by Lilly Miles
Journalists don’t start out cynical. In fact pretty much everyone I’ve ever worked with started out well-intentioned and with a burning passion to change the world and write the pages of history. I remember watching the news about the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989, Germans from east and west attacking the barrier with garden tools and kitchen utensils and bare hands while Kate Adie stood there telling us about it in her pearl earrings, and I turned to Mum and said that was what I wanted to do.
‘What, be on the telly with a spoon?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I replied, for this was in the days before ‘being on the telly’ was a job. ‘Telling everybody all the important things they need to know.’
And now here I am, a shilling-a-line hack on a tabloid, who spends her days stalking people and writing about their love lives while her own is in the toilet. Oh, the fairy tale!
Anyway the point I was trying to make is that most reporters are pretty decent sorts. Honest. It’s just that the line between comedy and offences-that-would-get-you-sacked-anywhere-else is a lot finer in a newsroom, perhaps because we’re so busy flouting social niceties for work we can’t see the point of sticking to them in our leisure time.
For example, I’m sitting at my desk drinking my first cup of tea of the day – only there’s no plastic spoons, so I’ll have to use my biro to fish the bag out again, honestly the stuff I put up with – and Porter’s walking the length of the office talking loudly to a contact on his phone.
‘But he’s SUCH a bell-end! Honestly, a great, big, gaping, raped-raw bell-end! Why doesn’t he just give up, the big, gay ARSE?’
I think he’s talking about the Prime Minister. Or it could be the Chancellor. Neither, as far as I am aware, is actually gay, it’s just how journos speak. But it’s the kind of talk which my friends who work in banks – and even those on magazines – say would get them shown the door while their biro was still spinning in the cup. Elliot, taking me to task over a story which had slipped through my fingers, once told me: ‘You’ve been raped over this story. Raped!’
As far as the racism goes it doesn’t involve any of the Bad Words or seriously attacking another race. It goes something like Bish’s phone call the other day to a press officer at the Ministry of Defence.
‘. . . yer fookin’ right we’re sending a girl to Afghanistan with yer boys. We’re an equal opportunities employer, yer know. An’the fookin’ ragheads should have the same opportunity to get the shit scared out of ’em as us. I tell yer what, I wouldn’t like to meet her on a dark night . . .’
‘OH MY GOD!’ I thought, barely noticing the isms. ‘AT LAST! I’M BEING SENT TO WAR! Brilliant! Will I get a gun?’
Bish banged the phone down, grabbed the office flak jacket from his bottom drawer, and strode down the newsroom, buttons popping as his chest puffed out with pride. I trembled. He stood over the reporters’ desk, legs braced like Lord Nelson bestriding the poop deck and surveying his victorious but raggedy fleet. Every reporter, from showbiz to politics, stiffened their spine and prayed their call had finally come.
‘Banks! Get yerself to RAF Lyneham, there’s a Hercules waiting for yer, and don’t come back until you’ve found a British boy in a terror training camp.’
Teflon Tania smirked her way out of the office while the rest of us subsided, disappointed, back in our seats.
‘Shit me,’ bitched Bridge.
‘Christ, is he serious?’ asked Princess.
‘At least she won’t need armour plating,’ griped Fifi.
Then Porter butted in: ‘On the plus side, we’ll finally defeat al-Qaeda. I mean, she’ll either make it up or they’ll all throw in the towel. I can see it now, a final video with someone tearfully saying – [please imagine a dreadful Arabic accent here] – “Fine, all right, we give up, cursed infidels. We will come out of our cave. Just for Allah’s sake, get this Banks woman out of here!”’
But, to be honest, Banks is probably the best person to go, in that she is bulletproof, empathy-wise. The trick to a good newsroom is having one person suited to each type of story, a many-headed Brothers Grimm. So you have someone like Princess Flashy Knickers to talk to rich people, Fifi to schmooze PRs and hang out with models and celebrities, public-school Porter to backstab with the politicians, Banks to send trundling out like a tank when you don’t want any prisoners or witnesses. Me, well, I get the stuff no one else wants: the jokey stories and the puns.
For example: Elliot slapped a story down on my desk about how some academic had done a study on illnesses in the works of Shakespeare. ‘You’ve got the kind of stupid brain that’s good at this,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I want ten puns, and make them sing.’ I didn’t write the story, but did come up with ‘Much Achoo About Nothing’, ‘Romeo and Fluliet’, ‘The Temperature’, ‘Chlamydioanus’ (that one didn’t go in) and ‘How Do I Infect Thee? Let Me Count the STIs’.
Journalism: giving good jobs to silly people. Well, it keeps us off the streets.
Reporters also dress like those they deal with, and become a little like them, too. So Bridge looks like a lady DCI, in a Jaeger suit which makes her seem severe; Fifi wears designer knock-offs and survives on champagne, canapés and nicotine; and Porter wears an old-school tie and lives in wine bars. Cubby the health reporter is a naturally-messy hypochondriac with drifts of vitamin supplements on his desk. Because I knock on doors and loiter around car parks I wear stuff smart enough that a policeman wouldn’t notice me and casual enough that I don’t look like a social worker. People don’t open doors to social workers.
Then we’ve stories about lap dancers, drug dealers and criminals, and for someone like that you need Bruce Willis on an angry day. We don’t have him, but we do have Buff Arnold, a shaven-headed, tattooed, West Ham-loving chap who despite having a face like a cobbler’s thumb can be really quite charming, simply by opening his blue eyes as wide as he can.
Buff is just shabby, the kind of person who looks like he’s tumbled out of a strip-joint and needs a wipe with a dishcloth, but gifted with a charming manner that makes people open up because they think he understands.
One day he went out on a story about a TV actor who was shagging someone significantly older than him. It turned out that the mistress was a granny, his real missus was a granny, and they were both widows called Doris. Buff got the chat off Doris Two, confronted the shagger and was punched in the face, then had to call an ambulance when he went to see Doris One and found her keeled over with a heart attack. The following Tuesday Buff went round to the family home to see how she was doing, on the off-chance she might talk.
He wandered into the office looking pleased with himself. ‘You look smarter than usual, did you wash this morning?’ asked Porter.
‘You won’t believe it,’ said Buff. ‘I knocked on the door and the bloke answered. He nearly hit me again, but I talked him round. Poor bastard. Turns out she died over the weekend and today was the funeral.’
‘Shit!’ we all said in unison – every reporter has been in the unpleasant position of knocking on a door at really the wrong time – ‘What did you do?’
Buff shrugged. ‘I asked him if he wanted to talk about it. He sat down and told me everything, said how his heart was broken but he was torn between Dorises. He went on at length about his love for older women with blue rinses. He gave me the photo album and then dropped the bombshell – her kids wouldn’t let him go to the funeral. He had a new suit and everything.’
A sense of where this story was going, and the reason for Buff’s wide grin, began to dawn. He went on: ‘Then he looked me up and down, said we were probably about the same size, and asked if I wanted his suit. Whaddya think? It’s Boateng.’
Unbelievable. We spent the afternoon calling him Buffy the Granny Slayer, but the TV guy is now his best friend and has already given him three stories this week – all because, for some reason, he felt Buff was on his side.
It is the ability to empathize which divides the world into the haves and have-n
ots. The person who cheats, steals or smashes stuff up lacks it, otherwise they’d never do that in the first place. The person who hugs you even though you’re a stranger, because you’re outside on your lunch break and crying on a bench while on the phone to your divorce lawyer, has it in spades – and will get their reward in heaven if I have any say in the matter. Buff has more than his fair share, Elliot doesn’t have any, nor does Banks, and Twatface probably can’t even spell it. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is something wired in so deep that if you don’t have it there’s no way to get it. And if you can’t care about a stranger, what hope is there for the people who love you?
Perhaps if Twatface had more empathy in general he’d have cared more about me, and we’d still be together. But then how many people really have a happily ever after? Maybe we just force the events in our lives into a fairy-tale format so that we can pretend we know how it works and fool ourselves: he’s a villain, she’s a hero, and here’s your happy ending.
