Caryl Phillips - In the Falling Snow

‘You mean like my life?’

He continues to smile, and he notices that Clive Wilson is looking perplexed.

‘So you think your life is monotonous, do you, Clive?’

‘Like watching bloody paint dry. Sometimes I think I should go out and get myself a young bird. Put a bit of spice back into things.’

‘And you think that’ll do the trick?’

‘Can’t hurt, can it?’

He stares at the computer screen and scrolls down the list of flats to rent in his area of west London, beginning with the three-bedroom flats, his thinking being that he can set up an office while he and Laurie can each have a bedroom of their own. The problem is the price of renting in London, which, as he feared, seems to have gone up significantly since he signed the lease for this one-bedroom flat. His rent is hardly cheap, but three years ago he was more concerned with the trauma of the break-up than he was with money. However, after a miserable week in the Travelodge, during which time it became clear that Annabelle was serious and had no intention of changing her mind, he convinced himself that this was an unexpected opportunity to begin anew, and he might as well seize it and pay the exorbitant rent. The recently decorated flat smelt of paint, and there were dustballs in the corner, and bits of sandpaper and twiglets of electrical wiring on the floor that the workmen had left behind. However, the space was his for him to reinvent himself as he saw fit, and although he remained somewhat confused and hurt by Annabelle’s rejection of him, he eventually made peace with his situation. But having his son move in with him is hardly a new adventure, more like an obligation that he knows he should fulfil, but without a job he is having difficulty figuring out how he can realistically make this work.

He quickly accepts the fact that he will most likely have to set up a work-station in his bedroom, and he scrolls down to the two-bedroom flats. While they are significantly cheaper, they are still prohibitively expensive and it occurs to him that maybe he should have tried to negotiate some kind of pay-off deal with Clive Wilson. However, given the manner in which they left things, it is now highly unlikely that his former boss would be receptive to any more overtures from him. He took Clive Wilson’s pint glass and crossed to the bar, where he ordered a lager. Once the barman had pulled the pint, and he had paid for it and received his change, he carried the pint of lager back to Clive Wilson and placed it on the table before him.

‘Where’s yours, Keith?’

He looked down at Clive Wilson. ‘So you’re really sorry that I’m leaving, are you, Clive?’

‘I told you, nobody understands all this gobbledy-gook about brand-repositioning better than you do. The new regulations make no sense, and the language is impossible. Anyhow, there’s still time for you to reconsider.’

‘Let me ask you, Clive. Do you know how to spell “hypocrite”? It’s not a hard question.’ Clive Wilson looked up at him with his hand eagerly gripping his new pint of beer. ‘Pride yourself on running a tight ship, do you? Well you need to look around yourself a bit for I’m not the only one who thinks that you’re a sad tosser. That’s t-o-s-s-e-r in case you’re still struggling with “hypocrite”. They’re both applicable.’

He turned and left before Clive Wilson could reply, but as he pushed his way through the crowd of briefcase-wielding after-work drinkers he knew that at least he’d done the decent thing and bought his boss a pint.

As he left the pub he saw a bus approaching, so he quickly dashed across the street to the stop outside the West London Internet Call Centre, a place that seemed to specialise in calls to Somalia, Bangladesh, or Pakistan. The girl ahead of him in the bus queue was wearing flip-flops as opposed to pumps. He remembers Yvette telling him that in London women’s feet get too dirty and calloused in flip-flops, but this girl, who was listening to some kind of bhangra music on her iPhone, seemed cheerfully oblivious to this fact. As the doors to the bus concertinaed open, and the line began to shuffle forward, he realised that for the first time since he left Bristol he was now officially unemployed.

He googles another rental agency and begins to scroll down their list of flats, but price remains the problem. Now that he no longer has a job, he will have to think again about this plan of Laurie moving in, for even large one-bedrooms appear to be beyond his pocket. Moving further out of London doesn’t appeal, for he has always been scornful of the suburbs and the commuting life, but at the moment the idea of knuckling down and getting another job is also unappealing. He should really start looking at social work job listings online, but he knows that he will be immediately pigeon-holed as an expert on inner city black problems, and be expected to spew sound bites to the media about how gun and knife violence are not black crimes any more than paedophilia is a white crime. However, when he points out to the press that Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets or white gangs in Essex are committing exactly the same gun and knife crimes, he will immediately be viewed as part of the problem itself. Some years ago, shortly after they left Birmingham and moved to London, he suffered his first, and only, instance of media backlash when he stood up at a national conference on drug trafficking and pointed out that a young teenager who had £10,000 in his pocket should not be liable to be arrested by the police, and have charges pressed against him, unless there was some direct evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Apparently, according to the Daily Mail , this made him an apologist for drug-dealing. Without even looking at the jobs that are available he knows that with his experience and complexion, and given the national push towards more racially polarised community monitoring, he will undoubtedly find it hard to land a job that doesn’t place him in the firing line of the press on race issues. What he finds even more galling is the fact that even the most senior job in this area is likely to pay him less than he was earning as an executive policy-maker with the local authority under Clive bloody Wilson.

The ringing of the doorbell interrupts the gentle clatter of the keyboard as he once again changes the parameters of his flat search. He glances at his watch and can see that it is going up for ten o’clock. He picks up his mobile phone from the messy desktop and makes sure that nobody has been trying to get hold of him, but as he does so the discordant sound of the doorbell again cuts through the silence and so he quickly grabs a tracksuit top and makes his way downstairs. Lesley stands before him with her hands pushed deep into the pockets of her winter coat.

‘I’m sorry, I know I should have called. If this isn’t a good time then we can always speak in the morning.’

He stands to one side and smiles in an attempt to disguise his surprise. ‘It’s fine. Come on in. I’m just playing about on the computer.’

He closes the main door behind them and decides that whoever gave her his phone number must have also given her his address. Lesley doesn’t look distressed, which might excuse her behaviour. In fact, there is an air of impatience about her manner, which leads him to believe that they are about to have a confrontation of some kind. But does he truly care? He knows that some friendships cannot be dissolved little by little, they require an indelicate blow. She follows him upstairs and into his flat, where he takes her coat and hangs it on the solitary hook in the cramped entrance hall. He then ushers her into the living room and encourages her to take a seat on the sofa, while he crosses to the computer and closes down the open window. He assumes that she will not be staying for long so he does not log off. He offers Lesley a glass of wine, but even before she can formulate an answer he moves back in front of her and goes into the kitchen where he pours them both a glass of the only wine he has left, a somewhat overpowering Australian Chardonnay. Before he shuts the fridge, he makes a note that there are two more bottles lying on the bottom shelf, in addition to the one he has just returned to the holder behind the door. He carries the two glasses back into the living room and decides not to apologise for the wine in case it sounds as though he is being pretentious. Instead he just passes Lesley a glass and then takes a seat opposite her.