The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox

by Lilly Miles

  Jeez, what bloke would like me just the way I am? Cracked and broken and in need of a lot of work. ‘Even I don’t like me,’ I thought, sitting on the bottom of the stairs for a weep of my own.

  It annoys me that even at this distance Twatface can still affect me. Sometimes, at a thought or a song or a memory, the tears well up inside and there’s no keeping a lid on them. They fountain up and fall down my face, leaving a trickle of make-up behind them and making me feel an idiot for still having tears to spill.

  Among my new skills, though, is the ability to rationalize emotion. One day I will shed the last tear. So that means you can never cry the same tear twice, that there is a finite reservoir of sadness, and each time I cry a little bit of the bad stuff leaves me and I’m a step nearer to never crying because of him again.

  After a bit I sniffed and wiped my face. ‘Are you really identifying yourself with a slightly crappy house?’ I asked the floor, sternly. ‘Because if you are, you’re screwed. A house is not a broken heart.’ I stood up and glared angrily around, catching a glimpse of the sunset through the front door fanlight, which I had stencilled with sunflowers a few weeks back. They glowed a lovely gold and made me smile, until I thought about the wiring, the kitchen, the tiles . . . Well, maybe I couldn’t do it all. But I could do lots. I had no idea about plumbing or electricity, but I’d learn as I went along, get Dad to show me a few things perhaps, and when there was something beyond me I’d just have to save up to get it done by someone else.

  And as for me – well, I have to learn to like myself again, and treat the heartbreak as another task to be fixed. There’ll always be cracks, but maybe one day someone will like them as much as the rest of me. Some will pass with time: the divorce will come through eventually, the tears will dry, and each new boy, each flirt, each kiss, will help build me up, step by step. But there won’t be nearly as much to be learned, or fun to be had, if I rely purely on another person to do all the work for me. I’m not going to hang around, psychologically in pieces, hoping for some guy to magically make it all better. Life doesn’t work that way. No one is going to love me unless I love myself first.

  The cracks are there now; I just have to try not to fall through them.

  DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FIVE

  SOMETIMES a newsroom is the centre of the universe: a Royal dies or a bomb goes off, the phones are going crazy, The Editor’s shouting out the intro for the splash from the other side of the office and the words flow, like butter off a crumpet, out of your fingers and on to the screen. Those are the days when you beat the police and the rest of the pack to knock at the door first, and the relatives hand over the family album; when a government press office dreads seeing your first edition drop; when the Prime Minister wants to know what page one is going to be, and it feels like you’ve a front seat at history in the making.

  Then there are the days when it’s more like being stuck at a county fair on a wet afternoon. When there’s a never-ending display of dull, lumbering beasts, beribboned, primped and poked into being paraded up and down for public approval; it seems like you’re up to your knees in more manure than should be physically possible; and the whole thing is run by psychotically avaricious clowns who wouldn’t be allowed into polite society.

  If you meet someone, at a party, say, and tell them what you do for a living, they generally do two things. First they tell you they never read the papers, aren’t the tabloids dreadful, and wouldn’t you want to work for a proper paper? Then they ask you about what really happened in the latest celebrity break-up, and sit there, open-mouthed, with a canapé halfway to their face, while you fill them in on what Jordan told your friend about her vagina. Then they go and tell everyone else about Jordan’s vagina, while still thinking they don’t care what the tabloids have to say about anything. People, hey?

  Most of them think being a reporter is dreadfully exciting, a glamorous merry-go-round of celebrities, politics and sex, when it’s 99 per cent sitting about and waiting for something to happen. In that sense it’s a lot like a divorce – one long dribble of nothingness in which you try to keep yourself busy while the passage of time is marked only by flicking elastic bands at each other and a bill of some sort.

  When the office is quiet, and strangely full of reporters – who don’t get sent out on stories as much as they used to, thanks to budget cutbacks – we indulge in the journalistic equivalents of welly-wanging, tug of war and bear-baiting. They’re a series of ritualistic, arcane contests that have been devised purely with the aim of making the instigator feel slightly superior to others, earn the right to shout, ‘I win!’ and kill time until something more interesting comes along.

