‘I saw it all,’ he said.
‘Did you?’
‘It was a ter-ri-ble scene,’ said the man, at dictation speed. ‘But the watch-man made a death-defying plunge to res-cue the old lady and he de-serves a med-al.’
‘Really?’ said William, scribbling fast. ‘And you are–‘
‘Sa-muel Arblaster (43), stone-mason, of lib The Scours,’ said the man.
‘I saw it too,’ said a woman next to him, urgently. ‘Mrs Florrie Perry, blonde mother of three, from Dolly Sisters. It was a scene of car-nage.’
William risked a glance at his pencil. It was a kind of magic wand.
‘Where’s the iconographer?’ said Mrs Perry, looking around hopefully.
‘Er . . . not here yet,’ said William.
‘Oh.’ She looked disappointed. ‘Shame about the poor woman with the snake, wasn’t it? I expect he’s off taking pictures of her.’
‘Er . . . I hope not,’ said William.
It was a long afternoon. One barrel had rolled into a barber shop and exploded. Some of the brewer’s men turned up, and there was a fight with several of the barrels’ new owners, who claimed rights of salvage. One enterprising man tapped a barrel by the roadside and set up a temporary pub. Otto arrived. He took pictures of barrel rescuers. He took a picture of the fight. He took pictures of the Watch arriving to arrest everyone still standing. He took pictures of the white-haired old lady and the proud Captain Carrot and, in his excitement, of his thumb!
318
It was a good story all round. And William was halfway through writing his part of it back at the Times when he remembered.
He’d watched it happening. And he’d reached for his notebook. That was a worrying thought, he told Sacharissa.
‘So?’ she said, from her side of the desk. How many Is in “gallant”?’
‘Two,’ said William. ‘I mean, I didn’t try to do anything. I thought: this is a Story, and I have to tell it.’
‘Yep,’ said Sacharissa, still bowed over her writing. ‘We’ve been press-ganged.’
‘But it’s not–‘
‘Look at it like this,’ said Sacharissa, starting a fresh page. ‘Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes.’
‘Yes, but that’s not very–‘
Sacharissa glanced up and flashed him a smile. ‘Sometimes they’re the same person,’ she said.
This time it was William who looked down, modestly.
‘You think that’s really true?’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘Really true? Who knows? This is a newspaper, isn’t it? It just has to be true until tomorrow.’
William felt the temperature rise. Her smile had really been attractive. ‘Are you . . . sure?’
‘Oh, yes. True until tomorrow is good enough for me.’
And behind her the big black vampire of a printing press waited to be fed, and to be brought alive in the dark of the night for the light of the morning. It chopped the complexities of the world into little stories, and it was always hungry.
And it needed a double-column story for page two, William remembered.
And, a few inches under his hand, a woodworm chewed its way contentedly through the ancient timber. Reincarnation enjoys a joke as much as the next philosophical hypothesis. As it chewed, the woodworm thought: ‘This is —ing good wood!’
Because nothing has to be true for ever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth.