The Making of Minty Malone

by Isabel Wolff

  Personally, I can’t believe that our ads are now so bad. Lots of them are like that, presented as conversations between two increasingly amazed people. We used to have witty ads, ingeniously written mini-dramas brilliantly performed by famous actors. But now all our adverts are crap. The upmarket companies won’t advertise with us any more because they know our audience share is falling. Worse, we’re not even managing to sell all our advertising space, so our revenue’s way down. When the figures are good, we all know about it because the sales team go round with deep tans from their incentive holidays in the Virgin Islands or the Seychelles. But at the moment their faces are as etiolated as chalk or Cheshire cheese. Not that we see much of them. We don’t. They’re on the phone all day, pitching desperately. Occasionally they come into the Capitalise office and give us grief if we’ve put an ad on air in an awkward place. We hate it when they do that, though I thought they were quite justified in blowing up Wesley for broadcasting an ad for the Providential Insurance Company – strapline: ‘Because Life’s So Uncertain’ – during coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral. He didn’t mean to; as usual his timings were out and he was suddenly twenty-five seconds short. So he grabbed that ad because he knew it would fill the gap exactly. And it did. But the station got a lot of flak and Providential withdrew their account.

  Wesley’d had lots of disasters like that, I reflected as I dubbed my interviews from cassette on to quarter-inch tape. The only reason he’d survived was because he’d been here so long he’s unsackable. It would cost them far too much to get rid of him. They just don’t have the cash. In fact, they don’t have the cash for anything here, least of all the new digital editing equipment; at London FM we still use tape.

  ‘Embarrassing nasal hair? Try the Norton Nostril Trimmer! – Removes hairy excrescences from ears, and eyebrows too! Has removable head for easy cleaning by brushing or blowing! Just £5.95, or £9.95 for the deluxe model. All major credit cards accepted, please allow twenty-eight days for delivery!’

  I glanced at the clock, it was five to seven.

  ‘And now a quick look at the weather,’ said Barry, the continuity announcer, with his usual drunken slur, ‘brought to you by Happy Bot, the disposable nappy that baby’s botty loves best.’

  I turned down the speakers in the office. I couldn’t work with that racket going on. I knew I’d be there all evening, editing, but for once I didn’t mind. In fact, I was glad, because it gave me no time to think about Dominic. I was oblivious to everything as I sat there at my tape machine with my headphones on, my white editing pencil tucked behind one ear. My razor blade glinted in the strip lights as I slashed away, lengths of discarded tape falling like shiny brown streamers to the carpet-tiled floor. I love the physicality of chopping tape. It’s so satisfying. Clicking a computer mouse on a little pair of digital scissors just isn’t the same. But that’s what we’ll soon be doing.

  As I wielded the blade, a tangled mess of cast-offs and cutouts fell on the floor at my feet. Citronella Pratt sounded like Minnie Mouse as I spooled through her at double speed: ‘Very-happy – soawfulbeingsingle – terriblysad,pooryou – ohyesI’msohappilymarried – veryveryhappilymarried – Very.’ And I thought it odd that she needed to keep saying that, because I’ve always thought that happiness, like charm and like sensitivity, tends to proclaim itself. I salvaged one twenty-second soundbite from her fifteen minutes of boastful bile, then took my knife to the other interviews. Soon they were neatly banded up on a seven-inch spool, with spacers of yellow leader tape between, ready to be played out in the programme the following day. All I had to do now was to write my script. I looked at the clock. It was ten thirty. With luck I’d be home by one.

  The office was deserted, everyone had gone home hours before. It had the melancholy atmosphere of an English seaside town in winter. I sat at the computer, and began to type. And I was just thinking how calm and peaceful it was and how the script wouldn’t take that long to do, and I was congratulating myself too on not crying or cracking up on my first day back, despite the emotional stress I was under, when I heard the sound of a newspaper being rustled. It was coming from Jack’s office. How odd. Who on earth was in there at this time? I opened the door. Sitting at his desk, at ten forty-five, quietly reading the Guardian, was Jack.

  ‘Oh, hi, Minty,’ he said.

  ‘Er, hi. You’re here late.’

  ‘Am I? Oh well, I had some, er …stuff to do,’ he said. Oh. That was odd. ‘I hope your first day back wasn’t too bad,’ he added gently. ‘Thanks for coming in. We need you.’ And he gave me such a nice smile. So I smiled back. And there was a little pause. Just a beat. Then Jack lowered his paper and said, ‘Are you all right, Minty?’ And you know, how when you’re really low, and someone you like and respect looks at you, and asks you if you’re all right? Well, it’s fatal. Before I knew what had happened my eyes had filled.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I heard Jack say, as I struggled to compose myself. ‘You can cry in front of me.’ I sniffed, and nodded, and then a small sob escaped me, and suddenly my cheeks were wet.

  ‘Come and sit down, Minty. It’s all right.’ I sat in the chair by his desk, and he opened his drawer and handed me a tissue.

  ‘I guess you’ll be doing this quite a bit.’ I nodded. It was true. ‘Can I give you a little advice?’ he said softly. I nodded again. ‘It’s simply to try and remember that old expression: “And this too shall pass.”’

  No, I thought bitterly. This will never pass. A part of my life has been ruined. I’d been publicly deserted. I’d been ditched. I’d been dumped. I’d been discarded, dropped, dismissed. And it hit me that in the lexicon of rejection, all the words seem to start with ‘D’. Dominic had disowned me. He had disavowed me. He had divested himself of me. He had disappeared. Through a door. Now he was distant. And I thought I’d die.

  ‘Nothing stays the same, Minty,’ I heard Jack say. ‘And, for you, this won’t stay the same.’

  ‘It will. It will,’ I sobbed. ‘I’ll never get over it. Never.’

  ‘You will,’ said Jack. ‘And at least, here, you’re among friends.’ At that, he placed his hand, just for a moment, on mine. ‘Now, how was the awful Mrs Happy Bot?’ he asked, changing the subject.

  ‘Well, she was …awful!’ I said, dabbing at my eyes, and trying to smile. ‘You know, the usual conceited guff. She’s such a pain.’

  ‘She certainly is,’ he exclaimed. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘she’s an absolute fucking pain in the arse!’ And with that we both started laughing. And I suddenly wanted to throw my arms round Jack and thank him for being so nice. He has this cool, sarcastic exterior, but he’s so, so kind. And he’s so attractive, I found myself thinking, not for the first time. I’d had this secret little ‘thing’ about Jack when I first started at London FM. But nothing had ever happened because, well, he was my boss. And then he’d started seeing Jane and, not long after that, I’d met Dom. Still, Jack was lovely. A lovely man. But why on earth was he in the office so late?

  ‘Aren’t you worried about the time, Jack?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s eleven,’ I said, glancing at the large clock on his wall.

  ‘Is it?’ he said, wonderingly. ‘Oh yes, so it is.’

  ‘Won’t Jane be worried?’ They’d only been married six months.

  Jack didn’t reply. In fact, he seemed to avoid my eyes as he reached for his jacket and put it on.

  ‘You’re right, Minty,’ he said quietly. ‘Guess I’d better be getting along.’ Then he picked up his paper, and I saw that he’d almost finished the crossword.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and he emitted a long, weary sigh. ‘I guess it’s time to go Home, Sweet Home.’

  September

  ‘What a funny thing!’ screeched Pedro from his domed steel cage. Indeed, I thought, what a funny thing.

  I was standing in the kitchen, where a strange sight had just met my eyes. All the cupboards, normally a refulgent white, had turned yellow overnight. They were p
lastered with primrose-hued Post-It notes. Every single one. They fluttered in the stiff breeze from the open window, like tiny Tibetan prayer flags, except that they tended to be deprecatory, rather than imprecatory, in tone. ‘Snores!’ said one, and then, in brackets, ‘very loudly’. ‘Could NEVER see my point of view’, declared the next. ‘Very poor judgement’, accused its neighbour. ‘Beginning to lose his hair’, alleged a fourth. ‘Just won’t LISTEN!’ snapped a fifth. ‘Putting on weight’, pointed out a sixth. ‘“Selfish”’, announced the note on the freezer. ‘Forgot my birthday’, spat the one on the spice rack. ‘Lousy taste in ties’, trumpeted the one on the tumble dryer. ‘Could be short-tempered’, sneaked the one on the fridge. Everywhere I looked, every vertical surface, bore some unpleasant legend about Charlie. Amber must have used at least five packs.

