by Carmen Reid
She was still a bitch in training though.
As Dominique put her phone down, Jo’s mobile began to ring.
‘Hell,’ she said, with a smile then: ‘Jo Randall,’ into the receiver.
‘Jo. You’ll have seen the news. We’ve got to have Annette vaccinated straight away. I’ve got some time off this afternoon. I’ve phoned the surgery, they can see her then.’ Hello Simon. She could feel her heart rate leap up.
‘Simon,’ she tried not to shout immediately. ‘Look, you know how I feel about this.’
‘There’s an epidemic, Jo. I’m not risking Annette’s health.’
‘Are you suggesting I would risk it?’
‘You know perfectly well what the risks are. This is the least risky option.’
The only thing she knew perfectly well was that this conversation was totally on the cards. Overdue, in fact. She should have phoned him last night, yesterday – not put it off and now have him barking at her, threatening to rush Annette off to the doctor’s this afternoon, while she had twenty-three minutes and counting to get her list together.
‘Simon, I’m in conference until twelve. I will phone you then and talk about it.’
‘I’m busy later,’ he snapped back. ‘There is absolutely no reason why she shouldn’t go today, Jo. She is fine. Quintet is totally safe. She is going to be fine. We have to have her protected.’
‘Simon. Please don’t do this. There’s no need to rush into it.’ Jo kept her voice steady, was determined she wasn’t going to plead. Simon was using the same words as the Chief Medical Officer: ‘totally safe’.
‘Give me today to think about it,’ she said. ‘Just one day. Nettie’s at home with Mum, nothing’s going to happen to her today. There’s nothing reported in the area. Just give me one day. I’ll phone you tonight.’
‘Be sure you do.’ He hung up abruptly.
The phone on her desk began to ring again.
‘What have you got for the list?’ she asked Dominique, catching sight of Aidan sloping into the office. A full twenty minutes late today.
‘Ask Aidan too,’ she told Dominique before answering her call.
Their ideas, scribbled onto a bit of notebook paper and tossed back to her, weren’t too bad:
A full whooping cough outbreak investigation.
A fresh look at wind power.
How Green is the Queen? Story idea.
A backgrounder/interview with Savannah Tyler.
(Yes, thanks team, I’ve only been trying to get this for two months now.)
A report, pulled off the internet, that cabbage and broccoli protect against Alzheimer’s. She was sure she’d heard that before.
Several other minor health stories . . .
She was reading their list, not listening too closely to the cold-caller trying to interest her in an issue which didn’t sound at all interesting. ‘Hmmm . . . well, d’you want to send me a letter? Or maybe an email and we’ll give that some consideration,’ she was telling the voice.
As soon as she was off the phone, she had to have it out with her ‘department’ about last week’s electric car fuck-up. She opened up a copy of last Sunday’s paper and smoothed the offending double-page article open in front of them.
‘Hello Aidan, maybe the solar power’s run out on your watch or something, but ten o’clock is the time I’d like you in, please. Now,’ she moved on quickly, ‘you both know the lawyers are involved with this . . .’ They nodded, looking sulky and embarrassed. ‘Jeff’s already told me about it. It was too ambitious, OK? I mean it’s good to be ambitious, have a bold plan, that’s what we try and do every week, but you’re not ready for solo flights like this just yet. OK?’
‘Aidan had a contact who gave us information he assured me we could trust,’ came Dominique’s excuse. Yup, blame it on Aidan. Snake woman.
‘But can I remind you, I still wanted to wait until Jo was back,’ Aidan added frostily. These two would clearly stab each other’s eyes out, given the chance, and she knew just how quickly they’d step over her injured body in the scramble to get to her job.
Aidan slipped off his cord jacket and hung it over the back of his chair, then ran his fingers through his black hair. Jo realized she’d been watching him for slightly too long. Desperate divorcee. She turned her attention back to the offending article.
Like Dominique, Aidan was around about the 22 mark. Jo had been landed with them both eight months ago.
