by Adam Carter
It came to him suddenly. Chewbacca. He very much doubted Chewbacca was out there scratching at the ground, although stranger things had happened. Actually, no, they hadn’t. He supposed it must have just been a cat or something. That was it. A cat with a very large shadow, he decided as something reared before the dark window. A cat with a very large shadow and a peculiar desire to smash itself against the ...
Starke’s brain kicked into gear just in time for him to leap backwards, away from the creature falling purposefully against the door. The wood of the door-frame splintered inwards, glass flew everywhere and Starke dived for cover behind a rack of true crime thrillers. He peered over the top when he realised there was only calm silence ensuing, and stared in horror at what he was seeing before him, standing totally unconcerned, growling into the night.
It was a bear. Starke of course did not know what type of bear, because he had never been much of a bear person, even as a child, although one type of bear seemed pretty much the same as any other when you were hiding from one behind a cabinet of true crime novels. He watched as the bear just stood there; indeed it did not appear to be intending any sort of untoward or antisocial action. It yawned, revealing a wide row of sharp fangs, and the jaw snapped immediately shut. The bear began to shuffle, there was no other word for it. It was as though it suddenly decided the space into which it had found itself was too confined and that it wanted to get about a bit. It began with a slight shake of the coat, then a violent one such as a wet dog might engage upon, until finally the bear walked sideways into a row of westerns and fell over. Starke had never before seen a bear walk sideways, but since he had never before seen a bear he was not about to quibble over what it may or may not have been capable of. Perhaps they were not designed to move sideways; perhaps that was why it had fallen over.
Starke decided he would have to scrabble across to the other side of the shop and escape through the back door. That he did not have a back door did not enter his mind, although in truth he just wanted to get away from the true crime. He had never much understood the fixation with such books and had no desire to die behind them. His hand brushed against an Ace edition of the Oakdale Affair and he jumped at the cruel image of the bear emblazoned upon its cover.
The bear growled once more and Starke chanced another glance over the cover of books (perhaps a worse pun than the one about the paper) and saw the bear rolling upon its back. It seemed very much as though it wanted for Starke to go out there and rub its tummy, which was the one thing Starke was steadfastly determined not to do.
He noticed something then, about the bear, and understood in an instant what had made the thing so angry, and what had potentially made it crash through his shop door. There was something attached to the foot of the bear, attached being perhaps an imprecise word, which simply should not have been there. Starke blinked, looked again, and his evaluations were confirmed. The bear had sometime earlier walked right into a trap; one of those circular steel thing with lots of teeth and covered in a sticky red liquid. Although, it was doubtful that it was covered with the red liquid before the bear had actually trodden in it.
Starke wondered what he should do. His every instinct was telling him to run while he could, while the bear was still upon its back, but a part of his mind (perhaps the part which had not even liked bears when he was a child) was saying, “Aw, you gotta go help the poor thing.” The voice of reason verses the voice of bear-helping.
He thought about the conundrum a little further.
“Well,” his angel whispered in his ear, “it sure beats having dinner with your mother-in-law.”
“She is not my mother-in-law,” Starke protested.
“Try telling her that.”
Starke may have argued further, although his voice was disturbing the bear, and so he hissed at his angel to be silent, stared down the devil upon his other shoulder and came to his own decision. Wordlessly, he began to crawl forward, evading the first printing of Frontier Earth in case it was worth anything (which was unlikely considering it had only been published at the very end of the last century), and found himself at the side of the bear. The bear, for his part, seemed to have quietened somewhat, and Starke found himself able to take note of the situation. He was beside the trap now, although had not the first idea as to how to remove one of the things. There was a catch which he supposed had to be released, so he very carefully pressed down upon this and with a huge effort pulled the teeth apart. The bear growled softly and, straining, Starke managed to get the thing free and dropped it to the ground.
“There,” he said to the bear, “how’s that?”
The bear stared at him over its long snout; then, with a single giant swipe which may or may not have been an attempt at hugging him in thanks, it managed to smash his head so hard that it killed him outright.
“Probably would have been a lot better than this,” Starke muttered as he reached for the doorbell of Liz’s mother’s house. (Anne. He was sure now it was Anne.) A part of him would have liked to have gone to the bookshop instead, although the reasonable part of him knew that Liz would have killed him if he had. Or at least she wouldn’t have spoken to him for a month. Shame about the bear, though. That would have made one hell of an exit.
