The Road from Midnight Read online

  Back at the office she introduced me to her editor, a great loud woman by the name of Sally Ochre, and the rest of the staff. Then she sat me down with a contract and offered me the job, which included a salary twice what I was on.

  “How soon can you start?” she asked.

  “How about today?” I answered gleefully. At last I had my escape route, and I couldn’t wait to take it. “Only joking, Nelly, could you give me a week to sort my shit out in Auckland and then I’ll be with you?”

  “Actually Jane, I can give you two weeks, so take your time and I’ll see you here on Monday, two weeks from now, 8.30 sharpish. Let me know when you want to come over and we’ll arrange the flights for you, and a month’s accommodation while you settle in. Welcome aboard.”

  I raced two floors down to the offices of Heal Yourself Well and crashed into Daisy’s office.

  “I got the job, I got the fucking job, I can’t fucking believe it!” I screeched.

  “Oh Jane, how cool is that, we’re going to be living in the same town again. When do you start?”

  “Two weeks today, can I stay at your place while I get myself settled? I can pay rent.”

  “Of course you can darling,” replied Daisy before giving me one of her thoughtful looks.

  “This will kill Jim, you know that.”

  “Shit I’d forgotten about that. How the hell am I going to tell him? Maybe I could just leave and then let him know once I’m here?”

  “No, Jane you owe him more than that. Go home and tell him as soon as you can. Let’s just hope he doesn’t slit his wrists or go on a year-long drinking binge. ”

  “Now, you’re just being melodramatic.”

  On the plane home that afternoon I wrestled with the sheer glee I felt at the thought of starting a new job in an exciting big city and advancing the career I held so dear, one minute, and deep sadness and dread at the thought of ending my relationship with Jim the next. Now that I had a reason to leave him I felt free and independent once more, but I did love him and knew that I would miss his devotion and the great sex.

  “You’re what!” screeched Jim, on the way home from the airport. “I thought you were just going over there to visit Daisy, you never told me you had a job interview, what the fuck!”

  “Well I didn’t see the point of telling you because I didn’t think I’d get it. Who knew that they would like me?” I lied. “I’m sorry but Sydney’s only a few hours flight away, we can still see each other, I’m certainly not interested in seeing anyone else, you fulfil me completely,” I ventured my second lie.

  “You knew all the time, I know you and your fucking career. You went over there to get a job, to pursue your dream of being the best fucking journalist in the world, and you didn’t give a fuck what that would do to me,” he was yelling now, in-between trying to light a cigarette and narrowly avoiding an old lady on a pedestrian crossing.

  “Okay calm down, Jim. Let’s just get home and talk about it then. I’m not changing my mind so the sooner you get used to the idea the better,” I said in the now or never voice I’d just discovered.

  Jim abruptly swerved and pulled the car over into the kerb.

  “Get out,” he screamed.

  “What?”

  “Get out now. You can find your own bloody way home.”

  And with that he leant over, opened the door and shoved me out before driving off with my suitcase in the boot.

  I stood on the side of the road somewhere in Mangere, a good 20 kilometres from home, totally humiliated. But also quite pleased. If he was going to be a total prick about the whole thing, then that made it all the easier to leave him.

  4

  Settling into Sydney was the most exhilarating experience of my life. I was sleeping on Daisy’s couch and we had decided to look for a place together just like old times. But what I loved most about my new home was the sense of a big, cosmopolitan city with trains, huge department stores and pubs on every corner. Daisy and I were soon joining the various journalists who gathered at the local Jolly Farmer pub for drinks after work and shopping together at David Jones and Grace Brothers in our lunch hours. And my job felt so grown up. After slumming it in the smoke filled, run down newsroom of the Auckland Daily, I had my own office with a computer and a printer and I was surrounded by women dressed in suits and high heels. I quickly adapted with the help of Nelly, who had once herself been a naïve wee thing from Tasmania and took me under her wing. The day she plonked a box of make-up, perfumes, hair products and jewellery on my desk, I thought she wanted me to deliver them somewhere.

  “No, they’re for you, to take home,” she laughed.

  “What free? Just for me? Crikey I wouldn’t know what to do with half of them,” I giggled.

  “You’ll learn,” she smiled.

  The job was difficult at first because I had no contacts in Sydney with the police or courts as I did in Auckland and couldn’t rely on them to pass me good stories. But Sydney did have three fantastic daily papers, not to mention the other states and I just started reading and clipping and following up on any story which hinted of incest, medical misadventure, victims or freaks.

  Six months into the job, it seemed to be going well, until Nelly slid into my office.

  “Sally wants to see you,” she whispered, in the way she does when something big was up. “On your own.”

  “Shit what did I do? Was it the story about the woman who got pregnant to her dwarf son? Was it too much do you think?”

  “I don’t know but she is in one of her moods,” she warned.

  Sally’s moods were legendary not just in the Fabulous Day office but the entire building of Poole Publishing. She could cut a person down with the blink of an eyelid and let rip with the most vindictive shocking abuse I had ever witnessed. Fortunately I had been doing an okay job and had managed to remain under the radar so far when it came to Sally and her anger.