‘We’re promoting you from chief health reporter and giving you your own department,’ Spikey had called her in to his office to announce. ‘Health and Environment. You’ll head it up, get a bit of a budget. Lots of great stories coming out of that area. I want us to be breaking them.’
For about half a day, Jo had been elated, vindicated, thrilled with the dizzy new prospects . . . had wondered who to interview, who to bring on board. Then Jeff had informed her that more trainees than usual had been taken on by the company this year and the executives were scratching their heads to know what to do with them all. So, she was getting two trainees to look after herself.
Two trainees were not the same as a new department. Two trainees were not a promotion. Two trainees were a pain in the arse as all their work had to be checked even more carefully than her own.
Still, they were getting better. Just so long as Spikey wasn’t planning to move them on at the end of their training and land her with two more new ones. No way. Yes, they were charming little rats who’d sell their souls for a front page exclusive but that meant that one day soon she was going to have a cracking team.
‘OK whooping cough. Obviously we’re going to be all over whooping cough like a rash. This is our speciality.’ She was being generous. This was her thing. She’d broken story after story about multiple vaccinations and their possible side effects and dangers. There wasn’t a parent in the country who suspected their child had been damaged by a vaccine that she hadn’t interviewed. She had a large database on the subject of vaccinations to tap: scientists, doctors, experts and ordinary parents. Hard not to think of Annette, Simon and the decision still unmade.
‘Aidan, I want you to stick like glue to the government side of this,’ she instructed him, ‘I want to know everything they know about the outbreak, every line they’re giving us. Dominique, you need to find out all you can about the infected children, where they are, how they were exposed, how they’re doing. The other suggestions,’ she glanced through the scribbled list of ideas again: ‘there’s a few things here we’ll follow up. But I’ll let you know what grabs them at conference.’
‘D’you want me to chase the Savannah Tyler interview? I’ve got a bit of an in with the Green Party,’ said Aidan. No she did not want him chasing the talk she’d been sweating to get herself.
‘We would love to do Savannah,’ she heard herself telling him in a calm and friendly way. ‘I’m pressing the official buttons very hard. If you can tactfully explore other avenues to strengthen our case, without irritating or putting anyone off, then you’re welcome. But you are not, under any circumstances, allowed to piss off Tony Jarvis, OK? He’s very important to us. Right, I have to speak to Jeff -’ she glanced at her watch – ‘about five minutes ago.’
Her desk phone sprang to life again.
‘Someone get that, take a message.’
She turned and walked off to the incredibly annoying sound of Dominique saying in a totally syrupy and ingratiating way: ‘Oh hi, Tony, no, I’m afraid she’s just gone into conference. Can I help at all?’ which is not the same as ‘Can I take a message?’ is it? No, it’s journo speak for ‘If you’ve got a story, tell me, so I can pinch it right off my department head’s desk.’
Anyway, first brief Jeff . . . then conference.
Spikey, real name Paul Skinner, was not nicknamed Spikey because he was prickly, although he was, nor because he frequently ‘spiked’ ideas, ditching them at the last possible moment and causing reporters to flurry around in desperate search of replacement exclusives, although he di
d that too. He’d earned the nickname because of his rumoured fondness for spiking his endless supply of coffees with all manner of mood-enhancers. He had a little metal box of alleged sweeteners that he click-clicked into his drinks with alarming regularity. He was constantly sniffing: numerous people were willing to testify in the pub to having walked in on him unexpectedly to find him dusting powder off his desk, or putting little envelopes hurriedly back into drawers.
His drugs may well have been legal. He may well have been taking Prozac, beta blockers, Valium even. Jo knew she would have to if she had his job. But the rumours continued to flourish:
‘Watch out, he’s just dropped something into his coffee’. . . ‘Hand in your expenses, he’s taken an E’. . . ’ ‘Spikey’s done a line, he’s going to be here all night’ . . .
And to be honest, his random moods, tantrums and ideas were like those of a man in the grip of a drug addiction. It made perfect sense.
