The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox

by Lilly Miles

  ‘I don’t feel bad,’ I lied, looking him up and down. He was fatter than I’d ever seen him before. ‘Good to see you’ve kept the weight off.’

  He laughed and patted his expanding tummy. ‘Yes, well, there’s more of me than there used to be.’

  ‘Huh,’ I sniffed. ‘Must be beer. Can’t believe Fatty’s letting you near her food.’

  He said something inane about how nice it was to see me, and how were Mum and Dad? And I replied as rudely as I could that it was none of his damned business. We circled each other like two dogs fighting over their vomit, until he said ‘I miss you, you know’, and I sighed.

  ‘How did we get here?’ I asked him. ‘I did everything I thought you wanted, got on with your family, showed you how much I cared. Maybe it wasn’t enough, but you got everything I had to give.’ I sighed again. ‘I don’t think you appreciated that. You didn’t think I was worth doing the same for, nothing worth looking after or trying not to hurt.’ He said sorry again, quietly, and left the pub, leaving me hollow upon my bar stool. A bit later Bish wandered up to me, drunk and therefore able to talk about personal stuff for once.

  ‘Eh, lass, jus’ bumped into your worse half outside while I was having a Woodbine,’ he said, as Buff Arnold and Val came to blows behind us over whose mobile phone had rung first in the church, since the sweepstake pot had now reached £250.

  ‘Oh, yeah? Whatever,’ I said, waving my empty glass at the barman, who was apparently considering abandoning his post to cower in a back room.

  ‘Aye,’ said Bish, swaying on the spot. ‘He stopped to talk to us an’ all. He asked how you were and that, and said you’d been bollockin’ ’im. Then he said, and this is a quote, like, “God, I love her.”’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah. He said “God, I love her. I mean, I’m glad I’m not married to her any more, but isn’t she great?” Then he wandered off. I didn’t know yer divorce had come through, lass.’ He drained his glass.

  ‘It hasn’t. We’re still married,’ I said flatly.

  ‘He’s such a twat, lass, why’d you marry him?’ said Bish, before wandering off to find a cab.

  DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR

  THE next day my liver was in near-total collapse. When I dragged myself to my desk I found the Fleet Street grapevine alive with the news that Val had a black eye, Buff had somehow landed a bar bill for £300 after losing a poker game, and Sickly of the Scandal had spent his hangover ringing around the gossip columns begging them not to print a rumour about him battering the landlord into a towel dispenser. ‘It was months ago, and it was a reporter!’ he was heard to howl. ‘I would never harm a landlord!’

  I snickered into my cup of tea, took a bite out of my emergency bacon sandwich and brown sauce, and sorted through the post that had been dropped on my keyboard. There, under the press releases and tickets to things I’d never go to, was a formal-looking envelope in thick white paper, lurking like a shameful cigarette end at the bottom of a beer glass.

  It was from the lawyer, and was my decree nisi. Which I hadn’t known was coming, and Twatface obviously had. Our marriage had been officially declared dead and I’d barely got my head around the fact that it was even unwell.

  So there it was, gurning up at me from my desk like a gargoyle in paper form, daring me to get upset, get angry or get arrested again. But the strange fact is that the decree nisi leaves me feeling absolutely nothing – nothing at all.

  I’m not making it up, not just saying it as part of the whole brave-face thing. It doesn’t even leave me cold or numb, it’s just an envelope of big, empty nothingness. In the strictest sense, of course, it’s simply a piece of paper with some words on it, but so is a wedding certificate, and that means a lot. Weddings come with happy memories. (Or in my case, recollections of the groom spilling beer on my frock and a drunken aunt bitching about my dress.)

  Marriage certificates have a coat of arms on them, and writing in proper fountain pen, and cost thousands of pounds and a year to organize, and require mothers to be kept happy, and lots and lots of shopping trips, and a photo album that makes you feel all warm, and an anniversary which later turns out to be the only time all year you have sex. Decree nisis, on the other hand, are matter-of-fact forms run off by the court on an inkjet printer, which tell you that all that is over, and was such a waste of time and money that you’d have been better off digging a hole in the ground, covering yourself with a duvet and hibernating for the whole five years of the relationship.

