by Tom Stacey
7
‘The thing’s on the blink more often than not,’ Williams said with breezy desperation in his Taffy accent, frowning above the black sheen of his mechanic’s head. Just at this moment he wanted beyond anything in the world to be of use to the old man. ‘Half an hour ago you could have caught the B.A. flight with it. That’s it now.’
Distant thunder of a jet after take-off was audible. Jones was lumped into a narrow basket chair across from the wirephoto machine like a discarded outer garment. Deadline for the first edition of the Post had come and gone. Jones had told London by telex of a ‘technical hitch’: London hadn’t reacted – not a word. At least he hadn’t had to underline his ultimate failure, shout it in their ears, that it was this machine or nothing. And so, now, nothing . . . They’d change the second edition front page for any damn silly thing – they liked changing it – but in forty-five minutes they’d be screwing down the second edition. For the third or fourth printings, the big runs, nothing but massive news would persuade them to remake – a Royal death, a shock defeat of the Government. Something of that order.
The Indian mechanic Williams had dug out from his home was tinkering and dithering with a stagey urgency. The machine’s parts were laid out on newspaper on the floor. There was no telling if he actually knew what he was doing, though the probability was that he didn’t.
‘There’s another flight tomorrow,’ Williams offered.
‘For God’s sake,’ Jones retorted. Did Williams understand nothing? The flight just gone didn’t get to Heathrow until 6 a.m. The story was worthless after tomorrow – that is, after tonight’s London paper. Politically worthless, and journalistically worthless too. At best a footnote. What else did accompli mean in fait accompli? After tomorrow nothing reported internationally could help the Emir: he might be dead by then anyway – would rather be dead, surely, if only because the shits would rather he survived.
Jones too would have had him survive, his dear old blood-buddy – survive long enough to learn that he, Jones, meant not to fail him, hadn’t dumped him as Suleiman’s son and suchlike were ready to. He would have had the Emir just to know, just be touched by that ebbing glow of very ancient comradeship. Then they could rot together, wrapped in the same stinking blanket, loose yellowed skin over old bones. He would have wished just that, nothing more . . . nothing more except, aha!, the joy of seeing the superiority wiped off Hatim’s little mouth and the smirks vanish, wupp, from the faces of the whippersnappers in the Darwish when they read tomorrow’s Post. The joy of it!
That wouldn’t happen now.
He let Williams top up the tumbler of siddiqi-tonic on the corner of the desk beside him. Two or three empty bottles of tonic water stood guard there, another, half-empty, at his feet. Williams himself settled back behind one of the room’s four desks, and the bottle of colourless sugar-spirit bobbed in mid-desk between them like a buoy on a woozy sea.
Was there not about failure, abject failure, Jesus-failure, a quality of depth that must always elude the triumphant? A truth lay there that nagged him lately.
He realised he had forgotten about his obit; and, more, he didn’t care about it any longer.
Through half-opened eyes he saw the giblets of electronic gadgetry ranged on the newspaper and the Hindi fussing over them; and the vision of a shrunken little chef, quite daft, preparing a fiasco of a banquet which the guests had already quit in disgust, roused a smile that did not quite reach his lips.
This cramped, low-ceilinged room had for him a toytown familiarity. This Williams had attempted to parcel it off with notices hung from the ceiling – ‘Domestic’, ‘Foreign’, ‘Sports’ and ‘Photo’. The plywood door leading off to Williams’s very own cubicle had a frosted glass panel bearing the word Editor. Diagonally across the ceiling a much bigger notice was suspended, exhorting his trainee local staff to ACCURACY FIRST LAST AND ALWAYS.
The mechanic worked away like the dotty cook under a strip light in the corner designated ‘Photo’. The machine itself wasn’t any bigger than the average typewriter, but its ingredients, spread out on sheets of Williams’s newspaper, seemed to cover half the floor and some would crawl away if he didn’t watch out and buck up.
It was too late now. As good as.
