The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox

by Lilly Miles

  Two days later Maurice rang in his usual giggly high spirits. ‘Thanks for the disclosure form, but we don’t need it. Twatface has agreed the financial settlement because he didn’t want to fill his in, apparently.’

  ‘Great.’ I sighed, putting my head in my hands and wondering what it was, exactly, that I’d done to the universe that it saw fit to arrange itself in precisely the manner which was most likely to utterly nullify my whole bloody existence. ‘Yes, it’s brilliant news, isn’t it?’ chortled Maurice. ‘So all that’s left is for him to collect his last few belongings. He’s sent a list, I’ll forward it on to you.’

  Within seconds, I had a text from the twat himself. ‘I need to collect my things tonight.’

  I replied: ‘You can’t. I’m out.’

  He pinged back: ‘You can’t stop me. I’ll break in if I have to.’

  ‘Oh, naff off,’ I texted, heading to the pub quiz and a depressing bottle of wine with Nancy and Princess.

  I was sitting in silent gloom in the Hare and Billet on Blackheath, listening to them argue about whether Britain’s first nuclear bomb was exploded in 1952 or 1954 and whether Nancy could Google it without being seen, when I had another text.

  ‘I shall be passing by the house in half an hour with a big vehicle. Is there no way you can let me in?’

  ‘He’s in WHAT?’ cackled Nancy when I showed her the message. ‘What a twat! Ignore him.’

  The next day his list came through: a glittering array of his winter coat, a clothing rail, his bloody awful dog-eared Rothko prints, some saucepans and the spare duvet, with a smattering of books. All of which, because I couldn’t stand to look at them lying around the house, I had long ago piled up in black bags in a corner of the living room. I told Maurice that Twatface could pick it all up on Wednesday night at 7 p.m., and resigned myself to a final stab in the guts.

  When the hour dawned I cared no more or less than that; I just wanted it over. He knocked on the door, said hello and I silently let him in. He said he wanted to check the loft to see if he had anything left in it, and tromped upstairs to bang and crash about. He came down clutching our wedding album, which he’d found in the box I’d shoved under the eaves when he’d first left.

  ‘I want to take this,’ he said, waving it at me.

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘You’re the one who didn’t want to be married.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t have any photographs of you and I’d like some. You know, to look at. You wouldn’t let me have any, and I have just as much right to our wedding album as you do.’

  ‘You bloody DO NOT,’ I cried. ‘That’s a record of a happy day which you might as well have pissed on.’

  ‘Well, why do you want it, then?’ he said. ‘You don’t want to be married to me, either.’

  ‘That’s not the point. It’s going to stay in the loft for the rest of my damn life, but you are not having it under any circumstances,’ I insisted, before inspiration struck. ‘Besides, we agreed we’d divvy the wedding presents between us, depending on whose side bought them; and my lot bought the album, so give it.’

  He handed it over reluctantly, but with a half-smile on his face as though he’d somehow won. ‘I do love you, you know. You’ll always be my wife,’ he said quietly.

  ‘No, I will not,’ I said.

  ‘Well, first wife, then,’ he replied, as I stalked off with the album to put it out of his reach.

  And I swear I don’t know what happened next; I cannot explain why I felt as I did. But a few minutes later as I saw him slowly taking stuff from the living room to pile up in the hallway, I began to lose patience. He said he was waiting for a cab to come so that he could load it all up, and I snapped at him frustratedly to put it outside the front door, because I wanted him out of the house. He said it was raining, and besides it was still his house, too, and then, as I stood impotently in the living-room doorway and watched him doing it the way he insisted he had to do it, something inside me just broke.

  Looking at him standing in what was now my home, the place where I finally felt safe and in control and where no one could hurt me, I felt totally violated. The worst person in the world was in the safest place I knew, and it was suffocating. I’d dragged myself up from the bottom of the pit he’d thrown me into, and he had been on my back with every step, dragging me back down. I wanted to finally shake him off and be free of him and all the stupid things he did, to be sure he couldn’t hurt me again.

