Based on a True Story (3 page)

Not for the last time, she made a decision in a second that could have benefited from a few minutes’ scrutiny.

“Do you know what, Kenneth? I’m not sure I’m in the mood for Chinese.”

He flashed a smile that had clearly served him well before, and stubbed out his cigarette. Stuffing his notebook into a shoulder bag more vibrantly patterned than anything Augusta owned, Deller reached for her hand. Stay where she was and salve her wounded pride, or follow the man with the orange flowered handbag? It seemed an oddly momentous decision.

“And so I followed him, darling,” Augusta told Frances, watching a waitress squeeze past with a carafe of wine. “We ended up down the street at the Pillars of Hercules. Do you know it? Gruesome place. It always smells like they’re pulling cat piss from the taps. Anyway, we got chucked out because Kenneth decided that the barman was ogling my bosom — I had misplaced a button or two over the evening, truth be told. My hero decided the only way to save my honour was to challenge the poor barman to a duel, armed with a wretched old cactus he’d found withering in a corner.”

The girl turned up her hands expectantly. “And? Don’t leave it there. Then what?”

“Well, the cactus was ancient, but somehow it had obtained quite a keen cutting edge, and how was Kenneth to know the barman was a hemophiliac?” The girl made a sound of horror or delight, and scratched a note on her pad.

They had fled through the night, hand in hand, Deller’s ridiculous orange bag banging against his hip. At one point, skittering down the wet pavement of Brewer Street, they’d tried to help a dustman upend a rubbish bin into the back of his truck.

“Oi, mate,” the dustman said, gently removing the overflowing can from Deller, who reeled under its weight. “Them’s a job for professionals.”

“It was sage advice,” Augusta said. “Some things are meant for professionals. I wish I’d actually listened to that even once in my life.” Her gaze was lost in the distance. “That particular interview went on for four days, and we ended up in Kenneth’s brother’s bedsit outside Salford. Not even Salford proper, you understand.”

“Whoa,” the girl breathed.

Enthusiasm always made Augusta nervous; she could never tell when it was authentic. But the girl seemed genuinely thrilled with the story.

“So,” Frances began and halted. “Did you . . . and Kenneth . . .”

“Did we sleep together? My God, of course we did. We were in Salford, did I mention? For four days. In November. There was no heating, darling. Once we’d stolen all of his brother’s ten-pence coins there was nothing to do but get under the covers.”

Ten-pence coins? Frances wondered if this was some strange method of British foreplay. If so, where did the coins go?

“Of course, he turned out to be a bastard of epic proportions. And a fraud. He’s reinvented himself as some sort of love guru in your home state.” Her lip curled. “Mr. Romance, my arse.” Abruptly she stopped, as if she’d suddenly realized who she was sharing a table with. She placed her handbag on her lap and snapped it shut.

“That story’s not in your book.” Frances reached over to check that the Record button was still lit on her tiny silver machine.

Augusta shrugged. “I felt like a tailor when I was writing it. The art is all in the cutting. And I hardly wanted to give Kenneth Deller the satisfaction of one more go-round between my covers.”

four

The newsroom smelled, as always, of cold coffee and yesterday’s air. Even when a rare breeze blew in off the streets of Farringdon, the office of the
London Advance
maintained the freshness of a Victorian coffin. Look closely and you’d see claw marks on the ceiling. Frances never looked.

In the corners of the newsroom, derelict printers occasionally spat out sheets of paper that no one collected. The grey vinyl floor was scabbed with cigarette burns, even though smoking had been banned for a decade — at least officially. A burnt tinge to the early-morning air spoke of a different reality for the late-shift reporters, whose lawlessness was overlooked as compensation for their punishing, and increasingly irrelevant, hours.

Frances slumped into her chair, temples pounding. The profile of Augusta sat open on her computer, a creature half-wrestled to the ground. Every time she felt she’d pinned part of her subject, Augusta slithered from her grasp. Frances wasn’t used to this kind of frustration: normally, she wrote blithely, quickly, as confident with words as she was cautious in life.

She suspected that Augusta had sold her a counterfeit bill of goods, yet she was having trouble mustering a suitably indignant response. An actress had a tentative relationship with reality. So what? It was entertainment, darling. The heresy of that thought startled Frances, and she sneaked a look around the newsroom to see if anyone had noticed the traitor in their midst. Facts were her path; truth was the way. In the ten years she’d been writing down other people’s words, she had never questioned this basic assumption.

Frances ground her palms into her eyes. It was almost four o’clock. Stanley would be escaping the afternoon meeting any time now, cheery or despondent depending on how his writers’ stories had fared. His armpit stains frequently spoke of woe.

Lately his crankiness had been unleavened by any lighter mood. Each day brought dire rumours about the paper’s fate — a new owner with deep pockets, said the optimists, while the half-empty brigade insisted they’d heard rumours that the whole operation would soon be moved online and staffed from a call centre in Tobago.

