The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox

by Lilly Miles

  He called out to my retreating back: ‘Of course, it would entirely depend on how much you were prepared to pay.’

  I turned back, smiled at him, and said: ‘Oh, I think we can come to some agreement.’ Then he invited me in for a cup of tea and a chat.

  It was the kind of story Twatface would have loved to hear. And when I got back home that night, to a quiet, chilly house where no one had lit a fire, put any dinner on, or noticed the milk had turned to cheese, I heaved a big sigh that it would have to wait until I saw the girls in the bar or at the office, by which time most of it would probably have slipped my mind.

  Thinking about it to myself just isn’t the same; I’d far rather say it out loud and chew the fat with someone. But out here in the desert of singledom, the purgatory of the separated-and-yet-to-get-divorced, there’s only one person to speak to now, and it’s me. On the plus side I don’t tell myself I’m mad – well, not often – and occasionally I give myself a pat on the head when my friends or my employers forget to.

  Along with my voice, for the first time I have a sense of solid ground underneath my feet. I’ve got my balance back, and can see roughly what direction I’m going in. I know that my cup’s going to run over with twats before I’m finished, but the test is not how many of them there are – just how I deal with them.

  So long as you follow what you think is right, and steer clear of what you know is wrong – and don’t let anyone mess with your swing.

  DAY ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FIVE

  BENEATH the fun of being single again there lurks a darkness which I have no idea how to face: a complete lack of self-worth.

  Almost every other task before me seems possible to overcome, apart from that. According to the crazy bankers I can take on a mortgage nearly six times my salary. I can get a raise for not being any better at my job than I was last year. I can chop logs for the fire, pay the bills, have my life shattered by a wrecking ball and somehow put the pieces together again. But as Humpty Dumpty and countless tea mugs will bear witness, while you can glue the pieces back where they used to be as neatly and nicely as you please, nothing will ever fix the fact that it was broken in the first place. The cracks remain.

  The walk from bathroom to bedroom is all of ten feet, but I can’t stand to do it naked. I used to; I never had a problem with my figure, or what others thought of it. I was confident in myself and the love Twatface had for me. But now after my shower I get dressed every morning in the bathroom, where there is only a tiny mirror over the sink, rather than walk back to the bedroom where there’s a full-length one. I simply can’t stand to look at my own body; it’s the same as it always was, a few pounds lighter, even, but it disgusts me because I gaze at it wondering what Twatface found so wrong that another woman was better.

  The one time I went to bed with someone else I had to have the lights off and more vodka in my bloodstream than actual blood, and still found it terrifying. In quiet moments memories return of how often Twatface turned me down, how little he seemed to fancy me. It may have had more to do with him but I would be less than human – and less than a female, sadly – if I didn’t wonder whether it was all somehow my fault.

  I remember making a special effort at one point, when it seemed like we hadn’t had sex in forever. We’d been out shopping, and I’d got some new underwear he’d helped pick. That night, I dolled myself up and waited, reclining on the covers, for him to join me. When he wandered to bed an hour later he didn’t even look my way before getting into bed and turning his back. I lay in the dark feeling tawdry, wondering what I’d done, and eventually asked him quietly if there was something . . . wrong . . . with me. Y’know, compared to other girls. Something he didn’t like, maybe? He sighed, said no, he was just tired, gave me a little squeeze and rolled back over. Maybe he was exhausted, but now I’m just not sure.

  Then there is the distant prospect of meeting someone who might find me attractive enough to have sex with, and which might not involve being drunk and scared. How do I take my clothes off in front of him? Will I be able to not obsessively check his phone or emails? What if the next guy says ‘I’d never do that to you,’ and all I can hear is Twatface saying the same words? The worry alone would send any man screaming from my arms. And even though I changed the locks, even though the last time I was scared was months ago, even though a bit of me still believes what he said and that it was all my fault, what happens when I am behind closed doors with a man? Can I put myself at someone’s mercy again?

  And don’t get me started on fat women. My eyes narrow at each one I see; this week I even caught myself hissing at one on the Tube, and then had to give myself a strong talking-to for being so unreasonable.