  There was nothing for it but to put on a fresh coat of lipstick (Sally was a stickler for well groomed staff) have a quick nervous wee and head on into “the pit” as we affectionately referred to her office.

  “Umm, Sally hi, you wanted to see me?” I ventured in my most pleasant voice with a smile I hadn’t used since I was hauled in front of the headmistress in sixth form for hijacking the school newsletter and practising a bit of creative writing on her letter to the parents.

  “Shut the door, Jane. And what fucking colour lipstick is that you’ve got on? Change it, it doesn’t suit you,” snapped Sally.

  “Okay, yes, you might be right, it’s a bit peachy isn’t it.” I ventured as I closed the door and stood waiting for my bollocking, whatever it was for.

  “How long have you been with us, Jane?” she said casually as she flipped through her latest magazine, deliberately not giving me her full attention.

  “Umm about six months, Sally.’

  “Mmm” she said pausing to look up from the magazine and look at me over her red-framed reading glasses. “Well I think that’s long enough.”

  “I … I’m sorry?” I reacted in shock, wondering what on earth I had done to get fired. “Have I done something wrong?” I whispered, feeling the tears welling up in my eyes and attempting to blink them away furiously.

  “Long enough as news editor, darling. Don’t get all emotional on me. I like your work, Jane, I like it very much. You have a skill which is rarely seen in the business, the ability to get anyone to talk about anything. In the past six months you have delivered me a constant stream of stories of such high quality and quite frankly some of them quite fucking unbelievable that I began to wonder if you were making them up,” she smiled. The first time I’d seen her smile since I started working for her.

  “So I did a bit of digging on you. My husband has a few newspaper mates in Auckland and one in particular assured me that you were the real deal. But he also added that he thought your real forte was in celebrity news. And quite frankly, Jane, I need someone like you to get up the arses of some of these jum
ped up stars we have here. None of them will give me a story unless it’s about their fucking pet kitten or a new bloody starving African they’re sponsoring. I need real stories out of these people, and according to this guy you are just the ticket, so from tomorrow you will hand over your news editor position to Diana and I’m making you celebrity editor,” and with that she returned to reading her magazine while I wrestled with the mixed blessings of not being told off but being given a job I would hate. I found my now or never voice again.

  “Well that’s great but, Sally, I’m a news journalist. Always will be, always have been. I like hard news, not soft celebrity stories. That’s not me. Whoever you talked to in New Zealand obviously doesn’t know me very well to say that.”

  Sally looked up at me again.

  “Oh I think he knows you very well, darling,” she said slyly before delivering her checkmate. “His name’s Jim Craig.”

  When I left New Zealand I never heard a word from Jim Craig. I tried to ring but he wouldn’t pick up or return messages. During my last two weeks at the Daily he went out of his way to ignore me and at my leaving shout he didn’t even turn up. Apart from leaving my suitcase along with all my other bits and pieces and his key to my flat on my doorstep on the day he dumped me at the side of the road, I had no contact with him. And since I had been in Australia my mates in the newsroom told me he had become even more reclusive and was immersed in a story about government funds intended for education being siphoned off into a fund for a certain MPs retirement. It seemed drug underworld stories were no longer of interest to him. Apparently he only once mentioned my name in the pub, and that was to say I had “sold out” by going to magazines, and in his considered opinion I had a highly inflated sense of my own talent and “would never make it” in Sydney. That hurt.

  If Jim couldn’t have me, then he was going to do his best to ruin me or at least my reputation. He must have been overjoyed to get a call from Sally and do the one thing he knew would break me. While I was obviously happy to take my hard news sense to a women’s magazine in order to leave him, I would not be happy about taking it down another peg into celebrity interviews. I couldn’t believe that even in Australia the Jim Craig muscle could still have power.

  I had no choice but to take the promotion, and the money that went with it. I was too new in Sydney to have made any contacts in the newspapers who could offer me a job, so for the moment, I was stuck with the magazine.

  But as it turned out I was even better with celebrities than I was with victims, so in the end Jim did me a favour.

  Within a year I had replaced Nelly, who had left to be editor of our rival Woman’s Week and I was now Sally’s deputy on more money than I knew what to do with and having more fun than I knew was possible. My day started at the office at 7am and usually didn’t finish until 7pm. I threw myself into my work and despite Daisy’s warnings that I was becoming a workaholic and feeding me up on herbal tonics, I was in heaven. And somewhere along the way the op shop suit wearing, bad permed blonde grew into a sophisticated, straight-haired, high-heeled, corporate woman.

  I had become the person I never intended to be but, as it turned out, I quite liked it. And somewhere along the way with my 12 hour days I had dropped a dress size, going from a healthy size 12 to a lean and mean size 10 which was beginning to look a bit thin on my 5ft 11in frame.

  On a quick trip home for my cousin Pete’s wedding my mother took one look at me and rushed off into the kitchen to start baking.

  “Geez, love, there’s nothing of you,” my father commented as I followed him into the kitchen.

  “We’ll soon see about that,” announced my mother as a light cloud of dust arose from her frenzied sifting of flour over the cake bowl took place.