  They aren’t just a way of passing the hours; trained to beat others to the story whatever the cost, reporters have the kind of competitive streak which would make a shark blush. On local papers the most-feared person is the Mum of a Girl with a Pony because if you muck up the gymkhana report she’ll have your spleen on a stick by lunchtime. On nationals – where I can’t work out if the scum has risen to the top or the good stuff has all sunk to the bottom – the thing you worry about most is the nearest reporter, because you are only ever as good as your last story, which is better if no one else has it. When you’re in a race to the door-knock, or a fight with the office chequebook on a buy-up, you have to win at all costs because your job and way of life depends on it. Adrenalin hurls itself around your system so often that you get addicted, and that’s why we would all file copy from our own funerals if something interesting happened, and why, even when there’s nothing going on, we still compete.

  First there’s gambling. Ridiculous sweepstakes are by far the most fun, like betting how many minutes late Fifi will be after a showbiz party the night before, or who will get beasted by Elliot first. We also have Cussed a Minute, in which you have to catch Bish on your tape recorder in a stream-of-consciousness swear tirade for at least sixty seconds, without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Then there’s Bish Bingo. This last one normally attracts a sizable pot, with subs, reporters and features bunnies all throwing in a pound and pulling out of the hat one of his many stock phrases, then waiting on tenterhooks to hear which he uses first, and thus who gets the winnings.

  After that there’s the insertion of ridiculous references into copy. ‘Trailing lobelia’ was one for most of the summer, which was used to describe the supposedly verdant appearance of every two-bed semi, sprawling country pile, down-at-heel squat or luxurious town house that was written about, until Elliot spotted it one day and sent an ‘All Staff’ email saying that if any reporter used the phrase again he’d fillet 50 per cent off their expenses.

  More often it’s a case of betting 50p whether one of your amusing tabloid labels makes it into print. ‘Peg leg, light-fingered fantasist Heather Mills’, for example, is guaranteed to give the lawyer a heart attack and get legalled out long before it sees the page, but last week Buff won a tenner by managing to get ‘bungling Nazis’ published, which makes the BNP sound like the Chuckle Brothers in an SS uniform.

  A lot of fun can also be had with our own office version of Buckaroo. Our health reporter Cubby Fox frequently disappears for hours at a time to ‘meet a contact’, in the shape of a bottle of Pinot Noir, and other times doesn’t even bother to think of an excuse for nipping down to the wine bar for indeterminate periods. The only clue as to where he is, and whether he might intend to come back at some point, is the jacket slung over the back of his chair. The trouble is that the jacket is often in place for hours, days, even a week at a time, although it’s a brilliant way of pretending you’ve just popped to the loo. Bish has given up ringing him to ask where he is, and even Elliot doesn’t bother to criticize because Cubby just ignores him. Instead, every time a reporter passes Cubby’s chair they pick up a piece of office detritus and poke it in a pocket. It might be a paper clip, a Post-it note, or an expenses form, but they can add only one piece at a time.

  He went down for a drink on Tuesday lunchtime, l
eaving the jacket on his chair, and went straight home from the pub, by which point four reporters had added something to the pockets. His wife rang mid-afternoon as I was walking past his desk, and when I answered the phone to her and she asked me where he was I looked at the jacket and said: ‘Oh, um . . . gone to meet a contact.’ ‘It’s amazing what journalists get away with when their wives aren’t in the game,’ I thought, as I put a stapler down one of his sleeves and went back to my own desk.

  He met another contact on Wednesday, and again didn’t trouble the office with his presence afterwards, and by then his coat looked like the Michelin Man’s bomber jacket. It was already the longest-ever lead time for an office joke, but then Thursday dawned. Every morning the sports, pictures, features and news desks have a meeting with The Editor to talk about what stories they have, which very conveniently gives the rest of us a nice quiet half hour for a snooze, a smoke or what’s known as a ‘Conference Quickie’ – an alcoholic drink to quell the shakes from the night before, or a cup of tea for the seriously unwell. Cubby had shambled in and announced the need for a heart-starter before conference was even called, and was still in the pub when it was over and The Editor kicked the execs back into the newsroom with strict instructions to rip the newspaper up and start again.