  The sex would probably have been better, too.

  But nevertheless there’s a piece of paper sitting on my desk now that says my marriage is dead. Oh, all right, I admit it’s been rather gasping for breath since Fatty had me dragged off in cuffs, and frankly had not much chance of recovery thanks to Twatface’s buggering about, and had in fact been limping for quite a while before that, with hindsight. But now a judge has signed it off there’s no arguing the point any more. It’s over: the dreams, the plans, and the babies’ names we decided on together, which now I can’t use if I have a baby with someone else, in case the child is hexed.

  The fact that I still have my wedding dress, never drycleaned it, and couldn’t even wear it again in case it somehow used up its magical properties, is no longer touching. It doesn’t remind me of a happy day any more, either. Now it’s just a bit of silk that smells of beer and makes me sigh, like an old pair of lucky pants when the elastic’s gone.

  And despite this piece of paper I’m still married. I still have a husband, and I wish like hell I didn’t. I still use the phrase ‘my husband’, only it’s no longer said with a sense of togetherness. We still have a house and a mortgage and lots of crappy things to argue about, yet at the same time we’re supposed to be starting our lives anew. It’s like trying to climb a ladder with someone on your back, with the added problem that they’re trying to prise your fingers off the rungs and drag you down into an abyss of self-loathing with them. If I found someone new, technically I’d be an adulterer, too, and indeed I already am. I cannot move on as I should. My feet are glued to the floor because I’m still legally and psychologically tied to someone who is the direct opposite of the smiley, sweet man I fell in love with, someone who is being such a bully about the divorce I literally hate him. There have been moments – hell, whole weeks – when I felt like killing him, simply to make the world a slightly less twatty place.

  But there is an unwritten code about these things: that even, and especially if, you were the wronged party, you will continue to bear the other party’s behaviour with nothing more than a grimace and a quiet bitch to your mates over a glass of wine. I’m not supposed to send the boys round, despite the many offers my fellow hacks have made. (Buff Arnold wanted to do the deed himself, but most suggestions were more along the lines of ‘I know someone who . . .’). I’m not allowed to haul Twatface into the town square and invite the world to throw rotten eggs at him. And maybe because most of my friends have yet to get married, there comes a point where they turn to me and say, ‘Isn’t it time you moved on?’ And yes, it is, and I’d love to – but we’re still married. It slows you down, like a ten-ton weight.

  I rang Maurice the smiling lawyer to find out what was going on and he explained, in his jolly, isn’t-all-this-a-lark? and that’ll-be-another-£150-thanks way that the decree nisi was, ‘Just a formality really, a recognition that you both agree the situation is irretrievable. You signed the forms last time you came in, don’t you remember?’

  Well, no, Maurice, because mainly I just remember the big cheque I signed at the same time. It left an indelible stain upon my memory. By the time you pressed some other documents into my hand and asked me to daub a mark on them my brain had spun off into a horrible world of massive debt and government bail-outs, so I wasn’t really thinking clearly. But while it’s a surprise it’s nevertheless welcome, I suppose, like when the end comes for a terminal cancer patient; as much as you wish they didn’t have cancer you’re kind of glad when d
eath finally arrives.

  If the decree nisi is the formal recognition of a marriage’s demise, the certificate stating baldly that the cause of death is ‘adultery’, then there’s only one thing which ends it for good and proper, and turns ‘my husband’ into an ex. The decree absolute, the final closure, the end. The funeral, as I am swiftly learning to think of it.

  But that, Dear Reader, is nowhere in sight.

  Maurice giggled. ‘Ooh no, you have the nisi to formally recognize the whole thing’s over, but we haven’t agreed a financial settlement yet, which can take years in some cases. Some parties never apply for the absolute, they’re happy to just have the nisi.’ (Who are these nutters? Are they allowed to drive?) ‘Although, in your case, without children, I shouldn’t think it will take more than a few months to hammer everything out.’

  ‘Months, Maurice? How many months?’