It also made perfect sense for one of the country’s best-selling Sunday newspapers to be run by a drug addict. He was needy, unpredictable, obsessive, moody, paranoid, demanded impossibly high standards, had few loyalties, was out to get everybody equally. Made a great editor.
But then she’d understood editors and news editors so much better since she’d had children. They were like big toddlers, they wanted what someone else had now! They would scream and scream until they got it and once you gave it to them, they didn’t want it any more.
So you had to stand firm. Maintain clear boundaries. Tell them what they could have, when, and not let them down. You never, ever made promises you couldn’t keep. And just occasionally, you could reward them with a lovely surprise.
So here they were, once again, the editor, his department heads and several senior reporters together on a Tuesday morning, to spend a little time reviewing last week’s cock-ups, but mainly to turn over a fresh, new, leaf and talk about how fabulous this week’s edition was going to be. Everyone would paint the rosiest possible picture of the raft of exclusives they had just waiting to sail into the paper. Of course, by Saturday’s conference, the list of explanations, compromises and lost opportunities would be long and frustrating and Spikey’s temper would be frayed.
But this was Tuesday. Nothing but clear skies ahead. Yeah, clear skies and a bitter Oxford byelection campaign.
Not to mention the bitter by-election office wrangle. When it was her turn to present her ideas for the week, Jo went through whooping cough in depth and the wind farm idea. She liked that. Aidan and Dominique would be good at that. Could do a lot of digging, collate plenty of information which she could knock into something decent. The ‘How Green is the Queen’ idea was also floated.
Everyone listened, but she’d barely finished before Spikey wanted to know how it was ‘progressing’ on the Savannah front.
‘Well. . .’ she wanted to heave out a big sigh, but thought that wouldn’t be the best policy. ‘If she’s going to do a talk, she’s going to go with us. But at the moment, she’s determined not to do a personal profile piece. Says it detracts from the message she’s trying to put across.’ Loud guffaws from the eight men in the room at this. Smiles from the two other women.
Savannah Tyler. You could understand Savannah’s point. She was fighting for election in Oxford next week. And according to the pollsters, she was on course to become Britain’s first Green Party MP. Unfortunately for Savannah, she wasn’t just a committed environmentalist with a serious scientific research background, a PhD, someone who’d made regular research trips to the Arctic, someone who’d reenergized a woolly political party and was on the brink of making history and getting herself into Westminster . . . she was also late thirty-something, single and, perhaps worst of all, unusually attractive.
To say that newspapers editors were falling over themselves to get ‘up close and personal’ with this new politician-to-be was an understatement. But Savannah, unlike any other politician on the face of the earth, was shy of the press.
She was willing to do TV interviews about policy matters, she was willing to take part in television and radio debates and she’d written several guest articles about her areas of concern. But at the slightest whiff of a personal question, she was off.
‘I was not invited here today to talk about myself,’ she could say in a particularly chilly way, making it clear that one more question would cause her to unhook her microphone and vanish. As had already happened on one telly breakfast show.
There were numerous journalists digging about, trying to do ‘backgrounders’ on her. But as yet nothing had come to light. The Green Party had closed ranks; her friends, the few that had been unearthed, did likewise.
Although Savannah was English, she’d been born and educated abroad, so there was no birth certificate, no childhood pals or college boyfriends to track down and begin with and no one had even found out where her family currently lived.
‘She’s very, very serious,’ Tony Jarvis, the Green Party press officer, had warned Jo. ‘This is not about her, not about some big ego trip. This is about saving the planet.’
‘Oh sod that,’ had been Jo’s jokey response. ‘We need her. Doesn’t she know how many extra votes she’ll pick up by revealing her true self to the voters?’
‘Jo, this is about a future for our children. Preventing catastrophic floods, preventing nuclear wars over the last remaining puddles of oil in the Middle East. . .’
‘Aha, I know,’ Jo had gone on, feeling the usual flicker of unease whenever Greens talked about ‘our children’ and ‘catastrophe’. Well, she didn’t like to think about it too much. She knew far too much about it, knew the probabilities, the inevitable. But didn’t we all? And none of us liked to think about it too much.
