The Pink and the Grey by Anthony Camber Page B

and a thin wonky line for a mouth. By all accounts he’d chubbed up a bit over the years and now looked like a thuggish younger Churchill: fight ’em on the beaches or I’ll kick yer teef in . The hair had all but disappeared two newspapers ago, he’d told us. On his right, as ever, Psycho Simon, not that anyone except Geoff ever called him that if they valued their testicles. Geoff and Simon divided the plum stories between them and played good cop bad cop whenever the law or related shite needed laying down. Simon had an east-end Goebbels look about him, wired on intravenous espresso. Always with a cigarette or a substitute in his mouth.
    Opposite Simon sat Manish: the other junior, dogsbody, tea-maker, court-sitter, RTA-attender, doorstepper, and whatever else Geoff and Simon didn’t want to get off their arse to do. I’d started at the paper before Manish — a whole week before — and regularly gave him the benefit of my greater experience. For some reason I’d never once persuaded him to make me a cup of tea. He was of south Asian stock, via Birmingham. Now I was no heavyweight but he was stick-thin. He’d made the classic mistake of telling us that his nickname at school had been Twiglet, and so Twiglet he’d instantly become. Hell, if I had to deal with the ginge and the top-o-the-morning shite day in, day out, he could cope. We took the piss out of each other all the time, which he claimed wasn’t flirting.
    After an hour of curry and planning we’d reached the any other business part of the meeting, which was the cue for the bashful little Thai waiter who wouldn’t meet my eyes to clear the plates away and deliver the second pints. I decided it was now or never and with a decent hit of endorphins buzzing through me I gulped down a mouthful of beer to gird my ever-fruitful loins.
    “Hey, Geoff, tell us about the olden days back when you were thin,” I said. “You do any vice stories? Ever had to pull your trousers up, make your excuses and leave?” I wanted to keep it oblique, chummy, knobs-up-muvver-braahn .
    Geoff gained a far-away look in his eyes. “Once or twice,” he replied finally, and I worried for a moment he might tell us more than I wanted to hear. “Back when I was young and virile. And could run.” He laughed. “What was ’er name, Psych? That Madam in Chelsea?”
    “Which one?” replied Simon. “There was the House of Feather, Jill’s Union, the Iron Lady, Chocolate Mansions…”
    Geoff laughed again. “I knew you’d remember ’em, you perve. Customer one day, next day outside in a car with a notebook and a photographer.”
    Simon raised a hand. “Vile slander, that is. Contact in the vice squad. Cost a few quid but she was worth it.”
    “Yeah, like the prossies.”
    “See anyone famous?” asked Manish with a half-burp, his fist against his mouth.
    Great thing about a table of journalists: everyone starts asking questions, taking the heat off you.
    Geoff grunted. “Not ’alf, Twiglet. Couldn’t publish, though. The old moneybags’ briefs slapped an injunction on us. Can’t say a dickie about it. Not till you’re all grown up, anyway. Nothing to do with the injunction, by the way — you’d blab. Kids always do.”
    Simon added: “It’d be all over the bloody Twitter.”
    They were a right little twosome. Not in that sense: it was more Fat Ant and Dec than Elton and David. Of course they knew all about me liking guys — I’m not sitting in anyone’s closet. If Manish turned up on a Monday morning bleary-eyed and bragging from a dirty weekend I sure as hell wasn’t going to play little miss prim and proper. If it got them uncomfortable and shifty-arsed, it was all the better. I gave not one single toss.
    I kept prodding at the editor. “What about, I dunno, businesses? Did you bring any of them down?” I asked.
    Geoff turned to Simon and cocked his head in my direction. “Jeez, all these questions, Ginge thinks he’s a proper journalist.” Back to me: