“How did he lose the other one?”
Cody put her coffee mug on the floor. “First night of term. All the girls in here, a little whiskey, a little frisky, and it just— popped out. I think he saw a little more than he bargained for.” She licked her lips. “You know what I’m saying?”
“The girls?”
“The girls. And the boys. I ain’t so fussy. I like… all shapes and sizes. What do you like, baby?”
Geoff’s adam’s apple quivered. “The wife…”
Cody inched toward him, her voice lowering. “The wife is for life. But Christmas is coming. And Cody, here, well, she wraps a present real good.”
“I don’t think—”
“You don’t like me, baby?” She shrank back. “Am I too… inexperienced for you?”
“I like you, I like you. I just—”
“Then what’s the problem?” She gave him a look. “Nobody will know,” she whispered to him, to me, to the Archivist, to a room of rapt elves, and to a frantically spinning disk. “Nobody will find out.”
Geoff’s eyes darted left and right, his brain evidently overloading.
I began to worry: was Cody prepared to persist with this approach? Was there not a chance—
“Archivist,” I said. “You must reveal the plan to me. This is a tactic not without risk.”
“I know what I am doing,” he said evenly.
“In the next room, you have a team?”
The Archivist merely indicated the screen, and smiled.
Geoff had begun, slowly and uncertainly, to lean towards Cody.
She licked her lips. “Yeah, baby,” she said.
His lips puckered and quivered as he approached her. A hand began a hesitant journey toward her leg. His bulk rotated upon the duvet to present his front oval to her.
She brought a soft finger quickly to his lips: “Dance for me, honey.”
“What? I— Fuck that.” He pulled back.
“Dance. I like to see your moves before I see your moves, know what I’m saying?”
“I don’t dance, love. I haven’t danced in fifteen fuckin’ years.” This was a softer voice, a gentler Geoff, with a chuckling finish. He was remembering those earlier days. His face smoothed for a moment, its lines fading.
“You like to dance, Bugle boy?”
“Used to. Made a great Prince Charming in my day. A right dandy bleedin’ highwayman. Adam and the Ants, ever heard of ’em? Ancient history to you, I bet.”
“Show me, honey. Show me. I like to see history comin’ alive.”
He laughed and shook his head slowly. “I couldn’t.”
“Do it,” she said, almost a whisper, a hand on his arm. “Do it for me?”
The Hub crackled with electric tension. We had all unconsciously leaned a few degrees toward the screen as their conversation became more personal, more intimate. We willed him to his feet. Thieves might have been making off with the college silverware, nobody paid the slightest attention to any of the other screens.
“There were these moves,” said Geoff. “You make a cross with the arms. Even had Diana bleedin’ Dors in the video.” Still on the bed, he balled his fists and raised his arms into an X shape level with his head.
“How did the song go, baby?”
He cleared his throat and began an embarrassed mumble: “Prince Charming,” emphasis on the ming, “Prince Charming, ridicule is nothing to be scared of. Something like that, weren’t it.”
“Sing it, baby. Dance it. For me.” Her voice was even lower, barely detectable by the microphones.
Hesitantly, Geoff rose to his feet and turned to face her. An elf quickly switched cameras so we could see his face. He shook his arms as if loosening up, and a small smirk came on his face, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to do. Neither could we.
“It was… here we go, like this,” he said. And then quietly but clearly, a warble: “Prince Charming,” he sang, one arm raised above his head almost in salute. “Prince Charming.” The other arm joined with the first to form an X. “Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.” Both arms down, and now into a strutting pose.
I gave the Archivist a confused smile. Is this what we had been waiting for? His eyes did not waver from the screens.
Cody was laughing and clapping, excited feminine claps with hands close to her chest as in prayer. “Another!” she said.
He obliged, at first reluctantly and then less so. For the subsequent five minutes he introduced us to excerpts from a medley of what I remembered as eighties hits, gaining in confidence and becoming more vocal and more outlandish in his dance moves. Cody responded with ever greater enthusiasm. She flicked back her hair repeatedly in non-verbal encouragement. Her body language communicated precisely what we knew he wanted.
