Playing James

by Sarah Mason

  The only way he would have got on to the table is when she put him there while she answered the phone. I say goodbye.

  “Love to Lizzie!” she says and rings off.

  three

  On Monday I try to delay the inevitable by spending the best part of an hour tidying my in-tray, sending e-mails to friends and gassing with the people in accounts. I really ought to be making a move down to the police station to take up the mantle of my new position but I just can’t face it yet.

  I have been reflecting on my rapid shift in job direction over the weekend and from a positive viewpoint I suppose there will be no more pet funerals and maybe “Crime Correspondent on the Bristol Gazette ” does sound quite good. Sexy, even. And I will be on more high-profile stuff which is obviously great.

  With uncanny timing, Joe pops his head around the partitioning. He frowns.

  “Holly, what are you still doing here? Have you got a death wish? You know a stationary stone gathers lots of stuff. Get. Down. To. The. Police station! There could have been ten robberies, kidnaps or arson attacks while you have been sitting here!”

  I leap up, make lots of “I was just on my way” sorts of noises, gather a notepad and pencils, pick up my bag and set off. I feel like Maria out of The Sound of Music when Mother Superior sends her off to the Von Trapps for the first time. Perhaps a quick chorus of “My Favorite Things” will help.

  Maybe not.

  I rev Tristan up and we depart in a cloud of carbon monoxide. I have to say I am feeling nervous. I hate being the new kid on the block—not knowing your way around or who everyone is. Not knowing that the coffee machine always gives you soup instead of hot chocolate or never to talk to your boss after Arsenal have lost. Those little nuances of familiarity that make everyday life comfortable.

  The police station is a large, ugly, concrete building on the edge of the city center. I haven’t been in it before—well, that is to say on a professional basis. I have been in there on a non-professional basis. Lizzie and I were arrested once for taking a shortcut through someone’s garden. It was the dead of night and we were staggering home from a nightclub. As we were scrambling down the other side of a large wall the owner of the garden had rather selfishly built, we were highlighted by a set of headlamps, duly arrested and carted off down here to the police station. A little harsh perhaps for what was, after all, just a spot of garden-hopping, but it turned out that the one we had been hopping through belonged to the local juvenile home and the police thought we were escaping reprobates. As soon as they realized their mistake, by checking with the appropriate authorities, we were rather hastily dusted down and thrown with great alacrity back out onto the streets. I could have done without the rather enlightening hour in the police cells beforehand though.

  I’m not too sure what the procedure is (the professional police reporter procedure that is, not the common criminal one). Normally the last correspondent talks you through it but Smug Pete has already left, and in view of my relationship with him I think it would have been distinctly unwise anyway. He would probably have had me parking in the High Commissioner’s parking space and giving everyone Freemason handshakes. I could just imagine him trying to convince me that comments from reporters are always welcome in a court of law, and if silence is called for when I start to speak it’s just to make sure I can continue uninterrupted.

  I think I will just have a chat with someone in the police PR department, be charming, play the “I’m new around here” card and maybe they’ll give me a clue on what to do next.

  As I enter the hallowed portals of the station there are a few people milling about in the reception area, but I head for the front desk and wait patiently for the desk sergeant to look up from his work. He doesn’t. I can tell we’re going to be good friends. He is dressed in uniform. A white shirt and black tie and one of those rather attractive navy blue fisherman-like jumpers.

  Still without looking up, he snaps, “Yes?”

  “Er, could you tell me where the PR department is please?”

  “You are?” he barks, continuing with his work.

  “Holly Colshannon, new crime correspondent for the Bristol Gazette.” At this point I am nearly prostrate on the desk with my head in his lap in a bid to get him to make eye contact with me.

  “ID please.” I hand it over and at last he looks up to check the physical likeness to my mugshot.

  He frowns as he stares down at the photo and then looks back up. I helpfully scrape my fringe forward, tilt my head to one side and pull a face.

  “Now I see it,” he snaps, dropping the ID card disdainfully back over the counter. As always when faced with disapproval, my mouth goes into overdrive.

  “I know it doesn’t look much like me, but you see, you’ll laugh at this . . . well, maybe not . . . anyway, my paper had just won ‘Local Newspaper of the Year’ which of course caused a hell of a strop from the Journal and naturally I’d had one or maybe two drinkies and—”

  He interrupts my rambling by barking, “Have you been here before?”

  I jump. There is no way I am going to own up to the escaping juvenile debacle. Especially to him. My voice leaps up at least an octave with nerves and I stammer, “First time, actually, inside any police station. Not terribly jolly is it? I mean, a couple of pot plants here and there and perhaps a sofa with a few scatter cushions would soon—”

  An acerbic voice behind me breaks my monologue.

  “I really hate to interrupt your Changing Rooms appraisal, fascinating as it is, but . . .”

  I turn around with a nervous apology hovering on my lips, only to find a pair of very familiar green eyes looking at me.

  “Oh. It’s you,” he says in the same way Churchill would have greeted Himmler if they’d happened to meet while holidaying on the Riviera.

  He had me there. “You’re absolutely right. It is me.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I happen to be the new crime correspondent!”

  “Oh, wonderful. That’s all we need.”

  He turns toward the desk sergeant, who almost becomes animated. Almost.

  “Morning sir.”

  “Morning Dave. How are you? The wife and kids OK?”

  “Fine, thank you, sir.” Yuk! I think I’m going to be sick. The desk sergeant hands over some papers to him and Green Eyes moves away. He must be someone reasonably important as (a) he was called “sir” and (b) he is dressed in mufti. Terrific. I haven’t even gained entrance to the building and I have managed to annoy someone I shouldn’t have. I go back to the desk sergeant and say in a very small voice, “Could you tell me the way to the PR department please?”

  He duly snaps out a couple of loose directions, buzzes me through the security door and I scamper away as fast as I can. My encounter with Green Eyes has unnerved me a little. What a complete boiled cabbage.

  I scuttle up several flights of stairs and along some corridors. This place reminds me, not a little, of a school. Maybe it’s the faintly dodgy smell of canteen food wafting from somewhere or the impersonal gray rooms. I can tell it’s not going to be anything like the offices at the Bristol Gazette. No cozy gossips around the coffee machine or long boozy lunches.

  The PR department is situated on the second floor and has nothing to distinguish it from any of the other wooden doors that line the corridor except for the smallest sign I have ever seen for a PR office. I knock and wait patiently. No answer, so I knock again and poke my head around the door.

  “Hello?” There is no one visible in the room, so I say again, “Hello?”

  I know I said there was no one in the room, but they could be hiding in a cupboard or something. And you know what? I’m going to hide in a cupboard as soon as I find myself a comfy one.

  There are some muffled noises coming from underneath a desk and a woman pops up and triumphantly holds out her finger to me. She is drop dead, stuff-it-up-your-jumper glamorous. She is dressed in what looks to my distinctly unpracticed eye to be Versace, Chan
el or something else with a many-zeroed price tag. Something you wouldn’t want to be scrabbling under desks in anyway. She balances on six-inch heels. If I tried to wear shoes like that I would be in Casualty before you could say, “Holly, you don’t look very stable.” Her dark hair is scraped back off her face in a neat little chignon and her freshly manicured nails are painted a sassy red. Her makeup has an elegance that would take me hours to achieve. And maybe not even then. She looks hopelessly out of place among the shabby office furniture. Her outfit looks as if it cost more than the yearly department budget. My first thought is what on earth is someone like this, who should be running multi-million campaigns from a flashy London agency, doing heading up the PR department of a police station?

  “There it is!” she exclaims. “Dropped one of my pills! I’m Robin! I’m the new head of PR. Well, relatively new anyway.”

  As I step forward, I glance down to her desk and try to catch the name on her pills. Not that I’m horribly nosy—it’s just a reflex action, as automatic as a dentist checking out your teeth. “Holly Colshannon,” I say, just managing to catch the word “Prozac” before having to look back up.

  She gives me a firm, brisk handshake. “Delighted to meet you, Holly. I only came down from London a couple of months ago and I’m still getting used to everything so you’ll have to show me the ropes a little.”

  “Er, actually, I’m new as well.”

  “Do you fancy a coffee?”

  “You’ve found the canteen then?”

  “Sweetie, it was my first port of call,” she says, leading the way out of the room.

  I think I have found the origin of that school dinner smell which determinedly hovers in the air. The canteen is in the basement of the building and seems to be run mainly by extras from Prisoner Cell Block H. Despite the less than salubrious surroundings, my eye is instantly drawn to a shiny new coffee machine which sits proudly on a stainless steel surface behind the counter. Coffee heaven.

  “I’m afraid it’s quite basic here,” Robin whispers loudly as we make our way toward the counter. “When I first arrived they had no idea what a skinny latte was! It was as though I was talking double Dutch! I had to make a hell of a row to persuade them to buy a proper coffee machine!” I think “hell of a row” would be somewhat of an understatement looking at the mutinous faces before me. I fervently hope my coffee will arrive intact and without additions of spittle, razor blades or boiled cabbage water.

  “We’re a bit stuck on cappuccinos at the moment,” Robin adds. “Whatever type of coffee you ask for, you always seem to get a cappuccino. I suspect it’s the novelty factor for them.”

  I suspect it is a small mutiny against the formidable Robin.

  We order and pay for two cappuccinos and walk slowly toward a small table at the back of the room, carefully balancing our cups of frothy coffee. We sit down.

  “So,” Robin says briskly, shaking down a sachet of sweetener, “which paper did you say you were from, Holly?”

  “Bristol Gazette. It’s the largest local paper.”

  She immediately looks wary. “I met your predecessor. What was his name?”

  “Pete.”

  “Yes, that’s him. Where’s he gone?”

  “He’s left for another job. With the Daily Mail,” I add.

  She raises her eyebrows and her mouth forms an “oh.”

  “It’s OK. You needn’t be polite about him. We didn’t get on.”

  She looks relieved. “Oh, good. I mean, he was just a bit . . .”

  “Smug?”

  “Yes. Smug.” We both sip our coffee.

  We chat about various things until I get around to asking the question I have been dying to ask since we met. I drop it casually, bang into the middle of the conversation.

  “So, what brought you to Bristol?”

  It might be my imagination but I am sure there is a sudden wariness in her eyes.

  “I worked in London. In advertising,” she says shortly. A-ha! “I just thought I needed a change.”

  “Quite a change. And to join the police department as well.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  We both nod our heads energetically for a bit. For the first time a small silence ensues and I know for whatever reason she doesn’t want to talk about this. One of the major rules of reporting is to let silences run and never break them yourself, the theory being that people hate gaps in conversation and will very often say anything to fill them. But my annoying and boring sense of fair play asserts itself. I am not interviewing Robin for the paper, I am just being nosy about her life. I decide not to further compound her discomfort and say, “It was a bit of a shock to find out I’d been given the police beat.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it’s not been, that is to say, historically speaking, the best post in the world.”

  I go on to explain about the past situation and what a terrible job crime correspondent is supposed to be. She frowns into her coffee and says slowly, “Well, we’re just going to have to do something about it, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t really know what can be done because it has been like that for as long as I can remember. Once there was this guy, Rob, who inherited the beat and he actually hid in the back of one of the patrol cars. I mean, he only wanted to see a crime scene firsthand. But you should have heard the fuss . . .”

