Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls (15 page)

Lorna was that anomalous creature, a woman who had survived in a newsroom to middle age and attained a position of seniority to boot. So long had she been sitting in the chief sub’s chair, shoulders rolled forward and chin stuck out, that her body had begun to look as if it were sitting down even when, technically speaking, it was standing up. Either way, the fleshy fold of her lower stomach lay over the top of her thighs like a thick apron, then her upper stomach folded down, in turn, over the lower stomach, followed by the uppermost layer of a heavy and apparently unsupported bosom.

Lorna was a very still person. She was quite still even when she was typing fast, and the way her fingers flicked and kicked on the end of motionless wrists put me in mind of an Irish dancer’s legs. Her stillness was not benign, however. She used it in much the same way as a crocodile does: lying there inert, lulling her intended prey into thinking it’s standing beside nothing more dangerous than a log of petrified wood. But, in fact, a crocodile can move as fast as a racehorse over a short distance, and when it does, you can easily find yourself with your jugular vein dangling down around your sternum. To the left-hand side of the chief sub’s chair, it was possible to discern a slight deviation in the walking track that had been worn into the carpet, and it only took new copy boys a day or two to discover why it was advisable to follow it.

‘Incompetence. Nothing I hate more than incompetence,’ Lorna would mutter, settling back into reptilian stillness while some fresh-faced graduate bled quietly from multiple cuts inflicted by the sharp edge of her tongue.

Or else she’d repeat, through barely opened lips: ‘Six months. Six more months. Six months and I’m out of here.’

It was a well-known fact that Lorna was leaving in six months’ time, since Lorna had been leaving in six months’ time for close to twenty-five years. It was even said that when she first accepted the job — back in the days when the newsroom rang with the cheerful TING! of typewriter return carriages and reporters were allowed to chain-smoke at their desks — Lorna shook the editor’s hand and said she was only staying for six months. But I never did believe that story, for the simple reason that it failed to account for Oscar. Bringing a pot plant to the office, I believe, is a sign of quite serious commitment.

The sum total of the affection that I could muster for Lorna was contingent on the image that I had of her arriving for work on her very first day, with Oscar. I dressed her for the occasion in a taupe-coloured skirt and jacket, and re-coloured her long, greying hair in an appealing shade of light brown. I gave her glasses, and while it is true that they were heavy-rimmed and unflattering, the overall effect of them was to suggest that this plain and sturdy-limbed young woman might harbour any number of intriguing mysteries. And this intimation of suppressed sentiment was only strengthened by the presence of the young
monstera
— nothing more than a single tender stem and a pair of leaves resembling a child’s outstretched hands -– growing, greenly, in the earthenware pot Lorna held in the crook of her arm.

Over the course of the ensuing years, Oscar grew into and out of a succession of pots. An especially big move came when he was forced, by a combination of his own virulent growth and the advent of the new computer terminals, off the desktop and onto the floor beside Lorna’s feet. By the time my own first day in the newsroom arrived, Oscar was housed in a colossal black plastic tub to the right-hand side of the chief sub’s chair. He was more of a tree than a pot plant by now, and his trunk had thickened to match the diameter of Lorna’s ankle.

I remember my first Monday at the paper as a hopeful day for both of us. I arrived early in order to settle in, and while I pinned my favourite photographs and quotations to the felted surface of my cubicle divider, and set out on my desk a small, framed painting of an apple by my now-quite-famous–artist friend Eve, Oscar reached out and brushed — for the very first time, with the tip of his uppermost leaf — the pale ceiling panel of electrical light that he had mistaken for the sun.

If we were to leap ahead by four years, however, we would find that same leaf pointing dejectedly down to the ground. Oscar’s trunk had, during that time, reached the ceiling and performed a U-turn, and now a strong, green curve of it was braced against the disappointment of the lighting panel.

And as for me?

Well, I had come to understand how it might feel to be the daughter of a boastful miller. I’m sure you remember the tale: the one in which a miller (in order to make himself appear a person of great importance) tells a king that he has a daughter who can spin straw into gold. The king puts the miller’s daughter into a room with a spinning wheel and a pile of straw, which she must turn into gold by morning, if she values her life.

‘Here’s a handful of hearsay,’ the editor would say to me before retreating behind his pane of frosted glass. ‘Spin me forty centimetres of copy by nightfall, there’s a good girl.’

