You Had Me At Hello

I take a gulp of coffee with the fresh roasted aroma of farming and agriculture.

‘I split up with my fiancé last month.’

His beady, rheumy little eyes lock on mine, waiting for a punchline. When none is forthcoming, he offers:

‘Oh dear … sorry to hear it.’

‘Thanks.’

I don’t know if Gretton has a private life in any conventional sense, or if he sprouts a tail and corkscrews into an open manhole in a cloud of bright green special effects at five thirty p.m. This topic of conversation is certainly uncharted territory between us. The extent of our personal knowledge about each other is a) I have a fiancé, now past tense, and b) he’s originally from Carlisle. And that’s the way we both like it.

He shuffles his feet.

‘Heard anything about the airport heroin smuggling in 9 that kicks off today? Word is they hid it in colostomy bags.’

I shake my head.

‘For once they really could claim it was the good shit!’

He honks at this, broken engagement already forgotten.

‘I was going to stick with the honour killing in 1,’ I say, unsmiling. ‘Tell you what, you do the drugs, I’ll do the murder and we’ll compare notes at half time.’

Pete eyes me suspiciously, wondering what devious tactic this ‘mutually beneficial diplomacy’ might be.

‘Yeah, alright.’

Although I can get ground down by the bleak subject matter, I enjoy my job. I like being somewhere with clearly defined rules and roles. Whatever the grey areas in the evidence, the process is black and white. I’ve learned to read the language of the courtroom, predict the lulls and the flurries of action, interpret the Masonic whispers between counsel. I’ve built up a rapport with certain barristers, got expert at reading the faces of juries and quick at slipping out before any angry members of the public gallery can follow me and tell me they don’t want a story putting in the bloody paper.

As I swill the remains of the foul coffee, bin the cup and head towards Court 1, I hear a timid female voice behind me.

‘Excuse me? Are you Rachel Woodford?’

I turn to see a small girl with a halo of straw-coloured, frizzy hair, a slightly beaky nose and an anxious expression. In school uniform she could pass for twelve.

‘I’m the new reporter who’s shadowing you today,’ she says.

‘Ah, right.’ I rack my brains for her name, recall a conversation about her with news desk which now seems a geological era ago.

‘Zoe Clarke,’ she supplies.

‘Zoe, of course, sorry, I’m a bit brain-fugged this morning. I’m doing the murder trial today, want to join?’

‘Yes, thanks!’ She smiles as sunnily as if I had offered her a walking weekend in the Lakes.

‘Let’s go and watch people in wigs argue with each other then,’ I say. I point at the retreating Gretton. ‘And beware the sweaty man who comes in friendship and leaves with your story.’

Zoe laughs. She’ll learn.

5

At lunchtime, I open my laptop in the press room – a fancy title for a nicotine-stained windowless cell in the bowels of Crown Court, decorated with a wood veneer desk, a few chairs and a dented filing cabinet – and check my email. A message arrives from Mindy.

‘Can you talk?’

I type ‘Yes’ and hit send.

Mindy doesn’t like to email when she can talk, because she loves to talk, and she’s a phonetic speller. She used to put ‘Vwalah!’ in messages to myself and Caroline, which we assumed was a Hindu word, until under questioning it became clear she meant ‘Voilà’.

My phone starts buzzing.

‘Hi, Mind,’ I say, getting up and walking outside the press room door.

‘Do you have a flat yet?’

‘No,’ I sigh. ‘Keep looking on Rightmove and hoping the prices will magically plummet in a sudden property crash.’

‘You want city centre, right? Don’t mind renting?’

Rhys is buying me out of the house. I decided to use the money for a flat. Originally a city centre flat from which to enjoy single-woman cosmopolitan living, but the prices were a wake-up call. Mindy thinks I should rent for six months, get my bearings. Caroline thinks renting is dead money. Ivor says I can have his spare room and then he has a reason to finally kick out his flaky, noisy lodger Katya. As Mindy says, he could do that anyway if he ‘found his cojones’.

‘Yeees …?’ I say, warily. Mindy has a way of taking a sensible premise and expanding it into something entirely mental.

‘Call off the search. A buyer I work with is stinking rich and she’s off to Bombay for six months. She’s got a place in the Northern Quarter. I think it’s a converted cotton mill or something, and apparently it’s uh-may-zing. She wants a reliable flat-sitter and I said you were the most reliable person in the world and she said in that case she’ll do you a deal.’

‘Erm …’

Mindy quotes a monthly figure which is a fair amount of money. It’s not an unfeasible amount, and certainly not a lot for the kind of place I think she’s talking about. But: Mindy’s encroaching madness. It’ll probably come with an incontinent Maltipoo called Colonel Gad-Faffy who will only eat sushi-grade bluefin and has to be walked four times a day.

‘Do you want to come and see it with me, after work?’ Mindy continues. ‘She flies on Friday and a cousin of hers is interested. She says he’s a bit of a chang monster and she doesn’t trust him. So you’re front runner but you’re going to have to be quick.’

‘Chang monster?’

‘You know. Coke. Dickhead’s dust.’

‘Right.’

I think it through. I was really looking for something longer term than a fixed six months. Six months with option of renewal, I’d thought. But this might be a way to live the dream while I look for something more realistic.

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘Great! Meet you by Afflecks at half five?’

‘See you there.’

As I walk back into the press room, I realise why I’ve dragged my feet in moving out of the house, however uncomfortable it is. My decision to leave Rhys is about to turn from words into action, become real. Splitting equity, dividing up our worldly goods, coming-home-at-night-to-empty-rooms-and-a-big-yawning-maw-of-an-empty-future real. Part of me, a shrill, cowardly part, wants to scream: ‘Wait! Stop! I didn’t mean it! I want to get off!’ Motion sickness kicking in.

Yet I remember the text I got from Rhys a few days ago, saying, in what sounded as much like sorrow as anger: ‘I hope you’re looking for places because the end of living together like this can’t come fast enough for me.’