  It was like a wave of horror broke over me and washed me away, propelling me forwards to grab a lamp, run to the front door and hurl it into the street. With tears pouring down my face I seized the coat, the clothing rail, his books, and threw them all down the front path and into the air, not even stopping to watch them flutter to the ground before running back to pick up something new. He tried to stop me, gripping my flailing arms, and told me I was mad as I screamed at him, wriggled free and grabbed something else to chuck out of the door. Thirty seconds later Twatface’s belongings were lying in a series of muddy puddles in the road as he scampered between them, trying to pick them up before they got soaked, and I tearfully slammed the door with all the force I could muster.

  Crumpled in a heap in the hallway, I sobbed and shook and finally just held my head in my hands and screamed. All I could feel and think about was the terror he made me feel, not just in my head or my heart but deep down at the base of my spine and spreading through my whole body. He had been where he should never be, he went where he was not allowed, he hated me and wanted to hurt me, and was not the smiling man I had thought he was. I felt invaded, contaminated, desecrated in some indefinable way, damaged and broken and stamped on – forced to do things I had never wanted to by the person with whom I had once shared the most, and been closest to, and invited into my heart.

  I heard a taxi pull up, doors slam, and then drive away, but it still took half an hour for the tears to stop, and another for the shaking to ease. I thought about ringing one of the girls or my mum, but put the phone down the moment I picked it up. How could I explain what had just happened? How could seeing my husband for the last time justify that behaviour? Why had I thrown everything into the street like some kind of banshee? It was all just madness, utter madness.

  And now there he’d be, telling himself quite rightly that he married a loon, stroppily trying to dry out his books and muttering about having to get the coat dry-cleaned, moving into Fatty’s flat with all the things of his that lived with me for the past six years, and doing what I can’t – getting over it. He doesn’t seem to feel a single atom of the emotions that have riven me since the bomb went off, and if he does they’re a pale imitation of the chemical patterns washing through my brain. Perhaps he went through all the despair months before me, before I knew anything was all that wrong; maybe he was this unhappy a year ago, and never said, just sought solace in anything he could find.

  I wish I could do the same. If only I could shag some boy without a second thought, move on, fall in love again, bound through life like an exuberant puppy who takes not the slightest heed of the shit stains in its wake. Why should I tremble at the thought of being on my own with a man? Why should I be a victim, restricted to the same scared routines, like an animal kept in a cage too long who now just goes around and around in circles, looking out of the bars but too terrified even to poke a paw outside?

  I was still trying to get my head around this, snuffling and shuffling around, when my phone beeped. It was Twatface.

  ‘I don’t know what happened there, but I meant what I said. You will always have been my wife. I’m sorry I wasted your time.’

  And that, Dear Reader, is officially the worst thing he has ever said to me.

  The fact that we were in love and now we aren’t, that we tried and failed, that it didn’t last as long as we’d hoped, that he really is that much of a twat and I can be that mental – I can deal with those things. That’s easy. It happens to lots of us and I’ve written that story a million times. But the thought tha
t what is now six years of my life was a waste – that it was all for nothing, earned nul points, is over, and now we’re back at the drawing board no better or worse for it, and that it can just be wiped away with an, ‘I’m sorry I wasted your time’ – that offends me. Deep inside, all the way down in the china shop of my soul where there’s a single little teacup left in one piece, it causes a tiny fracture to crack its way slowly downwards until the handle drops off and everything is finally broken.

  I remember the day when Twatface asked me to be his girl, and I looked at him and thought to myself: ‘I don’t know what will happen with this guy; it might work and it might not. I might get hurt. But I would rather take the chance, make the leap, than stay safe and never know.’ So I kissed him and said yes, and made my choice.

  Despite everything that’s happened it’s a choice I stand by. In our time together I experienced wonderful happiness and a love which made me feel happy and secure. I felt pain and loss and heartbreak, yes, and still do; but the one extreme does not cancel out the other. The alternative to them is emptiness. I would rather feel, and scream, than not feel at all.

