Better Together (17 page)

‘Huh?’

‘Well the studio is part of a guesthouse,’ she explained.

‘You didn’t say that when you rang me last week,’ said Talia. ‘You said you’d got a studio apartment and I told you that Ardbawn couldn’t be that backward if it had apartments.’

‘Every last town in Ireland has apartments these days,’ Sheridan reminded her. ‘Even if half of them are empty. I hadn’t seen it myself then. It’s a converted garage in the grounds of a guesthouse. It’s not bad, to be honest.’

‘Sounds different.’

‘It’s lovely if you like the whole back-to-nature sort of thing,’ said Sheridan. ‘Though the owner is a bit weird. She was very friendly when I enquired about it first, but she was a bit stand-offish today.’

‘Probably suddenly worrying about having the fearless journalist snooping around her guests.’

Sheridan chuckled. ‘You never know what goes on in these guesthouses. I could crack a cow-smuggling ring or something and the next thing Nina Fallon will be headline news.’

‘Nina Fallon!’ exclaimed Talia. ‘You’re staying in her guesthouse?’

‘Well, like I said, in a studio—’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. Sheridan Gray, do you not read your own newspaper?’

‘Which one? Given that I’m now the ace at the
Central News
.’

‘The
Scope
, you eejit.’ Talia went on to remind Sheridan of the previous year’s exposure of Sean Fallon as a cheating husband.

‘Oh my God!’ Sheridan couldn’t believe she’d forgotten (although, she thought, tracking soap stars and their lives wasn’t really her thing and she didn’t watch
Chandler’s Park
so she couldn’t really blame herself). ‘Nina’s his wife?’

‘Yes, you clot!’

‘Poor woman,’ said Sheridan. ‘It must be horrible to have your husband’s stupidity plastered all over the paper. Who broke that story? Elise?’ Elise had been one of the
Scope
’s lifestyle journalists.

‘Of course it was Elise,’ replied Talia. ‘You know what she’s like. Loves digging the dirt. She’s got a job now, by the way.’

‘Has she?’

‘With one of the tabloids.’

‘Bloody hell.’ Sheridan couldn’t help the dart of envy that went through her. She’d been in touch with the tabloids and they’d told her they weren’t hiring. She’d been gutted by that. Sport was as big a deal to most of them as cheating husbands. Of course sometimes they were the same story . . .

‘You didn’t want to work on a red-top, did you?’ asked Talia.

‘They would’ve paid better than the
Central News
,’ said Sheridan. ‘And I’m not snobby about it. OK, so they’re light on actual writing, but they do have their fingers on the pulse.
Whereas here . . .’ she picked up the copy of the
Central News
that she’d taken from the café when she’d come for her interview, and looked at the story about new stalls being available for the weekly farmers’ market, ‘here the pulse is pretty slow.’

‘You’ll speed it up,’ promised Talia. ‘I know you will.’

Sheridan wasn’t so sure about that. As far as she could tell, the pace of life was going to be glacial. Just like, it seemed, the owner of the Bawnee River Guesthouse.

Sheridan woke early the next morning and was at the offices of the
Central News
before nine. She wasn’t sure there’d be anyone in before her. There had always been someone in the
Scope
’s offices no matter what time of day it was, but she assumed that the
Central News
had a more laid-back sort of approach to punctuality and sniffing out important stories. So she bought herself a coffee in the deli before ringing the bell at the commercial centre. Almost at once the buzzer on the door sounded and she pushed it open. In the shadows at the top of the stairs she saw a figure leaning over the rail

‘Sheridan Gray?’

She nodded.

‘Myra Clarke,’ said the figure. ‘Delighted you’re here.’

Sheridan had already built up a mental picture of Myra Clarke. In her mid-thirties, she’d imagined. A bit bossy, because she was an admin person and they were always bossy. The ones at the
City Scope
had driven the journalists mad asking for receipts and time sheets and holiday rosters and all sorts of rubbish and getting narky when they didn’t hand over what they wanted straight away. Myra was probably the
same, she’d decided, and possibly looking a bit tired given that she was so far advanced in her pregnancy.

Her mental image bore absolutely no relation to the person she was looking at now. Myra was a tiny woman who appeared barely out of her teens – although that might have been something to do with the fact that her hair, in a feathery pixie cut, was shocking pink and she had the smoothest, clearest skin Sheridan had ever seen in an adult. She was dressed in a black silk smock that came down to her knees. She was also wearing black leggings and black biker boots. Her pregnancy bump was enormous.

