Ralph's Party (29 page)

And, I'm sorry ...'

He slid up the volume, pushed the cans away from his ears and rubbed his face hard with the palms of his hands. Shit. What the fuck had he done? He'd just lost control. Al he'd been aware of was the mesmeric, soothing sound of his own voice in his earphones, nothing else - not the listeners at home, not the procession of shel-shocked people gathering in his studio, certainly not the fact that he was waving goodbye to his career. He'd been talking to himself, sorting out his own head, over the airways, to thousands upon thousands of strangers. He felt better for it. It was better than the dreadful, numb nothingness he had been hauling around with him al weekend. At least things felt real again now .. .

painfuly, horribly real.

'Karl.' He felt a warm hand on his shoulder and turned around. It was John. 'Shit, Karl. That was somethij else. You OK?'

'Oh, Jeez. John. Shit.,.'

'Jules is out there. She'l take over for you, Come oil let me get you out of here.'

'Shit. Am I going to get the sack? Is that it? Is this over too?' He got heavily to his feet and puled at the hem of his denim jacket, awkwardly.

'Nah, nah, nah. Come on, Karl. Let's go. Jules is here, He put his arm gently around his shoulders and guided him through the swing doors and out into the corridor

It was like a film: people just stopped and stared at him, shamelessly, .craning their necks over partition wals and around doors; a hush fel wherever he went, He felt he should have a blanket thrown over his head and be bundled into a waiting van.

They passed the reception desk.

'Karl - Karl!' June had one hand over the mouthpiece and was caling his name across the foyer and beckoning him with her eyes.

Oh, God. What did she want? Karl just wanted to keep walking, until he was out of the building and on the pavement and in his car.

'Karl, stop!' June was wobbling across the marble floor on her stiletto-heeled ankle-boots. 'Stop, it's Jeff - on' the phone.'

Karl looked helplessly at John. This was it. He was going to get the sack. He took the phone from June.

'Karl - mate - get back here this instant'

Karl's heart sunk deep into his stomach.

'The fucking phones are going fucking ape, Karl hmth, hmm -

they want you back on the air. Get up here right now!

And then Jeff dropped the phone half-way through his last sentence like he always did, like only powerful people ever do.

'It's true,' cooed June, aflutter with unexpected Monday-afternoon excitement, 'the phones haven't stopped ringing for the last ten minutes - and they al want you. What
have
you been up to, Karl?'

she asked with a middle-aged, happily married, flirtatious smile.

Karl turned to John again. John shrugged and smiled and led him back up the corridors, into the lift and back to the studio. It was mayhem. Three extra secretaries had been brought in to help man the phones. The atmosphere was electric. A smal ripple of applause broke out as Karl walked slowly back into the room.

'Karl—mate.' Jeff strode towards him, smiling widely, and slung his arm across his shoulders, giving them a bone-crunching squeeze.

'They fucking loved it! You're a star, mate! We've taken two hundred cals in ten minutes! Get back on the air - give 'em what they want - tel 'em what you're feeling.' He guided him back towards his seat.

Jules smiled, slipped off her headphones, stood up and kissed Karl on the cheek, handing him the cans.

Karl sat down and looked around him at the sea of warm, sympathetic faces.

'I don't know if I can,' he muttered.

'What?' said Jeff. 'Of course you can, 'course you can. Just carry on

— just as you were.'

'But... I've said it now, said everything I wanted to say.'

'Wel, just say it again! They want it, mate. You can say anything you like. Just keep talking. We'l put some cals through to you, there're some fucked-up people out

there who can realy relate to you - they want to ta: to you. You can do it, Karl - hmm, hmm. Jules wil sfe here if you need back-up. Go on, just be yourself,; rules at al...' He squeezed his shoulders again air began to back out of the room, 'No rules ...'

Karl was terrified. He wanted to go home. Al this, expectation. Al these people, staring at him. Fucked up weirdies waiting to talk to him on the phone. Jeff winke at him. Jules patted his arm. John brought him another cup of coffee. The clock said he had forty-nine seconds Shit. He felt so alone...

The clock ticked away the last three seconds. Karl took a deep breath,, and held it. He cleared his throat 'Wel,' he began, 'I've er...