CHAPTER FOUR
It had been several days, and thus far had Crotcher failed to get in contact. Well, not exactly failed, Corsac reflected, considering he had said he would be at least a week. Indeed, Corsac had himself told Crotcher to leave him alone for the first week, and it seemed he was doing just that. The spare time had enabled the former comedian to do all the things he had been meaning to do for ages but for which he just had not had the time. He put up some shelves in the bathroom, he started reading Les Misérables and gave up just as Jean Valjean arrived at the old vicar’s house, he dug a cookbook out of the log box and made something special for Maria. He even thought about tending to the garden a bit, but it was so overrun at the moment he decided he could not be bothered. Instead he took up painting, proving to himself why he gave it up in the first place, but decided that once he had the garden in order he could sit out there and paint the roses. Maria of course had all the painting equipment already, for that was how she made her money, and Corsac felt a bit guilty afterwards at having used some of it up. Paints were expensive, he knew, and money was of course tight at the moment.
For her part, Maria had made no comment regarding his various activities about the house. He could see her growing impatient with him on occasion, although she did not once lose her temper at him, for which he was grateful. He was not so sure he did not deserve to be shouted at, although decided she was the best wife in the world and that he would thank her for it with flowers. Just as soon as he could afford some.
That was certainly a lot of decisions to which he had come in just a few short days. It was just a shame none of them revolved around his work and what he would do in order to obtain some money for the foreseeable future. He was far too proud to sign on, and he simply did not have any skills other than those which made people laugh. Maria (semi-) jokingly suggested he should do children’s parties, although he just could not bring himself to go back to something he had left behind so many years earlier. Besides, that had been Crotcher’s snub and the one thing Corsac wished to avoid.
He was at a loss, and waiting for that big break just around every next corner.
In the meantime he knew he should make the most of his sudden free time. After he surrendered any foolish ideas of painting to pass the time he became absorbed with daytime television, although found it extremely poor. All the shows seemed to be watered-down versions of what would be shown on the same channels later in the day, in early or late evening. He avoided the talk shows after chancing upon just one whilst channel hopping, passed over lunch-time chat shows without even giving them a try and settled upon a game show upon which there had certainly been afforded very little money. The grand money prize of an evening show was in the region of a million pounds, although all
the daytime ones could manage was a thousand pounds at the very most, and seldom even that. He reflected that this was all they were able to offer, although even the way they were presented did not seem as professional. No, professional was not the correct word, and he would be insulting the hosts were he to use it. The word he was looking for was dramatic. Nowadays many of the evening quiz shows were set out like a bad Hollywood film, complete even with the slowly building music designed to have the viewer’s interest firmly gripped. It was clever the way they managed to do this, although Corsac had never much liked American films and as such was not overly impressed by his revelation.
After flipping through the TV guide and discovering there was nothing extremely inviting on any of the channels over the next four hours, he turned the set off, then sat back in his chair. A terrible silence had descended upon the living-room and he realised that the reason people kept the box on constantly was not because they were particularly interested in what was being broadcast, but so they could have some background noise from which to disguise their own loneliness. Or aloneness. Surely the two words had to have some distinction, for they did not mean the same thing exactly.
He was on the verge of looking up the words in the dictionary, but managed to stop himself at the final moment before he would have risen. It was an act of passing the time fruitlessly and he knew it. No, he had to think of something else to do: something worthwhile with his time.
“Damned if I know what that is, though,” he muttered.
He sat there for some moments more, wondering what he could do with himself. His mind drifted slowly back to Frank and the pub and particularly the fruit machine. He had promised Frank he would not try his luck at the things any more because he could not afford to, but was it really trying his luck? It had been a while since he had played on any of them, and generally he would need a little while to get used to the machine before he started winning on it, but even so he would hardly ever lose on them. As he had told Frank, he had at one time kept a chart of his outgoings and incomings from the things, and he had always been on top. Not largely on top, but on top all the same. He was not a man who went in for the big money purely because he knew it would never pay such things out, except on rare occasions. He remembered a time a few years back when he had stumbled upon a Hulk machine. He hadn’t seen the film, but he remembered the TV show well enough so fed it three quid without hesitation. His trust in the Hulk had paid off, for towards the end of his money, words had flashed on the screen to the effect that it was telling him he had the chance to win a lot of money. He had hit the button quickly enough and got nine pounds out of it, and decided not to gamble it. He was offered a repeat, succeeded and in the end got eighteen for his three.
Of course, that sort of thing didn’t happen all too often, although even without this particular win his score-chart told him he was still up on his losses.
But he had said he would not go near the machines and was inclined to keep his promise. It was not that he did not want to go on them, for he knew he would win if he did, but he had made a promise and did not like to go back upon it.
Corsac stared at the phone intently, as though expecting for it to do something miraculous, although it did not respond, and eventually he simply sighed and reached for the stand-by button on the television remote. Keeping the remote handy, he learned all about the best kind of weed-killer to use in the summer, how to determine a pop star’s favourite breed of dog and (above all) how much a brazenly ugly palm-sized statue of Napoleon was worth should he ever wish to sell one at auction. At this he glanced about his living-room, but failed to see any. It therefore seemed a little pointless to tell him how much one could fetch.
He supposed with a sigh that this was the beauty of daytime television.