  ‘I say,’ squawked Pedro. He emitted a long, low whistle. ‘I say,’ he said again. Then he clawed at the yellow Post-It on his cage (‘Failed Ancient Greek O-level’), before shredding it with his razor-edged beak.

  Poor Charlie, I thought as I peeled the one off the toaster (‘Stubborn’), he didn’t deserve all this. I put in two slices of wholemeal bread and turned it up to ‘high’. There was a creak on the stairs, then Amber appeared, framed in the doorway in her velvet dressing gown, like some portrait by John Singer Sargent. What a pity, I thought. All that beauty, marred by bitterness.

  ‘You’ve got to accentuate the negative,’ she said, slightly sheepishly, as she removed a Post-It from the kettle (‘Complete wimp’) and filled it.

  ‘You should do it too, you know, Minty,’ she added as she unscrewed the jar of coffee (‘Pathetic’). ‘You’ll find it really helps.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said wearily. ‘It’s just not my style.’

  And then, out of curiosity, I tried to imagine what my yellow stickies might say. ‘Jilted me, during my wedding, in front of every single person I know’; ‘Extremely domineering’; ‘Had a violent temper if crossed’; ‘Constantly tried to sell insurance policies to my friends’; ‘Very rude about my mother’; ‘Dictated what I wore’; ‘Criticised what I said’; ‘Undermined me at every turn’. Oh, they would be far, far worse than anything Amber could come up with about Charlie. ‘Shallow’ was another obvious one for Dom, while ‘Deeply neurotic’ also sprang to mind.

  Whereas Charlie’s very stable. He really is. He’s also honourable. In every way. He’s the Honourable Charles Edworthy, you see, because his father’s a life peer. And Amber told me that Charlie had been a bit surprised when Dominic had asked him to be his best man, because they hadn’t known each other long, having only met through me. But I knew Dominic well enough to guess the reason at once – he’d thought it would look good in the ‘Weddings’ column of The Times. ‘Best man was the Hon. Charles Edworthy,’ it would say. But that announcement, like my marriage, had been unexpectedly cancelled.

  In any case, I knew all the bad news about Dominic. I didn’t need to write it down. It had been tucked into the back of my mind for the best part of two years. But the funny thing is that I’d accepted all those negative factors. It’s not as though I wasn’t aware of them – I was. They troubled me. And though, on the surface, I made out everything was fine, inside I was filled with dismay. So I did what I did at work. I edited the bad things out. I excised them, just as I remove the rubbish from my radio interviews. At work, I review all my recorded material, and then skilfully cut out the crap – all the bits that jar, or don’t fit; the inarticulate, or plain boring parts, the hesitations and the repetitions – I remove them all, so that the end result is smooth and easy on the ear. And that’s what I’d done with Dominic. But why? Why did I? People have begun to ask me that. Well, there’s a complicated answer.

  First of all, because I suppose I try to accentuate the positive. See the good things. And there were good things, too, about Dom. He was attractive, and generous, and successful. He was also very ambitious for me, which I liked. And of course he seemed to be very fond of me – though not, as it turned out, quite fond enough. But that’s why I decided that I could live with all his faults. Because I thought he loved me. Because, out of all the women he could have had, he’d chosen me. And that was flattering. Then I’m not the sort of person to make a fuss, however unhappy I feel. As I say, I always like to keep things smooth and ‘nice’. And that’s the main reason why I kept quiet – because I hate confrontations of any kind and I really don’t handle them well. Particularly when it comes to personal relationships. I’m terrified of giving offence. Because if I give offence, then I might be rejected. So I avoid giving offence, like the plague.

  That’s why I’m not going to say anything to Amber about the fact that she’s making no attempt to find her own place. Nor am I going to complain about the way she leaves her washing up, despite being here all day. Nor do I intend to bring up the subject of the phone. She spends at least two hours every evening on it, droning away to anyone who’ll listen about how ‘bloody appallingly’ she’s been treated by Charlie. And I do wish she wouldn’t do this, not least because I’d like to use the phone myself.

  Amber, meanwhile, had opened Pedro’s cage, and he was now perched on her shoulder, affectionately nibbling her hair. They’re very alike, I suddenly thought. Birds of a feather, in fact. They’re strikingly good-looking, attention-grabbing, profoundly irritating and time-warped.

  ‘Super, darling!’ screeched Pedro, as she handed him a sunflower seed.

