Hadley, page 4
I walked breezily across, reaching for my Marlboros. A man leaning against the side of the front car watched my approach. A bit like the cop watching Janet Leigh in ‘Psycho’ after she had nicked the money. The man had a crew-cut and was wearing shades. I saw the word ‘Cadillac’ engraved on the wing mirror. With the boldness of youth, I wanted to take these guys on.
“Hi there. What are you up to way over here?” I offered the man a cigarette. “No one invited you to the party?”
The man looked at me for several seconds without a glimmer of acknowledgement, ignoring the offered cigarette.
“Excuse me?” he said eventually.
I shuffled my feet. “I was just wondering who invited you here. Wondering what you were up to. It’s unusual to see American cars in this part of the world and suddenly there are three of them.” I looked along the line. The two other drivers, both wearing shades, were also scowling at me. “I mean, three American cars!”
The man in front of me reached into his pocket and pulled out a stick of gum. He was looking beyond me at the film set.
“If I were you, I’d go back the way you came,” he said. “You have no business here.”
I was squinting into the sun behind the man’s face when there wasn’t any sun behind him to squint into. Who did this guy think he was? Clint Eastwood?
“Sure. Sorry to have bothered you.”
I ambled back to my car, grinning and shaking my head at how I could be so cool. Until I realized that I hadn’t been cool. I turned and made the hundred yards back to the Cadillac, still shaking my head and grinning, and this time looking at the ground. I hadn’t got my story.
“I’m sorry. But I have to persist. It’s my job. Please tell me what you are doing here.”
The man looked at me for a while and chewed. He looked bored.
“Beat it,” he said.
I kept grinning, watching the man chewing, wondering where I could buy clothes like his and apply for his job.
“One more thing,” I said. The man didn’t react. “I was just wondering – do you know the way to San Jose?”
The man took some seconds again. “Son, I didn’t catch you?”
“Do you know the way to San Jose?” The ‘son’ bit rankled. “I was wondering if you could tell me.”
“San Jose. That’s funny. I don’t know.”
“That’s okay. Don’t apologise.”
“I didn’t. Now, please go away.” He looked to his left. “Just beat it.”
A couple of nights after the ‘Great Expectations’ shoot, I was driving through patchy, rubbish-strewn woods, singing along to ‘Cruel to be Kind’, when a car came bouncing up behind me, its lights dazzling me in the mirror. There was more than one car. A line of lights was flickering through the trees. I pulled my Renault 4 off the road and switched off the engine. Three limos flashed by. You could barely hear the engines, just the flashing ‘whoosh’ noises. I clapped my hands. I followed as fast as I could and was just in time to see the cars turn up a dirt road which I knew led to a silk farm. I followed the single track through trees and rhododendron bushes until I turned a bend and there, on my right, through the hedge, were the lights of the cars.
I stopped my car next to a cricket pavilion and walked on to a mown lawn in front of a magnificent house I had never seen before. It wasn’t lit up, but I could see that it was porticoed and pink. A swimming pool with a small diving board was empty and abandoned. A helicopter took up the opposite corner of the lawn, ready for a quick getaway. Leading down from the lawn into some walled garden were marble steps, but they didn’t meet up with the lawn. They had slipped back about a yard, like steps meeting – or not meeting – a plane. A drive swept round the side of the grass and along the front of the house. On the drive, in a row, were the three Cadillacs.
I turned and looked back at the cricket pavilion. It seemed out of place – oriental in design, with a curve to the roof. Never had the idea of following up a story appealed to me more, or in such colourful fashion. If I had only one mission, it was to find out what was going on in this place. Cadillacs! A helicopter! A mysterious cricket pavilion!
I got back into my car and drove up the drive. “Come out, come out, wherever you are… Oh shit.”
The men were waiting for me in a line across the drive, arms across their chests. One pointed at a space for me to park. I fumbled with the controls and turned on the windscreen wipers instead of turning off the engine. Another opened the car door and asked me to step out. Which I did, saying sorry again and again.
