by Carmen Reid
Much as Jo wanted to run her hands all over his bare skin and pull him down to the floor on top of her, she restrained herself. ‘I’m going to sit down over here and just watch you, OK?’ she told him. ‘The topless chef.’
‘OK.’ Without taking his eyes from the scales he added: ‘Obviously, if you want to touch yourself, I’m fine with that.’
She bunched his T-shirt up into a ball and threw it at him.
‘What do you like about me so much anyway?’ he asked, heaping sugar on top of the flour.
‘You mean apart from your fabulous body and what you do with it?’ Jo smiled.
‘I know it’s hard to look beyond that,’ Marcus joked back, clearly flattered.
Jo put her elbow up on the kitchen table, leaned her head on her hand and considered her reply.
‘You’re like a debut album by a band I’ve never heard of,’ she said finally. ‘That’s what I like about you.’
‘Huh?’
‘Well, you know, Simon was like a greatest hits compilation box set I’d heard thousands of times before . . . and you’re not. That’s what I like so much about you.’
‘I see,’ Marcus said.
‘I never cheated on Simon,’ she felt the need to add. ‘Last year, I thought about cheating on him a lot. In fact, I thought about it constantly,’ she confessed. ‘The postman . . . the Frenchman behind the counter at the deli always going on about his saucisson, just about everyone in my office, including the Fashion girls . . . Mel’s teacher . . . you name them, I had a bedroom fantasy about them,’ she laughed at her confession.
‘Simon and I were so fed up and so pissed off with each other, one of us was bound to go off and have an affair,’ she added. ‘I thought it would be more grown up to split before we did that. Rather than after.’
‘And his new bird?’ was his take on the question everyone else had asked her.
Jo shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. She was his shoulder to cry on and things developed from there. I’ve no reason not to believe him . . . and anyway if they were seeing each other before, do I need to know that? Do I want to know that? Probably not.’
Marcus broke eggs. She liked the way he did it: with a deft flourish, an ‘Olé’ kind of movement, a twirl of forefinger and thumb before tossing the shells into the sink.
‘I’m much more interested in you, Marcus,’ she said. ‘Why are you here? In a crap kitchen with me, baking a cake for a little girl you haven’t even met?’
‘I dunno,’ he answered. ‘Maybe you’re like the first new release in a decade by one of those great bands from the Seventies.’
‘Oh God!’ she burst into laughter, ‘I was a child in the Seventies. A mere child!’
Marcus cubed butter with a small knife and slid the pieces into the mix.
‘I hardly know anything about you,’ she went on. ‘Have you got brothers or sisters? I don’t even know that and I’m sleeping with you.’
He turned to give her a little grin.
‘Debut album, remember, band you’ve never heard of. . .’ but then he answered, ‘I’ve got a younger brother.’
‘Me too,’ she said.
‘Yours first,’ Marcus said, turning on the mixer.
‘He’s called Matt,’ she said over the whirring, ‘he’s 31, he works in the oil business, married, one son, currently living in the States.’
‘Do you like him? Is he a nice guy?’ Marcus asked.
Jo sighed. It was a tricky question, tricky subject: ‘Not much, I suppose. I liked him when he was small, but he got more and more annoying with each passing year.’
Marcus switched the blender off and checked the mix: ‘My brother’s cool,’ he threw in. ‘He’s a chef too. Works in a luxury resort in Africa.’
‘Nice one,’ she said.
‘I’m thinking about going out there for the summer,’ he said, and licked the back of a spoon dipped into the mix to assess it.
‘Very nice.’
‘He says it’s busy, but good pay and you can drink under the stars every night, swim in the sea every morning. We’ll maybe do a bit of travelling together once the season’s over.’
‘When does the season start?’ she couldn’t help asking. It was mid-May now . . .
‘Middle of June,’ was Marcus’s reply.
Middle of June. She smiled at him. So, the Marcus question – the Marcus situation – looked as if it was going to resolve itself. Nicely, casually, just as easily as it had begun.
‘Why don’t you come?’ he offered, pouring cake mix from the bowl into the tins.
