Ralph's Party

by Lisa Jewell

  He slid up the volume, pushed the cans away from his ears and rubbed his face hard with the palms of his hands. Shit. What the fuck had he done? He’d just lost control. All he’d been aware of was the mesmeric, soothing sound of his own voice in his earphones, nothing else – not the listeners at home, not the procession of shell-shocked people gathering in his studio, certainly not the fact that he was waving goodbye to his career. He’d been talking to himself, sorting out his own head, over the airways, to thousands upon thousands of strangers. He felt better for it. It was better than the dreadful, numb nothingness he had been hauling around with him all weekend. At least things felt real again now … painfully, horribly real.

  ‘Karl.’ He felt a warm hand on his shoulder and turned around. It was John. ‘Shit, Karl. That was something else. You OK?’

  ‘Oh, Jeez. John. Shit …’

  ‘Jules is out there. She’ll take over for you. Come on, let me get you out of here.’

  ‘Shit. Am I going to get the sack? Is that it? Is this over too?’ He got heavily to his feet and pulled at the hem of his denim jacket, awkwardly.

  ‘Nah, nah, nah. Come on, Karl. Let’s go. Jules is here.’ He put his arm gently around his shoulders and guided him through the swing doors and out into the corridor.

  It was like a film: people just stopped and stared at him, shamelessly, craning their necks over partition walls and around doors; a hush fell wherever he went. He felt he should have a blanket thrown over his head and be bundled into a waiting van. They passed the reception desk.

  ‘Karl – Karl!’ June had one hand over the mouthpiece and was calling his name across the foyer and beckoning him with her eyes.

  Oh, God. What did she want? Karl just wanted to keep walking, until he was out of the building and on the pavement and in his car.

  ‘Karl, stop!’ June was wobbling across the marble floor on her stiletto-heeled ankle-boots. ‘Stop, it’s Jeff – on the phone.’

  Karl looked helplessly at John. This was it. He was going to get the sack. He took the phone from June.

  ‘Karl – mate – get back here this instant!’

  Karl’s heart sunk deep into his stomach.

  ‘The fucking phones are going fucking ape, Karl –hmm, hmm – they want you back on the air. Get up here right now.’

  And then Jeff dropped the phone half-way through his last sentence like he always did, like only powerful people ever do.

  It’s true,’ cooed June, aflutter with unexpected Monday-afternoon excitement, ‘the phones haven’t stopped ringing for the last ten minutes – and they all want you. What have you been up to, Karl?’ she asked with a middle-aged, happily married, flirtatious smile.

  Karl turned to John again. John shrugged and smiled and led him back up the corridors, into the lift and back to the studio. It was mayhem. Three extra secretaries had been brought in to help man the phones. The atmosphere was electric. A small ripple of applause broke out as Karl walked slowly back into the room.

  ‘Karl – mate.’ Jeff strode towards him, smiling widely, and slung his arm across his shoulders, giving them a bone-crunching squeeze. ‘They fucking loved it! You’re a star, mate! We’ve taken two hundred calls in ten minutes! Get back on the air – give ’em what they want – tell ’em what you’re feeling.’ He guided him back towards his seat.

  Jules smiled, slipped off her headphones, stood up and kissed Karl on the cheek, handing him the cans.

  Karl sat down and looked around him at the sea of warm, sympathetic faces.

  ‘I don’t know if I can,’ he muttered.

  ‘What?’ said Jeff. ‘Of course you can, ‘course you can. Just carry on – just as you were.’

  ‘But … I’ve said it now, said everything I wanted to say.’

  ‘Well, just say it again! They want it, mate. You can say anything you like. Just keep talking. We’ll put some calls through to you, there’re some fucked-up people out there who can really relate to you – they want to talk to you. You can do it, Karl – hmm, hmm. Jules will stay here if you need back-up. Go on, just be yourself, no rules at all …’ He squeezed his shoulders again and began to back out of the room, ‘No rules …’

  Karl was terrified. He wanted to go home. All this … expectation. All these people, staring at him. Fucked-up weirdies waiting to talk to him on the phone. Jeff winked at him. Jules patted his arm. John brought him another cup of coffee. The clock said he had forty-nine seconds. Shit. He felt so alone …

  The clock ticked away the last three seconds. Karl took a deep breath, and held it. He cleared his throat. ‘Well’ he began, ‘I’ve er … I’ve been asked to come back. Ha!’ He laughed nervously. ‘It seems that you all like me better miserable than happy! Um, I’m going to try, to keep things going and we can all, maybe, just be miserable together. I’m not quite sure how this is going to work … but … I think I’ll play another song now. This one’s for Siobhan. For us. It makes me think of university, before I knew her, when I just used to watch her, y’know, and dream about her. When she was just a fantasy, something out of my reach. It’s one of the most perfect pop songs of the last ten years. It’s the La’s. “There She Goes” …’

  Thumbs up all around the room. Karl breathed a sigh of relief. He grabbed the playlist and began to scribble all over it, striking through it with his pen and rewriting it. This show was going to be for Siobhan. There were no rules, that was what Jeff had said. No rules. So he’d do the whole show for Siobhan, for them, play all their songs, all their favourite songs. Wallow in it. And if people wanted to listen to him wallowing, then they were most welcome to. He didn’t mind in the slightest.

