Widower Ran
Carlisle was on the phone to his mum when Shannon let herself into the house.
“Yeah. Yeah… yup. No. No mum. Nope.” He nodded to his assistant where she stood in the doorway, and she took it as a signal to head for the kitchen. “Yes, it was the arm that got broken. But it turns out it’s not smart to try and support your weight on a handrail when your hand is in a cast.”
He groaned as he lifted his bandaged ankle up onto the coffee table. There was a clatter as he knocked last night’s cans onto the floor. It was as good a reason as any to end the call.
He was saying goodbye as Shannon came in and slumped down into the room’s one armchair. Her body did the now customary double-take as the armchair sank in that little bit more than she was expecting. It always did. It was the armchair of constantly defied expectations.
“How was she?” Shannon said, once she was properly situated.
“Pretty much same as usual.” Carlisle replied. “Kettle on?”
“Yu-huh.” She looked at him, then over at the TV. “Daytime telly? Really? You couldn’t read a book?”
“I know.” He said, then turned his own attention to the screen. “Honestly, though… after a few hours you really get used to it. It’s actually not that bad.”
Shannon looked over at him. “Really?”
“No. Not really. Jesus, fucking Jeremy Kyle.”
“Fucking Jeremy Kyle.” She agreed. The click of the kettle boiling up in the other room prompted her to action. She wrestled herself out of the chair and headed for the teabags.
Carlisle watched through the end of the lies, recriminations, and lie-detector tests, and sat through a half-dozen adverts for sanitary products and no-win-no-fee lawyers. The super-upbeat music that fills the nightmares of the just-sickening employed, and preceded every edition of This Morning was bounding into the room out of the television as Shannon grumbled in, a mug of tea in each hand.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, as all of the daily introductions were made.
“Hm.” Said Carlisle. “No female presenter today?”
“I’m going after this.” Shannon said in response, raising her mug.
Two hours later the music was playing again, and Shannon was on her third mug.
Carlisle leaned forward in his seat, and manically scratched his thigh around the top of the bandage.
“You staying for Loose Women?” He said.
“I am not staying for Loose Women.” Came the reply. She moved to get up, with firm resolve.
“Aren’t there normally four of them?” Shannon said, ten minutes later.
“I… think so.” Said Carlisle. “There’s the old Northern lass off reality telly, whossname with the nice smile, the one with the face like a smacked arse who likes to think she’s Samantha off Sex And The City, and… yeah… the cute young one who nobody listens to.”
“Did they say where she was?”
“How did I miss the cute one?” Carlisle muttered, scratching his leg again, ignoring the question.
Shannon looked away from the screen, and across at her boss.
“You okay?” She asked.
“Something’s not quite right. What… am I trying to… remember?” Carlisle said, more to himself than Shannon.
“Well, there was no girl on the sofa on This Morning, and there’s a girl missing on this, but it can’t be that. It’s just a coincidence, innit?” She said, through his pondering.
“Well, maybe… but… Something something…”
* * *
That morning, while only half awake, Carlisle had watched the breakfast show. During the first half of the three hour show, the two regular hosts presented their anodyne mix of not quite news and not quite lifestyle as they did every morning.
Just before the midway point, though, Carlisle had become a little unsettled with the way the two hosts – the silver fox with the creepy unmoving eyes, and the elegant lady with the total lack of empathy – had started interacting. Playful banter seemed to have phased into a different kind of bickering, and it unnerved him for some reason.
Then, when they came back from the ad break, there was only one person on the sofa. The girl wasn’t there any more, and neither the silver fox nor any of the assorted guests or weather-molls acknowledged the disappearance.
He couldn’t remember her name. “Kitty Geneva” kept floating to the surface, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t quite right.
An hour or so later, there had been a mild disruption on the Jeremy Kyle show, when Kyle himself called for the dramatic entrance of one of the various female guests, and she didn’t show.
* * *
Eventually, bored, Shannon left Carlisle to his murmuring infirm delirium. Except it didn’t feel like delirium. It felt like he had seen something, sitting here in front of this flat-screen window on the world, and it was important, and terrible, and nobody else had seen it.
He was still trying to remember when, orange faced, David Dickinson tried to lift a corner of an antique chest that a hapless member of the public was hoping to auction for a small fortune, and staggered slightly under it. It was a peculiarly awkward piece of television, watching Dickinson fluster.
“Blimey!” He squawked. “Have you got a body in there or something?”
The member of the public giggled, and then Dickinson cackled, and Carlisle stared on, still struggling to remember the girl’s name.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by nixsight, nixsight. nixsight said: @thatswedishgirl BTW, not that you asked, but the reason I was so preoccupied with daytime TV the other day: http://is.gd/dsKWP (A story!) [...]