  “Mum, I’m fine, really. I’ve just been working hard and forgetting the odd meal. Believe it or not in Sydney this is how everyone looks.”

  She gave me a long look before silently turning back to her cake mix.

  “Come and help me bring the hens in,” said my father gently, sensing my mother’s disapproval.

  As we walked across the farm together I had an overwhelming sense of homesickness. It had been so long since I had seen a green field, a distant mountain or breathed fresh South Island alpine air that I suddenly became quite overcome with emotion.

  “She doesn’t mean to be so hard on you. You know she hates big cities, I can’t remember the last time she went into Dunedin, and as you know she’s never set foot in Auckland, let alone Sydney. She just doesn’t trust them and thinks that you’ll end up with some incurable disease from the pollution or at least an eating disorder,” he chuckled.

  “Well, she could at least be a bit more welcoming than taking one look at me and then racing off to the kitchen to start baking cakes.”

  “She just loves you, Jane. Don’t worry about it. But she has got a point, a man needs something to hang on to you know.” And with that he was off calling the hens and having a right old laugh to himself.

  My parents weren’t the only ones concerned about me. Daisy was worried that two years after leaving Jim I had not had another relationship. She put it down to post traumatic shock and the fact that I was still subconsciously in love with Jim. She diagnosed magnesium and zinc along with valerian tablets. I put it down to being too busy and the fact that none of the men I associated with did it for me. They all wore business suits, cut their hair short and talked endlessly about sport or share markets. I guess I had a type I liked, and that type was tall, slim, wore skinny black jeans, old rock band T shirts and had curly black hair and dark eyes.

  When my boss had forced me into my new celebrity reporting job I got straight on the phone and rang Jim at the Daily, giving him a full force blast. Something I hadn’t realised I was capable of, but I was obviously spending too much time watching Sally do it.

  “How dare you tell lies about me to my boss! You of all people know what I love to do, and I am no celebrity slut journalist. What were you thinking!?”

  “Oh Jane, how lovely to hear from you after all this time,” he said coldly.

  “I tried to say goodbye but you were ignoring me.”

  “Was I? I don’t think so, you obviously didn’t try hard enough,” I could see him smirking on the other end of the line as he lit a cigarette. “Listen, baby. The day you left me was the day I stopped doing you any favours. So let’s just see how well you do now, without me in your life. Goodbye.”

  And with that he hung up. I dialled back immediately but the operator on the switchboard informed me he wasn’t taking calls.

  So I sat down that night after Daisy and I had got through two bottles of wine together, she gave up and went to bed and then I opened another. I wrote him a five page letter which started with anger and rage and ended with sadness and loneliness, which was how I felt by 1am.

  A week later the phone rang in my office.

  “Fabulous Day, Jane Lyndhurst speaking,” I answered officially.

  “Thank you for your letter,” said Jim, soft and soothing.

  My heart leapt. What? The man I hated most in the world was on the phone and my heart was leaping. Don’t leap. Bad heart. No leaping.

  “That’s okay, I just had some things I needed to say, and you wouldn’t take my call,” I replied, wondering where the hell my now or never voice had disappeared to.

  “I’m glad you wrote, it told me that you still care.”

  “No I don’t. Not about you. I care about my career. You got that wrong,” I said hastily wondering just how drunk I was that night and struggling to remember what I had actually written.

  “Jane no one says they don’t care when they write the words ‘your penis is a work of art,’” he paused. “Can I come over and see you?”

  “No you can’t, stay away. I’ll never forgive you for what you said to my boss. It was a total abuse of your power, a power I might add you seem to think you have over me. And just because a penis looks good doesn’t mean I want to fuck it or the p
erson it’s attached to.” I was doing my best to sound serious but the ridiculous situation of this cross-Tasman phone call got the better of me and I giggled.

  “Oh so you’re a penis connoisseur, is that it? How’s your collection going?” he said. “Baby, I love you, I would never do anything to hurt you.”

  And there it was. “Baby” again while the sound of him laughing brought back the image of that nose-wrinkling smile.

  “Fuck off,” I threw back at him weakly, feeling myself being dragged back into his control and powerless to stand up to him.

  The next morning I dragged myself out of bed to answer the door bell and there was Jim in his T shirt and jeans, his hair gorgeously out of control, his smile in full force and his nose wrinkling in delight.

  And the sex was out of this world.

  Jim eventually returned to New Zealand after five incredible nights during which Daisy fluttered around like the eager bridesmaid she dreamed of being. She’d always liked Jim and while she understood my feeling of being hemmed in by his intensity she would have personally welcomed similar attention from a man.

  There would be many more visits but as far as I was concerned we never got back together, he just visited occasionally and I saw him on the odd occasions I went back to New Zealand. I could never forgive him for the terrible things he had said about me, even though when confronted he denied everything.

  “I never said that about you in the pub, baby, you know how people love to gossip, they were probably winding you up. The truth is after you left I never talked about you to anyone, I was too upset.”

  “Well you made up for that when you recommended me as the next best thing in celebrity reporting,” I countered, watching him closely.