London hadn’t the courage to confirm that they wouldn’t run his report until they got the picture; they’d just gone mum. But he knew, he knew their little apparatchik minds. They would typeset his copy, typeset it, yes . . . and sit on it until they got corroboration. He could hear Back Bench calling across to Foreign Desk: ‘Anything on agency yet, Jack?’’/‘Wha’? That ex-Emir?’/‘Tha’s righ’. Ahmed A-Wotsit.’/‘Not a dicky bird.’/‘No sign of Gran’s little message from Pictures, either.’/ ‘He’s over the hill, poor old Gran.’ There was always the chance of an old reporter fabricating, a die-hard sucking a wrinkled thumb.
‘Die-hard,’ Jones muttered.
Williams glanced up. Surely he heard something. ‘What d’you say, Gran?’
‘Nothing.’
But Jones had said something. Was it Tired? An odd comment, just like that. Williams couldn’t make him out. For example, was Jones looking at him? Ever since he had arrived the old man’s eyes seemed to have been focused on something else, far away somewhere.
Williams said, ‘Nothing’ll reverse that coup now, Gran. If anyone was going to intervene –’
‘Don’t,’ Jones broke in.
‘Don’t what, old man?’
‘Don’t wanna hear.’
Williams stared at him. ‘What I’m trying to say is,’ he resumed, ‘if anyone was going to intervene it’d be this lot here in Saudi. They’re sitting on their hands. I’ve run the bare facts, that’s all. Change of government, as announced. Hatim and Al-Bakr in charge, with the old boy’s approval. Nothing about his being wounded. No republican propaganda, of course – we’ve been given the line from the Ministry, that’s the point. I mayn’t even lead with it. Only run seven inches. Above the fold, though, naturally. You want to see a copy?’
‘No.’
Jones’s scowl momentarily attained focus.
Williams regarded him sadly: the grand old-timer Gran Jones so far gone. It was all one could say: sad. He could hardly make out how the old boy fitted together, crowded so awkwardly into the basket chair, jaw slack and the vague soggy eyes turning towards him sideways through half-closed lids, never looking at him properly – just hovering around his midriff or his knees like a cloud of midges. Sad. If anyone else had been present – anyone he could speak to – he’d have whispered, ‘One day we’ll all be like that.’
Jones suddenly said, ‘Which Ministry?’
‘Information.’
‘Balls to the Ministry of Information.’
‘Know what you mean, Gran,’ Williams consoled.
‘Means nothing. Means they’re biding their time. Waiting for a proper policy line.’ How could Williams grasp it, straight off the Wolverhampton Echo to this censored apology of a news-sheet where the staff (such as they were) packed up and went home at six as if the universe stopped at six? Williams was a fool and had no cigarettes . . . though at least preferable to that rabble in the Darwish.
‘I have no purpose,’ he began clearly, and then halted. He was going to say, ‘I have no purpose in going anywhere else.’ He observed how when drunk his mind would shape crisp, clean intentions, which his voice would not always choose to honour. What he wished to give expression to was that he felt settled here, in this cramped and dingy newsroom. At home. Mr Granville Jones, at home. On the desk beside him beyond the empty tonic bottles a spike impaled agency typewritten copy. His eyes drifted up to the great red capitals, ACCURACY FIRST LAST AND ALWAYS. An echo from the Echo. A Paki had succeeded Williams as editor there, he had told him.
It’d turned out such an arse-over-tit world. A world of all sorts of inconsequential fragments, a perpetual cascade of bits and bobs, jumbled, meaningless, a tumbling unstoppable confusion of hopes and horrors, the flailin
g, strutting puppets, wood and straw, Hitler, Musso, Stalin, Chiang, Mao . . . and nobody, surely, pulling the wires, yet such terrible wrenchings, drang, stürm, for Man, pour la destinée humaine, la mission civilisatrice, historical inevitability. Mountains of skulls and seas of tears. The thousand-year Reich gone to rubble in half a dozen. All in the name of order, coherence, purpose, ‘accuracy first last and always’. Some ‘always’! Liz, always. The boys, always. Romy, always, for ever, sub specie aeternitatis, saecula saeculorum. That he should have ever credited it with any direction, any reckoning, any justice, any resolution! That he should have once striven so! So cared! So loved!
