The Ties That Bind (21 page)

‘That pop-eyed hippy Marcelle,’ she said. ‘She’s got a superiority complex, all charity this, and morality that, reading groups and history club and then when it comes down to spreading gossip she’s no better than a Whitehawk fishwife. Go on, then, what did she tell you?’

Now Luke wished he had fortified his own drink. He was more used to extracting secrets than telling home truths. ‘Ah, uh, basically,’ he began. ‘Marcelle said that your career got off to a flying start, and you were a rising star at the
Mirror
, that the Nye murder happened when you were here in Brighton but you missed out on the story because you’d got drunk with the male reporters. She said that if you’d got the scoop, you could have had a brilliant career. I mean, an even better one, on the nationals.’

Something new crossed Sandy’s face. It wasn’t the expected shame but something much more exciting to Luke as a journalist:
relief
. She had feared the exposure of something much worse, he would have staked his savings on it. He’d seen it a million times, interviewing people who told him one story to hide the real one, and here it was again. Sandy must have seen it too in her own career, but all good journalists know that no matter how adept they are at spotting someone else’s tells, they can never be aware of their own.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, you’re right.’ Her eyes darted upwards and to the left, which you learn on day one of the job is a sign that someone’s lying. Luke had seconds to work out how to play this, and decided on a tried-and-tested technique of offering the interviewee something of yourself first, so that they would feel it was an equal conversation.

‘Right. Well, that’s awful. I’m sorry I hit a nerve. I can be a bit clumsy like that.’

She nodded to accept his apology. There was a brief awkward pause during which she studied the label on the gin. He thought he saw her mouth twitch in approval.

‘So what are you doing instead?’ she said, turning to face him again.

‘Eh?’

‘You said you were writing about something else. What?’

Luke hadn’t expected her to call his bluff, and swung close to the truth for his lie. ‘Len Earnshaw. Part of the Leeds firm, had a minor run-in with the twins. He was a bit player really but—’

‘I know who Len Earnshaw is,’ said Sandy in a tone that suggested he had just explained to her who the prime minister was.

‘Really?’ Luke felt a momentary surge of delight; that Sandy knew of Earnshaw validated his choice of subject, even if the book was no longer his. He was also pleasantly surprised by the credence her recognition gave his story.

‘Of course I do. Not that I’ve heard his name for years. Never thought he’d talk. He must be broke. Or stupid.’

‘Bit of both, really,’ said Luke. His new confidence took a sudden plunge as he considered how easy it would be for her to wrong-foot him, but she seemed to have lost interest already.

He held out his glass. ‘I don’t suppose I could have another drink? Been a bit jangled myself today. Do you remember that ex I told you about? He slashed his wrists the other day.’

‘Shit!’ said Sandy, half-filling his tumbler with a single slosh. ‘Luke, no. Did he survive?’

‘Yeah. He’s going to be all right, but . . . look.’ He retrieved Jem’s letter from the inside pocket of his satchel, unfolded it and laid it on the table before her. Sandy read it, eyes widening, then reeled back as though it might bite her.

‘Christ,’ she said. ‘You said he was possessive, but this . . . What did you
do
to him?’

‘Nothing,’ said Luke. ‘Except be the first person he fell in love with after a lifetime of sexual repression. And be a punchbag for all the guilt he feels for dumping his wife.’

He found that he was suddenly desperate to divulge all of it, from the night of the tattoo to the night of the burning books. It was the first time he had ever told the story in its entirety – of course he had talked it over and over with Viggo and Charlene, but they had lived through it in real time – and he enjoyed the catharsis of turning it into narrative. Sandy was the perfect audience, her reactions mirroring the descent of the relationship, from sighing at the romance of its beginnings to grimacing at the horror of its end. He felt that his were the barriers that were being lowered, and he was astonished by the relief.

Luke’s professional conscience was telling him to shut up, that he was going about this all the wrong way, but one unburdening whirled him along to the next.

‘I know how you feel, you know. With your career and that. To be finished before you’re even started.’

Sandy flared her nostrils. ‘How could you
possibly
?’

