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If you enjoyed The Deed Box, here’s an extract of Tomorrow’s Anecdote, a retro newsroom mystery set in the turbulent Thatcher years.
Extract: Tomorrow’s Anecdote
by Pamela Kelt
No-one could have seen the line of trees falling like dominoes as they toppled towards the A36 under cover of darkness that Thursday evening. One minute, I was driving back in a rental car from Brighton to the West Country, my shoulders aching with keeping it on the road as a crosswind buffeted. The next, I was slowing down to tackle a tricky bend when a giant tree trunk landed on the bonnet with an almighty thump.
As the car juddered to a standstill, I rammed on the brakes out of instinct. The seatbelt cut into my neck as I lurched forwards, then back, just like a test mannequin. For a moment, I sat there, pulse palpitating, still gripping the wheel. Then I counted to ten, opened my eyes and found myself staring out at a confused mass of branches and yellowing leaves. They glowed oddly in the light of my remaining headlamp. It was like being upside-down in a tree house, but much less fun.
If I’d arrived at that spot a split second later, the tree would have landed plum on the roof. And me.
My chest hurt. I realised the steering wheel was crushing my sternum. The crash had shunted my seat forward. Hands shaking, I fumbled for the belt release, and pinged it loose. Wincing, I bent down and yanked at the floor-level bar, shoving backwards with the balls of my feet. Nothing. Grunting with the effort, I tried again to no avail. The sliding mechanism must have jammed in the crash.
At that point, the electrics gave up and everything went pitch black. My forehead ached. I must have hit my head against the steering wheel. Darkness seeped into my mind and I slumped in my seat, semi-conscious. My brain seemed to float away from my body and I began to relive the past three days I had spent in a ghastly Portakabin where I had endured the vilest form of professional torture … that most feared phenomenon of all, The Management Course.
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“Let’s do some role play,” said Denise, with a bright smile.
Let’s bloody not, we all thought, cringing, averting our gaze like naughty school kids.
It was Tuesday, the first morning of what was laughingly referred to as a professional development course. All I was developing was a stonking headache.
We were a select crew; myself, one Clare Forester, a single-parent features sub with aspirations. I was employed at The Clarion, a modest newspaper in a market town in Somerset. Over the past decade, it had been buying out a dozen smaller provincial titles and centralised production in Wellsbury Spa, where I now lived.
Then there was Malcolm from a Carlisle daily, a portly middle-aged sports editor with lugubrious jowls and purple bags under his eyes.
Next to him sat Frankie, hot off the press from a Glasgow tabloid, a stocky chap with a fierce gaze and twitchy fingers that never stopped tapping biros on the desk.
At the opposite end of the journalistic spectrum was our final victim, Nigel, an acne-spattered youth from an obscure tri-weekly in Yorkshire who I reckoned was looking forward to his 15th birthday. He was only there because his boss had shingles.
A more motley set you wouldn’t find in any other line of work, yet we were all united in one thing: our loathing of the fragrant Denise.
There she sat, legs crossed at the ankles in her lacquered poodle perm, sharp heels, sensible but well-cut skirt, padded shoulders, crisp shirt with collars sufficiently starched to resist the barbs of provincial journalists. We are the absolute worst. We absolutely are. Thwarted in our aims of becoming anyone important in Fleet Street, we hang around in dusty newspaper offices, smoking, drinking, complaining. Provincial journalists drive me insane, up the wall, over it and into East Berlin. I hate them all. And I’m one of them.
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