Hack

by Graham Johnson

  ‘But what was really going on?’ I asked myself, kicking back in the seat. The countryside flew past like scenery in a puppet show. Getting more raggedy. Gloomier. Deeper. What was the bigger picture, trickily flickering away in the background? That was the real question. Steve and I traded knowing daggers. We were being left down here. Swinging in the wind. On our own. The Editor’s Special, ours alone to savour. Our Thing. For Made Men only. But why? What was the real reason behind Ray’s sudden U-turn? To keep Ricky’s prying eyes away? To exclude his uninitiated ways? So that the masters of the dark arts could work their magic? In private? Or was it really the case that Ray needed Ricky to work on another story? Who the fuck knows? All of it a total head wrecker. Agendas round here were deeper than ‘Who shot the president?’

  Bodmin Parkway was a ghost station. Autumn light fading fast. Too late to do proper pictures. Steve knocked off a few frames. But the plan was to get up handy the next day. Do the rest early doors. Then send Ricky on his way. Back to the office with the film. Darkness descended over the moors. My hotel bed was snuggly. Raindrops tapped on the window like a niggle.

  Sun up. Morning Glory wank. Straight on to the clean sheets. Be dry in an hour – did chamber maids ever notice these things? Did I give a fuck? Not really. By now I was selfish to the point of mania. Downstairs on autopilot for The Full English. Then straight down the bog before we got off. Five or six papers, slid under my door on expenses, turning to mush on the sweating bathroom floor. An animal marking out his territory. Going through the motions.

  Then we drove out on to the moors in the hire car to do the photo shoot. Dressed as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. In the costumes we’d hired from London before we left. Steve couldn’t remember Ricky being around – maybe he’d gone back. Neither of us gave a fuck anyway. It didn’t matter. We knew we were the only ones that mattered. Steve took pictures of me creeping around a disused watermill, near an abandoned copper mine. Stooped over a magnifying glass, held half-way between my face and the ground. The classic Holmes pose. Hooked calabash pipe, favoured by actors because it stayed in your mouth without you holding it, freeing up your hands for the shot. Swished-up in tweed plus fours and matching cape. Run up in pretty crumby material, I thought, the way fakes are. Topped off with a checkered deerstalker, which looked incongruously tattier, as though it had been brought in by mistake from another get-up.

  Ricky’s Dr Watson tramped behind or was he? Already turning into a mirage – like a dream. But his tension was real enough. Stressing, because he was going to get bollocked by Ray if he didn’t get off quick. The show was interrupted by a happy-clappy family of outdoor walker types. Off-handedly, we explained to the outsiders what we were doing. Dismissively, in fact, the way film people do to onlookers on location. The walkers fascinated by the glamorous media people who laughed a little too loudly. Curious about how they made their living from doing pointless things. But slightly scared off by their over-confidence.

  After Ricky had left, both Steve and I kept up the pretence of taking the job seriously. Neither of us wanting to be the first to speaketh the taboo out loud. Plodding on, playing it straight. A charade for each other’s benefit really. But deep down, both knowing that our fragile manufacture of consent was built on a fraud. Understanding that it wouldn’t be long before the parts wore out.

  That afternoon, we went to interview one of the councillors who’d claimed to have sighted the Beast. The planning committee chairwoman was a bit gruff and guarded, the way the Cornish can be. Cornwall brought back bad memories. I’d first come down here four years earlier, to do unpaid work experience on a small newspaper in Truro. Skint and desperate to escape the depression-ravaged City of Infinite Doom. By night, I rented out strangers’ bedrooms for cash to crash in. By day, I shoplifted Chinese chicken wings and shampoo from Marks & Spencer. Security-wise, it was wide open down there because everyone was so babes-in-the-wood. But the hardships born by robbing and roughing it were worth it in the end. Like an Ayn Rand hero battling against the fury of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, I eventually gegged a staff job on the local Falmouth Packet weekly.

  That afternoon, I interviewed a few other Beast of Bodmin witnesses. Then Ray asked for some quotes from a zoologist. A respectable academic who’d lend authority to the piece, which was rapidly becoming thinner than the unlined blag-tweed on my cape. But none of the universities that I called would play ball. Academics are scared of their own shadow because of all this peer review bollocks they stress each other out with. Unless it’s one of their own scams of course, such as blagging some funding, in which case they’ll come up with the right numbers, right off the bat. They really are the pits.

