From the top, then. Very, very fine, dry blond hair which conforms to the shape of his head and, as he has aged, looks like a wig or the helmet-like hair you clip onto a Lego man. Good hair for a David Lynch. A forehead which is still miraculously smooth, the skin very tight to it, the bone very tangible, the first great curve of his head a section of a sphere. His whole face is full of spheres. The eyebrows are faint and fall away. The bridge of the nose is where there has been an impact of pain. There are two, not deep, vertical lines which, taken with the declining eyebrows, make him look harrowed. The curve of the eyeballs is very visible under his eyelids – his face has started to become beautiful. And unusual. He cannot seem to open his eyes very wide, as if the eyelids have too far to travel back up the curve of the eyeballs. The eyes themselves are ethnically unplaceable, a speckled pale blue. Under them are deep pre-Raphaelite shadows (which in time have become real pouches). These shadows are immensely beautiful. And now you begin to see just how exquisite the face is. The nose is incredibly fine and straight, a nose which ladies in Beverly Hills might pick from a catalogue. The ears are sleek to his head: he looks like a bird. In the hollows beneath the cheekbones, like ripples playing on the underside of a bridge, lines of beauty continually form and reform. Everything about the face keeps getting finer – you feel you could crush his bones like a sparrow's bones. The outline of the lips is as sharp as the outline of a baby's lips. The cut in his top lip is like the V of a child-drawn seagull. There is a gap between his teeth which adds to the general feeling of sickness – again, you notice how beauty and sickness are bound together here in this pre-Raphaelite way. The lips are red, like the lips in a Tennyson horror poem. They might be poisonous. Take the head in your hands and turn it to a three-quarter profile. It's heart-shaped, and the line that runs from his forehead to his sharp chin, full of double curves, is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. You're at a loss to say why – it's explicable by mathematics, no doubt – but that line looks like the definition of beauty. And everything is amazingly smooth and golden. A sick beauty, made of gold. The most beautiful: Christopher Walken.
My mother was confused about what I should wear on the first day of my work placement at the Camden New Journal, torn between recommending a formal skirt and blouse and actually wanting me to wear the uniform of, say, Alan Dershowitz's elaborately casual team of legal students in Reversal of Fortune. ‘It's time to get your shit together,’ she said down the phone, pleased, because she believed that working at a local paper meant that I was in effect working against the system. ‘It's your job to get the truth out there!’ she reminded me. ‘It's your job to sniff out the truth!’
Propriety won out, so I wore low blue court shoes, a white blouse with a sweetheart bow, carried a neat handbag, and was very nervous on the way to work. It is important to communicate the extent of my ignorance. Getting on the bus, I looked at the change in my hand and thought: What is money? What do banks do? Seeing the headline on someone's newspaper, I thought: What's the Cabinet, exactly? I know they're Major's advisors, but are they actually MPs?
Inside the Camden New Journal – and there was no one to stop me from walking on in, no one around very much at all – was a room with grey walls and no discernible floor, just layers of newspapers and food wrappers, cake boxes, sandwich cartons, cigarette sleeves, flattened Cup-a-Soups. There were several desks constructed out of piles of back editions on which cigarettes had been left to burn out: the desks were singed but had never ignited because the newspapers were damp. The room was a shrine to the cigarette. All around were styrofoam cups hedgehogged with butts, and the three-bar electric heater was encrusted with bits of charcoaled tobacco and frazzled stands of hair where people had stooped down to spark up. Through the frosted glass of a raised office I could make out someone sitting low in their chair with their head back, not moving. Asleep? The only other person in the room was a man of around forty with a floor-length yellow coat talking into the phone in a Liverpudlian accent under a poster of Ivor Cutler. He beckoned me over.
He was the ugliest man I had ever seen. He had fine wavy reddish-brown hair which curled beneath a long pointed chin. His pale skin was covered in sore-looking freckles and from his cracked lips dangled a dead roll-up. He looked like a fox in the late stages of heroin addiction, or someone kicked off the set of The Name of the Rose for being too credibly medieval. He looked like David Thewlis. Cradling the phone, he plopped the roll-up in a carton of milk, and smirked at my handbag.
‘Got everything you need in there? Got all your little pencils?’
He talked like David Thewlis. He rolled his chair to the side of his desk and sat back in it unashamedly – his shiny green trousers unfashionably high, tight into his crotch like jester's pants, squashing his cock up and tight to the side – and relished my shoes.
‘Oooh, how smashing – a lovely little pair of Start-rites!’ he said. ‘I'm Jim Hewson, the deputy editor – we spoke on the phone. And now here you are.’
There I was. On the lapel of his yellow coat was a little badge that said ‘Touch My Monkey’.
‘Bring your little pencils. We're going out.’
He took me first to a pub and then down to Kentish Town police station, where he heckled the officer giving a statement about a head being found in Regent's Canal. I was already very drunk and confused and became extremely paranoid when he started to goad the police about being in league with the local gangs. The police clearly hated him. There was bitterness and fear in that room.
‘Still trying to get arrested, are you, Jim?’ the officer threatened. ‘And you, Miss “Quirke”. You trying to get arrested now too?’
‘You're not going to arrest us, we're white,’ Jim sneered.
After that he walked me down to a pub in Holborn, striding for miles like a peacock while I ran to keep up, my feet blistering in my court shoes. The Princess Louise behind Gray's Inn was where Jim liked to dig his stories out of the local councillors who drank there after meetings. Again there was a little pulse of fear at his presence, disguised under uneasy bonhomie. When I got back from peeling off my bloodied tights in the loo, he was smilingly scoffing at a councillor: ‘You're fucking her, aren't you? That's why this is happening. He's fucking her. You dirty man. What happened to your tights?’
On the way back to Camden we stopped at yet another pub where he drank his dozenth double of the afternoon and regarded the jukebox selections with the stalest disgust: ‘Why the fuck do I ever drink in here when all they've got to listen to is Freddie Mercury and his harem of stockbrokers?’
I could not reply because I fancied him too much even to open my mouth.
Jim was a communist. Everyone at the Journal was a communist. But Jim would never agree with the other communists, which seemed to make him immensely popular among them. People would come round and get sidetracked into spending long, hero-worshipping hours by his desk while he was unbelievably rude about them to their faces. Among these people were a group called the Chartists whom Eric Gordon, the editor, expected every Friday for a serious discussion involving the whole office. Eric was a communist too and had travelled to China as a journalist in the 1960s to help out with the Cultural Revolution. When he had objected to what he was seeing, the authorities had put him and his wife and child under house arrest. For five years. In a room that measured ten feet by twelve. And he was still a communist.
On Fridays when the big hitters rolled up, everyone was expected to contribute. Jim, whose hair seen closer up now seemed the colour of curry powder, would dazzle the room while Eric listened through the frosted glass to his protégé, too knowledgeable and wise to condescend to mere pyrotechnics. These were terribly detailed, recondite conversations