What Becomes by A. L Kennedy Page B

proper conversation.
    So.
    â€˜Hello.’ I made a point of speaking loudly. I was abrupt in my manner.
    â€˜Ah . . . I’m sorry.’ A man’s voice, muffled with a kind of indecision, but no more dramatic emotions than that.
    There’s this other voice, too, shrill and hacking up behind his words. ‘
Go on. Tell her. Her.
’ A woman is shouting, ‘
Go on! Try it – as if . . .
’ She’s at a slight distance, ‘
as if!
’ although not so far away that she
has
to shout. ‘
Go on! You called her, you tell her, you just fucking tell her.
’ She is plainly screaming because she wants to, because her emotions
are
dramatic and are leading her that way.
    And the man – who may be stunned by his situation – murmurs in with, ‘Ah, yes . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to –’ and then he stops.
    â€˜
Bastard.
’
    I have to assume he is pondering what he should say. Clearly he’d like to prove for the screaming woman that he doesn’t know me, so he can’t simply offer, ‘I didn’t mean to call you.’ That implies former acquaintance. He may also wish to seem incapable of sustaining an interaction as sophisticated as an affair – and he
has
succeeded – as far as I can tell – in sounding quite stupid. If I were him I might reel off
sorry
for as long as I could, but then would that mean I was sorry for getting caught rather than sorry for inconveniencing a stranger? It would be hard to tell.
    Half asleep, I can’t think of suggestions which might be useful and, in any case, it’s 3 a.m. and someone who knows this man – someone who sounds like a wife – is screaming at him in his house. No advice could save him at this point.
    He starts again, ‘I was the wrong number. When I rang a few minutes ago.’
    â€˜
Bastard. You think I believe –
’
    There is the sound of some object dropping, perhaps breaking, in a way that is violent and yet unclear. ‘
Fu-cking. Bas-tard
.’ The woman’s voice sheers off on her final syllable and subsides.
    The man is whispering by this time, ‘I am very sorry. I didn’t . . .’ His voice seems to huddle in close.
    And I am immediately very sorry, too. ‘Yes. Yes, I know.’ Even though I have been inconvenienced, I do want to show solidarity.
    â€˜Do you?’
    There’s an odd shade of innocence in his question which makes me need to reassure. I try, ‘Well, I . . .’ and run out of gentleness after two syllables.
    â€˜
Fucker!
’
    Another object, undoubtedly glass, hits an unforgiving surface with audible results and I say, less kindly than I might have hoped, ‘I’m going to hang up now. Goodnight.’
    Of course, I shouldn’t have said
goodnight
to him. I should have said
good morning
.
    Ten minutes later, he made his third call. Or else, I supposed it might be the screaming woman this time, whoever she was: pressing redial, wanting to scream at
me
now and badger out a vindicating truth. So I raised the receiver and slapped it down again at once.
    The phone rang repeatedly after that, but I ignored it, let it drill and drill, not giving up, until I had to disconnect it at the wall, listen to the milder nagging from the kitchen and the living room. In the end I unplugged the whole lot, silenced my home as an intruder might. Then I crept through and watched my television.
    The twenty-four-hour news was reviewing some survey: an occupied population soon happier with lowered death tolls, but worried by abductions and also rapes. Mutilations up 15 per cent. Degrees of normality returning, expectations readjusted, many officials pleased. Pictures of sand and litter, a low house with something uneasy about it, out of kilter – I don’t see it long enough to find out what, because I change the channel, because I don’t need to be depressed.
    Getting by, that’s my aim,