The Ties That Bind (17 page)

‘How do you know what’s what?’ he said. ‘Nothing’s labelled.’

‘It’s all in here,’ said Sandy, tapping the side of her head. ‘This corner of the room, for example, deals with political stories that crossed the border into celebrity, which usually means sex. So you’ve got John Profumo and Christine Keeler, John Major and Edwina Currie . . .’

‘Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe,’ continued Luke. Sandy opened another drawer, apparently at random. ‘Presidents get their own file,’ she said. Luke pulled a file at random and opened it to find Hillary Clinton putting a brave face on things.

‘It’s like the internet, but real,’ said Luke, replacing the file with care.

Sandy pursed her lips. ‘I know that anyone under thirty finds this incredibly hard to believe, but what’s online is really only the tip of the iceberg, you know. A lot of the papers have digitised their entire archive but most of the magazines still haven’t, and the further back you go, the more rarity value the stuff has. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had to use a cuttings service? If you’d started twenty years ago you’d have been virtually reliant on one. You had to ring up and ask for what you wanted and then they’d fax it, or post it, if we’re really going back in the mists of time. When I left my job, the idea was that I’d freelance and do this on the side, but I soon realised I could make more money providing cuttings for journalists than I could by being one.’

‘How do you even go about starting something like this?’ asked Luke. Sandy shrugged.

‘I hadn’t thrown a magazine out since I was a young girl so I had everything I needed. They knew they’d get what they needed from me, and that I’d do it faster than anyone else. I won’t lie, it’s not what it was. If you plotted a graph of what’s happened to my income in the last fifteen years it would probably make me cry. But there are still a few journalists who like to do it the old-fashioned way. It’s mostly celebrity interviewers now, or biographers who want access to stuff you just can’t get online. Look at Joan.’ She opened a locker that was stacked top-to-toe with files. Topmost was an interview from 1952 with a very young Joan Collins, cheekbones almost three-dimensional on the page. He rummaged. A later file, from the 1990s, saw the face, virtually unchanged, peering from the cover of
Hello
magazine. ‘So when someone at one of the supplements wants to interview Joan, they come to me. At a pound a page, I can still just about make it work. She came here herself once, you know, when she was writing her own book. Said it helped
enormously
.’

Sandy’s eyes lost their focus for a moment. Luke pictured Joan Collins poring over old pages amid the rat traps and wondered how seriously he should take this woman.

‘And the local stuff?’

‘That’s all on the next floor. Actually there’s a bigger market for that these days than there is for the mainstream cuttings. The internet seems to have brought a lot of amateur authors crawling out of the woodwork. I get a lot of aspiring novelists. Want to see it all?’

If the first and second floors had been organised chaos, up here, in what should have been two large bedrooms, all pretence of order had been abandoned. Books, boxes, concertina files and albums lined the shelves, teetered on tabletops and were stacked in piles on the floor.

‘You’re pretty close to running out of space.’

‘I know. There’s a cellar but it’s too damp to store anything, let alone paper. It’d all be mould within a week. I dread to think what it would cost to have it converted to proper storage. But there’s method in the madness, I promise you,’ said Sandy. ‘Test me. Ask me for anything. Any period, any event, and I can show you how it affected Brighton and Hove.’

Careful not to show his cards too early, Luke threw out a date at random. ‘OK, what about . . . the First World War?’ he said.

Without pausing she made her way through a connecting door that led to a little dressing-room. She took a suitcase from the top of a leaning wardrobe and opened the catches to reveal perfectly flat pages of newsprint; one from the outbreak of war, the banner headline reading THE KING ADDRESSES HIS NAVY, a little cache of handwritten letters, tied with a ragged red ribbon, and a 1916 diary. Luke opened it and flicked gently through. The writing was cramped and sloping as if paper were precious, and there was not a single paragraph break in the whole volume. His eyes, not yet recovered from the coalface of microfilm, protested and he closed the covers. An age-spotted envelope contained three telegrams, each informing the same mother that she had lost another son, making his dry eyes prickle.

‘I do keep meaning to sort out a system that someone
else
could decipher, but there’s new stuff coming in all the time.’ She gestured to a bellied cardboard box that had once contained potatoes, now criss-crossed with masking tape. ‘I inherited that last month from an old colleague of my Ted’s. The fella died last year, but his daughter only just had the heart to get rid of all his stuff. There’s about sixty years’ worth of negs and plates in there, stretching right back to the fifties.’

‘Is that how you get all this stuff? People just give it to you?’

‘The local stuff, yes. Ted was a press photographer and he always held on to his copyright, so all his stuff passed to me when he died, and the longer I kept going, the more word got round. House clearances are a big thing now: old people’s attics are full of priceless junk. Families haven’t got the space to store it, and then there’s all the people who die without families. If there’s one thing Sussex has got a lot of, it’s retirement homes: the staff know I’m always on the lookout. She coloured slightly. I know, it makes me sound like an ambulance-chaser.’

Luke thought that hearse-chaser was more appropriate, but bit his tongue. ‘You never think about giving all this stuff to the History Centre?’

She couldn’t have looked more offended if he’d suggested she give away her baby. ‘Luke, these documents are my livelihood, they’re my
life
.’ She picked up a file and held it against her breast like a suckling infant. ‘Sometimes I think I’d like to go suddenly, so I don’t have to confront life without it all. I haven’t got a pension, I might need to sell it all off one day. Not that you can put a price on what it all means to me, but I dread to think how
little
it’s going to be worth.’

Chapter 25

The final flight of stairs led to a tiny attic room with whitewashed walls that were as bare as the others had been cluttered. No shelves, just half a dozen desks that held four fax machines, an ancient Xerox and a primitive Acorn computer. Between the two desks was a window, a panelled sash that stretched from floor to ceiling. Pressing against the glass, Luke could see the top of the big wheel and a sliver of sea. If this were his house, this would be the room he’d write in. He looked down. The balcony was a shallow, ornamental one that didn’t look like it could take an adult’s weight. Shame: it would have been a great place to relax on a warm evening, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. Stepping quickly backwards, he nearly tripped over a Brother electric typewriter with half its keys missing.

‘Haven’t you got a scanner or anything?’ he asked. ‘You could get your whole archive on disc. It’d take time, but you could do it. Then you’d have space in your house.’

‘Lord no,’ she said. ‘Fuzzy faxes and grainy photocopies, that’s all my clients get. Anything sharper and they’ll put it online, and then where would I be? And what do
I
want with space? I wouldn’t be able to sleep with empty rooms, without all my papers around me.’

‘Fair enough.’

A wind whistled through a gap in the sash, rattling the glass and making them both shiver.

‘Oh, my ancient bones,’ said Sandy, in a mock old-lady voice. ‘Let’s go back downstairs, shall we?’

On the tiny landing was a door in a wall that that could only lead onto the fire escape. Luke tried the handle. It was locked. ‘Key’s in the desk drawer, in case you ever find yourself needing an emergency exit,’ she said. She glanced at his jeans. ‘I think you’re beeping.’

Luke had intended to ignore the buzzing mobile, and wished he had when he checked it to see a new unidentified mobile number. A knot tied in his belly and tightened with every ring. If Jem had got access to a new mobile phone, did that mean he was on the loose again? He could be making the call from anywhere. He could be sitting in his car outside Temperance Place now. Luke was in no mood to deal with Jem’s crap today or ever again. Enough time had passed since the suicide attempt for fear to evolve into irritation.

‘Just leave me the fuck alone,’ he muttered.

‘Man trouble?’ said Sandy. He must have looked surprised. ‘Oh, come on, Luke, I’m Brighton born and bred and the only other place I’ve ever lived is Soho. My gaydar’s probably better than yours.’

Luke smiled weakly. ‘Ex. Back in Leeds. He’s the reason I moved to Brighton.’

‘Unfaithful?’ said Sandy, lighting a cigarette. Her gossipy tone threw the whole affair into light relief.

‘Possessive,’ said Luke, accepting one for himself.

‘Handsome?’

‘Beautiful.’ Luke was discomforted by the accompanying twinge of remembered desire. ‘Rich, generous, great in the sack . . . unfortunately also fresh out of the closet and barking mad.’

‘
Juicy
. Maybe I’ll get you drunk later and let you tell me all about it.’ The odd thing was that Luke had a feeling that he could tell this stranger about Jem, and that she would understand. Maybe, if they got drunk together, he would.

