The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox

by Lilly Miles

  It was true, I had been too drunk. In fact I’d never been as drunk as that in my life. Seventy-four minutes? And no one else has ever had to put me in a cab home. I used to have to do that for Twatface. But now that he’s gone there’s no reason for me to stop drinking, no one in a worse state who makes me disgusted and stops my fun, no one to look after. There’s just me, and I’ve been spanking the booze. I must have got through two bottles that night, on no dinner and a couple of manky chicken wings. And all I’d achieved was to embarrass myself in front of a bunch of strangers and – the shame of it – be told by Twatface I was too drunk to talk. It was like the Queen telling someone they were too posh. The thought that I had behaved like him made me shudder.

  But, worse than that, I had upset a friend. If the past few months have taught me anything it is that the people I thought were acquaintances and colleagues, drinking partners or pals, are in fact some of the finest, strongest friends I’ve ever known or could have wished for. They stood by me in my darkest hour, cried with me, picked me up and helped me laugh again, and to each of them I owe a massive debt I hope they never need me to repay. They deserve more than I can ever give them, and telling Fifi, ‘Sorry’, after all she had done, was not enough to erase the dreadful thoughtlessness I had showed her.

  It’s fair enough to lean on your friends, fair enough to seek solace at the bottom of a glass, fair enough to ask a lot and rail at the world for a while, when your heart’s been broken and your life shattered. But there comes a point where you have to decide that it’s time to stand by yourself again, be responsible for your actions, and stop demanding that solace.

  So I choose to be better than Twatface. I choose not to wallow, I choose to learn and to stand up straight. I choose to put my friends before myself, I choose to try to be better than I am. And bugger it, I’ll paint the bedroom blue.

  DAY ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX

  YEA, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of divorce, I will fear no evil; for if there’s one thing I’m certain of it’s that the worst is past. The second thing, which I find just as comforting, is that I no longer have any arguments. With anybody. I can’t remember the last time someone annoyed me so much I raised my voice, the simple reason being that when Twatface left all the aggro in my life went with him.

  There is no longer a fight to get £20 towards the groceries; there are no tensions over a visit to one or other set of outlaws; there’s no rolling of eyes, crashing of pans or slamming of doors when someone blindly insists their view is right and yours is wrong. I remember once, soon after we moved into the house, that we were having an argument in the kitchen about something or other in which he resolutely stuck to his own pig-headed opinion and failed to listen to or consider mine. I felt like a fly battering itself against a window pane, so mindlessly frustrated at not being listened to that the only way I could see of getting him to pay attention to me for a second was to smash the ceramic bowl I was holding on to the concrete floor with all my strength. The shatter had not even died away when he declared I was ‘mad’, turned on his heel and walked off like he’d won the war.

  In one respect he had. If you’re compelled to smash the crockery in order to be heard you have already lost the battle, a fact I realized only while furiously picking up the bits of china, although at the time I was angrier still about the fact that he’d called me ‘mad’. It’s one of those words only ever used by men about women, and is just a way of dismissing indignation as a form of hysteria rather than something which might have a logical cause, i.e. the behaviour of the men in question. I used to say, ‘Don’t call me mad, call me angry,’ because it denigrated my opinion to that of some consumptive Victorian heroine in a swoon. He never did that, of course: he just thought I was mad.

  Smashing stuff was almost my only option – arguing with him was like attempting to nail fog to the wall. I would try logically to analyse the problem, and he would just insist black was white until I gave up trying to reason with him. The only alternative would have been for me to have ignored him completely and lived a totally separate life on my own terms except for the occasional conjugal, which is a situation I daresay he would have preferred immensely. One fact was constant: his insistent tones were all I could hear, even when he wasn’t there, and I felt drowned out, squashed, in a world where someone else kept changing the rules.

