Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (34 page)

And then we – and I mean the office, the whole office, literally everyone in the office – walked out. Most of us as far as the pub.

Are they going to close us down? Really? Could they actually do that? Would they seriously fold the
Globe
? I know it’s been awful there recently, Martin, I know it’s been terrible… but really? I mean: really?

Au revoir
!

Dan

PS – yeah, yeah, I know, I owe you again. Nineteen minutes. But I’m spending longer spellchecking and autocorrecting than I am actually writing this. I’m sloshed, Martin. I’m sizzled. Sozzled. I’m… gone. Real gone kid.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, April 6. Amount of my day wasted: 15 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Guilty New (Spymaster) Mum, Universal Grandpa.

So then: guess what I’ve been up to, these last few days since we spoke, since the rumour mill went into overdrive, since the already incredible rise and fall of the
Globe
became a soap opera so farcical, so full of cheap shocks and sensations it kind of began to lose any credibility at all with me? Guess what I’ve been doing yesterday and the day before, both before and during and after our esteemed chairman jetted into the country and delivered his rumour-quashing, troop-rousing, situation-calming speech?

I’ve been doing what everyone else at the paper’s been doing, of course! (Or at least, what those with any sense have been doing.)

I’ve been resuming what I started a few months back, when the police first got involved. I’ve been carefully, methodically, routinely and systematically trying to remove all evidence that I ever put up a story, researched a story, wrote a story, took a tip, passed on a tip, followed a lead, paid a contact, met a contact, talked to a contact, even had any contacts, answered my work phone, answered my work mobile, called anyone on either my work phone or mobile, sent or received a text, sent or received an email, searched for anything on Google, logged on to any other websites, printed anything, photocopied anything, wrote anything down, talked to anyone or listened to anyone. Anything, in short, that might be used against me in evidence, no matter how flimsy, no matter how flaccid.

I’ve been trying to eradicate all evidence I’ve ever done anything at the
Globe
, other than sit in my chair, deaf, dumb and blind, seeing no evil, hearing no evil, speaking no evil, writing no evil. (If I could, I’d try to remove the chair too.)

It’s not easy, of course. The published stuff I can do nothing about. A byline’s a byline: it’s there for all eternity. But the rest of the stuff – well, put it this way, I’m doing what I can.

My notebooks – every page covered in shorthand scrawl and scribble, phone numbers and addresses, names and quotes and questions and answers; my notebooks – the vapour trail of my whole career, the physical, tangible paper trail of every story I’ve ever worked on; my notebooks, the same notebooks we’re supposed to keep for ever just in case they’re ever needed as evidence… that evidence was the first to go. They came home with me on Wednesday in a couple of carrier bags, were piled up on the allotments across the road in the dark, torched and burned and consigned to ashes before the pubs called last orders.

And the rest of the paper stuff? The invoices, the memos, the printed transcripts and half-finished stories and tip sheets and ledgers? Rather brilliantly, someone brought a portable shredder in. Even more brilliantly, he was charging a fiver for 15 minutes on it, no questions asked. The queue was hours long. He made a bundle. And I got my slot (I paid for a half-hour); I did what I had to do.

The electronic stuff is trickier. Clearing your internet cache, deleting your emails, emptying your trash – that doesn’t really cut the mustard, unfortunately. All of that – it’s just cosmetic. It’s papering over the cracks, it’s hiding the damp under a coat of fresh paint. You’ve not got rid of anything. It’s all still there, even if you can no longer see it.

And so me and Harry the Dog got one of the lads from IT up, we bribed him with a couple of hundred quid, and he got a shredding program for us. A virus, basically. A nasty little virtual vandal that gets into your email system and properly scrambles seven shades out of everything you’ve ever sent or received. Trying to rescue anything legible after this bad boy’s been at it, apparently, is all-but impossible. Decoding a single message would take days – working through an entire newspaper’s ten-year history of emails would take an army of major tech-nerds a couple of millennia.

And you know what, Martin? This clever, deadly, borderline-legal little beauty is easily available to anyone with a bit of internet savvy and about £50 to spare. Amazing, eh? If it weren’t quite so close to home, it would make a great little cyber-shocker feature for the paper.

Anyway. Obviously we installed it. We unleashed it into our servers. We let it do its worst. (Although one old hack on Sport still didn’t believe it was enough. He’d seen a documentary, he said, and the only way to wipe a hard drive properly is to physically smash it up. He wanted to take an actual hammer to his workstation. He had to be calmed down quite dramatically.)

As for the rest… well, that was less precise. The work phones were lost, of course, in the Thames, minus their SIM cards, which were also lost, though off a different bridge over the river. The home phones were wiped and lost, and replaced with new Pay As You Go numbers, as before. And before they were wiped, an awful lot of calls were made to an awful lot of people requesting, begging or threatening silence.

And then, in the middle of it, of course, our Leader made his speech. No question of the paper shutting, he said! Just a little restructuring! Corporate housekeeping! Spring cleaning!

What does that mean? I haven’t a clue, Martin. So I kept destroying as much evidence of everything I’d done at that paper as possible. And I vowed that, as long as I continued to work there, I would no longer go anywhere near an interesting story again. It’s blandsville for me, from now on in. It’s strictly the safe stuff.

Which is another way, of course, of saying that I basically won’t be doing anything like what they’re paying me to do. And barely what you might call journalism at all.

Christ, this train is slow. Train Girl’s not on this morning, so I’m writing this delay in real time. (Lego Head’s not on either. Lego Head hasn’t been on this train for months. After two years in which Lego Head was on the 07.31 every single weekday I caught it, after two years in which he never even seemed to take a holiday, the Buddha of the morning commute has just disappeared. Should I be worried? Should I be pleased? Is it anything to do with you, Martin? Is it anything to do with the incident?
Quo vadis
, Lego Head? Whither goest thou?)

Anyway. Given we’re still stuck near Slough, it seems I’m going to have to keep going a little longer.

OK then. Fair enough. I’ll tell you what I did last night.

Last night I called my mother-in-law’s again. I wanted to speak to my wife. Finally. I called after I knew Sylvie would be in bed; I called when I knew we could talk without the distraction of our baby.

And so what did we talk about? We talked about our baby, of course. About how much she misses me. About how she’s a talker, not a walker. About how every day it seems her vocabulary doubles – but how every other sentence is prefixed or suffixed by ‘Dadda’. About how she needs me. (Sylvie, I mean. About how Sylvie needs me.) About how Sylvie needs a man around the place.

And that’s when I nearly started crying. And so do you know what I did, to stop myself crying? What I did, so my wife wouldn’t hear me tearing up and think me weak? I said something stupid.

I said that I was sure Sylvie was getting plenty of male guidance from Mr Blair. I asked how often they saw him, my wife and child, how often he came round. How often he came round to see them, to be with them.

And then Beth started crying. Spluttering and choking through the sobs, pleading with me, telling me she loved me, she was sorry, it had really been a one-off, it was terrible, she hasn’t seen him since she told me, she hated seeing him those times she had done since it happened (that Halloween, when we had the argument, when I took him to task in the pub – Christ!), that all she wants to do is move on, that she’s worried about me, that she can’t stand me being so horrible to her, that I need to realise what I’ve got and what I’m losing before Sylvie’s heart gets broken like our two hearts have been.

And what did I do then? I started crying too. I said I know she still loves me. I said I still love her. But I can’t forget. I said I can forgive (because I love her) but I can’t forget (because I love her). I said I know I’m a dick, but I can’t make things right, I can’t move on. Not just yet.

And now we’re nearly at Paddington. And that’s all you’re getting this morning.

Au revoir
!

Dan

PS – Martin, I’ve just realised. It’s Good Friday today! How will you be celebrating? Shall we have a crucifixion? Shall we free Barabbas?

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, April 6.

Dear Dan

Thank you for your most recent letters. I can tell you that your 22.20 service on April 3 was delayed after a collision between a train and some livestock between Reading and Taplow earlier in the evening. I am very sorry to report that three cows died in the incident, and another disfigured so hideously that it had to be put down as an act of mercy. The disruption unfortunately had a knock-on effect throughout the evening, resulting in many services being delayed.

On April 6 your service was held up after the failure of deliveries for the first-class buffet carriage meant that the train could not depart the sidings until more cream and sugar had been sourced. Thankfully, this only resulted in a delay of 15 minutes, which I think is a huge credit to all concerned.

And on another note, I am familiar with the phrase ‘corporate housekeeping’. It is, in business, what you might call, a euphemism. Rarely a euphemism for expansion of a business either, if you get my drift!

And at the risk of appearing unprofessional, it’s OK to cry, Dan.

Best regards

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
23.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, April 7. Amount of my day wasted: seven minutes. Fellow sufferers: no regulars. (Saturday, innit.)

The police came back today, Martin. We’ve been watching the detectives. Police and thieves in the street – scaring the nation with their guns and ammunition. They burst in, proper style, old-school rules, all shouting and running, dozens of them. They told us not to move a muscle. They started unplugging and picking up computers even as we’d barely finished typing on them. They swept up notebooks and emptied draws into those big clear bags you see on the cop shows… all without so much as a by-your-leave. A proper raid, Martin!

They waited until the minute after the last pages had gone to press – which is a tad suspicious, don’t you think? I mean, if it were a genuine surprise raid, they wouldn’t know or care when we went to press. They wouldn’t be bothered if we went to press at all. But no… they waited to spring their shock raid until just after we’d all finished for the week.

It’s almost as if they’d arranged it with the big brass upstairs, isn’t it? It’s almost as if the whole thing was done according to some kind of gentleman’s agreement (‘You can confiscate all the computers, take all the paperwork, arrest who you want… but let us get the paper out first, eh?’). Or am I being paranoid?

Anyway, in they came, shortly after ten tonight. Shouting and running and whatnot, brandishing their plastic bags. And while some of the guys shouted back in return, while some tried to keep hold of their hard drives, tried to stop them taking their notebooks and files and folders, some of us just laughed at them.

I laughed at them, Martin. I heard Harry the Dog laughing too. ‘Fill your boots, gents,’ he said. ‘You’ll find nothing there to interest you.’ And then they promptly arrested him. And then they arrested one of the guys on Sport (the same one who wanted to smash up his hard drive, which is interesting). And then they looked towards me – and then, and I still have no idea why, they looked past me and arrested poor terrified Wee Tim’rous Trainee. She immediately burst into tears and was led from the floor shaking and sobbing her heart out.

Why didn’t they arrest me, Martin? I can’t work it out. I’m the new showbiz editor! I’m the one who took down the teen-tax-Tory! I’m the one who fingered the boy Best for his kleptomaniac tendencies! Surely I’m worth at least questioning?

Well, apparently not. I’m trying not to be too offended.

And in the meantime… I came home. They’ve released everyone on bail, apparently, pending the investigation into all the stuff they seized tonight. I’m not worried about Harry the Dog: he’ll be OK, he’ll be fine. Harry’s one of those people who will always be fine. I’m not even worried about Wee Tim’rous Trainee. She’ll be all right. Like me, they’ve got rid of anything and everything they could.

But as for the paper… that’s a different matter. How can the paper survive this? ‘Corporate housekeeping’ or otherwise: we can’t keep going on like this. And now we don’t even have any computers. Trust me, Martin, no matter what the
Grand
Fromage
says: it’s the end of the
Globe
.

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]