by Sarah Rayne
At the roundabout that feeds onto the ring road that will eventually cough him out on the new-build development where he lives, Clive Donald brakes sharply to avoid a collision, and is faintly disgusted by his goody-goody instincts: even as he fantasizes about his own death, he can’t resist playing it safe, there’s no genuine abandon about him. Maybe I won’t go through with it, he thinks – maybe I am too much of a coward. What kind of miserable bastard needs to convince himself that he’s up to the job of finishing himself off? He catches his reflection in the hall mirror – paunchy, paper-faced, exactly what he feared becoming; you could watch him commit a murder and struggle to give a single detail to the police – and notes with disdain the way he hangs up his coat. Still the same pointless observance of tasks, the same routines. It’s as if one side of his brain can’t take seriously the suicidal yearning of the other.
As night falls, or rather stumbles, a cheerless purple over the road outside, Clive continues to struggle to raise the sheer balls to do it – not the courage, so much, but the sheer self-regard involved in the act seems more than this indifferent life of his deserves. He thinks about the reactions of each of his three ex-wives to the news: Angie, genuine sadness, maybe tears; Polly, contempt, exactly the sort of idiotic thing he would do; Marjorie, confusion – she was never able to empathize with him, or with anyone. But Angie, yes, the first wife, she was the one. If she hadn’t left. If they’d had children, perhaps. She will be sad when she finds out, she’ll remember their honeymoon on the Norfolk Broads, laughing at a line of ducks. She was the one, all along; everything since then has been a horrible mistake.
Midnight comes; going to bed would be an admission that he’s not going to do it, that he’s going to get up as always and do the usual things in the usual order tomorrow. Out of habit, Clive puts the radio on and sits, with thirty exercise books in front of him, hundreds of scrawled numbers in the little squares maths books inexplicably substitute for lines. Xavier Ireland introduces the night’s themes, opening a discussion on, as his annoying co-presenter puts it, ‘The Joys of Political Correctness’. The first song begins. The little tower of maths books sits unimpressed as Clive reaches for the phone and taps in the only numbers, among all those on his kitchen table, he has any use for.
‘He just keeps calling.’ Murray, dustbin-lid headphones clamped around his red-tipped ears, ruefully holds up the phone like a malfunctioning kitchen implement. ‘He’s tried four or five times in the past half-hour.’
‘Well, put him on.’ Xavier thinks uneasily of the emails he’s ignored from Clive.
The voice of the woman they never meet delivers, in smoothed-off consonants, the news and weather report.
‘But he always says the same thing. He’s miserable. His wives left him. He feels like he deserved ber, ber, better from life. I mean, it doesn’t go anywhere.’
‘But he probably needs to talk to me . . . to us more than most people.’
‘Are we a talk show or a char, a char, a charity?’ mutters Murray, half in jest, as he prepares to fade the song out. Xavier takes a sip from the BIG CHEESE mug. ‘And now,’ says Murray, with an aggrieved glance at Xavier, ‘we’re going to hear from one of our regular callers.’
Clive’s point is even more flimsily attached to the night’s debate than usual; after the most cursory of topical remarks he returns to the familiar ground of his misery.
‘I have to say, Xavier, I’m feeling unusually grim tonight.’
‘Any particular reason why tonight?’ asks Xavier.
‘Oh, there’s nothing particular about tonight. I just feel, you know, enough’s enough, really. Things haven’t worked out. I can’t really see a good reason to – you know. To keep plodding along like this.’
‘I told you so,’ say Murray’s eyes to Xavier’s.
‘Have you spoken to anyone else about this?’
‘I can’t really see the point.’
‘Because it’s not good for you to carry these thoughts around on your own, Clive. That’s why you called us, isn’t it?’
‘I think it may be too late for anyone to . . . I mean, I’ll go back to feeling like this.’
The conversation progresses in painful little steps, Clive evading any attempt by Xavier to lift the mood; but Xavier nonetheless tunnels on until Murray interrupts.
‘Well, great to hear from you again, Clive . . .’
Clive, far off on the crackly line, sounds as if he’s about to say something else, but he is gone.
In the next commercial break they glance uneasily at each other.
Murray breaks the silence with a shrug.
‘It’s not our responsibility to look after everyone in the wer, world.’
‘I didn’t say it was.’
‘You obviously don’t think I should have got rid of him, though.’
Xavier gestures in annoyance. In the car park, the fox comes briefly into view, nosing around a pair of black rubbish sacks.
‘It was bad radio,’ Murray persists.
An advert plays for the supermarket chain that employs Julius Brown’s mother.
‘It’s not always bad radio when we just let people talk.’
‘It is in his case.’ Murray doesn’t want to argue. He gets to his feet, miming coffee. Xavier nods.
As soon as Murray is in the corridor, Xavier makes a decision. He slides into his colleague’s chair and brings up the full list of callers; their numbers, their locations. He finds Clive’s number and dials it. After four rings, there is a hesitant answer.
‘Clive Donald.’
‘Hello, Clive, this is Xavier.’
‘From the radio?’
