Chapter Seven

Next day I was back down at the Canary Wharf offices trying to keep my eyes off the Thames – it was a beautiful morning and the water was catching the sunlight, throwing it back metallic. It was easy to envy Tabard and his hotdog-media life for the view alone.

I’d already knocked up a draft of the Routemasters piece and sent it through to a tech-savvy guy called Tariq, a recent graduate who, I’d been informed, could do astounding things with Illustrator, Flash and all manner of digital tools. Tabard had pointed out that copy which worked on radio and the printed page might well not fly on the Internet, though once I’d done my session with Tariq – my best ever hire, this pup’s going someplace – I’d see how the Web opened things up for whatever content I wanted to bring to it.

At the heart of my piece were the efforts of the Save The Routemaster group to retain a handful of the old red buses for the capital’s roads. Transport officialdom had designated a couple of so-called heritage routes that would keep the vehicles tracking past the Albert Hall, Trafalgar Square and Tower Hill, but that wasn’t enough for the Savers who were calling the plans a sop – rightly, in my view – and were lobbying for north-south passages too. My story on the Routemasters also offered up telling tech details on the vehicle for the ’raks – a nineteen-fifties chassis-less sixty-four seater, with an extra thirty inches added to the bodywork the following decade to provide additional seating for eight, etcetera.

Tariq had torn into the job, crafted some stunning pages. I sat next to him as he pulled images of buses from God knew where, peppered the text with hyperlinks. I could see what Tabard meant about having to deal with the Web – what I’d done was fine as a linear structure but a reader linking, going off everyways wouldn’t care for such a leadenfooted approach. I needed to seriously rethink.

While I made notes, Tariq worked up a few cartoonish buses and imported them to the page. The sketches were fantastic – Tabard’s pup had needed just a few simple red lines to render what were clearly nifty Routemasters raring to go. He explained that he planned to animate a fleet of them, would turn them into an interactive infographic that would be some kind of short-form game to attract the punters.

“I have a few other ideas I want to knock around to get more eyeballs,” he told me.

*

After my blistering session with Tariq, I met Tabard for lunch on the patio of an Italian eatery. We sat in the long shadow of an old dock crane, watched a while as a circle of screaming gulls snagged bread tossed for them onto the water by diners.

“What did you make of Tariq?” Tabard asked.

“Impressive kid.”

“Fact is, he just soaks all this stuff up. My suspicion is he knows far more than any of us.” He tapped his skull. “Absolutely gigs of memory.”

“He’s made me think, and that’s no bad thing.”

“We’re all going to grow with this project, Root. You’ll see. It’ll soon be time to give up the day job.” Tabard tugged on an eyebrow.

“I still love radio.” It was very true. Not even Minona could knock the passion out of me.

“Something I want to tell you.” Tabard forked up a tangle of tagliatelle and gobbled it down. “I read the treatments you gave me, but they’re bigger ideas than I need. I passed them up the Ferris Media chain and the film-production guys want to talk business with you.”

“You’re kidding?”

“The word is that the Rootmaster just might have a feature on his hands.”

*

I was knocked out by Tabard’s news. I spent what must have a good hour strolling aimlessly around the Canary Wharf development, crossing, re-crossing bridges, mounting and descending flights of stairs, found myself a couple of times stuck at the bottom of the huge basin that formed the Tube station entrance. I couldn’t believe a major player was interested in my words.

I wasn’t about to go home and work until I regained some kind of control of my thoughts, so I kept on walking. I went back to the ferry landing, footed my way by the river, happy for a while to take in breaths of cool air straight off the water. Was Ferris really prepared to give me a shot at making some kind of film? I passed a couple of housing developments, edged along a few old wharf buildings, before the pathway cut abruptly inland. Was I about to ink a real deal? I headed back towards Canary Wharf, did laps of the docks in the hope that a measured approach might slow the mind.