  ‘Oh, who can tell with these things? Unfortunately your husband’s lawyer doesn’t see things the same way as us.’

  The main thing Twatface’s legal eagle doesn’t see is why he owes me any money, because we don’t have children. We do, however, have a house, bought with the help of a small inheritance from my granddad, which, as Maurice gleefully pointed out, once I had put into the marital home became, technically, half Twatface’s.

  And Twatface wants it back. Well not back, because it was never his, but he wants five figures in lieu, or for us to sell the house and split the proceeds. Which if he was dirt poor I could understand, but a couple of months before we split he had an inheritance himself, and that one was about ten times the size of mine. It was destined for the mortgage and me getting pregnant, but because it was in his bank account and not our house it’s all his, apparently. So now he’s shacked up with Fatty, whose family reek of money, and he’s sitting on a big stinking pile of cash, and yet he wants to chase me for a few pennies more and make me homeless into the bargain. He’s even threatened to have my car off me. What a nice man.

  Well, I’m not having it. NO. FLAMING. WAY. I hit back with a succession of estate-agent valuations, each of which valued the house as the same or slightly less than when we bought it, and which therefore technically means he has to buy his way out of the deposit. Bless the recession! I would tell you that legal letters have been flying, but they’ve not. They’ve been limping, slowly, between solicitors, with zero result apart from making me worry what’ll happen next. It’s like water torture: days waiting for a letter to drop on the doormat and slice another few pounds off my bank balance and years off my mental health. So far it’s cost more than getting hitched in the first place, only without the nice frock. Why did I get married? If we’d just lived together one of us could have chucked the other out, and this would all be over.

  But then it seemed like the right thing to do at the time; we were in love, once, and while you might think holding on to that thought is a bad idea, it actually helps to remember that things weren’t always like this. And while it might have been a mistake, it was something I can’t wish away or regret. And I don’t – I know that one day the hate and upset and anxiety will pass.

  Twatface and everything he did will never leave me, for better or worse. It’s up to me to make that a lesson to be learned from rather than a scab to be picked over. In the meantime the corpse of my marriage is laid out in the living room, waiting for a decent burial and starting to stink.

  Just as that thought trundled its way across my frontal lobe and I was toying with the thick vellum of the lawyer’s envelope, there was a whoosh and a thunk as Bish dropped a bundle of paper on to my keyboard.

  ‘It’s that time o’year, lass. Appraisals. Come t’Bunker in five.’

  Thanking the fairies that at least it wasn’t with Elliot, I leafed through the bureaucratic, asinine nightmare which is a personnel review spreadsheet thingamabob.

  Such things are rare in newsrooms, where assessments are usually carried out on the hoof and on deadline, and normally involve being bawled out by the boss if you’ve screwed something up or, if you’ve landed a world-beating splash and saved the day, you might get a, ‘Not bad, you can come back tomorrow.’ Last week Bridget managed to rile Bish by getting in a fluster and not filing her copy quick enough. After calling down the newsroom to her three times to, ‘’urry the fook up’, he eventually went purple, leapt to his feet and bellowed, ‘YOU ONLY COME IN HERE FOR THE HEAT AND LIGHT, DON’T YER? We haven’t been this late off-stone since the old king died, NOW PULL YER BLUDDY FINGER OUT, you useless heap o’shite!’

  Elliot, in his more furious moments, has been known to sidle up to a trembling hack whose splash has just collapsed, and quietly whisper in their ear: ‘If you can’t find something for the front in the next five minutes I’m going to kick your cunt off.’

  And of course if you do well and they like you, like Tania Banks, you get gifted the stories that come in to the news desk: the sure-fire splashes and two-page spreads which get you a good show in the paper and a slap on the back from The Editor. If I didn’t know better I’d say Banks was sleeping with someone important, the way the good stories get neatly packaged up with a little pink bow, laid on a silver salver and then carried to her desk by a strutting Elliot, looking like he should be wearing tails and a pair of white gloves, while she simpers delightedly.

