The Dragon and the Crab

by Sarah Hilary © 2008

Pip Heron hunched her shoulders ferociously, blowing smoke down her narrow nostrils. The light in the woodshed was raw, falling on her hands, her ravenous face. Two feet from her, perched sideways on an uncertain pile of wood, Claudia Newton kept her Blackberry busy, her small lashless eyes scurrying across the screen as she entered notes. She didn't understand more than one word in ten of Pip's dictation, but it didn't matter because she knew that when she took the transcript to Mr Gatiss, he would put up his brows and mutter something about Pip being past her sell-by date, asking Claudia for the piece she'd written on her laptop last night about celebrity stretch-marks.

Mr Gatiss has explained to Claudia, when he took her on, that the newspaper retained Pip's services as a link with its illustrious past, ‘Like the cornicing and the picture-rails,' but there was more money to be made in column inches about Brangelina than dry bureaucracy in Brussels.

Pip was old school; ancient. ‘Yesterday's chip paper,' Mr Gatiss said behind her skinny back.

The old woodshed stood outside the back door of the newspaper's offices, in a converted townhouse in Marylebone. Health and Safety had said to knock the woodshed down, but Mr Gatiss kept putting it off. It was the only indoor plot where Pip was allowed to chain-smoke without setting off alarms.

‘Standing shoulder to shoulder with our tin-pot allies…' She tapped herself on the shoulder as she said it, her bone emitting a hollow sound like a length of piping.

She glanced at the girl with the Blackberry, to see if she was bothering with the pantomime of taking this down. Imagine something small always moving sideways, never in a straight line. Something irresistibly myopic. A little pretty creeping crab. Pip called Claudia ‘Claw'.

Claw wore pink, from patent-leather pumps to plastic hair-grips, a tiny shiny rucksack strapped to her back, its Lilliputian bump sitting snug between her birdlike shoulder-blades. She was in her way every bit as grotesque as Pip Heron.

Pip wore black, and sometimes red. She knew how it made her look grotesque; a Hallowe'en puppet strung together with wire and thread. She smoked Silk Cut with elbows jutting, smoke twisting from her face. She knew exactly what she looked like, carrying an unforgiving image of herself at the front of her mind, the way some people carry in their wallets photographs of loved ones, or bills to be paid.

The glossy little girl cocked her head and gave Pip her short-sighted smile, painted fingers poised over her noisy toy. What was wrong with a notepad and pencil?

‘Old hack hacks hands off ingénue,' Pip dictated in her head. ‘Bloodshed in the woodshed. How's that for a money-making headline, Gatiss, you sellout?'