The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox

by Lilly Miles

  Bridget spotted me and joined me on the floor with an arm around my shoulders, and then Nancy, Buff, Fifi, Cubby, Porter, Princess – and almost everyone else who’s held me up this year – got down on their knees by my side, kissed me, hugged me, and in the case of a drunken Valentine Lush, patted me on the head because it was the only bit he could reach in the scrum. They urged me not to cry and to be happy, and I laughed at them as the tears kept falling, and told them I was happy – and just glad the old year was gone. I haven’t been so happy at the passage of time since I’d been a kid and counting down the days to the next birthday.

  When everyone gathered for the wedding I was upstairs in the hotel, anxiously pacing as time ticked away. It didn’t occur to me for a moment not to go through with it; I was in the middle of the hourglass, finding it hard to breathe as I slid into the unknown. I got down the stairs, clinging on to my father’s arm, through the door and down the aisle, as my heart beat so fast I thought it would burst. I had one thought: that it was better to have loved and lost. Better to say yes, scream it from the rooftops, say fuck it and do it anyway, than to stop and ponder and pick holes in what might happen, and wonder if you ought to say no.

  Of course I also told myself that I knew him, and he’d never hurt me; but the fact remained it was a leap of faith, attached only to someone I hoped would help me fly. We came back to earth a bit quick and with a hell of a bump, but the drop was as much a part of the experience as the jump.

  My fury at Twatface has been more to do with whether he realized what he was doing. Did he know the things he did would hurt? Did he make me apologize to him because he genuinely thought it was my fault, or because he wanted to believe it? Was he mad or bad, and was everything he wrought really wrong?

  When you feel a powerful anger, you can’t waste its power. There must be a way to harness it for something useful. Like what? you ask. Oh, I don’t know – write a book, maybe. Let someone else know they’re not alone. Just shout NO! over and over again until someone hears it, for all the good that might do. All I can tell you for certain is that there was a time when I said, ‘I do,’ in front of the whole world, and meant it with every part of my being. Just because now every cell screams, ‘I DON’T!’ doesn’t mean that simply by being a negative it’s not worthwhile.

  There’s a poem I read somewhere that talks about the great yes and the great no, and the times you make the big decisions in your life. I said yes to Twatface, not so much because I was certain of the future but more because it was a yes, and it was better to say that than turn away. The same verse says that the right no can drag you down all your life, but poets are idiots sometimes. What the poet should have said is that the wrong no drags you down, but the right one bears repeating if you’re sincere.

  So here we go, as honest and true as I can be: I forgive Twatface. I can never forget what he did, good and bad, and I don’t hold with the namby-pamby Christian thing that forgiveness is a ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card and means your sins are erased. I mean forgive in the sense that I accept it, that I don’t demand any more that he be punished. Railing against him is pointless when it can’t change anything, and besides it’s led me to some good stuff.

  Despite it all, if I had the chance I’d say yes again – I’d do it all again, maybe a little louder and harder in places, but I’ve no regrets. Maybe I’ll get the chance to prove that, if I don’t stay on my guard too much. Who knows what the next decade will hold?

  I’m going to leave the bad memories behind me, and take the good ones with me.

  And I mean that most sincerely.

  DAY TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX

  THE call, when it came, was a surprise.

  ‘Oh, hello? Hello?’

  ‘Hello?’ I huffed, lunging for my suitcase as it passed me on the luggage carousel, which seemed to speed up as it went by, so that as I pulled the bag it ended up being dragged across an old lady’s knees and the heads of two small children. I apologized bad-temperedly, manhandled the case on to a trolley, grabbed the laptop bag from the floor where it had fallen and steered the wayward metal cart towards customs. Shoving the phone between neck and ear, hitching my bag on to a shoulder and puffing the hair out of my face, I said: ‘Sorry, who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Maurice,’ said the voice, which I could barely hear over the airport tannoy as I fumed through the green channel and looked for the Europcar sign, cursing Mondays while thinking how much I wanted a bath.

