by Will Wiles
I had Tamesis notifications. Information for Fenchurch Street, as it had guessed in its spooky way that I was on a train heading there. A message from Kay.
Where are you?
I replied: Been out & about w Pierce. Heading back now.
Was she checking up on me as well?
The Tamesis screen flickered and refreshed, refilling with streets and labels and tags and coloured heat. Travel Alert, it warned. Delays to C2C services into Fenchurch Street. Avoid if possible. More details / Show me other routes / What people are saying / Dismiss. I dismissed the warning. It might have been possible to avoid C2C services if I wasn’t sitting on one.
Twenty past five in the afternoon and as black as night on a viaduct snaking through Limehouse. I raised myself in the seat to look around the carriage. There were only a couple of other passengers. By now the train was at least thirty minutes late.
In the darkness, graffiti on the side of a new apartment building:
BUILD ROBOTS
DESTROY RENT
AND
TAKE THE REST OF HISTORY OFF
An electronic tok emitted from the train’s public-address system, and it crackled softly as if an announcement were about to come, but nothing happened. The crackle, a machine breath so gentle it was barely audible, continued – the sound of expectation, of something about to happen. Anything coming over? No.
Updating London … said Tamesis, the Bunk emblem spinning. East London unfolded on the screen again, with the rail line into Fenchurch Street an angry red and the District and DLR baleful orange. The map pulsed with markers. Fenchurch Street: Overcrowded. Avoid if possible. Tower Hill: Overcrowded. Avoid if possible. Bank-Monument: Overcrowded. Avoid if possible. Breakdown rippling outwards. Are you affected? Please tell Tamesis. We might not be able to help, but we love to listen!
From Kay: U in east? Drink?
I replied: Trains all ducked up.
The little Bunk-star under my words turned from grey to blue, indicating that she had read my message, but it did not pulse – she wasn’t typing a response. Nothing coming over.
Restlessness was mounting in me. The window that De Chauncey had left open was closing, causing a familiar churn of emotion: foreboding, and sickly delight. Even if I had wanted to hare over to Shoreditch and meet the man, the trains were now preventing me. I was obliged to go home and drink, boo hoo. It was perfect, and I started composing an excuse-filled email to the PR, hope that the disruption was severe enough and widespread enough to be news, to get into De Chauncey’s bubble, and keep intact the illusion that I had made every effort to reach him in reasonable time. But there was still that foreboding. Even if he accepted that there were real train problems, it didn’t clear up his schedule, or his disinclination to help me out. That thought needed dousing in lager until it went away. Tomorrow had to be obliterated. That was the only job on my to-do list. And the train was keeping me from that, as well. Every minute I spent sitting in this inert train was another minute I could be safely back home annihilating the future. What had promised to be a long evening of drinking was receding into being a standard-length evening, or even a short evening. My insides crawled with dissatisfaction. Never enough time to waste. At least I would be home all day tomorrow. But, in theory, working – I had promised Eddie. What were the odds of getting a draft done? I needed one, even an ‘unauthorised’ version. I might be able to brazen out the De Chauncey situation if I had something really explosive to show Eddie, even a (carefully edited) transcript. But it didn’t seem likely. Not with all the drinking I had planned.
The train lurched, and stopped again. Its halt had a more permanent quality this time: the engine sound dropped out completely and the lights flickered. I expected an announcement – I wanted an announcement – but none came, and the unresolved possibility poisoned the air. Clicks and pings came from below, components cooling. I thought about the becalmed freight cars in their Dagenham sidings, weeds growing up around their axles. We were probably only metres from a station. A more serious problem? A bomb, gunmen on the loose? I took a look at Twitter and Tamesis again to see if bad news, awful news, was breaking. It wasn’t. But Tamesis knew that something was up. Its real-time experience rating of Fenchurch Street and all other City stations was bad and falling.
On Tamesis, there was another message from Kay: Do you want to meet up? I liked Kay, but this was horrible, horrible, my evening, she was crashing my evening. Which was, in any case, trickling away minute by minute on this fucking train.
Who was I kidding, thinking that Pierce would go ahead with the interview? He’d be home already, deciding obscurity was better than infamy, or on the phone to the Sunday Times. I’d be left with nothing, or an angle piece about how I almost had the story but let it slip away – which would probably have to involve coming clean about my own problem, if I did it at all.
What was wrong with this fucking train? It was serious, evidently – either that, or the heaters were on the blink, as an acrid smell was filling the air, beginning in the pocket of membranes at the back of my mouth. I rocked in my seat, and craned up again to see if I could detect any panic among my fellow passengers. No obvious alarm. One young woman was hissing a lengthy complaint about the situation into her mobile phone, but the others gazed without focus and did not frown or sniff as toxins misted the air.
‘I’ve got to get out,’ I said, gathering my things into my bag. There was no way off, of course, the carriages were sealed tight, air thickening and fouling, vents coughing fumes, but on a superstitious level I thought I might be able to jog the train into movement by acting as if arrival in the station was imminent. Also I simply had to move – to stay still was to be stifled, to invite paralysis and collapse.
