It’s Tuesday, 9.20pm, and I’m sitting alone in my office, staring at a full glass of wine. In a few minutes I’m going to get a phone call from a radio station in San Francisco. Then someone is going to interview me. And then, when it’s over, I’m going to drink the wine.
I’ve done a lot of phone interviews, and it’s hard to beat this lonely little interval for sheer bleakness. Presently, I will be obliged to transform myself into the sort of person who has interesting answers to boring questions, but for the moment I’m stuck here with the real me, the one who doesn’t have any answers at all.
Six minutes before the appointed interview time, I begin, as always, to harbour faint hopes that the phone won’t ring. As the seconds tick by, this starts to seem a genuine possibility: maybe they forgot, or maybe their building has been evacuated because of a fire. I don’t need to know the reasons: if I just keep clenching and unclenching my jaw for a few more minutes, I can will the whole interview into nonexistence. Then the phone rings and I jump out of my skin.
Not this time, though: 9.30pm comes and goes while I am busy pressing the pads of both thumbs into each finger in succession. At 9.41, I get an email from San Francisco – they’re having technical problems at their end and would like to reschedule, same time, two days hence. I make a fist like a tennis player who’s just won a crucial point, and I think: you did it. Then I drink the wine.
Two days later, my wife comes into the kitchen while I’m staring into the fridge.
“What’s for supper?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. “We’re going out.”
“Are we?” I say.
“We’re going to a party,” she says. “You know about this.”
“There’s nothing about it in my diary,” I say. I feel I’m on safe ground here: there’s nothing about anything in my diary.
“Things still happen, whether or not you write them down,” my wife says.
Later, I check my diary: I’m right. It doesn’t say anything about a party. It just says “radio interview – 9.30”.
“I can’t go,” I say to my wife.
“You have to go,” she says.
“I have that radio thing,” I say. “At 9.30.”
My wife thinks about this for a moment. “That’s fine,” she says. “You come, you have a drink, you go home, you come back after.”
What she is proposing sounds insane to me. “OK,” I say.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” she asks. “You can’t wear that.”
We arrive at the party just after 7pm. As I chat to people I know but haven’t seen for years, I realise with some horror that my party self – with his forced geniality and stilted pleasantries – is identical to my radio self: oily, overeager, awful. Careful, I think; you’re going to use it all up.
Two hours later, I’m sitting in my office in my coat, practising my hollow laugh. “Heh, heh, heh,” I say. “Christ, you’re charmless.”
The door bursts open and the youngest one strolls in. “What’s funny?” he says.
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m just getting ready for a radio interview.”
“When is it?” he says.
“In four minutes,” I say.
“Ah,” he says. “I should probably bugger off.”
“No, you don’t really…”
“Later,” he says, slamming the door.
When he’s gone, I start clenching and unclenching my jaw, thinking: if there were a power cut in San Francisco, I could go straight back to the party and drink all the wine.
Then the phone rings and I jump out of my skin.
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