  I was talking to a divorcee this week for a story about their parent being left to starve in hospital. My normal method of interviewing is to find something in common with the person I’m talking to, and tell them I’ve had a similar experience. It’s not lying, there is usually something I can relate to, and it helps the interviewee to loosen up.

  The divorcee’s marriage was not linked to the story, but she mentioned it in passing. It turned out she’d been cheated on too, for years. Anyway, the interview ended with me virtually in tears on this poor woman’s shoulder, and her patting me on the back, looking at me sadly and saying: ‘You’re right to be sad, you know.’

  ‘What?’ I sniffed. ‘I thought you would tell me everything would be better one day.’

  She shook her head and sighed. ‘You will never trust anyone completely again. You can learn to love again, and of course you will, pretty thing like you, but next time you will always hold a little bit of yourself back; it’s only natural. Your heart will be harder, next time.’

  I mentioned this to one of the monkeys, Jock Beckett, while we were sitting outside the house of a Tory MP’s mistress, waiting for the shagger to turn up so we could get a snatch pic in the street.

  ‘Monkeys’ is a highly derogatory term used by reporters to describe photographers, a reference to their habit of gathering in groups, skanking fags off each another and gibbering about the length of their lenses – while avoiding soap and anyone who uses long words. In return they call us ‘blunts’, which is a dig at the state of our pencils, and rhyming slang for what they really think of us. Both terms are intended to be unkind; but I didn’t realize that when I first got to Fleet Street, and by the time it had been explained to me that I shouldn’t be using it, and it wasn’t funny, the word ‘monkeys’ had stuck in my brain.

  In the newsroom there is rivalry and mutual distrust between words and pictures, but down here at street level we are bound together by shared experiences, comradeship and the threat of mutual destruction. I’ve crossed continents with snappers, braved elephant charges and near-starvation, interrogation, snipers, dysenteric hangovers and rotting corpses – and as a result monkeys are among my best friends.

  You can spend three weeks with one, twenty-four hours a day, and not see him again for a year, but get so close on an intense but very shallow level, that you feel you know him better than his wife. If the two of you don’t get along, or one of you is trying to grandstand and stitch the other up, you’ll have a hell of a time. When the desk are on the phone screaming, when his missus wants to know where he is and neither of you are sober enough to get home, you need a wingman, not a colleague. You always cover each other’s backs: monkey and blunt together against the world, that’s the rule. If the snappers like you then you’re all right; if they take against you your days are numbered.

  Some snappers – the smellier ones – I would cross the road to avoid, but others I’ve shared some scrapes with are dear to me, like grown-up hairy children, and they don’t seem to mind too much when I call them monkeys. There’s Nick the Wop, a don among snappers, who can swear in almost every language on earth; Ladders, who’s so tiny he carries a set of steps everywhere; Dan the Van, who spends long days trapped in the back of a white transit with blacked-out windows, a bottle to piss in and a ziplo
ck bag to crap in; Mike the Bike, who risks life and limb to do high-speed pursuits on his Kawasaki; and then there’s Jock.

  Whenever he sees me he says, ‘Allrae, wee blunty?’ and ruffles my hair like a mad Glaswegian uncle. When everything blew up with Twatface he offered to, ‘Sor’i’oo’fer ye,’ which if I had understood what he was saying I might have taken him up on. So with hours to kill sitting in a car on a doorstep, I filled him in on the news that from now on I was apparently going to be a hard-hearted nut to crack.

  ‘. . . and this woman said that I’d never fall in love again, not properly, I’d always keep a bit back. Isn’t that sad? Isn’t the whole point of love supposed to be that you jump in with both feet?’ I asked him as we sipped nuclear-hot tea from polystyrene cups in my car.

  ‘Ah dinnae, lass,’ he said, wolfing down his third bacon sandwich of the day and dropping bits of fat in the passenger footwell as he surfed through the street’s WiFi networks looking for some internet to steal. ‘Ha de ye spell “Marylebone”?’

  I sighed, reminding myself that emotions were trickier for monkeys to understand than apostrophes. Shoving my tea on the dashboard to cool down, I grabbed Jock’s laptop off him to do the bit of every photographer’s job they hate the most – spelling – and thought, ‘Well, at least he’s not the Minicab Rapist.’

