The Fall

6

Sam Baker gave Zita a reassuring smile as they walked back in the direction of the car. Zita was looking at the phone as if it was a loaded gun that had inexplicably gone off in her hand and blown a hole in some guy’s face. For a moment Sam was startled by the look of shock in her eyes.

‘That was weird. Big, big-time weird,’ she said in disbelief. ‘I could have sworn that was me on the phone.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, being deliberately light-hearted. ‘Someone will have been passing your office, heard the phone ring, picked it up—’

‘And they just happened to sound like me? With this Pontypridd accent?’

‘Sure.’

‘Perhaps I’ve been out in this sun too long. Or maybe I’m really sitting in a room with rubber walls and no inside handle on the door.’

At first she’d looked troubled as they’d walked away from the amphitheatre, but now he saw she was making a joke of it.

He smiled. ‘Or this is all a dream. Any second you’ll wake up.’

‘Mmm, could be,’ she said, smiling broadly now. ‘You best pinch me.’

He couldn’t help but look down at the way those tiger-pattern leggings hugged her legs and oh-so-sassy hips. He wondered just where he should plant that pinch. Only it wasn’t PC to pinch a woman’s butt. Besides, he never was the pinching sort. Instead, he grinned at her. ‘Well, if you’re not crazy and you’re not dreaming then it must be low blood-sugar levels through lack of food. Come on, let’s find some lunch.’

Sam paused to look back at the amphitheatre one last time before he climbed into the car. He pictured where the OB trailers would be sited. Already he could imagine the cables snaking through the grass like a plague of black cobras. The satellite dish angled at 45 degrees, beaming the TV signals out to the satellite in its geostationary orbit 25 thousand miles in space, from where they’d be bounced back to the receiving dish in New York before being pumped out to 50 million homes or more. The sun burned hard. The shadows it cast were dark, sharply defined. The river shone like liquid silver.

At that moment he had a feeling that something in the landscape had changed. It was as if something was there now that hadn’t been there before. Only he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Inexplicably the sensation made him uneasy and, despite the heat, a shiver ran up his spine.

Then Sam’s stomach rumbled again, impatient for food. Perhaps Zita and he were both in need of lunch. He climbed into the front passenger seat beside her and within seconds they were driving away from the amphitheatre in the direction of town.

Lee Burton stood in the coach doorway, where he watched Laurel and Hardy and the gorilla (headless again) talking on the pavement outside the hotel. Smoking the dope on an empty stomach had made him queasy. Wearing this stupid Dracula costume didn’t help much either in the heat of a summer’s day.

The black cape and his white-painted face complete with bright red blood-trickles running down from each side of his mouth attracted the stares of York shoppers, and prompted one youth to quip, ‘Transylvania’s the next stop down, mate.’

So this is being a travel rep, he told himself for the tenth time that day. For three years he’d worked as a teller at a building society until they’d merged with a rival, then promptly downsized, as the phrase had it – meaning they’d slashed their workforce by almost half. He’d been one of those slashed, and found himself moping around his bachelor flat with a redundancy payment that was dwindling fast and no other prospects. After a boozy lunch over the Situations Vacant section of the newspaper, he and a couple of similarly jobless friends had applied for the tour rep positions as a joke.

Gobsmackingly, he’d been hired.

Palm-fringed lagoons beckoned. Or so he’d imagined. He’d anticipated that the company would send him to Barbados, or at least to Spain or Greece. Instead he found himself guiding tourists around the sunnier aspects of Yorkshire. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but some bright spark at the company had decided it would be more fun for their clients if the reps wore fancy dress and enlivened the coach rides with party games. So there he was as some lanky version of Dracula, complete with cloak and deathly-white make-up.

‘What’s keeping them?’ the driver grumbled. ‘I’m picking up another batch from the airport at six.’

‘I’ll go and ask.’ Lee stepped down from the coach, the long black cloak swishing behind him.

Drivers tooted their horns and waved at him. Maintaining the tour rep smile (thankfully, he’d lost the Dracula fangs in Whitby on a previous trip), he crossed the road to the front of the hotel. There Sue Royston, dressed as Stan Laurel, was extravagantly waving her arms as she talked at, rather than to, the gorilla. The girl in the gorilla suit was Nicole Wagner, a stunning blonde with blue eyes and what seemed like miles of white shining teeth.

Naturally, the most burning ambition of nearly all the tour reps was to be an actor. This was the next best thing. You performed to a coach of 40 or so tourists. A captive audience who were ready to let their hair down anyway. Lee had met no end of reps who were either applying for theatre auditions or waiting for calls from agents. Nicole Wagner, Lee had learnt, was a rare exception. She was working her way through university. Her burning ambition was to be a barrister. At rest-stops she could be seen writing furiously on notepads, fashioning five-thousand-word essays with titles like The Law of Torts – Evolution, Codification and Future Ramification, or she’d sit hunched in her gorilla suit poring over law journals with (so it seemed to Lee) shriekingly tiny print, no pictures, and titles that were dry as dead Law Lords’ bones; typical examples were Downyweather v Hoggatt Mineral & Aggregates Limited (1904) – Reflections of Ratio Decidendi or The Local Government Act 1971: Clause 4 (ii) Re-examined.

