Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (11 page)

All these deaths… and the fact that the whole thing is possibly not going to be over by the bank holiday and I may have lost my £50. That’s the worst bit. About the only person who does seem to be happy is Harry the Dog. He’s ecstatic, he’s loving it all. He spent ages last week lobbying Goebbels to run the pictures un-pixelated.

‘Nothing like a good suicide bomber,’ he told me in the pub last Friday, as we popped in for a quick one after work and he lined up the Guinness. ‘The readers go wild for a bearded nutter in a Semtex vest. Can’t get enough of the crazy old buggers. In a better world we’d have a suicide bomber every week. Throw in a dodgy government and a conspiracy theory and some proper clear shots of the carnage and you have yourself the perfect spread, my friend. Now, I’m nipping out for a crafty smoke – why don’t you line up another couple of jars of the black stuff while I’m gone, eh, there’s a good chap.’

The worst thing is: he may be right. When our readers engage with politics, it does tend to involve a fair amount of blood.

So what about the marches and the strikes and the barricades across the Mediterranean – that’s all good, right? Power to the people! Up the workers! But then, look at what they’re protesting about, look into the issues, and it’s not so good. It’s not so good at all, that they have to march, and strike, and man barricades. It’s not so good that it has to come down to this.

And there is bad stuff at work, too, to go with the good stuff. And the bad stuff at work is looking pretty goddamn bad.

The crooner with the false hair and the Highland flings – he’s not going to drop his suit after all. He’s got his court date. He’s taking us to court. And the word is he might win. The word is that regardless of how true the stories we printed about him may be, the methods we used to get them may have been unsound. Or, in fact, illegal.

And if he does win, don’t expect it to end there. If the sex-mad Scot does get the verdict he’s after, then expect the floodgates to open. Every famous face we’ve ever exposed is going to want a slice of the action. Every celebrity we’ve ever shamed is going to want their revenge.

Worrying, eh? It gets worse.

There have been whispers. Whispers of much worse. I mean, celebs: they’re one thing. Who gives a flying front-page splash if we look a little too closely into the affairs of film stars and television personalities and self-appointed rock gods and washed-up crooners and whatnots? It’s what they signed up for. And as we already know, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Not only is all publicity good publicity, but a lot of the time (unless it’s
really
bad publicity), bad publicity is better than good publicity. Bad publicity gets you remembered, and that’s what the publicity game is all about.

So, no, to hell with the celebs. They can take it. They get no sympathy from me.

But the whispers, however, are of a different kind of scandal. A different moral dilemma altogether. The whispers are that it may not just be the celebs who have come under the unwavering and occasionally not-strictly-legal scrutiny of the
Globe
. The whispers are that some of our, ahem, targets may be real people. Normals. Civilians.

It’s one thing fighting a moral battle with a multimillionaire serial-cheat heartthrob – it’s another thing entirely if the person you need to smear in court is a victim of crime himself. Or herself. Like, say, for example and just off the top of my head, if that person’s son was a victim of the infamous Beast of Berkhamsted, the still-at-large home counties’ serial killer who struck seven times six years ago. In that kind of situation, the moral weight shifts pretty significantly. In that kind of situation, we could begin to look like the bad guys.

But, y’know, like I say – it’s just whispers. And newsrooms are full of whispers, 90 percent of which are usually rubbish. Let’s not get too worried just yet. Let’s not upset the applecart, just as things are looking brighter. Let’s make like Harry the Dog, and see the positives in the terror, the sunny side to the horror.

After all, Martin, this letter was supposed to be inspiring you. I’m supposed to be firing you up here, filling you with passion, steeling your resolve to get your trains sorted. Nineteen minutes’ delay this morning – what are you going to do about it? How are you going to fix it?

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
20.50 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, August 12. Amount of my day wasted: six minutes. Fellow sufferers: Corporate Dungeon Master.