  But in the past few months there’s been not one row, not one cause for my pulse or voice to be raised. Even though I had that upset with Fifi, there was no argument – one party was offended, the other said sorry, and that was that. If my mum annoys me I just roll my eyes; if the boss is a bully I shrug it off. I get enraged at Twatface still, but it’s due to emails or legal letters which raise the blood pressure. I’m fine once I’ve punched the wall a couple of times. Although without someone to bounce off the house is frighteningly quiet and I end up having the radio on all the time, just for the company.

  In the quiet moments I get to sit and think. I can hear my own thoughts for the first time in years, and I’ve discovered that I’m not, naturally, as mad as he said I was. I’m pretty calm, largely sunny-natured, and prone to laugh at everything. Maybe it’s because there’s no one to shout at, or perhaps we just rubbed one another up the wrong way, but the thought of smashing a bowl to make a point would now never cross my mind. It seems, well – mad. I read something once about a baseball player, who said, ‘Watch the ball and do your thing,’ that life is short and you only get one swing at it, but we didn’t notice we’d dropped the ball. It’s difficult to believe that, while we were so busy locking horns with each other, we never realized the spiral we were in. Looking at my marriage from here is like considering a maelstrom, or a distant whirlwind – very interesting, but a good thing not to be in.

  The peace also gives me a sense of moral certainty. Not that I’m always right – Fifi taught me that – but that I know where I stand, where the edges and limits are, and what I can and can’t put up with. Nancy took me out for a drink on Monday for a moan about her own divorce. I sympathized and said I was sure that children must make the whole thing more complicated and awful, but she waved her wine glass at me and told me I was wrong.

  ‘Having the twins made the whole thing easier,’ she insisted. ‘We were arguing a lot, I thought maybe we could stick it out a bit longer but would probably break up eventually, and that it was better if it happened while the kids were too young to remember, rather than in five years’ time.’

  ‘Oh, well I always thought that I could get divorced because I didn’t have children. That, you know, they kind of compel you to stay together.’

  Nancy put her glass down and looked at me very seriously. ‘Don’t get me wrong; the twins are the best thing I’ve ever done. I’d never regret having them with him. But the love you have for your children is unconditional. They could do anything – murder someone, grow up and turn into paedophiles – and I’d always love them. But your love for your partner is completely conditional: it’s dependent on their good behaviour, and on them sticking to certain rules. As soon as I realized Knobhead couldn’t keep his side of the bargain, I let him go.’

  And that, I suppose, is one of the things Twatface taught me – I realized what my deal-breakers were, for the first time. I used to think I could forgive cheating if it was just the once, but when it happened it turned me inside out with a pain too consuming to overlook. There were some things so bad I would have once thought they would make me walk immediately, but instead I stayed, believing his excuses. Desperate to keep him happy, find a compromise, understand why he was doing what he did, I listened only to his voice and mine never got a look in. Occasionally it screamed in frustration, and a bowl got smashed.

  I heard someone say once that marriage is like a stick, and you each have to hold an end. Sometimes the stick is short and you’re close together, and other times it’s really long and you’re so far apart you can’t see each other any more; you just have to hope the other person’s still hol
ding their end of the stick. I am strong enough to go through life holding the stick on my own, but once it was clear Twatface had dropped his end and wandered off I didn’t see why I should. The deal was that it was us against the world. It was a condition I didn’t know I had, and realizing that felt like having a blindfold taken off, blinking like a hostage finally released from the cellar. If ‘us’ isn’t happening, then ‘me’ is what’s left, and that’s something I can make work.

  As a result I actually feel better for getting divorced; stronger somehow, like a diamond that’s been cut or a warrior who’s been blooded, but also much more like my old self. I am exactly the same, but imperceptibly better for the experience. Or at least, less inclined to put up with any crap.

  For example, after more than ten years as a reporter – having doors slammed in my face, being sworn at, chased by men waving sticks, and on one memorable occasion being shot at – I have reached the end of my patience with the general public.

  People, generally, are in my experience well-meaning and just doing their best in the only way they know how. But for some reason I can’t put my finger on, the population’s twat quotient seems to have rocketed of late.

