The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox

by Lilly Miles

  Maybe we’re all just children. Maybe we need to try harder to be grown-ups. Or maybe it’s just a reaction, the same as at a country show, to being surrounded by so much shit that sometimes the only thing you can do is sort it into varieties, grade it by quality, texture and odour, and award points in order to get some kind of handle on things.

  Much like writing a secret diary about one’s divorce. Somehow all of this makes me feel a little calmer, and easier in my mind with the fact the world’s been turned upside down – which isn’t something I ought to feel calm about, but that’s nevertheless what I’m striving for.

  God knows when I’ll be able to declare it done with, though. It feels like I’ve been getting divorced for years when in fact it’s just over five months. I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up one day and find a decade had passed, with no change to anything beyond my becoming an old woman. I long ago stopped responding to texts and emails from Twatface, finding it simply wound me up and made me wonder why he was doing this, that or the other. When I didn’t hear from him I was fine; but after a day where we’d had contact I would spend the night tossing and turning, thoughts spinning round my brain like demented bats in a belfry all hunting the same elusive fly, until I fell asleep exhausted as dawn broke.

  With only a few hours’ light sleep every night, week after week, it felt like my mind was splintering apart. I could get through to the weekend if just one or two other things went wrong, but if there were three or four I’d be a tearful, depressive heap by Thursday afternoon and just climb under the duvet and stay there. The boss shouting; a difficult phone call or email from Twatface; a long drive on a pointless job; no money and a bill coming in – it’s normal, everyday stuff we all have to deal with at times. But with the weight of separation already on my back this weak, flimsy edifice of mine would shatter under the addition of just one too many extra problems.

  We’re paying lawyers, I reasoned, so we should get our money’s worth and let them do the nasty haggling that just causes upset. And since then I’ve slept a little easier and been able to devote my attention to work and the house. Except I’m starting to realize that the lawyers don’t seem to be getting very far, a fact which seems to have also finally penetrated Twatface’s brain.

  I had this email last night from Princess Flashy Knickers:

 
  To: Foxy

  Ha ha. Twatface has been in touch to find out if you’re ill/had a bereavement/are for some other reason ignoring his texts and emails other than just not wanting contact. I told him you’re fine.>

  Now, on the one hand this makes me want to bang my head on the nearest wall and scream, ‘Leave me alooooooone!’ And on the other, I feel like punching the air and doing a little dance and singing, ‘He’s noticed I’m ignoring him! Victory! I win!’

  Then the fear kicked in – What did it mean? Why did he email Princess and not me? Is he worried I’m ill? Maybe he wants to win me back? Does he miss me? What’s he up to? Has his lawyer made him write it?

  I’ve been worrying for a while that the way things are going with this divorce, the recession will be over before it gets settled. That means the house valuations and everything else could be defunct, and if the price of the house goes up I can’t get a mortgage and I’ll lose it. I am absolutely, 100 per cent and 360 degrees, not going to lose my house, even if it is a hovel. It’s MY hovel, it was my inheritance that bought it, my work that’s making it better to live in, and it’s the principle of the damn thing. I simply will not give in and let go of the house, any more than I’d let Banks have my byline.

  Keeping myself occupied while the lawyers enjoy their expensive logjam is not getting me anywhere. It’s frustrating because no one seems to do things quite as quickly and to the point as journalists. We can beat the police, we can track an entire family’s movements and dates of birth, fashion a four-word headline to encapsulate a thousand-word story, and in my case we can apparently get married and divorced in the space of a very short time indeed. Everyone else clocks off at 5 p.m. and does things in a far more roundabout way. Journos go straight for the jugular, no messing.

  There are times when nothing happens in every walk and wail of life. When it happens on a newspaper the bone-deep paranoia and infighting with which you’re surrounded every day leads you to worry that you’ll lose your job, that life depends on finding a story and climbing over the twitching corpses of as many people as possible to get to it first. You hit peaks of nailing story after story, and then slide into troughs where nothing works and everything gets spiked and all the doors are slammed in your face. The trick is realizing when you’ve bottomed out, and then pulling yourself back up by your bootstraps. I need to find a way to apply the same do-or-die outlook to my divorce – I can’t ignore it, hope it sorts itself out or, perish the thought, let the other guy win.