‘Here’s half a rumour and a skerrick of unsubstantiated fact,’ he would say the next day. ‘Sixty centimetres by nightfall, if you value your life.’

And sometimes what was required of me was to spin column centimetres out of nothing at all.

‘So, what do you like best about maths?’ I would crouch down to ask Bruno, the seven-year-old winner of a nationwide Grade Four mathematics tournament, while he made dripping-water sounds with his tongue inside his cheek.

‘Dunno.’

‘What do you think you’d like to be when you grow up?’

‘Dunno.’

‘How do you feel about winning the competition?’

‘Dunno.’

‘How will you spend the prize money, do you think?’

‘Dunno.’

Are you actually retarded, or just a little shit? No, no,
please, don’t tell me, I think I can guess …

Or I would ask: ‘What’s the secret of your longevity, Mr Grosvenor?’ — shouting in order to be heard by the one hundred-year-old man who had lost all his inhibitions along with his bladder control and nine-tenths of his vision.

‘Nice tits,’ he’d say, as drool dripping from the tip of his chin fizzled out one of the candles on his birthday cake.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ his embarrassed and almost equally aged daughter would say, catching his hand before it dipped down the neck of my shirt. ‘My father was always such a gentleman.’

By way of some rudimentary alchemy I usually managed to produce sufficient words to accompany the pictures. (‘Ask seven-year-old maths whiz Bruno Crawford for the secret of his success and he’ll tell you it’s repetition.’/‘Terry Grosvenor may be one hundred years old, but his appreciation of life’s pleasures remains undimmed.’) The trouble was, the alchemy did not cease when I filed my copy and went home to bed. My nights were sometimes sleepless for wondering what further transformation was being wrought upon a story that would bear my by-line.

‘Please,’ said a senior Health Department bureaucrat, the latest Rumplestiltskin to whom I had promised my firstborn child if only he would help me spin this day’s quotient of straw into column centimetres. ‘Please remember that I’m only doing this interview on the understanding that you don’t use the word “epidemic”. We are not talking about an epidemic here, just a few isolated cases of glandular fever, and we don’t want people unduly alarmed.’

‘Oh please, no,’ I said the next morning when I walked to the corner shop to get some milk, and was confronted by the day-bills for our newspaper screaming TEEN KISSING BUG EPIDEMIC SHOCK from within their metal cages.

A Word from Rosie Little on:

Newspaper Headlines

I
t’s said that sport is the civilised society’s substitute for war, and also that the games we play as children are designed to prepare us for the realities of adult life. Certainly it’s true that my brother thrived in the capitalist kindergarten of the Monopoly board, developing a set of ruthless strategies whose success is reflected in his bank balance even to this day. I, on the other hand, can still be undone by the kind of ridiculous sentimentality that would see me sacrifice anything,
anything
, in order to have the three matching red-headed cards of Fleet Street, Trafalgar Square and The Strand sitting tidily together on my side of the board.

Working late shifts in a newsroom allows for plenty of time to ruminate on how childhood board game strategy might act as an early indicator of career success, and even to come up with the basics of a board game to prepare aspiring journalists for the life in the fourth estate. I call it HEADLINE DEADLINE.

A game for four players, HEADLINE DEADLINE closely approximates the actual process by which newspaper headlines are chosen on a daily basis. I won’t bore you with the intricate details of the game; suffice to say that the set comes with two decks of cards, one of which is made up of cards bearing a single word (SHOCK, TERROR, PLUNGE, EPI-DEMIC, PLEA, THREAT, TRAGIC, etc.), while the other is made up of cards bearing newsworthy scenarios, for example:

An elderly woman was
hospitalised yesterday and
treated for shock after a youth burst into a hairdressing
salon with a water
pistol. The youth, who is
understood to be unhappy
with a haircut he received at
the same establishment the
previous day, squirted the
hairdresser with the high-power
toy gun, warning her
that he was not her only
unhappy customer.

The players must use their stock of single-word cards to come up with a headline to fit the scenario before a ninety-second time limit expires. For the above scenario we might get SIEGE SHOCK TERROR, for example. Or TRAGIC TEEN GUNMAN HORROR. Or VIOLENCE EPIDEMIC THREAT, perhaps.