  Bridget knocked on a woman’s door this week, asking her to talk to us about her ex. The woman said she’d think about it, and could Bridget come back later? Bridge duly returned that evening and knocked on the door a second time. It opened and the woman’s boyfriend ran through it, picked Bridget up by the throat, and pinned her to the bonnet of her own car while screaming abuse.

  Bridget is busty and blonde. She’s been walking around with a bruised throat all week, coughing. The woman’s boyfriend told the police, inexplicably, that he’d had no idea Bridget was a girl, and no further action was taken because the woman said Bridget had been harassing her. If the victim had been anyone other than a journalist the boyfriend would have been charged with assault. How can it be harassment when they invited Bridget back?

  Bridget and I were just complaining about this injustice in the pub when Tania Banks wandered in and joined us. Now, she’s far from my best friend, for reasons already explained, but the work pub is neutral ground. She’d just come back from a job which left her so shaken she could barely hold a gin and tonic. The story she told even made me feel sorry for her.

  She was on a door-knock in darkest Wiltshire. It was dark, and she was trying to find a farm which was the family home of a charity worker blown to pieces in Afghanistan. She eventually found a gateway with the right name on it, and a rutted track, but her car – like all reporters’ vehicles a cheap and nondescript three-door thing – got stuck in the mud.

  Abandoning it, she grabbed her bag and picked her way over the ruts, repeatedly turning her cankles in the pitch darkness as she made her way towards the lights of the farmhouse. Banks knocked on the door, shivering in the cold and the quietness of the countryside.

  Her hands were still shaking as she told us: ‘The door opened, and it was a young guy, the brother or something. Of course I was as nice as could be, said how terribly sorry I was to bother them at such a difficult time, but would they like to pay tribute to him? He said he would ask his family, and wandered off. After a few minutes the dad appeared and waved me inside.

  ‘He took me through the kitchen into the back parlour. I thought it was a bit odd, because he was only wearing a dressing gown, and had this mad hair all standing up on his head, and he made a point of closing the door and then putting a chair in front of it. So I did my spiel again, and he just stared at me. Then he started ranting and raving, spitting about how he was going to keep me there because I was a journalist, and he was going to trap me like I entrapped others. I tried to calm him down, but it didn’t work, so then I told him he couldn’t keep me there, it was kidnap, and asking a question isn’t entrapment, and if he didn’t want to play that was fine, I’d leave and not bother him any more.’

  Banks took a gulp of gin, a shaky breath, then carried on. ‘He opened the door and walked out, but before I could follow him he closed it behind him and locked it. I banged on it, then tried to call the office, but it was real bandit country down there, so no signal. I was thinking, “Poot, I’m in real trouble here.” It was all quiet, then this guy came back, this time with a shotgun. He started waving it around, saying he was going to shoot me like his boy was shot, and I was bricking it. I was in the middle of nowhere, no photographer with me, and I was about to get flipping shot!’

  ‘What did you do?’ asked Bridget, gripped. I was studying the spirits shelf and pretending to ignore the whole thing, lest I lose my carefully-cultivated air of disdain for Banks and all her ilk, who pretend that not swearing like the rest of us makes them nicer people. People who say ‘Poot,’ are just pretending to be nice, and that’s the worst kind of nice to be.

  ‘I was scared, and then I got angry. I thought, “How dare he treat me like this?” So I told him he was completely out of order, and that he had to let me go immediately, and asked him if he had a licence for his gun. And when he carried on shouting, I lost it. I tried to shove him out of the way of the door, I shouted for his family to come and help, which of course they didn’t, and then I just started hitting him over the head with my notebook.’

  At this point I spluttered into my Pinot, and she glared at me for a second before carrying on.

  ‘After a bit he got out of the way, and I managed to unlock the door and get out. I went back through the kitchen, and there was his entire family, sat around the table having a cup of tea, and listening to the whole thing as calm as you please. They hadn’t lifted a finger while he was going mental with a gun. Honestly, it defies belief,’ said Banks, shaking her head.

