“Great! Can’t we get those together and do a big boob jump or something?” I found myself miming it, as Geoff had, and felt my face flush.
Spencer looked at me distastefully as he lifted his cup. “I see all journalists are cut from the same cloth, notwithstanding the stitching.”
“I’m sorry. You need this front page, though, don’t you?” He did, we all did — it would set us up nicely for the big one the following week — though I couldn’t say any of that with the eye in the corner. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, apparently, but I wasn’t sure what Spencer had was what I’d call freedom. More like trading today’s privacy for tomorrow’s security. But I suppose it wasn’t all that different from CCTV on the streets — except these cameras were exposed to a little more of the spice of life. The sofa felt suddenly less comfortable.
Spencer took a gulp of tea and set the cup down. “There is one possibility, though. Assuming the editor doesn’t want anything too racy, too explicit.”
“It’s a page one story, not a page three.”
“In which case I believe I might have a solution. Drink up,” he said, and reached across the desk for his phone.
Half an hour later we were in another part of college — Spencer called it Top Court, with an ironic smile — in a small room tucked alongside the dining hall. I could only describe it as bright brown: wood panelling varnished to shite, below ochre walls and a bronze-coloured ceiling. One wall was covered completely in mirrors tiled top to bottom. The whole room shimmered with specks of glitter. We were in a kind of dog-shit disco.
And with us were four students, undergrads by the look of them: still with a fierce, knowing innocence and cheekbones that could slice cheese. Barely a muscle between them, and certainly not an ounce of blubber. Spencer had called them here. He lined them up and introduced them individually, and then, with a flourish: “And together, they’re Cream of the Crop Top.” The guys bowed and curtsied elaborately.
It was a student fucking drag act.
“Jeez, due respect, I’m sure it’s great, but… Geoff will have my hide. We can’t do this.”
Spencer was dismissive. “You have yet to see them. It is a sight indeed to behold. I promise you, Geoff won’t only not notice, he’ll be positively overcome with desire.”
The act busied themselves noisily with bags and clothing and equipment.
“It’s madness! I’ve never seen a drag act you couldn’t tell from a mile away! I’m gonna be laughed out of the cocking paper! Are you sure we can’t lure a couple of lesbians here with a kitten and a copy of Sporting Life?”
“Trust me.” He patted my arm. “These boys know what they’re doing.”
And they were doing it fast. I gave them that, it was a well practised setup. They were shaved glass-smooth already — face, arms, chest and legs always ready for a bit of action — and they dressed quickly, tucking and padding and slapping on the make-up like a whore in a hurry.
Ten minutes after arriving, the wigs were on and adjusted and we were good to go.
It was an impressive transformation, I had to admit. Close-up, you could tell. You could feel the breasts weren’t right, you could spot the unavoidable physical differences. But, say, from a dozen feet, when they were jumping up in the air? The only ones who could tell would be the ones who would never tell.
The leader of the gang called herself Cody. Bright blue eyes, determined. Hungry, even: a man-eater. A pout of steel. Brash, confident, never short of a snappy response. Out of uniform, she’d been a mousey geographer called Jonathan.
Cody led the group out into the court and straight onto the grass. Even I, an outsider scurrying behind, knew that an undergraduate violating the turf was some kind of sacrilegious act.
“Cody, I don’t think—” Spencer started to object, and Cody gave him a glare that stopped him like stone.
The rest of the Cream gathered beside her, all four girls with legs apart and hands on hips. Like a group of superheroes: The XX Men, perhaps. The rain, gentler now, almost a mist, dappled their luxurious real-hair wigs and their light t-shirts and college-pink shorts. I could already see a few faces popping up at windows around Top Court as Spencer fussed me along.
I hurried to sort out my camera. It was important not to let the girls become too damp: although the editor might have wanted a wet t-shirt line-up, the wetter this lot got the less female they appeared. I scurried around to make sure the light, such as it was, was behind me.
There was a whistle from somewhere high up, echoing across the court. One of the girls waved. Then chanting began: Co-dy, Co-dy, Co-dy, and she waved too, to cheers.
I was ready. I called them back into position, a not-so-straight line of four, and counted down: three, two, one, jump snap. A second shot, and a third. I got the girls adopting different poses mid-air, with whoops and hollering and yelling all around, people banging on window frames, clapping, calling out names. I felt like I was taking photos of a girl band: a beautiful, successful, powerful girl band everybody had heard of except me. I felt like— I felt like my father.
Except, of course.
“Have we finished?” asked Spencer. “Only, the girls are getting rather rained upon.” The mist was coalescing back into small raindrops.
I quickly rattled off another five or six shots: different angles, different styles. Showing other parts of the court, showing the walls behind them draped with faces, with the girls stony-faced and arms folded, holding hands, pretending to run, anything I thought Geoff might conceivably buy. Then the rain began to splatter more heavily and it was all over: we darted back inside to the dog-shit disco with cheers ringing around us.
And in another ten minutes Cody and the girls had reverted to Jonathan and the boys and a smirking, flushed anonymity, and Cream of the Crop Top had been packed away into their over-stuffed kit bags until the next time. The adrenalin in my body was leeching away into nothing and I was thirsty, and hungry, and damp, and feeling like something had changed.
We thanked the boys, and then Spencer and I sprinted through the cloudburst back to his room. “Quite something, aren’t they?” he called as we dodged the growing puddles. “They sing and dance too, though that is in all honesty less refined than their overall look at present. They’re making rather wonderful progress though.”
“You know I had no idea there was a degree in drag. What is it, like a BSc in Sass and Shaving?” I had my camera bag under my jacket to try to keep it dry.
“BA, dear, not BSc. Oh, no, this is purely extra-curricular. We do very much encourage it though. We positively delight in our students graduating from St Paul’s having emerged from whichever particular chrysalis they might have arrived in.”
“Like, coming out?”
Spencer bounced through his stairwell door and held it open for me again. “There are many types of closet, Conor.”
The high I realised I was in from the photoshoot lasted until I returned to the Bugle office, dried off again, and sat at my desk next to a curious and restless Manish to start pulling the story together.
“Oi, ginger.” It was a muffled Geoff. He beckoned me over with one hand, the other stuffing a sandwich into his mouth.
“All sorted, boss,” I said. “I’ve got some cracking pictures. Page one copy on the way. Have you come up with a better headline yet? I’ve had a couple of ideas—”
“Hold your horses, kid. Change of plan.” Still chewing, he waved me onto the chair beside him.
“Geoff, we agreed page one—”
He swallowed. “Don’t get shirty, sunshine. You’re right, I said page one if you got the boobs. But I’m killing that story.” He gave me the full-on Churchill face.
I got louder. “You can’t, man, it’s a good story. What have you got, a councillor falling off a chair? This is better than that.”
He raised his hands to quieten me. “Listen. Who was it you spoke to at St Paul’s?”
“The guy running the race. Flowers, Spencer Flowers. He’s
a good guy.”
“Was he the one you called an arsehole earlier?”
I nodded reluctantly and tried to calm down. “He’s an academic. Course he’s an arsehole. But he’s a decent enough arsehole. I’ve seen a few arseholes in my time—”
Hands up again. “Enough. And he’s a bender like you?”
“Hey, if you’re gonna get all hate crime on my arse there’s a whole bunch of better words you can use.”
“Is he?”
“What’s all this about? There’s not some radical homosexual page one conspiracy going on.” Not quite. I was starting to properly bristle and my gay agenda hackles were on the rise.
“I’ve heard a few stories about this Flowers bloke. I thought you might have a bit more for me, some back-up.”
“Yeah, right, because all the gays know all the gays. We all sleep with each other and use the big gay telegraph to tell each other our big gay secrets. Tell me, how is the Queen? You must know her, she’s straight and old.”
