Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 19

10 October 1993

The elephants, who have not

been getting on with the new

rhino, slept through the exhibition

which was being held in

the elephant house at the zoo last

night (Monday) by an Israeli

artist who arrived in the country

only yesterday (Monday) before

returning to Tel Aviv tomorrow

(Wednesday).

‘No wonder you failed your fucking degree,’ Jim said. ‘Nobody cares when the artist is going back or what the rhino thinks. You want to know who was there and how long it's on for. See?’

‘Got it. Except – what's wrong with the rhino exactly?’ I wanted to keep him talking.

‘Even if the rhino's doing the elephant's wife, we don't want to read about it. That's not the fucking story. You've got to find the story.’

But I never could – two-hundred-word pieces unstoppably ballooned, like Rufus Sewell, into vast paunchy monsters, and then were brutally slimmed down again (like Rufus Sewell) by brisk sub-editors. And the Journal, for all its apparent slapdashness, was a very serious little operation, with a sinecure on the Local Newspaper of the Year Award. Eric knew what he was doing, always running the necessary campaigns and magnificently inclusive little obituaries of local burglars and tramps. So I was aware that it was something of a test when he sent me to talk to a woman who was staging a protest in Arlington Road about the poll tax. It was an important story and I had a sense that I might actually be sacked, and never see Jim again, if I couldn't find it.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ said Jim when I returned five hours later.

‘I think Mrs Norman's a bit paranoid,’ I said. ‘She thinks the FBI are watching her. But – it's actually quite interesting. There were two guys in a dark car watching the house the whole time I was there. Wearing ties. In this weather? It does seem a little strange. And get this – she keeps getting letters from the library asking her to return a book on J. Edgar Hoover. But she never took it out. So I wrote down the licence number in case you want to follow it up.’

I was demoted to theatre reviews.