Hunting Unicorns

by Bella Pollen

  * * *

  As I’m unchaining the bike from the railings I remember that I meant to tell Rory he will not escape his roots, no matter how hard he tries. There is something of the father in every son. The gene might be dormant, but it’s lying in wait. Then I recognize the fear and indecision in his eyes as he hesitates in the doorway and I see that he knows this already.

  I head for Highgate, for the cemetery. The street lights are fading, the sky lightening. I pass an old man sweeping dust from one side of the road to the other and a dumpy matron jogging, her grey tracksuit stained greyer with sweat. Past Primrose Hill, the streets are empty and the city belongs to me. The exertion of pedalling sends all remaining alcohol straight to my head. Despite the freezing temperature I feel gloriously warm. Tabasco is running through my veins. My brain spins with all the things to do in life and in this one perfect moment all of them seem possible.

  Then the moment passes. Crosswinds blow against my face. I put my head down, grip the handlebars – peddle for all life’s worth up the hill. It’s late autumn and the leaves are whirling. They fall against my face, slight, light, like oiled pieces of skin. Dawn breaks quickly as if the tip of a paintbrush had touched a dab of orange to wet blotting paper. I look into the sun’s weak rays to suck some warmth onto my face.

  Wait a second, where did that bastard come from? A white van has shot over the crossing and through the give-way sign. I squeeze the brake lever, nearly projecting myself over the handlebars. The bicycle stops, leaving just enough space for the van to swing through its turn. I give the driver a nod, but he doesn’t nod back. In fact he doesn’t wave, smile, salute or show appreciation of any kind – he just revs off down the street belching fumes from his exhaust. I stay still, breathing heavily, balancing the heel of my boot against the tarmac. As a spectator at this scene I might have an impending sense of doom. I might watch my face, catch the flicker of irritation that becomes a slow burn of anger at one human being’s total lack of consideration towards another. I might warn myself that to seek revenge, given the disparity in our chosen mode of transport, is to dice with death but from where I’m standing it doesn’t seem that way at all. Fuelled by the mix of self righteousness and idiocy that only the truly pissed can muster, it just seems like the right thing to do.

  It takes only a minute to catch the van. A taxi stops to eject its passenger, the van slows behind. I pedal out into the middle of the road, fly past his open window, shout, ‘Manners, you wanker.’

  The driver’s head turns but I am sailing on through the dawn chill, laughing, untouchable.

  Or at least so I think.

  By the time I see it, the bus is virtually on top of me. Christ, CHRIST, what happened? It swerves, I swerve and for a split second I think I’m home free but I haven’t accounted for its tail end, haven’t accounted for the fact that the thing moves together, has no mind of its own. It is, of course, just a bus, a thirty ton piece of metal, and I realize absolutely that it’s going to hit me and I know too that whatever happens I don’t want to go down. Up is an option, down under this monstrosity is not. If I’m going to go, let it be through the air, like an eagle, not squashed underfoot like some irrelevant bug.

  The bus hits. There’s no pain, it’s all too big for pain. There’s just a tremendous force, like being fired from a cannon, and really not so unpleasant as you might imagine. There’s an explosion of red, a deep, deep red, and a colour too vivid to be borne. I close my eyes but I can still see through the skin. I can see through the windscreen of the bus, into the driver’s black eyes, through his body into his beating heart. For a second, suspended in time I can see everything, all that defines my life, everything I love.