I've been asked to come bad Ha!' He laughed nervously. 'It seems that you al life me better miserable than happy! Um, I'm going to try to keep things going and we can al, maybe, just to miserable together. I'm not quite sure how this is going to work ... but... I think I'l play another song now This one's for Siobhan. For us. It makes me think o university, before I knew her, when I just used to watch her, y'know, and dream about her. When she was just a fantasy, something out of my reach. It's one of the most perfect pop songs of the last ten years. It's the La's, "There She Goes" ...'

Thumbs up al around the room. Karl breathed a sigh of relief. He grabbed the playlist and began to scribble al over it, striking through it with his pen and rewriting it. This show was going to be for Siobhan. There were no rules, that was what Jeff had said. No rules. So he'd do the whole show for Siobhan, for them, play al their songs, al their favourite songs. Walow in it. And if people, wanted to listen to him walowing, then they were most welcome to. He didn't mind in the slightest.

So for two hours, he talked about Siobhan, he played hauntingly sad and heartbreakingly happy music. He took phonecals from listeners who'd made the same mistake as him, some of them in tears, from listeners who just wanted to wish him al the best. He played requests for them,
their
songs.

It was two solid hours of pure emotion, of honesty and humanity.

The phone rang constantly, there were tears and torment and anger, sadness, misery and regret. Al the sad, lonely people in London came out from under their emotional duvets and felt part of the world again. It was unbelievably naff. It was horribly corny. It was Oprah on a bad day. But, it seemed, it was what people wanted.

And it was what Karl needed.

There were people queuing on the pavement, clutching bunches of flowers and autograph books when Karl left the building that night.

They'd been waiting for him. It was bizarre, it was madness. Thank you,' they kept saying. 'Chin up.' Pretty girls in clumpy boots gave him their phone numbers, pale men with dark eyes shook him by the hand. The atmosphere was peculiar. Karl shuffled through, said

'thank you' a lot, took the phone numbers, accepted the flowers, signed the autograph books and finaly made it to his car, slamming the door behind him.

'Jeez,' he muttered to himself, 'what the fuck's going on?'

Little did he know that this was just the start of the madness. For the next few days, he was London's best-loved celebrity. They did a piece about him on
Newsroom South East,
his picture was on page three of the
Evening Standard,
accompanying an article about

infidelity in the capital, every day there were increas ingly more people standing around outside the AL building, waiting to speak to him, to thank him.

But as far as Karl was concerned it was al complete! ridiculous. It didn't make any difference to him; Siobhai didn't cal.

He stayed with Tom and Debbie that night, and the next, and the next. He couldn't face going back to the flat. Siobhan knew where he was staying; he'd left a message with her mother, dictating the number twice to make sure she wrote it down properly. She neval caled. She must have read the newspapers, listened t: the radio, seen the news, but it didn't seem to hav-touched her at al. Not that that was why he'd taken oif this role as the capital's favourite agony uncle, but you: think, wouldn't you, that if the rest of the metropolis was awash with sympathy for him, that she would have felt it too?

She realy didn't want to know.

So, for three days he went to work, went home, got" drunk, talked to Tom and Debbie about Siobhan, talked about life, talked about finding himself single, childless and alone in his mid-thirties when he'd always assumed he'd be just like everyone else, and wondering what the hel had gone wrong.

After the third day, he began to get angry. For fuck's sake - she'd gone off with Rick, hadn't she? She'd betrayed his trust too. After al, what's the difference between lying down and letting someone kiss you for half an hour, and lying down and letting someone shag you for five minutes? Which is the more intimate realy! And supposing he
had
told her about Cheri, before she found out, would she have forgiven him? Would she, have said, 'Karl, you've done a dreadful thing but,

because you've told me al about it, and I didn't have to find out for myself, I forgive you and I know I can learn to trust you again'? Of course not. She'd have felt just the same, just as awful, just as unforgiving. She'd stil've moved out.

Finaly, after the show on Thursday night, Christmas Eve, he plucked up the courage to go home, back to Almanac Road.