  ‘Maurice?’ I asked. ‘Maurice who?’ Then it dawned. Maurice the divorce lawyer, the one who thinks everything’s funny, and only speaks to me to say nothing’s any different to the last time we spoke – except for being inexplicably more expensive. This was just what I needed after landing in Portugal in a rush and on deadline, when the plane was late and I had to file a story by teatime.

  ‘Oh, hello, Maurice,’ I said, spotting the right booth and scrabbling in my bag for the printout.

  ‘I just wanted to let you know that we’ve sorted out the final invoice, your ex-husband has paid his share of the costs, and there’s a small overhang which I shall forward on to you with our accounts,’ he said as I wiggled my eyebrows at the car-hire woman and handed over the paperwork. I glanced at my watch. It was 3 p.m, and it would take two hours to drive there, so then it would be 5 p.m., and I had to knock on the door, get a chat, and then file by 6 p.m. at the latest, even though I had nothing to write about yet. And I had to call that Portuguese journalist to see if he had anything new for us to use. I wished I was somewhere with a bigger time difference between me and the office. Jesus Christ, woman, hurry up with those keys . . .

  ‘Right. OK, Maurice . . .’

  Maurice droned on: ‘And once you’ve settled your account that will be the last of our dealings, and I’ve sent out copies to you of the consent order and your decree absolute . . .’

  I grabbed the car keys being offered, muttered an ‘Obrigada’, and steered the pestilential luggage trolley towards the doors as I continued to juggle the phone between either side of my collarbone. ‘Right, fine. Look, I’d better go, I’m supposed to be working. Hang on a minute – decree absolute?’

  ‘Yes, your decree absolute. It came through a while ago.’

  I stopped dead, cases and bags juddering to the floor and hair flopping back in my face as I realized he’d used the phrase ‘ex-husband’.

  ‘Decree absolute?’ I said again, like a stupefied parrot. ‘When?’

  ‘Ooh, a couple of weeks ago, didn’t I mention it?’

  ‘NO, YOU FLIPPING . . . oh God, no, sorry, look, are you sure? I mean, definitely?’

  ‘Yes. It went along with the consent order because Twatface agreed the financial deal, and then it was all rubber-stamped. Here it is, it was issued on December the twelfth.’

  My stalled brain flipped into gear. That had been a week or so after I’d met Cricket Boy. So I’d been unmarried for more than a month, and my new start had happened without me realizing it.

  ‘Right. Well. Good. Thanks,’ I said. Maurice said he’d send me the final bill, which should be nearly £3,000 but ‘as I am conscious many of the difficulties you faced’ which ‘arose largely as a result of your former husband’s behaviour’, he would knock £500 off out of sympathy. I thanked him again, feeling like a charity case, and ended the call.

  Slowly I pushed the trolley forwards, looking at nothing while thinking for the first time that I didn’t have a husband to complain about. The automatic doors swished open, and I found myself stood in the winter sunshine outside Faro airport, blinking and a bit confused. I wasn’t a wife any more.

  I had expected glee, relief, the lifting of a weight, maybe a clanging noise. Perhaps even reverting back to being the twenty-three-year-old I’d been before Twatface came along, with a carefree state of mind.

  Instead I was just unutterably sad. Sad to have missed it, sad not to have known, sad not to have marked the day somehow, and sad that was, finally, that. When we fell in love I was there,
when we got engaged and married I was there; when we split I was right in the middle of it. Each moment was a memory and an image to be treasured or put away until it didn’t hurt any more. But the end had come by itself, unnoticed, in the middle of a list of names read out in a court somewhere to a disillusioned clerk. We didn’t even say goodbye. It was like hearing someone had died on their own while you were still driving to the hospital; or waking up and being told the surgeon had cut your leg off. Can you do it again, and this time I’ll pay attention?

