by Jamie Tuck
On his way from the coast to the city, and Ted Berry’s eyes scan the departing platform as the fat yellow Metro train glides its electric way up the tracks. A frustrated artist has tagged the word 'Boz' on the station wall in bubble letters imported from the New York subway.
Even vandalism has been Americanised.
‘Bez?’ Wedge says, rocking with the train tracks at Berry’s shoulder.
The grafitti winks away, Berry turns his head to watch it go.
‘Wha?’
‘Sucks cocks.’
‘Aye, for baccy,’ Berry replies, lifting a finger. ‘You finger blokes’ bum holes and that. In toilets.’
Sam Smith is opposite, going backwards up the tracks in a Brazil football shirt – the name ZICO and the number 10 ironed onto the back. His bright red ADIDAS – All Day I Dream About Sex – bag sits on the empty seat next to him, his football kit inside.
‘You two are weird,’ he says.
‘What?’ Berry says, incredulous. He points at Wedge. ‘Smell his fuckin fingers!’
‘What’s with blokes and cocks and arses?’
‘Ha heh heh.’
‘You know all about blokes and cocks and arses,’ Wedge answers Smithy. ‘Admit it.’
‘I know more about snatch than you ever will.’
Berry sniffs the air.
‘Man, what’s that smell? It smells like cat piss.’
Smithy pulls his red bag closer – his favourite trainers inside, dying. Adidas Samba. No matter how many times they go round with the soap in the washing machine, there’s just no saving them.
This trip to the city is to buy new ones.
The Metro judders into the first station and the doors cough open – Smith’s Park. Five solid, angry looking young men get on the train and bowl down the aisle towards them. One of the youths staring at them, all the way, without blinking.
He pushes Wedge’s head to the side as they pass.
‘What the fuck you lookin at?’ he says. ‘Fuckin fat head.’
The feral kids walk on down the aisle, smelling of glue and beer.
‘Shit the fuckin bed,’ Berry says. ‘They eat their fuckin young up here, man.’
‘Fuck, man?’ Wedge says, glancing over his shoulder. ‘They gone?’
‘They’re sittin down,’ Smithy says. ‘Up there.’
They slouch at the back of the train, a bench apiece. The tannoy parps and the door’s black rubber lips kiss closed.
Fifteen seconds later, and they open again at the next station. The Ferals rise from their seats.
‘They’re gettin off,’ Smithy says.
‘Thank Fuck for that,’ Wedge turns to check.
Two 14-year-old girls board the train, yipping excitedly in uncomfortable bras. They sit down on the other side of the aisle.
Their eyes flick shyly in Smithy’s direction.
That rancid ammonia smell couldn’t, surely, be the boy in the bright yellow shirt.
The doors close.
Samuel Smith is, it has to be said, a very good looking boy. Maturing fast, chin peppered with teenage bristles. And these fine days suit his Mediterranean skin. He’s also an exceptionally good footballer.
What a bastard.
He and Berry had been best mates at primary school, but the last eighteen months had seen Smithy surge ahead towards manhood. He even smells grown up, aftershave and sweat.
Berry pulls his favourite t-shirt, a lime green Le Shark, away from where it sticks to his chest.
‘Fuckin scorchio,’ he says.
He looks out of the window. A grass verge. Rolling weeds. A yellow police cone and a shopping trolley. The train gathers then bursts into a warzone, derelict buildings sprinkled across the discarded plain.
No man’s land.
More weeds and space, space and weeds. Soon the red brick of a housing estate fills the window frame and the train jerks away speed in approach to the station.
Heads turned to the window or tilted down to newspapers and magazines, bop from side to side up the carriage as it clatters along the track.
‘Fuck?’ Wedge says.
He rolls onto his left buttock and leans against Berry’s shoulder, face squeezed yet inflated.
‘What?’ Berry says. ‘Ah, fuck off man. Don’t. Don’t man.’
Berry’s eyes nip and he puts his nose into the crux of his elbow.
Buh-dumf!
Wedge’s fart bassoons through the Metro carriage with crisp, head turning clarity; eyes spin in search of the source. The two Lolitas stop yipping mid-syllable and look to past the Brazilian dreamboy to his two annoying mates.
‘Scruffy bastard,’ one mouths to the other.
Wedge pulls Berry’s elbow away from his nose.
