‘Being an objective servant of the people in the industry of information?’
‘No, mate, all he has on his mind is the fuckin’ scoop.’
Of course, I thought. The scoop. The all-powerful scoop. Brian Robertson shook his head, loosened the tie around his neck.
‘You, son, I’m afraid, were not born a crime reporter,’ he said. ‘You were, however, born a colour writer.’
‘A colour writer?’
‘Yeah, a fuckin’ colour writer,’ he said. ‘The sky was blue. The blood was burgundy. Alex Bermudez’s bike that he rode away from home on was fuckin’ yellow. You like all the little details. You don’t write news. You paint pretty pictures.’
I dropped my head. Maybe he was right. I’ve always written like that. Remember, Slim? Vantage points. Stretching a moment in time to the infinite. Details, Slim.
I stood up out of the chair opposite Brian’s desk. I knew I’d never be a crime reporter.
‘Thanks for your time,’ I said, glum and defeated.
I walked forlornly to his office door. Then the editor’s voice stopped me on the spot. ‘So when can you start?’ he asked.
‘Huh?’ I said, puzzled by his question.
‘I could use a back-up of the back-up of the back-up turf writer,’ Brian said. He almost smiled. ‘Plenty of pretty pictures to be painted down at the track.’
*
Details, Slim. She has two creases running from the right corner of her mouth when she smiles. She eats chopped-up carrots for lunch on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she eats celery sticks.
She wore a Replacements T-shirt to work two days ago and at lunchtime I took the train into the city and bought a Replacements cassette tape. It was called Pleased To Meet Me. I listened to that tape sixteen times in one night and then I went to her desk the next morning to tell her that the last song on side two of the tape, ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’, was the perfect marriage of lead singer Paul Westerberg’s raw garage punk rock early days with his burgeoning love of celebratory love pop more reminiscent of B.J. Thomas’s ‘Hooked on a Feeling’. I didn’t tell her that the song is, in fact, the perfect marriage of my heart and my mind which can’t stop beating and thinking for her; that it’s the sonic embodiment of the urgency in my adoration for her, the embodiment of the impatience she has put in me, how she makes me will time to quicken, hurry up, hurry up, so she can walk through the door, so she can blink like she does, so she can laugh with the other crime writers in her pod, so she can look over here – over here, Caitlyn Spies – some one hundred and fifty metres all the way over to nobody me and the dead guy in the crossword pod.
‘Really?’ she said. ‘I hate that song.’
Then she opened a drawer beneath her desk. She handed me a cassette tape.
The Replacements’ Let it Be. The band’s third album. ‘Track nine,’ she said, ‘“Gary’s Got a Boner”.’ She said the word ‘boner’ like she might have said the word ‘lavender’. She does that, Slim. She is magic, Slim. Every word she says comes out as the words ‘lavender’ and ‘luminescence’ and ‘longing’ and . . . and . . . and what’s that other L word, Slim? You know the one they’re always talking about. You know that word, Slim?
*
Brian Robertson’s self-combustive hollering echoes across the newsroom.
‘So where have the fuckin’ pens gone?’ he screams.
I stand up from my chair to assess the cyclone of movement happening far away at the serious end of the newsroom, human shrapnel and debris spreading outwards from the nuclear bomb of my editor standing with his fist furiously gripping a copy of our Sunday sister newspaper, the Sunday Mail.
My elderly pod friend and crossword king Amos Webster rushes back to his desk and sits down, all but burying himself beneath a tower of dictionaries and thesauruses.
‘I’d sit down if I were you,’ he says. ‘The boss is on the warpath.’
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask, still standing, watching Caitlyn Spies nod her head at her word processor, absorbing Brian Robertson’s blitzkrieg of directions and unvarnished journalistic truths about how newspapers live and die on being first.
Brian Robertson explodes again, flame and shrapnel bursting from his lips. Seasoned journalists run for their lives.
‘Who wants to tell me where the fuckin’ pens have gone?’ he screams.
I whisper to Amos.
‘Why doesn’t someone just give him a bloody pen?’ I say.