by Sarah Rayne
PRAISE FOR MARK WATSON’S NOVELS:
‘Brilliantly hilarious and hilariously brilliant’
Stephen Fry
‘Unnervingly accomplished’
Observer
‘Intelligent, humane and desperately funny’
Independent
‘Packed with brilliant observation’
The Times
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2010
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Mark Watson, 2010
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Mark Watson to be identified as author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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ISBN: 978-1-84737-968-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84737-969-6
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places
and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people
living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD
To Kit
I
A bone-cold February night. London is being pelted with snow. The flakes dance in the neon beams of street lights and settle in scarves around the necks of parked cars.
In a car park around the back of a concrete building in the west of the city, a thin fox scuttles for warmth, leaving coquettish paw-print trails for early risers to marvel over in a few hours. Five levels up, through the steadily whiting-out windows of a radio studio, Xavier Ireland watches the fox seek out a nook in the shadow of a metal recycling unit.
‘Well, I’d stay safely inside, in the warm,’ Xavier advises his invisible, London-wide audience, ‘and keep calling in. Next, we’re going to hear from a man who’s had three marriages . . . and three divorces.’
‘Ouch!’ chips in his co-presenter and producer, Murray, in characteristically banal style, flicking a button to start the next song.
‘Very pretty out there,’ says Xavier.
‘It’ll be cer, cer, cer, chaos in the morning,’ Murray stammers.
In 2003 Xavier was working for this radio station as a runner, making tea, plugging wires into walls, when he saw snow for the first time. He had emigrated from Australia only a few weeks before, changed his name – which was previously Chris Cotswold – and thrown himself into the idea of starting a new life in this faraway country, where he had lived as a baby, but never since. He was impressed, then as now, by how flimsy each individual snowflake was and the sheer number of them needed to coat a street. At the same time, though, the unfamiliar sight and the bitter cold only reminded him that most of the earth was now between him and his home, him and his friends.
Xavier graduated over time from runner to Murray’s assistant, and eventually those roles reversed, so it’s now Xavier who acts as counsellor to the show’s large, sleepless constituency.
‘I just wonder what’s wrong with me,’ says their current caller, a fifty-two-year-old teacher, who lives on his own on the edge of a housing estate in Hertfordshire.
The wavering mobile connection saws off some of his sentences halfway through. Murray runs his finger across his throat, to suggest they move on to another caller – this call is a good three minutes old already – but Xavier shakes his head.
‘I mean, I’m a decent person,’ continues the depressed teacher, whose name is Clive Donald, and who, after making this call, will claw what patchy sleep he can from the rest of the night, before waking up, putting on a grey suit, and getting into his car with thirty maths books in a weather-beaten briefcase on the back seat. ‘I . . . I support a charity, for example. I’ve got quite a few interests. There’s nothing – obviously wrong with me, you might say. Why can’t I make a marriage work? Why do I keep making mistakes?’
‘It’s too easy to assume that everything’s your fault,’ Xavier tells him, and all the other listeners in their homes around the city. ‘Believe me, I’ve wasted months – well, years – reliving mistakes. Eventually, I made myself stop thinking about them.’
At last Clive, sufficiently consoled to find the will to go to bed if nothing else, thanks Xavier and says goodbye.
Murray punches a button.
‘And now the joys of the news and traffic,’ he says. ‘See you in a second.’
Murray goes into the corridor and props open a fire door, so that he can smoke a cigarette in the stark air. The snow is coming down with an un-British ferocity, like hail or sleet instead of the pretty featheriness of what usually passes for snow. Xavier takes a sip of coffee from a yellow mug with the words BIG CHEESE and a picture of a slice of cheese on it. This was a Christmas present from Murray a couple of years ago, and in its rather garish functionality, its awkward size, it somehow resembles its giver.
A few miles away, a shivering Big Ben – just visible from Xavier’s studio on a clearer night – strikes two.
‘These are the headlines,’ reads a woman miles away, her voice, almost completely toneless, appearing simultaneously on syndicated stations all over the UK. ‘In a couple of hours, the country will wake to the heaviest snowfall in ten years.’
It’s an odd turn of phrase, Xavier thinks to himself, ‘the country waking’, as if the UK were a giant, silent boarding-school eventually roused by the morning bell. In London alone, as the success of Xavier’s four-hour stint testifies, there is a huge, phantom community of people awake at night for all sorts of reasons: work schedules, unusual hobbies, guilt, or fear, or illness – or, of course, simple enthusiasm for the show. Xavier looks again at the clogged windowpane and imagines the still, snowed-on London stretching for miles outside. He tries to picture Clive Donald, the maths teacher, slowly hanging up the phone after the call and boiling the kettle, instinctively taking two mugs out of a cupboard, then putting one back. He thinks of all the regular callers: the lorry drivers fiddling with the dial as the signal fades on the M1 out of London, the elderly ladies with nobody else to talk to. Then in a vague way he considers all the half-million people on London’s night-shift, just beyond the boundaries of the car park with its creeping fox, its silent corners and, tonight, the building channels of snow.