Romy, who was she? Had she led him here, a will-o’-the-wisp, dancing and ducking ahead of him, up those narrow wooden stairs where the black fellow and his grizzled skipper had humped him? Humped him and dumped him. A half-corpse. He hadn’t wanted to let them go, those strange new sudden friends, so late in his life, though he knew he had no right to hold them from their sea. Then Williams took him over, and Williams’s dingy newspaper premises were after all a species of haven, peculiar to his kind. He thought: I should be grateful, I was lucky to catch Williams still at his desk after moving my copy on the oil company telex, lucky to shake off the tail Al-Bakr or Hatim had put on me: they’d have prevented me filing, spirited me away somewhere, maybe knocked me around. They gave up too easy, these cheap young political dabblers.
Dingy Williams in his dingy eastern Arabian newsroom. In their very dinginess, a terminal security. Here his argot is more or less understood, the remnants of what he could once do acknowledged, his remnants identified like bits of a once-famed ship wrecked at sea years ago, forgotten by all except the marine community: this was the Gran Jones, by God, a piece of bulkhead, look! – a spar, a knob from a cabin door. Can’t piece her together now, nobody can – the sea has half of her already, more than half. This is mere jetsam. But Williams is in awe all the same – dingy, boozy Williams with his phoney boister, stock-in-trade Welshness, and his dingy cluttered newsroom with his staff gone home at six.
‘Go home,’ Jones said.
‘Not at all, Gran. It’s a pleasure.’ Williams meant it.
‘Go home,’ Jones repeated sharply.
After another fifteen or twenty minutes there would be nothing anyone could do. ‘They won’t remake page one after the second edition’s gone to bed. Not for this.’ His fingers flapped the fragment on which the Emir had scribbled his message. Another fragment. A bit or bob. Portentous.
‘Not at all,’ Williams repeated, jaunty as ever, from the ‘Sports’ desk. It was a big night, old Gran Jones needing his help, over the hill or not. ‘I’ll see you through, Gran.’
Through to where? She had led him here, and this was the endplace. He had nowhere to go now, nowhere he wished to go, no home. Maybe he had never had a home, ranging the globe for news. ‘Home is where your typewriter is.’ That was what Liz used to say of him proudly when they were first married, and he quoted it to Romy the very first time they were in bed together, Home is where my typewriter is.
‘Your typewriter is a professional disgrace.’ Romy’s voice, here, in his head. And dawn already stealing through the window of her bedroom in the Residency annexe. It’s only the second morning after they first met at her father’s dinner-table, such is the force and speed at which a love-line breaks upon a fate-line.
‘I’m a descendant of Cain,’ he murmurs to her beside him, ‘a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth.’
She has her own information. ‘He came to live in the land of Nod.’
‘Who?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake – Cain. How can you not know that? Where were you at school?’
‘We wrote on slates.’
She slips out of bed with a rustle of sheets to fetch the Bible, and there and then obliges him to read Genesis where it tells of Nod being ‘east of Eden’. The Pentateuch is one of her archaeological sources. He has to take the Good Book over by the window to read it without his spectacles. Outside in the compound the lifeless British flag on its pole that frees slaves.
‘Where exactly is Nod?’
‘Exactly?’ she echoes.
‘Does anybody know?’
‘Funnily enough, the site has recently been located.’
‘Where?’
‘Here.’
‘No. Really?’
‘Yes – here.’ She is lifting the sheet to invite him back to bed and to herself. To Nod.
She whispers, ‘Nod is Old Hebrew for “a place of exile”.’
‘What happened to Cain in the end?’
‘He settled down and had a big family.’
Williams said, ‘You could come home with me. The settee lets down.’ He had never got so close to Fleet Street before. International newsmen never came to this place.
‘I want to stay here, Williams, if you don’t mind.’
Were the only fragments that counted the least preservable, like the utter surety and rightness after he had coupled with Romy, which were as utterly evanescent?
Williams got up and crossed to the disordered machine. The pomaded Indian still acted brisk and important; he began gabbling about the mechanism. Any fool could see the man could not reassemble it and have it transmit a picture to London all in ten minutes: he was still extracting parts. Jones had often seen such performances in the tropical world – a prolonged charade of professional activity, futile from the start, indeed the last state worse than the first.