My legs dissented under me. I found myself swaying against seats, attracting wary glances, being assessed for drunkenness, criminality and mental illness. Yes, yes, I’m sorry. No. I fear so. Again the speakers of the PA system clicked and crackled, but no words came over. The train did move, it shuddered again like a great beast dying but instead of dying it lived and moved. I looked through the window, seeking a familiar landmark to orient myself, only to see my own reflection, low-res in the smeared, scratched glass, eyes dark pits. I squinted and focused as the train gathered speed, and saw a line of white lights or reflectors beside the track. Except they were not reflectors or lights. They were birds, lined up on a wire fence, watching the train. Cockatoos, white cockatoos, not watching the train, watching me. They knew me.
At Fenchurch Street I had to physically shoulder through a crowd of irate City types, and one of them called me a ‘fucking cunt’, and I sincerely hoped they all got trapped together on a stinking train. Gulping the damp, cold air in a brick arch outside the station, surrounded by hunched and angry private misery, I realised that the District Line would be as bad or worse. I just couldn’t face it. So I looked for a pub.
SIX
I’ve given some advice on how to write profiles. Here is some advice on how to be profiled. One piece of advice anyway, but maybe the most important: bring the interviewer close to you. The closer the better. Some people are wary of interviews and keep their distance, assuming that distance means safety. So they’ll want to do the interview by phone, or – horror – by email, not in person.
This is a mistake, a big mistake. Distance is safety for the interviewer. It insulates them against feeling for their subject, and silences the scolding of their conscience.
Instead, draw the interviewer close. Meet them in person. Even better, meet them in your office or home. Make them tea. Make them a sandwich. Introduce them to your partner and your children. Clear the toys and phone bills off the couch so they can sit down. The journalist will snoop a bit, but your cooperation will give them a warm feeling inside. More important, they will have looked you in the face and drunk your tea. Their conscience works for you now. The guest–host obligation is still very strong, instinctive, hard to shrug off. It’s an ancient, beautiful, sacred part o
f the human experience. Exploit the hell out of it.
(Of course, none of this will work on the turd-hearted soul-gaps employed by some tabloid newspapers. Nothing will work on them. Remember that they are scripting an entire alternative reality. You are, to them, nothing but substandard copy, and the facts of your life will be edited to suit. This is the price of briefly featuring in the imagination of a rapacious billionaire. But for the profile editor of, say, a modern urban lifestyle magazine, this approach will work fine.)
I can’t remember what my earliest job title was, back on Divider – as I say, today it would be ‘intern’ but back then, only a fraction more than a decade ago, it was ‘junior editor’ or ‘features assistant’ or similar, and paid actual money. Which was welcome, because the role included one of the most hated tasks in the office: gathering ‘vox pops’ for a page on which ‘normal people’ (like you and me!) said what DVD release they were most looking forward to. I would go to Covent Garden, or Brent Cross, or Camden Lock, with a photographer and we would accost people. No one wanted to know. I got told to fuck off more times than I can count – bright points of human contact in otherwise total invisibility. Naturally the magazine was only interested in pleasant-looking people aged eighteen to thirty-five, because those were the only people that advertisers were interested in, so a lot of people were invisible to us as well. Of the small minority who did meet the demographic requirements and who did stop to talk about DVDs, many had inadequate English, or were keen to explain that Hollywood was SATAN’S REALM, or they wanted to show off about going to see a Todd Solondz film in the 1990s. Respondents willing and able to answer our questions mostly didn’t have the slightest idea about what was about to come out on DVD. (Think about it – do you?) Eventually we started taking out a cheat sheet, a list of prominent releases due in the next couple of months, to jog memories and maybe prompt some useful answers. All this work to produce a dozen headshots and priceless insights such as ‘Can’t wait for The Polar Express!’
It was never easy to approach strangers and ask them questions. Every time, I felt as if I were rucking against basic social training. And for no good reason. Those days would have dark evenings. After the Christmas mugging, I discovered that I simply could not do it any more. A photographer and I had gone to Greenwich for the day, and the weather was against us: scathing wind off the river, hail-hard drizzle. I approached a couple of people and was rebuffed: no time, no way, no English. My brain was prepared, once more, to put duty over taste. But my body was launching a protest. A cold, acrid mass of resistance was building in my chest, heavier with each passing moment. It waxed especially massive when I reflected that I was obliged to gather at least twelve usable responses before we could consider calling it a day. After twenty minutes or so I felt anchored to the corner, unable to move, almost unable to breathe from this leaden, freezing obstacle deep in my core, a pillar of misery, my mind struggling to think of ways to justify my body’s total refusal. Could I claim to be ill, or fake a crisis phone call that would summon me away? As it happened, the photographer picked up on my private hell. I can only assume that it wasn’t as private as I thought.
I told her about being mugged, and she was sympathetic, very sympathetic. We went to a nearby pub to warm up and have a drink – a pint, before noon. At once the glacial obstruction dissolved.
‘Tell them,’ the photographer said. She had ordered a bloody Mary, which had the poster-paint look of long-bottled tomato juice. ‘They can’t expect you to go out and do these interviews after something like that. Tell them you won’t do it any more.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. This was my first real job and I felt I was in no position to be making demands.