Finally he returned to the bed, in anticipation of his reward. He breathed out heavily. “I’m all warmed up now,” he said. “Was that good, love?”
“Delicious, honey,” Cody replied. “One more, for me?”
“No more.”
“Strip for me, honey. Dance off your clothes and shake your booty for me.”
“I’m not a bleedin’ stripper. Your go now. Come here, give us a kiss.”
“Strippin’ before kissin’ in my house, baby. Show me the goods or my lips are sealed, know what I’m saying?”
“Enough,” he said, and his mood darkened, and my heart skipped a beat. “Give us a kiss and stop all this American shit.”
Cody hesitated. I thought I saw her mask begin to slip. “No kissing, honey. Time for you to go.”
“You’ve had me dancing like a prick and I get nothing?”
“You’ve had my coffee and my company, and I don’t like your tone, so you can please now leave.” Her voice was firm but I detected a hint of fear. I became unsettled. The Archivist, though, watched on impassively, eyes narrowed.
“I’m worried,” I said. The Archivist ignored me.
Geoff spoke again, more angrily. “One kiss. Fucking students, pissing you around. I’ll have this college, bitch.”
Cody stood and pointed to the door, still in character. “Leave now.”
Geoff got off the bed and moved towards her: short, slow steps. “I’ll take this college down. You think this is a fucking game, don’t you. Dance for me. I’ve been dealing with fuckers like you for twenty years, and believe me—”
I grabbed the Archivist’s arm: “Do something!”
“—Believe me, I know what I’m doing.”
Cody backed away from him. “I’m not afraid of you,” she said, her character unravelling, her voice deepening.
That was enough. I bolted, almost slipping on the dark tiles of the Hub. I ran out into the anteroom, through the secure door into the corridor and out to the stairwell, and rushed up to the ground floor and the threatening grey outside. Straight across the lawn and through the arch to New Court, students pressing against the stone at my shout to allow me by, then sprinting along the path to Q Staircase. I hustled past the few people milling outside. Crashing through the doors and up the steps and along to room five, in less than a minute, I was banging on Cody’s door, shouting her name. I didn’t wait. I threw myself at it violently, once, twice. On the third hit it splintered open and I clattered through, red and puffing and dander well up.
Geoff was on the bed, face smushed into the pillow, with an arm wrenched high behind his back. Cody kneeled upon him. Her wig was half askew and authentic Jonathan peeked out from underneath.
He saw me and grinned, somewhat flushed. “Strike three,” he said.
twenty
The Fallout
Knowledge is power. With great power comes great responsibility, or so said a man in spandex climbing up a wall a decent few years ago, and my great responsibility was to avoid revealing to Geoff — when he arrived late and subdued to the office on Thursday morning with his wrist wrapped in bandages — that I’d been told all about what had happened at the college and had, literally, rolled on the floo
r laughing. Were it possible to laugh your arse off, I’d have done that too.
I’d woken up specially early to prepare a page of wrist-sprain jokes. It was going to be one of those unforgettable days, like your first kiss, or your last kiss, or the time the posh girl at school farted during class and for some reason it was the funniest thing ever.
I’d struggled not to let Manish in on the secret — we’d have both been giggling in the corner like a couple of old maids. And Simon was either pulling the straightest of faces — although he was hardly a smiler at the best of times — or he was just as in the dark as I wasn’t.
The previous afternoon, Geoff had never come back to work after his “stakeout”, as he’d called it. According to Spencer he’d barely recovered from the shock of being beaten up by a beautiful, petite boy in a mini-skirt and a wig when he realised that the only way Spencer could have known what was going on and crashed his way in to save Cody’s honour was if the pair of them were being watched. Jeez, I’d have paid money to see the fat man rolling around begging. My wife’ll kill me and I wasn’t going to hurt her-him-her and I’ll drop the story and everything. And all that would’ve been on camera too.
