Playing James

by Sarah Mason

  Joe gets out of his chair, walks around to the front of the desk and perches on the edge of it. Do I feign enthusiasm for the moment and get out of it later? Or do I try and do it now?

  A girl’s got to eat so I opt for the former and give a little gasp of joy. This seems to please Joe and he positively beams at me. Good decision, Holly.

  “It’s you! I’m giving you this chance!”

  “That’s great! But, but . . . do you think I’ve got enough experience for something like the police beat?” Mock horror. Please say no. Please say no.

  “Yes! Of course you have!” Rats. “I’m giving you this chance! You deserve it!” He tilts his head and adopts a more serious note. “Holly, I want you to make a go of this role. In the past we have always had the best people on it . . .”

  OK, OK, what’s he saying?

  “. . . but they have been too aggressive, too pushy. I want you to build a better relationship with the police force. Pour oil on, er, you know, murky waters. Eat humble tart. Don’t upset the apple pie. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Er, no, not really, but I’ll nod my head anyway.

  “The Journal has always had a really good relationship with the police and it’s been showing recently in their crime stories.” The Bristol Journal is the second largest paper in the region and our main competitor. We’ve taken it personally ever since they called our paper “a debauched office party that can’t tell the difference between Tony Blair and Tony Bennett.” I would dispute that wholeheartedly if only I knew who Tony Bennett was. They retracted the comment the next day under threats of litigation but steam still comes out of Joe’s ears every time their name is mentioned.

  He frowns deeply and continues, “They always seem to be one step ahead of us when it comes to crime leads. I think they must have someone on the inside. Anyway, I need you to take the bear by the horns on this one.”

  He pats my shoulder. “I’m pleased we’ve had our little chat. I feel better now. Much better.”

  Well, I’m glad someone does.

  “Start Monday. Have a good weekend if I don’t see you. Give Buntam my regards,” he adds breezily as he waves me out of the office.

  Last year we had a swear box in the office for six months and all the proceeds went to charity. It had only been going for three months when we received a letter from The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association thanking us for our donations and saying that the money was now supporting four golden retrievers. Well, I was responsible for at least two dogs and one leg of the third. As much as I am in favor of such a worthy cause, my salary only goes so far and apparently swearing is not an attractive quality in a woman. So I devised a new swearing system using fruit and vegetables which, I am happy to say, caught on here in the office. Fruit and veg you hate are bad stuff, and those you love are good. So, my new position on the police beat is TURNIPS but Pete leaving is something like apples (obviously not strawberries or anything really yummy because that’s reserved for the absolutely brilliant stuff). Now the office is littered with phrases such as, “Can you believe it? That is really, like, swede, you know?”

  Clearly the system is open to interpretation. There is one girl here who always yells, “That is so kiwi!” down the phone. We wondered if we ought to explain the system to her again until someone pointed out that she has a lifelong allergy to kiwi fruit. I really have got to find something better than this to put on my CV.

  So, the police beat is SWEDES, MARROWS, BRUSSELS SPROUTS and anything else horrible you care to mention.

  “How’s your day been?” Ben asks earnestly.

  I look at him sardonically. There’s a loaded question. We’re sitting in Henry Africa’s Hothouse for a Friday drinks-after-work thing. The giant palms are annoying me as one particularly troublesome leaf keeps scratching my head, and the setting sun is streaming through the windows and causing me to squint unattractively. Funnily enough, I’m not in the best of moods.

  “Oh. You know. A bit peculiar.” I take an almighty suck of vodka through my straw. I have wafted a little orange juice under its nose but that was only to show willing.

  “How peculiar?” He leans closer to me so that we can hear each other better in the excited, humming atmosphere of a bar on Friday night.

  I pause and rest my chin on top of my glass with the straw still in my mouth—no point in being too far away from it. I’ve never really seen the use of straws before tonight but suddenly I understand. Do you know you don’t have to move your head at all? “They’ve made me the new crime correspondent for the paper!” I say with my new straw friend to one side of my mouth, and try to smile brightly through my glass.