‘I love her.’ Jo decided this was the best tack. ‘I think she’s wonderful. I wish every politician was like her, stuffed with integrity and excellent intentions. I need to tell the country about her.’
‘So do,’ Tony had replied. ‘We’ve got info on all the stuff she supports, all the policies she wants to see introduced. . .’
‘Tony, you sly and cunning bugger, that’s not what I mean.’
Yet another conversation leading nowhere.
‘Is it about time to send you up there?’ Spikey asked her now, his short sparse hair on end, little beady eyes fixed on her. ‘You know, go knock on her door, get whatever you can. Or do we still have any faith in negotiations? I don’t need to tell you that Jason would like Politics to be all over her and Vince wants News to take over.’
No, he did not need to tell her. It didn’t matter what story she was covering, both the political editor, Jason Caruth, and chief reporter Vince Maguire thought they could do it better.
‘Give me a couple of days, I’ll let you know how it stands. Then yes, I agree -’ although she totally did not – ‘we’ll have to go and face her up.’ She already knew what the outcome of that was going to be. A great big slam in the face and many good stories from Tony Jarvis no longer coming her way.
‘We’ll have someone lined up for Saturday morning then, on standby in Oxford, unless we hear otherwise,’ Vince said, making a big show of writing himself a note about it. He looked even paler, puffier and sweatier than usual this morning, must have had a late night ‘meeting contacts’ yesterday. He ran his fingers over his buzz cut and she wished he would take off his dark tweedy green jacket because the sheen on his podgy face was just creepy.
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence, Vincent,’ she heard herself hiss, which was petty and unprofessional, but then, hell, so was he.
‘OK, the light relief,’ Spikey said and turned to his showbiz and fashion people. ‘What have you got for me?’
Martina Jarvis and Tilly London smiled and glanced over their notes. Showbiz editor Martina went first and reeled off a host of starry names, which elicited much nodding and scribbling from Spikey, then she paused for effect, pushed her short candyfloss blond hair behind her ear and held up a glossy photograph. The
snap showed a very unexpected celebrity couple canoodling in microscopic swimwear on the beach, unexpected because both the actor and the singer were married . . . to other people.
‘Thought you might like to see this as well.’
‘Oh yes,’ was Spikey’s response. ‘We like that. But how much is it going to cost us?’
‘All of this week’s Showbiz budget,’ she warned him. ‘But I think it’s worth it.’
‘Totally exclusive – not even a rumour of it in the other papers before Sunday?’
‘Totally . . . Well, I thought maybe I’d leak a hint of it for Saturday just to excite some interest and recoup a little bit of my money.’
‘Good idea.’
‘Is that a genuine pap picture, or did the happy couple pose for it?’ Vince wanted to know. ‘I mean it’s so clear, it’s such a good shot, you’d think they were in on it.’
Martina just raised an eyebrow: ‘Don’t think that matters to us, does it?’
‘Well, not if you’re happy for this newspaper to be used as a PR machine. Doesn’t he have a big film opening in, oh, about a week’s time, which the reviewers have said is crap?’ Vince asked.
‘Didn’t know you had such a conscience, Vince,’ Martina defended herself.
‘I don’t have a conscience,’ was Vince’s reply, ‘I just like news and advertising to be more clear-cut.’
‘OK, that’s enough. Martina will ask the snapper more about it,’ Spikey said, to bring the little spat to an end. ‘Tilly, what’s in this week? What’s out?’
Jo’s friend Tilly, fifty-something, smart as a whip, eccentric, glamorous, pure, undiluted fashionista, leaned back in her chair and said: ‘Oh like you care, Paul. It’s Tuesday, I’ve not even had time for a cigarette yet, if I decide on something today, it’ll be out of fashion by Sunday. It’s May, spring’s turning to summer, expect a double page spread of skinny girls in tight tops and tiny skirts, but then that’s what I give you all year long.’
‘The warm snap’s over, though, heavy rain forecast,’ Jeff warned.