So I spent the rest of the day just hanging around. I didn’t have a desk, so I shuffled my feet by the newspaper rack; drank frothy, muddy tea from the vending machine; and sat quietly beside the shelves of index cards that served as a kind of pre-Internet database. I didn’t ask anyone’s permission to stay, or to go, assuming that if they wanted to get rid of me, they would tell me. Every hour or so I would go downstairs to see Glen, who was at that point working on the foreign desk and designing an elaborate graphic of an exploding volcano on Montserrat Island. With his Hugh Grant flop, brilliant white shirt, Greek island tan, and posh drawl, Glen was a Times natural. I, on the other hand, had suffered a catastrophic breakout of stress-acne, and my pale skin seemed to have become paler from shock. Anyone in the newsroom could have identified me as “the intern kid” from four hundred feet away. If Glen hadn’t been downstairs, I’m not sure I would have had the guts to stay all day.
Eventually, at 6:00 P.M., I left The Times’s office—then located in a windowless former rum warehouse inside the News International printing compound in Wapping—and began the lonely, miserable trek to the Tower Hill tube station. From there I made three connections until I ended up back at my tiny, disgusting apartment on Caledonian Road. The next day I turned up for another unwanted, unpaid shift. The day after that I did the same again.
Finally, on Thursday, I was busted.
“Jesus Christ, are you still here?”
Oh no. I dropped the newspaper in my hand and turned to face Martin Barrow, The Times’s deputy business editor. During my week as a ghost in Rupert Murdoch’s machine I had already learned all about Barrow. He was infamous on the business desk for his relentless sarcasm, delivered in a nasal sneer that could puncture the most inflated journalistic ego. He was, I would later learn, the opposite of the “other” Martin: Martin Fletcher, the foreign news editor. While Fletcher was a well-bred scholar, fond of debating government policy and fine-tuning his correspondents’ work to emphasize intellectual points, Barrow was a workaholic with no formal university education who enjoyed ridiculing the pretensions of his colleagues. One of the many ways he did this was by using tradesmen’s terms for what many considered the sensitive art of writing stories. “Could you bash me out five pars while I shovel some more copy through the system?” was a typical Barrow request.
Later, much later, I would ask Barrow whether he had many friends who were journalists. “Nah,” he said. “They’re all plumbers and cab-drivers.” If anyone else had said it, it might have sounded like inverted snobbery. But with Barrow, whose bullshit detector was one of the most powerful on Fleet Street, it seemed natural. If Barrow thought an article was shoddily written, he would say so, often directly to the author’s face. “Mucky—very mucky,” he would tut with a slight downward curl of his upper lip. “Do you want to have another go at it, or shall I clean it up?” In Barrow’s universe, there was nothing worse than mucky copy.
It was obvious that Barrow relished his job as The Cleaner: the journalistic equivalent of The Wolf character played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction. His ability to “tidy up” copy was all the more impressive given that he was brought up in Peru and spoke Spanish as his first language. His appearance matched his role: With his Marine buzz cut and rectangular, steel-framed glasses, he had the slightly sinister look of an MI5 bureaucrat. During my week of invisibility, I noticed that Barrow spent his lunch hours taking five-mile runs around East London rather than eating lobster on the expense accounts of obsequious PRs. Barrow, clearly, had never been given the Lunch Tutorial. When he returned from his noontime exercise break, saddlebags of sweat visible through his gray T-shirt, Barrow seemed to snap and fizz with static from his high-voltage energy. He was always in good humor in the afternoon—the kind of good humor, at least, that a drill instructor might have after ordering you to do three hundred sit-ups. Perhaps Barrow was happy because he was pumped up with endorphins while everyone else was trying to sober up after their three-hour sessions in Coq D’Argent and Pont de la Tour. At 3:00 P.M., the foreheads of the business desk reporters, almost hidden behind their egg-shaped computer monitors, glistened with boozesweat.
Barrow, meanwhile, looked taut and tanned. Every so often his villain’s cackle would echo through the newsroom. When Barrow laughed, I thought, it didn’t seem like anyone was very happy about it.
As Barrow stood in front of me and laughed until the veins on his forehead started to tap dance, I definitely knew there was nothing for me to be happy about. “What’s your name again, son?” he asked eventually.
“Ugh, A-Ayres,” I told him, with a worrying stammer.
“Okay—Urquerz…? Follow me.”
Barrow sprint-marched me back toward his desk, his long, stiff arms swinging like a sergeant major’s. He sat down and began thumping and slapping his way through a pile of faxes. Finally he held up a press release with an unfamiliar logo at the top that read Pressac. The fax didn’t seem to have any words on it at all; only numbers, pound signs, and what looked like computer code.
“Here you go… erm, mate,” said Barrow. “Write this up as a nib. Hundred words? Shout when you’re done.”
With no further explanation, Barrow went back to his copy-cleaning, his long, thin fingers attacking the computer keyboard with urgency, as though he were programming the flight trajectory of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Before I could ask a question, a pretty, motherly secretary seized me by the arm and led me toward an unmanned computer terminal that looked as though it predated the mircowave oven. She sat me down, switched on the green LED screen, and patted me on the shoulder. “Here you go, love,” she said in a Northern accent as thick as gravy. “You’ve got to get used to Martin, he’s very busy, y’know?”
I felt relief wash over me like warm Mediterranean seawater. This secretary was the first person I had met at The Times who didn’t have a terrifyingly posh accent. I almost wanted to call my mother and tell her that everything was okay. I gripped my press release tightly and began to fantasize about the Pulitzer Prize I would win for the thrilling, witty, and brilliantly researched piece of broadsheet journalism I was about to produce. It would surely be the best nib ever published by The Times! Then a thought struck me. I turned and called out to the retreating seam of the secretary’s blazer. “Excuse me, erm, miss, but what’s a ‘nib’?”
She stopped dead, and I thought I could hear her heels grind into the carpet as she turned. Her face looked very different now.
“If you don’t know that, you haven’t got a bloody hope in here, have ya?” she said. “Nib means news in brief. Duh!” She rolled her eyes, turned 180 degrees, and stalked back toward the news desk.