  While I am speaking, I am busy scooping the froth off my coffee and sucking it from the spoon. At this not very attractive point in my existence, Green Eyes marches into the canteen holding a pile of paperwork. I have only just managed to extract the spoon from my esophagus and close my mouth by the time he has nodded at Robin and situated himself at the other end of the room. Robin sits there, staring at him.

  “Robin?”

  She looks at me distractedly. “You’ve given me an idea. We could turn this whole thing around, Holly. We could. Imagine what it would do for us! You could have your own column and I could go back to London in a trail of glory sooner than I ever dreamed!”

  You can tell Robin works in PR, can’t you? And why does she want to go back to London in a trail of glory? But I am anxious to hear any advice about my rapidly submerging career at this point and her obvious enthusiasm is a little infectious.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Good-looking isn’t he?” She is staring over at Green Eyes.

  “Er, yes, yes, he is. What is this idea?”

  “Very boy-next-door.”

  I take another look at Green Eyes. What sort of boys did she live next door to? I don’t know about you but I always got spotty skateboarders obsessed with Adam Ant, certainly no resemblance to this beauty. Not that I would have liked him living next door to me, especially after savoring the delights of his lashing tongue. God knows what he would have said about my legwarmer phase.

  Robin swiftly starts to gather up her stuff. “Come on, I’ll show you the ropes and then I’ll talk to the Chief about my idea.”

  Back in the PR office, she shows me the report basket where all the press releases detailing crimes committed get placed for the reporters. We simply come up here and help ourselves to a copy. She absolutely refuses to say anything more about this idea of hers, except for winking and asking if I will be back tomorrow, and after a while I give up my line of questioning altogether. I gather three press releases from the basket and make my way back to the car park and Tristan.

  Back at the paper’s offices, I peruse the reports. Not terribly exciting; one act of car vandalism by students (now I am not a student myself I take enormous delight in raising my eyes heavenwards, tutting and saying, “Students, tsk, would you believe it?”), one joy-rider and one bank-note scam. Picking the most interesting of the lot, the bank-note one in case you’re wondering, I start to make a few phone calls. It gets interesting and, before you know it, it’s half-past five when I file copy. Maybe crime correspondent is going to work out OK. I take great care to be polite to the detective on the case even though he makes it clear I am
bothering him, and I don’t make one disheartening reference to the police in my report. Robin’s positive attitude is catching. Maybe I, Holly Colshannon, can turn this around. Maybe I can make them like me.

  We’re back to The Sound of Music again, aren’t we? Carrots.

  Lizzie is coming over tonight. We usually spend Monday nights together as a sort of a solace. A tribute to the start of the working week. We have a bottle of wine, maybe some ice cream. Sometimes we watch a video, sometimes we just talk. Ben is normally at rugby practice on Monday nights and Alastair is always working (but that’s not just Monday nights).

  Lizzie is fine after the condom incident. In fact, we both had pretty much forgotten about it by the next morning, although one tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and numerous videos on Thursday evening did help. There was still no sign of Alastair over the entire weekend although Lizzie did claim he had been called away to an important meeting in London. It does make me wonder how serious he is about her. I am completely prejudiced though because who wouldn’t want to be with Lizzie? It is a mystery to me why he spends so much time working and lets her loose in my debauched company. She is mad about him and I am hoping this is just a natural cooling-off of the relationship on his side, which always happens after the initial can’t-keep-my-hands-off-you phase.

  As I buzz Lizzie in, I swing my head around the front door of my flat and wait for her to climb the stairs. She appears a couple of seconds later, grasping a bottle of wine in one hand and two Kinder eggs in the other. Her long dark hair hangs in a gleaming sheet on to her shoulders and her D-cup breasts jig about as she jogs up on her long, gazelle-like legs to the top step. Lizzie has an extra cup size on me which I would be very glad of, but she complains about it a lot. Do you know the test where you’re supposed to be able to clasp a pencil underneath your breasts? Well, Lizzie grumbles that she can not only clasp several pencils but also a ruler, a protractor and a large eraser too.