‘I never...’
The younger reporter, Michael, turned away, trying to suppress a laugh. Alix prodded him with her finger and he burst out. He said, ‘Sorry, but swear to God, it wasn’t me. Wish I had thought of it...’
‘And Peter’s quite right,’ said Gerry, ‘the early bird might get the worm. Though, under the circumstances, worms are hardly an approp... However, Rob, back to you, you’ve complete freedom to hoke and poke, but at the same time these guys are trying to put a paper together, and they’ve just lost their captain, so if it gets a little fraught, just...’ He waved his hands randomly. ‘You want coffee?’
Rob looked at the sink.
Alix said, ‘Michael, your turn for the bun run.’
Michael said, ‘I went yesterday.’
‘We were at the funeral yesterday.’
‘Day before.’
‘What’s your point?’ said Peter. ‘Cubs do the bun run. It’s traditional.’
‘Well, hopefully Rob will find that tradition has no place in the modern workplace,’ said Gerry, removing change from his trouser pocket, ‘but until he delivers his findings, I’ll have a coconut slice and a cappuccino.’ He went to pour his coins into Michael’s hand, but the hand remained closed. Gerry added, ‘Me being the owner of the paper, with ultimate power over hirings and firings.’ Michael opened his fingers and accepted the money. Alix and Peter also gave him their orders. Michael looked at Rob and said, ‘You?’
‘Large coffee, black, like my men.’
They looked at him.
‘Joke,’ he added.
*
Whatever the opposite of a paper-free environment was, this was it. There was a requirement for journalists in the pre-digital age to hang on to their notebooks for a number of months, sometimes years, after they wrote their stories, in case any legal issue came up, so that they could refer back to their original notes and produce them if needs be. The Express had notebooks, press releases and the endless minutiae of a journalist’s life stuffed everywhere and dating back not just months but decades. They were pathological hoarders. Billy’s office might actually have been quite spacious if not for the teetering mountains of overflowing boxes, cupboards and stuffed filing cabinets. The desk where Rob was expected to sit still had crumbs of Twix that probably boasted the former editor’s DNA. There was a diary with his copious but unreadable jottings open before him and a red felt pen with a chewed end. Rob was trying to interpret the photo bookings detailed in the diary and was so confused he picked it up and began to chew on it himself. When he realized, he almost gagged. He took a quick swallow of now-cold coffee and threw the pen in the bin.
Rob’s head had subsided enough for him to get to work. He had not wanted this, but a grand and a half for a day’s labour wasn’t to be sniffed at. He would do it and do it properly. Senior management consultant might have been laying it on a bit thick, but certainly he’d long since moved on from the doubtful glamour of straight reporting, couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually been out on a story. Organizing and leading a team, with one eye on the economics, that was where his career had taken him. He could do this with his eyes shut.