But this just made her laugh.
‘Me? Ha. No,’ she ran a hand through her hair, ‘Well, it’s nice of you to ask, you know. But. . . you may not have noticed’ – she waved her hand about – ‘I have children, this big job thing . . . career I think it’s called, my house, my mortgage, my divorce to sort out. So, no, I can’t just pack my beach bag and . . .’
‘Fuck it,’ Marcus said. He was shaking each cake tin in turn, gently, settling the mixture to an even level: ‘Once the summer holidays start, just come over, you and the girls, swim, get tanned, live in my beach hut with me.’
‘Aha.’ For one long, lovely minute, as he pushed the cake tins into the oven, she allowed herself to think about it: Mel and Nettie on the beach all summer long, Marcus, wood brown and naked, rolling over in bed towards her, hair curly and tangled with sea water, bleached in the sun. And then: ‘Cut’.
‘No,’ she smiled, ‘we can’t come . . . But you have to go –’
‘Why?’ He crouched down beside her and slid a hand up her leg.
‘Because you can,’ she replied, hands on his shoulders squeezing the muscle there. ‘Because you’re 26 and footloose and have all these adventures ahead of you. God, when I was 26, I was so boring. I’m boring myself just thinking about it.’
‘Not so boring now,’ he said, brushing his lips against hers, undoing buttons so he could touch her bare skin, ‘I’ve set the timer for forty-five minutes. Although I’ll skewer after thirty-five. Now what can we do in thirty-five minutes?’
His fingers were already inside her bra. He was kissing her stomach and moving downwards.
‘Make icing?’ she replied.
‘Oh yeah. I want to make icing with you.’
Chapter Nine
Hundreds of parents who claim their children were damaged by the MMR vaccine face huge legal bills unless they pull out of compensation claims against the manufacturers.
Mail on Sunday
Thursday: 10.25 a.m.
‘I’ve got IVF twins who are Quintet victims, according to their parents, and I’m determined to find some other children who have suffered in the same way to make the story much stronger,’ Jo told the morning news conference, treading the fine line between trying to make it sound as good as she could without exaggerating.
‘OK, sounds good,’ was Spikey’s verdict.
‘The wind farms research is going well,’ she updated them on Aidan and Dominique’s research. ‘We all seem to be coming down on the side of building them in the North Sea. Although that’s the most expensive option.’
‘In the North Sea?’ Spikey asked, incredulous. ‘Yeah, sticking them on top of oil rigs. Now that there’s hardly any oil or gas left to drill, it’s a natural progression.’
‘Hmm . . . Can Pictures mock that up for us? Massive windmills on top of oil rigs, stormy seas?’ The picture desk editor nodded. ‘Nice,’ was Spikey’s verdict.
Jo registered the predictable little prick of jealousy that he seemed to like the other story better than hers.
‘What else is on your list then?’ he asked.
‘Britain’s asthma league table and how it relates to the air pollution stats – quite nicely, in fact. We’re shelving How Green is the Queen, as agreed . . . the latest research into the causes of senile dementia . . . a few other bits and pieces, eco-tourism, and that’s us for the week so far.’ Jo smiled around the table.
�
�Nothing splashy then,’ Spikey concluded. ‘And no Savannah Tyler. Which is a bit disappointing.’ She caught the glance shot in her direction and felt stung.
‘The whooping cough vaccination story is really important, I think,’ she heard herself reply, feeling her stomach churn and cheeks flush as she stood up to him. Aaaargh, she hated to do it, but it had to be done, or else she’d let him ride right over her making her feel as if all the years spent working to get this job and do this job weren’t worthwhile.
‘The disease is proliferating,’ she added, trying to sound incredibly authoritative. ‘Another seven cases have been reported this morning. And all those children have already been vaccinated, so something strange is going on.’
‘But we’re not really getting to the bottom of that, are we?’ Spikey was clearly in the mood for a fight today.
He slid a weighty silver pen through his fingertips and rapped its end on the table a couple of times.
‘What’s the government saying? What about the manufacturers? Can no one shed any light on what has started all this?’
Jo, noticing that Vince was taking a deep breath and about to wade in, answered quickly: ‘We’re looking into all these aspects. We’re asking the right questions. Obviously, when we write about vaccination side effects, we’re writing about something the Chief Medical Officer doesn’t want made public. We’re not going to get a lot of support from the authorities or the drug companies on that.’
‘Time for a couple of bodies from News to be helping Jo, I think,’ came Vince’s suggestion.
‘Thanks for the offer, we’ll certainly come to you, if we need you,’ she said as sweetly as she could while thinking completely poisonous, how-Vince-must-die thoughts.
‘Well, it’s certainly not the splash,’ the editor said in . a way that signalled this was his final word on the subject. ‘Page three at best, probably five,’ he wrote in his notebook.
‘And Savannah?’ he added. ‘Didn’t we say she’ll be doorstepped if there still isn’t any word of her doing an interview?’
Jo could feel her heart sinking down even further.
‘I’m very close with this,’ she said, much more confidently than she really felt. ‘If we barge in now that will be the end of it. She won’t talk, they won’t deal with us. Just give me a bit longer. I feel really optimistic. I also think it will be worth the wait.’
Spikey let out a theatrically deep sigh, as if to make it clear to everyone what a long-suffering, brilliant player he was, but ‘see what he had to put up with?’
‘OK, you’ve got the rest of the week. But the byelection’s on Thursday next week, so Saturday morning, News doorstep her if you want to stay out of it,’ was his verdict.
‘Right. Leave it to me,’ was the coolest reply she could manage.
She saw the smug expression on Vince’s face, but then caught an encouraging smile Jeff fired in her direction and felt a little bit soothed. Oh fuck Vince. Fuck him.
Now it was Jason Caruth from Politics. Jo could barely stand him either. He always beat everything up and tried to make it sound like the scoop of the year. But his stories had a horrible habit of sinking like soufflés after a few checks on a Saturday afternoon, leaving everyone frantically searching about for things to put in the paper in their place.
‘Hold the front page,’ Jason opened with a smile. Jo just hoped he was being funny: ‘Blair love triangle.’ He paused for effect, but the response was muted as nobody expected it to be true.
‘Blair’s boy dates daughter of a Tory lord,’ Jason explained.
There were chuckles at this. It was cute.
‘Nice one,’ Spikey said and wrote a note on his list. ‘Nice headline, but not a splash. So, it’s Thursday morning and we await the front page. You know I don’t like that. What’s Showbiz got for us?’
Or, as Jo rephrased the question in her head: ‘Which celebrity Hollywood millionaire is opening their heart about the trauma of their recent illness – really just the time they spent in hospital recovering from wrinkle surgery – to plug their latest sure to be a global box office mega hit film?’
‘Sharon Stone,’ the Showbiz deputy editor replied and everyone round the table groaned.
‘And Madonna’s doing a book reading on Saturday,’ she added, to further groans.
The Showbiz deputy, Elaine, a stick-thin, longhaired young lovely, drafted in from Elle magazine and doing her first conference because her boss was away for the day, looked mortally offended. It hadn’t been like this on Elle.
Spikey wasn’t in the mood to discuss the showbiz agenda in depth so he merely nodded, scribbled on his pad and wound up the meeting with the words: ‘Bugger off and get me a splash by the close of play, will you? Keep me off the pills,’ which may have been his idea of a flippant joke, but it prompted a slight mass panic as the members of conference struggled to avoid each other’s eyes and choke back snorts of laughter.
Jo got back to her desk to find a Post-It from Dominique stuck to her computer screen. ‘Phone Mick Townell,’ it ordered.
The father of the twins. She would phone him just as soon as she could. Right now there were lots of calls to be made.
Vaccine manufacturers, for a start. Then the Canadian Department of Health – no, time difference, couldn’t do that till the afternoon. Green Tony. He had to get her something!
She scanned her email to see what was new.
Press releases, press releases, nothing looked interesting. But then at the bottom of the list [email protected].