On the last of the watery tours, I almost walked into a huge cast-iron marker buoy parked on the quay outside the Museum of London Docklands. It was enough to lure me through the doors and I ended up working my way through an old sugar warehouse and a huge spread of history. My eyes were charged with hundreds of beautiful maps and illustrations and I gawked at a breathtaking balloon’s-eye view of a Thames latticed with ships’ riggings, the river bung-full of livery barges, wherries, smacks. I peered into wooden viewing boxes to watch nineteenth-century rarees – illuminated peepshows of ancient monuments, ferocious animals, exotic landscapes with palm trees, camel trains. I had to laugh. They were, of course, the Soundies of their day.

I watched a film about the first few days of the London Blitz as fire-brigade figures ran hoses, fought endless smoke and flame. It was an amateurish work, badly edited, but I got caught up in the heroic narrative, enjoyed the flickering footage that delivered a distinct vintage.

I looked at my watch. I’d been out at Canary Wharf for about six hours, really needed to get back, do serious labour for the next day’s En Root recording.

On my way out, I saw a couple of huge, medium-format prints. At first I thought they were photographs of rigs but then realised they weren’t oil derricks at all. In fact, they seemed no more than huge steel drums raised above the water on spindle-legs, looked as though they’d grown from seed in clusters from the sea bed like so much metal mustard and cress. According to the blurb, they were the Maunsell Sea Forts, built in the Thames in the forties and armed with anti-aircraft guns to tackle German planes, doodlebugs flying in from the east. They’d been abandoned after the war, reoccupied twenty years later by a battery of broadcasters. The Knock John fort had played home to one radio station – this is the voice of Radio Essex on two double two – while another, Shivering Sands, harboured Screaming Lord Sutch and Radio City.

Here I was facing my Thames broadcasting ancestors, and I knew exactly what had to be done. I’d hire a boat to take me out to the Maunsell Forts. Yes, I’d go with a cameraman, shoot them, and make the hulking likes of Knock John look absolutely Hegley-style beautiful.

Bernard Herrmann’s the one to blame if you just got hot and sticky listening to that clip – which, if you didn’t recognise it, featured the squealing strings from Psycho’s shower scene. and let me tell you it’s Herrmann’s four-note brass device that makes everyone so fearful in Cape Fear. plus, he also created the sax solo in Taxi Driver that so evokes the sleaze of Gotham. Think of the sounds of Citizen Kane and Vertigo, too, and you’ll realise that Herrmann film-scored big time on the west coast. it was Orson Welles who brought him to Hollywood, got him to write for Kane – yes, those low woodwinds in the opening are his – before Hitchcock got hold of him and the two of them started a long hook-up. What’s important to know is that Herrmann went against the grain by avoiding those typical full-in-both-ears orchestral arrangements, opting instead for simple motifs that he repeated throughout the feature – though with minor, but generally majorly unsettling, variations. Herrmann remained Hitch’s favourite musicker until the director rejected the score for Torn Curtain, though some of those notes later got played in the Cape Fear remake. Interestingly, Herrmann also made it onto celluloid in The Man Who Knew Too Much, playing a conductor in the pit of the Royal Albert Hall. and now his music’s back in London at the Barbican where i caught up with it last night. my recommendation is that you go along this eve and listen to the BBC Concert Orchestra taking on Herrmann’s Hitchcock scores one more time. One piece of advice – bring along the shower cap.

I rattled off the show in the studio pretty comfortably given the lack of prep. Even Cushman wasn’t able to gripe about my lack of dexterity with the fades.

I snatched a couple of minutes on the receptionist’s computer to check my e-mail and read a message from Theresa Noble who’d picked up an item on Roger Huckerby Senior from the online version of the Costa del Sol News. And all his Iberian demise ran to was a single, two-line graph noting the death of a retired Englishman in a car accident on a notorious stretch of the N-340 just east of Marbella. Theresa called it tragic, so tragic, added that something had to be done. I hadn’t a clue what she meant.

I put a call in to Roger Junior’s office.

“Sorry to hear about your father,” I said. “I never did get to meet him.”

“I was all set to fly out to Spain in a couple of weeks. Now they’re shipping Dad this way.”

“Your mother wasn’t in the car with him, was she?”

“No, the old man was on his way to Malaga on business.”

“I thought he’d stopped working.”