  So for two hours, he talked about Siobhan, he played hauntingly sad and heartbreakingly happy music. He took phonecalls from listeners who’d made the same mistake as him, some of them in tears, from listeners who just wanted to wish him all the best. He played requests for them, their songs.

  It was two solid hours of pure emotion, of honesty and humanity. The phone rang constantly, there were tears and torment and anger, sadness, misery and regret. All the sad, lonely people in London came out from under their emotional duvets and felt part of the world again. It was unbelievably naff. It was horribly corny. It was Oprah on a bad day. But, it seemed, it was what people wanted. And it was what Karl needed.

  There were people queuing on the pavement, clutching bunches of flowers and autograph books when Karl left the building that night. They’d been waiting for him. It was bizarre, it was madness. ‘Thank you,’ they kept saying. ‘Chin up.’ Pretty girls in clumpy boots gave him their phone numbers, pale men with dark eyes shook him by the hand. The atmosphere was peculiar. Karl shuffled through, said ‘thank you’ a lot, took the phone numbers, accepted the flowers, signed the autograph books and finally made it to his car, slamming the door behind him.

  ‘Jeez,’ he muttered to himself, ‘what the fuck’s going on?’

  Little did he know that this was just the start of the madness. For the next few days, he was London’s best-loved celebrity. They did a piece about him on Newsroom South East, his picture was on page three of the Evening Standard, accompanying an article about infidelity in the capital, every day there were increasingly more people standing around outside the ALR building, waiting to speak to him, to thank him.

  But as far as Karl was concerned it was all completely ridiculous. It didn’t make any difference to him; Siobhan didn’t call.

  He stayed with Tom and Debbie that night, and the next, and the next. He couldn’t face going back to the flat. Siobhan knew where he was staying; he’d left a message with her mother, dictating the number twice, to make sure she wrote it down properly. She never called. She must have read the newspapers, listened to the radio, seen the news, but it didn’t seem to have touched her at all. Not that that was why he’d taken on this role as the capital’s favourite agony uncle, but you’d think, wouldn’t you, that if the rest of the metropolis was awash with sympathy for him, that she would have felt it
too? She really didn’t want to know.

  So, for three days he went to work, went home, got drunk, talked to Tom and Debbie about Siobhan, talked about life, talked about finding himself single, childless and alone in his mid-thirties when he’d always assumed he’d be just like everyone else, and wondering what the hell had gone wrong.

  After the third day, he began to get angry. For fuck’s sake – she’d gone off with Rick, hadn’t she? She’d betrayed his trust too. After all, what’s the difference between lying down and letting someone kiss you for half an hour, and lying down and letting someone shag you for five minutes? Which is the more intimate really? And supposing he had told her about Cheri, before she found out, would she have forgiven him? Would she have said, ‘Karl, you’ve done a dreadful thing but, because you’ve told me all about it, and I didn’t have to find out for myself, I forgive you and I know I can learn to trust you again’? Of course not. She’d have felt just the same, just as awful, just as unforgiving. She’d still’ve moved out.

  Finally, after the show on Thursday night, Christmas Eve, he plucked up the courage to go home, back to Almanac Road.

  He sat in the back of the cab, staring out of the window at the miserable, wet, dark night, his head pounding with frustration, anger, misery, loss and rage, and a blinding, all-consuming, heart-palpitating terror.

  His key sounded strange in the lock. Like a distant echo of something from his past, a shadow of a memory from a forgotten dream. He’d never noticed the sound of his key in the lock before, never been aware of the sharp metallic click and the smooth hydraulic movement. It was so familiar yet so new.

  It was cold in the flat. The central heating had been off for five days. Siobhan had always had it on full blast, claiming she felt the cold more than most, something to do with her circulation. He’d always wished it was cooler, complained, tried to open windows when she wasn’t looking or slip the thermostat down a bit. It was cold now and he wished it was so hot that the paint on the walls would melt …

  She’d cleared away all the mess. There were three huge black bin-bags in the kitchen, full of his broken records, and the Christmas tree stood naked and pitiful on the fire escape by the kitchen door, what was left of its decorations piled into a carrier bag and left by the fireplace. She’d taken all the nice bits and pieces that had made it their home, the vases, the clocks, the dhurrie rug. It was spotlessly clean. Everything was in its place. It smelled of furniture polish and Windolene. It was horrible.

  He’d wanted to turn around and leave the moment he’d walked in. Rosanne’s scruffy wickerwork basket, outside the bedroom door, was gone and her lead no longer hung from the hook in the hallway. It was silent, cold, dead and empty.

  Karl sat heavily on the sofa, their sofa. Where she had sat six nights ago and told him it was over, where he had clung on to her legs and begged her to let him stay. He put his head in his hands and let the silence and the chilling emptiness of the flat engulf him. It occurred to him, for the first time since she’d gone, that she wasn’t coming back. They hadn’t had a tiff; they weren’t having a breather from each other; it was over. She wasn’t coming home.

