Hack

by Graham Johnson

  Handed it over to Gav in my four-by-four at Camden Lock. Surprisingly – I’m sure you can fill in the gaps – the money never came back. Gav disappeared. When he finally surfaced, he said he had given it to Kate Moss’s dealers. But the story wasn’t very convincing. I listened patiently to the excuse. It involved a lot of shenanigans, him being dragged through a hedge backwards etc. Later, when it all kicked off, the exchanges became very heated.

  It was a massive fuck-up. On my shoulders. The excuse the News Desk and the Editor had been waiting for. To wade into me. The Editor came on: ‘I’m sick of you. I’m sick of you turning me over. Letting me down . . .’ etc, etc. She said some very bad things. I was with Emma at the time, who was pregnant. With the other baby in the car. I went white. Had to alight from the vehicle, half-way down the street and listen to her bollocking on the phone.

  Paralysed with stress. Couldn’t do or say anything. Phone call after phone call of madness. Had to press the button on this quick. Go nuclear. Stop the ride I want to get off. I phoned in sick. Told them that from now on I was officially ‘on the sick. Saying I was stressed out. Which was true. Spent six months decorating the cellar. Painting the floor pink. Turning it into a kids’ playroom. Every now and again, I went in to see the company doctor. Then an expensive psychiatrist in Park Lane. I don’t know whether I’d had a nervous breakdown. Or lost my mind. But it certainly felt like that way. I wasn’t in the right mind to make rational judgements. But all I kept saying to them was: ‘Get me out of here. Get me out of this place. I want to leave this job. It’s fucking me up.’

  The only time that anyone from work got in touch was to hassle me. I’d forgotten that I was still in possession of the Rooney brothel tapes. A quarter of a million pounds’ worth of Trinity Mirror’s property. Or not quite. Technically, Trinity Mirror had breached the copyright. Of the original, undoctored tape bought off the madame and the gangsters. Foolishly, the Sunday Mirror had sneakily made a copy which was in breach of the contract. I could have really fucked them over. Put it out on the internet or whatever. Sold them. But after making them sweat for a few weeks, I gave them back. Blackmail. Revenge. Not my style.

  Six months later I returned to work. On light duties. Then I took voluntary redundancy. But I had to fight to get in the queue for a payoff. Like Schindler’s List. Trying to get out of there.

  For the next two years, I remained an emotional wreck. You name it, I had it. Counselling. Reflexology. Acupuncture. Little pills. From the natural health centre, made from rare weeds. But gram-for-gram cost more than cocaine. Anything to stop me reaching for my M16. Taking to the streets with my top off. Potting-off punters, Michael Ryan-style. Yeah. Get some.

  The best treatment, though, was my weekly relaxation lesson. At the local mental health place. Bit One-Flew-Over, if the truth be told. But I loved it. Sat there in a circle with people on huge sinkers. Manic depressives. Obsessive compulsives. The acutely stressed. Anxious outsiders. A feller with a phobia of travel. Who’d been building up to a trip to Australia for ten years, coming every week, lying flat out on the floor. Bipolar. Mildly schizophrenic. Self-harmers. The panickers. But, like I always had, I had empathy for the outsiders. I felt more of a connection with my new mates than my old mates in work. Compared to these people, some of whom went into black holes for months on end, I was just a selfish yuppie.

  But the breathing exercises. The anger management. The meditation. The talking in a circle. It worked. At least for me it did. Or at least staved off the symptoms. Until I had the opportunity to go deeper. To root out the causes.

  To keep the show on the road, I banged out four books, on top of the one that I’d already done. Shied away from freelancing for newspapers. Couldn’t face it, in case I regressed. But managed to get into some corporate PR. The dark side – PR gun-slinging. Basically, destroying peoples lives for large amounts of money. Smearing them for big organisations. Doing what I’d always done for the tabloids. But the process was rationalised for added ruthlessness. Dispensing with the niceties of even having to write a story. Just straight to the heart of the matter – to destroy their lives.

  I never knew it but there was a whole secret industry out there. Of big corporations who employ black operatives like me. To get at their enemies. Before share flotations. City takeovers. Media battles. The revenge business. All manner of human misery. I never knew my skills were so transferable.

