She opened the back door. There, in front, stood a meagre fox, his glassy eyes fixed straight into hers. What a wonderful thing, she thought, to have a fox in my back garden. Pete had told her something everyone in England knew about foxes. “Nasty vermin, Pete said, they’ll tear your bin bags at night, they’ll pooh on your doorstep, and they smell. When I was a kid, I remember one killed my Mum’s hens.”
She liked the fox. For the time being.
It was the first fox she’d seen in London.
However, she knew that if the furry animal really went for the bins, she’d start hating him too.
That would probably help her feel more at home here, with Pete.
It was time to go to work. Seven pm. News at 10. The trains from Wimbledon to Waterloo usually took about 15 minutes, but she didn’t want to rely on their punctuality. She’d learned that too in the past 4 years.
The wonderful, anonymous, buzzing London she loved was becoming painfully hard to reach.
*
It was never like this when she used to meet him.
(The “ex” as she used to call him. The one from her previous life.
She knew she didn’t even have the right to call him the “ex”. )
Time usually flew, although the District line from Chiswick took actually longer to reach the West End than the train she uses now.
They used to meet at the Marquis of Anglesey or some pub in Soho, she’d forgotten the name, and take it from there.
Mad about cinema.
She was getting gradually so mad about him, and yet somehow she didn’t display the signs at first.
He was also somewhat… persistent. He kept phoning every day, showing up at work.
Then the invariable film to see, the new release she always knew they’ll agree upon.
He was different, she thought, as the train passed Earlsfield.
He was different from Pete.
He was different from the other guys.
Most of the time he wore boredom on his beautifully chiselled and discontent face. He was witty, fast, they understood each other perfectly; conversations were made of sentences half finished by the other.
He knew everything, and he wanted to know more.
He was also mysterious.
He didn’t belong, just like her. He had no one to belong to in this city; didn’t seem to want to at first, and that’s probably why, she thought at the time, he wasn’t as forward as she secretly wanted him to be.
He kept phoning every day asking to meet up but would walk with her shoulder to shoulder, avoiding her touch, smoking, no eye contact.
They would talk literature and cinema all night long, walking the streets in the rain, doing nothing else but being together and avoiding the issue of being together.
After a few months she realised that she adored him, and got scared witless. She hadn’t bargained for this. The big city required all her focus.
She also knew he wasn’t the boyfriend kind, it was written all over his face and his demeanour.
She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, lost weight, how predictable.
Eventually she refused herself the happiness to call him or even return his phone calls.
*
The train arrived at Waterloo. Brusque walk down the stairs and across Waterloo Bridge. It was cold; the wind was deafening her thoughts. Why did she feel this daft need to go down Memory lane all of a sudden?
She felt something was not quite right.
Can’t be Pete, he’s a treasure. She is so happy to have him now.
Can’t be regrets for the “ex” – she was through, she got out, it did hurt, but it’s over.
Can’t be the news. Nothing unpredictable. She watched telly, listened to Radio 4, listened to shortwave; she had a plan for the morning transmission.
She was good. She was strong again. Never mind.
*
Ten past ten, first news transmission finished, not much on the 9 o’clock news on telly either. Second coffee of the long shift. No sugar, milk, and the cup balancing on top of the newly arrived, ink smelling pile of morning editions of the broadsheets.
Up the stairs, into the section room. She smiled at the front pages, warmed up by the choice of colour pictures.
She was expecting it. It was the start of one of those days when the papers didn’t agree on a leading story. Good for mankind, bad for the media brotherhood.
One leading story in the press means that some poor souls’ great tragedy or disaster is transformed into an unequivocal triumph of soundbites and adrenalin.
Different covers, surprising editorials – press pluralism at large, the colourful everyday-ness of the world continues with no one horror-dripping drama screaming from each ink patch.
Of course, a bloody hard day to review the press on radio.
She was excited. Her colleague tonight wasn’t impressed; she reassured him that she’d do the press review. She liked multi, she liked different, she liked looking for clues.
That’s why she had loved him, the ex.
What the…
*
She used to love nightshifts. They’d go to the pictures before one – he was doing nights too – and then would go to the Kowloon, on Gerard Street. She’d have tap water instead of wine – what the hell; she was “head over heels” anyway.
She’d do the shift on an air cushion, some of her best scoops and interviews were done after a supper with him.
He was only a year older than her, but a good judge, a great journalist and an artist. He still is, she thought.
His paintings of twisted, tortured male torsos. Hung as high as possible, at break-neck line rather than eye-height, in his flat off Oxford Street.
Tall Georgian windows, spacious empty space, gothic candleholders, a bunch of incense sticks over a Bible. She’d be looking relentlessly for clues in every nervous stroke of the paintbrush, in every piece of furniture,, in every ray of hazy sunlight broken by a passing double-decker under the window path.
“Who does he think he is, who lives at Oxford Street…”
They’d smoke packets of Marlboro Lights listening to Radiohead until the small hours, and nothing else would happen.
Most of the time, she didn’t really want anything else to happen. She also knew that so little depended on her, really.
She wasn’t in control. She was spinning out of orbit, hopelessly trying to second-guess, to pray.
After a while of her ignoring his phone calls he had stopped calling.
She had panicked to the point of madness; she had finally called him and from there onwards she stopped looking at herself in the mirror.
Cold turkey didn’t work. She hated herself and she was heavenly happy. She had been experiencing a violent variant of the extremes that junkies feel while looking for a fix.
Once she thought of driving him away by making him hate her, alienating him, making him despise her choices.
Anything but indifference.
She took him to a Christmas carol concert in Royal Albert Hall. She knew he hated to sing and avoided the paraphernalia of cosy concert halls. And cosy middle-class get-togethers.
He kissed her for the first – and last – time that night. Real, deep, turn-on kiss. Knowingly, protectively, at her doorstep.
“Why could he second-guess me so well, and I can’t?”
Helpless and oh God so sweet an anger was heating the tears that were rolling down her cheeks while she wiggled the key in the keyhole, walking through the doorstep alone.
Nobody had told her that they couldn’t be together, and yet she knew they couldn’t. She knew and yet: “Why? Why? For f***’s sake, why can’t we?”
She couldn’t ask, too shy or provincial to ask, to demand, to throw herself in his arms or surprise him, arriving naked at his arty Oxford street flat…
He was alone, he had hundreds of friends and yet he was on his own.
He wanted it that way.
He even somehow contracted chicken pox while they still saw each other.
She envied that illness that covered his body night and day; she thought he’d done it on purpose, selfish, careless act of a weirdo.
She couldn’t make him out and therefore she couldn’t make him hers.
She wasn’t even trying any more.
She was witnessing her own drama on stage. She was the audience and the main character, but she didn’t have the confidence to accept the leading role. She preferred to remain the onlooker, the spectator in the cosy chair who needs easy answers thrown at him from the stage, from those who hurt, from those who cry, from those who dare.
She dare not.
She was a journalist in her own life. Reporting the story. Following the protagonists. Why oh why did she look at her own life like she was watching a soap opera? Why didn’t she interfere to stop herself from suffering?
Was she the journalist or the humanitarian worker? Which one was meant to get to the end of the rainbow?
Which one of the two women was meant to be happy – the one recording the events for posterity or the one suffering them to make them better?
Interfere. Interfere. Interfere.
*
The markets in Japan were about to close. They needed the yen/dollar exchange rate if they were to do a decent business spot on the show. For the first time in months she went through the hours between midnight and 3 a.m. without nodding off. It’s forbidden to sleep on the premises anyway.
The agencies started regurgitating snaps about an earthquake.
Earthquake. Earthquake! EARTHQUAKE!!! Turkey.
She shouted over to the next door room where the keyboard of her colleague had gone spookily silent. Minutes later both computers and printers were throwing up pages of rewritten scripts.
The adrenalin and the blood. She felt a vague sense of relief. Bad for mankind, good for journalism. There’s nothing better than work.
Interfere. Interfere. Interfere.
Commissioning the reports was easy. Nobody was asleep in Turkey anyway.
She could vaguely remember the panic and chaos and fear earthquakes spread among people – she was about five or six years old when it happened in her country.
She could feel the cold winter on her bear feet under the nightie even now, while her feet were sitting in the cosy, buzzing warmth under the computer.
Contorted faces, silence. People coming out in flocks with or without possessions, in silence. Even the children, shocked to be plucked out of bed in the middle of the night, blinking in the light of the torches and under the blankets, were all quiet.
As if the darkness of the night was, suddenly, calling on all people, via the inaudible frequency of a sinister whistle, to get together for a strange, dreamlike, pagan, blood-freezing ceremony.
They were coming out,
like jinxed, jumping as fast as humanly possible out of reach of their homes
which could turn into graves.
And then the aftershocks, accompanied by quiet gasps in the crowd.
It really did look like a midnight ritual, she thought.
Why do earthquakes, especially the deadliest ones, strike at night?
She closed her eyes.
“When do I start feeling compassionate and sad again?”
“When do I turn the adrenalin off and feel the pain?”
She tried, in the darkness of her glued eyelids, to remember the face of this scared little girl they just showed on television.
Interfere.
She had to wake up a seismologist, a market analyst and a political guru on South Eastern Europe and Asia to talk about the disaster.
Some of the many contacts a journalist has. “Do vultures keep the numbers of funeral parlours?”
Good interviews, hard work and a satisfying feeling of accomplishment with renewed self-confidence.
Good for her career, bad for the Turks who had to expect, the scientist said, a few days of aftershocks.
Literally and metaphorically – fading away were Turkey’s hopes of “swift economic recovery and political stability closer to Europe.”
Death toll expected to go in the hundreds.
Interfere Interfere Interfere
Where are the aid workers?
Are they coming?
Radio beats the colourfully humane newspaper on a day of breaking news. Every time.
Thus is the power of the broadcaster.
“We have to rewrite the script”, she shouts to the other pod, where her co-night shifter clubs angrily against the keyboard.
“It’s not my fault” – she shouts again.
He doesn’t answer.
She phoned Médecins sans Frontières. She phoned UNESCO. She phoned the Red Cross.
They talked, but they apologised that they would not leave straight away.
They cannot get hold of funds to fuel their cars and charter flights to the disaster zones.
They have all the emergency aid ready for a disaster like that.
Just no authorisation for fuel and travel costs. It was the middle of the night and the charity bosses were “unavailable”.
“Have you not got an emergency procedure in place for extreme situations like this one? Similar to the “on call” hospital staff, just for someone to authorise the funds? Just a signature on a piece of paper?” There was no point in her hiding her anger but she asked in vain.
“The government of the disaster zone country is responsible for the availability of first aid.”
Yeah right.
“Headquarters are waiting to assess the situation” , one humanitarian organisation told her.
On the record.
She had it ready for air. Her heart was beating fast. She interfered.
She put some meaning behind the real-life special effects of the action movie that the TV was proud to unfold to our hungry eyes.
Radio has its intelligent advantages.
The papers will grab the story in the morning and deepen it further, make it worth its while.
And what about the pictures?
“I know what tomorrow’s newspaper pictures will look like.”- she shuddered at the thought. “Thank Goodness it’s not going to be my turn to do the press review.”
Down to the studio, this time balancing a large glass of water on the script, to refresh the half-asleep articulatory muscles.
Her colleague, an old-time drinker in his late forties, read the news as if he had little springs opening his mouth and tongue at the wrong places, making him fluff twice at each sentence.
“Weird hours, even weirder are the folk working them”, she thought, shivering at the image of his twisted tongue.
She put on a fake smile to read the arts spot.
*
They did disagree. At the time she was very driven by compassion. With a cynical twinkle in his eye, about the only time he kept his gaze into hers for longer than five seconds, was when they discussed professional ethics.
