Chapter 1
Sunny
The sun was barely up, and already my piss was boiling.
I threw my strictly-work-purposes-only tablet onto the bed in disgust. It landed right side up, lighting my bedroom in a soft white glow.
The picture of my own stupid face shone brightly up at me from my photo byline in the morning’s paper, mocking me.
“Sunny Miller, Political Reporter.” I smacked a pillow over it so I didn’t have to stare at the comedy headline the subeditors had put on what had been, when I filed it the night before, a very serious article about the government funding programmes to “save the British countryside.” I mean, it was mostly about otters, and who doesn’t bloody love otters?
“WOTTA LOTTA OTTER NONSENSE,” the headline screamed from the page.
“You’ve got a face like Gordon Ramsay licking piss off a nettle,” Dav said.
We bumped fists, and as we set off along our usual route towards Gladstone Park, I told him about the latest comedy headline.
“The worst bit was the strapline: ‘They squat on public land and build illegal dams, and now they’re getting fat on the taxpayer’s purse.’”
Dav’s cautious side-eye suggested I’d lost him.
“Otters don’t build dams. Beavers build dams.”
“Gotcha.”
“So now, thanks to some bellend subeditor who’s somehow never been forced to sit through an episode of Springwatch, not only is Britain’s wildlife-loving public going to think I am an idiot, but Jemima Carstairs is never going to trust me with an exclusive again.”
Another cautious side-eye. I rolled my eyes.
“She’s the environment secretary.”
“Gotcha.”
Dav’s a music journalist for a slowly failing street magazine.
He’s proper smart, but about things like the feud between Robert Smith and Morrissey and remembering which Gallagher is the douchebag, not politics.
Dav and I grew up together. He’d been my best mate since year three, when Mrs Yates sat the (probably queer) new brown kid next to the (definitely queer) unpopular ginger kid, so the class bullies would have all their targets conveniently located in one place.
We quickly became thick as thieves, bonding over our mutual love of High School Musical.
I spent the next decade swapping my free school meal for the delicious and exotic contents of Dav’s lovingly prepared lunchbox.
We studied journalism together at Leeds; then Dav and his ludicrously perfect boyfriend, Nick, moved down to London while I went back to Leicester to spend two years at the local rag—writing about People’s Postcode Lottery winners and barn fires—before eventually landing a job on Fleet Street and joining him in London.
Dav patiently listened to me moan as we jogged along the quiet terraced streets of Willesden Green and through the Churchill Road underpass.
“I should quit,” I said, with sudden clarity.
Dav’s eyebrows arched like the Maccy D’s logo.
“It took you two years to get a job on Fleet Street, and you’re gonna pack it in because the subs like a joke? Get a grip, mate.”
“I’m embarrassed to work there.”
“You knew what the Bulletin was like. You knew what you were getting into.”
This was true. But I’d only taken the job to get my foot in the door at a national paper.
The plan was to work hard, break real news, and hope someone at one of the more respectable broadsheets might notice and give me a shot.
Or, if not a broadsheet, at least a paper that not only didn’t publish a pair of bare tits on page three but also didn’t respond to the criticism of its publishing bare tits on page three by publishing a pair of bare bollocks on page five.
How was anyone going to notice my “real news” when it was always turned into puns and parody?
“I’m not sure how much longer I can put up with it,” I said.
“Stick it out, princess. It’s not forever.”
We jogged through the ornate gates of Gladstone Park. There was a light frost, and the grass was white and shiny in the misty morning light. Dav was forgetting about my other huge, intractable problem—my chief of staff, JT Thorpe.
“He hates me,” I said. “Looks at me like he’s one uncomfortable bowel movement away from flushing me completely.”
“He promoted you to the politics team, mate.”
“Only because he flushed the turd in front of me. He’s never really forgiven me for missing that story about the sicko from Leicestershire.”
“You mean the bloke from Newton Bardon who was meeting men online, knocking them out with roofies, and cutting off their balls?”
“I should have known about all of it, apparently, as the newsroom’s designated ‘mincer from the Midlands.’”
“It was one psycho in his attic with his dick in one hand and a scalpel in the other. In a tiny village. Miles away.”
“If you ask JT, it should have been a Bulletin exclusive. And you don’t rob a man like JT Thorpe of a headline like ‘Bollock Bandit trawled chat rooms for tempting testicles’ and stay in his good graces.”
We reached the top of the hill. The view across London was obscured by mist.
“I should definitely quit.”
“How much money you got in the bank right now, mate?” I knew what he was going to say. “No way you got more than a month’s rent saved.”
He paused for confirmation, but I wouldn’t meet his eye.
“I’ll take that as a yes. You can quit, but you’ll be back in Leicester five minutes later, mate—sleeping in your old bedroom in your old council flat, watching your old Glee DVDs and wanking over Darren Criss, until your mum finally nags you to death.”
“I’d be fine for a while,” I said. But Dav was right. I had less than ￡300 in my account to last until payday. If I chucked my job, or if JT finally sacked me, London was over. My heart sank. We jogged in silence for a bit.
“You doing anything for the coronation?” Dav asked.
I groaned. “Are you seriously going to watch that gold-gilded wankfest?”
“It’s history, in’t it? Come round ours if you want. Nick and I are having a small gathering.”
“Some bloke inherits a hat from his old man—not to mention a shockingly unrepresentative role in our democracy and a couple of billion in property and trinkets—and suddenly everyone’s a knee-bending Tory.”
“You’ll never get a job up the posh end of Fleet Street with that attitude, mate. They’re proper rigid for King George and Queen Philippa.”
“You’re meant to be on my side, Davinder.”
“Look, do you want to spend an afternoon on my couch eating my mum’s bhajis or not?”
Amita’s bhajis? I didn’t need to be asked twice.
“Does that mean your folks are coming down for the party?”
“Sort of.” Dav paused. “They’re going down the Mall to watch the King and Queen go past.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“Class traitors!”
Twenty minutes later, we were back at my front door. My wonderful neighbour, Rosie, was hanging out her upstairs window, with a fag in hand, blowing her smoke into the street. We said good morning, and she waved back regally, like she was Queen Philippa herself. Dav put his hand on my shoulder.
“You’re a good journo, Sunny,” he said. “Just stick at it. It’ll all work out.”
Dav jogged home, and I went inside in search of a hot shower.
I was too late. The rush had already begun.
My flatmate, José, was in the bathroom and his girlfriend, Stella, had started a queue—standing in the hallway in her pyjamas, towel over her arm, hair like she’d spent the night shagging in a hedge.
When I did finally get a shower, the hot water would be gone.
I went to my bedroom, sat on the edge of my bed, and plucked off my socks.
Dav’s final words rang in my ears. Just stick at it.
I opened the BBC Sounds app and put on the Today programme.
Today is basically a taxpayer-funded babysitting service for baby boomers, but it’s also essential listening if you’re in the news business.
The silky-smooth voice of presenter Lucy Veeraswamy filled my tiny bedroom.
She was interviewing some woman about the cost of living crisis.
While I waited, I watched out the window.
The 260 bus was idling at the stop. Its rumble rattled the broken pane and made my floorboards shiver.
Old Mrs Patel from number eighteen pulled herself up onto the bus with an effort.
She was followed by a fit lad in his early twenties, wearing those sexy cargos the tradies all wear these days.
I opened GayHoller, the LGBTQ+ dating app, to see if he happened to be on it.
Some absolute hotties use that bus stop, and I’d scored from there before, so it paid to do a little investigative journalism.
“Let’s turn to what today’s papers are saying,” Lucy Veeraswamy trilled.
I turned up the volume. My story getting a mention was about as likely as the BBC namechecking the page-three girl.
And getting her boobs out in the Bulletin today, Candice from Carlisle.
It’d never happen. There’d be riots. Rightly so.
“To the big story of the day,” Veeraswamy began. “The Sentinel leads with allegations that the government is secretly planning to build a new nuclear power plant at Newton Bardon in Leicestershire.”
My heart (metaphorically) stopped. I couldn’t even draw breath for fear of choking on it.
“Energy Minister Bob Wynn-Jones has denied any such plan exists, but in an exclusive, the Sentinel says it has seen documents that suggest negotiations between the UK government and Belarusian energy baron Yevgeny Safin are at an advanced stage.”
“Bastards!”
My heart was now racing. How did I not know about this? JT was going to rip my throat out via the far end of my alimentary canal.
“We’ll be speaking to Sentinel’s political reporter, Ludo Boche, to get more on that story at a quarter past eight,” Veeraswamy said.
That just about finished me off. Ludo bloody Boche.
I punched the duvet. Then I launched myself onto the bed and punched it again.
I hadn’t met Ludo Boche yet. He was new on the Sentinel’s politics team.
He’d only been there for five minutes. I had no clue how this absolute knobber had broken a massive story in my own backyard, but I was willing to bet the fact his father was the Sentinel’s editor hadn’t done him any harm.
Journalism is all about contacts, and the Boche family had a rolled-gold address book.
Either Ludo or his old man would have gone to school with whoever dropped them that story.
You could bet your nanna’s last pair of knickers on it. I punched the duvet again.
The sound of air brakes pierced the morning air once more.
Bus stop boy would be disappearing into the vast metropolis of London, never to be seen again.
I grabbed my phone again to quickly scroll GayHoller in case the fittie had a profile I could save for later.
Nothing. Just my own stupid freckled face beaming back at me from above the words Ginger and Spice up your life.
For the second time that day, I was being mocked by my own electronic image.
I threw my phone on the bed and slammed my fists into the mattress.
Then I roared into my pillow for good measure.