Of course, he now knew for sure there was an Archivist, but — like everyone else who knows for sure — he thought it was a subject best left well alone.
Oh, those college toffs and their funny ways. Plenty of arseholes, sure, and plenty of bollocks too.
The morning meeting around Geoff’s desk couldn’t come quickly enough, which is not a sentence I found myself thinking often. I couldn’t wait to find out how he’d try to spin this one. I bet Spencer and the Archivist and their mates were crowding round a screen thinking the same thing.
“Right,” he said after we’d wheeled ourselves over and settled down with a biscuit. “What else have we got?”
“What else?” asked Simon. “How do you mean?”
“I’m spiking the St Paul’s stuff. It doesn’t hold up.” He made a chopping motion in the air with the wrong hand, and winced.
“Have you hurt your wrist there boss?” I said.
“What do you mean, it doesn’t hold up?” said Simon. “What doesn’t hold up?”
“I didn’t get nowhere with the… with the stakeout, did I. Waste of time. Can’t afford to spend any more on it, we’ve got a paper to get out. It’s dead. No more questions. What else have we got?”
“What about the immigration story?” asked Manish. “I’ve got—”
“Fuck the immigration story. It’s all dead, I’m telling you.”
“Jeez, that wrist must really be hurting you,” I said. “Have you been trying the press-ups again?”
“But I found something new yesterday afternoon,” said Manish. “You never came back, I could have told you about it.”
I kept going. “Or have you perhaps been sitting on your hand to make it feel like someone else? Not something a man in your condition ought to be doing.”
“I don’t give a shit about new evidence.” Geoff waved dismissively at Manish and the wrist complained again, making him growl. “Shit, shit.”
“Wait a minute. This is a big story,” said Simon. “And we haven’t got anything else. You’ve spiked the Flowers story, you’ve spiked the race story. Have you been got at?”
I held my breath.
“Of course I haven’t been bleedin’ got at, you pillock.” He raised his voice at Simon: not common at all. “If we can’t make the stories stick, we can’t print ’em. Christ.”
You’ve changed your tune all of a sudden, I thought. Twenty years late for Seb and his family.
“Simon,” I said, unable to resist, “you think maybe they’ve been… twisting his arm?”
“Gawd knows,” he replied. “But if we can’t print the immigration story we’re going to have to make something up.”
“Hey, I’ve got a great idea,” I said. “We could do an exposé on criminal injury compensation. ‘We interviewed Mr G. Burnett, fifty-five, who’d sprained his wrist in an unexplained and mysterious accident and tried to claim—’”
“Yeah, alright, leave it out,” said Simon. “We’ve heard that joke now, change the record. Twiglet, what did you find out?”
“Psych,” said Geoff, “Forget it, I’m telling you. It’s spiked. Rehash a punt wars story. Churn some PR. Plenty of easy pickings out there.”
Simon gave him a long hard look, then turned to Manish. “Twiglet?”
I sensed a disturbance in the force. A static charge building between the two men, balloon-Geoff rubbing up against wall-Simon. All I could hear was the beating of my own heart.
Manish hesitated, then did as he was told. He spoke to both men, eyes flicking evenly between them. “I’ve been hunting for that name, Wang Ming. It’s a pretty common name, I think, Wang — that’s the surname. I got a bit sidetracked with someone high up in the Communist Party, but it turns out he died years ago, so it’s either not him or a much bigger story. But then I found this.”
He slipped a sheet of paper from his notebook and passed it across the desk into a space almost exactly half-way between Geoff and Simon. Nicely done, I thought. It lay there untouched, both men leaning over and staring at it, avoiding each other’s gaze. If they got close enough I thought a spark might flash between them.
Manish continued. “There’s an intelligence officer with that name — or there was, it’s unclear — in the Chinese Ministry of State Security. The secret police. That’s the only known photo.”
The paper the editor and his deputy were looking at showed a blurred, almost smeared photo that was obviously Seb. And Manish had met Seb. I caught his eyes, and he caught mine in return: he knew, and he knew I knew he knew.
