Cooped up in my clapped-out Volvo, I took a long drag on a cheap cigarette. It was starting to get dark, and I already had a crick in my neck from staring up at the vacant window of the nearby house.
Out on assignment for an English tabloid, I was staking out a father, whose wife had run off with his brother, taking their kids with her.
It had started as a typical day back in the office of the news agency in Liverpool, where I was working as a rookie reporter.
Gleaning the outline of a major national story from a local paper snippet, I sprinted out the door, cell phone, news cut in hand.
“And bring back some good quotes,” hollered the paternal agency editor.
I left with his expression ringing in my ears, having learnt long ago I was expected to make people talk tabloidese for me. After all, my Scottish journo teacher had explained some months before, “Subjects don’t talk the way we need them to. If someone says they’re poor,” he explained in a thick brogue, “you ask, ‘So you feel shackled to a life of poverty?’ That’s a quote.”
Now, sitting outside the family home, the dusk long gone, it looked like it was going to be a wasted journey, the ditched family man probably tending his emotional scars in hiding.
Another cigarette and 30 minutes more of dreadful local radio, and I was going for a pint of beer over the road before phoning the office.
Then I spotted a twitchy figure skulking up the road.
I stubbed out my smouldering cigarette, turned up my coat collar, and stepped out into the crisp night air. It was him, Mr Suicidal, heading back in.
“Good night,” I said lightly, trying to sound casual. After all, I didn’t want to scare him off by thrusting a tape recorder in his face.
It wasn’t a snatched comment I was after, but a proper sit-down chat to make the night’s 9.00 p.m. deadline for the last of seven print runs of the Daily Mail.
Within minutes he was chatting away.
I’d told him I was a journalist, but he probably didn’t care. While he was getting on with his tale, I was jotting down in shorthand his quotes for tomorrow’s story.
The photographer, who pulled up just in time, sidled up beside me. I nodded to indicate I had what I wanted as he started shooting from the hip, flashbulb blinding the pair of us, killing the interview instantly.
I shrugged, feigning disapproval, only later to pat The Snapper on the back for being so quick.
Suicidal ran to his door, me to my car to call the office.
“Got the chat,” I said to the copy-taker back in the newsroom. Forming the story in my head I started to dictate:
Love-lorn Mr Suicidal yesterday turned lucky in loot, scooping £1.2m in the lottery jackpot, the day after his wife ditched him for his younger brother.
“They deserve each other,” Mr Suicidal, 36, said. “She’ll probably be killing herself knowing I’m now a millionaire, but she left me when we barely had two pennies to rub together.”
And so endeth this perfect little tabloid drama. Sent and ready to go to print within the hour.
