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stir from his post at the back of the newsroom, where he sucked in an unending stream of Twitter feeds, aggrieved rants to radio call-in shows, and texts from dodgy friends in Peckham, then spat them back out as undisputed truth. It was troubling that he considered this gossip sterling enough to deliver in person.
    “First thing,” he said, “they gonna fire half the editors and reporters. Then they find someone to do it cheaper overseas. Next thing you know, bam ” — he slammed his fist on Arthur’s desk, making them both jump — “all your stories about EastEnders are being written in Bombay.”
    “Mumbai,” said Frances, not really listening. A terrible feeling had come over her.
    “Bollocks,” said Sue, but she sounded uneasy. More than half her time was spent writing about EastEnders .
    Thick as he was, Gareth somehow sensed their distress. “Never mind,” he said, and plucked a copy of Heat magazine off Arthur’s desk (“Porky Princess’s Shame-Stain Saturday!”). “Taking the piss out of celebrities. That’s where the money is.”
    They walked back to their desks in silence. Frances slid into her seat. She tried not to imagine her future as an arctic slide through failure toward death. There were two months left on her contract, and it had never occurred to her that it wouldn’t be renewed. It wouldn’t make any sense for Stanley to let her go, would it? She was the equivalent of slave labour — cheap as chips. The newspaper didn’t even pay her benefits.
    An atavistic sense of preservation told her she should probably get out of the office as quickly as possible. She was just rising from her chair when she saw the door to Stanley’s office swing open. Even from where she was standing, she could see that a Niagara of worry had spread under his arms and down his sides. Without stopping to talk to anyone, he made his way to her desk, eyes on the floor.
    Not good , whispered a voice in the back of her head. Not good at all. Miss Bleeker? Do you think you could come into the office to discuss the test results?
    Stan stopped at her desk, and clawed one hand through his hair so that it stood like a cockatiel’s crest. He managed a smile, and that was when Frances’s chest tightened. Nurse? Could you leave us alone for a moment?
    “Hello, Frances,” he said. “Do you think I could see you alone for a moment?”

five
    Washed-Up Tales from a Soap Flake
    By Frances Bleeker
    London Advance
    Augusta Price once haunted Soho, and now Soho haunts her. This is where the actress used to drink and score pills, when she was still drinking and scoring pills. Those days, she says, are history.
    Price is perhaps most familiar to television viewers as Kit Gallagher, the hapless barmaid on the popular night-time soap Canals and as the vampire surgeon Helen Mount in the short-lived cult classic The Blood Bank . Those successes are behind her, but the actress, like a dowager leopard that refuses to give up the hunt, is preparing to pounce once again.
    We meet for coffee on a street that is full of ghosts from her antic past. Thirty years ago, in a café like this one, Price met a journalist and immediately ran away with him. Their affair lasted until they had no more coins to feed the electricity metre in a Salford flat. Yes, that’s right: They ran all the way from Soho to Salford.
    You won’t find that tale in her recent autobiography, Based on a True Story: A Memoir of Sorts . In fact, some of the most intriguing stories from an intriguing life are not present at all in the book, which was a surprise bestseller last Christmas. Other colourful tales are present, but gently tweaked. Price could have been a sculptor, rather than an actress, considering how adept she is at shaping the clay of her experience. More on this later.
    Those experiences, dark though some of them were, have left only a few marks on the woman sitting across from me — and she’s used all of her tools to try to erase them. Her dark eyes,