  Overhead the air darkens, the weather changes fast and furious. Clouds hurtle through the sky. I feel a great burst of passion towards life, and its momentum carries me home. I am standing in the lake-field. The soil is damp between my toes. I can smell the earth, smell the honeysuckle lifting off the river breeze. I see the woods, the park, the great oak tree bowed in the fox cover. I see my father, stripped to the waist, axe in hand. I see the elms falling. There’s a rushing in my ears, the sound the wind might make as it blows through the flowers of a horse chestnut – then there is nothing.

  maggie

  I have to confess that my basic knowledge of London’s geography comes from playing Monopoly. My father, never the most switched on of shoppers, mistakenly bought the English version for Christmas one year. My mother disapproved of the game – vaguely distrusting it as a training in capitalism – but I loved that the makers identified places by colours. It reminded me of a car game I used to play with my dad. He would describe in detail a city he had worked in, then make me blur my eyes and tell him what colour it represented – Madrid, for instance, was brown, Bangkok was orange, Washington white and New York was … well one of the reasons I love living in New York so much is that we could never pinpoint its colour. It’s a kaleidoscopic mix of shades, smells, sounds and race. Millions of multicoloured stitches that make up one small but fantastic pocket of humanity.

  Maybe it wasn’t the ideal present for an only child but I loved Monopoly. I saw it less as a training in capitalism than a crash course in survival. It’s surprising what tips you can pick up from a game. How to land on Chance and grab Opportunity. How to get out of jail free. I can still feel the adrenaline buzz of being down to your last buck and making a run for it through those lethal trouble hotspots – the triple-hotelled properties.

  I remember the colours of every card. Fleet Street was red, Piccadilly was yellow. Now, peering through my cab window at the damp streets of London, I assumed due to the grand nature of the offices to which I was heading they’d be situated in the royal blue hues of Park Lane and Mayfair. Turned out they were somewhere called Edgware Road, a street not actually featured in the game at all, which, as I wound down the window to take a better look, was unsurprising. With its shops selling carpets and lanterns, its profusion of hookah smokers sitting around outside juice bars playing backgammon, it felt more like some souk in Beirut than a mere traffic jam from Oxford Circus.

  ‘It is very … ah … Arab,’ Alexander Massey confirmed looking furtively behind me to the dark hallway as he opened the door.

  Overweight, old school and upper class, Massey was the author of five anthologies of obituaries and a leading expert on Burke’s Peerage (a publication listing everything you always wanted to know about the titles of England’s aristocracy but were too afraid to ask) and I was praying he was going to be able to help me.

  * * *

  It was January, the first month of the Millennium and the world was recovering from its conflicting feelings of relief that earth hadn’t exploded and its disappointment that nothing had fundamentally changed. I’d been in London for less than a week and already run into trouble. My crew was arriving in a couple of days but I had nothing to film.

  I work for Newsline. You probably know it, most people do. Newsline is a current affairs, news and issues program that leans towards story journalism rather than information journalism – sort of a younger and smaller cousin of 60 Minutes. We specialize in exposing scandal and exploding myths. We target corrupt government bodies, insensitive public companies, institutions and monopolies. I love working there, as a show, it just isn’t afraid to kick ass.

  This all started last November when I was running to a meeting in the Newsline offices. It was the Thursday before Thanksgiving weekend and New York was in its usual bi-thematic state of shivering outside and sweltering inside. Thanksgiving always feels like the practice run for Christmas and true to form the Santas were out in force, hitching wide leather belts over even wider beer bellies. It seemed that the whole of Manhattan was making the rush to Grand Central, off to family weekends and stuffed turkey dinners, but my parents had never been big on family occasions, and public holidays tended to prompt special derision for the over-commercial, greeting-card sentimentality of the American People. Besides, Alan Soloman, New
sline’s senior producer, had called me in for a meeting and when Alan scheduled meetings no one went home early.

  A week before Thanksgiving, I’d made Alan a presentation; a story I really wanted to pursue in the Middle East. Alan had been ambivalent about letting me go, but now I was hoping to get it green-lighted.