It is possible that the prototype set of HEADLINE DEADLINE, which was slapped together with materials from the art department during a succession of slow news nights, still lurks dustily beneath my old desk. But it is unlikely that anyone will ever create a more perfect headline than the one devised in just seventy-six seconds on a Monday night when there was no news at all (due to the malfunction of the newsroom’s fax machine):

NAKED HELICOPTER
NUN’S PLEA

The brilliance of this headline has eclipsed my memory of the scenario that spawned it, but I’m sure it doesn’t matter. Sales would have soared.

It was nightshift on the Christmas Eve that marked my four years and one month’s service at the paper, and by way of a concession to the festive season I had worn to the office my sixteen-hole cherry-red Doc Martens. I was on the phone to a policeman who could reasonably expect to spend his Christmas Eve answering the phone every hour, on the hour, to me and my cheery voice asking, ‘Anything happening?’

‘No, not a sausage,’ he said, as patiently as he could manage.

I put down the phone and called the fire brigade, the ambulance service and the talking clock, only because it didn’t sigh at me as if to say ‘not you again’.

‘If I saved really hard,’ I reasoned with myself after I’d said a fond farewell to the talking clock, ‘I could be out of here in six months.’

The phrase echoed in my mind and tripped the alarm on an early-warning system.
Out of here in six months.
Had I really just thought that? My heart stopped for a pico-second and my eyes shot to the chief sub’s chair. Which was empty.

‘Where’s Lorna?’ I called out over the din of the subs’ table. Surely the magic pudding of her six more months had not finally run out? The night subs had already sunk a couple of cartons and in their red and white Santa hats they resembled a pack of aged and feral elves.

‘Don’t panic, she’s only having a couple of weeks off,’ said one of the elves, leaning back in his chair and scratching his scrotum. ‘Oh, fuck! I’m supposed to water Oscar.’

Oscar, doubling as the office Christmas tree, was drizzled with red and gold tinsel. An angel had been hanged by the neck from one his highest branches.

‘I promised I wouldn’t let you down, Lorna baby!’ the sub shouted as he directed a stream of pungent yellow piss into the pine bark at the base of Oscar’s trunk.

‘Anything happening?’ I asked the on-duty policeman, brightly, an hour later.

‘No, not a sausage,’ he said wearily.

‘Anything happening?’ I asked the on-duty firefighter.

‘Nothing,’ he said firmly.

‘Anything happening?’ I asked the on-duty ambulance officer.

‘Honestly, you people. Can’t you take a rest? It’s Christmas Eve,’ he whined.

‘How are you, darling?’ I asked the talking clock.

‘At the third tone, it will be seven-oh-six and twenty seconds,’ he replied.

‘You sound a little lacklustre,’ I said. ‘Everything all right?’

‘At the third tone it will be seven-oh-six and thirty seconds,’ he said, and I knew just how he felt.

‘Anything happening?’ I asked the on-duty policeman, another hour later.

‘No, not a sausage,’ he said even more wearily.

‘Come on, it’s Christmas. There must be something. Anything.’

‘Well …’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s just a whisper at this stage. Don’t know much about it myself.’

‘Hmmm?’

‘We’ve just sent our divers down to the waterfront. Some poor bastard’s bobbed up near one of the docks.’

We didn’t cover suicides; apparently it encouraged them. But if it was anything else — accident, mystery, murder — it was a story.

‘You’re a legend,’ I said after he gave me the precise location.

I took a car to the scene, but parked it and its newspaper numberplates several blocks back from the water. Once out of the car, I concealed my notebook and pen by shoving them down the back of my skirt, beneath the hem of my cardigan. I was experienced enough to know that regular, just-passing-by nosiness was regarded by the authorities as much less abhorrent than the professional kind in which I specialised.

As I strolled down to the docks, I let my imagination out on a short leash. What would this corpse look like? Would it be bloated and blue? Would its extremities have been nibbled by crustaceans, or its eyes sucked out by eels? Would it be somebody I knew? A face I recognised? I entertained several deliciously morbid scenarios, but was forced to dismiss them just as soon as I saw that the divers had already done their work. One of them, his dripping wetsuit making a puddle on a concrete walkway, was zipping up a body bag, while the other was standing by the back of his utility, towel-drying the bare top half of his body. An ambulance was manoeuvring in the car park, readying itself for a swift pick-up.