Baby-face, now ignored by media heavyweights who nightly ignited the hotel bars reliving powderkeg situations they had survived, found time to take a detached view and plan ahead. The forest fire continued to be film-worthy but was becoming stale. Public appetites require constant spicing.
“The scribes will soon be gone,” the photographer had assured. “There can’t be much happening in the big wide world while all these laptops keep hanging around Strontian.”
Baby-face didn’t mind. He had met the corps, and a few might remember him as the young journo first on the scene. For forms sake, he had circled around them in the bars but found them cliquey and unresponsive. A high standard of cynicism was maintained on every subject they discussed and he quickly tired of the presumed superiority of their views.
“Christ,” he confided to the photographer, “what a bunch of pricks.”
“These are the second division,” the photographer said. “Actually, a few of them are fine once you get to know them. The heavy mob, the premier league, are their editors. Guys like the boss of the Sky foreign desk, they run the show. You see Tim on television from time to time when it’s time for a return to near reality. Then the news group can claim that it told an unpalatable truth. Hacks shuffle and cut their reports to toe the political line. Interventions by senior editors are made to save the integrity of the outlet. Or save a perception of integrity, I should say.”
So Baby-face flirted with the periphery in order to be seen and hopefully remembered. It was indeed a circus come to town, and he noted very few of the locals paying it any attention. The early tourists, however, flocked around the media folk for a memorable phrase to take back to Tunbridge Wells or wherever. Much alcohol was consumed in this process and the Argyll Hotel buzzed.
“This can not last,” the photographer said. “The bars will run dry. We badly need to pitch in with something different until something better turns up, like proof of fire raising. Come on, you’re supposed to have ambition. Think of a filler, something of interest.”
“We will visit the injured worker, the bloke who was burned at the very beginning of all this. Everybody has forgotten about him. I heard he’s in the Fort William hospital, not too badly done in and making a recovery.”
“Not brilliant, but we need something fresh,” the wrinkled photographer sounded unimpressed. “We need more than funerals and a hunt for some nutty arsonist. We need to beat a drum. It might drown out the sound of helicopter blades spreading death and destruction. You need to learn the trick of converting everyday crap into news when things go quiet.”
“There’s always hiatus, a time of waiting. They teach you that in reporter school. Comes a big bang of breaking news, a filling in of detail, then all the journos run off to pasture on something else,” Baby-face appeared to wish that he was legging it back to the metropolis where accidental death and murder occurred so regularly that no-one wearied.
“They taught you well,” the photographer said. “They teach all you guys well. Then you please your teachers, leave school, and go breathlessly in search of sudden fame, never properly seeing a story through. We should stick around. There’s always more. It pays to be patient.”
“You don’t need to keep reminding me,” Baby-face said. “But nothing from Nic. No directions, nothing. What is he doing in that eyrie of his?”
“Scheming,” the photographer answered. “What the hell do you think he’s doing?”