I imagined myself sprinting down the alley after Seb screaming just tell me your name like an infatuated teen crushing on the high school jock.
He finally reappeared from behind a bouncer — walking, not running, and even better carrying a tray full of mojitos. It looked like he’d bought the third round to save time, and I fancied him even more. Thankfully he hadn’t snagged a fresh catch of hangers-on. I knew what these guys were like, hooking onto any unaccompanied man and flapping about begging for scraps. I knew what they were like because I was pretty much one of them.
“I took the liberty,” he said, placing the tray of minty goodness on the table.
“Are you trying to get me drunk, Sebastian? It is Sebastian, isn’t it?” It was time to push for some answers while I could still hope to remember them.
“One day you will make a fine investigative reporter,” he said.
“But not today, is that what you’re saying? Hey, I’m starting small. It might be Seb short for something wacky like Sebarnacle, or it might be your initials, or any number of unlikely things.”
“Sebastian.”
“Great. Last name?”
“In good time.”
“I can’t write a story with just your first name. You’re not Madonna, or Kylie, or Diana, or Rupert.”
“Remember, you are still off duty. And you have no story. Nothing you are going to print, anyway.” He chuckled.
“Right. Well, cheers for that.”
A fresh infusion of mojito livened me up a little, and the smoker behind me moved on so I wasn’t so murderous. Time to set out the facts, as he’d gone quiet again and I couldn’t stop myself.
“OK, here’s what I know. It was you who called Geoff, but you weren’t sure whether it’d be him or me at the Union. It was me that pitched up, and you seem to know all about me, which by the way I’m finding simultaneously scary and highly arousing, so that leads me to think it was me you wanted to appear and not Geoff. I have no idea what you were planning to do at the Union, but whatever it was wasn’t the real point of the exercise, which is some kind of scoop you’re not telling me about that’s to do with me. How am I doing so far?”
Seb had listened carefully, nodding along, with his hands wrapped around his glass. “Pretty good. Mostly correct.”
“What I don’t know is why you’re all coy and defensive. Is it the ginger?” I rubbed my beard. “For the right guy it comes off, but then doesn’t it always. In any case it’s not properly ginger, not offensively ginger.”
Seb tugged at his cuffs. “To be honest, I had no demonstration planned at the Union.” He looked at me with the barest hint of a smile. “Had your editor appeared, then simply I would not have appeared. Had you not… embarrassed yourself, my intention was eventually to move across the gallery to speak with you.”
I frowned. “That’s a very strange way to ask someone out on a date. A smile and a hello usually does the trick, and frankly with me both of those are optional. I’m not exactly picky. Why didn’t you just sit right beside me in the gallery? Would’ve saved me a hell of a lot of face.”
“I wanted to see what you would do.”
“What I did was bollocks it all up. Was that good? Did I pass?”
He grasped his glass and spun it slowly on the table. “Not exactly. You were rather slapdash. Hasty. Reckless.”
“That’s me. Those three words and more. You should hear what Geoff calls me.”
“But I think you will do,” he said, sucking on the straw.
We spent the next couple of mojitos on nothing more than smalltalk. It was mostly me doing the talking. I didn’t get his surname, his home town, his college if he was at college, his job if he had a job, or anything. The notebook still in my bag was empty to the brim with facts about Seb.
I couldn’t decide whether he was quiet because I wasn’t — and the more mojito’d I became, the quieter I wasn’t — or because he was just one of those types. That was the more likely, I figured. I reckoned he was the sort of guy who’d be the first to spot flames curling out of an upstairs window over the road but the last to say anything. Not in a malicious way — he’d be quietly heroic and emerge smoke-damaged and coughing with a baby and a puppy, and then vanish into the night hand-in-hand with a fireman. But me, I’d be setting records clattering down the fire escape and into the nearest pub, going look at the size of his hose and forgetting I was a reporter.