‘But let’s make it a coffee for now, shall we?’ Sandy yawned, taking the cup and saucer from him. ‘This tea hasn’t touched the sides. It’s still a bit early for me. I’m a night owl, I’m afraid. Don’t really get going until the afternoon, and then I work all night.’ She clattered off to boil the kettle again. Luke grinned again to find a kindred spirit. So many people claimed to be real night owls when all they meant was that they usually went to bed a little after midnight. People like him weren’t really awake or alive until the rest of the city was sleeping.

He hoped that the scratching, scuttling sound he could hear was in his imagination. Now his phone pinged with a text message from the same anonymous number. Luke caught the first line as he was deleting it.

Aminah’s given me an iPhone! Woo hoo!

This is my new number. Pick up the phone u tart.

V xxx

Luke wilted with happy relief into the grubby pink sofa. He saved the number and wrote back immediately:

Nice one. See if you can tap her for a car next. x

At his knee was a little magazine rack, presumably another part of Sandy’s esoteric filing system. It contained only one magazine, this week’s
Radio Times
. Sandy had gone through the week’s listings and ringed the programmes she wanted to watch. Flushing with the dishonour of trespass, he tried to put it back exactly as he had found it.

‘It’s only instant, so don’t get excited,’ she said. She had reused the same cups: despite the froth of washing-up liquid on the surface, she had not quite eradicated the lipstick traces from the one he now held.

He placed it on top of a huge walnut bureau. Sandy slid a coaster underneath it.

‘Sorry,’ he said, noticing the gleaming grain. ‘More archives?’ He looked down. The jumble below took disorder to a new level. Things had been stuffed haphazardly into the little drawers: he saw a stack of spiral-bound notebooks wedged into a tiny drawer, the tip of a pink silk scarf protruding from another like a tongue.

‘Oh Lord, what a state that’s in,’ she said, trying to roll the lid closed, but it wouldn’t shut. ‘I keep meaning to get it in order, but you know what it’s like.’ She looked odd, or odder; shy and proud at the same time. ‘That’s what I call my museum. Just mementoes and silly stuff from back in the day that makes the faxes look like cutting-edge technology. Now this stuff really
is
useless, but I can’t bear to part with it.’

‘Can I see it?’ asked Luke. Sandy hesitated, tapping her toe before stepping aside.

‘Oh, go on then. I’ll give you ten pages for free if you can tell me what these things are.’ She pulled open a drawer to reveal a mangled ball of steel that would have looked like something retrieved from a car crash if it hadn’t had tiny mirror-writing letters stamped all over it. Another little casement contained a slender blue cylinder, another a thin metal disc. There was also a pile of press identification cards, ranging from softened paper of the sixties to the stiff plastic laminates of the last decade. The slicker the card, the more worn the face it portrayed.

‘These were the tools of my trade once,’ she said, as Luke picked up the thin blue tube. He twisted the middle: a nib shot out of one end and a torch popped from the other to shine a tiny light downwards. ‘For taking notes in the dark,’ he said. She pouted at him. ‘That’s not the hard one, though. What’s this?’ She handed him the metal ball, heavy as a shot. Luke turned it around in his fingers: only when he smelled ink did the penny drop.

‘It’s from a golfball typewriter,’ he said. Sandy gave a delighted laugh.

‘How does someone your age know about golfball typewriters? I’d have been surprised if you’d have recognised a ribbon.’

‘I read a lot,’ said Luke, but no books had ever described the third object, the thin little disc that he now held in his hand. ‘I give up,’ he said.

‘It’s a telephone diaphragm,’ she said. ‘In the days when you had to ring your copy through to the desk, you were dependent on public phone boxes, and if you weren’t quick enough you’d find yourself in the queue behind a reporter from a rival paper. They’d unscrew the receiver and take this out. The phone wouldn’t work without it, so you’d have to traipse for miles until you found another one – and by then, maybe they’d got the scoop and you hadn’t.’ Luke grimaced to show he understood. ‘So we used to carry a spare around with us, so that if someone did try to pull a fast one, we’d be able to screw in a new one. Pathetic really, wasn’t it? But I saw it all as part of the fun.’ She took it from his hands, slid it back into the drawer and rolled the top back down again. ‘You probably think I’m something from the Ark,’ she said, but she was smiling. ‘So who’s this piece for, and how can I help you?’