Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time
Page 16
I wish I could see his screen. I wish I could see what’s made this normally fed-up, harassed, curse-mumbling escapist suddenly look so cheery. Can it just be a particularly successful orc-slaying session? Or is he up to something else on there? What do you think, as a fellow role-playing adventurer? What do you know about Sauron Flesh Harrower that you might be able to share with me?
So. Anyway. What’s been occurring round your neck of the woods these last five days or so? (Again, so close to making the week, Martin! The mythical week without a delay!) Did you enjoy last Sunday’s paper? Were you pleased I managed to get a solid line on the bonking sirs of St Mark’s School for Boys? I’ve got to say, getting that former pupil to talk like that is what made it in the end. The things he said! The naked honesty! You can’t beat a good old angsty posh boy with an abused past, can you, Martin? The public love it; they can’t get enough.
But what am I saying? I sound like Goebbels. Don’t get me wrong, Martin: I think it’s awful what happened to that guy. And you should hear him – he’s still bearing the scars, 20 years down the line. It’s terrible. He was only a boy: having to watch that. Having to film it. Of course it’s terrible. You don’t need to tell me that: I’m the one who talked to him; I’m the one who got him to get it all off his chest, to name names and date dates and do it all on the record. (He was nervous at first, he wasn’t sure to begin with… but once we’d got through the tears and the stammering and the reassurances and the general stressing of the importance of the whole business, he was more than fine. In the end I couldn’t shut him up. In the end it was all I could do to get rid of him. What did he think I was – his therapist? Did he not realise I was on a deadline? Some people, Martin!)
Anyway. As usual, I digress. And we haven’t much time today. No space for chit-chat! Every word must count! So. What’s been happening with me (tearful and abused ex-public-schoolboys aside)? Well… Beth and I went out last week, didn’t we?
Do you remember? It was the only story in town! We left little Sylvie in the capable (and expensive) hands of a nursery teacher friend of a friend, we left the house, we caught a cab and we had dinner in a restaurant. Like a proper married couple does. And just for a couple of hours we actually felt like a proper married couple too. For the first time in ages we enjoyed being with each other again.
Picture the scene. A little restaurant in East Oxford, a hop and skip from the colour and bustle of the Cowley Road, crammed and noisy with students and couples in tables of six and four and two, and in the corner, knees touching and with a sputtering little candle in a wax-ridged Chianti bottle between us, me and Beth, my wife and I, out like a couple. Like any other couple on a date.
And we talked. We talked and talked. We talked about why we never really talk any more. And we promised to try to talk some more. And it was great. It was like old times. It reminded me why I love her. She told a funny story about a mother at one of her coffee mornings who nearly gave her kid a spoonful of calamine lotion instead of Calpol (you’ll have to believe me when I say it was funnier than that when she told it). She told me another funny story about a play she took Sylvie to see at the Community Centre called ‘Bathtime for Bubbles’ which involved two men jumping in and out of, well, a bath, and how at one point one of them slipped and fell over, half-in and half-out of the tub and one of the other children shouted ‘I can see his winky-pops!’ and sure enough, everyone could…
There’s a whole world I’m missing here, Martin. Being in London, I mean. Being at work. Being at the scandalous and scandal-ridden and sometimes downright stupid Sunday Globe. While I’m freaking out about phone hacking and stressing out about sexually deviant schoolteachers and laying bets on the outcomes of civil wars thousands of miles away, there’s a whole other world back here, at home. And it’s all happening without me. And somehow, I keep forgetting to ask about it.
This other world of mine, the one with Goebbels and Harry the Dog and Rochelle the Bombshell: it’s not real, is it? I get so caught up in it I sometimes feel like I’m in danger of losing myself, of forgetting what I am, who I am. I’m a tabloid journalist, sure, but is that actually what I am? Is that all I am?
Or am I a husband, a father? Am I the man Beth fell in love with, the man who fell in love with Beth? Can I be both? I hope so. I hope I don’t have to choose. But if I did have to choose… I’d choose my wife, right? I’d choose my daughter. Of course I would.
Of course I would!
But I’m going off-track again. The point is, we had a lovely time. Genuinely. We had a real time. We talked and we laughed and none of it had anything to do with all the nonsense that dominates my life the rest of the time. It was like going away. It was like going away on that holiday we need so much. And as a result – lucky for you, given the length of this delay again – I’m in a good mood for once. All good!
Au revoir!
Dan
Letter 43
From: DantheMan020@gmail.com
To: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com
Re: 20.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, October 27. Amount of my day wasted: nine minutes. Fellow sufferers: Sauron Flesh Harrower.
Dear Martin
I have news! Better news than all that stuff you get in the real world. Much more interesting than tabloid nonsense or death in the dust!
Sauron Flesh Harrower has been on my train for the last three nights, and if two days ago I was frustrated by the mystery of his newfound chucklesome demeanour, last night I got a sniff of the reason why, and tonight I cracked the story good and proper.
