Not Gonna Happen

by Adam Carter

  “That true as well?” Starke asked.

  “When did you stop listening, Starke? I told you they’re either all true or else they’re my own personal thoughts.”

  Starke nodded. “I’m beginning to see.”

  “Heard someone the other week,” Corsac said, “talking to her friend on her mobile phone.” He adopted his best young woman’s voice. “She said, ‘If I was lying in the road, you’d be the last person I’d call. You never answer your phone.’ Now, I may be wrong in this, but if I was lying in the road, I’d be more inclined to phone for an ambulance. They tend to answer, plus they’re not my mate-who’s-probably-not-a-paramedic.” If Starke got the hint, he showed no sign of it.

  “You know what’s the best animal to be on this planet? Go on, have a guess? No, I’ll tell you. A chicken. A chicken, because they have a moment in their lives when they’re immortal. When you cut off their heads and they run around still thinking they’re alive, they’re immortal. They can grow no older because they’re dead but they still think they’re alive. May only be for a few seconds or a couple of minutes, but can you imagine being dead but thinking you’re still alive?

  “Extend that by a few decades and you can bottle it.”

  “I understand!” Starke suddenly exclaimed.

  Corsac blinked. “Good for you. Understand what?”

  “Comedy is a way of putting across your views so people will listen. That’s what you do, and that’s what I’m doing. That’s why I’m here, today.”

  “Well,” Corsac said, “I’m listening.”

  “Not you,” he said. “Her.”

  “Me?” Liz asked.

  “What’s this got to do with the show?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing,” Starke said. “I see that now. The show doesn’t have to go on, it’s not about the show. It never has been. I don’t need an audience, I don’t need the show.”

  “Then let the audience go,” Sam urged.

  Starke paused, then nodded.

  “All right,” Sam said, turning her head away from her father. “Everyone out. Un-barricade the doors and go!”

  Starke offered no protest as everyone rushed for the doors. There was no order, no politeness, no care. Everyone simply fled for their lives.

  “And I’ll bet,” Starke said, “not a one of them said thank you for anyone holding the door open for them.”

  Sam noticed one of the doors had been left open after the last person had gone through. Starke had not told anyone to barricade it again; he appeared to have forgotten all about it.

  Now the only people left in the room were Starke, Louise, Sam, Liz, the man with the camera and a badly wounded game show host.

  “We have to get him out, too,” Sam said, indicating her father. “He’s dying.”

  “No.”

  “Why?” Sam snapped. “You already admitted the show doesn’t matter, what use is he to you?”

  “The show doesn’t matter,” Starke agreed, “but he does. He took Liz from me.”

  “Liz took herself from you,” Sam said. “She left you and moved onto my father because, like you, he was too weak and too stupid to see what she was really doing. My father isn’t the one you hate, Richard, it’s Liz who’s taken everything away from you.”

  “Shut up!” Liz hissed.

  “Why?” Sam snapped, boiling now. “My father’s going to die if you don’t start owning up to some responsibility for what you’ve done. You think I give a damn about you? You think I care whether your boyfriend here blows your brains out? My father needs a doctor and you ...”

  “No doctors!” Starke shouted.

  Corsac coughed in the sudden silence and he strained to say something. Sam crouched to listen, but she could feel him slipping into unconsciousness. “I’m ... I’m sorry ...”

  Sam shook her head, was about to tell him it didn’t matter, that none of it mattered any more, when she noticed Starke was no longer holding the shotgun upon Louise. Starke had heard Corsac’s words as well and had taken them as an apology to him. An apology for what he had done. And if a man could apologise, it meant there was something to apologise for. And if there was something to apologise for, if there was a reason a man like Jack Corsac would apologise at all, it could only mean he had been telling the truth all along.

  And that meant it was all Liz’s fault.

  “Starke, stop!” Sam shouted as Starke brought the shotgun up towards Liz. He shouted something and there was a thunderous explosion as he spoke. Louise screamed as blood sprayed into her face and slowly did Richard Starke sink to the ground, his shotgun, unfired, clattering to the floor beside him.

  The police, having been granted a clear shot through the open door, rushed in with their firearms, making the situation safe.

  *

  Sam turned back to her father, began screaming for someone to fetch a doctor, but Liz heard none of it. She collapsed to her knees beside the body of Richard Starke, knowing everything Sam had said was true. She had used both Starke and Corsac and now it looked as though both were going to die. She had spent a lifetime using everyone she had ever met. She had known from an early age she was beautiful and she had played upon it since as far back as she could recall. When she was nine she had a fight start over her: a fight she had orchestrated because she hadn’t liked a particular boy at school.

  It was by the time she hit puberty that she really found out how to wield her power. She would flirt, she would taunt, she would control. She had boys doing her favours, running errands for her. She even flirted with the class lesbian, only to torturously expose the poor girl in front of the whole year.

  It was in her college years that she began to sell herself in the pursuit of her own ends. Where she began to realise sleeping with a guy could get her whatever she wanted. She never once felt dirty or ashamed, she just knew it was preparation for what she would require in later life.

