“Not sending. Sent,” Cathy said. “He was on the seven forty-five from Saint Pancras.” With our travel budget, I was impressed he wasn’t on the Megabus.
“But I know the patch,” I protested.
“That wasn’t much help to us yesterday, was it?” JT said.
Newsrooms, I had discovered, were a bit like the jungle, or the dark room of a Vauxhall club: it’s very much eat or be eaten. I was now fighting for survival. My mind was spinning, trying to work out how I could be most useful.
“So, you want me stay here and help Cathy on the politics?” I asked.
“No, mate,” Cathy said. “You’re doing PMQs.”
Had the pool of sarcasm on JT’s desk not been metaphorical, I would have gladly drowned myself in it. Being sent to cover Prime Minister’s Questions was one step up from being asked to review the previous night’s episode ofHollyoaks. PMQs was a half-hour soap opera absolutely no one was interested in unless they were actually in it. It was performative, predictable, and almost never contained even a single piece of useful information or insight. The only real difference between PMQs andHollyoakswas the main actors in PMQs were unlikely to start an OnlyFans when their careers finally fell apart. Worst of all, there was zero chance of breaking any actual news—of taking a story further, of generating exclusives, of earning a front page—by sitting in the House of Commons watching a publicly televised pantomime.
“You cannot be serious?”
The veins shagging in JT’s neck gave me my answer.
“We should probably be watching that,” Cathy said, pointing up at the television hanging from the ceiling. On the screen,Wake Up Britain’s telegenic hosts, Krishnan Varma-Rajan and Sally Quartermaine, were telegenically interviewing a very telegenic young man.
I had a sneaking suspicion I knew exactly who the lad on the TV was. His clothes were what Americans would call preppy but, where I come from, would get your teeth kicked in. He had round glasses, which he kept pushing up onto his nose, even though they were already on his nose. It was some kind of nervous tic. (Journalism pro tip: always keep an eye out for people’s nervous tics.) He also had a mop of black wavy curls, which he kept trying to push behind his ears but which appeared to be completely ungovernable. He was gesturing wildly. Far too wildly for half past eight in the morning. He moved like a marionette, as if his arms were independently hinged.
JT turned up the volume. It kicked in just in time for me to hear the words “nuclear power plant,” and I knew for certain this absolute whalluper was Ludo Boche. The product of England’s best schools. Someone who had been handed their job as a graduation present. This was privilege in action. This was the British class system operating optimally. I felt resentment rising up inside me as Ludo Boche repeatedly mentioned my hometown of Leicester.
“Get my town’s name out of your fucking mouth!” I shouted at the television. Cathy jumped in her seat. JT glared at me, snake-veins pulsating.
“Is heflirtingwith Krishnan Varma-Rajan?” Cathy said.
“Flirting?” I said. “I thought someone had tasered his puppeteer.”
Chapter4
Ludo
Honestly, I didn’t expect to walk into the newsroom to a round of applause, but it was a nice touch. Even if that round of applause came from just one man, and that one man was my godfather, theSentinel’s pensionable theatre critic, Ben Diamond.
“Encore, darling boy!” he shouted, standing at his desk and clapping enthusiastically. I curtsied, extending my arms like Margot Fonteyn taking her final curtain.
“Did you watch me, then?”
“Watch you? Darling boy, I was transfixed. Not since Olivier last graced the National’s hallowed stage has South Bank seen such a gilded performance. Five stars. Absolutely five stars.”
“You didn’t give Olivier’s final performance five stars,” I said.
“Quite true, dear boy. Don’t quibble.”
I grabbed Uncle Ben’s hands and squeezed them, partly in a gesture of appreciation but also because I wasn’t sure he’d stop applauding otherwise. It didn’t matter how awful you felt, how bad your hangover was, or how violently you’d just vomited all over a sex symbol, Uncle Ben could make you feel as fit and confident as a young roebuck in the first spring of his physical peak. At eighty-eight, Uncle Ben was joie de vivre personified. The man could walk into a morgue and have the bodies up and dancing the foxtrot within five minutes. He was so beloved in our family that we all called him Uncle Ben. Even my father.
“I finally went to see the Lord Lucan musical last night,” I said, as Uncle Ben lowered himself back into his chair.
“What did you think?”
I leant in conspiratorially.
“Is it terrible to say that I was relieved when he finally killed the nanny?” Uncle Ben’s roar of laughter filled the newsroom. “That Australian accent was terrible,” I said.
“Darling, they’re lucky it hasn’t caused a diplomatic incident,” Uncle Ben said. “Australia House keeps inventing emergencies to stop the high commissioner from seeing the show. Last week they told him Shaftesbury Avenue was flooded.”
He laughed until he coughed, and I waited for him to pat the phlegm back down into his chest. The man had been smoking at least a dozen cheroots a day since, well, the days when men smoked cheroots. So, his lungs weren’t what they could be. His eyes watered with the effort, and it sent his neck scarf skew-whiff. I leant over to straighten it.