“You know what I mean, ginge. You’ve just come back from meeting this guy. You’ve said he’s an arsehole — your words, mate, your words. So, how much of an arsehole? Word is he’s out of control. Slagging it around. It gets a straight-up bloke like me a bit suspicious, don’t it? Taking liberties with innocent young freshers is he?”
I took a breath. Now was not the time to get all West Side Story. For all I knew Spencer was taking a few liberties with freshers, though I doubted it. What I’d seen at the college didn’t suggest that. He was genuine, decent. Proud of the girls and the boys. I reckoned they could look after themselves, no problem. In fact I could imagine one or two freshers taking liberties with him, if he’d let them.
What worried me was that Geoff didn’t understand St Paul’s, and more importantly St Paul’s — and Spencer, and Seb — didn’t need this kind of publicity. I was pretty sure Spencer was no saint, but I was also pretty sure that nobody was. Manish might have been slagging around more than Spencer. This kind of talk seemed… twenty years out of date.
“Geoff,” I said as calmly as I could. “I hate to break it to you, man, but… I’m sorry, you’ve been asleep for a couple of decades. It’s the twenty-first century now. Nobody gives a single shit any more.”
“This isn’t about all that. Fuck me, we hired you, didn’t we? Don’t start defending the bleedin’ tribe mate. If he’s in a position of power and abusing that trust—”
“Like you?” Oh, jeez.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Roll back, roll back! “I mean — you’re sitting there in a position of power right now. You mustn’t abuse that trust by— by printing stories about some college arsehole that might turn out not to be true.” Nice recovery there, Conor, you great cock.
The argument had gone on long enough to draw Simon slithering from his desk, the enforcer wheeling his chair across to run interference for his master. “This isn’t about Geoff,” he said. “This isn’t about newspapers, what they do now — or what they used to do.”
Geoff shrugged, palms up. “If the Spencer bloke’s clean, he’s clean, and there’s probably no story.”
“Back in the bad old days,” said Simon slowly, scraping a finger on Geoff’s desk, “it was a lot freer and easier in the business. We might print stuff then that we wouldn’t now. These days, we have the internet. Things can be checked. Traced.” A pause while he flexed the fingers on his right hand. “You’d be amazed what you can find in access logs.”
“So,” I said, “you’ve got something about— about this Flowers guy from some access logs somewhere? Is that what you’re saying?”
Simon fixed his gaze on me. “About him? Oh, no. Not at all. Not about him.” There was an emphasis on him that made me think of baseball bats and a broken nose. “Remember where your loyalties lie, mate.”
“Tell us what you know about Flowers,” said Geoff.
I walked into my flat that night and went straight to my laptop to open up Gaydar. A very quick message to Spencer: “Incoming!”
eleven
The Attack
It was the second consecutive long evening chewing the cud with Conor and Seb, and certainly not as pleasurable as I would have preferred. It was apparent I was now the target of the Bugle’s rabid ire, despite Conor’s gallant efforts to distract them from my college record. Even a knight in shining ginger armour such as he was unable to wield his broadsword against his liege and his deputy liege with any degree of decapitatory success.
One sticks one’s head jauntily above a parapet for just one millisecond and the wrath of the detritus of Fleet Street is arrayed pestilently against it, I thought.
Conor told me I was likely to be branded in print some flavour of sex pest with the stage-whispered subtext that I was preying upon the youth of St Paul’s. Via some lollipop-based subterfuge, perhaps, or promises of grade advancement according to some tariff of services.
Frankly, nothing could have been more distant from the actuality. The students at St Paul’s were far too tickled preying upon each other, and ordering in from sundry other colleges, to have any special regard for me. My rapidly decaying flesh and accreting gut held no allure when the first flush was, as it were, on tap.
A secondary but no less dangerous trouble for our conspiracy was the deputy editor: intimately allied with his governor, as Conor put it, the Riker to his Picard, and — were Conor’s suspicions proved — aware of Conor’s interest in the duo’s dubious past. This complication hastened and altered our plans somewhat. We could not risk the deputy’s investigations unravelling and foiling the intended revenge.