Martin. Those whispers in the newsroom I mentioned? I shouldn’t have mentioned them. Forget about them, Martin. They really are just whispers, the paranoid mutterings of over-stressed hacks over-keen to see conspiracy theories and worst-case scenarios wherever they can. And what would really not be good is if those whispers left the newsroom and reached the wider world and thus gained a kind of spurious credence, if you know what I mean. As any good tabloid journalist will tell you, it rarely matters if a rumour is true or not: a good story is a good story. And as I’m sure you don’t need telling, there are some out there who would consider those whispers to be a dynamite story.

So, mum’s the word, eh, Martin? So to speak.

The other thing I wanted to correct, or redact, or at least qualify, was my position with regards to Train Girl. Re-reading that last letter I can see how one might get the impression of impropriety with regards to my intentions towards her.

Martin, I’m not going to have an affair with Train Girl. I’m a married man. I have a wife. I have a four-month-old baby girl. I’ve got principles. I spend my days exposing cheats and outing liars and pouring scorn and outrage on the kinds of men who go sleeping around while the missus looks after the little ’un at home. And I am not that kind of man, Martin.

Which is not to say, of course, that none of what I wrote about Train Girl is true. It’s all true – she is funny and smart and sort of beautiful. She does make me laugh and she does make that morning commute a little more bearable. We’re friends. But that’s all – and that’s all we’ll ever be.

Believe it or not, I’m sort of growing to like you (despite your trains) and I actually would hate you to think of me like that. (And also, on a more practical level, I’d hate for you to inadvertently let slip some newsroom gossip and end up getting me the sack.)

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
20.50 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, August 12.

Dear Dan

Thank you for your letters. I take all delays very seriously and so always welcome feedback, positive and negative. So in that sense I am pleased to hear that you are enjoying your journeys into London more, as well as being saddened to learn of further delays to your journeys.

Please don’t worry about my discretion with regards to your letters. I consider our correspondence personal and although I log the pertinent facts from all your complaints in the proper manner, I would not divulge anything of a more personal nature that you tell me.

And I have no doubt your intentions towards ‘Train Girl’ are nothing but honourable.

Once again, I can only apologise for the latest delays and assure you we are striving to do better.

Best

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, August 17. Amount of my day wasted: 14 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Universal Grandpa, Guilty New Mum, Lego Head.

Hey, Martin! Marty! (Did anyone ever call you Marty? At school maybe? Marty? Marto? Martinho? Martorelli? The Big M? No?)

Guilty New Mum is on the train again today, Marty, and she seems to be having some sort of crisis. She’s packed in the breastfeeding and feels terrible about it, but then after the ‘incident in the Putin meeting’ (her words, Martin, and we can only wonder what that incident might have involved and what part her breasts might have played in it – even if, hilariously, she works with someone called Putin) she’s decided it has to be formula from now on. She doesn’t want to take any unnecessary lactation-related risks again. Except that now she spends all day and night wracked with guilt over poor baby’s nutritional intake. It’s a dilemma, Marto! It’s keeping her awake at night!

How do I know all this? Not because she told me: don’t be ridiculous. We’re commuters – we don’t talk to each other. We pretend each other don’t exist, most of the time. I know this because she told Sue all about it, in stage whispers on the phone, all the way from Didcot to Slough this morning. Who is Sue? Absolutely no idea. But, given from the way the conversation ended (‘No, Sue, you’re not listening! It’s not as simple as that, Sue!’), given the length of the sigh, the muttered curse and the rolling of the eyes immediately following the conversation, I’d say Sue don’t know shit from shinola where breastfeeding’s concerned. Even if she has had three of her own already.

Lego Head – who was sitting next to her today – remained inscrutable throughout, staring into the middle-distance; but I’m sure I caught Universal Grandpa suppressing a smile at the ‘incident’ anecdote. He caught my eye, there was a flicker of something like shared amusement, and then we both looked away again – me at my little laptop, he at his trusty
Telegraph
.

Either way, I’m in no mood for on-train bonding today. I’m hungover. My head hurts. My arms ache, my legs buckle, my chest throbs and my stomach rolls and lurches. I feel like death. I feel like I may even still be drunk. And, most alarmingly of all, I didn’t even have a drink last night. I didn’t have a drink last night, because of all the drinks I had at lunchtime.

Yesterday I finally went for my long-promised lunch. Goebbels and I, breaking bread and raising a glass together. Goebbels and I! As the clock struck half-past-noon, we left the newsroom floor and took a walk to a local place of refreshment, and we didn’t leave again until well after five. (I say well after five – it was actually 7.30.)

We had lunch together, Goebbels and I, for seven hours. And do you want to know what we ate for lunch? That’s right! We ate nothing. A Goebbels lunch revolves around the three major alcoholic nutritional groupings – the protein, carbohydrates and fat of the booze world. Whisky, wine and beer.

Though not necessarily in that order. Things started traditionally enough: the credit card slapped on the bar, the nod and wink and careful instruction to the barman to keep safe all the receipts, the request for two pints and two scotches (‘sharpeners, Daniel’). These were naturally consumed at the bar, standing, as befitted our status as real men, proper blokes, seasoned drinkers – along with another two like them – before we repaired to a cosy corner of the pub with a bottle of wine and the real business of lunch could begin.

Martin, don’t get me wrong – I’m a drinker. I like a drink. I could tell you stories about me and drink… but yesterday was another matter altogether. Me a drinker? Yesterday I was a rank amateur, a Sunday League clogger compared to the real drinking talent on show, the expert, ruthless, Premier League drinking displayed by Goebbels.

I lost count of how much wine we’d had after about the third bottle. By the time the whiskies were being lined up again I could barely count at all. I could barely speak.

But as it turned out, that didn’t matter. I wasn’t there to speak. I was there to listen. And, whatever other basic human functions I may lose when I’m drunk, my memory is not one of them. I never forget a thing. Goebbels talked up a storm; I listened. And I remembered it all.

Do you want to know what he told me? Of course you do! You want all the dirt! You, Martin, who profess never to buy the scandalous and scandal-ridden
Globe
… you’re getting a taste for the scurrilous tale or two, aren’t you? You’re learning to love the indiscretions I keep dropping your way. Of course you are. That’s the way it works.

So how about the one about the famously hirsute actor caught wandering around a notoriously rough gay pick-up spot in Edinburgh at three in the morning. You may remember that. And you may also remember his defence: ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said, ‘I was walking my dog.’ Far-fetched, maybe, but also plausible enough to get him off the hook. Except… do you know who he called from the police station, after he’d been picked up and hauled to the holding cells, along with several other men who also just so happened to be in the area at the same time?

He called his personal assistant. And here’s what he told her: ‘You need to do two things: first, get my lawyer. And second, go buy me a dog. I REALLY need to own a dog right now.’

Or there’s the primetime TV mogul who likes nothing more than to lie under a see-through coffee table while specialist ladies (how can I put this?) squat on the glass and, well, relieve themselves.

They do number twos, Martin. Goebbels has seen the photos. There’s even rumours of a video, somewhere.

He told me – and this is the crucial bit, Martin, this is when we’d changed up from wine to whisky – that there was absolutely no way the paper was going to go under. He told me that too many people were too terrified of what we had on them to dare take us on properly.

There is a vault, you see. All this information – it’s in the vault. We haven’t run these stories because, dynamite though they are, they’re worth more existing as threats. They’re great leverage. They keep us, in Goebbels’ words, ‘literally above the law’.

Even our litigation-happy crooner friend. Goebbels reckons even he’s not stupid enough to follow it through all the way. Goebbels reckons it’s a bluff, and the whole sorry business will blow over by Bonfire Night. Not because the paper’s not guilty. Because the collateral damage of taking on the
Globe
would prove catastrophic to all involved.