  The Minicab Rapist is the other kind of monkey. There’s nothing about him you can really put a finger on, except all the female reporters agree that if they were waiting for a cab and he came along just as one pulled up, he has the sort of aura which would make them say, ‘I’ll get the next one, ta. No, really. You have this one. I’m going in completely the opposite direction.’ He never, under any circumstances, gets invited to sit in my car, no matter how cold the doorstep is. He just has this . . . quality.

  The Minicab Rapist has a long black coat and, aside from his normal bag of cameras and lenses, doesn’t go anywhere without what I think of as his rape kit – a separate rucksack into which he occasionally delves to bring out odd items: like handcuffs and duct tape and a camera using old-fashioned film which he will tell you with a leer he develops at home in his ‘personal dark- room’. If there isn’t some Rohypnol, a pair of latex gloves and a douche in there, too, then I’m a banana.

  I try to avoid jobs with him, but I got lumbered earlier this week on a simple inquest. Thankfully it was a pack job, so there were five or six reporters and snappers lurking outside the court waiting for a family statement. I was talking to a friend from another rag about her boy troubles, and she was saying how she wasn’t sure what to do about some guy. Uncomfortably aware that the Minicab Rapist was stood next to us, grinning knowingly and listening to every word, I told her that life was short and that if she liked the guy she should just grab the chance. Then she turned to the Minicab Rapist, and pointedly asked him if our conversation was bothering him.

  He said: ‘Oh no, I find it fascinating. And I completely agree. I just grab women whenever the opportunity arises.’

  He leered and took a drag on his cigarette while my friend and I stared at him, and then each other, shivering. ‘Maybe he’s actually a sweet bloke, just mildly autistic or something,’ I said quietly, after we’d wandered away.

  ‘Hmm, or maybe he’s got Maddie McCann in his freezer,’ she replied.

  But while the reporters all sense a certain darkness about the man, he must have some kind of charm, because back in the office the sweet-natured, slinkily-fragrant females of the magazine department have fallen under his spell. The Minicab Rapist’s main claim to fame is that he took some of the first pictures of Kate Moss back in the day, and reckons he slept with her, too. This old glory so obsesses him that every girl he goes out with slowly morphs under his influence into a version of Kate in her heroin-chic phase.

  Now the mag girls are all shapes and sizes and colours of hair. On most newspapers they’re super-sleek and glossy, obsessed with the latest Lulu Guinness handbag or Westwood frock, nicking designer togs out of the fashion cupboard and trying out a different celebrity fad diet every week. They spend more on make-up than I do on council tax, and their combined perfumes are strong enough to gas the Kurds.

  But at my paper they have fallen victim, one at a time, to the attentions of the Minicab Rapist. They’ve gone down like skittles. One by one, they’ve got thinner and thinner. All of them, blonde, brunette or redhead, have grown their hair long, dyed it mousey brown and then stopped washing it. If you walk past their desks you can note the wave of waifs, with his oldest conquests looking like they’ve just walked out of a Serbian prison camp and his more recent ones kitted out in whatever’s in Topshop and smoking like chimneys. It is possible to tell how far through the department he has moved, simply by working out which one looks most like Kate in about 1990.

  I was in the ladies’ loo on Wednesday when I heard sobbing from the next cubicle. Presuming it was the normal existential angst of working in a newsroom, I ignored it, washed my hands and was about to leave when the sobber unlocked the door, sniffing. It was Linzi or Kelli or Salli, one of the glossy girls, anyway, so I know her name definitely ended with an ‘i’. Possibly with a heart drawn over it instead of a dot. I caught her eye in the mirror over the sink and niceness got the better of me.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said, handing her a tissue from the dispenser next to the hand-dryer.

  She shook her head and blew her nose. ‘Oh, it’s Mikey,’ she said, sighing.

  It took me a moment to realize who she was talking about, and I nearly burst out with, ‘Oh, you mean the Minicab Rapist?’ but I stopped myself just in time. Rape kits were probably not what she needed to hear about just then.