‘Yes.’
‘Goodness. I . . .’
‘Listen, Clive, I’m worried about you, mate. You sound a bit desperate.’
‘Frankly, Xavier, I am.’
‘Well, I haven’t got much time, I have to go back on air, but I thought I could come and see you, if you wanted. Just to have a chat.’
‘Come and . . . come and see me?’
‘I could come tomorrow, or – if you just text me your address. I can give you my number.’ What am I doing? Xavier asks himself with a bemused grimace.
There is a pause.
‘Could you come tonight?’
‘I won’t finish the show until four o’clock.’
‘I’ll be awake.’
They’re back on air in thirty seconds. Murray shoulders the door aside, an overspilling coffee mug in each hand.
‘All right,’ says Xavier hastily, ‘all right, I’ll come.’
Xavier sits in the back of a taxi heading north out of London, having told Murray he had ‘some urgent stuff to do’ and wouldn’t need a lift home. What urgent thing could possibly take place at 4 a.m., Murray’s brow wondered, but he didn’t pursue it. There are barriers between them suddenly. Xavier felt the curdling of a slight irritation, almost a distaste, as they parted in the car park.
He watches out of the window as the third quarter of the night gives way to the last; the dark still hanging heavy but quietly resigned to its end, birds on branches starting to murmur their way through rehearsal. The silent cabbie has the radio on, the same station Xavier and Murray were just on; there’s almost a solid hour of soul music now, and then at five their successors, the unnervingly awake breakfast broadcasters, will start to gabble at the early risers. The cab swings off a roundabout and deposits him at the end of a drab driveway. Xavier pays the man, who takes the money without a word, like the ferryman at the Styx, Xavier thinks vaguely, clutching at some near-forgotten memory from school. The pre-morning air is chilly and still. Xavier shivers as he rings the bell, wishing he were in his bedroom now on Bayham Road, or in front of the all-night news with a cup of tea. A dog barks a few doors down.
A balding man in a balding woolly jumper opens the door.
‘I can’t believe you’re actually here.’
Xavier steps inside.
‘See it as a kind of outside broadcast o
r something.’
Xavier follows Clive down the hall and into the kitchen, where a dismal pile of books sits on the table. The kettle and toaster stand bored beside a microwave oven which clearly does almost all of the cooking around here. A kitchen window looks out onto an ill-tended garden, fringed with nettles which sway restlessly in the wind, as if waiting in vain for the challenge of a gardener’s shears, like a dog appealing to be chased.
‘This place is a bit of a state,’ says Clive, rubbing his eyes.
‘Have you thought about getting a cleaner?’
Clive is surprised, as well he might be, by the directness of this response.
‘No, well, no, it hadn’t really . . . no.’
‘Sorry, strange question maybe. It’s just, it really worked for me.’ Xavier cautiously picks up one of the orange books. ‘You’re a maths teacher? I was pretty average at maths.’
‘So was I.’ Clive smiles weakly.
‘So, how come you listen to the show, if you have to be up for work at – what, seven? Half past six?’
‘Well, I have a lot of trouble sleeping. So I started listening to—’
‘To send you off.’ Clive looks abashed, but Xavier grins. ‘Don’t worry, that’s a familiar story. Most of our audience are exhausted. That’s how we get away with Murray’s bits.’
‘You know, I don’t want to speak out of turn, but Murray is really not—’
‘I know.’
Clive puts the kettle on. As he’s fussing around in cupboards, uneasily scanning shelves in the hesitant way of a man unused to entertaining, Xavier glances at the sink and spots a familiar logo.
‘I’ve got a mug the same as that, in the studio. The BIG CHEESE one.’
‘What? Oh yes. They bought that for me when I became Head of Maths.’
‘Ah. So you’re more than just a maths teacher?’
‘Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. I had to take two months off after my second wife – after we divorced. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. So someone took over as Head of Department and did a good job and, well, he sort of stayed in that role.’
‘Don’t you get two months off for the summer holidays? It’s a shame she couldn’t have divorced you then.’
Clive laughs out loud. It’s the first time he can remember laughing, especially in his own kitchen, in recent months.
‘No, the papers came through in March. Not even half-term. That tells you everything you need to know about my second marriage.’
‘Tell me about the other ones.’
Clive met the first one, Angie, in a manner so effortless and delightful that he struggles to believe it really happened, feels it is a story which would fit better in someone else’s life. He was walking through immigration at Heathrow as a young trainee teacher, after a week in Crete with some friends from the course. He had fair hair then, wore what used to be called a sports jacket, was in better shape than most of his mates, who had been getting drunk on the flight. A girl checked his passport. She looked at him twice, three times, looked between him and his black-and-white likeness. Clive’s heart wavered; he’d always tried to avoid trouble.
‘It’s not a very good photo . . .’
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ said the girl, whose name-tag read Angela Pickering. ‘I was just thinking that you were very handsome.’
Nothing in the world could have prepared him for this, and he had no idea how to reply, but luckily Angela Pickering continued, ‘Will you meet me in two hours, when I finish?’