Sniff.
‘AH! Fuckinhell man! That’s fuckin WRONG man!’
Worms appear at Wedge's temples as he rings his colon from shit to tip like a cake decorator.
A gaggle of wet Daffy Duck quacks depart his sweaty rectum.
He relaxes, tenses up an octave and pipes out another set.
The poison gas rolls and claws its evil indiscriminate way towards nostrils. Berry takes in another dose of soiled air then pulls his t-shirt over his nose.
A back hand volley sends the scent of a dozen dead swamp toads towards Smithy who, of course, can't resist a test whiff.
Sniff.
‘Aaaah! Man!’
The train pulls up to a new station and the hydraulic doors again cough open.
‘Y'scruffy bastard,’ Smithy says, raising his t-shirt and wafting his hand in front of his face towards the door
‘Pheeeeew,’ nods the proud father. ‘Y’could sew a button on that.’
A grey haired man dressed for tennis steps over the threshold and pushes his motorcycle cop sunglasses up into damp hair, his top lip and sunburnt nose twitch.
‘What the hell's that?’
His wife keeps her thick, gold framed sunglasses over her eyes as she follows him onto the train. She could be an extra on Dallas, some oil baron’s plastic wife. She wafts the cooler air around in front of her sun slapped face.
‘Is it the bins?’ she says.
‘The bins? Some bugger's dropped one,’
They walk on. The tannoy parps and the doors glide shut.
The train rattles onto a metal bridge high over a grass gorge and approaches the fat bend in the river. The tangled shape of an oil platform is being fussed over by cranes. Tiny bursts of acetylene light mark the spots on the scaffolding where men sting the steel. The train slides off the bridge, runs parallel to a road and then brakes, slowing into the station.
Two men in traffic warden uniforms stand on the platform.
‘Shit?’ Berry jerks forward. ‘It’s?’
He stiffens in his seat as the window glides to a halt; the dark suits step forward, a bright orange badge with a black letter M on their caps.
The train stops.
‘Fuck, it is,’ Berry says as the doors flick open. ‘It’s The Checkies.’
The two ticket inspectors board the front carriage.
‘What?’ Smithy says, spinning to look over his shoulder. ‘They gettin on?’
Passengers inside the other carriage hand over their thin yellow tickets.
The two young girls smirk.
Smithy fidgets.
‘Told ya we shoulda bought tickets,’ he says.
The tannoy parps and the doors begin to close.
‘Fuck them,’ Wedge says. ‘Checkie wankers.’
‘Gettin off,’ Smithy says, darting up and out with his bag.
‘What the fu . . .’ Berry says. He jumps up after him as the doors slide along their runners, Wedge gets snared; they open and release him, leaving a grey slash down his white t-shirt.
‘Fuckin homo,’ Wedge says. ‘What’s the matter? They didn’t even get on our train.’
One of the Checkies spots them bundling from th
e doors and steps to the closed door. The pair of carriages jerk free of the concrete and the Checky glides slowly up the platform. He's a young, efficient looking little accountant with round glasses and a square head – jaw locked with ambition in a job that fits him.
A great future ahead of him in The Force.
Wedge’s pants are down at the back.
‘Moonie!’ he shouts, his white backside exposed to the sun. ‘Checkie wankers! Kiss me fuckin arse!’
Equally suited to his role.
He slaps his arse cheeks.
‘Ha heh heh.’
The train accelerates away.
Berry looks around.
‘Where’s Smithy?’
Berry walks under the brown corrugated iron roof that covers the station entrance.
‘Smithy?’
He’s on the other side of the barrier at the ticket machine fumbling through his tracksuit pockets.
‘What y’doin?’ Wedge asks.
‘Buyin a ticket.’
‘Fuck for?’ Berry says.
‘Checkies. The Checkies.’
‘Fuck the Checkies,’ Wedge says. ‘I'm not payin.’
‘We’re not fuckin bairns anymore man. It’s only ten pence.’
The machine demands a coin. Smithy feeds it, waits for it to spit his ticket then walks back to the barrier. He pushes the thin yellow card into the slit and steps through chrome rods and onto the platform.
‘It's a tenner fine,’ Smithy says. ‘It’s not worth the grief.’
Wedge grabs the ticket as it jumps up from the slot on top of the barrier.