He started by going back to the counter and lifting out the bound files he’d seen on the way in. They went back about five years. He asked where the early years were and was told there were some in a strongroom, and the rest were held in the local library. The same girl reluctantly opened the strongroom. He asked her why they needed a strongroom at all and she said it probably didn’t really qualify as one but they’d always called it that. They sometimes kept petty cash in there overnight, but mostly it was a suppository for office stationery. Rob said depository and immediately regretted it. She said ‘Whatever’ and pulled a flimsy-looking door with a metal bar across it open and pointed in at the files. They went back fifteen years. He carried out the oldest, set it on the counter and started to flick through it. He loved the smell of old newsprint. Local newspapers, he knew, were like community goldfish bowls. The same stories kept coming round, year after year after decade. The Express had been around for a hundred years without missing a single week, through two world wars and internecine strife that had driven much of the rest of the Province into anarchy. But comparing the papers of fifteen years past and the most recent issues – he could hardly tell the difference. The paper was composed to a basic template and he was pretty sure if he went to the library and checked the hundred-year-old issues there wouldn’t be much between those ones either. Granted there was some ground given to colour photography in more recent years, but the stories themselves were almost identical – exhaustively verbatim reports of local courts, council and sporting events, composed on the thinking that, if everyone gets their name in the paper, then they will surely go out and buy a copy, rather than to any notion of writing a story whose length was judged by its news value. The photographs were wildly unimaginative – rarely more than a line of people standing looking fearfully at the camera, as if they were facing a firing squad. There were some attempts at action photos on the sports pages, but most of them were blurrily out of focus. The display advertising had hardly changed either – the same local stores, virtually nothing of a national nature. The biggest difference was in the classifieds – the earlier issues had pages and pages of what used to be known as penny-a-word adverts selling household bric-a-brac, but these had virtually disappeared, migrating wholesale to the internet and eBay – the paper had a website of its own, but it was basic and contained virtually no advertising. In short, the entire newspaper was little more than a relic of a bygone era. People, he thought, probably bought it because it was a tradition to buy it. The problem was, the people for whom it was a tradition were swiftly dying out. Their sons and daughters didn’t have the time or patience to wade through the stories or the reams of advertisements that weren’t relevant to them, and sales were down, year after year, after year. Rob was a newspaperman, had been all his life, and loved them. It was depressing when a paper like this limped along to its inevitable doom; it had simply failed to change with the times, and now it was far too late to do anything about it.
Despite this, Rob smiled to himself – it was just after 1 p.m. and his money more or less earned. He would do some more poking in the afternoon but essentially he knew what the paper needed. Closure or a proper kick in the arse. Although he didn’t have much of an appetite after his night of drinking, he could have eaten something. But when he popped his head out of Billy’s old office to see what Gerry or the rest would recommend for lunch he discovered that editorial was empty. In fact, not only was editorial empty, but the entire office. He was the only one left behind. The rats had left the sinking ship, leaving him in charge, with the front door open to all and sundry. He stood at the counter for a while, drumming his fingers, half-thinking it was some kind of wind-up and that at any moment they’d jump out and say boo. But the minutes ticked by, and nothing, nothing.
The phone went and he ignored it. Then another call, and another, and eventually he answered. Someone wanting to dictate a football-match report; Rob told him to email it, but the guy didn’t have access to a computer so he started reading it out and Rob had to grab a pen and take it down, and the fella was so serious and verbose that he might well have been delivering the Gettysburg Address rather than an account of a scoreless bottom-of-the-league amateur football match. He’d no sooner finished that than someone from a hair salon rang, and asked for Janine, wanting to place an ad. Rob looked around him, found a rate card and gave her the rate, and she seemed surprised at the price, cheaper than she’d understood. Rob told her to call back after lunch to confirm. With nothing better to do, and with all the office computers on and nobody interested in hiding anything behind passwords, he sat at Janine’s desk and started going through the circulation figures and how much was coming in from advertising, and it didn’t take him long to find a pattern. He was looking at the numbers with something approaching disbelief when the front door opened and a youn
g fella came in, not more than eighteen, hoodie, attitude, and asked for whoever was in charge. Rob gave him variations of coming back after lunch, but he didn’t want to, could Rob not deal with it and Rob said he wasn’t really supposed to but when the guy said something about he’d good photos of the robbery, he couldn’t resist. He asked him what happened and the fella said he’d been hanging around outside the Mace/Post Office on Groomsport Road and two men in Hallowe’en masks had run in, and a couple of minutes later they’d come charging out with bags of coins. But one of the guys, the elastic on his mask had snapped and, in trying to keep it in place, he’d dropped his bag and the fucking coins had gone everywhere. The young fella had caught the whole thing on his phone, including the robber’s face as he scrambled to get his mask back in place, and now he wanted to know how much the paper was going to pay him for his pictures. Rob looked at the pictures: they were brilliant. He could almost see the headline now: Caught red-handed. He loved the expression on the robber’s face, the mixture of fear, adrenaline, panic and disbelief.
‘Did you show this to the police?’ Rob asked.
‘Kiddin’?’
‘It’s really good, really, seriously good.’