One of Clive Donald’s pupils, Julius Brown, seventeen years old and an obese one hundred and thirty kilograms, is crying quietly in his room. Despite regular workouts at the gym, he doesn’t seem to be able to combat his obesity. He went on medication for epilepsy when he was fourteen; one of the side-effects was a startling weight gain, and although no doctor can really explain it, he continues to expand almost visibly each time he eats. Every school day is full of insults: people make fart-noises as he sits down, gangs of girls laugh in their impenetrable way as he passes in the playground. He’s studying three A levels including information technology and wants to design software, but expects to end up manning a helpline for thinner people whose computers won’t start up. He senses the snowfall without even looking outside: it was bitterly cold when he got the bus home from the restaurant where he works some evenings. He’d give anything for school to be cancelled tomorrow.
Others are thinking just the opposite, like Jacqueline Carstairs, the mother of a boy a few school years
below Julius. She is a freelance journalist with a fast, aggressive typing style like someone playing rock piano. Her husband has agreed to take their son Frankie to school tomorrow morning, so that she can stay up late and finish writing an article on Chilean wine; provided school goes ahead, she will then have time to work in peace tomorrow as well. Sharp-eared from years of parenting, she picks up the tissue-soft, almost undetectable sound of snow landing in the plastic recycling box outside. She punches into a search engine the name of a Chilean actor, now based in the UK, who features in an advertising campaign for the wine her piece is about.
The actor’s psychotherapist, Dr Maggie Reiss (pronounced ‘Rice’), is sitting on the toilet in her house in Notting Hill. Originally from New York, she has practised in London since 1990, and now boasts a long list of well-known clients from the worlds of entertainment, business and fashion. Two years ago she was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome, which she attributes to the unreasonable attitudes of many of her clients: their demands, their self-importance, even aggression, sometimes. Seated beneath a Klimt print which is a reproduction of an original found at the MOMA, she stares out of the bathroom window across the whitening roofs and chimneys. She wonders if anyone uses a chimney nowadays or if they are more or less ornamental, retained by London as part of its renowned package of eccentricities. Maggie’s red silk nightgown is collected in her lap. She sighs and thinks about one of her more highly strung patients, a politician who – even at this moment – is amongst the number of Londoners committing adultery. Today, he was particularly difficult in their session, making absurd threats to sue her if she breached confidentiality. He can go to hell, thinks Maggie, her stomach churning and complaining. I don’t need to feel like this. I don’t care if he lives or dies.
Just a few doors down from Maggie, George Weir, a retired bricklayer, really is dying. The two have nodded to each other in the street several times, but never spoken. As Xavier sips his coffee three miles to the west, George is in the throes of a heart attack, gasping desperately for air that suddenly seems partitioned off from his mouth by some invisible screen. He writhes inch by inch towards the phone to call his daughter, but it’s too late, and there’d be nothing she could do in any case. He was born in Sunderland seventy years ago this very week. He had been intending to go to his bowls club tomorrow, although in fact it will be cancelled because of the weather, and then cancelled again next week as a mark of respect to him.
One of George Weir’s last thoughts on earth is a memory of having to decline a Latin verb – audere, to dare – and, stuck halfway, being hammered on the knuckles by Mr Partridge. More than fifty years late it comes to him how the verb was meant to go. As he fights in vain for breath he also remembers learning that Mr Partridge was dead, perhaps twenty-five years ago, and feeling a certain satisfaction that, at last, the generation of sticklers and sadists who had plagued his school days was dying out. But now George himself, unthinkably, is dying, and he will be as ruthlessly obscured by time as Mr Partridge and all the rest.
Jesus, he thinks – despite never having been a religious, or emotional, man – Jesus Christ, don’t let this be it. But this is it. George will enter cardiac arrest shortly, and by the time Xavier and Murray drive home, he will be waiting, head back and mouth frozen open, for one of Maggie’s neighbours to find him. In a few days’ time a hearse bearing his body will pick its way solemnly through the remnants of the snow to Abbey Park Cemetery, glimpsed momentarily from his living room by Xavier, who for now continues to gaze out of the window at this canvas of tiny, unseen happenings.
‘Back on air in fer, fer, forty-five seconds,’ says Murray, resettling in his swivel chair and rotating gently back and forth. Xavier thinks for a moment more about his first experience of snow on that night five years ago, and then hastily turns his thoughts to the present: the chilly studio and the callers waiting for his attention.
By the time they drive home, just after four, the snow is thick on the roads. Xavier, a well-proportioned six foot three, sits in the passenger seat, his leather jacket drawn tight around his body, feet drumming on the floor for warmth. Murray, stout and bushy-haired, is ushering the car forward in fits and starts as if geeing up a reluctant horse.
‘Good show tonight,’ says Murray, nodding his big head of curly hair. ‘That man with the three wives was a deadweight, though. Should have lost him quicker.’
‘I think we had to keep him on. He sounded pretty lonely.’
‘You’re a good man, Xavier.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far.’
There is a somehow weighty silence. Murray clears his throat. The dutiful click-click of the windscreen wipers adds to the impression that he is about to say something important.
‘Wer, wer, what do you think about going to a speed-dating night? Tomorrow night. It’s in this place in cer, Camden.’
