The Pink and the Grey by Anthony Camber

even to connect loosely with Laurie and his companions, even to hold the mildest of conversations, and the dawning realisation of precisely how tremendously, ball-wrenchingly terrible it had all been.  
    There was Claire, too. She, at least, had prior experience of my excesses and I knew that the rift could be patched by promising to attend her Coriolanus or whichever was next to be ticked by her am-drams.
    And as I gulped more water and stared into the accusatory plughole, I realised that amongst all the nonsense my mouth had emitted was the idea of a charity race. And more: John, Paul, George and Ringo, thanks to Laurie’s friends, the couple, Lift and Pavement. What if, I thought, we select two colleges to substitute for the non-existent St George’s and St Ringo’s? What if we held a race from St Paul’s, to the others in turn, and then back? And what if we could repeat the event each year?
    There’s nothing worse than a drunk with an idea. It’s either genius, and survives the sharp glare of morning, or more likely — far more likely — it evaporates, dream-like, into a random assortment of meaningless words, a smear of inedible tripe on a cracked white plate. The only way to know for sure is to write it all down, sleep, rise regularly to pee or to throw up or both — though preferably not at the same time — and then once dawn smacks your retina around the chops and the hangover muscles its way in, attempt to examine it with some dispassion. And then screw it up and toss it in the bin, because it’s always unadulterated rubbish. But you’ll never know for sure unless you do it.
    Back in my room, a fresh glass of water by my side, I flipped up the lid of my laptop and cursed ferociously at the unfiltered sunlight melting my face. I hammered on the Decrease Brightness key until the nuclear intensity subsided, then blinked away the tears, fired up a word processor and began to mash the keyboard, swiftly and inaccurately.

six
The Choice

    The newspaper office was shut on Saturday morning — which for me was a very late morning — the paper being a crappy little two-bit local weekly rag with a shoestring budget. But I went in occasionally on a Saturday if I thought it might buy me a bit of time to work on something juicy during the week — usually spiked or nicked — or if my alarm didn’t wake me up due to a heavy night for one reason or another and I needed to make up the time. So it wasn’t too out of the ordinary when I pitched up at the building we shared with a bunch of other shitty little companies and used my amazing toothy charm with Colin the security guy, plus my ID card and my key, to let myself in.
    Once upon a time a place like this — well, not exactly like this — would be full of copy-girls and ink and cigarette smoke and the mating calls of typewriters. It’d smell of Johnnie Walker Black Label and grease and Old Spice and Chanel No. 5. You’d wade through discarded copy and comps to get your ritual bollocking from a slicked-back sub-editor for shitting all over the house style. The editor would survey his alcoholic, cancer-riddled hacks from a sound-proofed, bullshit-lined office. Everybody would have a cut-glass English accent except the cute blond country boy in the post room who you’d have a secret crush on and know, at some point, you’d see in a cottage somewhere with burning cheeks lurking beneath his fedora. And then you’d run away together to Jamaica and set up a news agency and drink rum every evening on the beach watching an enormous sun melt into the horizon. Or maybe that’s just me.
    These days the Bugle ’s office looked like any other arse-scrapingly tedious open-plan workplace. Plasterboard walls you could push a blunt pencil through. A couple of computers, a couple of big displays for them, and a grumbling monster of a printer for checking, which only Simon knew how to feed. A Health and Safety at Work poster dangling on one drawing pin that nobody had ever