“Is that the fella you saw?” Simon asked Geoff and me.
Geoff nodded, saying nothing.
I said, “I mostly only saw him from the rear, vanishing over the horizon. If you had an arse shot I could have given you a definite. But, yeah, I think so.”
“Is he known to be in this country?” asked Simon.
“Everybody’s denying all knowledge of the guy,” said Manish, which I’m sure was true as he didn’t actually exist. “But that picture came from a reliable source.”
“Which source?”
Dr Spencer Flowers and friends, St Paul’s College, Cambridge.
“A reliable one,” he repeated.
There was a moment of silence, during which I tried desperately not to do the smug face or the smug dance. I couldn’t say anything: they had to shovel themselves down into this hole all by themselves.
“We have to print it,” said Simon. “It’s either a defection, or the college is importing spies on student visas. Either way, it’s a story. We have to. Spies, Cambridge, queers — not like it’s unheard of. Maybe — maybe — all that from the fifties never stopped. Maybe this is the biggest story of our careers.”
Simon’s eyes started to fill with dollar signs. I bet he was thinking of Watergate, of movie adaptations, of the pair of them played by Brad Pitt and Danny DeVito. More like Laurel and Hardy, long into retirement.
Geoff sat for a fair while, spinning back and forth in his chair, blinking rapidly and rubbing his bad wrist. His thoughts were plain as day to me: head down, or head up? Be intimidated out of printing and save his own arse, or print and hope the story and the college explodes before it brings him down? I knew, somewhere deep inside the Churchillian rolls of flesh that jellied before me, there was a spark that couldn’t be stamped out. The cold, mechanical, beating heart of the journalist. The desire for, if not the truth, then the story.
“I’m too old for this shit,” he said. “Fuck it. Print it.”
I breathed out in relief as quietly as I could. I imagined a room full of people in St Paul’s jumping about six feet in the air.
A few hours later came the weedy shout across the office from Simon that I had been expecting. “Twiglet, you done with that story? Send it across and I’ll give it the once-over.”
/> That was code for: “I’m about to make a few trivial changes and rewrite the intro and put my name at the top.” And for once, Manish couldn’t wait to be rid of it. He polished a few pars and topped it with some rubbish for Simon to replace and then washed his hands of the whole thing.
“I’ve got a headline for you,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “The Spy Who Bummed Me. Can we use that?”
“No,” Simon replied. “What else have you got?”
“The Porn Identity.”
“No.”
“Con-spy-racy. You know, like conspiracy but with spy in red. And you get con and racy for free.”
“Hmm.” That was about as close to a Yes as we were going to get.
The headline worked for me. A decent trigger word to draw in the punters with a nice scary commie red. All it needed was a shitty pun and we were sorted.
“Oh, and a subhead: Student? St Paul the other one.”
That got a groan from Geoff, which made it a dead cert. Either that or he’d tried to flex his wrist again.
We wrapped up the rest of the paper in a flurry of activity, having devoted far too much time to spiked stories.
Curiously, all of the photos in that edition seemed to magically take up twice as much space as in a typical issue, and all the headlines and subheads grew a couple of points. We all became beard-scratchers about the importance of white space — especially in stories without enough copy.
There was one sad accident. The never-popular, award-losing Cat of the Week feature somehow managed to double its allocation of mangy old pussies as several dozen unfortunate slips of the mouse and the keyboard caused a bunch of cats from several weeks ago to find themselves stars for a second time. We knew there’d be letters about that, because the people who write letters are generally the people who write letters about that.
I managed to squeeze a full page out of the week’s ancient photo of Cambridge, a very popular space-filler, on the grounds that it included two boatered toffs leaning up against the St Paul’s college front gate paying absolutely and suspiciously no attention to a passer-by in a huge hooped dress and a flowery hat. Manish dared me to Photoshop in a small Chinese boy. It wouldn’t have been the first time. I didn’t, though: the letters, again.
The Pink and the Grey Page 23