“He liked to keep his hand in with some of the older clients. Quite a few of them live on the costas… Damn, this isn’t good news for the company. A lot of people still see him as a mainstay.”

That was more PLC than TLC, I thought. But maybe this would wreck all of Junior’s big biz plans.

“You know, we might yet turn this to our advantage,” he said. “A decent celebrity turnout at the funeral will draw the media. That could mean lots of goodwill for H&P. Didn’t you mention you were on the radio, Root? You’ll do something on him, won’t you?”

*

I’d arranged to meet Harry in the bar of the Baltic, a bar-restaurant over the road from Southwark Tube station, and was surprised to see she was already there when I arrived. The Harry I knew was perpetually strapped for time, always managing to build up a terrific charge of late meets during the course of a work day. But here she was, feet up on a banquette in a nice nook, garbed in a bright red flapper-style dress, matching cocktail in hand, the whole of her very well-lit by candlelight.

“Well, you are preceding yourself.” I pecked her on the cheeks. “Did New York instil good habits or something?”

“No way the Big Apple will change a bad variety like me.”

“You’re hardly rotten to the core, Aitch. You just need to ripen a little.”

“Enough of this,” she said. “Fetch me another drink. It’s a fruits of the forest, or something. And when you get back, I need to bitch.”

“What have I done?”

“I just need your ear. Hurry up.”

The barman took so long to make the first cocktail – he had a dressy move for pouring the liquor and pestled mint leaves with great care in a huge stainless steel mortar – that I plumped for a beer. Harry would be rocking with anger if I stayed away much longer and she already looked primed to go off.

“What’s that you’re drinking?” she asked.

“I didn’t want anything fancy.”

“Well, sit yourself down, Mr Simple.”

I threw myself into a chair and started on my beer.

Harry launched into highly convoluted story – she wasn’t good at sticking to the knitting when roused – but I picked out the main threads and the gist of it seemed to be that she’d just found out her company had bumped her off all things Hegley. To date she’d practically been running the star director’s show, cutting deals with distributors around the globe, goading the gofers to trawl through the endless lengths of extra footage so the company could haul more lucrative DVDs to market. And, it turned out that not only had they pulled the Hegley rug out from under her, they’d shifted Harry over to Guy Ritchie.

“This is strange, Bro,” she said. “It’s like I’m being punished.”

“Could it be some kind of promotion instead?”

“Come off it. Hegley’s a prestigious account.”

“And Ritchie?”

“Oh, please.” She took a gulp of her cocktail. “I’m supposed to be a top dog. And what they did was send me to New York then castrate me in my absence.”

“Go over their heads. Talk to someone at the conglomerate.”

“That’d be professional suicide.”

“Maybe you can make something of Ritchie. Someone needs to.”

Harry another took a huge slug of fruits of forest. “I could sleep with the boss, I suppose.”

“Really?”

“Oh, Root.” She turned big-time teary.

There was no way I could leave Harry in this state. And Meaghan was at a party up in Camden with Justin waiting for me to arrive with my best friend in tow. Plus, I hadn’t yet mentioned that particular plan to Harry. As I watched her search through her bag for a tissue, I decided the only way I could hope to come out of this smelling anything like some kind of sweet flower was to make her fall for Justin before she’d even met him.

*

At Al’s early next morning, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. The previous evening had panned out much better than I could possibly have imagined. I’d talked Harry to a dinner table at the Baltic and, after an hour or so of borscht-eating and a more-than-half-share in a bottle of wine, she’d got the bitter taste of the demotion out of her system and, for a while, was happy to kid again. That was when I got to work on the fab features of Justin – brilliant musician, fantastic journalist, salt-of-the-earth kinda bloke, doncha know it, wouldn’t mess a gal about, plus those hands… Harry was grateful for the escape, said she couldn’t wait to meet him.

Several hours later, when he offered to give Harry a lift home, she gracefully accepted.

Sitting at Al’s, though, I realised couldn’t begin to think about what might well be the beginning of that social item to be known as Harry and Justin. So I left an almost full cup of coffee on the table and went home to change into a dark suit and scoot on up to Highgate.