The Pink and the Grey (30 page)

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 time went in a flash, buzzing and darting and fussing with an energy I hadn’t experienced before at the
Bugle
.

Simon did almost all of the last-minute editing of the paper. Normally he and Geoff would share it, swearing back and forth at each other. This time Geoff sat back a little, nursing his injury and perhaps placing some plausibly deniable distance from his old friend should St Paul’s happen to inquire as to
what the hell
.

And then it was finished, and sent to print, and Manish and I gave each other the what-have-we-done face.

And Simon gathered us round, having apparently promoted himself. He said Manish and I had performed pretty decently under trying circumstances in the last week, and was sorry the other pieces lacerating St Paul’s had been sent to story heaven, the great holy spike where all shall be subbed and found to have ended a sentence with a preposition or some other toss nobody gives a shit about. About which nobody gives a shit. Whatever.

And then he fired us.

Gross misconduct, he said, as Geoff looked on with arms crossed and face ambiguous. Unethical behaviour, his finger wagged. Use of newspaper facilities for personal research with a view to freelance activities incompatible with our contracts. Section blah, subsection bollocks, paragraph shite (b), and about forty-nine other breached clauses. He showed us a printout of the GH Instruments searches we’d both done: all dutifully logged by the firewall, he said. None of it wiped by the Archivist’s little helpers, he didn’t say. Obviously a conspiracy between us, or a con-spy-racy, he said, complimenting Manish on the choice of headline.

Under the circumstances, he told us with a thin smile, we would not be held to our notice periods and would instead be clearing our desks there and then. He would graciously donate a couple of bin bags. If we wanted to argue, he said, he would happily call security and we could be escorted out by their big dogs with freshly painted holes in our arses.

I took it on the chin. Manish took it somewhere in the stomach, by the look of him. But we both knew that as soon as the paper hit the streets the next day and the full truth emerged then we’d have been ejected into the gutter in any case, along with the two of them. If anything, we were hauling our arses out of Dodge before whatever people got themselves out of Dodge for happened. I admit it did feel a little like jumping out of a diving, pinwheeling plane without a parachute, though.

I thought about unleashing a volley of insults as I left the office for the final time. The truth is, I’d used them all up already. There was nothing left to say. As the door closed behind me I simply called out: “Good luck.”

Two front-page stories about St Paul’s in two weeks: college profile duly risen, and Amanda’s challenge accepted and gloriously, soundly defeated. In a certain fashion. Two piddling trifles desired a slight finesse, that was all: an authoritative refutation of the spy allegations that would be sufficiently nutcracking to close the newspaper and deliver large doses of ignominy to Burnett and Wantage, and the logistics of a couple of thousand runners with charity buckets.

I learned the critical management technique of delegating in several directions simultaneously.

I stayed dry.

In the fragrant suburbs of the Admin dungeon the college switchboard sizzled and sparked with outrage, poutrage, uninformed media, and lawyers on the tout. The delicate administration staff, bless their dedicated college socks, overheated in short shifts and recited mantras to all callers from a script prepared by the Archivist: flat denials,
sans
detail; a universal unavailability for media of all denominations; and a reminder of great business regarding the
Band on the Run
event at which they would of course be treasured guests, along with their wallets.

It was the day before the race. The day before all would be resolved, one way or another. The part of me desiring to pack up and run had been boxed into a corner by the endless
things
that overflowed my mind. I was reduced to a liaison machine: the vertical kind, for the avoidance of doubt. And gradually the jigsaw formed.

I might still fail, crushed beneath a purple thumb or a media stampede or both. I might yet succumb to the fast-acting poisons of the college lasagne.
Unus maltorum
:
one of many
, nothing special. I would still try.

New Court began to echo with the crump and pop of nested buckets on grass. They arrived by lorry, by back gate and by chain gang, groups of eager student volunteers sacrificing their Friday afternoon naps for a trace of physical exercise. The multiple snakes of bucket-conveyors rippled along the gossip and news in the traditional fashion: that is to say, with mutations toward the vulgar. I encouraged instead a rousing work song, which transmuted rapidly into an impromptu performance of
HMS Pinafore
. I had not seen such a buzz around the college since the last Gaga.

Dennis came to inspect progress in a brief respite from tongue-lashings by harassed University officials unhappy with the day’s headlines. The poor man was not used to such limelight either within or without college, as his face rather demonstrated: caffeinated eyes with arctic eyebrows, and a smile pasted from
Hello
magazine. He exchanged uplifting words with one or two of the students, selecting the more olive-skinned, I noted. It was like a minor royal working a parade of ball boys at Wimbledon.