He’s got a new friend! A lady friend! Not in the real world or anything (don’t be silly!) but in the Dungeons of Diabolo, or whatever they are. A lady adventurer!
He has been sitting in the seat in front of me these two nights past, and I’ve been able to see his computer screen in the reflection of the window. It’s a bit tricky to make much out at first, but you get better with practice – and then tonight I had the excellent idea of using the zoom function on my phone to enhance the picture, and then by actually taking photos, to study in more leisure what’s actually going on.
And what’s going on is this: Sauron Flesh Harrower (by whom I mean his avatar, his little computer character) has been hanging out with a statuesque, Amazonian, barbarian princess-type chick. They’ve hardly been going adventuring at all – but seem to be spending most of their time in some kind of virtual pub, drinking virtual goblets of mead together. Her name? Elvira Clunge. I kid you not.
In the real world, on my train heading west in the night, he’s a middle-aged businessman in a pin-striped suit with thinning hair, sitting here chuckling and grinning at his computer screen like a loved-up teenager who can’t believe he got lucky with the captain of the netball team – and in his other world, the unreal world, he’s only got eyes for, he’s perched on a chair in a tavern called something like the Slaughtered Magi next to someone rejoicing in the name Elvira Clunge. The pair of them sitting stiffly and awkwardly, all loincloth and bikini fur and oversized weapons. And it’s making him deliriously happy. It’s… surreal.
He has a chat box open. (That’s what I needed the phone to read.) Do you want to know what they’ve been talking about? Do you want to know what the word from the Slaughtered Magi is? What sweet nothings Sauron Flesh Harrower and Elvira Clunge whisper together?
I’m going to copy it down verbatim for you. Seriously, I couldn’t make this up. Here we go (obviously this is a snapshot of a much longer conversation):
ourtesans of the Emperor Carnus the Rampant?
And that’s as much as I got.
Um. What are we to make of that? This man in his mid-forties, with his suit and shiny shoes, his slicked-back hair and briefcase, talking of battering rams and thrusting towers to a warrior princess in a virtual pub in a game called Ragnarok. This man in his mid-forties who chooses to call himself Sauron Flesh Harrower when he’s not at work in (no doubt) middle-to-senior management somewhere, engaging in borderline-violent sex talk with a total stranger on a computer screen on the 20.20 train from Paddington to Oxford? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
But also: when is he going to take her? I need to know! Martin, I never thought I’d say this, but tonight’s delay: it’s not long enough. I need more time. I need more time to find out how and when Sauron Flesh Harrower and Elvira Clunge are going to do the dirty with each other!
The only person more frustrated than me when we finally rolled into Oxford some nine minutes behind schedule was Sauron Flesh Harrower himself. With a sigh he snapped the laptop shut, slid it back into his bag, straightened his tie, slicked back his hair and gazed at his reflection in the window… preparing himself physically and mentally to face the real world again, the family, the wife who no doubt does not call him ‘my lord’, who perhaps isn’t as pure as the virgin snow upon the misty peaks of the Jagged Mountains of Montezuma and whose lips, I’d wager, are not softer and plumper than even the legendary pillows upon the beds of the courtesans of the Emperor Carnus the Rampant.
We trudged off the train together. And if he was going to keep quiet about his doings in the Tavern of the Slaughtered Magi (as I’m sure he was) then I couldn’t wait to get home and tell Beth all about it.
What did Beth say when I told her? She thought it was hilarious. She thought it was a scream. She fired up our own laptop and tried to join Ragnarok – she wanted to log on and find Sauron Flesh Harrower and Elvira Clunge and see the action for herself.
And so that’s exactly what we did. We found the game all right, we downloaded the drivers… and then it asked us for our credit card details. Do you know how much Ragnarok costs to play? Fifty quid a month! That’s what they’re paying, for their dirty talk in virtual taverns – 50 smackers a month. Six hundred quid a year!
Obviously we didn’t sign up. But we did go to bed still laughing, Beth jumping into the covers and whispering, ‘You have a mighty weapon, my lord…’
And, just to add to the jollity, Sylvie didn’t wake once, either.
Au revoir!
Dan
Letter 44
From: DantheMan020@gmail.com
To: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com
Re: 19.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, November 1. Amount of my day wasted: 14 minutes. Fellow sufferers: None (odd time of night).
Trick or treat, Martin! Surprises or sweeties? I hope the spooks didn’t spook you. I hope the ghoulies stayed away and nobody gave you the willies. And most of all, I hope the feral kids who seem to hunt in vicious, legitimised little packs like ASBO-flouting legions of the undead on that one particular night of the year did not do too much damage to you or your property.
I hope your house remained unegged. I hope your car has kept its full complement of wing mirrors and windshield wipers. I hope, in short, that the traditional Halloween teenage zombie apocalypse did not upset your evening too much.