The strange anonymous address again. She opened the message up. This time it was a fragment of newspaper cutting that had been scanned in. She enlarged the screen so she could read the print.
Dr who offered single injections hounded by smear attempt, was the headline. There followed a news story she remembered vaguely about a GP who allowed patients to pay for single vaccinations until he was called up before the General Medical Council on misconduct charges. This cutting was from the end of the two-day hearing when the doctor had been exonerated, cleared of all charges.
‘I vowed I would clear my name and I have,’ Dr Paul Taylor had told reporters afterwards. ‘The medical establishment wanted rid of me by fair means or foul. They threw the book at me, but they’ve failed.’
The piece went on with background information to the case, also more about the doctor, where he lived, where he practised, how he became interested in single vaccinations.
Underneath the newspaper cutting was the simple typed line:
You should speak to him and a telephone number for his surgery.
Jo made another attempt to reply but her message was sent straight back to her.
Anonymous tips – always a very suspect thing to act on. This could all be a red herring . . . a set-up . . . Although she wasn’t sure how, yet.
She logged onto the newspaper’s library service and looked up all the back stories on Dr Paul Taylor, to see if there were other reasons she should speak to him that she just hadn’t figured out yet.
After a quick scan of the handful of stories she found on the system, she dialled Dr Taylor’s number.
But Dominique was waving at her.
‘Mick Townell, line three, says he really needs to talk to you,’ she explained. ‘Urgent.’
‘OK.’ Jo didn’t like the sound of this. She hung up the call she was making and picked up the other line.
‘Mick, hello it’s Jo Randall, sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier. I was in a meeting. How’s it going?’
‘Er, fine . . . we’re all fine. . .’ Then there was a loaded pause that made her feel uneasy before he added: ‘You’ve never come back to me to say how much you’d pay us for this story.’
Oh right. It was going to be one of those conversations, where she tried to talk the interviewee out of the ludicrous amount of money they’d thought they could earn from her newspaper.
‘Mick. . .’ She decided not to bother with the publicizing your case/donati
on to the charity of your choice line again. Instead she told him: ‘We can give you £500 for your time. How does that sound?’
‘To be honest,’ he began, ‘it’s a bit low. The Daily Mail have phoned us up . . .’
‘Oh shit’ was the only coherent thought forming in Jo’s mind.
‘And they’ve said £3,000 at least. Maybe more for a full interview and photographs.’
‘OK. Well I can tell you that they’ve been known to exaggerate. What you’re offered before and what you get afterwards can be two different things. But anyway have you agreed to do the story with them?’
‘Well. . . not exactly.’
This didn’t sound like the truth.
‘I said I’d speak to you first.’
But Jo knew that someone from the Daily Mail news team would already be in their car gunning it down to the Townells’ home.
‘Mick?’ she asked, ‘Have you got email or a fax machine at home?’
When he said he did, she told him: ‘I’m going to go and speak to my news editor right now. Then I’ll send you a contract through. We’ll pay you £5,000 if we use your story on the front page.’ She was on safe ground here: judging by Spikey’s reaction, there was no chance of that happening: ‘£2,500 if it’s used anywhere else in the paper. But you have to sign up and speak to us only. How does that sound?’
‘That sounds fine.’ There was relief in his voice. He obviously hadn’t enjoyed this conversation much, which was a good thing because it meant he might stay away from the Mail when they arrived at his front door.
‘Put your computer on and phone me as soon as the email comes through,’ Jo instructed him. ‘I’ll speak to you in a few minutes,’ she said in a friendly tone. But at the end of the call she slammed the phone down hard.
‘Fuck,’ she announced loudly. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck. We’ve got a major fuck-up. Aidan, I need you to go to Canterbury. Very sorry. But I need you to go right now. Here’s the address.’ She handed Aidan, who was already on his feet scrambling things into his briefcase, a Post-It note. ‘Don’t even stop to blow your nose. I’ll brief you en route, but in a nutshell, you’re keeping the vaccine-damage family I’ve interviewed away from the Mail.’