They walked me round the cricket pavilion and in a side door of the house. It was opened by a fat man in white shorts and a tee-shirt, holding a can of beer in his hand. I was thinking about the chances of being kidnapped and held to ransom. I thought about my mum and dad, watching television in a tacky, Victorian-style conservatory just two miles away, wedged on to a modest 1950s house with a leaking roof and damp cellar. I thought briefly about another pretty girl on the rival paper who had a pet sheep.
“Interesting pavilion,” I said.
I was escorted into what looked like a kitchen, except that there were no appliances. There was a picture of Sean Connery, Pussy Galore at his side, on the wall above a pool table. There were also a lot of men in the room, sitting on chairs against the walls and talking among themselves. They all wore suits and a couple had pool cues in their hands. One was wearing a shoulder holster. I gulped.
“Guys,” the big man said. “I’d like you say hello to…”
“Hadley Arnold.”
“He’s with the press.”
“How did you know that?”
“It’s written on your windshield. It says ‘press’.”
A few raised their arms in greeting and murmured words of welcome. A man with a paunch and dark hair tied back in a ponytail walked over. He was struggling to tuck in his shirt. He put out his hand.
“I’m Joe,” he said. “Don’t be a berk.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m playing with you. I said don’t be a berk. As an English joke. Because you like your ribald jokes, right? Cockney rhyming slang. Berkshire hunt. What rhymes with hunt? Don’t be a berk. What’s your name again?”
“Hadley Arnold.”
We shook hands. Joe, humming now, appeared to be examining my teeth.
“Hadley Arnold?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you sure that’s not Arnold Hadley?”
“No.”
“You’re not sure?”
“No. I mean I’m sure.”
“Because Arnold is usually a first name.”
“No, but really, I’m sure. I know my own name. What order the words are in.”
“Good.” Joe slapped my arm. “You’ve come to watch the movie with us?”
“No. I…”
“It’s ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. Highly under-rated. You want to watch?”
“No, I can’t.” Tell them why, Hadley. “My father has a hernia.”
“Well I’m sorry to hear that. So how can we help you, Harvey?”
“Hadley.”
“Hadley. I’m sorry.”
“Well, I’m a reporter.”
“Okay. Which paper?”
“The Sotobech Sentinel.”
“The son-of-a-bitch what?”
“He was at the shoot on the weekend,” one of the men said.
I smiled and gave a futile wave. “That’s right. I saw you there. I’m sorry if I am intruding. I just wanted to know if you were film producers or something.”
“Film producers.” Joe looked up. He turned and looked along the line of chairs. “He thinks we’re film producers.” They chuckled. “Big shot movie producers.” He turned back to me. “No, sir, we’re not film producers. You’re welcome to stay and watch the movie, but there’s no story.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I guess I ought to be going.”
“We’re movie fans, but we’re not movie producers.” Joe dipped his head. “Tell me, are you a good reporter?”
“I like to think I am, yes. I hope I will be.”
“And they train you well up there? At the so-to-bed Sentinel? Shorthand, legal dangers, that kind of thing? The relevant torts?”
“I’ve only just begun and I’m not sure what a tort is, but yes, they…”
“Integrity, too, I would presume.”
“Sorry?”
“They teach you about integrity? I like that in a person. But I’m not sure it can be taught. Not right off the bat.”
I shuffled my feet and put my hands in my back pockets. “I don’t think I really follow your drift,” I said.
“I guess not. Not right off the bat.”
“Right. Sorry to have bothered you,” I said, eager to be home. I stood for a second and then turned and took giant leaps to the door. Which didn’t open. I pulled and pulled until Joe came up behind me and reached for the handle.
“Here, let me get that for you. You have to pull and then turn. It’s a little bit awkward.” I skipped past him on to the gravel and ran for my car, saying “sorry” a lot as I did so.
“Good luck with your career,” Joe shouted. “Keep your head down.”
The peg for my ‘Great Expectations’ story suddenly lost its appeal, except that I had already told the Sotobech Sentinel news editor, from a long line of beet farmers, about the Americans and he thought it was terrific.
