The Pink and the Grey (3 page)

Anyway. Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?

Hypothetically I should have been writing notes for my piece: who was there, who said what, how the vote went, a quote or two about the result, as if any bugger cared. But I knew none of that would get printed. Geoff didn’t want a straight report, or even a proto-toff version of the parliamentary sketch, though god knows I’d have loved to write that. If nothing punchy happened, and it never did, I’d be lucky to get an inch on page ten. Barely enough space to name the penguins flapping away down there and which zoo they belonged to. Better off writing
toss all
in forty-two point and moving right the hell along.

For half an hour I sat there, hands on balcony, chin on hands, bored out of my tiny mind and with the lazy, by-the-numbers rhetoric sending me to sleep. I did try to keep one ear on the debate hoping at least to hear a naughty word, as there’s nothing funnier than a posh twat trying to talk dirty.
Blahdy terrible, Tarquin
.

No dice.

My gaze began to wander along the rows of students, arranged like muppet rejects below me. Every few minutes a Statler or Waldorf junior would jump up with a turgid or ho-ho-humorous or otherwise inane interjection. Some sat texting or tweeting or facebooking or cockblocking or whatever it is students got up to. Most were content to sit quietly and listen to all the drivel, rhubarbing when whisked up by whichever penguin was on the quack. God, it was dull. At least with cricket there’s a chance someone might get a ball in the nads or in the face. I hoped that’s what Geoff’s tip-off was all about. A nutjob swinging a cricket bat, that’d be a story. Not the sterling-flavoured monotone that was currently sending me to sleep from the arse upwards.

This was not why I became a journalist. This wasn’t journalism — this was babysitting. I became a journalist to investigate, to track down crooks with twirly moustaches and see them banged up. I’d learned my trade back home in Dublin and ended up here, all bright-eyed and cocky at the
Cambridge Bugle
. When Geoff hired me I asked him whether this place had any, you know,
actual crime
, and he bluffed and scoffed and sweet-talked me into it in his fat cockney barrow-boy way since it was a new paper and, basically, I had no money and he had a small carrot to dangle.

I’d quickly learned that he wanted me for all the boring shite, all the grunt work. I trod the court beat and dutifully wrote pieces about cats up drainpipes and similar non-stories fuelled by puns every ten words. If I was a good little boy, and ate all my greens, and didn’t sulk, I might get the occasional obituary to flex my muscles. He and his deputy Simon nabbed the juicy stuff, whenever there was any, and the rest of the paper was packed in with topped-and-tailed agency copy and adverts. It’s amazing how many column inches you can fill every week with photos of grumpy pensioners pointing at cracked paving slabs. And of course they buy a copy for themselves, and a copy for their neighbour, and a copy for their bemused grandson in a more sensible city, and that’s how the paper was still going, to be honest.

It must have been about nine o’clock, when even the speaker — sorry, the president — was unsuccessfully stifling a yawn, that someone new came through the upstairs
Aye
door and found a seat in the gallery by himself, on the left-hand side, about as far away from me as he could get. A few of the muppets in the chamber below looked up and saw him.

He gave one a small wave.

I perked up.

Very slowly I sat back, hoping the seat wouldn’t creak, and started to unzip my camera bag, one z at a time. There was nobody around to stop me. I removed the camera as slowly and casually as I could and, keeping it well below the edge of the balcony out of sight, powered on and removed the lens cap. For once I remembered to check that everything was set to automatic, so I wouldn’t sit there swearing at the twatting thing and trying to make the photos not-entirely-black and not-entirely-white.

Zoom, focus, snap, snap, snap
, that’s all I’d need.

If anything did, by some magical fairy chance, kick off, then I’d have photographic evidence and without any question a front-page lead. I knew I could remember enough of what might happen to write it up: it’d be mostly photo, anyway, and I could do interviews afterwards. And if the copy wasn’t long enough I’d upsize the headline and the by-line — especially the by-line. That’s what you get if the journalists sub and lay out the pages themselves, Geoff, you cheapskate. Of course, if the story was any good Geoff would change a few words and ruin a gag and put his own name at the top, and I’d be granted an
Additional Reporting By
in nought-point text and lump it or take a hike. It wouldn’t be the first time. It’d probably be about the twentieth.

