Black Sheep

I ran over the gravel driveway, up the steps and opened the door. I needed to see him. I needed to tell him everything. It was pitch black, the only noise was the ticking of a grandfather clock. I walked up the staircase, my heels clicking on the wood. I pushed open the bedroom door. To see him curled up under the sheets, his red hair sticking up in odd directions on the pillow. My heart skipped a beat. I loved him to the moon and back. I slowly walked over and sat on the side of the bed.
“You came back,” he said sleepily, opening his eyes to look at me.
“Of course I came back.” He reached out from under the duvet to hold my hand, and rub circles with his thumb.
“Have you quit yet?”
“No, why would I-”
“I asked you to quit. I want you to resign.”
“So what? You ask me to do a lot of things.” He let go of my hand “What is your problem Harry?” He stayed quiet. “Just tell me your problem and we can sort this!” He laid, staring at the ceiling, not saying a word. “Let me in Harry.” I reached for his hand, just to hold on to something between us.
“I can’t let you in!”
“Why?! Why won’t you just talk to me?”
“I am talking!”
“no you’re not! We’re not talking, not properly!”
“Well what do you want to talk about?”
“This? Us? Why the hell you won’t tell me why you hate the media so much?”
“I would think that that’s a pretty obvious answer.” He almost whispered. The room went quiet. Thick quiet. The kind of quiet where there’s so much to be said, so many questions to be answered but nobody daring to say them.
“I understand Harry but-”
“See I don’t think you do. My mother was killed because of the media.” The sentence hung in the air.
“I know.” I went quiet.
“They hounded her, they chased her, she was miserable because of what they said about her. And they took her.” He sat bolt upright. “That morning when I woke up I knew something was wrong. I could just tell something wasn’t quite right. Father sat me and Will down and said ‘I’m sorry boys’ and I knew. He didn’t have to say anything else I just knew. They killed her just for a photo. Just for a fucking photo. It’s so fickle and shallow that they would go that far. That that one photo supposedly mattered to the public more than having her with us now and everything she would have done. She wasn’t there on Wills’ wedding day, and she won’t be there at mine. They took her away from me and Will and I can never forgive anyone for that.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive.”
“What are you asking me to do?” he looked me in the eye and I knew everything. In that moment I understood.
“I’m not asking anything of you.”
“Then what do you want me to do?”
“I don’t want you to do anything. I just-”
“You just what?”
“I just want you to understand. I grew up watching these women, these journalists on TV who stood there in there 4 inch Louboutin Heels walking into these big shiny offices shouting things like ‘stop the press, this has front page written all over it’ and I wanted to be that person. I wanted to be the roving reporter there on the front line telling everyone at home how bad the famine in Darfur was and how the people in America reacted to the planes hitting the twin towers. I wanted to be that person who would fly around the world telling everyone at home the truth. It’s all I ever wanted.”
“Just that? That’s everything to you?”
“Well it was. I was found by an online TV news company who told me that I would be the face of the news that I would be there covering the news as it breaks but it was never that way. I spent hours upon hours sat in a TV studio that was falling to pieces while I sat there, smiled sweetly and read the headlines like I was told. I moved to London against my parent’s wishes, practically ran away. Then I found out that journalism isn’t really all that. I’d wasted my degree and my time at uni to find the whole thing was a lie. It doesn’t matter what’s really happening. It doesn’t matter that the icecaps are melting, or that millions of kids in the UK are starving, or that people are being killed all over the world for believing something or feeling something or even loving someone. Nothing matters more than the money in the pockets of the bosses. That’s why those photographers killed your mum. It wasn’t that that’s what the people wanted. It was that whichever newspaper had that exclusive photo, the photo that nobody else could get, on their front cover so that they could have made more billions to blow on cocaine and prostitutes.”
“So let’s start a revolution and oust the media!” he joked, lightening the mood.
“It can work both ways.”
“what do you mean?”
“Well they’re looking for something and as soon as they find it they’ll get bored and look for something else.”
“So we give them what they want? Let’s just have a party and invite the press and hire some prostitutes all dressed as Hitler to serve lines of the finest drugs money can buy from the back of starving African child.”
“No, we just make them see what you’re trying to say.”
“but they already listen to my speeches.”
“There’s more than that. Say you see a flower and to you it’s the most beautiful flower in the whole garden, but they’re too busy taking pictures of the sky to see it, you need to tell them to look at it.”
“I understand, but how?”
“Ask them. They’re not that scary, they’re people too.”
“So I go up to a reporter and say ‘make sure you write about that’”
“pretty much,” I started playing with his fingers once the conversation had eased. The room went quiet again, more comfortable this time. “Where does this leave us?”
“right here.”
“you know what I mean.”
“Exactly, right here. I need to be more understanding and you just need to do what you do.”
“But how long for?”
“until you marry me and we have kids and a dog and live happily ever after.”
He leant towards me and for the first time that night, he kissed me. There was so much understanding and relief in that kiss that neither of us wanted to stop. And we didn’t. We slowly fell to our sides, his arm capturing me as I fell. His hand wrapped around my back gently reaching up to the zipper at the back of my dress. Then an idea popped into my head. I pulled away from him.
“Wait right here.”
“What for?” he whined when I stood up of the bed. I reached over to my handbag on the floor, finding my ipad.
“I’m resigning.”