  A big man, weathered and broad, Alan pulled down the shutters in his office then perched on the side of his desk, tapping dried cranberries from the packet – a token nod to his high cholesterol. A CBS executive was sitting in on the meeting. I couldn’t remember his name but since the sale of Newsline to CBS a year ago, network grands fromages were becoming a familiar sight around the place. The television fizzed then cleared. On screen were scenes of mayhem. I recognized them straight away. This was footage taken when England’s Labour Government had finally succeeded in pushing through the abolition of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords. My grandfather had been Irish and ever since the British Parliamentary channel had been made available on cable I’d been alternately horrified and amused by the antics of the Houses of Parliament. I assumed Alan was inviting criticism of somebody else’s rough-cut, a trick he pulled from time to time to keep correspondents on their toes. This segment looked like Ed’s work. With his hand-tooled leather shoes, fussy little dogs and penchant for antiques, a piece in England would be right up Ed’s alley.

  The action cut to the chambers where tempers seemed more frayed than usual, in fact it looked as if a fist fight was on the verge of breaking out between members. The shot changed again to a line of aging peers handing in their security passes. One had tears in his eyes. Alan freeze-framed the image with the push of a button.

  ‘Up until now the House of Lords has had the power to pass and initiate laws purely through their hereditary right. So it got us thinking … with the loss of this last vestige of political power, what influence do the aristocracy of England have left?’

  Only then it dawned on me this wasn’t a rough at all, Alan was pitching me a story.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I glanced at him suspiciously, ‘what about the piece I proposed?’

  He didn’t meet my eye. ‘We have enough people out there right now, Maggie. Instead, we thought it might be revealing if you went over and interviewed some of the heads of England’s more influential upper-class families…’

  I couldn’t believe I’d heard him right. The story I’d pitched was on honour killings in the Yemen.

  ‘But England is cold, wet, formal.’ I pleaded. ‘Couldn’t I please have desert, heat, scorpions? Couldn’t I at least have something a teeny bit more relevant?’

  ‘One thousand years of aristocratic rule. This is the end of an era, Maggie, this is historically relevant.’

  ‘Added bonus we get a nice tour round England’s country houses,’ the executive threw in, ‘keep the female viewers on the hook.’

  Alan must have caught the look on my face. ‘I know, Maggie, I know,’ there was regret in his voice and it stopped me short of total rebellion, ‘but the hard reality is, we have to chase the ratings like everybody else. Look, deliver me this piece and next time round you’ll get the assignment you want but for now, go revisit Brideshead in the twenty-first century.’

  * * *

  Revisit Brideshead in the twenty-first century. That was my brief – whatever it meant. I guess it could have been worse. In television it seemed to be happening more and more – hard news stories were being ignored in favour of mushy high-rating segments. At least I wasn’t being sent to see how some mother in Baltimore was coping with quintuplets or how Buttons, the heroic dog, had pulled a kid out of a hole. I’d never been to England and besides, when I’d calmed down enough to think straight, I realized I had a heady ulterior motive for spending a little time in Europe. I figured I’d just go and make the best of it.

  Course, it hadn’t turned out that simple. I’d done meticulous research in New York, but as soon as I arrived in London, permissions I’d spent weeks negotiating had been cancelled. The British, it seemed, were notoriously camera shy.

  Access, to a journalist, is like blood to a vampire. If you cannot get to the people you’re interested in, you try to get to their friends. If you can’t find a whistleblower you’re dead in the water.

  At that point I could have called in to Newsline with a blank. It sometimes happens, you chase a story as far as you can then it dies on you. ‘The dog won’t hunt’ as Clinton would say. You might have thought I’d be happy to find a legitimate reason for backing out of an assignment I’d felt railroaded into in the first place, but I couldn’t do it. I hated giving up on a story.

  Despite the market feel of the Edgware Road below us, Massey’s offices offices were dry, stuffy and very small. Books and paperwork were strewn on every surface, and a stressed-looking assistant was struggling with a copying machine in the reception area. Through an open window came the resonant wailing of middle eastern pop music. ‘The … er … ethnicity makes it very tricky at lunchtime you know,’ Massey said leading the way down the narrow corridor to his office – a box-sized room smelling of pipe tobacco and decorated cheek to jowl with framed cartoons from Punch magazine. ‘I’ve tried some of these places, but I never know what to order. I can’t tell you how intimidating it is not to know.’