So I told him all about myself, of course, about growing up in Dublin, about my father’s vanishing act, my journey of unrelenting self-discovery that somehow led to a season ticket to Humbug, all the usual sort of bollocks. He probably knew it all already. He probably had a manila folder somewhere with all my movements for the previous six months — and worse, the guys I’d slept with. There weren’t that many: I was pretty much Captain Bravado.
The evening grew late, tipping toward midnight, and the massed ranks of drinkers began to disperse or be dispersed slowly to their pits or wherever came next. The wind gradually left our sails and for the first time I felt the chill of the night, despite the lamps.
We went back inside the bar to finish off our drinks. It was still too loud for any kind of decent conversation and, more to the point, anything other than the grossest of flirting. And several mojitos in I’d given up on discovering Seb’s mysterious story: other things were on my mind. When he suggested a walk, I couldn’t agree fast enough.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“I live by the river.”
“Cool,” I said, though that didn’t narrow it down much. I didn’t care.
As we left the bar we had to jump out of the way of some kind of octopus woman, all arms, storming out. I didn’t recognise her. She looked like Helena Bonham-Carter in a kind of a Grim Reaper make-over. She swept along the alley ahead of us, people leaping out of her way in case she snuffed them out with a touch. I think I heard her say the name Spencer — that was the baldy drunk with the beercuffs. I had to laugh.
Some part of my journo brain was still awake as we walked. The cogs turned silently, analysing the route. We walked south along the Roman road, the city’s spine. Most likely that cut out the posh colleges — the ones with all the cash and the river views. That still left dozens of others, though, and he might have been a student living out of college anywhere in town. If he was a student at all.
“May I ask you a question?” Seb began.
“Is it the top or bottom thing? You’re forward after a few glasses, aren’t you? I’ll have you know I’m strictly—”
“No, not that. This is an ethical question.”
I wondered where this was going, as I wondered where we were going. We’d barely reached M&S, and we were being passed by drunk kids bouncing off each other and heading to a club. A couple of hi-vis types in caps — cops or pretend cops — promenaded just ahead of us.
I looked at Seb. “I’m not sure how ethical I am after a night of mojitos, but try me. I might surprise myself.”
A short pause. He was inspecting the pavement as we walked. “How do you feel about your editor?”
“Geoff? He’s too old. Never met a pie he didn’t like. And I can’t stand Londoners.”
“I mean professionally.”
“Oh.” It was going to be one of those deep-and-meaningfuls setting the world to rights, was it? “Is this a trap? Is this all a big ruse to root out disloyal staff? I’ll proudly sing the corporate song if I have to, I think it’s about dustmen and trousers.”
“I do not work for him. I want to know what you think.”
I wasn’t sure the alcohol had affected him at all. He was a little more talkative, perhaps, but he wasn’t mulleted. Neither of us was walking in a zig-zag.
We crossed the road by a packed taxi rank, turning down an unidentifiable offer from a taxi driver and avoiding a couple of beery cyclists taking the scenic route home.
I used the time to consider what to say. “He’s a shithead, I guess. A greasy fart in a lift. All
the empathy of a blocked drain. Does that help?” I looked for Seb’s reaction: nothing. “I’m not really doing the job for his benefit, if that’s any better. I need the money and the experience, and I’m getting a trickle of both. First sniff of a better offer and I’m all sayonara, suckers.”
He nodded and said nothing for a while. We turned between Christ’s and St Paul’s, onto Christ’s Lane: a narrow old passage paved with cobbles, with high stone walls on either side cast into sharp relief by balls of yellow light inset along its length. I could hear music and laughter from a first-floor window on the St Paul’s side, and there was a sweet smell wafting down that might have gotten someone into trouble.
“They sometimes call this little alley Romans,” I said to break the silence. “It’s a Cambridge theological joke. If it helps, I don’t think they’re meant to be funny. It’s something about epistles. Not entirely sure what, I haven’t been a good Catholic boy for several years now. These days it’s usually called St Paul’s Back Passage, what with the college’s reputation and all. Well deserved, too.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Did you go there?” Bam! with the journalism.