  “Is that good? I mean, didn’t you say it was an awful job? What happened to Percy or whatever his name was?”

  “Pete.” The giant palm tickles the top of my head again.

  “What happened to Pete?”

  I sigh deeply, breathing in vodka fumes. “Left for a job with the Daily Mail.”

  “Oh well. It’s a sort of promotion, isn’t it, really?”

  I look at him sideways. If he only knew. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Holly Colshannon, crime correspondent on the Bristol Gazette .” He sketches out my new job title in the air with his hand.

  “I suppose it sounds all right,” I say, returning my gaze to the cross-eyed examination of my ice cubes.

  “It sounds great!” Ben says boisterously. Normally a punch in the arm or a slap round the back would accompany this. This is his jollying-her-out-of-it tone. Not terribly jolly when you realize that the slap/punch in question comes from a six-foot-three rugby player.

  “Joe said he gave it to me because I did a good job on the Stacey fraud story.” The giant palm is looking for trouble now and I swat it away, trying not to lose my temper. I don’t want to be remembered in here forever as “that girl who got into a fight with a palm tree.”

  “Was that the one down at the hospital? With the shitty police officer?”

  “The very same.”

  “That was probably just a one-off. You said the other officer seemed quite nice.”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly get the opportunity to speak to him.”

  “Anything else happen?” he asks.

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “I mean, anything interesting?”

  I toy with the idea of telling him about my Buntam conversation with Joe, but decide, as I always do, that Ben wouldn’t see the funny side of Buntam. Ben is occasionally completely bemused by me and my scrapes and spends his time asking, “But how did . . . ?” and “Why did you . . . ?” in a puzzled sort of fashion.

  I shake my head and ask, “Who are you playing tomorrow?”

  “Bath.”

  “Oh,” says I in a knowledgeable sort of way. “Bath. That’ll be a difficult game.” I honestly haven’t got a clue, but I find that if I stick to ambiguous comments then I can’t come a cropper. “And will you be wearing your red shoes or your blue ones?” I ask, bringing the conversation back to more comfortable ground.

  “Holly. I have told you a hundred times. They are not shoes. They are boots. And it depends on whether the ground is wet or dry, not on what color the other team are wearing.” He smiles, leans over and kisses me affectionately on the forehead.

  Ben is boyfriend extraordinaire. He is simply perfect. I met him at an awards dinner. It was when I was the sports correspondent for the paper (before Joe found out I couldn’t tell one end of a cricket bat from the other). Ben was there to collect the “Player of the Year” trophy for the local rugby team. He gave a little acceptance speech and told the funniest joke about a Labrador, a vicar and a skateboard. Now what was the punch line? Yes. Well. Maybe you had to be there.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was dressed in the obligatory dinner jacket, his sandy hair was flopping over his face, he had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen and he glowed with the remains of a golden tan from a week’s sailing. I didn’t take one single
note for the paper all night, and the next morning I had to frantically phone round the other sports correspondents and promise them all sorts of lewd acts if they would just let me borrow theirs.

  Now, I can look OK when I want to. In fact, quite nice-looking. I am not like the advert people, of course, who wake up looking good, do a cross-country run, get the kids to school, rescue an old person and still look exactly the same. But when I take the trouble to do my hair and makeup the results can be pleasing. I am tall (about five-foot-nine, to be exact), have blond, longish hair (natural in places), freckles (yuk! Have tried lemon juice, doesn’t work), and a huge smile which I don’t think is very elegant but Lizzie assures me it is extremely jolly (which is sure-fire proof that it isn’t very elegant at all). Ben is very tall which is fantastic as I am a sucker for tall men. It is nice to slob around in his clothes and feel petite. I have always been really tall for my age. Once, at school, I went to a fancy-dress party as a flower fairy. I flounced and pirouetted around in what I imagined was a fairy-like fashion and then won second prize! For being the Jolly Green Giant . . .