  Every single thing that happened between Twatface and me – from the first kiss, the first time we made love, the first row, to the last time I saw him, scampering around in the rain picking up the detritus I’d hurled out of the house in despair – counts. Every day, every word, every feeling, meant something. It was not for nothing, it made me the mess I am and taught me a lot about myself and the things and people I hold dear. It showed my truest friends for the rocks they are, and ripped away all the things which weren’t built to last until all that was left was me.

  It might not seem like much, but that’s quite a lot – it’s more knowledge than many people get. I’m stronger than I ever thought, and I’ve survived this far. While I have no idea of the path my life will take after the decree absolute comes through I would rather have had that whole, horrible journey than not travel at all. At least this way I know what not to do another time.

  It was not a waste. I will make it not a waste – somehow.

  DAY TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN

  SINCERITY must surely be the most abused, cheaply treated and misunderstood virtue in the world: only those who don’t have it lay claim to it, insisting on what nice people they are while those that seek it seem only to find the disappointing opposite in everyone around them.

  So people in public life talk about their principles and private lives as though they wouldn’t betray both for a fistful of cash, and we poor journalists, who keep a beady eye and a careful note, are called on to fight for things we do not always agree with. No one who says they’re being true actually seems to know what it means, and the public who watch us suspect it’s a lie even when it’s not.

  Supposed sincerity is thrown in our faces so often that it becomes almost impossible to spot the truth when it’s staring you right in the face.

  On Christmas Eve night I pitched up at the family ranch spiky from the start of a hangover after drinking champagne at my desk, as is traditional on newspapers in the festive season. After a few hours of drinking the execs had kicked the reporters out of the newsroom and we’d all scattered to our respective homesteads, leaving the office staffed for the big day by its habitual festive trio of our token Jew, a Jehovah’s Witness and a Muslim recruited during the 7/7 terror attacks – after Bish realized his reporters were the wrong colour to get any of the door-knocks we were sent on. Elliot questioned whether twenty-two-year-old Yusuf had the experience to be a reporter on a national newspaper, to which Bish had replied: ‘’E’s brown an’ can say “Allah Akbar”. ’E’s good enough fer me.’ Needless to say, the paper produced by those three at Christmas is marginally better than the one a full staff manages to churn out the rest of the time.

  I was in a vile mood, not just from the hangover but the never-ending divorce, the upset with Twatface and that turn-of-the-year gloom you get when you’re having a rotten time and can’t see any prospect of things improving. I barely bothered to string a sentence together in response to well-meaning questions over dinner, and took myself to bed early.

  The next morning there was a whole hour of opening presents we were expecting and a few others we didn’t really want, forced vegetable preparation, and an argument about politics before we sat down to a lunch Mum had slaved over for hours.

  ‘Well, this is nice,’ said Mum chirpily in her paper hat as we tucked into turkey and sprouts in silence.

  ‘It’s exactly the same as last year, only without Twatface,’ I grumped, insistent as usual on telling the truth, no matter how bad.

  ‘Why are you in such a rotten mood? It’s Christmas, for heaven’s sake. Cheer up,’ said Dad.

  ‘Why?’ I said mutinously. ‘I’d far rather people just told the truth rather than pretending everything was dandy when it’s crap. Christmas is crap: it’s crap telly, and crap hats, and crap in the shops, and none of us even like turkey, but we sit and eat a hundredweight of it anyway because someone else thinks we ought to.’

  Mum and Dad looked at each other. Dad said: ‘That’s enough now. It’s Christmas Day.’

  ‘Huh.’ I snorted, like the horrid teenager I become every time I go home.

  ‘Have you heard from Twatface?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Got a card from his mum, addressed to Mrs Twatface, would you believe. I nearly put my fist through the wall when I saw it.’

  Mum sighed. ‘You’re so angry. I understand why, of course, but . . . I don’t know, you can’t go on like this. It’s been six months now. Maybe you should, you know, talk to someone?’

  ‘Well, I talk to you,’ I said, surprised. ‘What, you mean like a therapist?’

  ‘It might be an idea. You know you can always talk to us, but it’s a bit beyond our experience.’

  I turned it over in my mind. I’d thought about it myself, I must admit, because it had got to the point where my friends were rolling their eyes whenever Twatface was mentioned, and it had occurred to me that once the divorce was through there was going to be the giant triple-headed ogre of Sex and Relationships and Other Men to deal with. That was not a conversation I wanted to have with my mum.

  ‘Well, maybe, but what are they going to tell me?’ I asked, stabbing a roast potato resentfully with my fork. ‘Let go of my anger, move on? Easier said than done, and besides, therapists are expensive. I’ve a leak in the roof above the kitchen which comes first.’

  Mum said: ‘You do know that fixing up the house isn’t the same as fixing you, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ I said petulantly, ‘I don’t.’

  Although, of course, she was right, and while the house can be patched, heaven only knows how to sort me out. But that’s the thing: if you’re intelligent enough to realize you might need some help, then surely you’re bright enough to work out the answer for yourself. And who wants to hear what they already know? Maybe therapy works for some people, but I’m not sure I could take a psychologist saying, ‘He’s such a twat, why’d you marry him?’

  And besides, a therapist and I would disagree on the topic of fury. Surely, if you are capable of letting go of your rage then it was a worthless anger in the first place? It was really just irritation, unhappiness, or disappointment, and I can let go of all those things quite happily. But if it’s proper crawl-up-your-spine-and-spit-flame-from-your-eyes-and-smite-him-God-smite-him anger then it’s worth more than that, isn’t it? I can’t let something which has inflamed every nerve ending with righteous ire slip through my fingers like so much sand, and I don’t want to, either. It feels like denying the Holocaust.

  This was the less-than-healthy attitude I took to the New Year celebrations. Having looked forward to it for the past six months, telling myself that by then I’d have a decree absolute in my hands and could start afresh, I found myself regarding it with a baleful eye because there was still no end in sight. What was going to be new about a year that looked like a miserable continuation of the previous one?


  ‘That’s a fine way of looking at things,’ complained Bridget as we necked some of Harry Porter’s cheap champagne at a party he and his wife were throwing for what seemed like hundreds of people in their two-bed semi. ‘How abaht, instead of looking at the past year, you think about the decade? What were you doin’ on New Year’s Eve ten years ago?’

  I didn’t need to think. ‘I was covering the London New Year celebrations for the first time, and a bloody farce it was, too. My phone kept dropping the signal, it rained, my car got clamped and I couldn’t file.’

  Bridget rolled her eyes. ‘You need to work less,’ she said. ‘But how about everything that’s happened since?’

  I thought carefully, and realized I’d spent the past decade having – largely – fun. Fleet Street has kept me gainfully employed, and taught me the delights of eating and drinking on someone else’s dime. I have travelled all over the country and a fair chunk of the world chasing stories, fallen in love, experienced despair, grief and heartbreak, marriage, divorce, arrest and brief imprisonment – a story that, if told in the correct manner, with a little bit of spin, can make people laugh and hold an audience captive for a good quarter of an hour. Those ten years seemed to pass slowly at the time, but from this perspective they were packed with drama and incident. Even the tears were things I wouldn’t trade. It all made me what I am, and despite the flaws I’m not so bad.

  I began to feel a little more positive, and a lot more drunk. When the countdown began and midnight struck, my chest tightened unbearably as the seconds ticked away, and when the poppers flew and everyone threw their arms around each other to cheer and kiss, I let out a breath it seemed I’d been holding since Day 1, when the screaming began. New tears, slow and happy, trickled down my cheeks as my knees gave way and I slumped to the floor, feeling a relief I wasn’t expecting, and which is impossible to describe. Finally, the year was over. It was gone, taking with it everything Twatface had done. Never again would he bully or scare me, and nor would he hold me, kiss me, dream with me or love me like he used to. I had held it all in my hands and now it had slipped through my fingers into the past, and I watched it go with a sad kind of joy for everything it had meant and all the love I’d had and lost.