In Seb’s disturbingly capacious apartments beside the river, away from the cameras of college and the twitching ears of Humbug or anywhere else in public view, we inched soberly, in all senses, towards a revised and accelerated attack. Over the course of the evening I became half-tea, half-biscuit.
Thus Wednesday night granted me fewer hours of sleep than I was accustomed to, and Thursday morning began with the insistent, shower-interrupting ringtone allotted to the Master’s outer office — one of the poorly documented and less fiery of Dante’s circles. I was instructed to present myself for ritual castration by the Forked Tongue of Chatteris at precisely nine o’clock.
The first four bars of Yankee Doodle, from the college clock high above Bottom Court, seeped mournfully through to the Admin dungeon as I knocked and entered the coffin-office.
“He is arrived,” said Amanda from her desk, apparently to no-one: she was the sole occupant of the room, a small purple oasis of gibberish.
“Right,” said a voice from the phone, and I understood. The voice had a pronounced East London accent, distinctive from just that single word: the “r” drifted toward “w”, the “i” was more “oi”, the “t” absent without leave. The editor, or his deputy: and yet officially I still knew nothing. My heart began to pound.
“Sit, Spencer. Sit.”
I did meekly as I was told, clasping hands together in case they shook. I was thankful not to be hungover.
“I am telephonically engaged with Geoff Burnett. His position is as of editor of the Bugle, of which you are no doubt aware of.”
“I am— an avid reader,” I said, pre-deploying the negatory pause.
“Good to hear it, son,” said Burnett, voice muffled and distorted on the ancient speakerphone. “You’re in the next edition.”
I feigned ignorance and trowelled on the guilt. “Indeed, the race. We are profoundly grateful for your publicity, Mr Burnett, as will be the many charities that benefit from the event. I hope your picture editor found—”
“Silence, Dr Flowers,” Amanda commanded, perching upright on her distressed leather chair.
“Sorry, son, but a little bird has sung us a better story. Of course, in the interests of balance, we thought you might like to give us a few comments on the record.”
“And what story might that be, Mr Burnett?” I said. “I can assure you my finances, and those o
f the charity event, are strictly in order.” I kept my smile to myself.
“Your finances might be, kid, but your love life’s a bit of a cock up, if you pardon the pun.”
This I could hardly deny. I was awash in adrenalin, pushing the deliberate incomprehension further. “Are you proposing some species of — what’s the word? — make-over, Mr Burnett? I am afraid there is very little anyone, even the most talented, can do with my hair these days. I must decline a hairpiece on religious grounds, and a transplant—”
The editor interrupted. “Spencer — can I call you that? Spencer, listen. I’ll level with you. I don’t much care for the likes of you smart-arses and god knows this town’s chocka with ’em. Same goes for all the queer stuff. I tolerate it but I don’t have to like it. Once it crosses the line, I don’t have to tolerate it no more.”
Amanda listened impassively, hands folded on her blotter and not even twitching towards the biro pot. I saw a narrowing of the eyes at the word queer but that was all.
“A line has been crossed, you say? Which line is that, Mr Burnett?” I asked.
His voice crackled menacingly back. “Whichever line my paper chooses. Whichever line I choose. And I reckon luring students in your care back to your pit crosses one hell of a bleedin’ line.”
I rose slowly and faced the portrait of Drybutter on the wall behind Amanda with my hands clasped behind my back. I considered my next words very carefully indeed. “And I presume you have multiple on-the-record sources for these scurrilous allegations, which I of course strenuously and fully deny?”
“I’ve got enough to print.”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
I hoped Amanda might jump in and at least confuse him for a few seconds. Sadly, she remained — for the first time in living memory — annoyingly silent.
“Any comment for us, Spencer? On the record? Maybe you’d like to confess everything here and now and we can do a big set-piece interview. And then at the end you start bawling and get drop-kicked out of the college. You know it’s gonna happen. Might as well get it over with now — it’ll be simpler in the long run.”
The Pink and the Grey Page 12
