Who is Tom Ditto? Read online

  ‘Women should have equal pay, but – and I mean this, and I do not apologise for saying this – the work they do should be equal too. Or greater!’

  Just yesterday:

  ‘The Muslim world has to take some responsibility for the actions of some Muslims who do not represent them all but do do bad things in their name, and I make no apology for that, but I must be clear, I am not saying all Muslims.’

  It’s pretty controversial stuff.

  On-air he can be a bit of a dick, but off-air, he’s actually a bit of a dick.

  ‘… and in showbusiness, another award last night for Jay Z as Beyoncé took to the stage, and later in your Showbiz Update with Jen Latham, she’ll be talking to pop star Aphra Just about her move to France, and the new man in her life …’

  I’d rather be reporting on Syria.

  ‘It’s 6.32, and now you’re up to date …’

  I gathered my stuff together. I’d be back before seven. I try not to stay in studio during the show.

  ‘I’ve forgotten your name again,’ said Leslie, as the ads played out. He pointed at me, vaguely.

  ‘Oh, it’s—’

  ‘But I don’t like you saying, “now you’re up to date”. I think it’s pretty self-evident that people are now up to date because you’ve just updated them.’

  ‘Ah. Thing is, it’s from the news team,’ I said. ‘They want everyone on the station using it. Sense of unity.’

  ‘Sorry, is this the station or is this my show?’ he said, which was a tricky one, because the answer was ‘both’. ‘I’m telling you to lose it. So lose it. And now you’re up to date …’

  Five past twelve, shift over.

  I’d done my handover notes in a hurry, then just googled, clicked, read.

  Facebook. No updates.

  Twitter. No update since the restaurant the other night.

  I’d even checked her MySpace, which is where she would always joke she’d go when she wanted to be alone.

  No updates.

  Do I tell people? Because I have no idea what to tell people.

  I tried Fran, her best friend, again. Fran likes me. We understand each other. But I was getting nothing back and it made me paranoid. Did Fran know? Was Fran in on it?

  But Pippy made a good point: Zara, on Long Acre. She’s Deputy Store Manager. Her colleagues would know where Hayley was. They’d have to. She’d have told them, because you have to tell your employers these things, don’t you, if you’re not coming in any more?

  But what if you are still coming in? What if it’s just me she’s away from? And if she’s in there as usual, then great, I’ll confront her. Cause a scene. Ask her what she means by all this. Ask her where she stayed last night.

  Jesus, where did she stay last night?

  I could walk there in ten minutes, and by the counter: result. I spotted Sonal. We’d only met maybe twice before, but I knew her name. And also, she was wearing a name badge.

  ‘Sonal …’

  ‘Hi …’ she said, half-smiling.

  ‘It’s Tom. Hayley’s boyfriend.’

  ‘Tom! How are you? Did she forget something?’

  ‘Oh. So you know?’

  ‘I know what?’

  ‘You know Hayley’s gone?’

  Busted. Gotcha. You knew, you bitch.

  ‘Yes, I know she’s gone,’ she said, brightly. ‘Of course I know she’s gone. What do you mean, I know she’s gone?’

  ‘I didn’t know she was gone.’

  I sounded panicked and crazy. A couple of women holding a black dress – they’re all black dresses in Zara – turned to look at me. Sonal lowered her voice and clearly hoped I’d lower mine.

  ‘You didn’t know she was gone?’

  ‘Where’s she gone?’

  ‘Sorry – you don’t know where she’s gone or you didn’t know she was gone?’

  ‘Either. Both. I got a note last night.’

  She blinked at me, once or twice, eyes widening for a second, then back.

  ‘A note?’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Hayley? She’s gone travelling, I think.’

  She called over to a colleague.

  ‘Jo? She said she was going travelling, Hayley, yeah?’

  Jo nodded. All hooped earrings and scraped-back hair.

  ‘She said she was going travelling,’ said Sonal.

  ‘Travelling where?’

  ‘She said she didn’t know where.’

  ‘Oh, so just general travelling? Just like that? Sudden aimless travelling?’

  ‘Well, not just like that – she gave her month’s notice.’

  ‘A month?’ – fuck! – ‘You’ve known about this for a month?’

  ‘It was her leaving do last week,’ said Jo.