In those days, things were simpler, or so Clive remembers, anyhow: they saw each other for a year – went to the pictures, dancing, to parks, museums, always her idea – and then they got married. When she lifted the veil, her cheeks were glistening with tears and he kissed her when instructed by the Vicar. They cut the cake and went off to Norfolk.
Perhaps it wasn’t that things were simpler ‘in those days’, perhaps things were just very simple with Angie, because her impulsiveness sliced through decisions which would have detained anyone else. They bought their house after looking round it just once. She flitted from job to job and then, leaving him to bring in the money, from hobby to hobby: glass-blowing, jazz piano, cross-stitch. Once he came home and she had bought two chinchillas. She laughed as he stepped back in horror from the enclosure.
‘What on earth did you buy a pair of . . . of these for?’
‘I couldn’t just buy one. They get lonely on their own.’
Opposites attract, they say: and it might be true, but over the long haul of a relationship similarities are a lot more useful. Angie’s impulses and Clive’s meticulous plans played out in an unlikely harmony for a few years, but they began to grate against one another. They never fought, just slid, consciously but helplessly, into the mire which had claimed three or four other couples of their acquaintance in the past year alone. Clive hated to see Angie unhappy, the emotion suited her so badly, and he was almost relieved when, impulsive as ever, she slept with a man she met at the supermarket, and then with a man at the sorting office, and with very little acrimony they began the negotiations which would end with Clive owning the house and Angie beginning a new life somewhere in Africa. Clive, who had scarcely believed how easy it was to get married, was now taken aback to write divorcee on forms.
The second marriage was even more traditional in the pattern of its decline. It began with each party, Clive and Polly – another maths teacher, they met a conference – lonely, divorced, overeager for company; progressed from a series of days out to the registry office to a year and a half of bickering, and ended with the two them lonely and divorced all over again, and resentful at a settlement which somehow they both considered an insult. Clive was suddenly forty. He had lost a lot of his hair, most of his enthusiasm for work, and two marriages, both of which felt in hindsight like things that had happened to him, rather than things he had made himself.
By the time it came to the third marriage – to a woman called Marjorie, who proposed to him six months after they met at a party, but got sick of him pretty quickly, and now lived in a lesbian community – Clive had almost come to feel that his life in general could be summed up as a process he had been subjected to, a trick that had been played on him, rather than a chain of events he’d had any control over. It was someone else’s idea, surely, not his, that he should end up a maths teacher with a string of failed relationships behind him, living in a featureless semi in Hertfordshire which was the least bad of the remaining options. Not that he felt unlucky, or in any way victimized; just stupid, as if in embarking on life he’d set his sights too high, and had his inadequacies exposed at once.
Over the course of the past few years, staring at blank or contemptuous faces across rows of desks, applying red pen-strokes to minor errors in books, stumbling through the smallest of staff-room small talk, tiny, tiny talk, Clive’s indignant confusion at having been tricked, at having failed to work out the rules of life until it was too late, has hardened into something grimmer, and more permanent: misery.
By the time Clive Donald comes to the end of this potted history of his disappointments, light has started to dawn – weakly, as if leaking through a hole in the sky. It’s one of those mornings where it is hard to tell whether it is simply slow to start, or the beginning of a depressingly dark day. Xavier glances at the clock, and Clive’s eyes automatically follow.
‘Good heavens. It’s a quarter to seven.’
Xavier has been in Clive’s kitchen just over two hours, but he registers the time with no particular alarm.
Clive seems agitated.
‘I’ve kept you here—’
‘Not at all,’ says Xavier. ‘I came of my own free will, if you remember. It’s been good to talk to you.’
‘I should, I should,’ mutters Clive, ‘I should be sort of getting ready for work.’
‘So when you invited me here, were you planning to go into work on two hours’ sleep, or . . . or what exactly?’
Clive sighs.
But it sounds too stupid to say out loud.
‘I’ve been pretty unhappy, as you know,’ Clive tries again, ‘and I was thinking . . .’
Xavier nods; he’s heard this kind of thing far more often than most people.
‘And yet you’re worried you might be late for work?’
Clive grimaces.
‘You would have been quite a bit later, by the sound of it, if—’
‘I’m embarrassed. It seems ridiculous, talking about it.’
‘If I were in professional mode,’ says Xavier drily, ‘I’d suggest that embarrassment about your emotions is part of your problem rather than part of the defence against them. But since I’m not, I’m going to simply suggest that you don’t go to work.’
‘What?’
‘Call in sick. Give them an excuse.’
‘I’ve got classes.’
‘Well, of course you have. You’re a teacher. But it’s one day.’
Clive falters visibly. He runs his finger along his brow.
‘You don’t even like the job.’
‘People can’t just not do their jobs because they don’t like them. The country would be at a standstill.’
Xavier grins.
‘OK, maybe. But you can not do yours, for today.’
Clive hesitates again, and then he nods.
They walk in small circles on the dew-soaked lawn; it leaves a wet imprint on the hems of Clive’s corduroy trousers. Beyond the fence which pens in the garden, traffic roars its way into another morning.