‘Hey, give . . .’
He curls the ticket into his mouth like a strip of Juicy Fruit gum.
‘Y’fuckin dick!’ Smithy says.
Wedge’s jaws work the ticket to a yellow mulch.
‘Nyah ha ha.’
‘Prick.’
Another train tickles the wires overhead and is soon up against the platform. Flashes of flesh and clothing turn into bodies on orange seats as the train comes to a halt. The doors open. The trio step into the carriage and collapse in identical poses.
The doors parp their tune.
Berry tilts his head again to the glass; the train rises up to window level with the bedrooms of a row of terraced houses. People appear inside, here and there. But no one is fucking or fighting.
They never are.
He stares over towards a fresh tangle of dormant cranes that scratch at the skyline over a colossal black shed, as long as the river bank itself. The shed stretches out for acre after acre. One fading painted word, vast, is stencilled along the side – SHIPBUILDER.
‘Fuck,’ Berry says. ‘It must be mental in there.’
‘Where?’ Wedge says, chewing Smithy’s ticket.
Another station arrives.
‘In that fuckin shed thing.’
‘Eh?’
The two Checkies board the train with the other passengers, in disguise – they’d taken off their hats.
‘Tickets,’ says the little Himmler ticket inspector, glasses slipping down his nose. ‘Please.’
He puts his hat back on, he loves his hat.
The older checkie steps back onto the platform and lights a cigarette.
Smithy spasms for the door, changes his mind then sits still, staring at Wedge’s rotating mouth.
‘Cunt,’ he says.
‘Tickets,’ the Checky repeats, his hand out towards Wedge. ‘Please.’
Berry watches the young Checky's face; his head is oddly hinged, the top half of his skull moving when he talks but his lower jaw is locked in position and protrudes far enough to scoop pickles from a jar. Both rows of teeth are wired with dark metal train tracks. Braces.
He looks like a human stapler.
‘Do you or do you not have a ticket?’ he says with an erection in his pants, probably.
‘Well?’
Wedge spits the yellow mess into the ticket inspector’s hand.
‘There y'go occifer.’
The Checky looks down at the rancid mulch then up at the head-in-a-hurry.
‘Get off MY fucking train,’ he commands. ‘Now!’
‘But that's a valid ticket!’
‘Ha heh heh.’
The Checky bends down and puts his freezer lips between Wedge and laughin boy Berry.
‘It is!’ Berry points.
‘And where’s yours?’
‘Up me fuckin arse.’
‘Get off my train. Or I'll call the police.’
‘Y’mean?’ Wedge looks around. ‘You’re NOT the police?’
Outside the train, and the older Checky loosens his tie then waves to the driver.
The doors close.
‘Name?’ the young Himmler asks Smithy.
‘Samuel Alfonso Smith,’ he says.
Wedge looks at him.
‘Al-fuckin-fonso?’ he snorts.
Berry watches the bureaucrat flip open his pad, then lick the tip of his pencil.
‘Hey mister?’ Berry says.
‘Yes?’
‘What y’do that for?’
‘What?’
‘Lick y’pencil.’
‘What?’
‘Y’know. Why do people do that? Lick their pencils? Don’t they work like, without y’lickin them first?’
‘Do y’lick y’mate’s pencil too?’ Wedge says, nodding to the other checky.
‘Ha heh heh.’
‘I bet you rub each other’s balls and that, at night, with y’hats.’
The checkie shakes the doubt from his head.
‘Address?’ he says to Smithy.
‘1 Purbeck Close, Preston Grange, North Shields,’ he answers, truthfully.
‘Fuckin Smithy man?’ Berry mutters.
The little Himmler scribbles, rips the ticket from his pad and hands it to Smithy.
Then he turns to Edward James Berry.
‘And what's your name?’
‘Michael Jackson,’ he says. ’No middle name.’
The checky licks his pencil, scribbles.
‘Address?’
‘Ow!’
The little Nazi looks up from his pad as Berry drags his feet back two paces and jerks a hand out to his side. Then the other.
‘Ow!’ he squeaks, grabbing his balls.
‘Sorry?’
‘Sorry – ow! - it’s me nerves,’ Berry says, easing the tightening strings in his cheeks. ‘Ow! Three Billy Jean Drive, Preston Grange, North Shields. Ow!’