“But I don’t feel I have enough material.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. This is unusual and mysterious. We can play with it. I want lots of puns. It will be terrific.”
I queued up my typewriter, waited until the news editor had gone, wondered why he had spat the word “puns” in my face, and sank my head into my arms. Then came a flash, or rather lower-than-simmer, puttering, blue-flamed back-burner gas, of inspiration.
“The people of Sotobech have their own Great Expectations for a best-of-British movie production of the classic made here in the Fens, but they can be forgiven for asking what the Dickens all those Americans were doing on the set.”
The story was published at just two hundred words with lots of pictures of the actors and none showing the American cars. It was a truly awful read and the page was poorly designed with no one big picture to set it all off. The headline was a ball-grabbing ‘Great Expectations in the Fens’ and at the grand old age of twenty-one, I knew the only headline to pull in any reader to such a piece of fluff would be something like ‘Let’s get laid in the Fens’. It was unfit to join my then still thin file of cuttings and I was happy to consign the movie, and the Americans, and the story, to history.
At least, I was happy about it at the time.
My cell phone brought me back to the present. It was Baxter up on the twenty-third floor.
“We need that fucking intestines story. It’s still on your screen.”
“Yup. I’m just coming up.”
“The hills are alive with intestines. Don’t let it get too technical.”
“Okay.”
“We don’t want it to be too medical.”
“Okay.”
CHAPTER FOUR
SHRUBS WAS AN old-fashioned news agency, in that it still peddled news. Some of the bigger agencies had turned their attention to the financial markets, and a story was only a story if it had implications for investors. In layman terms, it meant every story was long, analytical and hugely important, leaving little room for the man-bites-dog stories which were Shrubs’s bread and butter.
For the most part, its correspondents were inexperienced and rough round the edges. That’s where the Hong Kong desk was supposed to kick in – we had senior journalists, mostly British, American, Indian or Australian, who could clean up the copy quickly and move it out. But some of the deskers were pretty awful. They had carved reasonably successful careers while being awful, knowing next to nothing about grammar, spelling or the law. Or how to write. Or how to edit. I was often in awe of their ignorance, and of my own, and of Baxter’s style of news editing. A cruiser sank off the U.S. West Coast during the Hong Kong desk’s control period, i.e. when everyone in California was either fast asleep or out rollerblading down some boardwalk wearing nothing but a thong, and I was taking the story off CNN. Baxter exploded from his office. He too had been watching CNN, which was now showing a coastguard helicopter flying low over debris lying thick in the water. He leant over my shoulder and pointed at the screen. I breathed in his cheap, chirpy after-shave which had a name like ‘Turbo’ or ‘Exhaust Bay’.
“Is that helicopter pink?” Baxter asked.
I was not immediately sure of the significance but in any case, it was difficult to tell. It was dusk on the West Coast and the colour of the helicopter was just too close to call.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“No, it’s pink. Look at it.”
“It could be pink. Or it could be the light. You want me to write that it was a pink helicopter searching for survivors? As opposed to a blue one, or a green one? Do you think it’s worth the risk?”
“It’s a pink helicopter. What do you say, Hadley?”
Give me a gun. “It does look pink now, but we wouldn’t want to get it wrong. I can’t see any insignia, but isn’t it unlikely the coastguard would fly around in pink helicopters?”
“Of course it’s pink. You want to know why?” I didn’t. “It’s a gay helicopter. From San Francisco, most likely. Pinkie, pinkie helicopter. From San Francisco.” A cackling Baxter returned triumphantly to his office, slamming the door behind him.
The New Delhi bureau had written, on a Monday, a curtain-raiser to the Pope’s visit, beginning: ‘The Pope arrives in the Indian capital on Friday hoping to erase years of distrust’ etc, etc. The story was allotted to the English sub, Rupert, he of the violently shaking legs, whose life-long editorial mission was to hunt down the word ‘witness’ and change it to ‘eye-witness’ (as opposed to ear, nose or throat witness) and who wanted to make an ‘urgent’ (a couple of paragraphs moved super fast) out of it.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he’s arrived four days earlier than scheduled. He’s already there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It says he arrives.”
