Exposure Read Free

you’re making me nervous.”
    That was both of them then.
    “If it was anyone else but you, Helene, I’d tell them to go screw themselves.”
    Such a delightful chap, charm school notwithstanding.
    “Okay, I’ll take it to Mac,” he said at last, “but you gotta give me a bit more. Who is this guy? You gotta name names.”
    “You think I’m going to feed you that?! What am I, some cub reporter still wet behind the ears?”
    “Okay, okay. Pedal off the metal, Ms High-and-mighty. I’ll talk to Mac. I’ll see if I can get you five now and another five when you turn in the piece. I’ll need at least twenty thousand words. And photos. Good stuff.”
    “Frank, please don’t insult me. I want sixty up front and another forty when you get the story. Sterling. Plus I want serial rights, syndication, expenses and the usual per diem. Non-negotiable.”
    “Oh, come on! Nobody gets a deal like that – not even Syd Harris.”
    “True, but that’s because he’s dead. Once in a lifetime, Frankie.”
    “You’re busting my balls, Helene!”
    “Yes, well, you’ll grow another pair eventually. S’long, Frank.”
    “Wait, wait! Look, I gotta okay it with Mac. Just gimme an hour, okay?”
    “You’ve got 30 minutes, Frank, or I’ll take it to Hawkins.”
    “You’re a bitch, Helene.”
    “You can sweet talk me all you like, Frank. Thirty minutes.”
    She snapped the phone shut, her heart hammering a deranged Ginger Baker solo. One hundred thousand pounds plus serial and syndication. This was going to make a nice bit of padding for her frail pension pot.
    Of course, she had bugger-all to go on, having just made the whole thing up.

Chapter 2
     
    The cottage was cool and shady, even in the heat of summer. It was really two fisherman’s cottages knocked into one. The limewash rendering was smooth on one half and attractively textured on the other, where it had been combed over granite. Wisteria grew around the deep windows, unusual in this part of the world where the salt-laden south westerlies regularly decimated the softer varieties of plants that occasionally recklessly mistook themselves to grow in the mild climate.
    Before she had turned her key in the door, her phone beeped. A text. From Frank. Just three words: ‘You got it’.
    Helene stood staring at the text for a second longer than necessary, then closed the phone slowly.
    When she pushed open the heavy front door, divided stable-wise into two sections, a depressingly small pile of post lay on the doormat.
    The inevitable statements because all her utilities and credit cards were on standing order, a flyer for a new Chinese restaurant in Penzance and a handbill about an afternoon tea party at the local church hall, now long since passed. The oldest mail had been stacked neatly onto the kitchen table.
    More mailers. Nothing personal. She missed letters, proper handwritten letters, full of news and the personality of the writer. Emails had obvious advantages, but still...
    Helene stared around her tiredly. Familiar yet unfamiliar. It always took her a while to get used to being home again.
    Home. A word that resonated with so many suppressed feelings. Home ought to be the answer to the question people of a certain age – her age – too often asked: Is this all it is?
    In her teens, home had been somewhere she longed to leave: the neat ex-authority terrace with the tidy garden and suffocating cul-de-sac. In her twenties it was a pit-stop of unwashed clothes and half eaten meals, dozens of messages and dates scrawled on notes and stuffed in a diary; half-remembered names sketched on paper napkins, useful contacts, full of possibility. In her thirties, home had been a smart, salary-sapping future nest, with a husband and dinner parties, long days at work, air travel, foreign hotels, smart, clever people, political discussions in a dozen accents, half a dozen languages. But somehow the nest had never been feathered and the husband had disappeared along with the