Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (9 page)

And I hardly looked at her legs at all. Even when she bent over to pick up her ticket from the floor and her skirt hitched right up at the back. I hardly even paid any attention at all to how smooth her skin seems to be. Because I’m married, right? Because – as we’ve already discussed – I’m not that kind of person.

It was nice to make a friend. Good old Jamie Best and his odd cuddly-toy-centric peccadilloes. Jamie Best and his Iggle Piggle pickle! He’s given me my finest career moment and he’s made me a new friend.

(Sadly, he hasn’t managed to make the trains run on time. But he is only one man. And, believe it or not, and don’t take this the wrong way and get any funny ideas, for once I welcomed the delay. Eighteen minutes extra chatting to Train Girl this morning? It flew by!)

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, July 26.

Dear Dan

Thank you for your letters of 21 and 26 July. I’m sorry to hear that once again our service has not been up to the standard I expect. The five-minute delay on the 21st was due to minor congestion and the lengthier delay on the 26th occurred because of the late arrival of a driver to another service in the Reading area. Unfortunately that left that particular service stuck on the platform – which then impacted upon a wide number of other services, yours included.

On unrelated matters, I’m afraid I don’t take generally take the
Sunday Globe
as a rule, though I have been known to pick it up on occasion. I am very pleased to hear that you scored a ‘scoop’ however and I do hope it makes things a little easier for you at work. I am more of a rugby than a footer fan myself, but I also hope Mr Best receives the professional help he so clearly needs. He would seem to be a very troubled young man.

Best regards

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
20.50 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, July 27. Amount of my day wasted: nine minutes. Fellow sufferers: Corporate Dungeon Master.

Martin, I’ve been thinking again.

What you want to do is take inspiration from the people of North Africa. Look south. Look beyond Paddington station and over Europe and into the streets and the squares of North Africa. There’s change afoot. There’s a revolution going on – and for once, it looks like the good guys are winning.

It’s inspiring, isn’t it? It only takes a spark. It only takes a moment to change everything about everything.

We’ve got another sweepstake running in the
Sunday Globe
newsroom. This war will be over by Christmas? Forget that: this war will be over by Halloween. (Although I’m not sure they celebrate either Christmas or Halloween down there.) When will this war be over? You know where I’ve put my money? I’ve put £50 on this war being over by the August Bank Holiday. I’ve put half a ton of my hard-earned on this war being over by the Reading Festival. They’ll be dancing on top of those tanks before September – you watch.

And if that’s not inspiring enough for you, take a look at the streets of Athens! Have a butchers at the piazzas of Naples! Get yourself an eyeful of what’s going down in Seville and Murcia! The people are taking control again. There’s agitation. Aggravation. There’s anticipation of change. Strikes and barricades, marches and demonstrations: all across southern Europe.

What are they getting up and angry about in our holiday hotspots? Who cares? Isn’t it enough that they are at all? Taxes, unemployment, corruption, student rights, agricultural policies… whatever. The point is that they’re putting down their cappuccinos, they’re abandoning their kebabs, they’re spurning their siestas and they’re shouting about it. They’re trying to make a change. They’re trying to make a
change
.

Still not inspired? OK, try this. How’s this for a tale of changing fortunes? You can keep your civil wars and revolutions, you can pooh-pooh your populist uprisings – this one’s a doozy. This one came straight out of left field.

It’s about me.

It seems I’m the man these days. At work, I mean. (I’m not the man at home. I mean, I am the man, the only man in the house, the only one of the three of us there with a Y chromosome – but I’m still not the man. I’m still the one to blame for everything, back at home.)

But at work… at work, I’m the man. Since my adventures with England’s Number 9, I’m the new darling of the news desk. It may even be that my days of non-bylined NIBs (News In Briefs, Martin, do keep up) might be numbered. It may even be that all those hours I spend getting the stories and standing up the stories, only to hand the stories over to someone more senior, might be over.

Goebbels is practically in love with me right now. It seems my scoop has eased the heat on him a little. Sales were up on Sunday, every news channel and Monday paper followed our lead, and for the first time in months, people stopped talking about us as a scandal-hit rag, or a shamed tabloid, or a crumbling empire, and remembered what it is we actually do. And that made everyone happy.

So Goebbels has gone all sweet for me. It seems I can do no wrong in the misty eyes of the deranged old psychopath. He even wants to take me out to lunch. (I say lunch – there’s unlikely to be any actual eating involved. In the best Fleet Street traditions that men like Goebbels were spawned from, ‘lunch’ means ‘pub’. And only women and children eat in pubs, right?)

Goebbels taking out a junior showbiz writer for lunch? It’s unprecedented. It’s unheard of. It’s, frankly, unbelievable. It’s about as predictable as a civil war in North Africa, about as rare as a pan-Mediterranean protest. And it’s certainly as exciting as both. (Well, for me, anyway.)

I’ll let you know what he says. I’ll let you know what comes of it all. But in the meantime, stay tuned – and hey! Don’t get so down on yourself! So my train was nine minutes late home tonight: that’s better than the 18 minutes it was delayed yesterday, right? That’s twice as good.

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
20.50 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, July 27.

Dear Dan

Many thanks for your letter and thank you for your encouraging words. Although your service on July 27 was unfortunately a victim of an incident involving the disturbance of a badger sett in the Taplow area, it is reassuring to know that it has not put you off continuing to use Premier Westward.

Best

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
21.18 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, August 3. Amount of my day wasted: 14 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Corporate Dungeon Master.

