The Bullet That Missed полностью

He is watching Stop the Clock on a very big television. Fiona Clemence looks wonderful. He thought he should probably give it a go, after Joyce mentioned it. Admit some professional jealousy, swallow a bit of pride, he has plenty to spare, and watch it once. See if Fiona Clemence is any good. He hoped not.

Annoyingly, he watched an episode and is now hooked. Fiona is OK, friendly enough, good at reading out loud, but what a quiz. Mike imagines what he might have done with it. Every time a contestant says something, Mike thinks about how he would respond. Once or twice Fiona Clemence says the same thing as he would have done, and that irks him a little, but, overall, he thinks he’d be slightly better.

But isn’t that just the thing, Mike? You can think all you like, but you never did it. Never took the risks. He filmed a pilot once, the late eighties or so. It went well, everybody agreed, ITV loved it, commissioned a series, but wanted one little change. Could they get a different host? Someone younger, someone – and these words remained etched in his mind for a long time – ‘more authentic, more real’.

Mike never put his perfectly groomed head above the parapet again, never left the burrow, however much he could smell the air outside. ‘More authentic, more real’ – for years he had railed against this insult. Mike was real, Mike was authentic, and if some twenty-somethings from London with fashionable hair and trainers couldn’t see that, the problem was not with Mike, it was with them.

So there he sat, behind his desk, year in, year out, telling the people of Kent and Sussex about fires in care homes, building-society robberies in Faversham, or a Hastings man claiming to have the world’s largest bouncy castle. And he was real enough and authentic enough for the people of Kent and Sussex, thank you very much. Walk through the streets of Maidstone or East Grinstead and see who thinks Mike is real. Everyone.

There were a couple more approaches from national TV, never anything concrete or exciting, but approaches nonetheless. But Mike refused even to consider them. He was happy where he was, thank you.

Except, Mike thinks back, looking at his cider in the ridiculous decanter, he wasn’t happy at all. Did he know he wasn’t happy? No, he had enough booze, and enough local adulation to keep him sedated, to keep his train on the tracks. He’d started to become a little more irritable, sure, a little bit more demanding of those he worked with, probably less fun to be around. But that, to his mind, was just professionalism, in a world where the people around him started getting younger and younger. As the teams he was used to working with started drifting off to bigger things, to London, or, in one particularly galling case, to Los Angeles.

But Mike was not happy. And the reason that Mike was not happy was that Mike was not authentic, and Mike was not real.

And who taught him that lesson?

Bethany Waites.

How old was he when Bethany arrived? She was a researcher first, so maybe 2008? Wikipedia will tell you that Mike Waghorn was fifty-six in 2008, but he was sixty-one. Bethany would have been early twenties, he supposes, down from Leeds, with a Media Studies degree of all things. She would make him tea, he would tell her what a waste of time a Media Studies degree was, she would bring him stories her more experienced colleagues had missed, he would buy her a pint after work, she would challenge him, goad him, encourage him, and he would make sure she got safely into a taxi at the end of the night.

A year or so in, Mike told Bethany she should be appearing on air. Bethany, typically, did not disagree with this assessment. So she started filming reports. Then, every now and again, she’d pop into the studio to discuss those reports. Then, when Mike’s co-host was on an ill-advised holiday, Bethany would step in, and, before you knew it, Mike and Bethany were the team at South East Tonight.

One evening they had been having a pint near the studio, as they often did, and there was a copy of Kent Matters on the bar. It was a local magazine, just photos from events, adverts for spas and expensive houses, that sort of thing. There had been a picture of Mike in the magazine. He was looking very suave, wearing a tux, at some business event or other. The Kent Accountancy Awards maybe. He remembered that one because he had fatally mispronounced the name of the awards very early on, and had the crowd firmly on his side from thereon.

He had taken Pauline as his ‘plus one’, as he often did in those days. She liked a drink, and he liked having someone else to talk to other than an accountant from Sevenoaks who hadn’t heard of him but demanded a selfie nonetheless.

Bethany had pointed the picture out, his arm around Pauline’s waist, and Mike had smiled, and told her about the ‘Kent Accountancy’ slip-up. Bethany then began the long process of making Mike a better, happier man.