  My knees weakened.

  ‘She had a leaving do? Sorry, just to be clear, my girlfriend had a leaving do last week and has now gone travelling?’

  Sonal tried a smile, then a shrug, both unconvincing.

  ‘What night?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What night did she have her leaving do?’ I said.

  ‘Um, Thursday, I think,’ said Jo.

  Thursday. She has Pilates on Thursdays.

  My head started to spin.

  She’d known for a month. A month at the minimum. She’d even celebrated.

  ‘Well, this is very unusual,’ said Sonal, shaking her head, and now the world became just noise, just till rings and door beeps, just traffic and wind, and ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This is very fucking unusual indeed.’

  [1]

  Kosinski, M/Columbia Journalism School 3/15/84 Michael Berg Award entry

  AN INTERVIEW WITH EZRA COCKROFT

  It is Christmas 1982 and Professor Ezra Cockroft sits at his table at Keen’s on 72 West 36th Street and picks at his salad. Like me, he has ordered for himself the recommended house salad with a twist and left the beets and candied walnuts to the side in one neat little tower.

  He is a tall man of eighty with delicate hands and long limbs, still tanned from an autumn spent in Floridian sunshine, though dressed now in New York black.

  He sips at his drink – a thin green daiquiri, which I too ordered because I happened to notice the recipe was the very same my great-aunt had at this time of year so often used.

  I ask him about this.

  ‘You ordered with confidence,’ he says. ‘I invested in your confidence. Investments made with confidence tend by their nature to carry lower risk – it implies assumed knowledge, and thereby affords those you carry along with you a greater chance of reward.’

  He takes his napkin and cleans a corner of a leaded casement window. A barman prepares another daiquiri behind a robust mahogany and brass bar.

  My steamed Finnan Haddie with drawn butter arrives, as a heartbeat later does his.

  three

  ‘Thursday June 14th, I’m Tom Adoyo with the stories you’re waking up to… …’

  I’d managed maybe two or three hours of fitful sleep. Got out of bed, somehow, and made my way to the nightbus. Ah, the nightbus. My people.

  It’s actually pretty full at just gone four. You’d think it’d be empty. But there are people. Cleaners, mainly, heading into town, keeping a low profile for an invisible job. A couple of the homeless upstairs, bedded down for the night, pale faces pressed heavy against smeared windows. The people you don’t treat as real.

  ‘… Thousands trapped after Mexico storms …’

  The nightbus is where I write my weather. It’s pretty simple. Of course, I check the BBC website. But you have to check the Met Office app, too – you can’t just rely on the BBC. I don’t know how they get away with it. It’s people like me that get the grief for it. All day, you’d get people complaining to the station, texting in, saying ‘you said it was going to rain today and it has not rained today’. Well, why are you texting me about it? Just enjoy it. Grow up.

  So I tapped it all out, checked the news, and emailed myself the script.
I sometimes wonder what people must think if they’re reading over my shoulder. ‘Wow. This guy writes very formal emails about so many topical world events.’

  Anyway, highs of nineteen today.

  ‘… US officials say North Korea could be planning multiple missile launches …’

  My eyes are so heavy in this studio. Pits musty. I haven’t showered, just topped up with Lynx. Adewale, the security guard on reception, had made a joke when I floated in. I didn’t listen, just pushed through the heavy doors to the corridor, where today each of the six LCD screens had been programmed to read WELCOME TO OUR FRIENDS AT AIG INSURANCE!, a couple of small pink animated balloons juddering from side to side.

  ‘… Benefits cheats to face ten-year terms …’

  I had to blink hard to focus on the copy on the page. I’d spent last night at the Builder’s Arms, on the chair by the door, thinking, not wanting to be in the flat, not wanting to be just listening out for the scratch of a key or waiting for a text. I don’t drink, really. I just wanted to be around people who did. That’s when you hear the really heavy laughs, the guttural woofs of shared joy, building, rising, exploding like fireworks in a dim pub sky.

  ‘And later, in showbiz, which pop star has drawn criticism from the Vatican after filming the video for new track “Carry On” just metres from the papal residence …?’

  Shoot me now.

  ‘It’s 6.03, currently four degrees in Soho, with highs of nineteen this afternoon – and now you’re up to date.’