The checkie pushes his cap back, rips out the ticket for Berry and turns to Wedge.
‘Name?’
‘Mick E Mouse,’ he says, upside-down-reading the pad the checkie holds in his hands like The Bible. ‘That's emm, oh, you, ess, ee,’
‘Address?’
‘Err? That's err, number two. Sir. Ehm? Number two Dis Nay Land Drive, North Shields.’
‘Ha heh heh. Ha heh heh.’
The checky’s eyes sharpen but see nothing. The smug little civil servant rips out Wedge’s ticket from his almost empty pad and hands it over.
‘Right,’ he says, flipping it closed.
Job done.
The steel ropes rattle.
‘Don't get back on the Metro. Next time we'll call the police.’
‘Is that what y’wanna be, like?’ Wedge asks, as he crumples his piece of paper into a ball.
‘Pardon?’
‘Is that what y’wanna be like, when y’grow up? A copper? So y’get to nick people properly and y’know, beat them up with your truncheon and that?’
‘You think you’re dead clever don't you?’ he says. ‘That's a ten pound fine each, don't suppose any of you little tramps have it on you?’
Berry nips Smithy, hard, on the back.
‘Ah man! Fuck y’doin?’
‘Nah,’ he says for him.
The older checky drops his cigarette an
d grinds it with his shoe then kicks it down for the track rats. The train arrives and the doors open. He barely moves his head as four laughing 10-year-old boys sprint passed him from the train.
‘Checky wankers!’ they shout as they run across the platform and leap the barrier. ‘Fuck off!’
The young Nazi takes a quarter stride in their direction then accepts defeat. He crosses the words ‘Mind The Gap’ hammered into a piece of steel on the new train’s threshold.
Wedge throws his crumpled up ticket, it hits the checky on the back of his cap.
The tannoy parps and the doors start to slide closed. The ticket inspector turns.
Just in time for a close up of Wedge’s naked arse cheeks, smeared against the glass.
‘Moonie!’ he screams. ‘Checky wankers!’
Prreeeeep.
His fart lacks propulsion - like an old door on a rusty hinge. He gathers himself for a final push on his bowels as the train starts to move away.
Baa ha-haar!
It sounds like a crisp packet bursting in a puddle.
‘Ha heh heh. Ha heh heh.’
The train and Wedge’s arse cheeks part company, two bum sweat marks evaporating slowly from the glass.
Wedge lunges upright, putting his hands on his hips.
‘Fuck!’ he says, squirming up a further inch on tightly-clenched buttocks. ‘I think I followed through?’
The train unfastens from the station and glides up the polished parallel lines like a fat yellow zip.
≈
Smithy takes the first of forty one concrete stairs down to the street.
‘I’m not gettin back on again,’ he says. ‘I’m gettin the bus.’
‘Eh?’
Berry cups a hand over his eyes. The towering black shed he’d seen from the Metro spreads off to the east with no end in sight.
‘Right, OK. Aye.’
The arm of a yellow crane, rigid as a pterodactyl’s perch, is hanging high beyond the gates of the shipyard.
‘Man, I wanna get inside there,’ he turns to Wedge.
But he’s not there. He’s on his way down the steps, puffing out smoke.
‘Sniper’s fuckin dream,’ Berry says. ‘Hah heh heh.’
Berry picks up a gravel chip and throws it.
Misses.
He heads down the steps, gaining speed as he goes.
‘Bell End!’ he shouts.
He reaches street level and looks down to the shipyard.
The massive shed squats deceptively small from here, its endless roof sitting almost square to the office blocks at the top of a steep ramp that falls away to the shipyard’s doors.
A red-ink dolphin leaps between the words ‘Swan’ and ‘Hunters’ - a firm famous across the world for the construction of massive, killer ships.
Not anymore, not really.
The last thing out of here was a tiny ferry. The Pride of the Tyne now crosses the river like a kid’s toy.
‘We gotta get in there man,’ Berry says.
‘Maybes we can play with the cranes?’ Wedge yelps. ‘Fuckin spin them around and that! Lift things up. Fuck man, let’s go!’
‘What about me new trainers?’ Smithy says.
‘Fuck y’trainers man,’ Wedge says, pointing. ‘Looker. Cranes and that.’
Berry nudges Smithy down the path and over the road, the Tarmac pulls at their soles like hot treacle.