He thought there weren’t any in journalism. Funny, my mother thinks that too, she argued sarcastically.
She had come to journalism from literature. So had he.
But somehow the wish to put the world to right was not part of his ambition.
She was so much more romantic and so non-cynical, it was unhealthy for her career – and she could faintly feel it.
He loved teasing her sometimes. At other times, he’d listen to her quietly and look straight into her face, completely comfortable knowing that, elated about her subject, she’d be staring not at him but somewhere in the air, trying to make a point.
He didn’t really care about making a point about anything. Even when he was teasing her (“So why on Earth did you choose not to go to that Berlioz concert back in 1989; why did you waste a ticket and joined a street demonstration? Did you honestly believe you could change anything?”), even then he wouldn’t make a clear point of what his own view on the matter was.
“What would you have done in my place?”
He shrugged his shoulders, half a smile on his smoking lips, his eyes hiding the answer somewhere behind her back.
He was a coward, she decided. A bloody intelligent one, but a coward.
*
The taxi was taking her home, to the fox and to Pete. Her head was spinning, she felt slightly sick as she usually did in the cab after a 14-hour nightshift.
She was SO tired. Her memories projected an additional blur onto the early morning haze outside. Her head…
The rest of their story – she could hardly call it a “relationship”, could she – developed over a few weeks.
She was meant to see a film with him that night. Her gay friend Kit caught up with her unexpectedly for another of his melancholic chats about age and cosmetic products.
Kit and she went to meet him in Leicester Square before the film, for a quick bite.
The two men met.
It must have been un coup de foudre.
She knew nothing about it for some time.
He sold the cinema tickets on the spot as they couldn’t find a third one for Kit, not even asking her whether she minded. Kit was transfixed by him, he was carefully guarded but his eyes shone with such a spark…
A few weeks later the two of them “eloped” to Brussels for a weekend, without telling her a thing.
He had stopped phoning, he was untouchable, impossible to reach, gone.
Initially she was completely thrown; couldn’t work out what had happened.
And then Kit was nowhere to be found either.
She didn’t want to know the truth which was already burning her inside out; she was crying her eyes out, like a stupid dolly.
She felt ashamed and used, and lied to.
Eventually she mellowed, she prayed.
She had hoped at least for a chat, like, a cynical “Thanks for getting us together” or something.
She would have loved to remain their girlfriend godmother, their good luck charm, their cosmetics guru, their…friend, like before?
Anything, to stay near him. Like a soul protector, like a devoted sidekick.
Yes he knew she was in love with him, yes, he probably didn’t know how to deal with it or was afraid to hurt her directly.
Oh and now, so much passion, such a whirlwind in a man who rarely displayed anything but cynicism in her presence.
Why did they run away with the truth?
This hurt more than any truth.
Feels like a betrayal.
She had never suspected him of being gay. He never looked the part; he’d never even tried to hint.
Did he know it himself before?
She was looking in the mirror now, constantly, pulling faces to herself.
“Cowards“.
*
Her fingers felt and grabbed tight hold of the keys in her pocket.
She slithered out of the cab, dragged herself up the stairs.
Something was definitely wrong.
Couldn’t be her work – she’ll probably get a tap on the shoulder for that earthquake coverage, when she’s back on normal shifts.
Couldn’t be her memories – she’d been there, she’d recovered, she was good. Couldn’t be…
She ran towards the toilet. She caught a glimpse of her green face in the mirror over the sink.
She was violently sick. Again. And again.
Slowly her head cleared. She sat on the toilet seat, exhausted, shaking, painfully alone like the last human on earth.
The last… or the first?
She picked up her coat. 9 o’clock. There must be a pharmacy open.
The test was positive.
She cried.
“The fox and Pete had managed to adopt me, to tame me, to give me a home.”
Oh the warm, liberating, cleansing tears of ownership.
“I belong.”
London, 27 October 2005
Dora Court 