  Maybe divorce – and life, come to that – is a bit like a fingerprint. Full of ups and downs and whirly bits, but each one is completely individual. There aren’t any rules about what there should or shouldn’t be, and it’s daft to rate yours against someone else’s. All you can do is navigate the peaks and troughs the best you can. And all I really know is this job. I’m not sure whether I’m a round peg in a round hole or if it somehow shaped me, but I know how to write, how to persuade someone to do what I want, and how to beat the opposition when I have to.

  All I want is my house, and my life, and to say ‘I wiiiiiiiiiiin!’ as loud as I possibly can – even if it is the most pointless, painful victory in the world.

  Nope. There’s no way round it. If I’m going to get what I want, I’m going to have to talk to that twat.

  DAY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SIX

  THEY say that worry makes you sick; but seeing as it also makes you thin, who really cares?

  The real problem is not feeling ill, or losing weight, but everything else which follows along behind the worry, like some kind of unpleasant medieval entourage of maladies. The teeth which ache all the time from unconscious grinding, the infected bits of skin down the side of your fingernails where you’ve been gnawing at them, a constant sense of dissatisfaction and, above all else, the 2 a.m. cold splinter of fear which wakes you up with a gasp and the belief that you are absolutely, totally and utterly screwed.

  With me the fear is mainly money. It never used to be – I’m not one of those who cares how much I have or how much everyone else has. So long as there’s enough to pay the bills and buy a new pair of shoes when I fancy, then all is right with my world. But having never bothered with more than a mild concern about not spending more than I earn, it is now the central preoccupation of my entire life. Faced for the first time with one salary, one enormous mortgage and a house which would have been turned down for a role in The Money Pit over budgetary constraints, my days are now a round of own-brand baked beans, trying to make a tenner last till Friday and pressing my nose sadly against the window of the shoe shop.

  I count, constantly. All day and all night, over and over again in my head. ‘That’s £32 for the leccy, and £26 for the gas. Round it up and let’s call it sixty, then I’ve got to put some petrol in the car, that’ll be £40, and I ought to try and put something aside for the insurance next month, say another fifty, and the mortgage is £980, let’s call it a grand, so that leaves me with . . . right. Well, if I eat a big lunch at work I won’t eat when I get home, maybe I could manage the £25 for those blue shoes, but I promised Princess I’d go to the cinema with her Tuesday, that’s another £15. Ooh, look! I’ve picked up a pub receipt from the floor, that’s an extra tenner, lovely.’

  They say that money makes the world go around, but it makes mine grind to a complete stop. What I can and can’t afford, where I can and can’t go; it defines me now, in a snide, niggly, cheap little way. I have developed a hatred for money; it has almost as much influence over my happiness and well-being as the divorce, with the added issue there’s no end in sight to the problems it causes me.
It squats like a toad in the middle of my life, too fat to get around and too oily to climb over.

  My first job on a local paper earned me the princely sum of £7,000 a year, and it felt like I’d won the lottery. Eighteen and still living at home, I blew every penny on awful shoes, crushed velvet leggings and purple nail polish, while my friends were off at university getting used to Pot Noodles. As the years passed and my salary crawled its way to the unimpressive plateau of being a Fleet Street hack the figures increased, but then so did the rent and the sheer number of shoes. I’ve never again had so much money as I did when I was on £7,000 a year, back in the days when I never worried about a thing.

  After I fell in love it seemed I had even less to worry about. Twatface earned less than me at first, but I didn’t mind in the least if there was just one present at Christmas or I didn’t get flowers like my friends did. I was too independent to be comfortable with someone spending money on me, anyway. We had each other, and that was all I wanted.