  And now she was an adult, and had supposedly been so for a long while. She had used her body in order to obtain money from Richard Starke, using his unstable mind as her means to exploit him. She had pushed him to this, she had twisted and tormented him and utterly destroyed him. She hadn’t even realised she had been doing it. She honestly at the time had believed she loved him, but now she could see she had only been following her instinct. And, casting her eyes to where two daughters wailed over the unconscious body of their dying father, she knew at last the guilt she should have known a lifetime ago.

  Liz felt the cold, hard metal of the shotgun in her hands and turned it around without even knowing what she was doing. She found the trigger and positioned the gun at the same moment, placing the barrel to press against the roof of her mouth. She vaguely heard someone – Louise she believed – screaming at her. It couldn’t have been Sam; Sam wouldn’t have attempted to stop her. But it was too late, too late for anyone to stop her now. Liz was everything Sam had always thought of her and more besides and she could take it no longer.

  She squeezed the trigger and it was over.

  Someone, a policeman, grabbed the gun from her hands and Liz looked at him, startled. She had pulled the trigger, but the gun had failed to go off.

  The stupid thing hadn’t even been loaded.

  Something hard and venomous cracked across the side of her face and it took several police officers to drag Sam from her, kicking and screaming. Liz tasted blood and closed her eyes, wishing there was more to be had. She knew she deserved everything she would get, and a part of her wished the police had not dragged the banshee from her.

  Liz had stared Truth in its naked visage and it had shaken its head at her in sorrow.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  He could see them in his mind’s eye. He could see their faces, knew their thoughts and deserved every last ounce of their anger. He didn’t know whether anger could even be measured in ounces, but ... No, that was the comedian talking; the constant thinking, the questioning of society which led to aggression. Corsac knew he was in that respect not so unli
ke Richard Starke. They were both thinkers, both questioning. But while Corsac chose to air his views openly, upon the stage – making others laugh at the very serious issues he cared so much about – Starke had kept everything bottled up inside. Bottled up until it had at last exploded.

  Yes, they were similar. More so than anyone would likely ever determine. The main difference between the two of them, though, was one of friendship and family. Corsac had two daughters, a wife and so many others to look out for him. Even Frank, even Frank had unplugged that fruit machine to save his friend the undue pain of constant money loss. But what did Richard Starke have? He had an uncle who had passed away, and he had Liz.

  Corsac had also had Liz.

  For Starke, though, there had been no one to warn him against her. No one save his doctor, who didn’t count as a friend since it was his job to care. When she betrayed him, it pushed him over the edge.

  Corsac could see them all now, all the faces. Judging, scolding, waiting for him to say something, waiting for him to wake up just so they could berate him for being such an idiot. And he had been an idiot, it was a fair assessment of his actions over the past few months. He had led the perfect life and now it seemed as though he had just thrown it all away. And for what?

  Nothing.

  He could picture Louise very easily. So far as he was aware, she still knew nothing about his duplicity. He was still her trusted father in her eyes, just as she would always be his little girl. The very last thing he would have wanted was to see the illusion shattered, for Louise to see that her father was not the infallible soul she had always taken him to be. He was human, and no father ever wanted his daughter to see he was human. He did not want to die, but he would much prefer to die than see that look of hurt in his Lou’s eyes.

  Marie came to his mind next. Marie, upon whom he had cheated, whom he had treated so badly. Marie, who had always been there for him, who had also never suspected what he was up to. Marie, who had put up with his late nights, his constantly staying away. Marie, who had never suspected her husband was spending so much money on another woman for the simple reason that she had no idea how much he earned now he was on Deadlock. He thought of Marie and he was ashamed. Ashamed because what she felt far surpassed trust: it was an unquestioning blind loyalty that he did not deserve. He did not deserve her at all.

  And finally there was Sam. Sam, who had found out. Sam, who had given him the ultimate in ultimatums. (Or should that be ultimata?) Sam, who had seen the situation for what it was and had slapped some sense into her father with the metaphorical wet fish. Sam, who had looked upon him not with the sad disappointed eyes reserved for Louise, but with the angry, determined and entirely crushed expression that told him she was not going to let this one go. If he was not going to take action, she would.

  He loved Sam. He didn’t often tell her, they had grown so far apart over the years, but how he loved her. How he loved all three of the women in his life. But Sam ... Sam had been there when he had most needed her and she had reacted in exactly the way he had most needed for her to react. She had shown him sense and had made him a better person because of it.

  How he wished he could tell her just one final time that he loved her, that he loved them all. How he wished he could hold her as he had when she was a child, and thank the Lord for her simply being alive.

  “Dad?”

  What?

  “Dad!”

  “What?”

  “Dad! Dad!”

  Jack Corsac stirred. He could see something. A ceiling, it looked like. Yes, it certainly looked like a ceiling. That meant he was on his back. He looked about him. There was equipment nearby, a glass wall with blinds and a door. And there was Sam, her face streaked with tears, her hands clasped over one of his. She was crying, but she was also laughing, and he realised she was also shouting for both her mother and her sister.

  Corsac grunted and tried to sit up. “Sam?”