  Finger point. Sweeper. Ads.

  ‘Hey dickhead,’ said Leslie, as I rose, his eyes dead. ‘Thought I told you to drop that.’

  ‘Sorry Leslie,’ I said.

  ‘Fucking know your place.’

  I checked my phone. No messages.

  Jesus, nothing? Nothing?

  I sent another: ‘Where are you?’ and watched it whoosh away to nowhere.

  Travelling. She’d never mentioned wanting to go travelling before. We didn’t even have a holiday booked. I’d been on at her for months about a holiday. Anywhere, I told her. Egypt. The Algarve. Didcot Parkway. Just anywhere but London. It’d do us the world of good. I guess at least one of us had taken my advice.

  There were other people I’d tried, as I’d sat in the pub.

  I left word with Fran again.

  Hayley’s dad in King’s Lynn. I had to look that one up, remind him precisely who I was, and have him gruffly deny all knowledge.

  I tried other colleagues, friends I had numbers for. I tried our landlord, Mohammed, who seemed mainly concerned that I’d still be paying in full and wasn’t trying to negotiate some kind of discount.

  No one seemed worried.

  ‘Oh, she’ll turn up,’ said our neighbour, Edith, ninety-four, and you can imagine how reassuring that was. ‘Have you tried calling her?’

  Her phone, of course, was constantly turned off. Though it still went to voicemail. She was still paying the bills. She still needed a phone.

  So who had she told? Who do you tell when you want to disappear?

  ‘Maybe she found you smothering,’ said Pippy, just a thick Kilbride accent like a knife through London around her. She put her hands up defensively. ‘I’m only being honest.’

  She took a bite of her garlic bread. We were in Eatalian, on the corner. I’d ordered nothing, just water. Pippy hadn’t noticed. She’d drawn love hearts and shooting stars on her hand again.

  ‘It’s just so frickin’ hashtag “mental”,’ she said, still only being honest.

  I knew I needed to run through all this with someone. Pippy would do for now. Though I was slowly working out she wasn’t exactly delicate.

  ‘Do you think she’s met another man?’ she said.

  I stared at my drink.

  ‘Or does she have a history of … anything? You know. Mental illness, or whatever?’

  ‘She seemed fine. She even did a Sainsbury’s shop. Online. She knew that was too much food. Who does that?’

  ‘Mad people.’

  ‘She’s not mad.’

  ‘Evil, then.’

  ‘Bit strong.’

  Pippy is single. She’d tried match.com but had her fingers burnt when she began her profile with the words ‘I am a thirty-seven-year-old Scottish girl’ and then didn’t get any replies. It was three weeks before she realised it was because what she actually wrote was ‘I am a thirsty seven-year-old Scottish girl’.

  ‘Maybe the shopping …’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s what she meant by “carry on as normal”. Maybe she just wants you to just carry on as normal.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘So she wants me to cook two meals a night? Set two places at the table?’

  ‘You eat at the table? Not in front of the telly like everyone else in the world?’

  We never eat at the table. We’d bought that table together in IKEA in Edmonton, imagining we’d have friends round, and make homemade salsa and buy rustic breads, then eat dinners with interesting figures as we talked long into the night about Vladimir Putin and high finance. In reality we put our keys there.

  ‘Sometimes we’d eat at the table, yes, we’re not animals.’

  ‘It’s just so weird,’ she said again, sighing, and I was just grateful to have anyone at all agree.

  Back at home, that evening, I sat on the floor surrounded by her clothes, my head in my hands.

  Above me was her wall calendar. Full of things that would now never happen. 23rd – Janey’s wedding. 10th – Fraser & Iona/dinner at ours. 12th – Cinema?

  I’d torn the wardrobe apart. I’d lost it. Forty-five seconds of rage – at the lack of information – at the limbo she’d left behind.

  There was a suitcase missing – the middle-sized suitcase of a set of three. What did that imply? A week? A month? Maybe it implied she might be back. If you know you’re going forever, you take the big suitcase, right?

  Unless you realise there’s so much you just want to leave behind.

  I stared at myself in the mirrored doors of the wardrobe.

  What was wrong with me?