‘Have a drop more anaesthetic, old man. I get the best sid you can find.’
Jones disliked the taste but let Williams top him up again. Why not? It was apt, this kind of dereliction. A nest of newspapers. Tramps in England stuffed their boots with newspapers. Newspapers made tramps.
When his Arab friends had lifted him out of the taxi and into this back-street building he caught sight of the neon sign over the shop below – ‘Al-Maimery’: a curious name yet also containing its obscure aptness. A maimery for the destitute, the bust, the washed-up. An endplace for the ones with nothing to lose. Was this not the time that counted for most, when nothing was left for him?
For years and years now he had been shedding things. He who had had so much; the whole world. There was a time when the events of the world had no right to take place without his attending upon them.
Now, nothing. He said to himself: so it has come to this. A reporter without a pen. Powerless to transmit a simple image. Fumbling about in his mind he came on his voluminous manuscript, and recognised it instantly as a monstrous exercise in worthless egotism. He hoped Paul would put a match to it. Quite likely, if they had come looking for him, they would have searched the majlis and carried off his papers: such was the way of uniformed men in time of tension, to whom anything written in a language they knew not was evidence of conspiracy. Let them keep them. A mountain of words. Let some back-room Egyptian translator in Security wade through it all. Let that underpaid Gyppo hack be the only reader of his quarter-century’s worth of labour. Such sacrifice, such hazard, such wisdom, such ephemerality. He used to be able to read tomorrow’s world like a tablet on a mountainside: he was seldom wrong. He could read unreportable facts behind the reported news, he could read governments, read nations, read races. He could analyse with uncanny swiftness those polar demons – rich and poor, weak/strong, black/white, north/south, left/right – tearing at the soul of the planet’s principal inhabitant: knew them like players in a travelling troupe with their masques to perform. He knew the passion of men for identity – their place, their lingo, their God – and for what they thought they possessed or deserved. For such figments men would clamour, hate, rip one another apart, devastate, annihilate. In the name of their illusory claims to full humanity men would become beasts. He could read it all. So what?
Men would, of course, be gods . . . but where God was, nothing was. He was vaguely familiar with that tag or text and though he had given himself no practice at this God of the wastes who called to him from towers
, he saw now that his life had been an elaborate exercise in becoming nothing and that this might, just might, be a species of inestimable gain – the will-o’-the-wisp entrapped – as if for this ultimate distillation he had been spared. He could bring this paradox to the Emir: his old blood-brother whose entire authority was reduced to a scrap of writing so tiny it could be concealed in the palm of a hand where the love-line burst across the fate-line.
Williams studied his watch. Gran Jones seemed to him to have dropped off, his head lolling. Was this the sharp end of the profession after all, the way the big news really broke? He saw the thick hands, mottled with prickly heat, twitch momentarily and the Emir’s paper flutter to the floor like a dead leaf.
Something was still to be resolved, Jones knew. A bird flapping and fluttering. They made the holy spirit a dove, but this was his parrot troubling him. His parrot would die if Aziz neglected to call in and feed her. The parrot was the residual duty impeding his attainment of nothing in this endplace newsroom. The parrot tethered him and would not allow him to go, like a stick caught on a stream-bed vibrating against the current. The bird struggling and the stick trembling snagged his release – for he was otherwise ready now to let go, to abandon himself, to become so naked as to shed body also . . . shed everything except a necessary stupor concerning wherever he would be borne away.
Through half-closed eyes he saw the Indian mechanic beginning to reassemble the wirephoto machine and he was aware that his grey parrot with the red feathers in her tail was of an importance that still forbade him to be gone. The red tail feathers, he knew, were a symbol of good fortune: just as the life of the bird must be preserved for a vehicle of providence in her tail feathers, so he must not let go because of his fragment of truth. It was somewhere about his person, a truth, a purity amid all the chicanery and confusion and worthlessness: a crumple of paper among the ants, the last footstep in the lone sands.
Williams said, ‘I think we’re getting somewhere, Gran.’
Truth was indivisible, he was well aware. A gem purity.