But then it’s a journalistic conceit that we hacks think we know everything, when actually we only know a little about a lot of things. For example I could storm Mastermind on questions about Big Brother contestants or the illnesses of Shakespearean England, because I’ve written about those. But anything I haven’t written about or experienced – happy marriages, childbirth, why Katie Price is a nice person underneath – is a mystery to me. Perhaps I’m the one who lacks empathy, and has to package other people neatly as stock characters to make sense of them. Maybe Twatface is sitting somewhere right now, wondering why I dislike him so.
But that doesn’t stop me feeling I’ve written this story before, and already know there’s no such thing as a happy ending.
DAY NINETY-FOUR
HINDSIGHT is not only a beautiful thing, it’s a bloody annoying one. Just like being in love: you don’t notice it until you need it, and by then it’s too late to do anything about it.
There are some things you realize only when it is too late – such as there are some differences between couples which are too fundamental for marriage to overcome. Smokers and non-smokers, for example; tea-lovers and coffee-drinkers, people who argue and people who simmer silently. Those who like dogs, and sociopaths who like cats. If you pair up with someone who is on the other side to you it will simply never work out. At the time you’re in love, and it feels like anything is possible, but then hindsight sidles up, taps you on the shoulder and rather unkindly points out that smokers smell, coffee stains your teeth, and cat-lovers have a problem with giving and receiving affection.
But then being in love is very different to being without it. Once upon a time I needed only to see Twatface’s name pop up on my phone or inbox to feel warm and happy. These days it provokes despair, rage or pity and an angry puzzlement at how he can have changed so much from the person I remember.
He only wants to know if I’ve had the latest directive from his lawyer, or how I dare try to name Fatty as the third party – or if I’ve seen his favourite red silk tie anywhere. He swings from angry, to pathetic, then to maudlin reminiscence – ‘Today’s the three-month anniversary of our separation. It makes me so sad, my darling’ – and I’m left wondering what on earth happened to the person I married, because this idiot’s a stranger.
Where once there were cuddles and closeness and farting-in-bed competitions – the romance faded after a while, I must admit – there is now just a monster rampaging around and stamping on my poor battered heart. It’s already broken, can’t you leave it alone?
Did he keep his true self from me for years, or was I an idiot? I can’t believe he was capable of the huge, elaborate and consistently clever deceit that this would have required, which leaves me with the unpleasant possibility that I’m a fool. Heck, let’s be honest and call it a high probability. Have I really spent all this time crying for no one?
These thoughts send me trawling back through old love letters and photographs in an effort to piece together the truth, trying to work out what was real and where I was misled. It’s a painful business and not much fun, although I did find an old picture of Twatface under a Swiss road sign in a town called Cunter, which cheered me up for a bit.
It brought up long-forgotten memories of things half-said, plans we made and the first time we met each others’ parents. His never argued, whereas mine do it all the time, and he couldn’t get his head around how to do it in a healthy, clearing-the-air way. He used to say I was like a volcano, that I’d be fine for long periods and then suddenly go KABOOM, and afterwards subside, and it’d be like nothing had happened. He said he quite liked that, because I didn’t simmer about things, but then that was before the whole getting arrested episode and my trip to the nick.
And I used to like the fact that he didn’t know how to argue – it meant I usually won. But now I can see that what actually happened was that he’d avoid the issue until I quietened down and forgot about it, and then go and do whatever it was anyway and just hope I wouldn’t find out. Which, when you’re married to a tabloid journo, is like jumping off a tall building and praying gravity doesn’t notice.
The oldest mementos remind me how much he loved me and the promises he made, but as I hunt through the albums towards the present day the lies creep in, and the recollections that all was not as well as I’d thought at the time.
Exhibit A is this email that I sent in May, after our trip to Venice, and just a few weeks before the end. I’d been to the wedding of Harry Porter, who was sensibly marrying a non-journalist, in the shape of his Swedish girlfriend Godrun, who worked in a law firm in the City, like normal people do. I sent the email to my then-friend Tania Banks, who couldn’t make it, with a blow-by-blow account of everything she’d missed.
To: Banks, Tania
Subject: wedding of the century.