  Bish stalked over to the reporters in a foul mood. ‘Where’s the bluddy health ed? His flamin’ page two lead’s been shat out again by The Editor.’ We all kept our heads down. Bish picked up a phone and stabbed a number out, rolling his eyes and muttering about mobile reception in pubs.

  ‘Cubby, it’s yer boss. D’you remember? The poor sod who keeps you in a job. I wonder, if you can spare the time from your busy schedule of buggerin’ about, whether you could trouble us with your presence in the orifice? It’s that place with little white boxes called computers, which we use to write words down and print them out on bits of mashed-up tree, and then fold them together into what we like to call a newspaper, and then sell copies to raise the funds to pay your bar tab. Your machine’s due for its thousand-word or six-monthly service, whichever comes first. Now get yer bluddy arse out of the pub and back up here, pronto!’

  He crashed the phone back into its cradle and stalked off, stopping by Cubby’s chair to shove an empty packet of Woodbines into the top pocket. Bridget quietly got her Bish Bingo list out of her top drawer and announced she had scored two. I insisted I had three from that one rant alone, but was soundly beaten by Harry Porter, who already had two on aggregate from an earlier bitch at the coffee machine, and swept £4.75 in loose change out of the sweepie mug and into his pocket with a cackle of glee and a solemn promise to buy us a packet of biscuits with it.

  A few minutes later Cubby was back, tie askew and lips stained a fetching shade of Merlot. Bish spotted him, wheeled his chair back from the news desk and barked down the room: ‘CUBS! Approach the bench. And bring some batteries, I’ve a new arse-kicking machine I want to try out on yer.’

  Very much aware that Bish would tear further strips off for perceived slovenliness, Cubby picked his jacket up and threw it on as he hurried the length of the office. Untold numbers of drawing pins, biros and micro cassettes were flung in every direction, scattering across desks and whirring over reporters’ heads as Cubby ground to a surprised halt. Leaping from his seat, Bish – who had won by virtue of being the last to add to the load – bellowed out ‘CUBBAROO!’ and the subs led a round of applause.

  Gingerly going through his pockets, a stunned Cubby pulled out spiral-bound notebooks, plastic canteen cutlery and bits of used tissue, and piled it all on a desk in front of him. Agog at the size of the hoard, he turned to us and said: ‘Whathefu . . . ?’ Tearfully we explained the game he had never realized we played, as his scowl deepened. ‘Even in all my years of journalism,’ he said, putting his nose in the air and turning on his heel, ‘I have never before witnessed such utter bell-endery.’ Shuffling in dudgeon towards the news desk, his mood was barely lightened by the fact Bish was now so highly delighted with himself that he couldn’t be bothered to deliver a bollocking, and cheerfully told Cubby just to rewrite the lead.

  Other times we can’t even think of anything interesting to do, and we bet on which raindrop gets to the bottom of the window first, or what time the paper will go off-stone – an esoteric printing term from the days when we used to produce newspapers by banging two rocks together, since when not much bar the technology has changed – and Bish tells us to go home by growling: ‘Day bugs fall out.’

  Things got so bad at one point this week that we actually had a staring contest, but had to declare it a draw because we were all so zombiefied by boredom no one was capable of blinking any more. I flicked a rubber band at Porter as he leaned back in his chair, rubbed his eyes and said: ‘Oh God, this is so DULL!’

  ‘You moan when it’s busy,’ I pointed out. ‘Make your mind up. Would you rather have peace and quiet or constant stress?’

  He straightened up and rested his chin on his hands as he gazed around the room. ‘Fuck knows. Neither. How many cardboard drink holders have you got in your tower now? It’s getting out of control.’