He sat in the back of the cab, staring out of the window at the miserable, wet, dark night, his head pounding with frustration, anger, misery, loss and rage, and a blinding, al-consuming, heart-palpitating terror.

His key sounded strange in the lock. Like a distant echo of something from his past, a shadow of a memory from a forgotten dream. He'd never noticed the sound of his key in the lock before, never been aware of the sharp metalic click and the smooth hydraulic movement. It was so familiar yet so new.

It was cold in the flat. The central heating had been off for five days.

Siobhan had always had it on ful blast, claiming she felt the cold more than most, something to do with her circulation. He'd always wished it was cooler, complained, tried to open windows when she wasn't looking or slip the thermostat down a bit. It was cold now and he wished it was so hot that the paint on the wals would melt...

She'd cleared away al the mess. There were three huge black bin-bags in the kitchen, ful of his broken records, and the Christmas tree stood naked and pitiful on the fire escape by the kitchen door, what was left of its decorations piled into a carrier bag and left by the fireplace. She'd taken al the nice bits and pieces that had made it their home, the vases, the clocks, the dhurrie rug. It was spotlessly clean. Everything was in its plac It smeled of furniture polish and Windolene. It was horrible.

He'd wanted to turn around and leave the moment he'd walked in.

Rosanne's scruffy wickerwork basket outside the bedroom door, was gone and her lead no longer hung from the hook in the halway.

It was silent: cold, dead and empty.

Karl sat heavily on the sofa, their sofa. Where she had sat six nights ago and told him it was over, where he had clung on to her legs and begged her to let him stay. He put his head in his hands and let the silence and the chiling emptiness of the flat engulf him. It occurred to him, for the first time since she'd gone, that she wasn't coming back. They hadn't had a tiff; they weren't having a breather from each other; it was over. She wasn't coming home.

For the very first time in his whole life, Karl was alone.

Cheri had seen him come home on Christmas Eve, two months ago now. It was the first time he'd been back since that radio show.

She'd stood in her pure-white fluffy bathrobe and watched him from the window; he looked grey and dul and monotone, not like the Techni-colored Karl she remembered. She'd watched him put his key in the lock and had almost been able to see the pain nicker across his face as he slowly pushed open the door...

She could imagine what he was feeling. Of course she could, the whole country knew what he was feeling, for God's sake. He was a celebrity - which was just so bloody typical. When she'd met him he'd been nothing but a lowly dance-teacher. Then she'd dumped him, and now, because of their affair, because of
her,
he was famous, splashed al over the papers, his face popping up with grating regularity on the pages of gossip magazines and on TV chat shows. He'd even - and it made Chen's blood boil just thinking about it — been interviewed by Richard and Judy. Richard and Judy! First London and now the whole bloody country was enraptured, smitten, head-over-heels in love with Karl bloody Kasparov. Poor Karl Kasparov.

Poor Karl, my arse, Cheri had thought. Poor Karl, who'd taken her with such ferocity and regularity on that chair at the Sol y Sombra.

Poor Karl who'd caressed

and licked every inch, every corner, every soft, supple delightful nook and cranny of her firm, ripe body, groan ing and grunting like an animal with undisguised desire Poor Karl, who lied to, cheated, deceived and betrayed the woman he'd publicly professed to loving so much Cheri realy didn't feel much sympathy.

OK, so she'd made the running. He'd been harder than most. In fact, he'd been her greatest conquest. She'd wanted him because she thought he was unattainable because every Saturday morning she'd look out of her window and see Karl, Siobhan and their sweet little dog walk back from the shops, laden with bags, and they'd be laughing and chatting about wonderfuly domestic issues and mutual friends and their plans for the day, and he would casualy place a hand on Siobhan's shoul der and look at her as if she was the only woman in the world, as if she wasn't fat, as if it didn't matter. Karl patently had no idea what he was missing. He was a handsome man. The hair and the sideburns were a bit sily and some of his shirts were a little loud but she could see that he was fit; he had a good solid neck, wide shoulders, a great bum, accentuated by his tighter than currently fashionable trousers and wonderful thick black hair, shiny with gel. And she just loved Irish accents, had never been able to resist them. He could do better than that, she'd decided. He just needed something, or someone, to make him realize. She was doing him a favour.