Newsdeath

by Ray Connolly

  Huckle raised himself from his kneeling position, and, flushing the lavatory, made his way to the washbasin, where he poured himself a glass of cold water that washed away the acrid bile that burned his throat and mouth. Filling the basin with cold water he shoved his face and head under to cleanse the sweat which had soaked the roots of his hair and the tops of his lips. He pulled his head back and with eyes closed reached for a towel, dripping water all over the bathroom. Only when his head was swathed in white towelling did he open his eyes again, staring into the mirror, into his tired blotchy face, watery blue eyes and short dark hair, combed forward these days so that it disguised its own erosion, and which partly hid the Elastoplast that the hospital had provided to cover his stitches. Cautiously he lifted the edge of the plaster, tentatively eager to discover what size of wound lay beneath it. He was disappointed. The two tiny stitches were hardly worthy of comment. Footballers got worse every other Saturday afternoon. He doubted whether there would even be a mark in a few days time.

  He wandered out of the bathroom and into the living-room, and searching in a cabinet drawer found a cigarette he had saved for such a moment. Giving up smoking had been no problem for him, but he needed the assurance of the ever-ready packet for rainy days. Three puffs and he put it out. He always did. The sound in his head was now abating: and his mind was clearer than it had been all night.

  He looked around his little flat without affection. There was a bareness to it which reminded him of his days in bedsitters when he was a student. In those days to live in a two-roomed apartment in Chelsea Cloisters would have meant that he was a millionaire, but now the poverty of his life was reflected from the surface of every piece of furniture. When he had left Susan twelve years emotional and material accumulation had been left behind. He had taken the minimum of his own possessions, taking care not to deprive her of anything she might need. At first, probably because he had been busily occupied outside the flat, he had hardly noticed the bare walls and the cheap teak furniture. He sat and considered his surroundings, his eyes passing over the empty coffee mugs, bills stacked behind books on the mantelpiece, and, everywhere he looked, pieces of Sunday newspapers scattered like a paper chase from the bathroom, through into the small square living-room and on into the bedroom.

  Leaning across from his chair he pressed a button and the room was filled with the melancholy of Delius, pre-recorded sadness to accompany such moods as the one into which he had now fallen. All in all, he thought, there wasn’t much to show for thirty-five years on earth: a couple of cameras; a typewriter, electric and rented from a place in the Strand; a second-hand Renault which had broken down; a coffee perculator which plugged into the same socket as the typewriter; and then, shoved haphazardly on to a bureau behind the settee, a dozen or so files of his own newspaper clippings, an encyclopaedia of his life’s work, a coded map in volumes of words which had led him out of one life and into another.

  He pressed the ‘stop’ button on the elaborate tape-deck system and put an end to Delius, and, getting up, crossed to the shelves which he had erected in one corner of the room. If his Press clippings contained his life’s work, then here on these half dozen shelves was the greater part of his life’s pleasures and playtimes. Susan could keep the house and the family car but he would keep his tapes and his tape recorders, his hundreds of stereophonic hours of music, and thousands more hours of what, in lofty, drunken moments, he would describe as ‘the sounds of history’.

  While some men collected stamps Huckle collected sounds, speeches, discussions by the famous, arguments by the illiterate, radio jingles from now defunct radio stations, living words by dead heroes. It was a library in which a radio station might have taken pride, and to Huckle it was a passion. When wiser men had questioned Richard Nixon’s decision to tape-record every White House burp, Huckle had understood and stayed silent, suctioning his recording device on to the side of the telephone and collating with a glee disguised by his methodicalness the useful and the useless audio-ephemera of his daily life. When he had lived in Fulham the tapes had become an escape from the bitter silences. Now that he was alone with his headphones and recorders, hi-filters, Dolby buttons, microphones and earplugs, twin sockets and zipped pockets and a small mountain of C-120 cassettes for economy and convenience, his sounds of history had become a path out of the solitude of the perpetual insomniac, and a study of his past that would be for ever with him. He was, he realized, sorry that fortune had not allowed him to record tonight’s explosion.

  But supposing he had been killed? It was a zany notion, he knew, but he was sure his true fate should be in recording his own death. Only that would make sense of the time wasted over the years in compiling the great and mundane moments which had occurred in his lifetime.

  Carefully he ejected the Delius cassette and turning on his radio searched along the tuning dial for LBC, the twenty-four-hour all-news programme. Perhaps there was something there he might save. The crackly voice of a phone-in listener came over the airways ‘… all I want to say, Michael, is that with all this bombing and violence and sex and all that going on, we should seriously think about making all the coloureds have licences …’ Huckle moaned to himself. Why was it that late-night phone-in programmes attracted the most bigoted segment of society? Weary immediately at the Cockney howl of the protesting person’s larynx, he turned the radio off again and allowed his mind to wander into a state of semi-trance. Not much to show … he thought again, and his night wandered wide-eyed and unblinkingly towards his day.

  At six o’clock he heard the first intimations of morning when a milk cart, shaking with bottles, hurried past in the street outside: it was a daylight sound, he thought, and climbed into bed to try to sleep away anything that might be remaining of this night. It was to be a short sleep: at 7.30 the telephone he had been expecting all night drilled an alarm into his brain. With eyes still closed he felt for the receiver, two fingers automatically turning on the tape recorder beside the phone.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Huckle? Sorry to bother you. Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not hurt …?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good man. We heard you’d been involved last night, and wondered if you felt up to giving us an atmosphere piece for the first edition.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake. I might have been killed.’

  ‘Indeed … thank God you weren’t. How about it … say five hundred words …?’

  Huckle lay back on his pillow. Once there’d been a time when he would have broken his fingers in his haste to get to the typewriter, but now every story seemed like a chore: even stories in which he had been personally involved.

  He sighed into the phone, the long-suffering groan of the man who knows he’s going to be defeated in an argument. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I really don’t think anyone gives a damn about reporters having narrow escapes. Everyone’s bored stiff with the bloody IRA now. We’d do better talking to the parents of the girl who was killed …’

  ‘You haven’t heard then?’

  ‘Haven’t heard what?’ Huckle felt aggrieved that he’d been woken up, annoyed that the conversation was taking on the style of a guessing game, and disgusted with himself for his lethargy.

  ‘They don’t think it was the IRA this time. The Mirror had a call from some woman claiming responsibility on behalf of a group called PUMA.’

  Now Huckle was listening: ‘Puma?’

  ‘P.U.M.A.’ The initials were spelt out for him. ‘It may have been a hoax, but a bomb’s a bomb, isn’t it, whichever gang of lunatics decides to set it off …’

  Huckle was now listening and he was interested. Clive Pleasants, early morning assistant news editor, familiar with the onerous task of waking up reluctant writers and asking them to perform even more onerous tasks, could sense that Huckle’s attitude was changing. Through years of being friendly and understanding, smiling through insults and obscenities, he had developed an extrasensory power
which told him when he had his reporter hooked.

  ‘Is that okay then? Say six hundred words. An atmosphere piece. You do that sort of thing well.’ The sliver of flattery always helped.

  ‘Well … okay …’

  ‘Right then. We’ve got young Winston Collins filling in all the details from this end, and Carol McGough is ringing around some of her contacts trying to find out what PUMA is supposed to be … so there’s no need to bother about that. Just let us know what it’s like when a bomb goes off behind you … okay?’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ said Huckle, marvelling at the practical dispassion of Pleasants. ‘I’ll come back to copy in about twenty minutes. Just let me gather my thoughts.’

  ‘Good lad,’ came the cheery reply. Pleasants had won again. ‘And, by the way, it’s good to know that you’re still alive.’

  Huckle smiled: was Pleasants congratulating him for surviving? ‘Yes, it’s not bad.’ He hung up, turned off the recorder and lay back on his bed. But now he wasn’t tired at all. He closed his eyes in concentration. Was there anything he had missed, he wondered. And again he saw the girl: the girl who looked like Susan, the same wide eyes and hair which seemed to tumble around her face: and the same tall, confident, almost arrogant stance. He thought about her: and he thought again about Susan. But mainly he wondered what the hell was PUMA?

  Chapter Two

  By the time he reached the office he had stopped feeling sorry for himself. All that belonged to yesterday, his token day of penitence. Despite the lack of sleep and the heartburn he felt a charge of excitement running through him. The stitches in his forehead were now to be worn like a badge, telling everyone at a glance that he was again at the centre of things; and the story he had phoned over at breakfast time was in the paper and on the streets by the time he arrived in Fleet Street. The morning papers had carried the story of ‘London blast: Girl dies’ in their later editions, but the mystery of the new terrorist group gave the first editions of the evenings a good foothold on the news of the day. As Huckle had expected his own ‘I was there’ account hadn’t been given much of a run on page one (the hard news account and new terror scare story was much better copy), but it did more than enough to crank up a conveyor belt of sympathy as he made his way through the open-plan office. Indeed people who hadn’t spoken to him in years were falling over themselves to be nice. And that, in itself, was nice, although it was equally meaningless.

  He was, he liked to think, a soberly dressed man. Immediately after phoning through his story he had showered, carefully combed his hair in an anti-clockwise circle around his head and dressed, as always, in his functional, workable navy-blue corduroy suit. Blue was more than his favourite colour: he wore it in all its hues and shades like a football team wear their livery. With his navy-blue suit (he had another virtually identical one), he would wear either powder-blue shirts, or shirts of blue gingham, blue and white checks or dogstooth. His tie would invariably be navy blue and his black shoes would show just a trace of navy-blue socks bandaged around his ankles. When he had first left home the problem of laundry had been a number one priority; but now the National Sunlight van collected crumpled, smeared and work-stained clothing to return it one week later, tied up in pink ribbon and wrapped in tissue paper. He was actually now better turned out than he had been when living in Fulham.

  He wasn’t a handsome man, his forehead was too wide and his cheeks too flat for that. But he was all right for thirty-five: and a bit better when he had a sun-tan. And the thinness which had been a curse when he was adolescent could now be more kindly described as slenderness. He was the sort of man you wouldn’t notice in a crowd, and who wouldn’t make any attempt to be noticed. It wasn’t that he was particularly shy; it was more that he never thought he had anything worth saying.

  He hadn’t mentioned the fair-haired girl in his story. He had been tempted but the possibility that his memory might be playing tricks with him was frightening, and he wanted to talk with the police again before running the risk of writing about some shock-created fantasy. Yet the half-memory of the girl fascinated him. When he had thought the explosion to be the mischief of some half-mad Irishmen she had seemed an incongruous element: but the mention of PUMA caught his imagination. And when he’d called the paper back with his story at eight o’clock Pleasants had already had confirmation that Scotland Yard were taking it seriously, while the Press Association were reporting that both the Dublin-based IRA and Sinn Fein were angrily denying that any IRA units had been active in London in the past twenty-four hours.

  ‘Of course they lie a lot, don’t they?’ Huckle had countered when Pleasants had told him this, which was undeniably true, but, for a newspaper it was also somewhat counter-productive; a new terrorist group was certainly a better story than a familiar and old terrorist group.

  ‘So what’s PUMA then?’ he asked, as he eventually dribbled his way through the ranks of sympathizers and sat down at his desk, looking casually at the front page of the paper, his eyes already alert for any alterations which the sub-editors might have made to his story.

  Winston Collins, the young black reporter who sat next to him, smiled up from his typewriter. ‘It’s a big black cat that bites,’ he said, rolling his eyes in mock terror before fixing them with amused indifference on the two small black nylon crosses knitted into the skin of Huckle’s forehead: Ms that all you got?’

  Huckle laughed. Winston was his only good friend these days. A lot of people he knew were his pals, encouraging him to go drinking, loafing and womanizing when he knew that the road past temptation led only to sloth and inebriation. But Winston with his banter, his terrifying industry and keenness and his ability to cover up whenever the pursuits of the flesh had come in the way of his friend’s career, was the only one Huckle relied upon. Between these two there was never any of the rivalry which motivates reporters even on the same newspaper. Rather they enjoyed what Huckle liked to think of as a joking relationship, a constant teasing and deprecating of anything and everything in which the other was involved.

  Winston was second generation English; born in Kensal Rise, a run-down, worn-down largely immigrant straggling area of north-west London. He now lived in the Barbican, a large, expensive and windy block of flats situated on the edge of the City, and right behind the Smithfield meat market, through which he would walk every day on his way to work. ’Take care,’ Huckle had advised him during a recent beef shortage. ‘Some of those meat porters don’t like blacks and they could get a good price for a bit of prime cut West Indian down the East End.’ To which Winston had retorted: ‘Don’t worry, my skin’s too thick to chew.’

  And that was probably true, because Winston was above all a self-creation, and all the tougher because of that. He had come to Fleet Street by way of a West London weekly paper and a course in journalism at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and after less than two years there it was accepted that he was in for a considerable future. But then, as he pointed out, that was only because he tried harder than anyone else. At twenty-five his life had been one of sheer diligence and application. At a time when shorthand was despised by young journalists with their Sony TC 55 pocket tape recorders Winston had learned his hooks, circles and loops better than any secretary; his typing utilized ten fingers; he was, in any temporary absence of a lawyer, the office expert on libel, and he rarely worked less than a twelve-hour day. Worse than that, Huckle would observe, the boy hardly drank, had never smoked and was saving his body for some girl called Angela who was away at a teacher’s training college in North Wales. And yet, despite Winston’s horrifying dedication, a bond of friendship had developed between the two men, an unlikely friendship fortified by Huckle’s admiration for Winston’s drive, and by Winston’s affection for what he saw as an appealing vulnerability in the older man.

  Throughout Huckle’s domestic problems Winston had offered a silent and understanding ear, and it was during this time, when by chance the two men had been thrown together at adjacent desks, that th
ey had come to know each other. Huckle’s early suspicions of the black man’s efforts were quickly evaporated by Winston’s guilelessness. Winston was on the make all right: but his ambition was naked enough to be attractive. This morning, Winston, who had been told about Huckle’s involvement in the explosion at six o’clock when Sam Griffiths, the overnight reporter, had telephoned him, had correctly judged that if all the rest of his colleagues were going to be lashing out concern by the quire, his best tack lay in nonchalance.

  ‘Hope you’ve kept up your insurance contributions.’ Winston passed Huckle a steaming hot coffee in a plastic cup that buckled and spilled over his desk. ‘If you’re going to go around getting in the way of bombs your old lady’s going to be needing some financial assistance before long.’

  ‘I’d be more use to her dead, that’s for sure,’ said Huckle.

  ‘Yes,’ said Winston. ‘That’s sure for sure.’

  Just at that moment the second edition of the day was dropped on to their desks with a casual flourish by one of the office boys, tipping over Winston’s coffee as it fell. He yelled good naturedly, and tried to blot up the mess with his newspaper: ‘That little bugger must do that at least three times a week,’ he complained to himself. ‘He’s a vandal.’