We have to go outside because Mick says it will look more natural. “More natural than what?” I want to ask but don’t bother. Let’s get it over with and then I can go home.
He has me walking in the garden of the hotel, up and down, toward him and away from him. “Look into the distance, Jean,” he calls, and I do. “Can you put on something else? I’m going to need some different shots.” I dumbly obey, returning to the room to put on my new blue jumper and borrowing a necklace from Kate and then coming back down the stairs. The receptionist must think I’m famous or something. I suppose I’m just about to be. Famous.
When even Mick gets bored with snapping me leaning on a tree, sitting on a bench, perching on a fence, strolling down a lane—“Don’t smile, Jean!”—we all go back inside.
Kate has to start writing, she says, and Mick needs to put his photos on the computer. We stand in the corridor outside the rooms, and Kate tells me to relax for a couple of hours and charge anything I want to the room. When she disappears into her room, I go back to mine and start packing everything into a carrier bag. I’m not sure if I can keep the clothes the paper bought for me, but I’m wearing most of them and I can’t be bothered to change. Then I sit down again. For a moment I’m no longer sure if I can leave. This is ridiculous. I’m a woman of almost forty. I can do what I want. I pick up my stuff and walk down the stairs. The receptionist is all smiles, still thinking I’m a celebrity, I suppose. I ask her to ring for a taxi to take me to the nearest station, and I sit on one of the armchairs in front of a bowl of apples. I pick one up and take a big bite out of it.
FORTY-TWO
The Reporter
FRIDAY, JUNE 11, 2010
Kate plonked herself down at the reproduction Regency desk and pushed the reproduction leather blotter aside. Her much-loved and abused laptop was on the bed where she’d left it that morning after typing up her notes with the first cup of coffee of the day. Its cable snaked across the expanse of white sheets to a plug behind the bedside table. She untangled and reconnected it, took off her jacket, and powered up. Her head rang with Jean Taylor’s voice, and the story was already taking shape in her head.
She was a plunger, not a planner, when it came to writing. When it came to her life, really. Some of her colleagues sat with their notebooks, marking quotes with an asterisk and underlining important points. Some even numbered paragraphs, as if frightened their notes might disappear or that they’d break some sort of spell by starting to write.
Others—“the real talent,” she acknowledged to herself—wrote the whole thing in their heads over a coffee or a beer and then threw it down on the page in one beautiful, flowing draft. She did a bit of both, depending on how much was going on around her—a bit of writing in her head as she left the interview, and then she plunged into the story on her computer, getting a flow going and editing and rejigging as she went.
It was funny; even though they all wrote on computers, the journalists of her generation still talked as if they were scribbling on bits of scrap paper and filing stories to heartless copy takers—“Is there much more of this?”—from piss-stained telephone boxes. She’d come in at the very tail end of the Fleet Street years but had loved the raw edges of journalism then. The newsroom had rung with the sounds of newsmen and – women at work. Now her newsroom was open-plan, hushed and planed smooth by designers. It felt more like an insurance office than a national newspaper, and exposed by the silence, bad behavior and office characters had faded. It was a gray world now.
She ought to ring the news editor, but she didn’t want to hear his take on her interview just yet. He was bound to get in on the act, telling her how to write it even though he knew only a couple of quotes. Then he’d stride into the editor’s office and tell him he’d got the scoop. It was his reward—seldom paid out—for all the shit he had to take. She understood but wanted to savor the moment; she’d got a confession from Jean about Glen and Bella. It wasn’t the full monty, but Jean had said she thought Glen had taken the child. Good enough. The first words from the widow. Kate began typing.
From time to time she looked up to rethink a phrase and caught sight of a woman’s face in the huge mirror over the desk. She looked like a stranger—serious, focused on something in the distance, and somehow younger. She didn’t look like a mother or a wife. She looked like a journalist.
Her phone rang as she finished the section of killer quotes, and she answered immediately. “Hi, Terry. Just got out of the interview. I’ve got a brilliant line from her.”
Fifteen minutes later he rang back. The paper had cleared three pages inside and planned a second day. All Kate had to do was finish writing it. “Two thousand five hundred words for the inside, Kate. Let’s do the background on their marriage and all that for day two. Give it a kick up the arse for the front, okay?”
The serious woman in the mirror was nodding.
She wondered what Jean Taylor was doing next door while she was writing about her. This is a weird job, she told herself as she started to perform surgery on the body of the story, cutting all the good quotes on the Taylors’ marriage and pasting them into the follow-up story.
Despite what most people thought, the ordinary men and women facing tragedy or drama who crossed Kate’s path were largely grateful for her attention and the stories she wrote. The celebs, the infamous, and other critics claimed everyone hated the press because they did, but many of Kate’s interviewees stayed in touch for years. She was part of their lives, part of an event that changed everything for most of them.
“It’s really intense and intimate during the time we’re together,” she told Steve in the early days of their relationship. “Even if it’s only a few hours. It’s like when you meet someone on a long train journey and you tell them everything. Because you can, because it’s a moment in time.” Steve had laughed at her seriousness.
They’d met through friends at a disastrous Murder Mystery dinner party in North London and clicked when they laughed at the wrong moment, mortally offending their hosts.
In a shared taxi home afterward, he’d perched on a fold-down seat opposite so he could look at her, and they’d talked drunkenly about themselves.
Steve was a final-year medical student, working with cancer patients, and thought journalism was superficial, fluffy even, and she understood. It was a common misconception, and she tried to explain why journalism was important to her. Then she waited to see if their love affair would take and, when it did, Steve came to see things differently.
He witnessed the early-morning calls from the distressed, the late nights she spent reading court documents or driving up motorways to track down a key piece of evidence for a story. It was serious stuff, and proof was her annual haul of Christmas cards that hung alongside those from Dr. Steve’s grateful patients. Hers were festive greetings from parents of the murdered, rape victims, survivors of plane crashes, rescued kidnap victims, and winners of court cases. They all took their place on the ribbon streamers festooning Kate’s house from early December. Reminders of happy days.
Two hours later, Kate was polishing: reading, rereading, searching for repeated adjectives, changing a word here and there, trying to look at the intro with fresh eyes. She had about five minutes before Terry would start screaming for copy and should be pushing the send button, but she didn’t want to let go of the story. She was messing around when she suddenly realized she hadn’t discussed day two with Mick and lifted her phone to check in with him.