‘That’s what I thought. There’s others... Look.’
He showed them. Just as good, maybe better.
‘Are you a photographer? I mean, the composition—’
‘Nah. So?’
‘So?’
‘So what were you thinking?’
‘What was I thinking? I was thinking how good they are and how great they’ll look on the front page with your name beside them.’
‘I was thinking five hundred each, and no name because I don’t want them coming round my house and doing the kneecaps.’
‘Ah – right, I see. Yes, good call on the name. The money – it’s not my decision, but I’m pretty sure they don’t pay for photos. It’s just not that sort of a paper.’
He put his hand out to Rob, who was still holding the phone, and clicked his fingers. ‘No problem – I’ll take them to the Telegraph, or the BBC, they’ll pay.’
Rob said, ‘Yep they probably will. It’s a pity though. This is your local paper.’
‘Aye, and it’s crap. My mate told me to come here first and I said it was a waste of time, and you know what? He was right, and he’s not right often. See ya around.’
The fella gave him a wink and walked out of the office.
Rob stood at the counter. Should be no skin off his nose, but he wanted to grab the guy and wrest the phone from his hand. He wondered how long it had actually been since he’d handled something that actually constituted news, not a forecast or a spreadsheet. Rob swore to himself, and then pushed through the swing door and across the other side of the counter. He opened the front door and saw the fella just a few yards along, stopping to light a fag.
He said, ‘Hold on.’
The boy exhaled and said, ‘What?’
‘What’s your name?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘Nothing, it’s just... I’m Rob.’
‘So?’
‘So, I want your photos, and I want them for nothing.’
‘Aye, right. Why would I want to do that?’
‘Because... because it’s the right thing to do.’
‘Really.’
‘Really. It’s the right thing to do, and you owe it to this place. These people.’
‘Right. How’d you work that one out?’
Rob moved closer. The street was busy enough – an Asda a few doors down, and the all-you-can-eat buffet at Pizza Hut. He said, ‘Look – I grew up in a town like this, pretty quiet most of the time, but every once in a while guys like your guy in the picture, they do something, something like a robbery, or they shoot someone, they do it because they can. That guy, he could just as easily have shot you if he’d seen you. He could have shot your sister if she’d been in there buying her groceries. Or her daughter, could have been caught in the crossfire. Or their getaway car, could have mown down your elderly parents just crossing the road. That fella in the picture, no one’s going to find him, because he got away, he was wearing a mask, nobody but you and what you have in your phone knows what he looks like. But we put it in the paper, then someone’s going to recognize him, he’ll be taken off the streets and your sister, your niece, your mum and dad, they’re all going to be safe. That’s what a local paper does. It serves the community, it protects the community, it tells you who the bad guys are and stops them getting away with it. This paper, I happen to know it’s going through a hard time, it really hasn’t any money to pay you, and yes maybe you can get something for it up the road in Belfast, but this place, this Express is where your picture should be, you should give them it for nothing, because it’s the right thing to do, it’s your... duty.’
The fella was nodding. He said, ‘I don’t have a sister.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘And nice speech ’n all, but, like... a load of bollocks, too. “A” for effort, mate, but no chance. No chance.’
He laughed, and walked off.
Rob stood, surprised at himself for coming over so evangelical, and thought maybe it had come from either being dehydrated or quite possibly he was still drunk from the night before. But then he heard a slow handclapping coming from behind and he turned to find the reporters, Alix, Michael and Peter, standing there, catching his performance on their way back from lunch, with sour-faced Peter giving the sarcastic applause and the other two providing a backing band of silent pity and mocking bemusement. Rob shrugged at them and said, ‘I’m going for a sausage roll.’ He stalked away, aware that the colour was up in his cheeks. As he walked he reminded himself about the money, the cheque in his pocket, and decided it was more than adequate compensation for half a day’s work and looking a bit stupid in front of some bumpkin reporters he’d never have to see again.