‘What?’
‘You know, speed dating. You go round meeting lots of women. And then . . .’
‘Yes, I’m familiar with the idea. I’m trying to work out if you’re serious about us doing something like that.’
Murray rubs his nose with his free hand.
‘I mean, wer, wer, we’ve both been single for a wer, while.’ His stammer tends to gather momentum at moments of embarrassment, as if his voice were an old hard drive trying to download each word individually. ‘W’ is often the first casualty.
‘I’m pretty happy single, mate.’
‘I’m not.’
The car makes a laboured turn around a skiddy corner next to a postbox, collection times obscured by its new coat of snow.
‘I don’t think I’m in an ideal position for a singles event. I can’t say I’m Xavier from the radio. Imagine how embarrassing it would be if one of the women was a listener.’
‘Well, use your old name. Call yourself Chris. What was wrong with that ner, name in the first place, anyway?’
‘Well, whatever name I say, they’re still going to ask what I do for a living.’
‘Make up a job.’
‘So, basically, you want me to meet twenty-five strangers and lie repeatedly to all of them.’
‘They’ll all be lying,’ says Murray, ‘that’s wer, wer, what people do to make themselves attractive.’
Murray carefully snaps the indicator, although there are no other cars on the road, and trundles shakily down the sharp hill towards 11 Bayham Road.
‘Do you really think this is the way you’re going to find someone?’ Xavier asks. ‘Hundreds of brief conversations in a noisy bar?’
‘Have you got a better idea?’
Xavier sighs. Nearly anything would be a better idea. It should be obvious to Murray that, with his stammer, he is very poorly adapted to the three-minute date. Naturally, Xavier doesn’t want to spell this out to him.
‘Well, all right. It’ll be good to cross another solution off the list, at least.’
As he pads down the path, his feet sinking surprisingly deep into the wad of snow, like candles into butter icing on a cake, Xavier glances back and exchanges a wave with Murray.
At a broadcasting-industry party last Christmas, an influential producer – short and buxom, in telescopic heels – tried to interest Xavier in leaving Murray and pitching for his own show: something which people have been doing ever since Xavier began to make a name for himself.
‘You know, no offence, but he’s holding you back,’ she shouted, leaning up and breathing cocktail-soured air into Xavier’s face. She was the sort of woman who shouted at everyone, as if, being so diminutive, she was used to having to convey her words over a great distance. ‘He’s holding you back . . . What’s his name?’
‘Murray.’
‘Exactly, babe.’ She grabbed Xavier’s wrist as if they might be about to dance, or kiss. Not being a regular at corporate parties, Xavier often finds himself taken aback by the ill-becoming intimacies of the people who wield power in his business. ‘I was talking about you just the other day in a meeting.’ She m
entioned a couple of high-up figures. ‘You should be looking at TV, I mean it, you’d look great on camera, or if you prefer radio there’s all sorts of other things. But you need to be on your own.’
Xavier glanced uneasily across the room at Murray, who was hovering at the edge of a group, unsuccessfully trying to drop a word here and there into a fast-flowing conversation.
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Do think about it.’ She pressed a business card into his hand.
He slipped the card into his trouser pocket, where it still is now, in his wardrobe. He did not, of course, relay the conversation to Murray; as always when these situations arise he said that it was just small talk.
Xavier watches Murray, with his clumsy doggedness, marshal the car up the hill in a series of grinds and jumps.
As he lies in bed in a waiting room between thoughts and dreams, Xavier finds his mind being dragged back to the conversation in the car, and remembers the day he changed his name, two weeks after landing in London. The actual process was surprisingly undramatic, a matter of filling out forms and taking them to a grey office in Essex, and waiting for confirmation by post a few days later. But the infinite choice of new names had been rather daunting.
He settled on his new initials, XI, first. A number of things seemed to point in their direction. Firstly, XI was a little-known but valid word which he played to win a Scrabble tournament the same week he changed his name. Of course the letters meant eleven in Roman numerals, too, and this is a number he’s always been inexplicably attached to: it was no surprise to him to end up living, as he does, at 11 Bayham Road. Xavier was one of the only first names he could think of to fit the bill; Ireland, the surname he chose, had no specific relevance either. But taken as a whole, Xavier Ireland seemed to work quite well – exotic, unique, but somehow plausible.
Changing his name had felt significant because the old one, Chris Cotswold, had had a decisive role to play in forming the key relationships of his life so far. He met his three best friends, Bec, Matilda and Russell, when the alphabetical register threw their surnames together in sequence in Fourth Grade. They were sorted into groups and given one of Aesop’s fables to act out. Chris, as he then was, took charge; he cast Bec, well dressed even at nine in tights and red shoes, as the fox; Matilda, hair in plaits, as the sheep; the chubby Russell as the boat which would take them across the river. As they started to rehearse, Matilda’s nose began to bleed. He will always remember the ominous drip-drip on the floor tiles, and her small, composed, freckly face a road map of dirty dark blood-trails. She sat, with a nine-year-old’s indifference, the drops gliding down her nose like raindrops on a pane.