  In the end, the only person who would speak to me on the record was a crank who claimed to be a Beast expert. Calling himself a crypto-zoologist, whatever the fuck that was. Dedicating his life to the search for animals whose existence had not yet been proven, such as unicorns and Bigfoot. For fuck’s sake! What was going on? This was the News of the Screws. The World’s Number One Guttersnipe. Not the fucking Fortean Times. What the fuck was Rebekah doing? Lining herself up with all these whacked-out National Enquirer types? I was a stormtrooper in the world’s most vicious nuclear news holocaust. The bones of my victims crunching underfoot. Now I was chasing ghosts around like Dan Aykroyd. But crypto-person would have to do. Any turd can be polished up into an expert. Just watch the pundits on the news, if you don’t believe me. I did a phoner with him from my hotel bed. Wasn’t so bad after all – I could boost his phony credentials by throwing in some of the expert-sounding techno-talk that he came out with. Quite nicely, his pseudo-scientific term for phantom cats was ABCs. AKA Alien Big Cats. Which had a kind of nice, X-Filesy, kind of FBI ring to it.

  ‘They’re also called cryptids,’ he added.

  ‘Yes mate,’ I said. ‘I can imagine. I’ll call you back when I get some more evidence . . . you can cast your expert eye over it and tell me what’s what.’ Knowing that he’d say anything about anything if I asked him – or paid him. Either way would do. I rang off and turned over for a little kip before tea.

  When the pressure is on, a day feels like a long time in journalism. I checked in with Ray that night. A sliver of impatient menace in his voice. Disappointment that I didn’t have anything dynamite to feed Rebekah. Ray said that the Sherlock Holmes photos that Ricky had couriered back to the office had been too ‘light-hearted’. But most of the pressure was self-made. Coming from the remnants of my own soul. My desire not to let Ray down. Not to let Rebekah down.

  That night I discussed the grave situation with Steve. Based on what Ray had said, we concluded that Ray was under pressure from Rebekah to make her pet project as sensational as possible. So that she could impress Rupert Murdoch in Phil Hall’s absence. Subtly, the thrust of the story was changing. Instead of pretending to look for clues to the Beast’s existence, now the imperative was to find the Beast itself. Oh dear!

  ‘Ridiculous,’ said Steve. ‘It’s never going to happen. Forget about it.’ Instead he set about cheering me up over dinner in the hotel restaurant. North London Jewish of the old school – funny, over-the-top, sharp. One minute he was puffed up on his own self-importance. The next he was down in the shit helping you to save yourself.

  The next day was Thursday. Always dreading the 10 am check-ins with Ray, on jobs like this. Having to endure his poisoned pauses. Made worse because I didn’t have fuck-all to fill them with.

  ‘They’re turning up the heat, mate,’ I reported to Steve afterwards to keep him in the loop, crunching the gravel over to the car. ‘They’re upping the ante – they want bigger and better.’

  ‘What can we do?’ said Steve, holding out his arms in an over-the-top expression of comic hopelessness. ‘The fucking thing doesn’t exist – we’ve got more chance of finding Lord Lucan.’

  ‘Don’t tempt fate – they want that story for next week,’ I said. ‘Let’s concentrate on our ABCs for now.’ Similarly, Steve said he was getting call
s off his partner Mazher Mahmood asking when he would be back – the Fake Sheikh had some big stories line up and was getting frustrated with Steve’s absence. Or so Steve claimed. In addition, the picture editor kept calling asking ‘How you getting on?’

  Bodmin’s mind-blowing doomscape should have taken me out of myself. A jagged bed of granite covered by a worn blanket of peat and moss. Strewn with rock ruins. The black skies rolling in low and claustrophobic. Propped up from collapsing by mysterious tors. Dotted all around. But I was too highly strung to allow nature in. Steve and I headed off to the outskirts of a village where a recent sighting had been made. Into a little copse on the edge of a row of light-coloured cottages. Talk in the pubs and snugs of scratch marks on the trees there. ‘Stick to the road, lads,’ one of the piss-taking locals had shouted as we got off from the ale house.

  ‘Why?’ I said, looking out for the American Werewolf in Liskeard.

  ‘Because if the farmer catches a couple of emits on his land, he’ll feed you to the pigs.’

  The Cornish, eh? Who says they aren’t a good laugh? I was missing the city badly. Sunset over Lewisham. Lungfuls of clag off the A13. Getting stared-out by tooth-sucking gang members on the way to buy a pint of milk.