  I’m not bad looking. Tall, like my dad. His Kenyan genes give me that, though he remains leaner than me. Mum was French, and I’m told I have her doleful eyes. She always said they’d make me a heartbreaker, but so far it’s been pretty much an even split. Other than that I strive for neutrality. Neat hair, mainly black clothes. I don’t think there’s anything there that would immediately make someone run away.

  So hopefully it’s my personality.

  I’m quick to anger but speak up rarely, though when I do I speak clearly and well.

  I don’t suffer fools gladly, but I do suffer them.

  Instead, it brews and boils inside me. Makes me moody and quiet and want to be alone, though not alone like this.

  And then the doorbell rang.

  It was 8pm. That’s an unusual time for visitors.

  She’s back. It’s over.

  I scrambled to my feet, clunked my shoulder on the doorframe and fast-limped to the hallway, heart racing, blood pumping to my head, grabbed at the door handle …

  ‘Sainsburys, mate,’ said the man, surrounded by blue crates and orange bags.

  I’d wondered why she’d ordered so much. She was looking after me. Making sure I ate. That I got my five-a-day.

  That scheming bitch.

  I ate at the table that night, making myself a little corner amongst the keys and bills and paperwork and takeaway leaflets and magazines.

  I’d begun slowly to resent the flat. This one-bed with ideas above its station, five minutes from the chip shop but just around the corner from Clissold Park, and lazy Sundays by the paddling pool in the summer. Mohammed had said we could decorate, but I’d begun to dislike it for how little it now represented me. The bright pink feature wall in an otherwise magnolia lounge. The ‘quirky’ kitchen cupboard knobs from whatever that shop’s called … Apostrophe? Apology?

  All this was Hayley’s personality. Or, at least, what she’d quite
openly decided was her personality. She’d spend hours marking the pages of back issues of Living Etc when we first moved in, circling Cole & Son wallpaper or Farrow & Ball paints and writing weird words like ‘Rockett St George’ on brightly coloured Post-its. I tried to remind her this was a one-bed in Stoke Newington, not Babington House, but she kept buying, kept circling. Hayley likes magazines. Heat, Grazia, Stylist, Elle, Cosmo. A great big pile of them, dog-eared, bruised, rumpled by bath water. The enemy within. Had they given her ideas about me? Were they talking about me behind her back? Suggesting she was unfulfilled, in this rented flat in North London, with an average man in his average clothes and their average life together? I picked the top one off the pile, looked at its cover.

  FASHION. STYLE. FOOD. GLAMOUR. TRAVEL.

  For the woman who wants it all – and usually gets it!

  These magazines did not think I was good enough; that I was a slob; a Neanderthal.

  I threw them down, and pushed my plate away. My kebab had gone cold anyway.

  And then, in the corner of my eye.

  A small red light, blinking on the floor by the sofa, in a pathetic attempt for attention.

  The answerphone.

  I clicked Play.

  ‘Hello Ms Anderson, this is Mark, the Sainsbury’s driver, just confirming your delivery slot of between 8 and 9pm.’

  My heart sank.

  I sank to the floor, with it.

  But the answerphone kept going.

  ‘Wednesday. Eleven … Nineteen … am.’

  An old message. Already listened to.

  I went to delete.

  ‘Hayley …’

  A man’s voice.

  four

  Half past five and I sat, staring at the screen, the cursor blinking back at me.

  I hate that wink.

  ‘Go on!’ it’s saying, full of beans, always bouncing. ‘Write something!’

  Yeah, cursor? Why don’t you write something?

  ‘Morning,’ said Pippy, as I stared at my blank page. ‘You grabbed that audio?’

  Some report or other. We’ll have one reporter in the field in the morning, another to take over at lunchtime, recording on their phones, sending stuff back to us. They pretty much go and get vox pops. So someone gets stabbed in east London, they’ll find someone to say, ‘You just don’t expect this kind of thing to happen round here.’ That’s the job. Getting people to say, ‘You just don’t expect this kind of thing to happen round here.’ It’s the same every day. You could just use the same person’s disembodied voice in every report for every story. Mugging in Kilburn? You just don’t expect that kind of thing to happen round there. Lottery winner in Kennington? You just don’t expect that kind of thing to happen round there. It’s like no one expects anything to happen anywhere at all.