  But the gods must have been smiling upon me the night I met Ben, because I sashayed up to him and not only scored a try but converted it as well.

  I, the Jolly Green Giant herself, won the jackpot.

  Still to this day, I don’t quite understand how. Because he is, as Lizzie would say, “a catch.” And now, wonder of wonders, we’ve been going out for a while; in fact, nearly a year. So, life is very good. Not perfect, but then whose is? I mean, the rugby games every Saturday do get tedious, and then of course there are the constant training sessions. Oh, and the team-bonding male thing after the games . . . But I know loads of girls who would love to go out with him so that just makes me the luckiest person ever. And I don’t want to be one of those girlfriends who is constantly nagging that I don’t see enough of him because, to be honest, it is lovely to see him at all and I know his sport is important to him. I can put up with the rugby and all that goes with it because he is near enough perfect for me. He is charming, witty, funny, great in bed . . . the list just goes on and on. And although I am not thinking about it right now, I think he is The One because what else can a girl ask for? Right?

  “Come on, Colshannon,” says Ben as he drains his pint glass, “let’s go home.”

  I resist the urge to give the palm tree a swift kicking as we leave and instead wave to the barman across a sea of people and get stuck in the revolving door for two turns before Ben pulls me out.

  Ben and I drunkenly meander back to my flat, singing rowdy rugby songs to which I don’t know any of the words but prefer to make up my own anyway.

  I live in a darling little flat in Clifton (posh part of Bristol). It’s small, but I love it so. It’s situated on the first floor of a gorgeous old Regency house and my sitting room has huge sash windows that cost me over half a month’s salary to curtain. The bedroom is at the back of the house and thankfully has smaller windows which look out over our neatly boxed communal gardens. I also have a tiny guest room which just about fits a small double bed and nothing else.

  I live alone at the moment but I am hoping that in the not-too-distant future Ben will live here too. I choose to live on my own— if you had grown up in my household then you would too. There are obvious advantages to single occupancy, one of which being, as every self-respecting hermit knows, the freedom to eat toast for supper without the many questions that accompany eating toast for supper. (Is that all you’re having? Why don’t you put some ham on that? How many vegetables have you eaten today?) Also, I don’t have to endure cohabitation with my family, who manage to take living together just those few steps closer to hell. They overstep the boundaries even nightmare flatmates respect. You have no idea how blissful it is to find everything in the fridge just the way I left it. It is a constant surprise to me to find my car still parked outside, money still in my purse and my eyebrows still intact every morning. I suppose I was a bit of an accident as I am the youngest out of five. The rest of them have been a bit pesky and although I didn’t exactly have a haloed childhood, I think, relatively speaking, I didn’t give my parents a huge amount of trouble. My brothers in particular gave my mother a lot of headaches. I remember her buying a book called How to Deal With a TroublesomeTeenager. When I asked her which brother she had bought it for, she said, “All of them. I’m either going to smack them over the head with it or stand on it so I can reach while I smack them over the head with something else.”

  We buy kebabs at the top of Park Street. Ben has everything and I have everything except the meat bit because it always looks dodgy and someone from the paper was sick for five days after he had one. But Ben has the digestion and constitution of an ox so he is never sick. We leave a Hansel and Gretel trail of salad in our wake and wander up the hill toward Clifton.

  I decide I want a piggyback halfway up one of the hills, but can’t manage to leap up on to Ben’s back. God knows how someone as uncoordinated as myself has ever managed to go out with Ben for so long. After the third attempt, Ben runs up the hill carrying one leg while the other one drags behind us and I hang halfway between.

  We fall, giggling madly, into bed.

  “Now,” says Ben, “I have an important issue I want the new crime correspondent to look into . . .”