  ‘Christ, lucky escape!’ said Bridge in her Aussie drawl. ‘What’s wrong with people?’

  The same thought crossed my mind next day as I was driving across town on a doorstep of my own. Waiting behind an old Nissan on a roundabout, I wondered why the driver wouldn’t pull out. I honked the horn once, and when the Nissan still didn’t move backed up and went around it. As I passed the car, I looked in the window and saw the driver was a grey-haired old lady of seventy or more, and she flipped me her arthritic middle finger with a sneer and something I lip-read as a ‘Fuck you!’

  ‘Jeez,’ I thought, completely unsettled. ‘That’s someone’s granny!’

  When I got to the address it was a large suburban four-bedroomed house in a Surrey suburb. The guy I was looking for was the former husband of a woman who was shagging a married television celebrity, and while she was divorced we still wanted to see if her ex – as they often do in these cases – had an opinion about it. ‘She’s a dreadful slag and did the same to me’, is always what you hope they will say, or at least a confirmation that yes, the ex was aware the famous so-and-so was her new boyfriend so we could run it.

  Anyway, I walked up the front path through the neat garden, past the tidy flower beds, and knocked on the door, feeling a little deflated. It was all nice and middle class, and the middle classes never talk to the papers. They’re too worried what people might think. The posh and the poor do because they just think it’s funny. Anyway, the door opened and stood there was a little girl, no older than eight or nine. ‘Damn,’ I thought. ‘He’s got the kids. Well, can’t have her hearing this.’

  Out loud, I said: ‘Is your daddy in?’ She nodded and walked off to the back of the house to get him.

  A nice-looking, sensible chap in a clean shirt and jeans came to the door with an enquiring smile. I looked past him to make sure the little girl was nowhere to be seen and couldn’t hear me. Quite reasonably and quietly, I told him why I was there, and politely asked if it was something he might be able, even off the record, to confirm or add to in some way.

  He exploded in rage. ‘How dare you come to my house and terrify my children? How dare you tell them this sort of thing about their mother? Is this how you get your kicks, you sick, disgusting freak? I’d be ashamed to show my face in your shoes, what an appalling,
disgraceful human being you are! Is your mother proud? Is she? IS SHE?’

  It was all shouted at the top of his voice, carrying around the house and up and down the street, and with a sneer writ large across his formerly-reasonable face as I backed away before his fury.

  Normally I would have apologized and legged it before a piece of wood or a sawn-off made an appearance, while ringing the desk to tell them this one was a no. But something in me snapped and had, finally, had enough. Twatface, Banks, the nasty granny; I was fed up of the world being mean to me when it didn’t have to be. A reporter’s never going to get a story by bollocking someone, but I was not going to take it any more.

  ‘Don’t you DARE speak to me like that!’ I said, wagging a finger in his face like I was my own mother. ‘Look, I appreciate that having a reporter knock on your door can come as a surprise, but I have been nothing but polite to you, and there is absolutely no reason for you to be so appallingly rude! For your information I made every effort to ensure that your daughter did not hear what I had to say, but your bellowing has made sure that she and most of your neighbours now know about it in great detail. So if anybody’s acted like a rude idiot here, it’s you. Well done, and goodbye.’

  And with that I turned on my heel and walked back up his path in high dudgeon. I was still shaking with anger when I was back in the car, and my brain had barely stopped humming with the phrase, ‘What a twat!’ on a loop when I pulled up, twenty minutes later, outside the woman’s parents’ house.

  Now, they were much posher: gates, gravel, two Mercedes on the driveway. Feeling extremely negative about the whole pointless story, I knocked on the door and explained in a grumpy tone to the snooty-looking gent who answered that we were doing a story about his daughter.

  He sniffed, looked down his nose and said to me: ‘One does not sell one’s own family down the river for tuppence.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, turning away. ‘Sorry to bother you.’