The Pink and the Grey Read Online Free

home in Dublin and ended up here, all bright-eyed and cocky at the Cambridge Bugle . When Geoff hired me I asked him whether this place had any, you know, actual crime , and he bluffed and scoffed and sweet-talked me into it in his fat cockney barrow-boy way since it was a new paper and, basically, I had no money and he had a small carrot to dangle.
    I’d quickly learned that he wanted me for all the boring shite, all the grunt work. I trod the court beat and dutifully wrote pieces about cats up drainpipes and similar non-stories fuelled by puns every ten words. If I was a good little boy, and ate all my greens, and didn’t sulk, I might get the occasional obituary to flex my muscles. He and his deputy Simon nabbed the juicy stuff, whenever there was any, and the rest of the paper was packed in with topped-and-tailed agency copy and adverts. It’s amazing how many column inches you can fill every week with photos of grumpy pensioners pointing at cracked paving slabs. And of course they buy a copy for themselves, and a copy for their neighbour, and a copy for their bemused grandson in a more sensible city, and that’s how the paper was still going, to be honest.
    It must have been about nine o’clock, when even the speaker — sorry, the president — was unsuccessfully stifling a yawn, that someone new came through the upstairs Aye door and found a seat in the gallery by himself, on the left-hand side, about as far away from me as he could get. A few of the muppets in the chamber below looked up and saw him.
    He gave one a small wave.
    I perked up.
    Very slowly I sat back, hoping the seat wouldn’t creak, and started to unzip my camera bag, one z at a time. There was nobody around to stop me. I removed the camera as slowly and casually as I could and, keeping it well below the edge of the balcony out of sight, powered on and removed the lens cap. For once I remembered to check that everything was set to automatic, so I wouldn’t sit there swearing at the twatting thing and trying to make the photos not-entirely-black and not-entirely-white.
    Zoom, focus, snap, snap, snap , that’s all I’d need.
    If anything did, by some magical fairy chance, kick off, then I’d have photographic evidence and without any question a front-page lead. I knew I could remember enough of what might happen to write it up: it’d be mostly photo, anyway, and I could do interviews afterwards. And if the copy wasn’t long enough I’d upsize the headline and the by-line — especially the by-line. That’s what you get if the journalists sub and lay out the pages themselves, Geoff, you cheapskate. Of course, if the story was any good Geoff would change a few words and ruin a gag and put his own name at the top, and I’d be granted an Additional Reporting By in nought-point text and lump it or take a hike. It wouldn’t be the first time. It’d probably be about the twentieth.
    Someone once defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. That was writing for the Bugle, in a nutshell. First day: here’s your desk, here’s your computer, let’s measure you up for your straitjacket. By now I’d long given up making a fuss about hijacked by-lines — Geoff and Simon had skins thick enough to snap needles. I just focused on clocking up the experience, pocketing the money, and cultivating the kind of simmering resentment that usually ends with the words “and then he turned the gun on himself”.
    As the current speaker droned on — he was making some half-arsed gag about music being the food of doves, or something, and how my sides were splitting — I kept my eyes fixed on the new guy. I decided to call him the interloper . Everyone has to have a name. He had short, dark hair, and wore a white shirt under a navy blazer. He looked white, but possibly a little stir-fried. Hard to tell from where I was sitting. Mid-twenties by the look of him, a few years or so younger than me. Too old to be an