done karaoke before in my life. Now I was three sheets to the wind, the bar was quietly expectant, and Jilted John and Fat-fighter Simon were lifting me on to the table we were sitting at. Arse, balls and buggery!

  I hadn’t even picked a song. Heavy piano chords started to thump out, and I recognized Elton John
’s song for surviving singletons. Oh, marvellous!

  ‘Well, my girl,’ I thought to myself. ‘There’s only one way to deal with this. Chutzpah.’

  I started to sing. The first few words were strangled and nervous as my eyes sought out a point on the back wall to stare at, but after the first verse something magical happened. Somehow, as though we were in a movie, the song moved everybody in the same way, in a perfect storm of mood and alcohol. First the Lonely Hearts Club joined in, and then the whole bar followed. It was like being the novelty act on The X Factor, where the judges roll their eyes but the audience still cheer. I even managed to hit some of the notes as I danced on top of the table, doing an admirable impression of Elton John in Slightly Mad Melissa’s huge red sunglasses while the Lonely Hearts Club thumped their hands on the table and their feet on the floor.

  The Two Fat Ladies jumped up on to their chairs to do backing singing for the chorus, and when the guitar solo kicked in, Fat-fighter Simon clambered on to the bar and rocked the air guitar, while Jilted John played the drums on some upturned pint glasses, and Ruairi and Kate danced rock ‘n’ roll in the middle of the floor. It was one of those times where everything just seems to come together, and when the song finished the whole bar cheered as I collapsed back in my seat. Ruairi sat back next to me and said admiringly: ‘Why, you’re da white Aretha Franklin!’

  I refrained from pointing out that I was nowhere near that fat, and took pleasure in the fact that all the lonely hearts had big smiles on their faces. During the course of the evening Simon and Melissa snuck off and got it on, Kate made plans for Christmas with the Two Fat Ladies, and Ruairi made it plain he fancied me, but by that point I was too drunk to pay much notice. Next morning the raging hangover didn’t seem so bad, even on the flight back home with yet more stags drowning in Strongbow.