  The Tower is a good indicator of how boring life has been over the past few months. If the reporters are all in the office we get through so much tea and coffee that the tower of drink holders in the middle of the desk, which we add to every time someone gets a round in, grows exponentially, like a triffid or a lawyer’s bill. This week we had to split it into two and move it on to the floor, where it now resembles the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

  ‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Sixty?’

  ‘Nah, more like eighty. In a single tower,’ said Porter.

  The betting fever took hold and before we knew it everyone had chucked in 50p and made a stab at the figure. Porter said seventy-two, Princess chipped in with a ridiculous forty-seven, Nancy guessed an inexplicable thirty-five, and Bridget reckoned sixty-eight. Even the work-experience girl had a pop. Cubby, who was refusing to partake in our silly games on principle by this point, was persuaded to adjudicate.

  He counted under his breath while we all tried to put him off by shouting random numbers in his ear. Then he counted again, just to be sure. The tension mounted unbearably until Cubby solemnly announced: ‘It’s sixty-one, morons.’

  ‘GET IN!’ shouted the work-ex girl, grabbing the £3 as the rest of us began to complain he couldn’t possibly have counted right, and was he sure he wasn’t at least one out . . .

  ‘And yer all fookin’ sacked!’ bellowed Bish from the other end of the newsroom, glaring at us over the top of his computer screen. We scrambled back to desks and chairs, uncomfortably aware that we probably all ought to find some stories. The threat of sacking is waved over reporters’ heads so often you’d think we’d become immune, but no – it just makes us paranoid.

  Tania Banks, looking supercilious from behind her own screen, from whence she, too, had refused to play (not that we had really asked her), said: ‘You really all ought to be more like me, you know. I give Bish at LEAST ten stories a week, even if I don’t think he’ll like them, so he knows that I’m always busy and always keen.’

  Nancy rolled her eyes at me, and I grimaced back. Even though we hate Tania, and we know Bish thinks she’s a suck-up, the fear kicked in. It was only the worry that an enemy might get more stories in which made us keep our heads down for the rest of the day and start bashing the phones to get some leads.

  DAY ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FOUR

  ON Saturday a few of us piled into Greenwich to watch Porter try to kill himself by setting off fireworks in his back garden. I was in the kitchen still wrestling with why we were all so competitive, while Porter was outside wrestling with oven gloves and a set of Poundland instructions written in Chinese.

  ‘Maybe we’re just children and we only understand things if one person’s beating someone else in the egg and spoon race,’ I ruminated.

  ‘Yes, or maybe we just need more fresh air and sunlight,’ said Bridget as she picked
up a bottle of Ernest & Julio with a look of distaste. ‘Who in the name of arse brought this?’

  There was a brief scream from outside, and then Porter, trailing smoke, rushed in and shoved his face in the sink, which was filled with ice and cans of Stella.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked, having a sip of the piss Bridget had handed me in a glass.

  Porter lifted his face up, dripping with water and looking crazed and wild-eyed. He grabbed me. ‘ARE MY EYEBROWS STILL ON?’ he demanded in a panicked tone.

  I peered at them – he’s receding so there’s not a lot to see of him, hair-wise – and said: ‘I think so. Although you do smell a bit burned.’

  ‘Fucking Catherine wheels!’ he shouted, before storming outside to try again.

  ‘Personally, I think journalists just have a twisted psychology,’ Bridget told me quietly as we followed him into the garden for the big display, which consisted of a box of rockets and a freezing cold barbecue of sausages that had been dropped on the ground at least twice. ‘And I’m sure you’re not supposed to let someone with a mental age of six near fireworks.’

  ‘Ooh, Porter, have you got any of those ones which squeal?’ I asked him excitedly as I grabbed the box off him for a look-see. ‘You know, the ones which corkscrew round and go “wheeeeeeeeeeee!”’

  He swore at me and grabbed it back.

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ I said sadly. ‘My dad used to tell me they were the hedgehogs that had crawled into the bonfire to hibernate, and I could never decide if it was really awful and I ought to save them, or really brilliant because it was so much fun when they died.’

  Bridget looked at me. ‘You’re so screwed up,’ she said with a sigh.