Luke poured himself another measure and this time it wasn’t just for show. ‘When my magazine folded, I decided to make a go of freelancing. I started off just writing gay interest stuff for the broadsheets, the idea being that once they saw what I could do, they’d give me work as a general investigative reporter. Big stories, all that. So, I uncovered this story about a local businessman. I only came across it by chance, talking to someone in the pub. Hiring illegal immigrants to clear out asbestos-ridden buildings without the proper equipment. I pitched the idea to one of the broadsheet supplements, and they seemed interested at first, asking for more and more details. In the end, they rejected it, which was fine, it’s their right to do that, and I started to offer it around. But a couple of weeks later, the paper I’d originally pitched it to ran it as the lead story on their Saturday edition. They’d got their own star reporter to cover it.’

‘Bastards,’ said Sandy. ‘But you’re hardly the first to be ripped off like that.’

‘No, and it’s the accepted wisdom that you just have to put up with that sort of shit on your way up the greasy pole, but I lost my temper. I did a screen grab of our entire email conversation and put it up on my blog. I got a lot of positive feedback from other bloggers and people outside the industry, but the commissions dried up overnight.’ She tutted and he faltered; did she think he was an idiot? Her opinion of him suddenly mattered. Then she shook her head in sympathy and he was encouraged. ‘The news desks closed ranks on me, right across the board. I took my website down but it had already gone viral by then, so anyone who looked me up would find screenshots of my little . . . tirade. I was a laughing stock.’ He blushed at the memory and was glad of the fading light.

Sandy tilted her head to one side in sympathy. ‘But there’s always work somewhere, lovey.’

‘There’s work and there’s
work
. I got offered the odd piece for the weekly magazines, celebrity websites, but when it comes to important pieces, the kind of stuff I specialised in, the kind of stuff I was the best at . . . no one would touch me.’ He wondered if she could understand the crash that had followed; the depression he could never have guessed was in him. The way that some days it felt like Viggo and Charlene were holding up the sky so that it wouldn’t fall down and push him into the ground for ever. ‘So there you have it. I do know how it feels to have the only thing I’d ever really worked towards gone overnight. Although unlike you, it was all my fault.’

‘Oh, Luke.’ She did understand, he could tell. He felt a weird euphoria at having unburdened himself chase the alcohol through his veins.

‘Still,’ he said, shaking off the droplets of his sob story. ‘You’re living proof I can still start again. You made a go of it down here.’

‘Let’s not kid ourselves,’ she snorted. ‘It’s not the same as London. Nothing touches the buzz of a national newsroom.’

He saw a chance to regain his footing on the road to October 1968. ‘What was it like, being a woman in the newsroom then? Is it true that they thought all you were good for was making the tea and having your arse groped?’

Sandy laughed. ‘It’s true that busy hands were par for the course,’ she said, fingers pinching imaginary flesh. ‘But to be honest in those days, being a woman was only a disadvantage in the newsroom. When it came to the work, I actually had the edge on the boys: people would open up in a way they wouldn’t to some old bloke in a brown suit. So I got interviews that no one else did.’

‘They must have thought you were good,’ said Luke, ‘If they sent you all the way to Brighton to cover stories.’

‘I put myself forward for the Sussex jobs whenever I fancied a trip back. If I’m honest, I wanted the chance to come home on expenses. I wish I’d never done it. I’d rather have stayed away from Brighton for ever than come back here to bloody Joss Grand.’

She had said the name unprompted: the shock of it made Luke colour as though caught out in a lie. He realised that without meaning to, he had offered something of his own so that Sandy would respond in kind. He had been so lost in their conversation that he had almost forgotten the reason for it, and it thrust his focus back to his original intentions.

‘So,’ he said. Even as he took his chance, he knew that the line between confidant and journalist was beginning to blur. ‘That evening . . .’

Sandy’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re a bit keen for someone who’s decided not to write about it.’

‘You know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘The best way to let go of a story is to find out how it ends.’

Chapter 31

‘I was following Enoch Powell,’ said Sandy. ‘Lucky me, eh? I’d covered his “Rivers of Blood” speech in Birmingham, and his coming down here to give a talk happened to coincide with my sister having a baby girl.’ The gin was literally loosening Sandy’s tongue, the first slurs and sibilants of drunkenness affecting her speech. Her body language suggested that the truth was swimming closer to the surface; her arms were slack at her sides and her eyes now cast to the right, the place of memory, not invention. ‘I’d only seen a photograph. I’ve still got it.’

She walked over to the walnut bureau she called her museum and drew from a drawer a ragged black-and-white square of a young woman holding a baby in a knitted hat. ‘That’s Janet, and the baby’s Jill. They’re in Canada now, we haven’t seen each other in years.’ She gazed wistfully at the photograph. Luke could see her guard coming down as surely as lowering a veil. ‘Well, if you’ve read as many back issues of the
Argus
as you say you have, you’ll know how the rally went. Powell was booed off the stage. He had to leave with a police escort. I helped them get a better picture, too. I’d been paired with this photographer, Mark Hempel, who was a right chauvinist bastard even by sixties’ standards. He’d whinged all the way down about having to work with a bird. You had to stay with your photographer literally all the time: if you lost each other there’d be hell to pay, so I wasn’t best pleased to see him either. Thing was, that day, we got a bit of a scam going when it came to getting pictures. The upside of chauvinism was chivalry, so occasionally when there was a scrum, I’d elbow my way in to the front, and the blokes would take a step back so they wouldn’t crush me, and then I’d duck and Mark would get the shot in over my head. The picture we got that day was of Enoch dodging an egg someone had thrown. I phoned the story through and Mark sent a boy back to London with the film on the eight o’clock train. The last train didn’t leave until gone midnight, so the rest of us thought we’d make the most of a few hours’ drinking time on the seafront. I was going to go back to my mum’s, and they were all catching the last train home. We all ended up in The Cricketers. Do you know it? It’s in the Lanes, about halfway between the two piers.’

Luke nodded. Now was the time to let silence work on his behalf. He’d learned that while he was on work experience, transcribing the tapes of the senior features writer, a guy who got the best exclusives. There had been such long silences where his part of the conversation should have been that Luke had sometimes wondered if he’d taped over his own words, but no: his silence unspooled the rope with which his interviewees would eventually hang themselves.

‘Mark was telling anyone who’d listen what an insult it was that a photographer of his experience should be paired with someone like me. I wanted to cry, Luke. If I’d been a bit older I’d have told him to piss off and probably got three cheers for it. But I was only seventeen and I thought I’ll show him, I’ll beat the boys at their own game, and match them drink for drink. Ha! Needless to say after about an hour I was in trouble. I had about four gins lined up in front of me, and I thought, one more sip of this and I’m going to be sick, so I said that I was going to the Ladies and I slipped out of the saloon door and wandered down to the pier to get a bit of sea air, sober myself up. It was so windy I couldn’t even get the scarf tied over my head, and I remember thinking what a mess my hair was going to be, but it was either messy hair or puking down my new coat and it was Pierre Cardin.’

Luke stole a quick glance at the bottle of pink gin. It was half-empty, and not much of that was his doing. She snapped back into the room, her eyes suddenly locked on Luke’s.

‘You know what I used to wish?’

‘What?’

‘That I had cameras in my eyes. Wouldn’t that be a gift for a reporter? That some kind of science fiction magic, some . . . implants or something, would let me blink and it’d be like the shutter release, and I’d capture whatever was in front of me. That I could take my memories to Boots and get them developed. Your generation has that, don’t they? I mean, you haven’t literally got cameras in your eyes, but you’ve all got smart phones with you all the time. If it happened now, I could have filmed what I saw and I could have sold it, my story would’ve been on Sky bloody News within half an hour.’ Her voice had the exaggerated projection of the inebriated.

‘Sandy,’ whispered Luke. He didn’t quite know what he was onto, only that it was something huge. His skin burned with excitement. ‘Sandy, what did you see?’

‘It was blowing a proper Brighton gale. I had to lean forward into the wind just to walk. When it’s windy there’s nowhere better than a pier to blow the cobwebs away. It was late and out of season so the West Pier was shut, but anyone who’d grown up in Brighton knew how to leap those turnstiles. There was no one to see me, really, just a bloke parked up in a black Bentley at the top of the parade and he didn’t look like he was going anywhere. I thought I’d have the place to myself.’