I turned back around and pulled the sides of the pillow up around my hung-over ears to try to drown out the snoring of the stranger beside me.
Why the hell did I have to bring her back with me? Now I’d be stuck with her all morning. I glanced at the clock by my bed – 11.22 a.m. Ah shite, now I was late for work again too. At least Ed wasn’t around any more to give me grief about it – that was something, I suppose.
Ed had moved out by the time me and my broken nose and stitched-up eye got home from hospital after the lunch. I’d been dying to get him out of my house for two years, but not like that – definitely not like that. I hadn’t spoken to him or Lucy since that day – neither of them would take any of my calls, and I wasn’t surprised. I knew they’d never forgive me, so I drank to try to forget about it, to get through the days.
I hadn’t seen much of the lads since that day either. I knew I was a miserable git to be around, so rather than inflict myself on anyone that mattered to me, I withdrew. No doubt they all thought badly of me for messing with Ben’s family anyway.
I did think about trying to get in contact with Mel McQuaid a couple of times. I thought I should probably try to apologise for getting personal the last time I bumped into her a couple of weeks after the lunch. I was in particularly shite form that night, and she pissed me off by pretending to pick me up – all for her friends’ sake. A guy has feelings after all! But all that aside, I was actually kind of happy to see Mel again that time – even if things hadn’t finished up particularly well. So I did mean to try to get in touch with the girl, but like so many other things over those six months, I never quite got around to it.
About the only thing that gave me any meaningful link to the rest of the world around then was work. It wasn’t always easy getting my act together to go in every day, but I forced myself to do it – I needed to work. At least, I needed something.
It was just before lunch by the time I got in to work that day. I almost wished I’d stayed in bed – winter had really set in, the rain was pelting down and it was freezing cold outside. I was glad to get into the office and get a hot cup of coffee and a couple more painkillers into me, and was just going through my emails when Jeff, our junior business correspondent, popped his head around my office door.
“Hi, Richard, Edith’s looking for you, said to drop in to her as soon as you get in.”
Shite.
“Right, okay, thanks, man.”
Edith Maguire had been in the newspaper game for over twenty-seven years and I’d worked with her at the Chronicle for fifteen of them. Her husband Kevin and her son Jason were both past pupils of Ashvale. Jason was arguably Ashvale’s best-ever full-back – he ended up playing for Ireland for well over a decade, lucky sod. I’ve no idea where he got his stocky build from though – his parents were both tiny. But you couldn’t let Edith’s size fool you – she was the best in the business, a tough old bird, and we’d had more than our fair share of run-ins over the years – most of which she won.
Well, she can’t have a go at me today, I thought. I’m sure I filed my article on time before hitting the pub last night.
At least I think I did.
“It was too late, Richard. We went to press over an hour before you filed your copy. I couldn’t hold it any longer. Why the hell didn’t you answer your phone?”
“Ah sorry, Edith, mustn’t have heard it.”
Which may have had something to do with the all-night bender I’d been on the previous night as well. Edith’s PA had emailed me the tip-off in the morning, but I didn’t get round to opening my emails till lunchtime, and didn’t really start digging around on the story proper until later in the afternoon.
“We can get it into tomorrow’s edition, can’t we?” I knew I was grasping, but it was worth a try.
“Yes, indeed we can, Richard, but, you know, there’s just one catch. The one small thing I think you might be forgetting about the news – it sort of needs to be, eh, new?”
I hated when she did the sarcastic thing.
She took off her glasses. “The Times, Indo and every other paper in town are going to be all over this story today. This should have been ours, Richard – it was on a plate for us. It’s not often we get a leak on a good lead business story like this.” She threw her pen down on the desk. “No wonder our readership figures are slipping.”
Crap. The readership figures. When she started on about those, I knew I was in trouble.
“All right, Edith. I messed up. Won’t happen again.” I stood up to go.
“Really? It’s not going to happen again? Because it seems to be happening a lot lately, Richard.” She got up from behind her desk, and walked around to face me. She had to stand several feet back from me to look me in the eye. Edith hated looking up at people.
“Can you sit back down, please, Richard?”
“Sorry, Edith, no can do. I’ve got to get going, busy schedule today.”
“Perhaps you might have tried coming into the office on time then?” She pointed to the chair. “Sit, please.”
I flopped back down. I knew I was behaving like a petulant teenager, but I didn’t care. The painkillers hadn’t made much of an impact on my headache, and I was not in the mood for Edith’s crap.
She sat down on the front of her desk next to me, and then, surprisingly, her tone changed. “Richard, are you okay?”
“Ye-eees,” I said, trying to work out where this was going. “I’m fine.”
“Really? Because you’re looking pretty rough. When was the last time you had a haircut?” She reached out and ruffled my hair as though I was a kid. “And would there be any chance you might remember to shave before coming into work?”
I swatted her hand off. “Would there be any chance you could lay off, Edith? Not being my mother and all?”
Edith laughed. “Rose would have something to say about the hair too, I’d imagine.”
She was really beginning to piss me off. I’d always hated the fact that my boss and my mother were friends – the Ashvale Mothers’ network was way too close for my liking.
Edith cleared her throat. “And I heard that you missed the Ashvale golf outing last week. You normally go every year, don’t you?”
“It clashed with something else, that’s all.”
“Mmm.” She squinted at me, as though she was trying to make out some small print. “Well, maybe you should consider laying off the booze for a while? Take some time out?”
I shoved my chair back. “Jesus, Edith, I’m fine, okay? Everything is absolutely fine. Sorry about the story – won’t happen again.”
She held her hand up to stop me.
I may have been pissed off, but I wasn’t stupid – I sat back down.
“Forget about that now, Richard.” She paused and looked at me for a few more seconds, then walked back around to her chair and sat down. “I have a new assignment for you, Mr Blake.” She put her glasses back on and picked up a piece of paper from the desk. “I want to try you on something different for a time. You’ve mentioned to me on several occasions that you’d like to do more feature work, so I’m asking Jeff to take on the business-and-economics desk for a few weeks.”
“You’re what? No way, Edith!”
But she was taking no prisoners. She fixed me with a stare that assured me as much.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Do you remember the whale-in-the-Thames piece you wrote last year?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“It was good, Richard. Very good in fact. I’d like to see more.”
“Come on, Edith. Enough already. I’m busy, I don’t have time for this.”
She just smiled and looked at the page in her hand. “In a few days’ time the international environmental protection agency, Greenpeace –”
“The Save the Whale brigade?”
“Yes, indeed, Richard, the very ones.” She cleared her throat, and continued reading. “In a few days Greenpeace –”she glanced up at me over
her glasses, “expect to be leaving Shimonoseki in Japan to tail the whaling fleet down to Antarctica. The Japanese persist in whaling out in the Southern Ocean despite a 1986 moratorium – apparently the whalers operate under some legal loophole that allows them to hunt a quota of whales under the guise of scientific research.” She tapped the page. “Greenpeace point out here that thousands of whales have been killed through this loophole, but no credible research findings have yet been produced. They say that, in reality, scientific whaling projects are just poorly disguised commercial operations and attempts to see a return to full-scale commercial whaling.” She put the page down. “So Greenpeace will be tailing the fleet in order to throw a spotlight on the whaling programme, and to communicate to the world what the Japanese are doing. The publicity will help Greenpeace to advocate for an increase in pressure from international governments and people doing business with Japan. The whaling controversy is severely damaging Japan’s image both at home and abroad, and the hope is that growing pressure from the international community might even cause the hunt to be cancelled or scaled back this year.” She paused, took off her glasses and looked at me. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a time that we need to cover more environmental issues, so I want to run a short series of features on this expedition – not the usual ‘vulnerable whales versus big-bad-Japan’ type of thing. I want us to come at it from a different angle, to explore the human side to the story. On board the – eh –” she picked the page up and put her glasses on again, “ah yes, on board the Illuminar . . . that’s the name of the ship Greenpeace are sending down there.” She looked up at me with a smirk.
I just stared at her. I was sorry about the whaling, but I had no idea why she was telling me about it, or what it had to do with me. I didn’t for one minute buy her line about my whale-in-the-Thames piece.
But she was still rambling on. “On board the Illuminar will be a young Irish couple – newlyweds. They’re part of the crew that will be going out to publicise the actions of the whaling fleet and, if needs be, to get between the whalers’ harpoons and the whales themselves,” she looked up, “which all sounds very dangerous to me, to be honest. These activists really do place themselves in such risky positions. Remember what happened with the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985? And that poor photographer that was drowned? That was really shocking.” She shook her head. “Anyway, I want to know what makes a couple of young newlyweds from Ireland travel halfway around the world to spend months at sea and put themselves in grave danger from harpoons and the elements. Is it for the love of the whales? For the love of adventure? Or for the love of each other?”
She must finally be losing it, I thought. Had to happen eventually, I suppose. Tough game, the newspaper business – the old girl’s done well for twenty-seven years – sad to see her start to fall apart really.
“This story potentially has it all, Richard,” Edith was saying. “Young love, heroic adventures, majestic leviathans. It has the making of a great epic!” By this stage her eyes were almost popping out of their sockets.
Yep – the old girl had definitely lost it.
“Ri-iight. Okay, Edith,” I said, nodding slowly. “That’s very interesting.”
But she ignored me. “Greenpeace expect to be joined by a TV crew in about two to three weeks’ time, so they’ll need the space on board back then. They’re planning to make a stop somewhere like Tasmania or New Zealand to refuel and pick up the TV crew, before heading south to Antarctica – so wherever the refuelling stop is will be your drop-off point.”
She sat back in her seat and flashed me a big smile. “So what do you think?”
I laughed. “I think if you’re finished with the whaling waffle, Edith, I need to get back to my actual work.”
“Mmm . . . So anyway, Richard,” she picked up an envelope from her desk, “your London flight is tomorrow evening for an early Thursday-morning flight to Japan – everything you need to know is in here.”
She threw the envelope at me, and my old rugby reflexes kicked in – I caught the damned thing.
“You’ll need to get to know the newlyweds, Ray and Sinéad. Dig deep. I’d like to know exactly what it is about these whales that has them and . . .” she looked at the brief again, “‘millions of people worldwide coming together to save a thousand whales, including fifty humpback whales’. They say the humpback whale is actually an endangered species.”
“Are you finished now?” I asked.
Edith nodded, and sat back in her chair. She had a smug grin on her face that needed to be eradicated as quickly as possible.
I leaned forward. “No!”
But she just kept smiling.
“No bloody way, Edith. If you think for one minute that I am going to go to Japan of all places to interview two idiot whale-huggers, then you have completely lost it!”
Edith just sat there, looking amused.
“Why? Just tell me. Why the hell are you asking me to do this? Surely one of your fluffy supplement freelancers or actual feature-writers would jump at this one – a nice jolly overseas? An ocean cruise at that? They’d be happy as pigs in shit.”
Edith still didn’t react. But there was no way I was taking this lying down.
“Why do you want me to go anyway?” I said, this time a lot louder. “What? Just because I wrote some sentimental crap a year ago about a whale who was stupid enough to swim up the wrong channel? It doesn’t add up, Edith. Why the hell are you sending me?”
She stopped looking amused, leaned over her desk and fixed me with a stare. “Because, Richard. It may surprise you to know that I have a quota of depressed, irritable, overdrinking, lecherous journalists on my staff. And right at this moment, I am at my absolute limit.” Her own voice got louder then. “I am tired of picking up the pieces of your sloppy work over the past six months. I am sick of signing off P45s for lovelorn interns that you’ve seduced and tossed aside.”
I tried to interrupt to defend myself, but she was on a roll, driving the knife deeper and deeper into the carnage of my pathetic life.
“But most of all, Richard, I am fed up of having to look at your unshaven, miserable mug every morning. Actually no, sorry, I mean afternoon – I can’t remember the last time you actually made it into the office before noon.” She walked around the desk, leaned over and put her hands on each arm of my chair to eyeball me a few inches from my face. “So, Mr Blake, if you don’t get your sorry ass out to Japan, and if you don’t send me back a series of shit-hot features from the Pacific Ocean, then you can kiss your beloved business-and-economics desk goodbye once and for all.”
She drew herself up to her full height, all five-foot-nothing of her. “Do I make myself clear?”
She had me. I was furious, but I knew when I was beaten.
I looked away from her. “This is a pile of shite, Edith, and you know it.”
“Good. I am so glad to hear you’re on board, Richard.” She laughed. “See what I did there? On board? Brilliant!” She cackled away to herself as she went back over to sit at her desk.
“Yeah, hilarious.” I stood up. “So can I go now? Or would you like to stab me in the leg too? Or perhaps the arm? You’ll be glad to hear you’ve finished on the back.” I walked to the door.
“Well, there is just one more thing, Richard –”
I turned around. “What now?”
“Don’t forget to pack your thermals. I hear it can get pretty chilly out at sea at night.”
“Fuck off, Edith!”
“Thanks, sweetie. You can close the door on your w–”
But I’d already given it a good slam. It was about all I could do to salvage the last remaining shred of my manhood.
Chapter 6
RICHARD
She didn’t relent. I don’t know if Edith even read the lengthy protest email I sent her, but the following evening I found myself packed, pissed-off and passenger in a taxi on my way to the airport. And as if bloody Japan wasn’t bad enough, as about the only person
who would actually care or even notice that I’d be out of the country for a few weeks I’d called my Aunt Sheila the night before. Which proved to be a big mistake – she’d guilted me into going to see my mother on my stopover in London on the way.
These bloody women were ruining my life.
I rang the doorbell of my mother’s house, and waited for a few seconds before turning my key in the door and letting myself in.
She met me in the hallway. “You’re very late, Richard – I thought you said you’d be here by eight?”
“And hello to you too, Mother. Nice to see you.”
I walked past her down the hall into the living room which led into the small galley kitchen. It was, as always, just like stepping back into my childhood – nothing had changed in all the years. The electric fire was still burning in front of the fireplace, my mother’s armchair was perched beside the fire, and the living-room table was already set for the next meal – two places.
My mother followed me in. “Where are the rest of your bags? I thought you were going for a few weeks?”
Almost a year since we’d spoken and my bags were all she could ask about.
“Did you not pack more than that? Sheila said you were going for at least two or three weeks. You’ll need more than that, Richard. At least one more jumper in case it gets cold.”
I handed her the bunch of flowers I’d picked up at the airport. Then I took off my coat, put it on the back of a chair and rested my daypack down.
She sighed and put the flowers down on the table, then picked up my coat and went out to hang it up in the hall. Coming back into the room, she took the flowers and walked into the kitchen. I heard her rummage in the cupboard then run the tap.
I followed her in, then said as patiently as I could manage: “I left my big bag at the airport – they have a left-luggage area there. So how are you, Mother?”
Look into the Eye Page 6