Simon Clark - The Fall

‘They’ll have made a mistake. Or maybe their videotape broke.’ In their 30 years of marriage – a placid, easy-going marriage as comfortable as a good pair of slippers in front of a roaring log fire – Jud Campbell had been forced to recognise, and accept, that his only rival for his wife’s affection was Peter Falk. Her Columbo hours on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons were sacrosanct. ‘Maybe it will be on later?’

‘No.’ She scowled at the television as if by the intensity of her stare alone she could see into the black hearts of the programme schedulers who were playing this evil trick on her. ‘They’ve messed everything up. They must be having a bad hair day, every single one of them. Look.’ She picked up the remote and stabbed a button. ‘Look, they’ve even buggered up Teletext.’

‘Looks all right to me. What’s wrong with it?’

‘Look at the date at the top.’

‘Oh.’

‘See!’ Her grey eyes blazed in triumph at proving her point. ‘Look at the day at the top of the screen! Can’t they get even that right? I ask you.’

Jud looked at the top of the Teletext screen. The time was right. But the date was wrong.

It should have read Tuesday 23 rdJune.

Instead the date mutely announced: Monday 22 ndJune. His wife nodded, now more satisfied than annoyed.

‘They’ve buggered up royal.’

‘Who was the guy in the bacofoil waistcoat?’ Bony Harris asked the blond-haired man lounging regally on the deck.

‘Some cretin prattling on about slack lines or something.’

‘They do look loose; I could check—’

‘I’m not interested in them. Get me Shitter Brown on the phone.’

‘Sure, Mr Carswell.’

‘You know, Bony,’ the blond-haired man’s eyes were hard and tiny as if someone had substituted shiny glass beads in their sockets. ‘I’m on holiday but I’ve been sitting here and grinding my teeth. I’m paying that wet fart Rossman to waste my money running radio ads that don’t pull in any punters, for Christ’s sake. That last radio campaign cost me nearly ten thousand pounds, but it didn’t put a single extra body into the Manchester club. Ten thousand! I might as well have brought it here and fed it to the fucking ducks.’ Carswell seethed.

Bony Harris knew his boss was poised for one of his regular eruptions. When Carswell went into a fit of incandescent anger, anyone in the wrong place could get blasted off the payroll. Thank God it was going to be Rossman.

Carswell looked at the can of beer as if it disgusted him, or maybe it was thoughts of Rossman that put a god-awful taste in his mouth. ‘I’m going to tell Shitter Brown to get Rossman to clear his desk and then see that he’s thrown out into the street. Let some other poor schmuck look after the charity case, because I’m sick and tired – sick and tired! – of being screwed by time-wasters. Ach… what is it with this beer? It’s disgusting.’

He threw the can of beer onto the banking, where it foamed onto the grass.

‘Well, in a couple of hours Rossman can go home to his shit-tip of a house and lick his wounds. But when you get to my position you can have them licked for you. Isn’t that right, Bony?’

‘That’s right, boss.’

‘I’m going down below now, Bony. You stay up here and telephone Shitter Brown.’

‘Okay, Mr Carswell. Do you want me to check those lines?’

‘No.’

The man stomped down the steps into the cabin. A girl of around 17 sat watching Through the Keyhole . She had long black hair and wore a white dressing gown identical to Carswell’s. Shaking her head, puzzled, she said, ‘ Columbo ’s supposed to be on. They’ve changed it without—’

Carswell walked across to the television where he punched the power button with his finger. Then he nodded briskly in the direction of the bedroom door.

In York, Ryan Keith sat on the steps of the Magnus Hotel and wept. He knew he looked completely stupid sitting there in his Oliver Hardy costume, the bowler hat gripped in his two hands, his plump head hanging down loosely, while tears dripped onto the pavement.

‘This is another fine mess…’ he blubbered. ‘This is another fine mess…’ A purple wedge of hysteria tried to separate him from sanity. Any second now he’d run screaming down the street. A plump Oliver Hardy in baggy trousers that came up his chest as far as his armpits, a white shirt and spotty tie and, over that, a charcoal-coloured jacket. And he’d be running and screaming and crying because his friend Lee Burton lay crushed under the back wheels of a truck. A crowd gathered. Someone had rolled up a cardigan and put it under Lee’s head. A priest was reciting the last rites and drawing little crosses in the air over his head. And blood was everywhere. It dripped down the deep zig-zag tread of the tyres. It ran down the road in a big stream of thick, glistening red that was the colour of mashed strawberries.

And worst of all, his friend was still conscious.

Lee knew what was happening to him; he knew he was dying as he lay there under the back wheels of the truck looking from face to face with this look of surprise like someone had pinned a note on his back reading PLEASE KICK ME .

Ryan Keith couldn’t take any more. No. Not a single solitary fucking second; not with his friend lying crushed and bleeding.

So he, Ryan Keith, made a miserably pathetic sight. A plump young man in an Oliver Hardy costume sitting weeping on the hotel steps. The tears dropped in coin-size splotches on the pavement.

So what?

So what if today had started out a Tuesday only to turn into a Monday somewhere along the way?

So freaking what?

He didn’t care. He couldn’t take any more.

‘This is another fine mess… another fine mess…’

He couldn’t say any more. The sobs made his whole body pump up and down. His tears fell like rain.

The girl sang: ‘ Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight. Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight …’

Sam Baker blinked. Just now it had felt as if a whole river of sunlight had poured in through his eyes. He blinked again, but spinning discs of light still clung to his retina.

Blinking hard, trying to squeeze out the light as if it was shampoo that had got into his eyes, he shook his head.

‘ Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight. ’

Sam Baker was dreaming a weird dream. Of course, most dreams are weird. They make no sense to anyone but two-hundred-dollar-an-hour shrinks. His own common-or-garden recurring dream had him locked into the studio’s gallery, directing the live TV programme from hell when all the screens on the editing console became so defocused he couldn’t tell the football from the stadium, but manfully he’d struggle to make sense of the distorted shapes as he hollered instructions to the PA sitting at his side. ‘Cue camera three. Close up camera two. Cut to camera one…’

This dream was different. There wasn’t an editing console in sight. And all he could see were lights. Green ones, white ones, red ones, spots of light, stripes of light. He crushed his eyelids down, blinking his hardest.

A moment later he opened his eyes and looked around. The lights were gone.

A ghost girl sang softly to him. ‘ Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight. Buffalo girls gonna come out tonight, gonna come out tonight… ’

The ghost girl smiled sweetly then disappeared. She left behind a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey on the wooden bench. Lying as it did on its side, it glugged out its contents onto the hard grey pumice stone that formed the floor.