  As the years went by his salary overtook mine, but we still took it in turns to buy dinner and split everything half and half. Occasionally he’d be struck with insane generosity and buy me a present. I was thrilled with the gifts not because of their value but because he rarely bought any, and that was what made them special. Meanwhile I did the normal girly thing of buying him clothes and shoes and books and toys whenever I’d been to the shops on my lunch break, and he could expect a dozen Christmas presents.

  He always said he was broke, and his bank account statements proved it wasn’t a lie. Several times he asked me to help him get his finances straight, and I’d tell him he should try limiting himself to £50 and making it last the week, taking the Tube rather than cabs – and he’d listen and smile and nod, and not change a thing.

  I never understood how people could go to war over money, argue, kill, move heaven and earth just to get a bit more. I was always of the opinion that money can’t make you happy, but debt can make you miserable. At first Twatface made me feel like a millionaire, with more love than sense and the feeling that the world was ours for the taking. In fact it was all hokum, and we were living on borrowed time, the heart’s version of a Ponzi fraud: dreams, built on lies constructed on a wish, in which you repeatedly invest until they suddenly collapse and expose all the loans you took out on the never-never.

  Now it seems like there’s a mortgage on me as well as the house, a huge pit of emotionally negative equity which, if I’m terribly lucky and slave and cry and work for years, I might just about manage to claw my way through so I can be back at zero, and start again in a whole new pyramid scheme of pain and misery with someone else. What a wonderful thought.

  Twatface, as with so many other things, was the opposite to me: life was all about money, and everyone always had more than him. He never wanted to spend, queried each bill, and niggled about everything; he was always tight about ‘our’ spending, but when it came to ‘his’ money he was carefree, spendthrift and never saved a penny. After we married I scrimped and hoarded everything I could, and that’s how we bought our place. We still split everything down the middle, although it was beginning to irk me that I was earning a third of the household income and paying half the costs. Before I realized ‘we’ had problems, we started to argue about money.

  I’d do the weekly shopping and he’d stamp and shout about being asked for a contribution and say he was broke. He started to hide his bank statements. When I found them, ferreted away at the back of the bureau, they showed trips to ATMs three or four times in one night, getting out £100 a time. ‘How the hell do you spend £300 on a night in the pub?’ I’d ask, and he would yell at me for being ‘controlling’.

  Just as we split he had got that huge inheritance of his own, which we had earmarked for renovations and a baby. At the time I thought that if we had a child he might cut down the nights out, and we could have a joint account, so I could save some of our money. I roll my eyes now that I was ever that stupid.

  These days, extreme financial anxiety has replaced a husband as my regular bedfellow. Every night after I climb under the duvet there is a moment of dread as I stare at the bedroom ceiling, which needs replacing, listen to the house creak itself to sleep, and think about how much money I owe and what I’d do if I lost my job. When Twatface and I took on the house it was with the cushion of two salaries and the knowledge that one of us could support the other if something went wrong. We could always go on holiday, and one day we knew he’d look after me while I raised the children and maybe wrote a book or something.

  And that of course was just the moment when all that safety – all the security of a partner and marriage and a future – flapped its wings and flew south for the winter. There is now no cushion, no backing, and absolutely no plan, just a tightrope and a horribly long fall on to spiky bits if it all goes wrong. No one will support me, and my independent spirit is terrified to find what being on your own really means. Every night I try to think about the size of the problem, and every night I realize it’s so big I give up, switch off the light and grind my teeth fitfully till morning.

  And if, at the same time, every story you touch turns to dust, and nothing you work on goes anywhere near the paper, and Bish comes up behind you, pats you on the shoulder sympathetically and says, ‘Yer poor, storyless fook,’ in a pitying tone, it really doesn’t do much for your state of mind. All I could do was sit at my desk, squeezing pus from the side of my finger and noting the white flecks in the nail, which meant that yet again I was not eating properly.