  ‘He’s dumped me and said he’s going out with Vicki,’ she said, starting to wail again.

  I put an uncertain arm around her bony shoulders, having a quick look for needle-marks while I did so. ‘There, there, it’s all right, you’re better off without him,’ I said fruitlessly, while she subsided into sniffles. ‘Hasn’t he got a bit of a track record with most of the girls on your desk?’

  She nodded and sniffed. I battled the urge to tell her to eat something substantial. Then she sighed. ‘There’s just something about him, though. He’s impossible to resist. He used to pick my clothes, and order my dinner in restaurants. He really seemed like he cared – he said it was because he knew what I looked best in, and that salads were better for me.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, raising my eyebrows.

  She went on: ‘I asked him about the other girls, I mean I couldn’t not. I tried to make a joke of it, and said, “How do you do it?” and he just looked at me like this . . .’ She dropped her head like Princess Di on Panorama and looked up at me through her eyelashes. ‘. . . and he said, “It’s the baby blues, honey. The baby blues get them every time.” Oh God, he has such lovely eyes.’

  I stood there, a picture of confusion as she cried again. This was entirely beyond my sphere of understanding. Turning round and walking away would have been rude, but I had no idea what to say.

  ‘Well,’ I started, wondering where the hell I was going with this. ‘It’s kind of unusual for men to tell you what to wear. Or eat. And, you know, you seem bright enough to know that stuff for yourself.’

  I thought a bit while she blew her nose. There had to be something I could say that would perk her up a bit, and actually register.

  ‘Look, you’ve got a job on a national newspaper. You can’t do that if you’re an idiot,’ I said, in the face of all the evidence. ‘He’s just a rat who shags his way round the office, and didn’t love you as much as he loved himself. I shouldn’t think he’ll be with Nicki for long.’

  ‘Vicki,’ she said through the snot.

  ‘Vicki, then. The only thing to regret is that you didn’t dump him first,’ I said, before finally and desperately calling on Bridget Jones’s Diary for inspiration. ‘What you need is to find a bloke who likes you just the way you are.’

  Big mistake. With a wail, she ran back into a
cubicle and locked the door. ‘Note to self: do not channel world’s most annoying singleton,’ I thought, leaving her to it.

  When I got back home that night, double-locking and bolting the door behind me like I do every evening, I dumped my bag at the foot of the stairs with a big sigh and glanced around. The house looked as beaten down and bodged up as I did – paint roughly slapped on here and there over crumbling plaster, a restoration project that needed a lot of love and attention. I walked around, idly picking at the remaining paper and loose plug sockets. You couldn’t get Kate Moss to cross the threshold. And I thought, ‘God, what a wreck. Who’d take this on?’

  Somehow, as my thoughts turned, I realized that when we’d bought it a year before the end, my marriage had been in just the same state as the house: spruced up for public viewing, with ornaments and furniture put in front of the cracks, and problems no one wanted to see, held up by hope more than anything else. Once Fatty had stamped her way into our world the tremors shook all the shit out, including Twatface. I’m left in a life where the flaws are now obvious, and fixing them is the biggest project I’ve ever had. The house is 150 years old and still standing, so I suppose the structure must be sound. It’s just been a bit unloved.

  I’ve started attacking the bedrooms, tearing out the old built-in cupboards, stripping the nasty Anaglypta and discovering the botched plaster underneath. I’ve learned how to put a new skim of plaster on a wall, paint a ceiling without falling backwards off a stepladder, and put up coving. But in a sense these new skills are hollow compared to what I cannot do: I cannot replace the fuse box or re-fit the bathroom, any more than I could save my marriage, create self-esteem out of nothing or feel more attractive than Fatty.

  Then I realized that my self-confidence was probably at an even lower ebb than that of Linzi/Kelli/Salli, who were all so busy subjugating themselves to someone else’s whims they’d forgotten who they were to start with. A bit like I did, for a while. Only now I feel like the princess who turned into a frog, or a swan who somehow became an ugly duckling and is scared of her own reflection. At least Linzi, Kelli and Salli all ended up looking a bit like a supermodel.