*
Finding a sausage roll was harder than he had imagined. Bakeries and cafés had moved on. It was difficult to buy anything that didn’t include sun-dried tomatoes. The closest he got was a panini stuffed with ham and cheese. He found a park just round the corner from the office. There was a duck pond that appeared only to have swans, a children’s zoo with various tropical birds, and a wired-off enclosure that boasted a dozen or more pet bunnies and several discarded bottles of Buckfast. He sat on a green wooden bench opposite a small playground. Without the distraction of the Express he could feel the weight of home hard on him again, and it wasn’t helped by the kids charging about screaming. There were lots of mothers standing guard, tossing him the occasional glance.
A woman sat down beside him, but he hardly noticed her until she nodded at the mums and said, ‘Look at them, they don’t know whether to shag you or shop you.’
He turned and saw that it was Alix. He said, ‘Sorry, what?’
She said, ‘You don’t want to make it a regular habit, lone male watching kids at play. We write about them nearly every week. We’ve a lot of pedos.’
Rob said, ‘Good to know.’
‘We can see the park from upstairs in the office. I spotted you hanging around and thought I’d better come and say sorry. We haven’t been very welcoming.’
‘Really?’
‘You hadn’t noticed?’
‘I’d noticed. I’m surprised you’re apologizing.’
She smiled and said, ‘Did you get some lunch?’
‘Up to a point.’
‘There’s a café in Market Street we go to quite a lot. We should have invited you. We didn’t because Michael thinks you’re, like, a corporate raider or something. Asset stripper. The Liquidator. He has an overactive imagination, but he probably has some kind of a point. We know we’re going down the drain. The question is, why are you really here?’
‘Consultant.’
‘That speech you made, didn’t sound like a consultant’s speech. I liked it.’
Rob shrugged. ‘For all the good it did.’
Alix grinned widely as she produced her phone, tapped the screen and held it out so that he could see the photo of the robber the young buck had first shown him.
‘How’d you manage that?’
‘I’m a tenacious reporter, that’s how. Also, I used to babysit him. Sean was only this high then, but you never forget the special ones. Always a wee bundle of energy. So I applied a bit of pressure and he caved, and for free too.’
‘Well done,’ said Rob.
She nodded, and sat back, and looked at the kids.
After a bit she said, ‘So.’
‘So.’
‘So we should have been nicer. You’re only doing your job and we should have invited you to lunch.’
He nodded.
‘We kind of stick together, like a family. A dysfunctional family. A dysfunctional highly unpopular family. A dysfunctional, highly unpopular and poverty-stricken family. Well? Are you closing us down?’
Rob looked at her for what he intended to feel like a long time. Her green eyes flitted about, picking out every detail of his face and trying to decide if any of them represented a hint of their destiny or doom. Rob opened his mouth, as if to speak, but instead tapped the side of his nose. He gave her a smile and a wink and then stood and walked off.
*
He went back to the office, intent on telling Gerry his thoughts on the paper: really, he’d known what he was going to say twenty minutes after starting that morning, with only the complication of what was going on with the advertising still detaining him; but now it was time to finish up, break the bad news and get offside. He sat in Billy’s office waiting for him to return, watching the journalists at work that never quite looked like work. He remembered that that was how it was when he’d started on his local paper, the work itself fairly mundane but the chat and banter great, and what Alix had said about them being a family, albeit a dysfunctional one. She was quite right, you got to know your colleagues ridiculously well on a small paper, but it was always something of a soap opera. On papers like the Guardian you worked your own patch and didn’t share stories; they’d look at you like you were mental if you went round the office asking for an opinion, for advice. Here on the Express it was almost stream of consciousness; they just opened their mouths and jabbered their way through the day. Alix had been showing the young lad Sean’s photo to Michael, and then Janine in Advertising, the girl on the desk, some of the printing staff, in case anyone recognized him; Peter came back in from a smoke break, took one look at it and said, ‘Aye, I know him. That’s Bobby McCartney’s boy. Ahm... Terry, I think. Aye, Terry, the oldest one.’
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