Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (19 page)

And meanwhile, along the borders, the friendly troops keep amassing. There have been skirmishes, incursions, a little gunfire and a strengthening of positions. And, of course, it’s all been in the name of stability.

Because, Martin, let’s not forget that the Neighbouring Regime is friends of the raggle-taggle new government. They welcome the people’s revolution; they applaud the passing of the old order. And the army lining up along the border like so many angry dogs straining against an invisible leash… it’s there to help.

There are no hard and fast numbers coming through as yet, Martin. We’re woefully short on facts. It’s tricky to stand up a story when it’s coming across thousands of miles of desert and through a media blackout. But what we’re all hearing in the newsroom, what Harry the Dog’s sources are telling him, is that the friendly soldiers are taking control of the border towns. They’re in North African territory now. Keeping the peace. Looking towards the larger towns.

How long before they stop pretending and just start invading? I pulled out Christmas Day in Harry the Dog’s latest sweepstake. I reckon that’s a duff choice. I reckon it’ll all be long over by then. We’ll be on to the next thing.

And meanwhile, the world keeps turning; forever smoothly, forever flawed.

In the Royal Courts of Justice, the accusations mount up, the charges amass. The way they tell it you’d think we were actual criminals. And there’s a new whisper buzzing around the place too, a new panic.

According to the word in the pubs and the bars and the less-discreet emails (seriously: when will people learn about emails? You’d think they would realise that, given all that’s happening right now, undeletable electronic records are perhaps not the best medium for communicating indiscretions. You’d think that, like me, they’d not only open up new email accounts for that kind of thing, but also get new laptops like the very one I’m using right now to write them on), according to industry gossip, one of your so-called quality papers is lining up something against us. They’ve got themselves a story, apparently. Something related to but not directly concerned with the court case. Something big. Something horribly big. Something that could cause more trouble than our litigious friend could imagine in the wettest of his dreams.

I think you can probably guess what the worry is in the
Globe
newsroom. When we’re not all placing bets on the future wars and extent of bloodshed of innocent people thousands of miles away in the dirt and sand, when we’re not trying to dig up something new and nasty about our crooner friend, when we’re not busying ourselves with the business of putting out the world’s most-read English-language newspaper every week… we’re bricking ourselves about where this whole thing might lead.

Where will it lead, Martin? If you want my opinion, I’ll tell you: nowhere. The world will keep turning, the accusations and allegations will come and be proved or disproved and sooner or later the whole thing will be forgotten. Today’s news: tomorrow’s chip wrapper. That’s the way it’s always worked.

And in the meantime, I’m going to be 11 minutes late for work. And, it being Thursday today, that gives me 11 minutes less to prepare for conference; 11 minutes less to get a list of stories together to take into our morning meeting, the meeting where we decide what’s going into the paper, the meeting where Goebbels traditionally rips to shreds any ideas not meticulously researched and properly stood-up. As it stands I’ve got one solid line on the secret stripping past of a soap star, a couple of super-flimsy leads on the extra-marital shenanigans of a couple of bonking headmasters at a top public school, and a potential cracker on a Conservative MP, the school friends of his three teenage daughters and what could only be described as a highly improper use of taxpayer’s money. But I need more time, Martin. I need more time to make it tight before I can show it to my boss.

And you know what? Eleven minutes might have at least helped a bit. It would have been a start. And Lord knows we all need one of those, eh?

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
20.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, October 25. Amount of my day wasted: 11 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Sauron Flesh Harrower.

Evening, Martin. As our dungeon master friend opposite me on this evening train might say: Hail weary traveller! Thine, I dunno, staff looketh bent and haggard and thine sword hangs heavy in the sheath. What news of the war, fellow adventurer?

Truth be told, Sauron Flesh Harrower isn’t looking himself tonight. Something’s changed. Something’s wrong, something’s not quite right. It’s almost as if he’s… happy? He keeps grinning at the screen, making amused little noises to himself; I swear I saw him actually rub his hands together in glee.

I wish I could see his screen. I wish I could see what’s made this normally fed-up, harassed, curse-mumbling escapist suddenly look so cheery. Can it just be a particularly successful orc-slaying session? Or is he up to something else on there? What do you think, as a fellow role-playing adventurer? What do you know about Sauron Flesh Harrower that you might be able to share with me?

So. Anyway. What’s been occurring round your neck of the woods these last five days or so? (Again, so close to making the week, Martin! The mythical week without a delay!) Did you enjoy last Sunday’s paper? Were you pleased I managed to get a solid line on the bonking sirs of St Mark’s School for Boys? I’ve got to say, getting that former pupil to talk like that is what made it in the end. The things he said! The naked honesty! You can’t beat a good old angsty posh boy with an abused past, can you, Martin? The public love it; they can’t get enough.

But what am I saying? I sound like Goebbels. Don’t get me wrong, Martin: I think it’s awful what happened to that guy. And you should hear him – he’s still bearing the scars, 20 years down the line. It’s terrible. He was only a boy: having to watch that. Having to film it. Of course it’s terrible. You don’t need to tell me that: I’m the one who talked to him; I’m the one who got him to get it all off his chest, to name names and date dates and do it all on the record. (He was nervous at first, he wasn’t sure to begin with… but once we’d got through the tears and the stammering and the reassurances and the general stressing of the importance of the whole business, he was more than fine. In the end I couldn’t shut him up. In the end it was all I could do to get rid of him. What did he think I was – his therapist? Did he not realise I was on a deadline? Some people, Martin!)

Anyway. As usual, I digress. And we haven’t much time today. No space for chit-chat! Every word must count! So. What’s been happening with me (tearful and abused ex-public-schoolboys aside)? Well… Beth and I went out last week, didn’t we?

Do you remember? It was the only story in town! We left little Sylvie in the capable (and expensive) hands of a nursery teacher friend of a friend, we left the house, we caught a cab and we had dinner in a restaurant. Like a proper married couple does. And just for a couple of hours we actually felt like a proper married couple too. For the first time in ages we enjoyed being with each other again.

Picture the scene. A little restaurant in East Oxford, a hop and skip from the colour and bustle of the Cowley Road, crammed and noisy with students and couples in tables of six and four and two, and in the corner, knees touching and with a sputtering little candle in a wax-ridged Chianti bottle between us, me and Beth, my wife and I, out like a couple. Like any other couple on a date.

And we talked. We talked and talked. We talked about why we never really talk any more. And we promised to try to talk some more. And it was great. It was like old times. It reminded me why I love her. She told a funny story about a mother at one of her coffee mornings who nearly gave her kid a spoonful of calamine lotion instead of Calpol (you’ll have to believe me when I say it was funnier than that when she told it). She told me another funny story about a play she took Sylvie to see at the Community Centre called ‘Bathtime for Bubbles’ which involved two men jumping in and out of, well, a bath, and how at one point one of them slipped and fell over, half-in and half-out of the tub and one of the other children shouted ‘I can see his winky-pops!’ and sure enough, everyone could…

There’s a whole world I’m missing here, Martin. Being in London, I mean. Being at work. Being at the scandalous and scandal-ridden and sometimes downright stupid
Sunday Globe
. While I’m freaking out about phone hacking and stressing out about sexually deviant schoolteachers and laying bets on the outcomes of civil wars thousands of miles away, there’s a whole other world back here, at home. And it’s all happening without me. And somehow, I keep forgetting to ask about it.

This other world of mine, the one with Goebbels and Harry the Dog and Rochelle the Bombshell: it’s not real, is it? I get so caught up in it I sometimes feel like I’m in danger of losing myself, of forgetting what I am, who I am. I’m a tabloid journalist, sure, but is that actually what I am? Is that all I am?

Or am I a husband, a father? Am I the man Beth fell in love with, the man who fell in love with Beth? Can I be both? I hope so. I hope I don’t have to choose. But if I did have to choose… I’d choose my wife, right? I’d choose my daughter. Of course I would.

Of course I would!

But I’m going off-track again. The point is, we had a lovely time. Genuinely. We had a real time. We talked and we laughed and none of it had anything to do with all the nonsense that dominates my life the rest of the time. It was like going away. It was like going away on that holiday we need so much. And as a result – lucky for you, given the length of this delay again – I’m in a good mood for once. All good!

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
20.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, October 27. Amount of my day wasted: nine minutes. Fellow sufferers: Sauron Flesh Harrower.

Dear Martin

I have news! Better news than all that stuff you get in the real world. Much more interesting than tabloid nonsense or death in the dust!

Sauron Flesh Harrower has been on my train for the last three nights, and if two days ago I was frustrated by the mystery of his newfound chucklesome demeanour, last night I got a sniff of the reason why, and tonight I cracked the story good and proper.

He’s got a new friend! A lady friend! Not in the real world or anything (don’t be silly!) but in the Dungeons of Diabolo, or whatever they are. A lady adventurer!

He has been sitting in the seat in front of me these two nights past, and I’ve been able to see his computer screen in the reflection of the window. It’s a bit tricky to make much out at first, but you get better with practice – and then tonight I had the excellent idea of using the zoom function on my phone to enhance the picture, and then by actually taking photos, to study in more leisure what’s actually going on.

And what’s going on is this: Sauron Flesh Harrower (by whom I mean his avatar, his little computer character) has been hanging out with a statuesque, Amazonian, barbarian princess-type chick. They’ve hardly been going adventuring at all – but seem to be spending most of their time in some kind of virtual pub, drinking virtual goblets of mead together. Her name? Elvira Clunge. I kid you not.

In the real world, on my train heading west in the night, he’s a middle-aged businessman in a pin-striped suit with thinning hair, sitting here chuckling and grinning at his computer screen like a loved-up teenager who can’t believe he got lucky with the captain of the netball team – and in his other world, the unreal world, he’s only got eyes for, he’s perched on a chair in a tavern called something like the Slaughtered Magi next to someone rejoicing in the name Elvira Clunge. The pair of them sitting stiffly and awkwardly, all loincloth and bikini fur and oversized weapons. And it’s making him deliriously happy. It’s… surreal.

He has a chat box open. (That’s what I needed the phone to read.) Do you want to know what they’ve been talking about? Do you want to know what the word from the Slaughtered Magi is? What sweet nothings Sauron Flesh Harrower and Elvira Clunge whisper together?

I’m going to copy it down verbatim for you. Seriously, I couldn’t make this up. Here we go (obviously this is a snapshot of a much longer conversation):

: I have shed the foul blood of many fell beasts to drink with you tonight.

: *blushes* I’m glad you have done so, sire.

: Your beauty is worth it. For this moment I would have faced even the fabled Hounds of Hades.

: And for a kiss? What trials would you undergo for the promise of my lips, softer and plumper than even the legendary pillows upon the beds of the courtesans of the Emperor Carnus the Rampant?

: For your lips? Nothing more. There is no need. You are my woman now. Your lips are mine. Your body is mine. You are mine.

: No man has ever touched my womanhood. I am pure as the virgin snow upon the misty peaks of the Jagged Mountains of Montezuma.

: That is as it should be. When I take you I must be the first.

: Will you take me, my lord?

: Verily I say that I shall. Like a battering ram upon your palace gates I shall be. Like a mighty axe swinging through the trees in your forest. Like a

: When?

: When?