‘Then let’s fake it,’ the photographer said. ‘I’ll snap the first twelve people who come along, and you make up the quotes. We’ll be done in half an hour.’
I was shocked by this suggestion. What if we got caught? She pointed out that the odds were steeply against discovery. The magazine was read by a few tens of thousands of people, ABC audited. That sounded like a lot, but it was nothing against the national population, and we would probably be photographing tourists anyway. They’d be back in Houston or Milan by the time their picture appeared next to a heartfelt endorsement for Saw II. And even if one person did discover their picture was used without their permission above an invented quote, where’s the harm? It was a memory-card mix-up, nothing more. Big deal. A one-line apology in the next issue, if anything. My qualms about this amused her, and she told me about some of the sleights-of-lens she had been asked to do for other magazines. For my magazine. It was eye-opening.
‘Look, I’m under no illusions,’ she said at last. ‘I’d really love to be doing Diane Arbus, Kevin Carter stuff. I can take a great photo. This isn’t photography. This is the coloured sludge used to stick adverts together. It doesn’t matter.’
Nevertheless, I couldn’t do it. However safe we might be from discovery by readers, our bosses might suspect wrongdoing. That would be more serious.
So, after a couple of pints, I sent the photographer home and went into the office. There, I gave my section editor and the overall editor a straight account of what had happened, that the mugging made it impossible to do this assignment. They were formally sympathetic, making such gestures of fellow-feeling as social obligation and their legal responsibilities militated, visibly restraining their frustration that such a miserable and hated job was back in circulation, while still being sure to let some of it show. I was of course to be excused the task – that was what basic courtesy demanded, backed by the helpful shadow of human resources problems down the line. Their hands were tied. The only price I had to pay for playing such an immediately winning card was some discomfort of my own, of being made to feel that I had somehow conjured this hindrance to the smooth running of the magazine out of nothing.
A discussion of options followed. A couple of junior members of staff floated into the frame but were disqualified; there was talk of giving it to an intern. (The magazine industry at large was just waking up to the potential pool of free labour offered by internships, and was oblivious to the harm – they had struck oil in the basement of a burning house.) A day of photography made the page relatively expensive, I discovered.
At last the decision was made: they would fake it. The page would remain my responsibility, but I would use photographs from the vox pop archives, and invent the quotes, with an emphasis on films that would please our advertisers.
And so it was, for four months. I was certain that the ruse would be immediately exposed. It never was. What really stayed with me was the insouciance of my superiors. As if this sort of thing was nothing new. As if it happened all the time.
My point, such as it is, is that all interviews are acts of intrusion. Whether it’s a sleeve-grabbing ten-word vox pop, or a lavish 5,000-word New Yorker piece, intrusion is the art, the craft of it. Social boundaries will be crossed. It’s inevitable. Done well, no one is unhappy. No – not quite, not always. If an interviewee is delighted with an interview, if they think it’s the most marvellous piece of writing ever, the interviewer is left feeling a little sore. A little cheated. It’s even worse if the subject’s PRs are ecstatic. Because you could have gone further. No boundaries were pushed.
You don’t want the subject to be happy. You don’t want them furious, either – Quin-level furious, editor-phoning furious. You want them to be grudgingly pleased, with maybe just an aftertaste of having been used. You want them to use words like ‘fair’ and ‘close to the knuckle’.
There’s an acceptable level of intrusion. An acceptable level of truth-telling. There’s even an acceptable level of treachery. Think about that. An extent to which you can misuse a subject’s trust without losing their cooperation and gratitude entirely.
And there’s an acceptable level of snooping. That’s what the interviewee consents to when they invite the journalist into their home – a certain amount of bookshelf-browsing, furniture-pr
ice-deducing and family-photo-studying, in return for a little more obligation and sympathy.
It’s a deal, a contract. And you broker it as you go along, mostly, without very much being explicit. There are parts to show and parts to hide. There are comfort zones, and they are not bounded by neat, hard lines but by fertile zones of possibility. The discomfort zones, the border areas before one reaches the no-man’s-land of broken trust and inexcusable breaches, are where the interviewer does business.
Pierce had brought a loaded gun to the negotiation. The contract with him was truly, uniquely, symmetrical: if I revealed anything he didn’t like, he would reveal some truths about me. He had hacked the deal.
A line from Quin floated into my mind: ‘People know they shouldn’t feed so much information into their apps. But they do it anyway. Because they like the way it feels. They like to trust. And they know, the more we know about them, the more we can help them.’
Where had I heard that? Was it from the interview, a line only just bubbling to the surface now? Or had it come from somewhere else? Everything Quin said was TED-toned, rehearsed, audience-ready. No beta utterances. But this felt like something he had said to me in person, face to face. Where? When?
When I first felt the obstruction, the resistance, in my stomach after the abortive vox pops, I thought it was no more than a consequence of trauma, and that it would weaken and dissolve with time. Wrong. It strengthened and grew.
I’ve called it the Need. That’s not quite right. It’s difficult. These are sensations that taunt and neuter language. Something inside is screaming, and it doesn’t use words.