  In-between trying to rustle up something which might get my name in the paper and save my job for another week, there’s the never-ending background worry of divorce. The legal letters have slowed from a trickle to the occasional, unhappy drip, with no movement forwards, backwards or even sideways. Last week Maurice felt ‘compelled to mention the matter of costs’ which, he reminded me with a giggle, were ‘continuing to rise’; but he didn’t say a figure, and I was too depressed to ask.

  So instead the letters limped on, Twatface demanding money off me and me demanding money off him, both of us spending and achieving nothing except grey hairs. It had been months since I had spoken to him, but the time had come to bite the bullet. I realized that if I wanted the house, and I did – it’s the last bit of that dream I had which I’m absolutely not going to give up – I was going to have to fight him for it.

  So one morning after the post had brought another desultory ‘no change’ letter from Maurice, I seized the twat by the horns and rang the person who, for the moment at least, goes by the name of husband.

  ‘Hello, you!’ he said in tones of great excitement. ‘How are you? I haven’t heard from you in ages!’

  Taking a moment to swallow the bile which rises every time I hear his voice, and wonder quietly to myself how he can treat an estranged wife who hates his guts as if she’s some long-lost pal ringing to see if he fancies a pint, I bit back the angry retort it was choking me not to utter and instead said in polite, clipped tones: ‘Fine, thanks. And you?’

  ‘Oh, you know, work’s a bit shit. The boss is being pretty horrible at the moment, but then he is a lunatic. So what’s going on with you? How’s your mum?’

  I rolled my eyes. This was going to be a ridiculous conversation.

  ‘Never you mind. What’s going on with the lawyers? Maurice says he can’t get any answer out of yours. Don’t you want to get divorced and lumber off into the sunset with Fatty?’

  ‘MY lawyer won’t talk?’ he burst out. ‘She keeps telling me that YOURS won’t answer letters, and frankly it’s getting ridiculous. Honestly, you can’t hold this up as much as you might try to, I can’t afford to keep hanging around like this, you know . . .’ He ranted on for a bit while I gnawed the inside of my face off in order not to scream at him.

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself to be polite. ‘Look, I’ve told Maurice to pull his finger out. Your high-priced ice queen is spinning you a line. And even if they’re both
being a bit rubbish, all that’s happening is our bills are going up.’

  ‘Yes, well, I suppose so,’ he grumbled. ‘I still think you’re trying to stall it, though.’

  ‘Oh, stop being such a twat! Why the hell would I do that?’

  ‘Well, you don’t talk to me any more, or email, and if you did we could have sorted it all out.’

  ‘No, all that would have happened is we would have shouted at each other and got nowhere. At least this way we’ve got nowhere quietly. Look, why don’t you just tell me what you want, I’ll tell you what I want and we’ll tell our lawyers?’

  He took a bit of persuading, and my lip took a lot of biting, but eventually he said no, he didn’t want the house and was happy for me to have it, if I could afford it, and he was prepared to walk away without asking for any extra cash to buy him out.

  ‘Considering you owe me half the deposit, that’s very big of you,’ I sniffed.

  ‘Well, you get it back this way,’ he said, annoyingly. ‘What about you, anyway? The lawyer says you’re demanding my inheritance, that’s not right.’

  I sighed. ‘I’ve done no such thing. We bought the house with my inheritance, which you’re benefiting from—’

  ‘I’m walking away from it!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘You weren’t until now,’ I pointed out. ‘Meanwhile you’ve got a six-figure sum sitting in your bank, and if you bung me something completely inconsequential you wouldn’t notice, like £5,000 or something, I can afford to start on the kitchen and we’ll call it quits. It doesn’t mean anything to you and it makes a big difference to me. The alternative is I won’t be able to take the house on, and we’ll have to put it on the market, and the divorce will have to wait until it gets sold. It could be months. Is that what you want?’

  He hummed and hahed, and I thought I had him until he said the lawyer had told him we could go in front of a judge to decide how much of the inheritance was fair. My lip was drawing blood by this point.