The Fall

7

The man who sold ice creams from his candy-striped van in the amphitheatre car park returned home to find a man lying on top of his wife in their bedroom. It was clear enough what was happening. The stranger was digging himself into her as if convinced that if he could only get in deep enough he’d hit a big red button inside her belly that would set off every klaxon, bell and siren in Casterton. Probably make the Town Hall floodlights flash, too, and then the lady Mayor would sing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ from the top of the clock tower.

Sarah wasn’t complaining. She was giving her lover loud enough encouragement.

In the open doorway of the bedroom the ice-cream man stood open-mouthed, and unnoticed by the two lovers. His hand clutched the edge of the door so tightly he felt his fingers must surely sink in through the plywood panels.

At that moment he didn’t know what appalled him most.

His wife’s enthusiastic and noisy infidelity, or the fact that her boyfriend had the insolence to wear the ice-cream man’s pyjama top.

He couldn’t take his eyes from that pyjama top. Lost in her own universe of pleasure, his wife’s hands clutched at the striped fabric, pulling it tight across the man’s broad back.

This was too much.

The man who sold ice creams stepped back through the bedroom door and onto the landing, shaking his head, his chest so tight with shock he could hardly breathe.

Right now, more than anything, he wanted somehow to blindly stagger downstairs and get away from the house. But he found himself leaning forward to peer through the crack where the door was hinged to the frame.

Oh, God Almighty. This was like seeing the aftermath of a terrible car smash. He was shocked, revolted, horrified. But he knew he had to look.

They’d finished by this time. With a satisfied groan, his wife’s lover lifted himself up, then rolled onto his back to gaze contentedly at the ceiling.

That’s when the man who sold ice creams knew he’d lost his mind.

Because the man who lay there all sweaty and red-faced in bed was no stranger. The ice-cream man found that he was staring at an identical copy of himself.

Jud Campbell, the historian who’d lectured in the amphitheatre, returned to his narrow boat where he lived with his wife. He unbuttoned his gold waistcoat as he walked.

The boat was moored on the river bank just a moment’s walk from the amphitheatre itself. He soon noticed a flash river cruiser moored behind his own boat. It had been secured pretty badly, too. The aft lines were loose, allowing the boat’s arse to drift outwards where it might get clipped by other passing boats.

A blond-haired man, dressed in a white dressing gown, sunned himself on the deck of the big cruiser. He was drinking from a can of beer and smoking the biggest cigar that Jud had ever seen.

‘Excuse me,’ Jud began politely. ‘I noticed your aft lines are slack.’

The man pulled on the cigar before shrugging. ‘So?’

‘The stern of your boat’s being pulled out by the current. There’s a chance you might get hit by a passing boat.’

The man wasn’t interested. ‘Seems okay to me.’

‘The river’s plenty wide enough at this point, but there’s a sandbank just out there and it’ll force the bigger river traffic close to the shore.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ the man said casually and returned to gazing out over the river while sipping his beer.

Jud shrugged. He believed he was being polite and neighbourly. If the arrogant twat wanted to sit there with the boat’s arse dragging out into the water where it’d get crunched by one of the big river barges then it was his lookout.

Shaking his head, he walked up the gangplank onto the narrow boat, where he paused to wipe a mark off its brass bell. The Tiber-Lizzie was Jud’s pride and joy. A magnificent 70-footer, it was powered by a new Mitsubishi four-cylinder diesel; the boat boasted a waxed pine interior, stem-to-stern carpets, fitted kitchen, Eberspacher central heating and an all-steel hull painted in a cool, unflustered oak-leaf green. Along the full length of the cabin’s exterior Jud himself had painted a fine dragon in red and gold. And there, studded like jewels along its flanks, were the brass porthole frames that Jud would lovingly polish every week without fail.

Jud had heard that when men reach 40-something they transfer their affections from their now-grown-up children to gardens, dogs, aviaries or aquariums (but rarely to wives); he guessed his time had come and he’d switched his affections, and his desire to nurture, to the Tiber-Lizzie. His wife would sometimes click her tongue and tell him he was obsessed to the point of madness with the thing. But secretly she was pleased he sunk his energies into what was, after all, their home, and not into cultivating a fixation on which dog or nag would be first across the finishing line, gambling away their life savings in the process.

In the cabin he found Dot sitting in front of the portable TV while scowling with surprising ferocity at the Radio Times.

Pleasingly plump in the way that Arabs are supposed to find so attractive, she was normally so cheerful that Jud found himself experiencing a mild sense of shock at her angry expression.

‘They’ve got it all wrong, Jud,’ she snapped.

‘Got what all wrong, dear?’

‘I want to watch Columbo but I’ve got this Through the Keyhole rubbish instead.’

‘You’ve got the right channel?’

‘What do you take me for, Jud? Of course I’ve got the right channel.’

‘Maybe the magazine is wrong?’

‘This is the Radio Times,’ she said primly. ‘It is never wrong.’

‘Oh,’ he said mildly again while slipping off his waistcoat before carefully folding it into a tissue-lined box. His wife referred to his waistcoats as ‘stage gear’ and he looked after them with scrupulous care. ‘Perhaps the tennis overran. They might have substituted a shorter programme so they can get back on schedule again.’

‘Jud. Don’t treat me like a simpleton.’ Her voice was actually softening now she was no longer bottling up the frustration here alone on the boat. ‘Look, it’s all gone to buggery. Today’s Tuesday.’ She shook the TV guide. ‘2.45, it says here. Columbo.’