  We made our way through the brambles, into the centre of the small wood. Suddenly, silent amid the yellow oak saplings on the forest floor. Shooting up through the carpet of dead brown. The soily smells, flashing me back to childhood. The virgin Cornish jungle wilder than I remembered. Moister and more mystical. Sure, there were marks on the trees, mainly thin birches. But grazes and scratches, just like you would see in any other wood.

  ‘Who knows what the fuck they are?’ I said.

  ‘Look over here,’ said Steve, pointing at clusters of loosely parallel lines on a tree in a diamond-shaped clearing of ash and maple.

  ‘Do you think they’re scratch marks?’ he asked.

  I looked at him, smiling. Both of us edging closer to the inevitable.

  ‘How many claws is this fucking thing supposed to have?’ he asked me.

  ‘Well, if it’s a puma, as everyone seems to think it is, then they’ve got five claws,’ I replied,

  ‘The scratch marks are usually about head height,’ I added like Arthur C. Clarke on Mysterious World, ‘because the puma gets up on its hind legs and reaches right up the tree to stretch itself. Like a normal cat does on a post.’

  Steve looked at the most promising clusters more closely. One lot was a good fit – a bundle of five faint, parallelish lines. But there were also threes and fours as well. Randomly scattered about it. So it was no more than the wear and tear of Mother Nature, wasn’t it?

  ‘Well, they could be fucking anything, couldn’t they?’ Steve agreed. Both of us still moving around the unspoken. Like a pride of lions around a herd of elephants-in-the-room. Waiting for the other to pounce first.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Steve said. ‘I may as well get some pictures of these anyway – what a load of bollocks.’

  Steve boshed off some frames of the five ‘scratches’. First using the bit of natural light, seeping through the disintegrating canopy of autumn leaves. Then on flash.

  ‘Even with the flash, you won’t fucking see them on the picture.’ Gently opening the door for me to come in.

  ‘They need to be thicker and deeper,’ I agreed.

  ‘Yes, they’re way too thin,’ he added.

  Edging closer. Into the zone now.

  ‘Well, can’t we clean them up a bit?’ I finally suggested.

  Steve smiled.

  ‘Get the dirt out of the grooves?’ he said. ‘Just so that they show up better. Against the bark?’

  I began scraping the bits of old shit away.

  ‘What about that?’ I said. ‘Is that better?’ I wasn’t exactly stunting-up the evidence yet. Just ‘enhancing’ it a touch. Sexing it up as they say at the Beeb. But definitely moving in the right direction now. To everyone’s relief.

  ‘Still, it’s fucking shit, isn’t it?’ Steve said. Even after my handiwork. ‘Could be fucking anything, couldn’t it? The other branches scraping against the trunk? Scars from when it was growing up? Who the fuck is going to believe those have been done by a wild fucking beast? Not going to work, mate.’

  ‘Well, we’ll have to make it fucking work,’ I said. ‘Won’t we?’

  I began scraping away at the scratches with my finger again. Then a branch off the floor. Then a stone.

  ‘Fuck it,’ Steve said, pulling out a long jaggedy key.

  ‘Give it here.’ Steve nudged me out the way. The resigned superiority of the older tradesman. Carving out the grooves, where the spindly scratches had been. Wider and deeper. Steadying the oval bow of the key with his right hand. Pushing down on the blade with his left. Visibly straining, as the whittled curls of live wood fell away to the deck.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he gritted. ‘Who the fuck’s gonna fucking know whether it was us? Or the Beast? Or the fucking local kids, anyway?’ The scratches were now monstrous and terrifying. Looking like Freddie Krueger had crashed the Teddy Bear’s picnic.

  ‘That OK, d’you think?’ Steve mused. Standing back to admire his woodcraft, like he’d put up a new shelf.

  Finally, the taboo had been broken. The tension that had been holding us back evaporated instantly. The relief was palpable. Now, at last, we had exposed to each other our hidden inner spoofer. The dirty secret was out. Shared between us. No going back. Locked into a conspiracy of stunting from now on. That both of us would have to take to the grave. Our secret seeming more secure somehow. For having hatched it within the bowels of a dark wood. In the middle of a desolate moor. Far away from an office, which didn’t seem as real now.

  ‘Come here,’ I said, grabbing the key competitively. ‘Let me have a go.’