  ‘I wish you’d learn how to say, “Charlie’s a bastard,”’ she said to him with a regretful air. This is extremely unlikely. a) Pedro was very fond of Charlie, and b) he hasn’t added a single word to his vocabulary since 1962. He’s like an old record in that way, and the needle is well and truly stuck.

  ‘He’s going in the next novel,’ Amber said, with a smile.

  ‘Who, Pedro?’

  ‘No, Charlie, of course.’

  ‘Oh dear. As what?’

  ‘As an effete toff called Carl Elworthy who turns out to be a serial killer!’

  ‘Poor chap,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean, “Poor chap”?’ she retorted, as she applied bitter orange marmalade to my toast. ‘Poor me, you mean.’ She bit into it with a loud ‘crunch’, then tore off a tiny piece for Pedro. He took it daintily, then his bulbous, black tongue ground it around his beak, like a pestle in a mortar.

  ‘What a bastard,’ she said again.

  I wanted to tell Amber the truth – that I didn’t blame Charlie at all. That I thought she was over the top. But I didn’t because I’m a bit frightened of Amber, just like Charlie was.

  ‘Scary, isn’t she?’ he’d once whispered to me, slightly tipsily, at a drinks party.

  ‘Oh yes!’ I said, surprised at his candour. ‘I mean, well, you know, a bit!’ And then we’d both blushed guiltily, like conspirators, and gone, ‘Ha ha ha!’

  ‘We’re going to get over this, Minty,’ Amber added, as Pedro waddled down her arm. ‘We’re going to forget men,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to bother with the bastards at all. In fact, we’re going to enjoy ourselves without them, we’re going to …’

  ‘Celibate?’ I said wryly.

  ‘No, cerebrate,’ she announced happily. ‘We’re going to cultivate the life of the mind!’ She stirred her coffee excitedly then buttered my second piece of toast. ‘The key words for us, Mint, are Protect, Pamper and Improve – with the emphasis firmly on “Improve”. And we’re going to spend time with women, too, Minty. Clever women. I know,’ she went on enthusiastically, ‘let’s start an all-women’s book club! They’re extremely fashionable – Ruby Wax is in one, and so are French and Saunders. We could call ours the BBBC.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The Brilliant Broads Book Club!’

  ‘I say!’ Pedro squawked.

  ‘We could have really intellectual evenings, with plenty of booze thrown in! We could hold them here!’ she exclaimed. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Mint?’

  ‘Oh!
Well, no, all right, if you set it up,’ I said as I picked up my bag. ‘I haven’t got time to organise it myself. And – Oh Christ, I’ll be late for work!’

  ‘Constipated? Then take Green Light for inner cleanliness …’

  Oh God, not this one again, I thought, an hour later as I sat at my desk chewing the rubbery breakfast roll I’d bought in the canteen.

  ‘Just one little Green Light and you’ll be raring to GO! Only £3.95 from all good chemists. Or £5.95 for economy size.’

  All of a sudden Jack appeared. He was tense. We knew this, because he was twisting a length of yellow leader tape in his hands.

  ‘Meeting!’ he barked. ‘And you’d better have lots of ideas after our impressive performance in the ratings.’

  We all knew about this – it was plastered over the front page of Broadcast. ‘London FM Loses Grip! Audiences Right Down!’ We’d slumped by a disastrous 10 per cent in the quarterly figures compiled by RAJAR. We trooped into the boardroom, where Jack was fiddling with the speakers, trying to eliminate the incessant sound of the output. It’s like trying to cope with an unwanted guest, babbling away nonstop.

  ‘Do YOU have athlete’s foot? Then try Fungaway, the topperformance treatment for toe fungus of every kind. Fungaway works by –’ Click. Jack had found the switch. Silence. Thank God for that.

  Then Melinda’s face lit up. ‘I know!’ she said. ‘Celebwity diseases!’

  ‘What?’ we all said.

  ‘Celebwity Diseases!’ she announced. ‘We could make it a wegular spot!’ She then went on to explain that this Hollywood actor had herpes, and that director was said to have AIDS, and she’d heard that a well-known British soap star was known to have chronic piles, and why didn’t we do a weekly feature in which the stars would discuss their ailments?

  ‘Great idea, Melinda,’ said Jack. ‘We’ll give it the thought it deserves.’

  Melinda beamed, and shot me an excited smile.