Someone once defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. That was writing for the
Bugle,
in a nutshell. First day: here’s your desk, here’s your computer, let’s measure you up for your straitjacket. By now I’d long given up making a fuss about hijacked by-lines — Geoff and Simon had skins thick enough to snap needles. I just focused on clocking up the experience, pocketing the money, and cultivating the kind of simmering resentment that usually ends with the words “and then he turned the gun on himself”.

As the current speaker droned on — he was making some half-arsed gag about music being the food of doves, or something, and
how my sides were splitting
— I kept my eyes fixed on the new guy. I decided to call him
the interloper
. Everyone has to have a name. He had short, dark hair, and wore a white shirt under a navy blazer. He looked white, but possibly a little stir-fried. Hard to tell from where I was sitting. Mid-twenties by the look of him, a few years or so younger than me. Too old to be an undergraduate, for sure. Maybe a postgrad? He was leaning forward, forearms resting on the balcony with hands clasped in front of him, looking intently at the toff whining away below. A little stressed, maybe? Or was I projecting?

This had to be the guy, I thought. He was probably the one who’d tipped off Geoff. I realised I should’ve asked Geoff more about the caller, but then again he was the old hand — if it was important he should’ve told me.

I decided the interloper had almost certainly seen me and figured out who I was, which was why he’d sat directly opposite me, and he was busy winding himself up to kick things off as promised. He had that shifty fake-relaxed look about him, the one you get when some lad notices you’ve been checking him out — that
oh, what an interesting ceiling
look with a nervous whistle. The same one a straight guy gets when his girlfriend asks him to hold her handbag.

I had no idea what dastardly act the interloper had planned. If he’d told Geoff, Geoff hadn’t spilled the beans to me. He wasn’t likely to pitch a tent there and try to occupy the Union, not by himself, and no amount of pepper spray could make a decent, photogenic difference from up here. A banner, or a flour bombing? I couldn’t see any bag. That ruled out the cricket bat mayhem too. Was he going to piss all over them? My editor might still use a picture of that, give or take a censoring blob. He was restless, and shifting, which didn’t rule out a full bladder. I felt sure
something
was brewing.

I took a chance and raised my camera to the balcony. Not high enough to be seen from below, but high enough to focus on the interloper. It was an SLR, digital of course, which meant I had to look through the viewfinder. I attempted a subtle, slow slouch, no sudden movements to alert anyone in the chamber. Down, down, down, approach, squint, zoom, focus…

The interloper was looking directly at me.

OK, I thought. This was either very good, or very very bad. I froze.

He aimed a nervous smile towards me, a dainty wave. More than a touch of the gays about him, if you knew the signs. No flamer, just what my grammy would call
theatrical
or
a little light in the loafers
with jazz hands and a fey little kick back. He’d pass in a crowd as long as you didn’t throw him a ball. A
Waitrose balsamic
kind of guy. His face definitely showed more than a hint of eastern promise in his past, maybe a scandalous interracial one-nighter a few gens back in the far east. It worked, I thought. I decided I probably
would
, under different circumstances, and not, you know, while being caught papping him in the upstairs gallery of the Union chamber.

It was then that I noticed the silence.

And, through the viewfinder, I saw the interloper point at the president’s chair.

I sat up slowly and saw my zoomed-in lens overlapping the balcony edge. Shit. Below, a sea of amused muppet-toff faces gazed up at me. I could almost hear the show’s deep sax intro in my head.
It’s time to play the music…
or face it.

The president was standing, holding the order paper, and staring at me. “Can I help?” he said.

Both sides of the chamber erupted in laughter and clapped for the ritual ten seconds, just enough for a light nasal browning without descending into outright rimming.

There was nothing I could do but brazen it out. I called out: “No, no, you guys carry on with… whatever it is you were doing.” Not so much of a laugh. “Mutual masturbation, wasn’t it?”

Someone coughed. It was
almost
a laugh. On a good day, one-to-one, it might’ve been a cough-laugh or a laugh-cough or maybe as much as an honest snigger. But not this time.

“I think, sir, you ought to leave,” said the president sternly. The secretary dutifully wrote something down, as if this were Nuremberg and they’d just passed sentence.

I cut my losses, packed up my camera and shuffled quickly to the
Noes
door, glancing across to the interloper whose expression was, I’d say, unreadable. Which was odd. Angry I could have understood, ruining his big night. Amused I could have understood, if his goal was to make me look like an arsehole, which I absolutely did. Unreadable suggested… I didn’t know.

I rushed down the stairs two at a time, past the voting doors in the main lobby through which I could hear the debate continuing — with a joke or two at my expense, no doubt — and clattered through the inner doors to the office airlock.

“Got a deadline, sir?” Mr Pinstripe said.

“I’m lucky if I’ve still got a job,” I replied as I banged through the front doors. I thought about calling back “Count to ten and then duck,” but reckoned I’d caused enough trouble.

Outside, the rain had eased and the temperature had dropped. I could see a few washed-out stars battling through the glare as I escaped the grounds of Hogwash onto the damp city streets. Under the colonnade, leaning against a jeweller’s shop window, I rang Geoff before anyone from the Union did: no sense prolonging the torture.

He was an unhappy little cockney bunny.

I had no photos and no story. If anything, I was the story. I paced back and forth, explaining, excusing, apologising, arguing. It was a stupid debate, nothing was going to kick off, it was just some bloke waving to his mates, his source was a flake, but hey, I wouldn’t claim for those hours because, well, oops, and all that.

I was about to launch into a pointless but hopefully distracting plea to print my spiked history piece when the interloper appeared beside me, face still a blank canvas.

“Hang on, Geoff. Two seconds,” I said, and muffled the phone against my jacket.

“Quite some exit there,” the interloper said. Hint of posh, a bit like Donald Pleasence only not so much of the serial killer. Confident. Intense. Eyes of stone. Didn’t look like he’d just pissed over a balcony.

“Shitty tip-off,” I said. “It happens. You test it out, make an arse of yourself, and move on.” I shrugged, and stuck out my hand. “Conor. Conor Geraghty. Your Majesty’s Press.”

He gripped my hand and shook firmly. “Oh, I know who you are.”
 

My college room enjoyed all the splendid comforts of home: to be precise, gin. Compared to the Master’s bunker I had just left it was grand and palatial. It had windows, heat, the lot.

The accommodation nestled deep and high in the poky northern corner of New Court, about as far from the Admin dungeon as collegiately possible: T Staircase, room two. It had been in my possession for a few years but it was not my
home
, merely the ramshackle office for my day job as a Director of Studies — hence the gin.

I was honoured to be the present keeper of the place, the latest in a long line stretching back over a century. Once, before one or other of the wars, it had been the office of the college astronomer, or at least of a fellow with a powerful telescope and a hobby requiring many hours outside in the dark. Another occupant, according to the oral history of college passed between the generations, began to supervise undergraduates dressed only in a toga in dubious homage to our classical forebears. A fierce winter and a window disinclined to form a seal reputedly brought that experiment to a noble and yet rapid end.

I sympathised with that distress: the room was not a friend to the right-angle. The walls to left and right, half oak panelling, half crumbling plaster in an unforgiving cream, toppled very slightly inward and could induce a vague claustrophobia in the unwary or unsober. An attempt to disguise this tilt with floor-to-ceiling shelving helped somewhat but succeeded mainly in reducing the room’s effective width. At least the wall’s thickening with obsolete reference books and barely thumbed biographies obtained a certain amount of sound-proofing, for those within and those without.

My desk by the white-rimmed sash window was varnished beyond redemption and littered with dusty old toys — not those kinds of toys — plus papers to read and to ignore and the inevitable laptop front and centre. Add a brace of chairs, a sofa of unknown provenance and a disintegrating kettle to keep the paracetamol company, and the room could fit no more. Oh, there was the ubiquitous camera, of course, snug like a spider in the corner above the door — upon which hung a turkish rug of multicoloured wools and cotton, delicately woven, a story for another time, perhaps.