  I am awake very early on Saturday morning, and lie in bed wondering if something awful happened to me yesterday or whether I’ve just had a bad dream. Slowly it all comes filtering back and I remember that I have been given the police beat. In view of its reputation, I don’t quite know how to feel about it. Leaving Ben sleeping, I slip out of bed in order to make some tea to quench my raging thirst. Yesterday’s events are still weighing heavily on my mind half an hour later so I go back to the bedroom to see if Ben is awake and perhaps might want to talk about it.

  He’s not. I bounce around on the bed for a while, open and shut drawers and curtains and generally make a nuisance of myself. I then check again on Ben’s slumber situation. He opens one eye and mumbles, “Holly, go away.”

  I wander back out to the hall and, in a pathetic bid for attention, pick up the phone. My finger hovers over the first digit of Lizzie’s number. Remembering her reaction last time I called so early, I redirect my finger to a different number.

  “Hi, it’s me,” I say as my mother answers.

  “Who?”

  “Me, Holly.”

  “Holly, Ho-l-ly.” She plays with the name thoughtfully in an it’s-familiar-but-I-just-can’t-place-it kind of way. This is my mother’s idea of humor and her not very subtle fashion of telling me that I haven’t called for a couple of weeks. I impatiently prompt her, “Your daughter, Holly.”

  “Ohhhh, that Holly! How nice of you to call, darling!” Despite being on the other end of the telephone a couple of hundred miles away, I smile at the long, drawling, emphatic tones of someone more accustomed to the West End than the West Country. It’s rather like talking to a demented Eliza Doolittle.

  “What’s the weather like with you?” I ask while eyeing the rivulets of water streaming down my windows.

  “Ghastly, darling. Absolutely ghastly. All this terribly healthy sea air. I nearly gag every time I take a deep breath. I’m having to smoke twenty a day now just to make up for it. Can you imagine? TWENTY a day. It’s going to drive me to an early grave.” Despite her protestations and passionate soliloquies on London smog, I have a fancy that my mother actually enjoys the countryside, but of course she couldn’t possibly admit to it.

  “How’s the play?” My mother has managed to persuade the entire cast of the latest play she is starring in to start rehearsals down in Cornwall. The director, a longtime friend, agreed only because it stops her causing chaos elsewhere. One of the problems of starting a new play is that she partly assumes the identity of whichever character she’s playing. This time it’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest . The whole family breathed a collective sigh of relief when the last run of Daphne du M
aurier’s My Cousin Rachel ended.

  “Your father came to the last rehearsal and one of the new actors asked him if he had any advice. He told him to say his lines and not fall over the furniture.”

  “Well, that’s quite good advice.”

  “It is, isn’t it? How’s the delectable Ben?”

  A silly smile comes over my face at the mere mention of him and I wind the telephone flex around my fingers.

  “Oh, he’s fine. Really good, in fact. He’s still asleep at the moment. How are Dad and Morgan?” Morgan is my mother’s Pekinese. He is absolutely ancient and only has two teeth left at the back of his mouth. This is very amusing when he tries to bite other dogs as he has to sort of suck them for a while first.

  “He’s a little flatulent.” I sincerely hope she is talking about Morgan and not my father. “How’s work?” she asks.

  “You’re talking to the new crime correspondent on the Bristol Gazette! It’s a kind of promotion, I think!”

  My mother gives a very suitable gasp of admiration and says, “That’s wonderful!” I grin down the phone. One of the advantages of having an actress for a mother is that you always get a good reaction. “But what happened to the, er, Possum bloke? Didn’t he have the police thing before you?”

  “Pete. Although Possum would have been a better name for him. He got a job with the Daily Mail.”

  “Serves him right.” Sometimes my mother’s idea of a person’s comeuppance doesn’t quite tally with my own.

  “Crime correspondent is not a great post.”

  “Darling, you can turn it around. I am sure you will do brilliantly. Shit MacGregor! Stop it, Morgan! OFF! Darling, I have to go. Morgan is on the table eating the Stilton.”