Prophet Margin

Unearthing the shadowy cabal responsible for every broken shoe lace.

Christ’s Entry into Brussels by James Ensor (1888)

Squeezing a living out of a condemned local newspaper had its perks. Ignore the skeletal budgets, the sclerotic staff, and the flagrant inability to pay the harried photographer a sandwich wage. To outsiders, this local newspaper remained a storied institution of stability and truth.

By outsiders, I mean that cadre of visitors and callers to whom we, the glorified copy-pasters of press releases, playfully referred to as 'nutters.'

Great Britain is no longer so great. But this nation still produces the world's finest oddballs. There are two dominant species of nutter. The first is the endearing eccentric—'A bit of a nutter.' The second is the vexatious and unhinged—'The man's a complete nutter.'

Local newspapers, though coughing up lumps of blood-flecked phlegm, still command an unblemished reverence amongst the nutter community.

Any hard-boiled hack has in their contacts book a compendium of nutters, each with their own specialism. If stuck for a front-page story or a juicy quote, an enterprising hack will dial up one of their trusted, lovingly unhinged confidants.

Nutters of a certain familiarity would shuffle off the high street and into reception. The receptionist knew her brief. She'd wave the fruitful upstairs into the newsroom. If a known timewaster turned up, invariably dressed in mustard corduroys, the receptionist quarantined them downstairs. The phone would rattle.

"I've got a Mister Talebearer down here. They say they have a story. Their neighbour sneaks into their greenhouse at night and plants slugs amongst their tomato plants."

Silence.

She'd reply: "There's nobody available at the moment. Sorry."

The impounded would saunter off to the local Wetherspoon pub to harangue the staff and patrons with their mad tales of horticultural terrorism.

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This filtration system sieved the useful from the useless and the vigorous from the violent.

One vexatious nutter convinced at least three of his competing personalities of my involvement in one of his several persecutions.

If I remember correctly, an assailant named 'Fucking Ex-Wife' had allegedly run a car key down the side of his clapped-out Range Rover. This imaginative chap put two and two together. His 'fucking ex-wife' was seeing a mystery man who shared my first name. With his nostrils flaring, his eyes glazed in casual violence, he'd bore through my paltry skull: "His name's Christopher. He's got brown hair, too…".

From that day, reception hotly refused entry to any man around six-four, nineteen stone, who 'looks a bit mental' and who was once married to a woman with the first name 'Fucking.'

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I say we had perks. This Potemkin institution was a small-town newspaper staffed with two and a half washed-up hacks. Two-thirds of the editorial staff were either genuinely alcoholic or doing a rather uncanny impression of an alcoholic.  In a two-day flurry of typing and the c-word, we'd press together a satisfactory twenty pages. From Wednesday to Monday, the spectral bosses left you to your own Malbec-sodden devices.

This consumptive state of affairs sucked toward the newsroom every time-rich nutter within a twelve-mile radius.

The phone would jingle. On the other end was hushed jabbering: "Is this line secure?"

On more than one occasion, the caller revealed themselves as a highly trained operative on the run from Mi5, the British secret service. What followed was pure Kabuki theatre.

"I suppose you've seen the news."

"What news would that be, sir?"

"Ha. You know what I'm on about. Novichok. The Salisbury poisoning?"

"What about it, sir?"

"What about it? What-ah-bout-it. Whataboutit?"

He'd continue: "I bet you'd love to know what really happened in Salisbury. Wouldn't you?" This was not a question.

Russian history offers some insight here. Mother Russia, a nation animated in a litany of resentment and claims of stifled greatness, was a common cause célèbre amongst occupied minds.

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The callers lived in a cocoon of silkworm intricacy. Inserted into this Aristotelian three-act narrative was a series of expertly placed emotional triggers. Tripping these wires obliged the audience of one to umm or ahh. Punji pits dotted the jungle underfoot. An overindulgent gasp invited suspicion. A pallid grunt sparked mild panic on the other end of the phone.

These incalculable faux pas compromised the entire production, a grand narrative to which you—a so-called journalist—were incredibly fortunate to be privy.

The sacred laws of French kissing governed this hair-triggered ballet. Synchronised tongues please the Gods. But one party's errant tongue provokes wrath. You know what I mean. A rhythmless tongue is as if the other party has slipped an electric eel into your mouth.

These callers wanted one simple thing: to be judged as both modest and heroic. Ordinary men of extraordinary means begrudgingly tasked with ridding the world of corruption and evil.

This dicey danse macabre exposed my two left feet. I couldn't calculate my umms and my ahhs. I'd ahh when I should umm and I'd umm when I should ahh. Their lungs would expand. Their blood would run hot. Under no circumstances, utter the colloquial, 'Really?' as in, 'Please, continue.'

"Whaddaya mean, really? You think I'm making this up?!" Interrobangs exploded on the end of one's nose.

"What is your name again?! Christopher. I see. Christopher. That's a saint's name. Is it not?" This was not a question.

"Well, so they say. You do know the truth behind Saint Christopher. Don't you? No? Saint Christopher was actually…"

The narrator would fizz and foam until you dutifully reattached the trip wires and restarted the grand narrative of everything. But this time with feeling.

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Why not just put down the phone? For the same reason, one doesn't open the doors of a moving bus and bundle into the road. Once you've said, 'Hello?' you've stamped your ticket. The doors have swung shut. The madman's boot has flattened the accelerator pedal. You may reach your destination once—and only once—you've dutifully ahhed and diligently ummed.

Slamming the phone down, to riot in understatement, was inadvisable. That is, unless you valued a constantly buzzing phone, an inbox bursting with CAPS-LOCKED emails, a quivering receptionist, and an endless scroll of hyperthermic 'evidence' claiming the caller's manifest troubles were authored by Mi5 or the Jews.

To umm and ahh offered a prudent escape. Besides, what these callers craved most would arrive in due course.

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After an hour or so, they'd exhaust themselves. Sneering condescension simmered into Mediterranean ease.

Displaying the early symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, I'd signal the end of the grand theory of everything.

"That's quite the story, sir. Thank you for trusting me—of all people—with it."

"Oh, it's nothing, Christopher. May I call you Christopher? You're one of the good ones. I trust you, Christopher. I mean that. By the way, Christopher, I'm sorry for calling you a c***."

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