They turn right at the front of the yard, looking for a gap in the red brick.
‘Me trainers . . ‘
‘In a bit man,’ Berry says. ‘There’s nay fuckin rush.’
West along the river, the wall is replaced by a brand new fence. It seems to be guarding nothing more than a patch of dry derelict land. White canvas tents are pegged over it at regular intervals.
‘What’s this?’ Wedge says.
Berry steps back to look at a sign.
‘‘Segedunum Roman Fort – English Heritage archaelogical dig,’’ Berry reads. “The Strong Fort – the precise spot where Emperor Hadrian had finally halted the expansion of the Roman Empire.’ And, hey?’
‘What?’ Smithy says.
‘’KEEP OUT,’’ Berry reads. ‘’Trespassers will be electrocuted.’’
‘What?’ Smithy says, reading the sign.
A man attached to a beard crosses from one tent to another, one of many beards sifting almost two thousand years worth of brick and dirt in search of the past.
‘It says ‘prosecuted’ you wanker.’
‘Hey aye, it does,’ Berry says, he pulls a spaz face. ‘D’uh!’
‘Fuckin spic wankers,’ Wedge says. ‘Geordies were too hard for them.’
They wander through the open gate.
‘Ah, c’mon man,’ Smithy whines. ‘This is stupid man. The sign? I need to get to town.’
But he follows.
They head behind the tent where the beard went.
There’s the sound of a belt being undone and pants heading to the floor.
A groan.
‘Fuckinhell!’ Berry whispers. ‘He’s doin a shit! Ha heh heh. Ha heh heh.’
Wedge puts his fingers to his lips, and points behind the makeshift toilet.
‘Hole,’ he mouths. ‘In the fence.’
‘Ha heh heh.’
There’s a gap in the much older fence that blocks access to the dockyard below.
The fence has been neatly opened by an excavating beard, showing an uncharacteristic bit of initiative - looking for the Emperor’s clothes a few feet beyond the site’s official permit from the local council.
Stones possibly laid by conquering hands sit in an open grave, the soil painstakingly removed over many hours with a toothbrush.
Wedge pushes through the gap, scattering them down the bank.
‘Oops.’
The man in the tent groans and there’s the crisp cracking sound of a turd being born, the beard’s anus making a clean break of things.
‘Nyeeugh,’ he groans, dropping the rest of his load like cement from a mixer.
‘Go on son!’ Berry whispers. ‘Ha heh heh.’
Berry pushes Smithy through the gap.
They’re inside the shipyard.
Piece of piss.
Berry and Smithy follow Wedge out into a gulley behind two storeys of 1930s red brick. White doors hang from a hinge like kicked teeth. Berry sticks his head in the door, there’s a staircase strewn with envelopes and random sheets of paper.
Just your average derelict office block.
Boring.
There’s not even any windows left to smash.
They scout around the side of the building.
A strip of grass falls away to a steep drop of about twenty feet.
Berry looks up.
‘Shit. The. Fuckin. Bed.’
The sheer ludicrous scale of the dock yard brings him to a halt.
It’s a vast concrete clearing.
A few years earlier HMS Ark Royal, the Royal Navy’s brand new flagship no less, had been built here, she’d flooded streets and houses on the south bank of the river when she was launched. They’d had to dredge the river just so her hull wouldn’t stick to the bottom.
Berry had watched the aircraft carrier sail out to sea, holding onto his big brother Will’s hand at the feet of Lord Collingwood’s monument high above the mouth of the River Tyne. He’d dreamed for days about being a sailor, just like Will.
The sheer scale of the boat being drawn from the fat mouth of the river like a swallowed sword had – until now - no context. The tugs had disconnected their ropes and parped their phantom horns as the gigantic galleon floated into the North Sea with the turds and the tampons.
Berry takes in the skyline, it’s cluttered with painted motionless steel; cranes standing guard every few hundred yards like iron storks.
The skeletons of a spent metal army.
‘This place is
fuckin mental,’ Berry beams to no-one - even Smithy has gone. He’s scuffing down the green bank to the concrete plain holding his Adidas bag.
Berry is struck by a chemical blast to the brain stem.
‘Neeeeeeeeeaaaa!’
His legs scuttle down the grass verge and he tips into an involuntary forward roll.
‘Shit fuck!’
He rolls and rises, rolls and rises - the world turning from green to blue, green to blue until something bony breaks the rhythm.
‘Oof,’ Smithy squeals. ‘What y’doin?’
Berry gets to his feet and straightens his t-shirt, Wedge is standing in front of him.
‘Tit,’ Wedge smiles. ‘What y’doin.’
Berry grabs his ample head under his armpit.
‘Ha heh heh.’
‘Fuckin get off man . . .’
He rubs his ears.
‘BELL!’ Berry shouts into one of them.
‘END!’ he shouts in the other.
He unlocks Wedge’s head and sprints across the plain.
‘BELL! END! Woo hoo!’
In the city, and Rick E. Delaney’s eyes are locked on the trainee reporter’s arse as she stands at the water cooler filling a plastic glass. She’s hot off the press this one, star of the fresh new intake from the newspaper group’s graduate training scheme.
‘Delaney!’
The news editor's Ulster bawl screeches passed Delaney’s ears and out the open plan office’s window to the High Street, traffic tooting by.
A fan moves the hot air around Delaney’s desk.
Click.
It wafts his hair to the right as he turns to watch the young girl walk back to her desk.
Click.
‘Delaney!’ Craig Munroe, the news editor, shouts again from the thin row of computer screens in the centre of the news room.
‘You fuckin idiot!’
‘What?’ Delaney shakes his head, pushes back his hair.
‘Sorry?’
Delaney gazes over to the newspaper’s street boss – Bambi-eyed, bemused - one hand in his hair.
Click.
‘You fuckin deaf, or what?’
Ellen Carter winces as she touch types at her keyboard opposite Delaney, the green screen flashing in her glasses.
‘No, no. I was just . .’
‘Got a second?’ Munroe says. ‘Shall I get back to you later?’
‘No, no,’ Delaney beams. ‘Fire away.’
‘You're weatherboy. Two hundred words. Ten minutes. Hurry the fuck up.’
‘Me? But?’
Munroe picks up a ringing phone.
‘News desk,’ he says it like anyone else would say ‘fuck off’.
Delaney looks back at himself from inside his own green terminal and twitches his head to the side to move a hair curtain from his eye.
‘Message pending’ flashes at the top of his Atex computer screen, he types 'rms' - the code to read a message. It's a page full of text, The Press Agency’s national weather round up, sent by Munroe. There’s a note at the top of the copy; ‘Wake the fuck up. Weather report. Regionalise. 200 words. Ten minutes.’
‘Fat IRA twat,’ Delaney mutters.
‘Protestant,’ Ellen says as she types.
‘What?’
‘His dad was in the RUC. The IRA shot him.’
‘Good.’
‘Rick!’
‘I'm too bloody good to be weather boy,’ Delaney says. ‘Why doesn't he give it to you to do?’
He taps at his keyboard then nods to the adjacent desk where the new trainees re-arrange faces and phone voices, trying to look and sound like grizzled hacks.
‘I mean . .’ he says. ‘ . . . to one of the kids to do?’
Sarah Walker-Stone, the reporter whose naked buttocks he’d just been slapping in his head, sits with the rest of the bairns. She’s pretty, if a little plain - a great future ahead of her reading an autocue for local TV news.
Click.
He beams a smile and winks.
She flushes.
‘She’s got a boyfriend, Rick,’ Ellen says. ‘Ben. He works upstairs on the mag. Nice guy.’
‘So?’ Delaney says.
The room sounds like a call centre, phones ringing - muffled conversations and tapping keyboards.
‘Weather stories are for learners,’ he mumbles to himself in his screen. ‘I’m sick of doing stupid weather stories.’
‘Anyway,’ Ellen says. ‘What do you care, you’re leaving. Right?’
Her fingers reach for the words of that day's front page splash; a round up of sporadic riots across the country tacked onto a minor local skirmish that may or may not have had something to do with the sun. Page one in the local newspaper handbook: find the local angle (even if there isn’t one).
Last weekend’s copy of The Sunday Sorted sits on Delaney’s desk, it’s masthead boldly proclaiming its world view with the three words spelled out in a gothic typeface last seen in the Third Reich.
Mum Swaps Kids for Drugs, is the front page headline.
He paints his own name above the story in his mind.
