Peter Robinson - Not Safe After Dark

Yes, if he got rid of Charlie, he would be doing the world a favour.

The Buccs threw a touchdown pass to take the lead in the dying seconds of the game, and Calvin shook himself free of his dark thoughts. Of course he wouldn’t murder Charlie. He’d never harmed a soul in his life, didn’t have the guts for it. It was nothing but a pleasant, harmless fantasy.

Got that one, thought Calvin when the game was over, and Charlie had picked the Rams. He was still nine points ahead of the field, though, pretty much impossible to catch, and Marge was still six behind as they went into the final week. It had been a weekend of upsets – the Seahawks beat the Raiders, the Chiefs beat the Broncos and the Lions beat the Jets – but Calvin had come away with nine points.

‘Say hi to your mom from me,’ Charlie called out as Calvin bundled up and headed out to clear the snow off his car. He didn’t bother answering.

Calvin hadn’t been home five minutes, was watching the news quietly on TV, when the banging started. Mother had a walking stick which she didn’t use to walk with as she rarely bothered to walk, but to bang on the floor of her bedroom to summon her son, calling out his name. With a sigh, Calvin hauled himself out of the La-Z-Boy and climbed up the stairs.

He hated Mother’s sick room, the unpleasant smells – she never opened the window and didn’t bathe very often – the way she lay there looking frail, hands like talons clutching the sheet tight around her neck as if he were going to rape her or something, when the very idea of her nakedness disgusted him.

‘Yes, Mother?’

‘You were out late.’

‘It was a long game.’

‘Anything could have happened to me. I could have had a seizure. What would I have done, then?’

‘Mother, you’re not going to have a seizure. The doctor told you yesterday your health’s just fine.’

‘Doctor, schmoctor. What does that quack know?’ Her tone became wheedling, flirtatious. ‘Calvin, baby, I can’t sleep. I’m having one of my bad nights. Make Mommy some hot milk and bring my pills, Little Calvin. Pull-leeeease.’

Calvin went back downstairs and poured some milk into a saucepan, enough for two, as he decided he might as well treat himself to some hot chocolate if he was heating up milk anyway. While he listened to the hiss of the gas flame and watched the milk’s surface change as it heated, he thought again how pleasant it would be if he had the guts to do something about Charlie Firth.

The man was insufferable. For a start, he was well off and always made a point of letting you know how much his possessions cost, from the Porsche to his leather Italian loafers. Women, of course, just wouldn’t leave him alone. He had a big house on Kingswood, prime Beach property – all to himself, as he had never married, probably because no woman in her right mind could stand his company for more than a night – and as well as winning the NFL pool, he had been his company’s real-estate agent of the year more than once. A success. And Calvin, what had he got? Nothing. Unemployment benefits. A savings account that was thinning out as quickly as his hair, a pot belly that seemed to be getting bigger, a hypochondriac mother who would probably live to torment him for ever, a small, gloomy, draughty row house on the wrong side of Victoria Park. Nothing. Sweet fuck all.

Bubbles started to surface on the milk. Time to turn down the heat. Mother hated it when he burnt the milk. Before he had even got the mugs out of the cupboard he heard the banging on the ceiling again. As if the silly old cow thought banging with that stick of hers would make milk boil any faster. He burned himself as he slopped the hot milk into the cup, forgot about his hot chocolate and hurried upstairs.

In the light of the next day, killing Charlie didn’t seem like such a good idea. Given Calvin’s luck, he was bound to get caught for a start. And, technically, Charlie would still be the winner. If you didn’t phone your picks in on time, the administrator assigned you the underdogs, and even with the DAWGS, as they were called, Charlie would still beat the field. He would be too dead to collect his winnings, of course, and Calvin supposed they would go to whoever came second.

The way the pool worked was every Wednesday before five o’clock you phoned in your picks, based on that day’s point spread, to the administrator, who ran the whole thing from his desk at one of the major newspapers downtown. You always got his answering machine with its curt message: ‘I’m away from my desk right now. Please leave your message after the beep.’ There were over a hundred people in the pool, at a hundred bucks each for the season, and in addition to the grand prize of $2000, there were also smaller weekly prizes. Calvin had actually covered this year’s entry fee on one weekly win. Usually by Friday evening a photocopy of everyone’s picks, along with the weekly and accumulated scores, was faxed to Jeff, who made copies and distributed them in the bar.

Calvin liked to see which teams everyone else had chosen – especially Charlie – but this week he would miss it. On Thursday he had to accompany Mother down to Fort Myers, where they would spend Christmas with their only living relatives, his Aunt Vicky and Uncle Frank, who had retired there seven years ago and were generous enough to help out with the airfare.

The Florida trip used to be the highlight of Calvin’s year. Not because he liked the place. Three or four days was about all he could stand. It was too hot and too full of old people, or people who didn’t speak English, as if Toronto wasn’t bad enough that way. No, what Florida used to mean to him was freedom, glorious freedom! Mother used to stay down there for at least six weeks, and as soon as she was ‘settled’ Calvin was allowed to go home alone. God only knew how Vicky and Frank put up with the old bat, Calvin thought, but they did. Now she was too worried about getting sick and not being able to afford US medical bills, so they were both returning on the following Wednesday.

That Tuesday morning at breakfast Calvin checked the sports section to see if the spreads had changed since Monday. He liked to do that, factor it into his calculations. Sometimes you could guess a lot just by the ways the spreads were changing. After that, his day followed its usual dull routine. He cleared the driveway of snow, did household chores, did some food shopping and took care of Mother. But on Tuesday evening Calvin had a date.

This was one thing nobody knew about him – at least, so he believed. Calvin had a secret girlfriend. Heidi. Probably no one would believe it if he told them that a pudgy, balding, boring fifty-one-year-old man like him could have an attractive blonde forty-year-old woman as a girlfriend. Sometimes he could hardly believe it himself. They had met six months ago in HMV downtown, both looking at the selection of show tunes. A common interest in film musicals led them to venture to a local coffee shop together, where they found they enjoyed one another’s company immensely. A loner by nature – apart from the easy and informal gregariousness of the bar – Calvin found it hard to talk to her at first, but Heidi had a way of drawing him out of his shell. There was, of course, a big problem.

Heidi was married.

Slowly, piece by piece, it emerged over furtive meetings in the city centre, first just for coffees, then regular lunches at Red Lobster, that Heidi was not exactly happy with her marriage. Her children had both left home, one for Winnipeg, poor sod, and the other for southern California, so it was only a matter of time, she told Calvin, before the separation occurred. Until then, they had to be very careful and keep their relationship a secret. Her husband worked shifts for a security company, and this week he was working evenings. Calvin would go over to the west end, where Heidi lived, not far from High Park, and they would talk and make love until midnight, at which time he would dress and sneak out of the back door to where he had parked his car several blocks away.