‘Strewth…’

Standing close by on the pavement was Oliver Hardy, real name Ryan Keith, a plump 20-year-old who fiddled with his spotty tie, plastered a wide grin on his chubby face and repeated ad nauseum, ‘This is another fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.’

Nicole tossed back her breathtaking blonde hair. ‘If he says that again, I’ll kill him,’ she said savagely.

The aura of mellow happiness engendered by the dope had clearly worn off, Lee saw.

‘The shit’s hit the fan,’ Sue told him. ‘Bloody gone and hit it and splattered all over the fucking place.’

A passer-by shot her a startled look. That’s the first time anyone’s heard Stan Laurel use the f-word, thought Lee, as he sweated inside his Dracula cape. ‘Is anyone going to tell me what’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘The receptionist in there…’ Nicole pointed at the hotel, the gorilla head still clutched in her fist, ‘…has just told me that our party on the coach aren’t booked in until tomorrow afternoon.’ Her eyes blazed with fury.

Sue added, ‘The booking office have got their dates mixed up. They’ve sent 40 people to York and there isn’t a hotel for them.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Nicole asked. ‘We can’t send them back to the hotel in Whitby, because that will have been taken by another party.’

‘And they can’t sleep on the coach,’ Ryan supplied unhelpfully.

‘Shit.’

Lee felt as though his heart and lungs were sinking down through his chest into his stomach. ‘Someone’s fucked up royal, haven’t they?’

‘Well, no-one had better look at me.’ Sue pulled her copy of the itinerary from her baggy Stan Laurel jacket. ‘Look.’ She stabbed a finger at the lines of text. ‘23^rd June. The Magnus Hotel, York. Earliest check-in time, 13 hundred hours.’

‘And it’s now half-past two,’ Lee said. ‘The receptionist definitely said we’re actually booked in tomorrow? For the 24^th?’

‘Well, no… not exactly.’ Nicole ran her fingers through her blonde hair (perhaps as a prelude to tugging it out in frustration). ‘She told me we’re booked in for the Tuesday the 23^rd.’

Lee shook his head, bewildered. ‘The 23^rd? Today’s the 23^rd. So what’s the problem?’

‘No. That’s what’s so bizarre. The receptionist insists—’

Behind him the coach driver sounded his horn impatiently. When Lee glanced back, the man was using his fingers to mime people walking off the coach. Lee shook his head.

Nicole continued, one hand still holding onto her blonde hair. ‘The receptionist insisted that today is the 22^nd.’

‘Monday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Impossible.’

Sue gave an emphatic shrug. ‘Well, I say it’s Tuesday.’

‘Me, too.’ Lee pulled the cloak higher up his shoulder; the thing was a dead weight on his back. ‘Yesterday – Monday – we were in Whitby.’

‘Only the receptionist and the hotel manager tell us that today is Monday. Either they’ve gone mad, or it’s us.’

Ryan rubbed his plump cheeks with both hands. ‘Oh, shit. I knew we shouldn’t have smoked that dope. We shouldn’t, we shouldn’t…’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Nicole snapped uncharitably.

‘Oh, come on.’ Lee said. ‘It can’t be the dope. You’d have to smoke a whole bush of the stuff to lose a day like that.’

‘Bad dope,’ Ryan suggested.

‘Bad dope, my foot. We all say it’s Tuesday. Agreed?’

They all nodded, and Lee was once more struck by the absurdity of it all. The sight they must have made – a blonde girl in a gorilla suit, Dracula and Laurel and Hardy standing on a York pavement bustling with shoppers – trying to convince each other that it was a Tuesday and not a Monday.

Again the coach driver sounded his horn. This time he jerked a thumb back at the passengers. They were staring out of the window at their reps, obviously keen to unpack, shower and hit the city’s tourist hot spots.

‘Damn him,’ Nicole hissed. ‘Can’t he be patient for one minute?’

‘Who’s going to tell the clients?’ Ryan cried, looking woeful in his Oliver Hardy suit and bowler. ‘They’re going to tear us another set of arseholes, aren’t they?’

‘Tell them what?’ Nicole’s eyes flashed dangerously. ‘That they haven’t got a hotel? Or that somewhere on the road we took a wrong turn and ended up here on a Monday, not a Tuesday.’

‘It’s the dope,’ Ryan whined. ‘I said we shouldn’t have smoked it. I’m not used to it. This is a bad trip we’re having. We need to lie down and drink plenty of—’

‘Look, just take it easy,’ Lee told him. ‘Everyone, stay cool. We all know it’s a Tuesday. Okay?’

They nodded.

‘So, if we know it, then it must be the hotel that’s mistaken—’

‘But I’ve just stood and argued it all out with them.’ Nicole wound her fingers in her hair. Lee watched in fascination, expecting her to start tearing out great golden handfuls. ‘The receptionist told me it’s Monday. Then the manager told me it’s Monday. They even showed me the diary.’