  I felt cold and terribly alone, stood by myself on a piece of foreign tarmac. It used to be that whenever I was sent abroad Twatface insisted I text and let him know I’d landed safely, or would be ringing to tell me what everyone else was doing on the story back home, chattering about his day and asking about the job. Now there was no one to ring, no call expected, in fact no one who would notice for a day or two if I didn’t answer the phone at all. I had been legally amputated from a person who had been almost a Siamese twin – one I had come to hate, but joined to me all the same, and who had experienced everything in my life for so long I could barely remember what it was like not to have him around, in my heart and in my head. Or on my back, where I’d carried him for years, catering to his every whim like the retarded half of Master Blaster in the Mad Max films.

  And now that weight was gone for good. But rather than flying free, soaring towards single life and a new beginning, I felt more like a blackbird who’d smashed into a window it hadn’t seen and was lying on the ground with its wings broken. Now what?

  I found myself beside the tiny Fiat Shitto which was all the paper could afford these days, unloaded the bags and got in. Mechanically I went through the motions of moving the driver’s seat, the mirrors, plugging in the sat nav and programming the route to Praia da Luz where, Evil Elliot insisted, there was someone who had the latest definite sighting of Maddie McCann, even though it had been years since the newspapers had shown any interest in the missing toddler. Then I just sat, staring through the windscreen at the back of the hire car office, brain in neutral, a soldier home from the wars with no one left to fight.

  After a few moments I shook myself, muttering, ‘Right, do something,’ under my breath. I had a story to get and that was purpose, of a sort.

  Then it occurred to me that I had always intended to throw a party. There had been one at the start, after all, so there should be one at the end. Grabbing my phone I sent a text round to my mates announcing my divorce and inquiring if they were free on Wednesday – by which time I should have flown back home – for drinks.

  I turned the key, and pulled out of the car park and on to the motorway. Sitting alone in the silence between the mountains on either side of the road I began to cry a little, thinking about the wedding and everything that we’d dreamed of, and all the hopes I’d had, which I knew Twatface had shared at first. Then my phone began to beep, and despite the obvious health and safety risks I couldn’t help but glance at my messages.

  ‘Oh, honey, FINALLY!’ said Fifi. ‘I shall be there with bells on! Champers all round!’

  ‘Congrats, you’re finally shot of the bastard!!!’ from Nancy. ‘See you Wed!’

  ‘Thank FUCK,’ from Harry Porter. ‘I was getting bored. Will there be cake?’

  ‘Oh, good, at last. Don’t read this if you’re driving, but Dad says check your boiler,’ from my mum.

  At that I laughed, and with tears on my cheeks while zipping along the motorway at 70 m.p.h. finally felt the relief I’d been craving. My heart cracked a little more, and I almost felt a physical pain, imagining it inflating for the first time in months, and pumping the blood freely once more around my creaking arteries. The sun shone down in my eyes, and what with the crying I could barely see the road, but even though I was far from happy it felt like I was taking the first step back to wherever happy is.

  ‘Ahead, continue straight on,’ said the sat nav, and I smiled at it as I leaned over and switched on the radio, wondering if the Shuffle Gods had anything to say to me.

  They had Michael Jackson, informing me the sky was the limit but I would have seen nothing until he got through.

  I whooped, whammed the volume up, wound the windows down and joined in, tunelessly and full of snot, about the whole world had to answer right now that Michael and I were, indeed, very bad.

  Once the song was over I deflated again; but frankly I needed a rest from all the emotion, and my eyes were sunken and sore with sunlight and tears. Within a short time I’d arrived at the address, knocked at the door, called a local journalist to help translate, discovered the sighting had been reported by a blind woman who claimed to be psychic, found another Maddie McCann story about the bumbling local police, got to the hotel and filed while sitting at the bar.

  Just as I hit send Nick the Wop arrived, having come on a later plane from a different airport. I greeted him with the news there was nothing for him to photograph, passed him the bar menu, and rang Elliot to inform him he had a slightly better story than the one he was expecting. ‘Better?’ he spat. ‘What could be better than finding a missing child?’

  I rolled my eyes at Nick. ‘Well, all right, not better, maybe, but at least it’s accurate, which the sighting wasn’t – reason being it was by someone who couldn’t actually see.’

  Elliot sighed at me. ‘You’ve managed to turn a definite splash into an unlikely page thirty-four; congratulations,’ he said, slamming the phone down.

  ‘Hey ho,’ I said to the Wop. ‘Guess what? I’m divorced.’

  ‘Oh, mite, dat’s fakkin’ bwillant, innit? Lessav a drink, den,’ he said, and we enjoyed two enormous steaks, two bottles of red and ridiculous gossip about the reporters and photogs, Princess Flashy Knickers’s one-night stand with Jock, and the likely suspects for whom we thought The Editor might be shagging these days. I exchanged texts with Cricket Boy once or twice, me informing him I was drunk, and him replying he was in Greenwich visiting his brother, doing a crawl around my favourite pubs. At midnight the Wop and I rolled off to our separate rooms, promising to meet for breakfast at eight because Elliot was bound to come up with something else for us to do before we could leave.

  I was half-asleep in a happy fug of alcohol when my phone beeped. I thought about ignoring it, then heaved myself over, scrabbled in the darkness across the bedside table and brought the phone to my face, squinting at the screen and realizing it was nearly 2 a.m.

  It was Cricket Boy again. ‘Where are you out tonight, anyway?’ he said.

  I hadn’t told him I was abroad, so he must have assumed I was in Greenwich, like him. I stared at the ceiling, and counted back in my head to the last time this had happened. Let’s see, it was the guy before Twatface. No, not him, even. It was the one before that . . . It had been more than seven years, the best part of a decade, since I’d had anything resembling a booty call. Now here I was, finally divorced, my happy-at-times-and-awful-at-others marriage was over, and I seemed to have the attention of a tall, handsome man who could dance me off my feet, and lived far enough away not to represent any threat of a relationship and all the problems that would entail, and he wanted to know where I was so we could hook up for some drunken, torrid, commitment-free shenanigans.

  And I was in a different flipping country.

  I buried my face in the pillow and screamed, briefly. Then I laughed, and texted back: ‘Portugal.’ He replied: ‘Bugger. When are you back? I’m off oop north again tomorrow morning.’ I told him I would be back the next evening or the day after, with a sad face, then, when he pinged straight back, informed him it was 2 a.m. and he had to bugger off because I had to be up early. Briefly, I considered the fact that he’d left it till 2 a.m. to text, and I was, therefore, probably just a last desperate roll of the booty dice. But it was welcome all the same, and I turned over, curled myself around a pillow, and drifted off to dream of tall men dressed in cricket whites with grass stains on their knees.

  The Wop and I struggled through our hangovers the ne
xt day to meet for breakfast and a call from Elliot, who curtly informed us we were booked on a plane home. We headed to the airport, and I got a text from Cricket Boy telling me he had left Greenwich two hours earlier and probably wouldn’t be back for another couple of months. ‘Damn and blast it,’ I thought, ‘just my luck.’

  DAY TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY-EIGHT

  BACK in the office I learned that one more hack from our team was going to have to go, whether they liked it or not. Dozens more were going in different departments as the bean counters wielded their scalpels, but Bish had managed to fiddle his budget so that it looked like he didn’t have as many reporters as he did, and that had saved a few of us. But worse, they would select who to lose using a scoring system – and Evil Elliot was in charge.

  The mood among the reporters was depressive. ‘Elliot’s got a special new Red Pen of Death,’ moaned Porter. ‘He keeps making notes with it.’

  Bridget added: ‘I s’pose I could always move back to Oz.’

  And Princess muttered: ‘I think we can guarantee Teflon Tania will emerge unscathed. Cow!’

  We all sat and sighed as we did our work, and I got an early cut for my divorce party. I had intended nothing so much as drinking the remains of Twatface’s wine, which I was still finding stashed in hiding places all over the house, and playing country and western music too loudly for anyone else’s comfort. But when everyone arrived it seemed they’d all had second thoughts, too, and what had been planned in my mind for months as a raucous bash turned instead into a low-key gathering in my front room, where half a dozen mates in a bad mood shared a Chinese takeaway, and everyone avoided the topic of why we were there in the first place.