Dear Martin

What about you, big man? Are you well? Are you good? (Don’t you just hate it when you ask someone how they are and they reply ‘good’? I’m not asking after your moral health. I don’t care if you’re good or bad. Or even, as Corporate Dungeon Master’s little on-screen alter-ego would appear to be, ‘Chaotic Neutral’. I was enquiring about your physical and mental wellbeing. Are you well? Or unwell?)

I hope you’re well. Both physically and mentally. I hope you’re in a better state (physically, mentally and most likely morally) than the company you’re supposed to be running, at least.

As for me, I’m OK, thank you. You know, mustn’t grumble. Work is still going well, at least. I’m still the news desk’s golden child. Did you see the paper on Sunday? Three bylined pieces! (Plus all my usual guff, the stuff that doesn’t get my name attached to it, the titbits and teasers and gossipy asides.) Goebbels is still smiling at me. Creepy though that is.

And there’s the England match to look forward to. I’ll be working Saturday afternoon of course, but I’ll have the radio on. The first England match of the season. Against the European champions, too. How will our plucky lads fare against the continental pass masters? How will our gritty determination play out against their silky skills? All eyes will be on Jamie Best. All of England will be looking towards the troubled young striker and sometime soft-toy kleptomaniac…

I, personally, cannot wait. It will be a match to savour, one way or the other. Will you be there? In your box at Wembley, quaffing Chianti and eyeing up the prawn sandwiches? Of course you will. England expects!

But, you know, it’s not all wine and roses, is it? Nothing ever is. What’s that we were saying about Pyrrhic victories? Work, for example, is going well – but it’s coming at a cost, of course.

I hate to keep asking your childcare advice, but do you ever cease arguing, once you become parents? Do you ever stop it with the nagging and the sniping and the snapping? Do you ever get back to how things were before the birth, when you used to enjoy talking to each other?

And so we have these arguments, over and over and over and over (like a monkey with a miniature cymbal, as someone smarter than me once put it) and the end result is always the same: I don’t understand. And she’s always crying. And I feel frustrated and angry and misunderstood, but also like a bully and a bad husband and a bad man. And it breaks my heart.

I don’t want to be a bully and a bad husband and a bad man. I don’t want to argue with Beth. Why would I want to do that? I want to help her. I love her. I want it to be like it was before, when we never argued, when we spent most of our time laughing, when we could make fun of each other without immediately taking offence, taking it personally, taking it the wrong way. I want to come home and have her happy that my career looks like it might be going somewhere.

And instead… take my scoop. Take the weekend’s adventures, my moment of triumph, my big break. What was my wife’s reaction? A weak ‘Well done’ and a week’s worth of resentment. It’s all very well for me to go off gallivanting to Manchester chasing stupid footballers, you see – but some people have to stay at home and look after our baby. It’s all very well for me to drop everything at a moment’s notice to go enjoy myself writing about celebs – but some of us have to live in the real world, the world of feeds and nappies and endless exhaustion.

My Sunday scoop: the way you’d hear it in my house, you’d think it was an entirely selfish act. Can you credit it?

Oh, and now I feel worse. Because now I’ve read this letter back to myself and it sounds like I hate Beth. I don’t. I love her. It’s just… I wish I wasn’t always in the wrong. I wish she’d appreciate what I have to go through too.

It makes me wonder what they talk about at these baby groups she goes to. (Three times a week now.) She’s made friends there, which is great, obviously, a couple of older mums I know from sight, one on her third and the other on her second, living proof that it must get better, that people must go back for more of the same; plus some single dad type from up Jericho way, where the houses are nicer and the pubs are all ‘bars’ and the shops are all ‘delis’.

He’s a
Guardian
reader, apparently. Just him and his baby boy in an end-of-terrace. With basement and loft-conversion, natch. No doubt tastefully decorated in stripped pine and neutral colours and a hint of the exotic. Just him and his baby boy… oh – and the cleaner three times a week, obviously.

Seems he got disillusioned with working in the city and now freelances for charities. No idea where the mother is. (Part of me wonders if she got sick of the sheer smugness of it all: you see his type round Oxford a lot – sipping on their fairtrade lattes and rustling their
Guardians
and banging on about the shanty towns and slums of New Delhi and Buenos Aires, talking earnestly of their internet campaigns and letters to the editors of worthy magazines nobody actually reads, and all the while sitting on mortgage-free half-a-million-quid houses and planning to send their kids to public schools.)

Let’s just say he’s not my type. He’s rugby more than football, if you know what I mean. He probably even calls it ‘footer’. (No offence, Martin.) He’s not the sort of person I would choose to hang out with, but of course I’d never say that to Beth. It’s great she’s got a friend. Good for her.

But I can’t help wondering, great though it is she’s got someone to talk to during the day… what is it they actually talk about? We never talk, not in a meaningful way. What is it my wife and the other mums, my wife and the single dad (let’s call him Mr Blair. It’s not his name but I can’t help thinking it suits) actually talk about?

Does she laugh, when she’s with Mr Blair? Does he make her laugh? Does she listen to tales of his work? Is she impressed by them? Is she interested in what he has to say?

Would you believe me if I told you I hope he does make her laugh? Because, believe it or not, I do hope he does. I don’t want her to forget how to laugh completely, you know.

Oh dear. I’m sorry. What a downer of a letter! And after all the excitement of my last letter too. I promise to make the next one better. I promise to keep my woes to myself. Next time I’m delayed, Martin, I shall stick to talk of trains. You have my word.

And enjoy the match! Come on England! Come on Jamie Best!

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
21.18 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, August 3.

Dear Dan

Please accept my apologies for the late running of the 21.18 yesterday. The train was held up due to a strange sound being heard underneath one of the coaches after it arrived at Slough. Subsequent investigation proved it to be a false alarm, but the train was unable to make up the time lost before it reached Oxford.