  ‘They need to be big, fuck-off tiger marks,’ I said, ‘as though it’s a fucking lion’s den or something.’

  Now that the secret was out, I wanted to show Steve that I was up for it – good at it. From then on, it’d become a mini-arms race to push each other to find out who was the most game.

  Steve finished them off, until they looked ferocious and fresh. Then we did a few others. One lower down the same tree and a couple on different trunks altogether. Making sure to rub some soil back into the pinky-white scars. To age them a little.

  The remoteness was making us lose touch with reality. Incrementally edging us on to more risk. Once the spoofing floodgates had been opened, there was no holding back.

  I drew some paw prints in the mud.

  ‘It doesn’t fucking matter anyway.’ said Steve, as he beavered away on the scratches. ‘What kind of a fucking story is this anyway? It’s a fucking fairy tale.’ Panting. Going red with exertion. ‘Catch the Beast of fucking Bodmin. Find the Abominable Snowman.’ Sweating. Taking off his jacket.

  ‘I can’t believe she put me on it in the first place. No one will fucking believe it anyway. What the fuck does she expect us to do?’ I got my Sherlock costume from the car and posed up. Examining the phony scratches and the prints with my magnifying glass.

  23

  Lost in the Field

  Later that Thursday, after our first day of enhanced techniques, as the CIA call them, I checked in with Ray.

  ‘OK, what you got?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, we think we might have found some, er, new evidence of the Beast,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ he perked up, genuinely keen.

  ‘Yes, well, we, er, went to a place where there’d been some, er, sightings, in the past, you know, and one of the local councillors, from that, er, article, said that there’d been some unexplained scratches on the trees. So we went there.’

  ‘D’you see anything?’

  ‘Yeah, er, sure enough, mad one, we found some marks, some scratches, like.’

  ‘Really?’ raising his voice. Excited that he’d have something to feed Rebekah.

  ‘What are they like? Where they made by the Beast.’
>
  ‘Just lines on a tree, really.’ Playing it down for effect. ‘And some funny paw marks on the ground.’ Deliberately underselling it, as though we were nonchalant.

  ‘Nothing spectacular,’ I went on. Double-bluffing it, as though it was something we wouldn’t even dream about spoofing. But somehow my deep sense of shame, operating involuntarily in the background, was tugging it down even further. Long pause. Tapping of Ray on his keyboard, distractedly.

  ‘But they look like claw marks,’ I finally conceded.

  By this time, I could sense Ray losing interest. After thinking about it, he probably realised that they were only tertiary evidence. Easily hoaxed, obvious and meaningless without a picture of the Beast itself. He flattened his voice deliberately. To signal displeasure. Before rallying a bit at the end and going through the motions.

  ‘Can you get them checked out?’ he asked. ‘By your expert?’

  Ray wasn’t too keen on the crypto-guy. He was still pushing for a better commentator.

  ‘Sounds like a nutter,’ he said. ‘You can take the pics of the claw marks to him for a first opinion, but in the meantime, see if you can get a better expert. A professor, or a zookeeper or something. If a proper expert says they’re from a big cat, then it might be OK. File your copy as soon as and I’ll have a look at the photographer’s pictures in the morning.’

  That night I filed around 1500 words of bollocks to the copy-takers over the phone. Steve pinged his pictures in, hoping that would satisfy Rebekah and we’d get pulled off as soon as.

  Friday was a kind of day off, while we waited to see whether the mystery claws story would make. In the morning, I drove to my old journalism college in Camborne. Popping in to see my ex-tutor Gareth. Gareth was a very straight guy. An ex-hard-drinking hack from Wales, who’d seen the light and turned to lecturing to save his soul. I don’t know why I went – the visit felt awkward. As though I was proving to him that I was a success. But it felt phony and premature. All the time half-ashamed inside that my career was mostly built on stunts and lies – the biggest one I was in the middle of pulling off, right now, under his nose, here in Cornwall. God forgive me. Gareth was such a straight-goer that I sensed he could see through my phoniness. He was pleasantly underwhelmed by my status at the News of the World – I thought he’d be more grateful. But that was just me craving approval again. Deep down, I think he was trying to say: ‘Calm down, don’t get carried away.’ But I was too self-absorbed for it to hit home. As we shook hands, before I got off, he was gracious: ‘You were easily the most ambitious in the class – you were always going to end up in Fleet Street.’