Pushing her chair away, Frances crouched above her desk to scan the newsroom. There was the usual spurt of near-deadline activity, not a buzz exactly, but more of a stuttering, as if the very cold engine of an ancient car had been coaxed to life.

Her email provided no relief from the day’s anxieties. A message from Human Resources invited her to a stress-busting workshop on the first floor:
Please be reminded that lunch is not provided during the Lunch and Learn sessions.

A note had arrived from her mother during the night. Mid-afternoon in California. Frances pictured her sitting by the kitchen window overlooking the ocean, the half-sized appliances neatly wiped down, a cup of fair-trade coffee by her elbow. A moment of peace while Frances’s father napped. Frances skimmed the email, wincing at its muted admonition:
I wish you could find time to come and visit. I know how busy you are, but Daddy would love to see you while his good moments are still frequent.

She jerked around as the chair next to her gave a wheeze. “You missed the cake,” said her desk mate, Sue.

“There was cake?”

“The last of the purge. Arthur’s leaving today.”

Frances peered across the newsroom at Arthur, a cardiganned hobbit who’d been the
Advance
’s literary editor for as long as anyone could remember. (“Arthur buggered the Bard,” read the graffiti in the men’s toilet, or so she had heard.) The newspaper was culling the herd in a desperate attempt to fend off insolvency. Long-serving journalists had been invited in for a quiet chat with management and told that their contributions, while invaluable and magnificent, were not what the
Advance
needed in an era of linked digital strategies. Arthur and his fellow veterans were each given a large envelope marked Voluntary Severance Protocol. And a cake.

“Arthur’s older than evil,” said Sue.

“No,” said Frances, “he’s exactly the same age as despair.”

They watched as the literary editor hoisted his Penguin bag over his shoulder. Stacks of books covered the surface of his desk, and more were piled on the floor around it.
Surely he can’t mean to leave them all behind
, Frances thought. But he was already halfway out the door, radiating the bliss of the freed hostage.

He raised a hand: “The wallpaper is killing me,” he said, and disappeared.

There was silence as the
Advance
journalists considered this latest loss, the perilous state of their careers, the attrition of the industry they loved. Then, as one, they rose and began to trot toward Arthur’s desk.

“Come on,” said Sue, who was already out of her seat. “Free books!”

Frances followed, because she would follow Sue anywhere. The
Advance
’s television columnist was her dearest friend in London — her only friend, it sometimes seemed. A single mother to three fractious children, Sue allowed all the mischief she denied herself at home free rein in the newsroom. At sixteen she’d escaped from a tiny town in Wales whose name had been bled dry of vowels.

The hordes had already descended on Arthur’s desk by the time Frances and Sue arrived. Like ants, they took whatever they could carry. Frances noticed the crime editor walking away with a slab of a coffee-table book called
People of Antwerp.
Most of the mystery novels were already gone. Poetry and politics remained.

“I feel terrible for Arthur,” Frances whispered to Sue. “It’s like we’re taking the pennies right off his eyes.”

“Mmmm,” said Sue. “Do you need a stapler?” She pulled out a hardcover from a teetering stack and held it out to Frances. “Augusta Price’s memoir. Didn’t you have to interview her?”

Frances did not need another reminder of the story that sat, limply half-written, on her computer. She was busy extricating a biography of Lord Beaverbrook from a pile.
Stan will love this
, she thought, her heart thudding at the idea of handing it to him.

Sue began leafing through
Based on a True Story
. “I forgot she was still alive, until I read that excerpt in the
Mirror.
Was it true, that business about the shaman? Christ. The things that woman’s survived. Is she still a drunk, or did one of those stints in rehab actually stick?”

Frances tucked the Beaverbrook biography under her arm; maybe she would see Stan at the pub later. He usually joined them for a drink.

“Did you know Augusta Price isn’t her real name?” Frances asked. “She was born Anna Maria Ferragosto.” She took the book from Sue. “But she doesn’t write about that. Or lots of other things that happened to her. The book’s hogwash, if you ask me.”

“Hogwash,” said Sue. “You really have to stop fouling the air with your profanity or Stan’ll wash your mouth out with soap. Although,” she said, feigning interest in a guide to gluten intolerance, “you might enjoy that.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, I forgot. I’m not supposed to notice that you fancy Herr Big Arse.”

“He does not have a big ass,” Frances said indignantly. “He’s just a bit pyramid-shaped.”

It was humiliating enough to have a crush on her boss; that it was obvious to her colleagues was a mortification beyond words. Frances began to leaf through the Beaverbrook biography, although her thoughts lay in the past, when she’d arrived at Stanley Pfeffer’s office door two years earlier, clutching a message of introduction from a mutual friend and a sheaf of clips she’d written for the
Bakersfield Californian
.

Pfeffer was barking at someone on the phone when she entered his office, and she stood nervously by his desk until he muttered, “Bye then, Mum,” and hung up. He turned to face her, and waved toward a chair. He needed a haircut, and it looked as if he shaved with a chainsaw, but he had friendly, tired eyes and she liked him immediately.

He asked after their mutual friend, and flipped through the stories she’d carefully culled to showcase her strengths, stories about drought, foreclosures, homelessness. She noticed, with alarm, his eyes begin to glaze. He neatened the stack and pushed it back toward her. “Why’d you want to work here anyway?”

Frances flipped through her stock responses — change the world, make a difference — but she feared he would just sneer at her. Earnest American. The answers she’d rehearsed in the hotel mirror had evaporated. Her mouth was dry.

Pfeffer’s phone rang, but he ignored it. “I mean, leave California for this —” he flapped a hand at the ash-grey sky outside his window. “You’d have to be mad.”

Frances sensed a door closing before it had even opened. She blurted, “Journalism may kill me, but it’ll keep me alive while I’m doing it.”

He leaned forward sharply, cocking his head. “What was that?”

“It’s just something Horace Greeley said. He was an American newspaper editor.”

“I know who he was.” Pfeffer gave her a small, sideways smile, and she realized he was younger than she’d first thought. “Greeley was high minded,” he said. “They called his newspaper the ‘Great Moral Organ.’” He studied her, as if trying to solve a puzzle with no clues. “Are you high minded, Frances?”

She couldn’t look away. Tentatively, she said, “Only if I’m required to be?”

He burst out laughing and rocked back in his chair. “Good. Because those sods out there all want to write about the plight of the downtrodden. I need somebody to find stories people might actually want to read.”

Frances thought about the four-part series on corruption in the sewage-treatment industry that she’d written in Bakersfield.

“That’s me,” she said. “Only the stories that people want to read. Sex and death and animals.”

Stanley rubbed his jaw. “It’s your choice. The hours are crap and the pay’s worse. The pub downstairs is all right, though.”

He turned back to his computer and Frances realized, with a giddiness that filled her from head to toe, that he was offering her a job. It turned out to be a short-term contract with no benefits and no security, repeatedly renewed, but it didn’t matter. Suddenly every morning was a doorway; every day sped by.

“There’s your love now,” whispered Sue, and Frances elbowed her, keeping her eyes on the senior editors leaving the meeting room. Stanley hurried past them, head between his shoulders, brows creased as he scanned a printout. His prematurely grey hair looked as if it housed a family of badgers.

For once, Stanley didn’t turn to her and ask about her story, or share a sarcastic remark about the newsroom’s collective laziness. Frances felt an odd shiver run down her back, but shrugged it off. She was being ridiculous. The purge was over.

A tobacco-rich voice spoke in her ear, making her jump. “We’re sold to the Russians. It’s the dole queue for us.”

“The fuck we are, Gareth,” said Sue. “I’ve heard nothing about it.”

The office messenger had sidled up to them, and now he picked up a book from Arthur’s desk. “This intel’s pretty good,” he said. “Some
KGB
fucker looking for an investment in London. He’s bought the paper and he’s going to give it to his kids to run. Run into the ground, innit.”

Normally Gareth could not be induced to stir from his post at the back of the newsroom, where he sucked in an unending stream of Twitter feeds, aggrieved rants to radio call-in shows, and texts from dodgy friends in Peckham, then spat them back out as undisputed truth. It was troubling that he considered this gossip sterling enough to deliver in person.

“First thing,” he said, “they gonna fire half the editors and reporters. Then they find someone to do it cheaper overseas. Next thing you know,
bam
” — he slammed his fist on Arthur’s desk, making them both jump — “all your stories about
EastEnders
are being written in Bombay.”

“Mumbai,” said Frances, not really listening. A terrible feeling had come over her.

“Bollocks,” said Sue, but she sounded uneasy. More than half her time was spent writing about
EastEnders
.

Thick as he was, Gareth somehow sensed their distress. “Never mind,” he said, and plucked a copy of
Heat
magazine off Arthur’s desk (“Porky Princess’s Shame-Stain Saturday!”). “Taking the piss out of celebrities. That’s where the money is.”

They walked back to their desks in silence. Frances slid into her seat. She tried not to imagine her future as an arctic slide through failure toward death. There were two months left on her contract, and it had never occurred to her that it wouldn’t be renewed. It wouldn’t make any sense for Stanley to let her go, would it? She was the equivalent of slave labour — cheap as chips. The newspaper didn’t even pay her benefits.

An atavistic sense of preservation told her she should probably get out of the office as quickly as possible. She was just rising from her chair when she saw the door to Stanley’s office swing open. Even from where she was standing, she could see that a Niagara of worry had spread under his arms and down his sides. Without stopping to talk to anyone, he made his way to her desk, eyes on the floor.

Not good
, whispered a voice in the back of her head.
Not good at all. Miss Bleeker? Do you think you could come into the office to discuss the test results?

Stan stopped at her desk, and clawed one hand through his hair so that it stood like a cockatiel’s crest. He managed a smile, and that was when Frances’s chest tightened.
Nurse? Could you leave us alone for a moment?

“Hello, Frances,” he said. “Do you think I could see you alone for a moment?”