BY RICK E. DELANEY! - he feels he’s worthy of the exclamation mark.
‘Munroe’s such a fat, talentless turd,’ Delaney whines on. ‘I could do his job better than him, any day. I'd stay if they'd put me on the desk. How can they expect to hold onto the most talented people if they don't look after them?’
‘You told him you're joining The SS yet?’ Ellen says, glancing from her screen to his face then to the clock on the red wall spinning towards deadline.
She presses the SEND key.
‘Not yet, no.’
Delaney pauses and reads the top of The Press Agency copy attached to Munroe’s message, pleased to see 'By Peter Lee, Press Agency News’ at the top.
‘Another talentless turd,’ he says to himself in the screen.
He deletes the name and inserts his own, smiling as the characters form.
Just typing his name is enough to give him an erection:
EXCLUSIVE
BY RICK E. DELANEY
The Kernel’s house style is not for reporter bylines set in capitals, it’d always be the first change the sub-editors had to make on any of Delaney’s copy - he’d never noticed.
Delaney looks across to Munroe, a telephone is pushed against the side of his damp, sunburnt head. His face inflated by the pressure of his job. And lager. His hand is deep inside a sack of Tudor crisps, salt and vinegar flavour. He pushes a handful into a ham sandwich, lying pink and open on his desk. He crushes it closed with the palm of his hand.
‘Go on, fatboy, have your heart attack now,’ he whispers. ‘I’ll even write your obit. ‘Fat talentless twat died today at his desk - and there was much rejoicing . . .’’
‘Rick, for God’s sake. Don’t say things like that.’
Click.
The fan moves his hair.
Click.
His eyes settle on the news desk clock.
‘Eek!’
He grabs the telephone and calls the local meteorological centre to get the report for the day.
‘Look out y’window son,’ the weatherman tells him. ‘It’s bloody hot.’
‘Thanks.’
Slam.
He starts to write.
‘‘The north east is set to keep walking on sunshine,’’ he reads to his green reflection.
He pauses. Smiles, nods to himself.
‘‘As the hottest start to the summer since records began is set to continue. Experts say temperatures could break all records and reach over one hundred degrees. A Tyne meteorologist told The Kernel: ‘Don’t pack away your bikinis and trunks just yet, it’s going to keep on being a scorcher for quite a while yet, that’s for sure.’’’
‘’Quite’?’ Delaney ponders. He deletes the word - no matter none of it it was actually said, the meteorologist is a scientist not an artist. And it’s what he meant, really. Plus, fuck it, they’re usuall
y wrong anyway.
He reads over his words, taps his cursor back to the word ‘break’ and replaces it with ‘annihilate’ - changes his mind, replaces that with ‘obliterate’ - then searches the story baskets, cutting and pasting text sent in by reporters in district offices, swotting their names off their stories - he presses the SEND key and his name flies, solo, into print.
Munroe leans back to one side of his chair and grabs at the crumpled cloth of his suit jacket. He pulls out his Marlboro red cigarettes and gets up.
He glances back at his screen and leans forward and down, peering into the glass, as if a bird just shat on it.
‘Fuck me,’ he says to his reflection, aggressively hitting his delete key nine times.
‘Delaney!’ he shouts.
‘Boss?’
‘How the fuck can a weather story be an ‘Exclusive’?’
‘Oh, oh? I? Haha.’
‘Such a cunt,’ Munroe mutters. ‘Such a fuckin cunt.’
He sighs and steps away from his desk, three sheets of paper in his hands. He passes the general reporters’ cluster of desks on his way to the door.
‘Well done Ellen,’ he says as he passes. ‘You're a star. That page one copy went through untouched.’
She purrs up to him like a stroked pussy.
‘Thanks boss.’
‘Brown nose,’ Delaney mouths to her.
‘You could learn something from that girl Delaney,’ Munroe says from the back of his fat departing head.
He pushes open the door and steps out into the hallway, he presses the button for the lift.
Ellen nods at the door.
‘Now’s your chance,’ she says. ‘What you waiting for?’
‘Sorry?’
‘To tell him.’
He looks at her, confused.
‘You’re leaving.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Delaney says. ‘Yes, you’re right.’
He gets up and heads for the door.
The lift pings as it reaches the ground floor, just two flights of stairs below.
‘Lazy fat pig.’
