The Social Diary

by Ros Reines

  ‘The editor would like to see you now, Savannah,’ she said grimly.

  What now? I wondered as I rose from my seat and meekly followed her. Asking for a moment to fix myself up seemed out of the question.

  As we drew closer to Tim’s office I noticed that Erica was inside talking to him. As she caught sight of me through the glass wall she seemed to shudder as she stood to leave.

  ‘Hi, Erica,’ I said as she brushed past me with a smug expression now on her face. She had the look of a woman who had either just been given a raise or perhaps an approval to go to the French collections.

  She grunted at me, which made Janet nod her head in a knowing way.

  What was going on? Perhaps I was about to be reprimanded for not bringing home the ‘shark eats dog’ story. Had word spread around the office that I was a fishy failure?

  ‘Hello, Savannah. Come right in and take a seat,’ Timothy said. ‘Janet, just close the door behind you, will you?’ he added.

  ‘You look a little, er, tanned,’ he commented, when Janet was gone. This was diplomatic of him considering that, when I’d caught a glimpse of myself in the washroom mirror after returning from my hellish harbour cruise, I’d resembled a tomato that was about to burst.

  ‘Have you been out in the sun?’ the editor probed.

  Was he kidding? In case he wasn’t, I decided to play it straight. ‘I have actually. I’ve just spent the last couple of hours sitting on a boat at Five Dock waiting for a shark to attack a dog,’ I informed him. ‘There’s been a lot of that going on in the inner-city waterways apparently.’

  ‘What!’ Tim exploded. ‘Don’t tell me that Malcolm sent you out on that dopey story? He floated it in conference and it was just so stupid that I didn’t bother shooting it down. But why the hell would he ask you to do it? For that matter, why did you agree?’

  Not waiting for my answer (which was lucky, because I didn’t have one; it hadn’t occurred to me I had a choice), and with his face suddenly as scarlet as mine, he picked up the phone and screamed at Janet, ‘Get me Malcolm Yates on the phone—now!’

  I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. The last thing I needed was to be caught up in a row between the editor and the chief-of-staff. It wouldn’t do my stocks at The Sydney News any good at all.

  Switching to speaker phone, Timothy replaced the receiver and began drumming his fingers on the desk so impatiently that his cache of biros almost spilled from their container. ‘Well, where is he?’ he barked over the speaker to Janet as the silence stretched on.

  ‘Just getting him on the line, Mr Shaw,’ she replied, sounding brisk but a little unnerved.

  I could hear the jovial tone in Malcolm’s voice when he finally picked up the call and wondered if he had some kind of death wish. Or was he too pissed to understand that he was about to cop it?

  ‘What the fuck are you doing sending a crew out to do that stupid shark story?’ Tim demanded.

  ‘Well,’ Malcolm began, ‘it seemed like something that our readers . . .’

  Tim lurched forward and picked up the handset. ‘That’s bullshit,’ he roared. ‘And just to be clear, you are not to assign Savannah to do any of your half-wit jobs. The only person she answers to is me. Got it?’

  With that, the editor slammed down the phone. He sat back heavily in his chair, clearly satisfied. He seemed to have entirely forgotten why he had called me into his office in the first place.

  I again shifted in my seat uncertainly. Should I try to slide out the door or just stay put until he remembered? Just as I started to rise delicately from the chair, Tim spoke.

  ‘What a tosspot,’ he exclaimed as I quickly resumed my perch. ‘So, Savannah, have you been getting out there making valuable contacts? Erica tells me that she spotted you at Emerald Ville yesterday. Do you actually like that place? It’s overpriced rubbish if you ask me. And then you settled in for a long session at the Champagne Bar at the Hermitage, I hear. Hot on the trail of Alex Evans, I hope. I tell you, something is not right there and I want this paper to be the first to expose him and his dirty dealings.’

  So that’s what Erica Hopewell had been doing—dobbing me in to the boss for spending almost an entire afternoon lunching. What about her? I decided to tough it out.