Round our way, of course, we like to train ’em young. We prepare our children for their adolescent delinquency by getting them dressed up and trick or treating as soon as they can walk. Or even, in fact, earlier.
Last night, Martin, my baby daughter went trick or treating. We all did: Beth and Sylvie and I, our little nuclear family. We all dressed up, we got a little bag for sweeties, we carved ourselves a pumpkin, and we hit the haunted streets of old Oxford town. I wanted to go as Sauron Flesh Harrower and Elvira Clunge, but the weather just wasn’t with us. Wrong time of year for bikinis and loincloths.
Beth still cut a dash as a rather saucy-looking Cruella de Vil (I don’t know about you, but the slashed red dress and high heel does it for me, Martin), I was a rather rakish Dracula, and Sylvie was the cutest little toffee apple you ever saw (the costume was actually a Sainsbury’s baby Christmas pudding outfit, cunningly adapted).
We hooked up with a bunch of other parents and babies and we went out in search of loot. And proper fun it was too: just about everyone had dressed up… everyone except Mr Blair, of course, who said something arch about Halloween being an ancient English pagan tradition that had been co-opted, corrupted and commercialised by the Americans. Didn’t stop him grabbing a handful of fun-sized Milky Ways when they were handed out, mind.
Anyway: like I say, it was fun. Sylvie had a whale of a time – it basically combined the four most exciting things in a young life: staying up late, dressing up, hanging out with Mum and Dad, and getting lots of nice things to eat. Or look at, in her case, as she’s still too little for chocolate.
Someone had brought a hip flask with them, and by the time we’d covered three or four of the closest streets to our house, we were all pretty well up for the pub… which is exactly where we ended up. Adults, dressed like unwanted extras from the ‘Thriller’ video, sitting around a couple of big tables; children, dressed almost unbearably cutely and massively overexcited, running, crawling and bum-shuffling in and out of our legs and around the pub.
The only slight downer came when Mr Blair tried to engage me in a conversation about the media (look, he started it!). I tried to be nice to him, Martin, honest I did – he is Beth’s friend, after all, and all the other mums seem to like him too (though not so much the dads, which is interesting) – but, really, I couldn’t resist sharing a few tales from the front line with him.
I confess: I was deliberately trying to shock him. You can’t blame me for that, can you? I’d had a drink and all, and he was claiming some kind of spurious authority (I mean, what does he actually know? He may be the man when it comes to babies, he may be able to attend bonding weekends, but when it comes to the workings of Her Majesty’s press, he’s as ignorant as a baby himself.) So all I did was tell some of the more outrageous stories I’ve heard. The odd thing is, they’re all true.
I told him the one about the Sunday broadsheet that decided to run an investigation into the Lesbian Avengers pressure group – and sent two male reporters to infiltrate the organisation (their reasoning being, astonishingly, that these particular chaps made for more realistic lesbians than any of the women in the office).
When the men were exposed as not only journalists, but inept drag queens (which could admittedly look like someone was taking the mickey), there was nearly a lynching – the two guys ended up being chased down the Holloway Road in London, holding their high heels and hitching up their skirts, pursued by a mob of 50 or so righteously furious women, before finally seeking sanctuary in a pub showing an Arsenal–Spurs game. Their pursuers burst in after them, punches were thrown, someone got glassed, and the police were called before a full-on lesbians v football hooligans riot broke out.
I told him the one about
the reporter on another paper who was told to dress up as a schoolgirl and buy some crack in King’s Cross – just because someone there thought that the idea that crack was being sold to schoolgirls in King’s Cross would make for a good headline. She duly got dolled up and hung around for a while, fending off propositions from all manner of unsavoury characters, getting increasingly terrified, before finally someone offered her some drugs. Grateful, she handed over £50 and hot-tailed it back to the office, thankfully still in one piece.
But when they got a lab to test it, it turned out not to be crack at all. She’d been sold flakes of crystallised ginger. So what did the paper do? They ran the story anyway. The point was, she thought she was buying crack, right? And the comment editor took home the ginger and cooked it on her salmon for tea.
And after that, seeing as I’d had yet another drink and I was in full flow and on the subject of crack anyway, I told him the story about the features journalist who was told to babysit the crackhead heiress who was ready to spill the beans on her rock star boyfriend. She duly put her up in a hotel room overnight, stayed in an adjoining room, and in the morning went to rouse her. Except she wouldn’t answer the door. There was no sound at all. Panicked, she got the hotel manager to break in, and found the girl shivering and blue-lipped and in the first stages of severe withdrawal. Between fainting fits she managed to tell the journo that the only way she’d be able to make the interview and photoshoot was if she got hold of some more drugs, and fast.
So of course she calls the news desk and asks them what she should do. The answer?
‘Buy her some fucking crack!’
The desk gave her the address of a crack den in Hackney and she drove there, with the addict semi-comatose in the back of her Micra, knocked on the door, bought some rocks, asked for a receipt for her expenses, was told to get lost by the dealer.