Delaney takes the stairs. Framed front pages of a footballer with an awful perm line the stairwell walls as he goes, in celebratory poses, like the pastor in some evangelical church. Delaney reaches the ground floor altar and the final team photo – some sort of Last Supper, a football and scarf in place of the bread and wine. The headline is just a name: KEEGAN! - more than enough around these parts.
‘Messiah my arse,’ Delaney says. ‘You still won nothing.’
He takes the final step passed the security guard - screech, screech, scrape - and out into daylight.
‘Cunt,’ Norman grunts.
Munroe is on the other side of the alley in the shadows reading the sheets of paper, a story for tomorrow’s paper, his first cigarette is already down to the filter. He accepts one of Delaney's, wrenching it from its gay silver box.
‘I need a word boss,’ Delaney says.
Munroe grips the fag tight between thumb and forefinger like a dart, lights it. He looks grey, a creature that doesn’t belong above ground let alone out of doors.
A heart attack waiting to happen.
He’s 34.
‘I need a word too, Delaney.’
Delaney's feathers flutter. He rolls out his number one winning smile.
‘Really? What about?’
‘You,’ he exhales. ‘Being an utter cunt of a kid.’
Delaney's smile drips away like diarrhoea.
Munroe puts his fag to his lips and sucks hard.
‘Well, I don’t think that’s very . . .’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ he jabs the nearly finished cigarette dart at Delaney’s chest. ‘You’re nowhere near as good as you think you are. You think you’re fuckin Hemingway, but you’re not. You’re a shit, sloppy writer – fuckin cliché-riddled wank, and most of it’s made up. Everything is fuckin ‘set to’. Well, I’m ‘set to’ send you on your fuckin way. Idiot.’
He drags hard on the fag.
‘But . . .’
‘Shut up. And I'm fuckin sick to the tits of reporters complaining that you shafted them. You’re always pinching bylines and pissing everybody off. What the fuck is wrong with you? Eh?’
No answer.
‘You’re shit Delaney. Dog. Shit. A fuckin fraud. Out your depth. You wouldn’t know a good story if it pissed in your ear. You’ve not once brought in an exclusive of your own. Not once. You should fuck off and get a job in PR . . .’
He drags smoke hard and deep into his lungs, looks at the filter and shakes his head at the wanky brand name on the barrel.
‘ . . . where you belong.’
‘How dare . . . that’s. That’s just not true.’
‘What’s not true?’
‘Everything. All of it.’
Munroe flicks the cigarette away and pulls out his own box of Marlboro reds.
‘Go on.’
He doesn’t offer Delaney one.
‘I can’t be that bad,’ Delaney says. ‘If one of the nationals wants to poach me.’
‘Fuck off,’ Munroe snorts, man breasts shaking with a heavy laugh. ‘Hoo hoo hoo.’
‘It’s true!’
The news editor looks up over his cuffed palm as he lights his fag.
He drags hot tar into his lungs.
‘Go on.’
‘The Sunday Sorted.’
‘Hoo hoo hoo hoo.’
The laugh is raucous, unrestrained.
‘Hoo hoo hoo hoo.’
‘Hey, but?’ Delaney says. ‘I? In.’
‘You’re fuckin jokin, right?’
‘In London,’ Delaney continues. ‘I’ve been offered a contract and. And everything. There’s nothing you can say to keep me. And . . .’
‘Interesting,’ Munroe says. ‘When do they think you’re gonna start?’
‘Soon.’
‘Like fuck you are,’ Munroe says, dropping his cigarette butt and grinding it under his heel. ‘You're on three months notice, loads of reporters are on holiday and I need someone to do the shit shifts. Starting tonight. One of the kids has gone off with stress.’
‘You can't do that!’ Delaney snaps.
‘I think you'll find I can matey, read your contract,’ he says. ‘If I let you go any earlier it's because you’re shit and I'm sick of the fuckin sight of you. Your training contract was finished this Christmas, and that was gonna be the end of the fuckin road for you here matey. And that’s the truth.’
Munroe heads to the door, Delaney follows.
‘In the meantime, don’t make any plans for the weekends, eh. You’re busy.’
The sweating news editor steps through the doorframe.
He stops and turns.
‘You'll not last at The SS matey,’ he says with the cracked voice of experience earned hard. ‘You're not good enough.’