  ‘Frances Ford—the PR director of Chantelle Cosmetics—invited me to lunch and I was keen to go because her parties are always attended by the flashy entrepreneurs and the established names. I wanted to be sure that I was on the list for future launches.’

  ‘A wise move,’ Tim agreed. ‘You should be at all the key parties in Sydney—that’s your beat. Anyway, what’s this Frances like? Is she as torturous as some of my mates suggest?’

  ‘She is intense, but it was worth it just to be there. I actually thought that Emerald Ville was kind of cool, and the dining room was stacked with some interesting names along with quite a few villains. Do you know Lahar Kapoor? He sent a bottle of French champagne to my table.’

  Timothy snorted. ‘He’s the bloke with the pretentious jewellery store, right? He looks like someone on the make. Don’t go accepting anything else from him, especially if you’re on your own. We don’t want it to look like he’s buying favourable coverage.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t just get you in here for a restaurant review, Savannah,’ he said. ‘Just make sure that the door is closed properly, would you?’

  This was ominous—my fragile stomach churned as I sprang from my seat to do as I was told. I sat back down and stared at my dress—there did seem to be a streak of grease from the tinnie’s motor on the hemline. Very attractive.

  ‘Does the name Dennis Quinn mean anything to you?’ Tim said, easing back in his chair.

  ‘Quinn?’ I blinked at him. ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘He’s that high-profile criminal lawyer—always front and centre with the well-known villains on the television news.’

  ‘Oh, him—sure,’ I said, recalling footage of a red-haired man in a flamboyant waistcoat, glaring at reporters as he left the Supreme Court.

  ‘Well, Dennis also acts for the millionaire punter and property developer Wes Heart—the man you wrote about a couple of weeks ago when he got into a scuffle with a gatecrasher at his son’s twenty-first birthday party.’

  ‘Of course.’ I remembered it well because Wes Heart was such a violent drunk that he was on a warning from an Eastern Suburbs magistrate that the next time he hurt someone, he was going to jail, no matter how much wealth and power he thought he had in this town. So far the victim of the latest assault—who had wound up with a broken arm—had not wished to take the matter further, so I had been trying to get an eyewitness to the fight to describe it on the record. The item in my column had ended up being almost benign:

  Did millionaire property king Wes Heart take matters into his own hands when a local university student tried to gatecrash his son Drew’s twenty-first birthday bash?

  According to some patrons at The Doves—the Woollahra hotel owned by Heart—the alleged gatecrasher was literally kicked to the kerb. While his friends confirmed that he went straight to St Vincent’s Emergency and emerged later with his arm in a cast, he has so far declined to press charges. A spokesman for Heart’s company, City Developments, denied that any fisticuffs had taken place.

  ‘There was a gatecrasher on the night who was swiftly dealt with but nobody was injured,’ he said.

  I had had no luck persuading the poor bloke—Christopher Harris, an engineering student—to talk, despite offering to avenge his treatment in the paper. Before his mates also went to ground, they indicated that he had been paid off big time.

  Despite sending a photographer to lurk outside Harris’s share house in Paddington, hoping to get a snap of him with his arm in plaster, I had not been able to advance the story any further.

  ‘Well, you’ve definitely hit a raw nerve, Savannah, because now Dennis Quinn has suddenly come out of the woodwork making all kinds of allegations against you,’ Timot
hy said gravely.

  Allegations? What kind of allegations? Even though I couldn’t think of anything I’d done wrong, I felt my severely sunburnt face start to drain of colour. My mouth even went dryer than it already was, which was really something.

  ‘It’s nothing to worry about, Savannah; I have the utmost faith in your personal integrity. Still, I want you to listen when I get Dennis Quinn on the line again just so that we know what we are dealing with here.’

  ‘Okay,’ I agreed nervously.

  ‘And don’t say anything when I’m on the phone to him, okay? I don’t want him to know that you’re here in the room.’

  ‘Sure, no problem.’

  It took a couple of attempts to get Dennis Quinn on the line, but a few minutes later he was on the other end of the speaker phone.

  ‘Dennis,’ boomed Tim, ‘how are you? Now I’m just following up on some of the claims you made against one of my reporters, Savannah Stephens. Would you care to repeat them?’