  She laid a gentle finger upon his lips. “I know, Dad. I love you too.” And she kissed him on the forehead.

  Louise and Marie charged into the room, a doctor trailing a few metres behind. The women leaped upon him, hugging him, while the doctor checked the charts and the screen, almost oblivious.

  Corsac coughed once and found himself in that moment the happiest man on Earth. “What happened?” he asked. “I don’t remember anything after blacking out.”

  “You don’t, generally,” Louise said, having to sit down because her legs had just turned to jelly. “That guy the cops shot. He’s dead.”

  “Oh,” Corsac said. He had hoped Starke had survived. It was such a shame for a man like that to be sacrificed to his own inner turmoil. Corsac had been saved. It was a shame they could not both have been. “And the rest?”

  “Nothing much,” Sam said, her tone dropping back into marginal seriousness now that the initial relief was over. “No arrests have been made. Nothing to arrest anyone over, I guess.”

  Corsac absorbed this slowly. “Look, everyone, I’m sorry. I behaved ... well, I know I can’t ever say anything that’ll make up for all of it, but I just wanted you all to know I was sorry.”

  “Sorry?” Louise asked. “For getting shot?”

  “What?” Corsac asked. “No, not for getting shot.”

  “It’s all right, Dad,” Sam said, holding onto his hand again and this time squeezing with sufficient force to make him realise she was trying to get a message across. “No one was hurt, other than you. It’s over. No one needs to be hurt after the event.”

  For a moment Corsac didn’t understand what she was saying to him, but then he slowly began to nod. “I love you, Sam. All of you.”

  “I should hope so,” Marie said. “You know, I heard after there was a cameraman left in there. It was a shame they didn’t keep broadcasting, I didn’t have a clue what was happening.”

  “They didn’t broadcast?” Corsac asked.

  “Of course they didn’t broadcast,” Sam said. “You think a hostage situation’s really Christmas-dinner entertainment? That’s why they have the ten-second delay, Dad. No one was even really sure what was going on until it was all over.”

  “Christmas dinner,” Corsac said. “I forgot, is there anything left?”

  Marie laughed, trying not to cry. “Same old Jack.”

  “They’re doing a programme, you know,” Louise said. “A drama about the Siege of Deadlock. They even want you to star.”

  At this Corsac did laugh. Loudly. “Well, at least it would make a change from comedy, but no. I’m through with that. I was gonna quit the show anyway, and now seems the best of times. After all, I wanted a swansong, and what better cast-off could I have asked for than that, eh?”

  Louise hugged him, tightly. Corsac never wanted her to let go. “What are you gonna do now then, Dad?” she asked.

  “Do?” Corsac asked. “Why, on the insurance I’m getting paid out for what just happened, you know ... I think I may just retire. Spend a little more time with my family.” He looked at Sam and smiled genuinely. “Especially now that I’ve at last been made to realise just who my family really is.”

  *

  No one goes away a loser. It was something Mr J had said about the Christmas special, or had used words to that effect. Liz knew it wasn’t true. She had watched Richard die, watched as a man who had so deeply cared for her had been shot to death in front of her eyes. She had never cared for him, even at the time she found him quirky and foolish. She had never cared for him and ultimately she had got him killed.

  But Mr J? Had she cared for him? She liked to think at the time that she did, but now she questioned those feelings. He was just another cog in her infernal machine, moving to her whims, dancing to her every desire. She had not cared for him any more than she had cared for Richard.

  But that was not true. She had cared for Jack. She didn’t know whether it was love, she had no idea what love was, but she did know that her feelings for Jack were unlike anything she had ever felt for another hu
man being. She had just been using him, but now ... Oh, it didn’t matter anyway. It was far too late to do anything about it. Jack Corsac was in the hospital. Even if he regained consciousness, he would return to his family. And so he should. Liz knew she could never contact him again, could never see him except on TV. She had attempted to ruin his life and she had almost succeeded. She had not intentionally set out to do so, but it had almost come to pass regardless. She had almost ruined him and was only grateful she had not succeeded.

  What was she left with now? Memories of what she had done to Richard, regrets over what she had done to Jack. And one other thing.

  A strange noise sounded. It took her a moment to recognise it but when she did, she knew it was Corsac’s mobile ringtone. He had no phone when she had first met him and she had bought him one so they could contact one another. Hers was the only number stored in his phone. When the police cleared the studio, Liz had found the phone, lost or discarded. No one knew it was Corsac’s, so Liz had taken it as a final reminder of the man. And to make sure he did not use it to contact her ever again.

  But now it was ringing.

  Gingerly, tentatively, even afraid, she answered the phone. “Hello?”

  “Jack!”

  “Uh, no.”

  The female voice on the other end became suddenly suspicious. “Who’s this?”

  “Liz.”

  “Oh, the glamorous assistant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is Jack there? Is he all right? I saw on the news they said there was a terrorist attack or something.”

  “Something. Jack’s in the hospital.”

  “Oh God!”

  “Uh, excuse me, but who is this?”

  The voice became coy. “Well, I wouldn’t like to say.”