Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (30 page)

Also, apologies for the late running of several of your trains recently.

Warmest regards

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, February 17. Amount of my day wasted: nine minutes. Fellow sufferers: Train Girl, Lego Head, Universal Grandpa, Guilty New (Spymaster) Mum.

Hi Martin. Thanks for your letter. I appreciate it. Your trains may be appalling, but you are a gentleman at least. And so thank you for writing back. And thanks for the advice. The giving of the advice, I mean. The actual advice… well, let’s just say easier said than done, eh? That’s the thing about advice. It’s all so simple to give and so much more difficult to take. It’s the gift everyone asks for and nobody really wants. Truly, where advice is concerned, the joy is in the giving and not the receiving. Anyone can seem wise, when dealing with other people’s problems, anyone can seem sorted when sorting out other people’s lives. It’s dealing with your own mess that’s tricky. It’s sorting out your own life that causes such problems.

But anyway. Thanks. I do appreciate it, believe it or not. Even if I can’t act on it.

Anyway. I’ve been taking different advice, from an altogether less avuncular quarter. Train Girl: she wants to take me out. She wants to take me out and get me drunk enough to forget all about it. The way she sees it, what I need to do is take a holiday from my own life for a night or two: if I can’t solve the problem, I can at least run away from it, right? And you know what? It works for me. The way I’m feeling right now, it’s the only plan I’ve got.

Because, Martin, I don’t mind telling you there’s rather a lot I could do with running away from. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better, either.

But, look, I’m not going to keep banging on about myself. It’s just not British, is it? Let’s look around. Let’s look outside the train and see what else there is to bring us down.

There’s riot-payback, of course: a queue of court cases waiting to start, the prisons and police cells and remand centres packed to bursting with kids waiting to hear their fates. The fall-out from the weekend of anarchy in the UK. Those accused of torching cars and buildings, of looting TVs and DVDs and food processors and anglepoise lamps and whatever else they could lay their hands on; the stone-throwers and bottle-smashers; the ringleaders and troublemakers and herd-followers and easily led and led-astray – everyone under the age of 25 in possession of a hood in all greater London, it seems.

And are we expecting full, frank and fair trials for them all? Of course not: they’re being pushed through the system at maximum speed, stamped and processed and spat out with optimum efficiency. The hearings start next week, and it’s my guess they’re not going to reflect well on any concerned. Some of them will deserve to go to jail. Some of them won’t, and will go anyway.

And then there’s our own little court case.

We’d almost forgotten about that, hadn’t we? What with all the other excitement going on, we’d almost forgotten how it started. With the nation’s most outraged superannuated club singer.

And now, after all this time and all that expense, the jury has retired to consider its verdict. He’s going for a whole load of money, of course, he’s after millions in ‘damages’ – but it’s the reputational impact that’s the real worry. A guilty verdict coming now, in the midst of all this other stuff, will be a disaster. It will effectively be seen as an endorsement of all the other accusations facing us – as evidence we did what they’re saying we did, to him, to all those other celebs who chucked in their two-penneth worth during the trial – but also to the ordinaries, the civilians, the poor little Barry Dunns of this world.

It’s going to follow, isn’t it? If we were capable of going through our crooner friend’s bins, of trailing his personal assistants, of tapping up his friends and associates, of paying for tip-offs from every doorman, maître d, madam and high-class drug pusher we could wave a chequebook at… if we could do all that (and, to be fair, we may well have done, but that’s really not the point) then we’d also be capable of hacking into the personal information of a little boy killed by the home counties’ most notorious serial killer. Stands to reason, innit.

That’s the worry, Martin. That’s the implication. That’s what’s at stake now. That’s what a guilty verdict could do.

But on the other hand, if the jury should come back in our favour, if those 12 angry men and women should look past the whited sepulchre of celebrity and see the rotten core underneath, if they should do the right thing – well then, our boy’s a dead man walking. Open season. Fair game. All those stories, Martin, all those whispers and rumours: every one of them’s going to be front-page news.

And you know what the worst thing might be? I think the worst thing might be that I find myself praying things go the way of the
Globe
, not because I believe we were right so much, but because I want to see the sanctimonious charlatan unmasked good and proper. I’m becoming like Goebbels: I want revenge.

Am I becoming like Goebbels? That would be the worst thing of all. I wouldn’t blame Beth for leaving me, if that were the case. I’d leave me too.

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, February 22. Amount of my day wasted: 12 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Train Girl, Lego Head, Universal Grandpa.

Oh Martin. Oooh, Martin. Ow! Martin! My head. My poor head. My aching head.

My head hurts, Martin. It aches. It bangs and hammers and drills; it thumps and thuds and seems to bulge horribly at each of my temples. My brain doesn’t fit any more, my eyes don’t feel like they’re mine. My nose, my ears, my teeth, my tongue… they’re somebody else’s. Nothing in my head feels like it fits any longer. I’m like an anagram, Martin: I’ve got all the right bits, but in some horribly wrong order.

I am, in short, hungover. Hungover? Hungover doesn’t begin to cover it. I feel like death. I feel like I’ve actually died.

And you know what the worst bit of it all is? This is how I feel every morning, now. This is normal. Feeling like my own head isn’t mine every day – this is how I am on every one of your trains in the morning. And the feeling lasts until lunchtime or so, when I have another drink and start the sorry cycle all over again.

So obviously you know by now that he won his court case. The prostitute-using, tax-dodging, coke-guzzling, beautifully bewigged flower of Scottish singing: he won his case against the despicable, scandal-hit, scandalous scandal rag I work for. Emphatically. Indisputably. Unanimously.

And the result? Massive damages. Millions. Fourteen of them, in fact. Plus costs of another three mill on top. And worse than that, the ignominy, the humiliation, of having to hear him on every news channel, in every (other) newspaper, preaching about the evils of our organisation. And preaching, it must be said, to a quickly converting congregation.

Oh, and you know what else? (I don’t think this has been reported yet, but it will.) His victory – it’s not going to be the last. Every other lying, shagging, abusive and abusing actor, singer, footballer, reality star and two-bob celebrity in the country is lining up to follow his suit. They’ve got the dollar signs in their eyes, of course (can’t blame them for that) – but they’ve also got revenge on their minds. It’s a chance to hit back at the people who’ve exposed them for what they are – and there’s not a single one of them ready to pass it up.

The word in the newsroom is 2,000. Two thousand separate claims being filed as we speak. Two thousand court cases upcoming. And after them, the MPs, no doubt. The bent coppers. All the corrupt officials we’ve stitched up and taken down over our proud history. Followed by the countless others. The ordinaries. All those stories from the shires, the randy reverends and saucy housewives and shenanigans in suburban staff rooms.

And then what, Martin? Assuming we’re deemed to have infringed on their rights to a private life too? Who comes next? The actual criminals? All the gun-runners, arms dealers, drug-pushers, rapists and paedophiles we’ve put away? Where will they draw the line? Where will it end?

Two thousand celebrities jumping aboard the bandwagon could see us tied up in court for the next millennium – literally, if each case takes as long as this first. Two thousand celebrities winning could see us paying out… whatever 2,000 multiplied by £17 million is. (I told you, I’m hungover. And I can never remember the difference between a UK billion and an American billion. Ours is the million million, right? The proper billion.) Billions, though. Definitely billions.

A joke is what it is, all right. And everyone’s laughing but us.

Not that I’m in the mood for laughing anyway. Not that I feel like cracking a smile especially. Coming in drunk to an empty house, passing out on the sofa in front of News 24, failing to be woken by any plaintive wailing, any pleading screams, any heartbreaking whoops or squeals or gurgling giggles. Waking up to silence and the detritus of whatever rank food I picked up on the way home; waking up to empty rooms with only the flotsam and jetsam of a beautiful little life to remind me that a beautiful little life once lived here.

I found a dummy in the fridge the other day, Martin. I was looking for something to eat at four in the morning, I was peering at the remains of some mushroom and sniffing at some eggs (can you tell an egg is off by sniffing alone? Who knows?). I was poking around in the fridge in the cold hours before dawn and I found a dummy.

And I thought: what the hell’s a dummy doing in the fridge? And then I remembered: Beth used to keep one in there, back in the summer, back when Sylvie used to wake with a fever in the night and Calpol wouldn’t calm her down. She used to keep a dummy in the fridge and it was the only thing that would cool our baby daughter’s tears at the tail end of last summer.

And I burst into tears. And I stood there, leaning into the fridge at four in the morning, head resting against the shelf, hands turning blue with cold, blubbing and snivelling like a baby myself, wailing and screaming for my little girl. I stood there crying like that until my legs gave way and I fell asleep on the kitchen floor with the fridge door still open and when I woke up what was left in there had definitely gone off and it was time to get up and face another day at the most hated newspaper in the world and I was hungover and nothing felt right any more.

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
22.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, February 23. Amount of my day wasted: 15 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Overkeen Estate Agent.

Martin, I’ve got a present for you. Look: I’ve made you a crossword. It’s not up to the standard of my dad’s, but still, it’s a one-of-a-kind, made especially for you. It took me the full hour-plus-15-minute-delay home to do it, but it was worth it. At least I think so. Hope you think so too.

Across:

4. Dad, Pops, the Old Man

6. City of the Blues

9. Indolent animal

10. Me, him, them, and all the other sad sacks

13. The indivisible union of man and woman

15. Verbal justifications for incompetence

17. French for goodbye

18. The ultimate Biblical sin

19. Inevitable additions to any PW journey

20. No man should have a phone this colour

Down:

1. __ Head – the Buddha of the Morning Commute

2. You’ll always find me in “C”

3. Affectionate term for the last train home

5. What every celeb has in common

7. The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems

8. Popular name for the slow train home

11. The ultimate human sin

12. Horse-riding, computer-geek journos?

14. A belittling psychotherapist?

16. Perfection

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
22.50 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, February 28. Amount of my day wasted: five minutes. Fellow sufferers: Overkeen Estate Agent.

Breaking news! Even the nonsense that Overkeen Estate Agent is talking cannot distract me tonight (‘We’re going to baseline that bad girl till she squeals’, ‘High fives and max respect all round’, ‘Legendary closing, my friend: stitched like a kipper’, etc). Because there’s news!