‘Come on in,’ said Myra. ‘We’ve loads to talk about before I head off and Genevieve gets a move on.’

‘Genevieve?’ said Sheridan uncertainly.

‘My baby.’ Myra sat down behind her desk. ‘I can’t wait for her to come along. I feel like a flipping rhino at the moment. I mean, you can see for yourself.’

Sheridan nodded, not really knowing the appropriate response.

‘And those feckers DJ and Shimmy, well, they spend their time laughing at me because I waddle around the place. I tell them that I’ll sue their sorry arses for discrimination and harassment, but sure they’re nothing but big lumps of eejits themselves.’

‘Right,’ said Sheridan.

‘I’m the one that keeps the show on the road,’ said Myra cheerfully. ‘They’ll natter on about their editing skills and their IT skills and their sales skills and whatever, but they’d be nowhere without me to keep an eye on them.’

‘I see.’

‘So you have to be on the ball the whole time with them
or they’ll run rings around you and nothing will get done. Now to be fair to Shimmy, he’s great at the aul’ website stuff and he’s an absolute demon of a salesman, but pure useless at getting the money in, which is the most important job you have in the whole place.’ Myra’s big blue eyes looked earnestly at Sheridan. ‘Paudie – Mr O’Malley – has a minimum amount of revenue he expects us to bring in, and if we don’t, well, we’re up the creek without a paddle ’cos he could close us down in an instant. You have to balance his ads against the proper paying ones. Not that he needs to advertise and not that he couldn’t afford to keep the
Central
running anyway, but he says everything has to have a commercial bias and so that’s important.’ Myra paused for breath and then began talking again. ‘So, the way it is, Sheridan, no matter what you think, it’s vital to get that ad money in. I have a system set up on the computer and I’ll show it to you. After that, it’s the pieces from our contributors. Naturally we need to keep them coming, but it’s not a crisis if one of them makes a total mess of it because we can always write something ourselves. DJ is great at it, but sure you’re a proper journalist so you’ll be able to do it no bother at all.’

‘Right,’ said Sheridan in Myra’s next pause for breath.

‘I’ve a list of people who send us contributions – household tips, beauty advice, recipes, that sort of stuff. You’ve got to make sure that Des sends in the sports reports, and keep at him to go to the girls’ and ladies’ matches – he’s a sexist bollix and wouldn’t bother otherwise, no matter that the girls all love seeing their names in the paper and their mammies buy multiple copies when there’s a report on their games. You have to write some articles – DJ will tell you about them. Sometimes he starts them and you have to finish them; to
be honest I was pure shite at that, it would’ve been quicker for him to write it all himself but I think he thought I should sort of try to be a journalist person even though I’m not . . .’ She beamed at Sheridan. ‘He was very concerned that I’d be worried about a real one with experience taking over my job, but it’s not a worry at all because it’s not like you’d want to stay in Ardbawn for ever; you’re practically famous, you’ve had your byline in a proper paper.’

By now Sheridan was almost dizzy listening to Myra, but the younger girl had more to say.

‘The stuff you have to do yourself, absolutely have to, is the agony-aunt column and the horoscopes. We don’t get the horoscopes on syndicate – Paudie thinks it’s nice for them to have a kind of local flavour – and people
do
write in with problems, God love them, so we have to do the replies ourselves.’

‘Agony aunt!’ Sheridan looked horrified. ‘DJ never said anything about being an agony aunt. I can’t possibly do that.’

‘Of course you can,’ said Myra. ‘It’s just common sense.’

‘Well, yes, but . . .’

‘Just imagine you’re talking to your best friend who wants to do something stupid,’ Myra said. ‘Easy-peasy. The horoscopes are harder, I think. You have to make up stuff and I’m desperate at it.’

‘I told DJ I could do horoscopes, but to be honest I was spoofing,’ admitted Sheridan. ‘I don’t believe in them at all.’

‘You don’t have to.’ Myra grinned at her. ‘All you have to do is write them.’

By the time DJ and Seamus (Shimmy, Sheridan reminded herself) arrived about fifteen minutes later, Myra had
introduced Sheridan to the accounting system that she used. Sheridan had never had to worry about accounts before, and she wasn’t entirely sure she’d be any good at it now – maths had never been her strong point.

‘How’re ya, sweetheart!’ DJ held out his hand and Sheridan did her best not to wince. ‘Welcome to our little hive of activity.’

‘What activity?’ demanded Myra. ‘You pair of slackers should’ve been here ages ago. Though I suppose it’s letting Sheridan know how things really are – she’ll be doing all the work and you’ll be taking all the credit.’

DJ chuckled. ‘Ah, get that bee out of your bonnet, Myra, and make us a nice cup of tea.’

‘Make it yourself,’ said Myra. ‘Last time I looked you had hands of your own.’

Sheridan’s eyes darted anxiously between the two of them, but then she realised that this was routine banter. There was no malice in their words, and when both of them guffawed, she allowed herself to relax.

‘Have you told her everything that needs doing?’ asked DJ.

‘Well we had to do something while we were waiting for you,’ said Myra. ‘We’ve gone through the accounts stuff, because the rest of it will be like falling off a log for her.’

‘I’m not all that familiar with accounts,’ said Sheridan apologetically.

‘Get yourself up to speed as quick as you can,’ DJ said. ‘We send in monthly reports to Paudie. He expects us to keep the finances under control.’

‘That’s what I told her,’ said Myra.

‘Does everything depend on Paudie O’Malley?’ My first investigative question, Sheridan told herself.

‘Not entirely,’ DJ replied. ‘But he’s the owner, and you know what it’s like, the owner is the boss.’

‘Like a football club,’ said Myra helpfully. ‘They might know jack-all, but they’re still paying the bills.’

Sheridan laughed. And so did Myra. As DJ and Shimmy joined in too, she started to think that maybe a few months with the
Central News
might not be the worst way of spending her time. Especially if she came out of it as a winner in the end.

By five o’clock she was utterly exhausted. She’d never worked as hard in her life. There had been plenty of times with the
City Scope
when she’d had to churn out a few thousand words in a single sitting, but they had always been her own words and she’d always been in control. Now she realised that at the
Central News
, everything was about teamwork. She was expected to be able to answer the phone, do some filing, make tea (everyone takes turns, Myra assured her; this isn’t the last bastion of male chauvinism, I promise you, no matter how much they’d like it to be), edit pieces sent in by local contributors (or possibly rewrite them, she realised as she looked at an almost incomprehensible account of a fund-raising book sale, still not sure at the end of it what it was actually raising money for) and then read the emails and letters sent in for the Ask Sarah advice column.

‘I always thought the problems in local papers were made up,’ said Sheridan as she leafed through them.

‘No, we get loads of them,’ said Myra. ‘The thing is, everyone thinks their problem is unique, but it’s not. So you’ve buckets of advice to fall back on. Look – I have a
whole folder of stuff here you can go through.’ She double-clicked on an icon on the computer screen and a window opened with a series of folders marked ‘cheating husband’, ‘jealous boyfriend’, ‘affairs’, ‘mother-in-laws’, ‘difficult children’ and a variety of other headings.

‘Wow,’ said Sheridan. ‘All these problems exist in Ardbawn?’

Myra chuckled. ‘Well they probably do, and maybe we need one big psychiatrist’s couch,’ she said. ‘But our letters come from all over – Kilkenny, Carlow, in fact anywhere in the whole world, because people who grew up in the area and moved away still look at the
Central News
website or the digital version. They have to subscribe to get full access,’ she added, ‘but you’d be surprised at how many do. Loads of them still log on from places like the States and Australia.’

‘No place like home,’ said Sheridan.

‘Exactly.’ Myra beamed at her. ‘And we do our best to reach out to those readers and give them what they want, which is news from the town and the surrounding area, information on how things are changing and all that sort of stuff.’

‘What if you discover that someone from Ardbawn has become famous or something?’

‘Oh, we give them lots of coverage,’ said Myra confidently. ‘We love to see people doing well.’

‘What about Sean Fallon?’

The office was suddenly silent. Sheridan could feel three pairs of eyes looking at her.

‘I’m staying with his ex-wife,’ she reminded them.

‘She’s still his wife.’ Myra corrected her. ‘They’re not divorced.’

‘Sean’s an idiot,’ DJ said. ‘Everybody in Ardbawn supported
him and then he makes fool of himself by his carry-on with that tramp. You’d imagine he’d have more sense.’