“No.” Woohoo, a negative fact.
There were another few seconds of quiet, which I was beginning to recognise meant another question bubbling up.
“Has your editor ever asked you to… embellish a story?”
I made a kind of hissing sound. “You’re asking the wrong guy. No point trying to embellish what I’m allowed to do. Yesterday a pussycat with a history of drug-dealing and prostitution was run over by person or persons unknown but believed to be linked to the Mafia and on a bicycle.”
“But would you?” asked Seb, voice raised a little. “Are you loyal to him — or loyal to the truth?”
“Jesus, this is getting heavy. Ask me again when I’m sober.”
I could see him becoming agitated, a little more expressive in the gestures. It might have been the alcohol finally kicking in, I guessed.
“What about phone hacking, email hacking, dirty tricks? Does he get you to do those?”
I shook my head as we passed the bus terminal. The trees along both edges of the path through Christ’s Pieces were lit by strings of bulbs bobbing into the distance, thick constellations between the branches. I kept my eyes open for bikes without lights, the little shits.
“Hacking? That’s all big boys’ stuff,” I said. “We’re a tiny, tiny paper. We tell the truth. I think we tell the truth. I try to. It’s as dull as Hull on a wet Thursday in November, but it’s accurate, give or take a stolen by-line. Accurate, you know, as long as I’m allowed my notepad.” I mimed scribbling. “If you ask me, the dodgiest things we do are the puns in the headlines. We spend more time on these than on writing the shite that follows them.”
Silence again, which I filled before a new question could be asked. “You know, at the risk of sounding defensive, we’re not all horrible people. Sure, I wouldn’t give Geoff the time of day if I didn’t get paid for it, and the red-tops with their brown envelopes and private investigators on the sly, they’ve done bad things. But it’s not what I do. Not what I want to do. I want to make life better, investigate the arseholes and get ’em put away. I’m one of the good guys, I promise you. Now, are you gonna tell me what this is all really about?”
A quiet voice: “Yeah.”
“Off the record.”
“Yeah.”
“Then fire away. I’m all ears, apart from the mouth.”
He took a deep breath. “Do you know much about your editor’s past?”
I stopped and turned to him. “Would you stop talking about the pissing editor and get on with your story?”
He shushed me, a hand on my arm again, and walked on. “I am, I am. This is about him. Burnett. Do you know what he did before the Bugle?”
“A reporter on Fleet Street, is all I know. Does he have something on you? A little dirt? Is that what all this no-notepad stuff’s about, you want to tell the story properly? I can probably arrange—”
“No. You are correct, he was on Fleet Street, twenty years ago. He was an investigative reporter, just like you want to be. He broke stories, like you want to, and sent people to prison, like you want to.”
“Why do I get the feeling there’s a but coming up.”
Emerging from the trees, we walked a few yards to a zebra crossing. There were still a few taxis trailing up and down. Were we heading towards Midsummer Common, I wondered? It looked very much like it.
Maybe, I thought, he just said he lived by the river. Maybe he was planning to lure me to the riverside, break my back on a narrowboat and toss me in. Maybe the story might be about me after all. The pavement ahead peeled right, towards the river, and I consoled myself drunkenly with the knowledge that if he did bump me off there’d be a massive front page photo of me, albeit below the masthead where you don’t really want it rather than as one of the columnists’ mugshots along the top, the duck shoot.
Seb took his time, apparently gathering his thoughts. I kept my mouth shut, and shivered.
“My father had a business. It was moderately successful, not yet global but expanding. It had won an export award. A bright future awaited us, so we thought. And then your editor decided this could not be allowed to happen. He uncovered some financial irregularities — correction, what he thought were financial irregularities.”
“Ah,” I said. I saw where this was going. I imagined a small silver key in his back, winding him up and up as he spoke.