  ‘Good to hear from you, Tim.’ Quinn’s voice sounded decidedly creepy. ‘Yes, I thought you should know she’s a bit of a druggie. Were you aware of that?’

  ‘I had no idea,’ said Timothy as I shook my head violently to indicate that the strongest pill I took was a Panadol, even if I had taken quite a lot of them today.

  ‘I think you’ll find that her boyfriend is some kind of uni student who deals in drugs,’ Quinn continued, lying blatantly. ‘He goes by the name of Dylan Rogers and one of his best mates is Christopher Harris, who tried to push drugs at Drew Heart’s birthday party. Both men are utter filth.’

  ‘What?’ I said, unable to stop myself, which earned me a lethal warning glance from my editor.

  ‘Well, I shall look into it, Dennis. Thanks so much for letting me know.’

  ‘No problems, mate. And, by the way, you’re not planning to publish anything else about Wes Heart and his kid’s party, are you? That story about Wes hurting someone was nothing more than the fantasy of someone who is drug-fucked and unable to sell their sick merchandise.’

  ‘Well, thanks for letting me know, Dennis,’ Tim repeated. ‘I appreciate it.’

  Dennis Quinn seemed not to hear the biting sarcasm in the newspaper editor’s tone. ‘Look, mate, anything I can do to help. Hey, you, me and Wes should sit down and have a bite to eat soon. He has a big project that he’d like to involve you and the paper in.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said the boss tersely. He hit the button to disconnect the call and for a couple of seconds regarded the device suspiciously. Then he looked at me without really focusing.

  ‘I’m not on drugs,’ I blurted out, sounding almost guilty. ‘And Dylan Rogers is not my boyfriend. I’ve never even met him face to face.’

  The editor continued to stare at me as if he couldn’t really compute what I was saying. ‘Under no circumstances are you to let on to that piece of shit Quinn that you were privy to the conversation we just had, do I make myself clear?’

  I nodded.

  ‘As for your drug-taking, I don’t much care what you do in your private life, just as long as you don’t break the law and you keep your approach to your work strictly professional.’

  ‘But I don’t take drugs,’ I protested weakly. (It probably didn’t help my case that I was looking dishevelled thanks to my hangover and the fishing expedition for the shark.)

  The editor stared at me, his face hardening, which immediately set off yet another seismic wave in my stomach.

  ‘Savannah, I don’t want you to let up on Wes Heart,’ he said, sounding bitter, almost fierce. ‘You might find that you can’t get anyone on the record on this occasion but at some stage, somewhere, he’s going to fuck up again. And you have got to be across it, so we can publish it. I don’t care how rich and powerful anyone is, if they break the law or if they try to bully those who cannot defend themselves, you can rest assured that we will take it all the way and expose them, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, rising quickly from my chair to take my leave.

  ‘Oh, and Savannah, if that prick Malcolm Yates approaches you to do another story, come straight to me, will you?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said.

  Making my way back to my desk, I was aware of the intrigued looks from many of my colleagues, but I couldn’t stop to tell them what had just gone down because I could feel Tim’s eyes boring into my back. He had forbidden me to discuss anything with my fellow journos, so I winked at them instead. Suddenly from the other end of the office, I could see that there had been a delivery for me. Sitting on my desk was a huge bunch of red roses—there must have been at least three dozen. With Erica looking on, curious despite herself, I tore open the card, which simply read: Thanks for an epic night—Daniel.

  Seven

  When he had left my bed in the morning, looking all rumpled and sexy, Daniel had promised to call me later. But what did ‘later’ mean? It could be hours, days, weeks, months or it might mean ‘later this century’. But at least the massive bunch of red roses was proof that something positive had taken place. Even if this turned out to be little more than a one-night stand, he had handled the situation with courtesy and grace.

  Was it just a coincidence that Daniel had walked into the Taj that night and had sought me out? As far as I was concerned he was my guardian angel who was there to protect me from being pecked almost to death by socialites. (Honestly, once they tried to get their claws into you, there was no turning back.) In such an artificial atmosphere as this A-list bar, Daniel and his laid-back attitude had just shone. It was clear that he had that rare gift of being able to read and understand the opposite sex. And now I found myself craving the intimacy of being with him. Not that these were feelings I welcomed because the one thing that journalism had taught me was that I had to remain clear and detached. It had been important in London’s music scene, and it was critical now when I was writing something as controversial as a gossip column in Sydney. I had to keep my private life away from the people whom I was writing about or they would eat me alive.

  Now here I was a fully grown woman obsessing about a man like some kind of juvenile twit. Instead of chasing leads for the column, I kept pondering what Daniel had meant by ‘later’. The first thing I had looked for when I staggered through the front door that evening, carrying the huge bunch of roses, was the light flickering on the answering machine to signal I had messages. I swear that my pulse started beating faster when I saw that I’d had two calls.

  Dumping the roses on the couch, I hurried over to the machine. To my disappointment, the first was from my mum: ‘Savannah, I know you’re at work but I just wanted to remind you about that lunch on Sunday with your cousins. Don’t be late and please bring back the plates you took with the leftovers last time you were here. They were from my best set.’ The sound of my mother’s voice irritated me, as if she had deliberately participated in a cruel plot to get my hopes up. What was the point of her ringing me here when she knew I was at work anyway?

  As I listened to the machine going through its tiresome clicks to get to the second message, I surveyed my home. I hadn’t had time to clean it before I’d left for work so it was exactly the way it had been the night before. There were the pathetic glasses—okay, jam jars—which I had brought out for the champagne before we decided to swig from the bottle, and my shoes were exactly where I had kicked them off. I held my breath as the second message started and was rewarded by the rich, deep tone of Daniel’s voice, which immediately sent a shiver of excitement through me.

  ‘Hi, Savannah—Daniel here. Hope you got the flowers. I’m heading out of town for maybe a week but I’ll call you when I get back. Take care of yourself, baby. And thanks once again for an unforgettable evening.’ He blew a kiss down the line.

  I felt disappointment and self-doubt nudging my consciousness. Was he just trying to end this nicely? Maybe this was the way Daniel did one-night stands? Luckily there was no time to wallow in my angst because I had an event to cover. I was already runnin
g late and I still had to wash off the stench of the shark expedition and find something else to wear.

  I threw my putrid cream dress into the laundry hamper in disgust. It would be some time before I chanced fate by wearing it again because it would always remind me of dodgy assignments. Leaping into the shower, I tried not to notice the slightly damp towel that Daniel had used this morning and resisted the urge to sniff it because that would be borderline pyscho.

  The last thing I felt like doing now was going to the fashion show. It’s not that I had anything against the label, but the thought of walking into a restaurant packed with socialites who would be trying to out-Gucci each other was a tad intimidating. My fantasy now was to be lying on the couch in my dressing gown, eating a bowl of chicken soup with toast, watching something mindless on television and gazing adoringly at Daniel’s roses (which were sitting inelegantly in a plastic bucket because I didn’t have a vase big enough and I had not wanted to split them up). After the day I had just had, I deserved nothing less.

  Come on, Savannah. It’s your job, I reminded myself as I walked into the bedroom and pulled one of my faithful old party dresses from London off the hanger. It was inexpensive but it was Gucci-esque in a certain light; it might fool a few people. It was a little bit edgy, dipping down in the back and shorter in the front, and I teamed it with a pair of knee-high boots from Bromley, which had been a major purchase at the time. Surely a humble newspaper columnist wasn’t expected to have a wardrobe of designer clothes at her disposal. I surveyed my face critically in the mirror. At least my freshly roasted skin gave me a healthy-ish glow, and I could tone down my red nose with my Helena Rubinstein mint stick. Turning my head upside down, which made me feel slightly dizzy, I brushed out my long hair to make it look wild rather than flat. Checking myself out in the hall mirror with its comforting dim lighting, I thought that I could probably just pass muster. Let’s hope they turned the lights down low and the mint camouflage didn’t turn me into the ghost who writes. At least that image made me smile.