“It says he arrives on Friday.”
“How can he arrive on Friday?”
“What?”
“It says he ‘arrives’. Between you and me, that’s the present tense. Is, was and always will be.”
“I cannot believe this. The copy says he arrives on Friday. If he’d already arrived, it would have said he arrived on Monday.”
“How can he arrive on Friday? Friday is in the future.”
“So you want to say the Pope will arrive on Friday?”
“Not if he has already arrived today.”
I was thinking of either stabbing Rupert with my pen or launching a dramatic change in career when Baxter again exploded from his office.
“I heard the last bit of this and there is no doubt in my mind that the Pope is still due to arrive on Friday. A simple phone call would solve it once and for all.”
I was calmed and grateful. “Thank you, Rodney.”
“The only possible area of confusion is whether he means this Friday or next.”
“What?”
“The pontiff.”
“You’re right,” Rupert chimed in. “There’s another question for you. It’s pluperfect.”
“Another question for me? What do you mean it’s pluperfect?”
My self-proclaimed area of expertise was spelling. The computer system once had a built-in spellchecker, but it was useless in spotting the wrong use of ‘effect’ or ‘affect’, ‘it’s’ or ‘its’… It was useless anyway. It would throw up suggestions that were unscientific and ridiculous and which occasionally got on to the wire. Hadley Arnold, only once though, came out as Hardly Armchair. When it replaced former Chinese President Jiang Zemin with Jingo Semen, the whole thing was disabled. So was the sub who let it through after Baxter ran him down in his Hyundai Sonata. My reputation as a speller was reinforced, I thought, by a test of ten everyday words I would give to people and which I would preface by saying that I had learnt it from my uncle when I was kid and he had said the average score, among educated Englishmen, was two.
I would also make clear that what was an everyday word in the first half of the twentieth century was not necessarily so at the beginning of the twenty-first. I would also make it clear that my uncle, long since dead, had spent most of his adult life in colonial Africa where expats had had time on their hands and drunk a lot of gin on verandas.
One quiet afternoon, I gave the test to Baxter, who put his feet up on his desk confidently, leant back and stared at the ceiling.
“Hit me,” he said.
A great idea. The words were: embarrass (tricky – two ‘r’s or one?), harass (same!), rarefy (you’re kidding, an ‘e’?) vilify (cool!), supersede (whoa!), desiccate (no, no, you’re wrong), plaguy (what the fuck is that?), picnicking (silence), inoculate (you have to be kidding) and innuendo (um).
Baxter scored zero. Nil points. He dismissed me from his office and a week later fired off a letter of reprimand which was to go on my file, although what future generations of news editors would make of it was unclear.
“You may think you have embarrassed, or even harassed, me with your ludicrous spelling test which appears to be ‘out of Africa’. But it has since been superseded by events, so don’t think you can use it to vilify me. Your desiccated test is anyway inaccurate since I have since found that plaguy is extinct. Not that I am one to hold a grugue (sic), so I won’t ask you, willy-nilly, to name the last five secretary-generals of the United Nations.”
It was a constant battle of asserting one’s authority in a field in which all the stars were out reporting in any number of tongues and writing seamless copy, not sitting at desks and looking glum. And looking more and more glum the older they got; age could be cruel to wire service subs. Experience, in the most part but with notable exceptions, didn’t seem to add value. It just made someone who had managed to get ‘commitment’ right for twenty years start spelling it with a ‘k’. I had read a piece about the Sultan of Johor playing golf in Malaysia. It said that when he hit a bad shot, he would turn, grimacing, and scan the horizon to make sure no one had seen it and be angry if they had. The writer described it as a ‘360-degree scowl’. For subs on the Hong Kong desk, their entire working life was a 360-degree scowl. For the few who had a grasp of history (count me out here), there was some point to them being there. Most of those who claimed a grasp of grammar or the law didn’t know the difference between a transitive verb and Perry Mason.