“He didn’t contact my father. Why not? Why not? It could all have been stopped there and then. Misunderstanding, or something. An apology, no hard feelings. But no, oh no. As far as we can tell he didn’t contact anyone from the company at all. Not a word! No phone call, nothing!” He was angry now. “Based on barely more than supposition and a source even the— even the Metropolitan Police considered unreliable, he and his editor went barrelling ahead and just printed the story. No regard for the truth. No regard for the effect on the business. No regard for the family.” He punctuated the sentences by chopping the chill air ahead of him. Someone across the street looked over at the noise.
We skipped across a set of traffic lights and through a metal gate with a narrow cattle grid, its dark paint peeling off with the passage of thousands of bikes and feet. This was Midsummer Common, dozens of acres of grassland criss-crossed by paths, and with Narnia-like street lamps at the intersections. It was currently occupied by a herd of cows somewhere away in the mist. Only in Cambridge.
The river was getting closer. We skirted the eastern edge of the common, on a path curving slowly to the right as the common narrowed, and then took a fork aimed directly towards one of the footbridges over the Cam. We’d be passing not far from many of the college boathouses across the river, where some of the fittest and most lycra-hugging arseholes of their generation trained and rowed. Not that I used to walk along the footpath occasionally on the off-chance, of course, and never with my long lens.
“So what happened?” I asked, hoping he’d unwound a little.
There was no let up in his anger. “What happened? What always happened. Businesses were ruined. Lives were ruined. There was a cascading effect.” He mimed tumbling over and over. “I was young at the time, protected. It is only recently that I learned the whole truth. The board sacked my father, of course. They could do little else against the publicity, day after day after day. He tried to clear his name. No chance of that. Your editor and his friends kept on and on with the story despite the lack of evidence. They grabbed at anything to destroy him. They dug up an old girlfriend and made people think they were having an affair. Nudge-nudge, no smoke without fire. Those stories. Bitter, vicious lies.”
I nodded. He needed to get this out.
“It was relentless, and groundless, and devastating. The family, my family suffered greatly. The pressure. The constant cameras, the intrusion. At our windows, at the front door, on the bonnet of the car. It was a witch
hunt. I used to have nightmares, all banging and flashes and arguments and tears, whirling around.”
He stopped for a moment, and looked at me, and took a breath, and became quiet again. “My elder sister took an overdose. Luckily we found her in time. In fact, I found her — she was supposed to be babysitting me while our parents were out talking to solicitors. And the stress of it all, well, ultimately, it ended my parents’ marriage.”
Well, that put a great big fucking downer on the evening, right there.
“So you see,” he said with a cold smile, “I’m not a great fan of Geoff Burnett.”
It was my turn to be silent.
He finished the story, slowly, quietly. “And afterwards, well, my father was reinstated eventually because he had done nothing wrong, of course. But it could never be what it had been before. It was not long before he left that company and started something new, not so corrupted with memories I suppose. Something quite successful, which is good. I grew up with my mother, as did my sister.”
“How is she now?”
“Fine. Both are fine. My sister is married, with a little girl. My mother says she is far too busy now for marriage.” He let out a short, sad grunt. His foot connected with a pebble, deliberately or not I couldn’t tell, and it skittered along the path and escaped into the grass.
I made the right noises but I wasn’t sure what I was expected to say — what I could say. I could hardly apologise on behalf of all journalists — or even just Geoff, had I wanted to — for any wrongdoing perpetrated by others while I was playing kiss-chase. And that’s assuming everything Seb had told me was true.
“Listen, I’m sorry, but—”
“What’s it got to do with you?”
“Crudely, yeah.” I gave him a sympathetic smile.
We were approaching a footbridge, which arced low over the Cam to slice through the boathouses on the other side. At the steps, Seb stopped and turned to me. “We were a happy, contented family until Geoff Burnett came along. I would very much like to organise a little payback. I want you to help.”
The Pink and the Grey Page 5
