“I can’t say. I didn’t see them,” Foulsham admitted, experiencing a surge of panic as Jackie produced a pile of tabloids from under the counter. “I’d rather forget,” he said hastily.
“You don’t need to read about it, Mr Foulsham, you lived through it,” Annette said. “You look as though Christmas can’t come too soon for you.”
“If I oversleep tomorrow I’ll be in on Monday,” Foulsham promised, and trudged out of the shop.
All the taxis were taken, and so he had to wait almost half an hour for a bus. If he hadn’t been so exhausted he might have walked home. As the bus laboured uphill he clung to the dangling strap which was looped around his wrist and stared at a grimacing rubber clown whose limbs were struggling to unbend from the bag into which they’d been forced. Bodies swayed against him like meat in a butcher’s lorry, until he was afraid of being trapped out of reach of the doors when the bus came to his stop.
As he climbed his street, where frost glittered as if the tarmac were reflecting the sky, he heard children singing carols in the distance or on television. He let himself into the house on the brow of the hill, and the poodles in the ground-floor flat began to yap as though he were a stranger. They continued barking while he sorted through the mail which had accumulated on the hall table: bills, advertisements, Christmas cards from people he hadn’t heard from since last year. “Only me, Mrs Hutton,” he called as he heard her and her stick plodding through her rooms toward the clamor. Jingling his keys as further proof of his identity, and feeling unexpectedly like a jailor, he hurried upstairs and unlocked his door.
Landscapes greeted him. Two large framed paintings flanked the window of the main room: a cliff bearing strata of ancient stone above a deserted beach, fields spiky with hedgerows and tufted with sheep below a horizon where a spire poked at fat clouds as though to pop them; beyond the window, the glow of streetlamps streamed downhill into a pool of light miles wide from which pairs of headlight beams were flocking. The pleasure and the sense of all-embracing calm which he habitually experienced on coming home seemed to be standing back from him. He dumped his suitcase in the bedroom and hung up his coat, then he took the radio into the kitchen.
He didn’t feel like eating much. He finished off a slice of toast laden with baked beans, and wondered whether Fishwick had eaten yet, and what his meal might be. As soon as he’d sluiced plate and fork he made for his armchair with the radio. Before long, however, he’d had enough of the jazz age. Usually the dance music of that era roused his nostalgia for innocence, not least because the music was older than he was, but just now it seemed too good to be true. So did the views on the wall and beyond the window, and the programs on the television—the redemption of a cartoon Scrooge, commercials chortling “Ho ho ho,” an appeal on behalf of people who would be on their own at Christmas, a choir reiterating “Let nothing you display,” the syntax of which he couldn’t grasp. As his mind fumbled with it, his eyelids drooped. He nodded as though agreeing with himself that he had better switch off the television, and then he was asleep.
Fishwick wakened him. Agony flared through his right leg. As he lurched out of the chair, trying to blink away the blur which coated his eyes, he was afraid the leg would fail him. He collapsed back into the chair, thrusting the leg in front of him, digging his fingers into the calf in an attempt to massage away the cramp. When at last he was able to bend the leg without having to grit his teeth, he set about recalling what had invaded his sleep.
The nine o’clock news had been ending. It must have been a newsreader who had spoken Fishwick’s name. Foulsham hadn’t been fully awake, after all; no wonder he’d imagined that the voice sounded like the murderer’s. Perhaps it had been the hint of amusement which his imagination had seized upon, though would a newsreader have sounded amused? He switched off the television and waited for the news on the local radio station, twinges in his leg ensuring that he stayed awake.
He’d forgotten that there was no ten o’clock news. He attempted to phone the radio station, but five minutes of hanging on brought him only a message like an old record on which the needle had stuck, advising him to try later. By eleven he’d hobbled to bed. The newsreader raced through accounts of violence and drunken driving, then rustled her script. “Some news just in,” she said. “Police report that convicted murderer Desmond Fishwick has taken his own life while in custody. Full details in our next bulletin.”
That would be at midnight. Foulsham tried to stay awake, not least because he didn’t understand how, if the local station had only just received the news, the national network could have broadcast it more than ninety minutes earlier. But when midnight came he was asleep. He wakened in the early hours and heard voices gabbling beside him, insomniacs trying to assert themselves on a phone-in program before the presenter cut them short. Foulsham switched off the radio and imagined the city riddled with cells in which people lay or paced, listening to the babble of their own caged obsessions. At least one of them—Fishwick—had put himself out of his misery. Foulsham massaged his leg until the ache relented sufficiently to let sleep overtake him.
The morning newscast said that Fishwick had killed himself last night, but little else. The tabloids were less reticent, Foulsham discovered once he’d dressed and hurried to the newsagent’s. MANIAC’S BLOODY SUICIDE. SAVAGE KILLER SAVAGES HIMSELF. HE BIT OFF MORE THAN HE COULD CHEW. Fishwick had gnawed the veins out of his arms and died from loss of blood.
He must have been insane to do that to himself, Foulsham thought, clutching his heavy collar shut against a vicious wind as he limped downhill. While bathing he’d been tempted to take the day off, but now he didn’t want to be alone with the images which the news had planted in him. Everyone around him on the bus seemed to be reading one or other of the tabloids which displayed Fishwick’s face on the front page like posters for the suicide, and he felt as though all the paper eyes were watching him. Once he was off the bus he stuffed his newspaper into the nearest bin.
Annette and Jackie met him with smiles which looked encouraging yet guarded, and he knew they’d heard about the death. The shop was already full of customers buying last-minute cards and presents for people they’d almost forgotten, and it was late morning before the staff had time for a talk. Foulsham braced himself for the onslaught of questions and comments, only to find that Jackie and Annette were avoiding the subject of Fishwick, waiting for him to raise it so that they would know how he felt, not suspecting that he didn’t know himself. He tried to lose himself in the business of the shop, to prove to them that they needn’t be so careful of him; he’d never realised how much their teasing and joking meant to him. But they hardly spoke to him until the last customer had departed, and then he sensed that they’d discussed what to say to him. “Don’t you let it matter to you, Mr Foulsham. He didn’t,” Annette said.
“Don’t you dare let it spoil your evening,” Jackie told him.
She was referring to the staff’s annual dinner. While he hadn’t quite forgotten about it, he seemed to have gained an impression that it hadn’t much to do with him. He locked the shop and headed for home to get changed. After twenty minutes of waiting in a bus queue whose disgruntled mutters felt like flies bumbling mindlessly around him he walked home, the climb aggravating his limp.
He put on his dress shirt and bow tie and slipped his dark suit out of the bag in which it had been hanging since its January visit to the cleaners. As soon as he was dressed he went out again, away from the sounds of Mrs. Hutton’s three-legged trudge and of the dogs, which hadn’t stopped barking since he had entered the house. Nor did he care for the way Mrs. Hutton had opened her door and peered at him with a suspiciousness which hadn’t entirely vanished when she saw him.