  In the cut and thrust of newsrooms the assessments go both ways. The last editor was a shouty old bastard, and one day he pulled a two-thousand-word spread by Valentine Lush, who had lavished love on it and spent a hellish ten hours dealing with constant rewrites and meddling. Told his prose had been ‘sent to spike’, Val decided he was going to make a stand. Stiffening his spine with a couple of slugs from the hip flask he kept in his drawer, he stalked up to the back bench where the editor was laying out the paper, tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned round laid him out cold with a technically perfect right hook. Val flicked a resignation letter on to his boss’s unconscious form with a flourish, said, ‘Fuck you, you old bastard,’ and swept off to the pub to a round of applause. That editor left shortly after, and his replacement rehired Val on day one of the new regime.

  Anyway, the paperwork and form-filling of the corporate world has wound its tendrils even into the shenanigans of journalists. My review asks the kind of non-quantifiable questions that simply don’t apply to reporters, but get asked anyway in an effort to make our work a series of boxes to be scored out of ten, which can be presented as a profit-and-loss table in the annual meeting for shareholders. Rather than ‘gets splashes’ or ‘writes well’ or ‘has shorthand and knows their law’, it’s all multi-media arse-wipery which has little to do with how you actually do the job.

  For example:

  * Is the resource [seriously, we’re a resource] good with multimedia?

  Translation: Can she nick pictures off Faceache?

  * Is the resource aware of the issues surrounding journalism?

  Translation: Does she mind being despised?

  * Is the resource aware of how a journalist should behave ethically and professionally?

  Translation: Does she stand her round and share her Berocca?

  And that’s about it, along with the normal guff about whether you’ve hit your targets from the last review (drink less, earn more), and where you see yourself in five years’ time (please Lord, a book deal and a column). Oh, and it runs to about twenty pages. Shame there isn’t a similar thing for divorces, really, or marriages, come to that.

  Anyway it now sat between Bish and me on his cluttered desk in the Bunker, along with a smouldering Woodbine in his overflowing ashtray and twenty-years’ worth of newspaper cuttings. His most recent favourite’s from the Scum: ‘YOU CAN’T SLURRY LOVE’, about a pervert caught pleasuring himself in a muck-spreader.

  ‘Well, lass, how’s it been?’ he asked, flicking through the bundle of papers and ‘the resource’s’ attempts at writing a load of old bollo about multimedia buggery.

  I wittered something about wanting to do more writing
jobs.

  He shook his head at me. ‘No lass, not the bluddy job. At ’ome. What’s happening with that bluddy twat yer married?’

  Surprised he was asking, I stumbled through a brief explanation of how things were moving on, just the financial agreement to go; that I really wanted to keep the house but didn’t know how I’d afford it on one salary, and that it was a bit of a worry with redundancies in the air. Bish nodded and mmm-hmmed, trying to ignore his phone ringing. With a glare through his glass wall at the newsroom, he said: ‘Am I the only bugger answers the phones round here? Bluddy Kelvin used to, yer know, it was a chance to talk to The Reader. ’Ang on lass. Yes, what? Who? No, we don’t do pizzas. Piss off, caller.’

  He hung up, took a drag on his dog-end and said: ‘Look, I’ve talked to The Editor and we’ve agreed to recommend yer for a small pay rise. Won’t be a lot, but we want to help all we can. Me first wife were a right cow, and we were only married a year and a half. I know how it feels, lass. Anyhow, to get it past the board we’ve got to pretend you’re God’s gift to reporting, so leave this form with me, I’ll make up some shite and fill it in for yer. They’re a load o’claptrap any road.’

  Lost for words, I stammered some thanks. Bish waved a hand and told me to bugger off, not to tell anyone else or they’d all want some, and to send the next one in.

  Back at my desk, I realized I’d somehow managed to swing a pay increase in the middle of a recession. A whole extra peanut.

  But it made me think. If there was a review of how this divorce was going, what would it say?

  ‘Has the resource made peace with her spouse?’

  No.

  ‘Have both parties come to an amicable understanding?’

  No.

  ‘Has the resource let go of her marriage?’

  Not by any means.

  Well, that’s all a load of old bollo, too, if you ask me. I’d far rather it asked: