Authors: Sam Baker
He pushed again, harder this time, and the notes sounded below, flat and dull. He would have to go away eventually. He couldn’t stand there pushing the bell forever. He must know she wouldn’t answer.
When she next looked down he was staring up and she stepped smartly into the shadows, while he kept staring, uncertain whether he saw movement.
Just go, she willed him. Please. Let me go.
If her thoughts were enough, he’d be gone. Instead, he rummaged in his pocket for a pen, then searched for paper. What kind of journalist doesn’t carry a notebook, she wanted to shout at him. The useless kind. Except he’d found her, when she was trying so hard not to be found, so he couldn’t be that useless after all.
In disgust, he pulled a receipt from his wallet and ripped off part of it, dropping to a crouch and began to write. A note, she presumed. He halted halfway through, his head tipped to one side as if debating what to say. Then he put it on the mat, or she assumed he did, because he vanished briefly, but the letterbox didn’t clang, and then she heard his too-big feet crunching away down the gravel. That same slow, solemn pace.
She stood there for what seemed like hours to see if he came back. If he was waiting just around the corner to catch her when she came down. When fifteen minutes had passed without a sign, she cracked.
The note was simple, to the point.
I won’t tell anyone anything before we’ve talked. But we
must
talk. Call me …
A promise, and what might or might not be a threat, depending on how you read it. There was a mobile number too. Below that an email address.
Why did he think she would talk to him?
How could she think she wouldn’t?
Ghost padded up the gravel while she was crouched by the mat reading Gil’s scrawl. He shot her a glance to check her mood had improved, and decided to brave it, slipping in through the open door to spare himself the effort of entering via the water butt and broken pantry window. She glanced at her rucksack lying in the doorway, and then at the cat, who was glaring at it with contempt, and sighed.
Where did she think she’d run to?
What was to stop him going to the papers? He didn’t seem entirely happy with his just-retired status, maybe he still had something to prove. This would give him a story. Even if he didn’t, there was nothing to stop him going to the police. Her only option was to talk to him. That was how the press worked. Or that was how they wanted you to think it worked. Confide in them and you could control the story. Was that what Gil’s ungainly friendship had always been about?
She dropped the rucksack back inside with enough of a bang to send Ghost halfway up the first flight of stairs and then slumped on to the floor.
‘Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction and death, and trying to bear witness. It means trying to find the truth in a sandstorm of propaganda …’
Marie Colvin (1956–2012)
The pub was already brightly lit and she could hear the noise from a suddenly opened door as two men tumbled out, talking loudly. Their conversation stilled as she passed and restarted, but quieter. She knew that if she turned they’d be looking at her, so she didn’t. She pushed the door open and the chatter inside dipped, then resolutely kept going.
Gil was at a table in the corner, staring forlornly at the murky amber of a half-empty pint, a crime novel lying face down, spine broken, beside it. Taking a deep breath of her own, she slid between two men in golf jumpers and pushed her way towards him. If he wanted her to talk, then talk she would.
‘I can’t do this here,’ she said when Gil looked up.
He opened his mouth and shut it again.
‘We’ll have to go back to the house. Wildfell, I mean. But you can’t come with me. Obviously.’ She inclined her head over her shoulder as if he wouldn’t know what she meant. ‘Give me ten minutes, then follow me.’
‘No.’ Gil drained his pint in one mouthful, propelling his seat backwards with his feet. ‘I’ll walk you.
‘It’s not for your sake,’ he added, seeing her expression. ‘Just don’t want you changing your mind.’
Helen shot a sidelong glance at those clustered round a big table to one side, empty pint pots herded into the middle. The ones looking at her, and that was practically all of them, glanced away. ‘What will they say?’
‘Does it matter?’
She surprised herself by nodding.
Gil shrugged. ‘You can understand my reluctance to let you out of my sight, surely?’
‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘I suppose I can.’
The entire pub watched them leave.
‘Where do you want me to start?’ Helen placed the cafetiere on the floor between them in the upstairs sitting room, before sliding her precious bottle of vodka from its perch under her arm.
She’d need it, even if Gil didn’t.
He watched her pour coffee into a mug, nodding first when she waved the milk carton at him, and again before she sloshed in a hefty slug of vodka. ‘At the beginning?’ he suggested, when she handed him his mug.
She didn’t return his smile. ‘You say that like I should know where it is.’
From the way he looked at her, she could tell he was trying to decide whether she was playing games. ‘Not me,’ she wanted to say. ‘One game-player is enough in any relationship.’
‘What I mean,’ Helen said instead, ‘is
whose
beginning? Mine or Art’s?’
For a second, he seemed to understand, but she recognised it for the old journalist’s trick it was. He would sit and he would be quiet and he would be sympathetic and if she stalled he would prod just enough to get her talking again.
‘D’you mind?’ he asked, waving his pack of B&H at her. Helen pushed a saucer towards him with her toe, shook her head when he offered her the packet.
‘Start,’ he said when he’d had time to light up and inhale, ‘with the Admiral Duncan.’
Helen swallowed hard and sloshed vodka into her own coffee, leaving it black. He wasn’t bluffing after all. How much did he already know?
London 1999
It was my first day. I was late. I was always late. It was congenital. Actually, congenital was the last thing it was. Nobody in my family is ever late except me. I was late because I’d taught myself to be. Once learnt, I found it impossible to unlearn.
So I was late on my first day as junior photographer. Still not on contract; but, even so, a big leap up for a freelance who’d done nothing since college but assisting and the jobs no one else would take. All the obligation, none of the rights. I didn’t know that then, though. Wouldn’t have cared if I had.
The lifts weren’t my friends either. One was stuck on six, the other had flat-lined. So I ducked into the stairwell, taking concrete steps two at a time. An unpleasant cold sweat had broken out under my shirt. There’s no convincing excuse for arriving twenty minutes late on your first day. No excuse other than cutting it too fine, a tube breaking down, the heard-it-all-before usual that gets you an eye-roll, if you’re really lucky, and first dibs on the next crap job to cross the picture editor’s desk if you aren’t. Bursting out of the stairwell, I bent gasping in the atrium by the lifts.
‘Late?’
I jumped, cursing myself for not looking before collapsing in a heap.
The bloke at the coffee machine didn’t even bother to take his cigarette out of his mouth when he looked me up and down. I don’t know what he saw, because I didn’t give him more than a cursory glance, but I doubt it was impressive. ‘Don’t sweat it,’ he said, before turning his back on me and heading for the newsroom. ‘They’re still in conference.’
The picture desk was in a corner of the newsroom, some bollocks about light that anyone who knew anything about photography knew was going to make not the slightest bit of difference by the end of the coming year. Digital, you see. I’d dropped my rucksack and camera bag and just finished arranging myself nonchalantly on the corner of the picture editor’s desk when conference emptied out. Thank God, it didn’t take any longer, because I’d have started to snoop. A sleeping computer without a password is a terrible thing.
‘Lawrence. You made it then.’ The picture editor, top of his voice. All eyes turned to me, decided I was ‘not interesting’ and turned away. In less than a second, I was dismissed. Or maybe I imagined it. Either way, my new boss was clearly a twat.
‘Get yourself a coffee,’ he said. ‘Machine’s out by the lift. Get me one too. Milk, sugar. Then open that lot over there. Make yourself useful.’ He indicated a small desk, half a desk really, hidden under an enormous pile of brown envelopes.
I opened my mouth to protest, I’d done the assisting thing, setting up lights, taping down wires, endless form-filling and filing … Then I caught the dare in his eyes, thought better of it and surprised myself. Already, I was learning you don’t have to say every single thing that enters your head and I’d only been there ten minutes.
Slow news day.
The phrase was invented for ones like this. Saturdays bracketed by Easter and bank holidays when nothing happens except football and the paper starts filling up with comment and analysis of the non-events of the week. Busy for picture research, sod all to do if you’re the not quite staff, not quite photographer.
The morning was painfully quiet, made worse by the huge pile of
collects –
pictures that needed to be returned to their rightful owners. Family shots from the seventies and eighties. Weddings, funerals, christenings, summer holidays, graduations, you name it. The kind of pictures that mean absolutely nothing to anyone but their owners. Dump them in the bin instead of carefully addressing an envelope and sending them back and you’d rip a tear in someone’s life. A small one, maybe. A tiny tear in a life that was insignificant in news terms; one with no public voice, but still a life.
‘Lawrence! Job for you!’
I leapt up, bag in hand – keen keen keen. I don’t know where I thought he was going to send me. Somewhere big! Somewhere important! Ten minutes later I was on a bus to Lewisham to photograph some woman for a triumph-over-tragedy filler that wouldn’t even run if any real news happened between now and deadline. I didn’t care. I had a commission. And, I told myself, even the legendary war photographer Margaret Bourke-White had to start somewhere. Although I very much doubt it was on the 89 to Lewisham.
As first jobs went, it was underwhelming. I only remember it because of what came next. It was just after half six, and everyone had pretty much given up on the day except for the poor sods who had to put the paper to bed. Dullest Saturday in the history of dull Saturdays. I was loading my cameras into my rucksack, one staff photographer was out, one was on holiday, one had sloped off early.
Then the news desk phone rang and all hell broke loose.
Phones began ringing off their hooks and suddenly everyone was moving and yelling, grabbing coats, Dictaphones, swearing about remaking pages. In amongst the furore I caught the words Soho and bomb. Nail bomb.
Fuck! Nail bomb.
Also, somewhere in there, bloodbath.
‘Lawrence! Scrap that, whatever you were planning to do tonight, cancel it. Huntingdon! Ridley! Take her with you.’
‘But, guv …’ I didn’t know which of them protested, but it was clear they didn’t fancy taking a woman, and certainly not a newbie.
‘You need a photographer. Lawrence is it.’
Well, fuck you too
, I thought, when I saw the look on their faces.
The news editor turned to me. ‘Get everything.
Everything
. I mean it. If in doubt, cover it. And don’t come back ’til you have.’
I got the rest: Or don’t come back at all.
‘Come on!’ The guy from the coffee machine – Ridley – was wedging the lift door open with his foot, an expression on his face that said he’d shut it on me, given half a chance. The other one was already in the lift ranting into his mobile phone. ‘Get a fucking move on!’
Once in a cab they discussed strategy and swore at the traffic. Walk, I wanted to say. Better still, run, it’d be quicker. I forced myself to stay quiet. It was pretty clear they thought I was the weak link. As far as they were concerned they’d be better off with no photographer at all. A small voice in the back of my head was a bit too hasty to agree with them.
‘Admiral Duncan’s near Dean Street. Drop us on Shaftesbury as near to Dean as you can get,’ Huntingdon told the driver.
‘No chance, mate.’ The driver shrugged. ‘Gridlock up ahead, look. Locked solid. Bloody chaos. Police everywhere. Something going on?’
Listen to it
, I wanted to say. Instead, I yanked down the window and the shriek of approaching sirens rolled in, swamping the cab. Huntingdon ignored me, scowled at the back of the cab driver’s head. He looked like he wanted to pull it off.
‘We could always get out and walk?’ I said. Sick of being ignored, I directed the comment to Ridley, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. ‘Or, better still, run?’
Huntingdon looked like it was now my head he wanted, but he threw a tenner at the driver, leapt out and sprinted off. Point making, much.
‘He’s starting at Wardour, working back,’ Ridley said, only the faintest hint of patronising in his tone. ‘I’m starting this end, we’ll meet in the middle. You stay with me. Photograph everyone I talk to and anything I tell you. We need colour and lots of it. Road blocks, ambulances, fire engines, stretchers, crowds. Cover the lot. And the injured. Plenty of injured. If we get back without them we might as well not go back at all.’
‘How injured …?’ I started to ask.