Unscripted by Claire Handscombe

Author:Claire Handscombe [Handscombe, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbound

Thom

When a call comes in the middle of the night, you are prepared. Or, as prepared as you can be in the time it takes you to realise that the phone is ringing, that you were asleep and now you are awake, and that the combination of those things means that the ensuing conversation is unlikely to be pleasant. You, therefore, assume your serious, sombre voice and brace yourself. But when the phone rings during the day, when you have just a towel around you and are dripping swimming pool water across the kitchen floor, when it’s sunny outside (which, this being Southern California, is almost always), a crazy hot late-July day, sometimes you don’t even check caller ID before you pick it up and breezily greet the person on the other end.

‘Thom, it’s Ebba.’

He recognises instantly in her voice that something is wrong. Very wrong. Middle-of-the-night-phone-call wrong. He grips the receiver a little tighter in response.

‘Ebba, what’s up?’

‘I’m sorry to call. It’s just—’ She evidently can’t bring herself to say it, whatever it might be, so he fills the silence with reassuring words, words he means with every part of himself.

‘Don’t ever be sorry for calling me, okay?’

‘My dad died,’ she says. Thom takes this in, or tries to. ‘I thought that you would want to know.’

‘Ebs. I’m so sorry.’

Back in the day, Marshall Brown and Thom played tennis together. They smoked cigars together. They sang Christmas songs together one year, around his piano, and while Ebba and her mom were in the kitchen mulling some wine he turned to Thom and said, ‘Just so you know, if you wanted to marry my daughter, that would be okay with me.’ And when Ebba came back into the room he had to come up with a ridiculous explanation for the grin he couldn’t seem to take off his face. To be loved by Ebba was miracle enough; to be accepted and deemed worthy by her doting, talented father was better luck than he could ever have hoped for.

Holding the phone between his ear and his shoulder now, he doesn’t know what else to say. How is it, he wonders, that we’ve all had those phone calls and yet for all our twenty-first-century knowledge, all our wizardry, all our supposed sophistication, we still have not figured out an appropriate response to this, the most certain of human facts: death? But even the shared silence is something. Ebba told him once, towards the beginning of their relationship when he was still constantly and desperately trying to impress her: you know, sometimes, it’s okay to just enjoy being together. We don’t always have to talk. So he is here, just being. Only the telephone doesn’t quite feel right.

‘Do you want me to come over?’ he asks.

Another silence. He imagines her wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand, reaching for the Kleenex, and he is suddenly desperate to take her in his arms. To hold her. To squeeze the pain out of her, if that were only possible.

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