‘They’re the ones who are mistaken,’ Lee insisted. ‘Look, there’s a newsagent. I’ll go buy today’s newspaper, then we’ll march back in there and shove it under their idiot noses. Okay?’

They all let out sighs of relief as they realised this would be the solution to their problem.

Lee fished some coins from the pockets of his tight Dracula trousers. ‘Just wait here.’ The driver honked again. ‘Ryan. Tell him that we’ve had a problem and we’ll be unloading our people in the next five minutes.’

Ryan gave such a sharp nod that his plump cheeks wobbled.

‘Good man,’ Lee told him, smiling. ‘Right, I’ll be back in a minute.’

Lee ran across the road, dodging a motorbike and an open-top tourist bus. A young kid pulled at his mother’s hand and yelled, ‘Look! There’s Batman!’

Lee wished again that he didn’t have to wear the absurd Dracula cape that billowed behind him as he ran. The thing already had holes ripped in it where he’d caught it on bushes, fences and God knew what else.

Steeling himself against curious stares and jibes, he ducked into the shop, bought the first daily newspaper he put his hands on and came back out onto the pavement.

Sue in her Stan Laurel costume and Nicole in the gorilla suit, with her blonde hair tumbling lusciously down the fake black fur, stood across the road, arms tightly folded.

But at last he had the answer to all their troubles clutched in his hands. Already he was imagining walking into the hotel and holding up the newspaper with all the righteous majesty of Moses revealing the Ten Commandments to the children of Israel and saying, ‘There. Tuesday! It says so in thick black letters on every page.’

Half-way across the road Lee couldn’t resist looking at the newspaper. There, below the paper’s name, the Daily Mail, was the day and the date.

Monday.

He stared at it in a kind of bug-eyed amazement. Monday?

So the newspapers have got the day wrong too, was the thought that went instantly whirling round inside Lee’s head.

He flicked through the pages, believing in his heart of hearts that some typesetter had mistakenly keyed in the wrong date before the newspaper presses had started rolling late on Monday night. But no. Monday. Monday. Monday, 22^nd June. The day and date headed every page.

He looked up from the paper to his two colleagues on the pavement, wondering how he was going to tell them that by some crazy fluke they’d all forgotten what day it was.

But he was never going to get the chance.

At that moment a petrol tanker hammered along the road behind him. The bow-wave of air pressure pushed him forward.

The next second a tremendous pull yanked him back off his feet. At the same time there was the sensation that his head was being torn from his neck.

The sky flew somewhere under his feet; a bellowing roar filled his ears. Then he was lying on his back.

Only he was still moving.

The road surface slid under him, buffeting the air from his lungs. He felt no pain, only astonishment that such a thing was happening to him.

It took him only a moment to realise what had happened. The truck had caught his cape as it had thundered by.

Now he was being dragged, head first, beneath the massive silver cylinder of the petrol tanker.

He managed to turn his head to look to the front of the truck. Past the criss-cross bars of the truck’s subframe he saw the twin rear wheels of the tractor unit. The cape had somehow caught itself on the mudguard.

If he didn’t release the cape from around his neck he knew he’d either be strangled or have the flesh scraped from his back by the road’s abrasive surface.

But Lee’s fatal error was that he didn’t think through the consequences of simply releasing the cape’s catch from around his neck.

And not for a moment did he envisage what would happen if he stopped dead while the truck kept on rolling.

He was acting on instinct. The instinct to get that choking collar from around his neck.

His fingers scrabbled at the button on the collar, trying to push it through the looped piece of cord.

The truck rumbled like thunder.

With a peculiar detachment he marvelled that he could see the legs of shoppers blurring by.

At last the button slipped out through the loop.

Snap!

Suddenly the cloak had gone. He slid to a stop on his back.

The bottom of the truck kept on moving above him. That was when he realised his big mistake.

Although he still lay on his back in the road, his head jerked up in time to see the twin rear tyres of the truck slamming against the road towards him.

At that moment the truck driver must have braked.

The wheels slowed.

He’s going to stop; he’s going to stop; he’s not going to run me over: those were the words hammering joyfully through Lee’s head.

The truck did stop.

Only not soon enough.

Still on his back, Lee raised himself up on his elbows to watch the two huge tyres as black as the gates of death come rolling forward and pass between his splayed-out legs. They crunched up over his groin, shattering the pelvic bone, before stopping on his stomach.

The bolt of pain wrenched him up into a sitting position. His face slapped against the hot rubber of the tyre. Yet despite it all, some small part of his brain coolly compared the deep zig-zag cut of the tyre’s tread to the jagged lines of valleys on a map. It even marvelled at specks of a white, chalky grit adhering to the rubber.

And he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was going to die there in the road.

Slowly, remorselessly, the rear wheels bore down on him, bursting his stomach, crushing his liver and kidneys.

He screamed.

But no sound came out.

Only blood.

It burst from his mouth in a great gush of crimson.