  I took one of the leather-bound volumes of Burke’s Peerage from his shelf and opened it curiously. Alexander Massey was reputed to know the names and genealogy of every great family in England – if he couldn’t help me, then nobody could.

  ‘Do you mind me asking, is anyone actually interested in this stuff anymore?’

  ‘Oh you’d be surprised,’ Massey said affably. ‘Hotels, shop owners, that kind of thing. The sort of people listed here,’ he tapped the front cover, ‘can get very shirty about being wrongly addressed, you know.’

  ‘You publish this annually?’ The book weighed a ton.

  ‘The great problem with the war,’ Massey regarded the ringing phone with something approaching dismay, ‘apart from bombs coming down of course, was a shortage of paper, that’s when we decided to bring it out every five years instead of three. Now it’s growing in popularity all the time.’ He plucked the receiver gingerly from its cradle.

  There was something a little Graham Greene about Alexander Massey – Our Man In The Edgware Road, keeping watch on his tiny piece of the empire, wearing his white linen suit in the perishing cold of a London winter. Actually, Massey was punctiliously dressed in neat fawn-coloured pants and corduroy jacket. In a way he was disappointing. I’d been hoping he was going to be a fantastic snob, instead he was gentle and self-effacing.

  ‘Quite so, quite so,’ he was saying into the receiver, ‘to read of one’s own death, whether over breakfast or not is, naturally, terribly distressing, but a genuine editorial mistake I can assure you,’ he threw me a pained expression. ‘No, no I’m quite sure that’s not the case. I feel confident that your son must have been as distraught as everybody else … ah … sent a removal van for the furniture did he? Yes, I do see. That does present things in a slightly different light … yes, yes of course I’ll send a written apology.’

  ‘Well, rings the changes I suppose,’ he positioned the phone back on his desk. ‘Usually get it in the neck for leaving out births.’

  ‘Don’t people mind their addresses being printed?’ I scanned through the tiny print of the book. ‘Aren’t they worried about getting robbed or stalked?’

  ‘Dear me,’ Massey said vaguely, ‘well yes, I suppose there is a danger, but in my experience the criminal fraternity prefer browsing Hello! magazine for that sort of thing.’ He took the list from my hand. ‘Now these are the people you’re interested in, are they? Let’s see,’ he switched on the brass light by his elbow and studied the names. ‘Fermoy … yes, made their fortune selling black crêpe for Queen Victoria’s funeral. He thumbed through the wafer-thin pages, ‘Hartfield, oddly enough I was at prep school with. Just been voted out of the Lords. Makes cider now I believe … Bevan, as I�
�m sure you’re aware, is cousin to the queen.’

  ‘Really? A close one?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He smoothed his finger gently along the book’s binding. ‘Eighth Earl of Bevan, family name Lytton-Jones, Danby also of Clandoyle. Issue two sons, eldest recently deceased—’

  ‘Look, I know it sounds really pushy,’ I rummaged in my tote bag for a pen, ‘but is there any way you could help get me in with these people?’ The idea was to visit some of these fallen lords in their homes. See how they lived, find out what they stood for, what they believed in.

  ‘Well now,’ Massey cleared his throat, ‘I’m only interested in genealogy, I’m a bit of a dry stick when it comes to the people themselves. Besides I think you’ll find that the real top dogs, the sort you’re after, would never allow themselves to be filmed.’

  I pondered on this. I live in an age and a country consumed with celebrity. It’s simply a national obsession. People will bare all and usually for nothing. The very idea of discretion seems archaic. When you ring up sources in America and say you work for a television show, you can barely shut them up.

  ‘Do you have any influence? Could you get me any kind of access?’

  ‘You’ll have to find someone who’s familiar to that world,’ Massey said, ‘someone they trust. It would of course entirely depend on the thrust of your piece but I’m afraid the answer is you probably won’t get access. Why would they agree? What could you possibly offer them?’ He closed the book. ‘I’m sorry.’