  For the very first time in his whole life, Karl was alone.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Cheri had seen him come home on Christmas Eve, two months ago now. It was the first time he’d been back since that radio show. She’d stood in her pure-white fluffy bathrobe and watched him from the window; he looked grey and dull and monotone, not like the Techni-colored Karl she remembered. She’d watched him put his key in the lock and had almost been able to see the pain flicker across his face as he slowly pushed open the door …

  She could imagine what he was feeling. Of course she could, the whole country knew what he was feeling, for God’s sake. He was a celebrity – which was just so bloody typical. When she’d met him he’d been nothing but a lowly dance-teacher. Then she’d dumped him, and now, because of their affair, because of her, he was famous, splashed all over the papers, his face popping up with grating regularity on the pages of gossip magazines and on TV chat shows. He’d even – and it made Cheri’s blood boil just thinking about it – been interviewed by Richard and Judy. Richard and Judy! First London and now the whole bloody country was enraptured, smitten, head-over-heels in love with Karl bloody Kasparov. Poor Karl Kasparov.

  Poor Karl, my arse, Cheri had thought. Poor Karl, who’d taken her with such ferocity and regularity on that chair at the Sol y Sombra. Poor Karl who’d caressed and licked every inch, every corner, every soft, supple, delightful nook and cranny of her firm, ripe body, groaning and grunting like an animal with undisguised desire. Poor Karl, who lied to, cheated, deceived and betrayed the woman he’d publicly professed to loving so much. Cheri really didn’t feel much sympathy.

  OK, so she’d made the running. He’d been harder than most. In fact, he’d been her greatest conquest. She’d wanted him because she thought he was unattainable, because every Saturday morning she’d look out of her window and see Karl, Siobhan and their sweet little dog walk back from the shops, laden with bags, and they’d be laughing and chatting about wonderfully domestic issues and mutual friends and their plans for the day, and he would casually place a hand on Siobhan’s shoulder and look at her as if she was the only woman in the world, as if she wasn’t fat, as if it didn’t matter. Karl patently had no idea what he was missing. He was a handsome man. The hair and the sideburns were a bit silly and some of his shirts were a little loud but she could see that he was fit; he had a good solid neck, wide shoulders, a great bum, accentuated by his tighter than currently fashionable trousers and wonderful thick black hair, shiny with gel. And she just loved Irish accents, had never been able to resist them. He could do better than that, she’d decided. He just needed something, or someone, to make him realize. She was doing him a favour.

  It had been hard at first, getting his attention. ‘Come on,’ she’d wanted to shout at him, ‘come over here, take a look at a real woman, look at what you’re missing – you can have me, I’m yours. I promise you, you’ll never look back, never be happy with a fat woman again.’ But to no avail. He looked at her, he smiled, he said ‘Morning’ when they passed in the entrance or on the street, but he didn’t ‘notice’ her. And the more he didn’t notice, the more she wanted him. It became almost an obsession, deciding what to wear in the mornings, listening out for the slam of his front door, ensuring that their paths crossed at least once a day. She’d followed him once, wondering where he went every evening at six o’clock in his Hawaiian shirts and peg trousers, and had discovered that he taught a dance class. At last, a connection, a way in. She could jive, her father had taught her when she was a little girl. She’d waited until the class finished and then followed him home again, colliding with him at the front door and engineering a conversation towards an invitation to join his next class.

  Even then it had been hard. She’d turned up every Tuesday and summoned every ounce of her passion to inject into the childish steps of the dance, ensuring that she always partnered Karl, that every move she made shouted ‘sex’, lassoing him with her eyes, hooking him with a grind of her hips, and smiling, always smiling. But still, nothing. He would compliment her on her dancing, express his gratitude that at last he had a partner who had a true appreciation of Ceroc, buy her a beer, walk her home afterwards. But nothing. Siobhan this, Siobhan that, he talked about her all the time and eventually she understood that if she wanted Karl she would have to take him. So she did. But she’d soon tired of him.

  And now he was famous – rich and famous. And where was her credit, her glory? Where would Karl be now if it hadn’t been for Cheri? Just another low-profile, anonymous DJ on local radio, that’s where.

  It wasn’t fair. All her life Cheri had dreamt of fame, had dreamt of being a prima ballerina, until she’d suddenly shot up to five foot ten and realized that she wasn’t going to be the next Margot Fonteyn, she wasn’t going to be showered with roses and pursued by millionaires. And
as far as she was concerned, her unwanted growth-spurt was the only reason why Darcey ‘bitch-face’ Bus-sell had ever made it; it should have been her.

  It wasn’t right that Karl was famous and she wasn’t, that she received no recognition, stuck in the chorus line of undistinguished musicals in London’s less dazzling theatres while Karl was partying it up with celebrities all over town. She was twenty-six, talented and beautiful, but she wouldn’t be for ever – it would be too late one day; she’d be old and ugly and her chance would have gone.

  The more Cheri thought about Karl and his sudden fall into the lap of celebrity, the more she wanted to take up her role. She was, after all, the woman referred to constantly in interviews with Karl, in newspaper articles, she was that ‘disposable woman’. In a way, she was famous already – famous for being a marriage-wrecking bitch from hell.