‘And we’ve got Through the Keyhole instead?’

‘Yes, and according to the Radio Times, Through the Keyhole was on yesterday afternoon, Jud. Yesterday.’

‘They’ll have made a mistake. Or maybe their videotape broke.’ In their 30 years of marriage – a placid, easy-going marriage as comfortable as a good pair of slippers in front of a roaring log fire – Jud Campbell had been forced to recognise, and accept, that his only rival for his wife’s affection was Peter Falk. Her Columbo hours on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons were sacrosanct. ‘Maybe it will be on later?’

‘No.’ She scowled at the television as if by the intensity of her stare alone she could see into the black hearts of the programme schedulers who were playing this evil trick on her. ‘They’ve messed everything up. They must be having a bad hair day, every single one of them. Look.’ She picked up the remote and stabbed a button. ‘Look, they’ve even buggered up Teletext.’

‘Looks all right to me. What’s wrong with it?’

‘Look at the date at the top.’

‘Oh.’

‘See!’ Her grey eyes blazed in triumph at proving her point. ‘Look at the day at the top of the screen! Can’t they get even that right? I ask you.’

Jud looked at the top of the Teletext screen. The time was right. But the date was wrong.

It should have read Tuesday 23^rd June.

Instead the date mutely announced: Monday 22^nd June. His wife nodded, now more satisfied than annoyed.

‘They’ve buggered up royal.’

‘Who was the guy in the bacofoil waistcoat?’ Bony Harris asked the blond-haired man lounging regally on the deck.

‘Some cretin prattling on about slack lines or something.’

‘They do look loose; I could check—’

‘I’m not interested in them. Get me Shitter Brown on the phone.’

‘Sure, Mr Carswell.’

‘You know, Bony,’ the blond-haired man’s eyes were hard and tiny as if someone had substituted shiny glass beads in their sockets. ‘I’m on holiday but I’ve been sitting here and grinding my teeth. I’m paying that wet fart Rossman to waste my money running radio ads that don’t pull in any punters, for Christ’s sake. That last radio campaign cost me nearly ten thousand pounds, but it didn’t put a single extra body into the Manchester club. Ten thousand! I might as well have brought it here and fed it to the fucking ducks.’ Carswell seethed.

Bony Harris knew his boss was poised for one of his regular eruptions. When Carswell went into a fit of incandescent anger, anyone in the wrong place could get blasted off the payroll. Thank God it was going to be Rossman.

Carswell looked at the can of beer as if it disgusted him, or maybe it was thoughts of Rossman that put a god-awful taste in his mouth. ‘I’m going to tell Shitter Brown to get Rossman to clear his desk and then see that he’s thrown out into the street. Let some other poor schmuck look after the charity case, because I’m sick and tired – sick and tired! – of being screwed by time-wasters. Ach… what is it with this beer? It’s disgusting.’

He threw the can of beer onto the banking, where it foamed onto the grass.

‘Well, in a couple of hours Rossman can go home to his shit-tip of a house and lick his wounds. But when you get to my position you can have them licked for you. Isn’t that right, Bony?’

‘That’s right, boss.’

‘I’m going down below now, Bony. You stay up here and telephone Shitter Brown.’

‘Okay, Mr Carswell. Do you want me to check those lines?’

‘No.’

The man stomped down the steps into the cabin. A girl of around 17 sat watching Through the Keyhole. She had long black hair and wore a white dressing gown identical to Carswell’s. Shaking her head, puzzled, she said, ‘Columbo’s supposed to be on. They’ve changed it without—’

Carswell walked across to the television where he punched the power button with his finger. Then he nodded briskly in the direction of the bedroom door.

In York, Ryan Keith sat on the steps of the Magnus Hotel and wept. He knew he looked completely stupid sitting there in his Oliver Hardy costume, the bowler hat gripped in his two hands, his plump head hanging down loosely, while tears dripped onto the pavement.

‘This is another fine mess…’ he blubbered. ‘This is another fine mess…’ A purple wedge of hysteria tried to separate him from sanity. Any second now he’d run screaming down the street. A plump Oliver Hardy in baggy trousers that came up his chest as far as his armpits, a white shirt and spotty tie and, over that, a charcoal-coloured jacket. And he’d be running and screaming and crying because his friend Lee Burton lay crushed under the back wheels of a truck. A crowd gathered. Someone had rolled up a cardigan and put it under Lee’s head. A priest was reciting the last rites and drawing little crosses in the air over his head. And blood was everywhere. It dripped down the deep zig-zag tread of the tyres. It ran down the road in a big stream of thick, glistening red that was the colour of mashed strawberries.

And worst of all, his friend was still conscious.

Lee knew what was happening to him; he knew he was dying as he lay there under the back wheels of the truck looking from face to face with this look of surprise like someone had pinned a note on his back reading PLEASE KICK ME.

Ryan Keith couldn’t take any more. No. Not a single solitary fucking second; not with his friend lying crushed and bleeding.

So he, Ryan Keith, made a miserably pathetic sight. A plump young man in an Oliver Hardy costume sitting weeping on the hotel steps. The tears dropped in coin-size splotches on the pavement.

So what?

So what if today had started out a Tuesday only to turn into a Monday somewhere along the way?

So freaking what?

He didn’t care. He couldn’t take any more.

‘This is another fine mess… another fine mess…’

He couldn’t say any more. The sobs made his whole body pump up and down. His tears fell like rain.