  However, it wasn’t a good place for me to be. But it was life in the big bad city – I needed to keep the kids in salmon fillets and cherry tomatoes and the like. Or at least I thought I did. I did. Some libel investigations to boot. That’s when the legal departments of newspapers employ ex-journalists to investigate ‘the other side’. In big-money disputes, over defamatory articles. Ironically, I did one for Tom Crone at News International. A tricky case they were getting sued on. Involving Wayne Rooney’s ‘auld slapper’. I helped make it go away.

  But the madness was never far away. Never quite got over the humiliation of leaving the job. The loss of status. The loss of power. Life outside the corporate order. When you go off work with stress, it’s looked on as a form of mental illness. Which it is. Many of my former colleagues, some of whom had never done a good story in their lives, thought less of me for it. But that was part of the problem. I was still seeing myself, my own value, in terms of stories. In terms of my professional reputation. Of what other journalists thought of me.

  In August 2007 the kids, Em and I went away for a month. Make-or-break. She was thinking of leaving me. She’d had enough of me always being angry. Sitting up into the early hours. Watching Performance on the telly downstairs, on my own. Going to the pictures, again on my todd. Sitting there in the dark. Seething. But we got off. Shacked up in a big-fuck off chateau in Provence, in the South of France. To make things better. To see if I could exorcise the demons.

  Then one day, I walked into a book shop out of the blue in a place called Aix-en-Provence. A dark yearning in my soul. Literally screaming out for help. And there, stacked up on top of each other on a shelf, was the answer. A book about philosophy.

  ‘Have that, thanks very much.’ Foot down in the space cruiser back to the mansion. Read it from cover to cover in one go. Drinking it in like an elixir. Like being put on a drip. Given a huge dose of mental medicine. Bathing my mind in stillness.

  I’m not going to bore you with all the details. Like an alky going on about the 12 steps and all that. But in a nutshell, for the first time in my life the book explained to me what truth was. How important it was to tell the truth. At all times. Speak plainly and in a straight-forward manner. Regardless of whether or not it was in your own self-interest or not. There it was in black and white – the meaning of truth and why it’s good to tell it.

  Other good tips as well. Patience to reduce anger. Justice to be fair. Courage to get through the day without a hunted look in my eyes. I don’t mean having the bottle to turn over a big drug dealer. But to have no fear. Not to worry about the future. Not to worry about things beyond my control – such as my reputation. Or stories about skateboarding parrots.

  Philosophy gave me an insight into my madness. The madness of being a hack. No wonder I was fucked up. For the last fifteen years I’d been thinking in an irrational way. What I thought of myself. Linking my self-worth to stories. One week I was soaring – because I had a story in the paper. Getting praise off the Editor. The next I was low – because I didn’t have a story and I was getting fucked off by the Editor. Tabloids are like a stock exchange of esteem. Playing havoc with your self-worth. Totally reliant on external events. Whereas what philosophy taught me was to link my place in the world with internal events – what was going on in my mind. Thinking. Telling the truth. Being patient. Being a hack was an unnatural thing to do. Delving into everyone else’s life. Running around in circles. When I should be looking into my own. As opposed to living a life of distraction.

  When I got back to London, I was a changed person. Sold off all
the property. Got into a simpler, quieter life. Turned off the phone. A lot of people think philosophy is an academic subject. About obscure, unhelpful things such as ‘is a chair, really a chair?’ etc. But my idiot’s guide to the subject explained that it was just about thinking about your life. Not going through it on autopilot. Teaching me to think about my opinions and how I behaved. No longer letting emotions, such as greed and sadness, distort the way I thought. Mightn’t be your cup of tea. But it worked for me, anyway.

  I’ve got bang into a school of philosophy known as stoicism. Stoicism literally stopped me from going insane. From going right off my fucking head. As I said – of literally reaching for the assault rifle. Running over to Canary Wharf. Taking up a sniper position in my old newsroom. That’s how fucked I was. Today I still work for the papers. Mostly crime reporting. But every day, before I go out on a job, I read philosophers such as Epictetus and Seneca. Or Marcus Aurelius who wrote:

  ‘Say to yourself first thing in the morning: today I shall meet people who are meddling, ungrateful, aggressive, treacherous, malicious, unsociable . . . I cannot be angry with any of them or hate him. We were born for cooperation.’

  I read things like that to get through the day.

  That’s that.

  End of Story.

  Acknowledgements

  A big thanks to editor Rory Scarfe at Simon & Schuster and agent Jon Elek at AP Watt.