A shrill whistle sounded throughout the room and he realised the phone was ringing. He rushed to it, almost falling in his flight upon legs suddenly unused to movement, although grabbed the receiver after only three rings.
“H?”
“Dad?”
“Oh,” Corsac said, for it was the voice of his youngest daughter, Louise. “Hi, Louise.”
“Oh?” she laughed. “Charming.”
“Sorry, Lou, didn’t mean it like that. Just expecting H to call.”
“H?” she asked innocently, “anything serious?”
Corsac paused. “I’m thinking by your strange cordiality it means your mother’s told you about my job.”
“Uh, she may have mentioned it. In passing.”
“In passing,” Corsac said, his voice ever as straight as his face.
“Look, Dad,” Louise said, and he could hear her shifting on the settee to make herself more comfortable, which showed him that she had all of a sudden become less comfortable, “she’s just concerned about you. So am I, for that matter.”
“Funny, she’s not mentioned to me that she’s concerned.”
“Well, it’s been a few days now, right?”
“I asked H to leave it a week.”
“Maybe you should phone him anyway.”
“I was sort of waiting for him to call.”
Louise laughed. “That’s your not-so-subtle way of saying you were trying to keep the line free, yeah?”
“Well, I was hoping it was him.”
“He won’t phone if you don’t call him, Dad. Not if you’ve already told him not to bother you until next week at the earliest. He may suspect that you’re sitting there waiting for him to call, but he’s not psychic. He won’t know until you actually tell him.”
“Phone him to tell him to phone me?” Corsac winced. “Not gonna happen.”
“There you go, see. You still haven’t forgotten how to do your routine.”
It was true, for those three words had become the staple for the stage act of Jack Corsac. It was a phrase which had made the newspapers years ago, that single headline telling everyone in an instant that the story was about him. Many comedians had their own catchphrase (Roy Walker had had a whole TV programme about them once), and Corsac had been no different. Had. He had no intention of going back to that now. It was not that he hated comedy, it was just that he was going nowhere with it and had grown fed up with the constant burrowing in the rut into which he had become stuck. How though could he explain that to his daughter? He found he could not.
“How are you anyway?” he asked, trying to keep his tone jovial, although knew it cracked somewhere as he spoke.
“Trying to change the subject now, are we?” Louise teased, although she allowed him his trick and changed the subject for him. “I spoke with Steve the other day. Seems to be doing okay with himself.”
“Always said you were better off without him, Lou.”
“I’m your daughter, Dad, I’m not supposed to listen to a word you say.”
“Unspoken rule, I suppose.” Corsac sighed. He really didn’t want to hear about Steve, although was thankful for Louise for talking about something else. Now that she was, however, he almost wished she would talk about what they were avoiding. There was a part of him which wanted her, needed her, to tell him that leaving his job had been a foolish and irrational idea. It did not matter that it was not spontaneous, for he had been considering his options for some time now. He had worked through a dozen other things he might be able to do in the same field as his work, although his thoughts had always come to nothing. Eventually he had been forced to simply pack the whole thing in without somewhere else to which he might go. It may have seemed a particularly stupid idea to someone looking in upon his life, and yet it was a decision which had been years in the making. Things were not getting better and he knew they never would.
Now he just had to find something else to do.
“I was watching that talk show with that tall guy with the grey hair before,” he said.
“God, why?”
“I really don’t know.”
Louise laughed. “Well, that’s certainly the main reason that show’s still on air.” She paused, as th
ough deciding whether to say what she was thinking, then did so anyway. “You never thought of doing something like that?”
“A talk show?” Corsac winced. “Not something I’ve ever considered, no.”
“You’d be good at it.” He could hear a pause where Louise took a sip of coffee. Corsac suddenly had a yearning for tea.
“I’d be terrible,” he told her honestly. “I’d end up banging their heads together just to settle things.”
“At least you’d make the papers.”
“Either that or give them all knives to round off the show.”
“Now that would get you on TV, too. Trevor McDonald would have a field day with that.”
“He doesn’t do the news any more.”
“Doesn’t he?”
“Don’t think so.”
“To be honest, whatever you do, you have to make the papers. It’s all about publicity, wasn’t that what you always told me? So long as you have the right agent, you’ve got it made.”
“Are you saying Harry’s not good enough for me?”
“Well, he hasn’t come through lately, has he? I mean, he knows you weren’t happy where you were and he didn’t do anything about it. Maybe you should try someone else.”
“I don’t know. H is a good man.”
“Doesn’t help you much though, does it?”
Corsac did not reply.
Louise realised she had touched a sore spot, but knew she would have to press home her point, otherwise nothing would come of it. And now that she had begun she did not want to stop in case she never again got this opportunity to speak to him on this subject. She knew her father, and the next time they spoke he would have put the entire conversation behind him, covertly refusing to speak upon it by deflecting any questions or points she would raise. If she did not get her points across now, she knew she never would.