1. I decide to wear tight red dress. Due to season, pack bright red leg warmers in expectation of church-based coldness during service. No one will see in a church, right?
2. Husband has night shift the day before. I boot him out of house early and we belt down to Sussex, arriving at church mere moments before the bride. Don leg warmers immediately.
3. Nancy and her husband and new twins, who had got ready at nice hotel, turn up and hop on pew with me and husband. We gurn at Porter at front of church. Porter resignedly waves and gesticulates.
4. I have £10 bet with Nancy’s husband that bride will blub. Bride turns up and there is definite moistening. Loser of bet insists she was not crying. Argument ensues about who owes who £10.
5. During ceremony husband embarrasses everyone nearby and fascinates rest of church with his baritone, which is so low it loosens an old lady’s bowels. Nance simply stares aghast at him.
6. After ceremony totter across fields to hotel for reception. Pull leg warmers up to knees due to total freezingness, then turn into hotel gateway only to find all guests have been gathered on steps for joint photo. I am last one there, due to pain of high heels, and after much ‘excuse me’s’ and ‘so sorry’s’ ram self in at back so no one can see bright red woolliness of legs. Husband disappears.
7. Mulled wine is served. This is good. Have three glasses.
8. Hacks are informed they are needed for photo with bride and groom, plus partners. However husband cannot be found despite searching for quarter of an hour. This means hacks have photo taken and all partners are banned from shot as bride says it ‘won’t look right’. Husband turns up, claiming to have been on phone outside, and bride tells him he has ruined her picture. More wine.
9. Lunch. Gathered hacks are on table of shame in corner along with friends of bride’s parents, all of whom seem to be Essex-based self-made scrap-metal millionaires, or highwaymen if you listen to husband. I am plonked next to one who won’t shut up, and find him utterly delightful fun. Husband looks down nose.
10. Bride’s father makes nice speech. Porter’s is slushy and pathetic, with lots of references to ‘my wife’. H
e has a bit of a blub, and Nancy’s bloke starts the £10 row again. Best man is OK, quite funny.
11. Gets to 6 p.m. and husband, who has been scathing about scrap-metal millionaires throughout meal, is pissed. Me tired. Everyone decides to go to rooms for little snooze. Husband has fingers prised off bar only after I convince him a sleep will help him drink more later.
12. Reception starts at 7.30 p.m. but husband and I turn up around nine, due to laziness and start of hangover. Hacks have also surfaced, gangsters have been drinking all the way through, and new arrivals include legendary drinker and feature writer Valentine Lush, Buff Arnold, Evil Elliot, Bish, Bridget Jones, Fifi Jenkins, and Princess Flashy Knickers. Much drinking ensues.
13. Husband forces me to dance, despite fact he can’t dance. I kick off shoes and start wolfing canapés. Lush says he is praying for redundancy announcements this year, as he has been at paper for 463 years and could sell the occasional paragraph to the Daily Glimmer.
14. As evening progresses I discover Bridget is not wearing knickers, as would show VPL. Bridge confesses same to one or two others.
15. One of bride’s mates, a Mancunian known as Gavin the Gas Fitter, pants after Bridge all night.
16. Me, Nance and others dance drunkenly with gangsters, who liken party to one thrown by the Krays in 1962. Bish dances like a demented David Brent. Everyone too drunk to work camera phones to capture the moment.
17. At 1 a.m. band gives up, exhausted, and hard core of hacks head to bar. Princess and I watch as Gavin the Gas Fitter challenges Bridge to a game of strip Connect 4, no doubt confident he needs only to win one game before she loses her single item of clothing and is bare-arse naked. Bridget loses but refuses to strip, small fight ensues. Memories of night now bit of a blur . . .
18. Fifi forces Princess and Bridge into cab back to their B & B nearby. Gavin the Gas Fitter goes to bed alone, disappointed and with black eye. At 1.30 a.m. Nancy and I head to rooms with husbands. Husband says he is getting drink of water, and won’t be long. At 3 a.m. I awake, go to bar in jim-jams, drag husband to bed. Valentine offered cab to his own hotel, but drunkenly refuses and reels into the night, looking for a rural lock-in.