SHORT STORY

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THE PHONE-IN

It was amazing how quickly Fiona’s Phone-In took off. She was very different from any of the others. She wasn’t concerned with issues and welfare and lifestyles: Fiona specialised in one thing, getting people out of whatever ludicrous trouble they had got themselves into.

If you had invited your future mother-in-law to afternoon tea and you had no idea what to serve, a listener would come to the rescue and advise.

To make her show exciting, there had to be an element of urgency about it. The mother-in-law had to be coming today, the boss and his wife tonight or the drunk you had agreed to go greyhound racing with would have bought the tickets for Shelbourne Park.

Fiona was great at communicating the lurking danger. Unless someone phones in now, this poor person is up the creek, and, from all over Ireland people began to phone their advice, showing the country to be utterly devious and cunning and able to get out of almost any situation, no matter how terrifying.

For a radio personality, Fiona kept a very low profile. You never saw pictures of her at art exhibitions or theatre first nights. She never opened supermarkets or presented prizes at schools and nobody ever remembered seeing her in a fashionable restaurant or a country hotel. A small picture appeared from time to time in the RTE Guide. She had a lot of curly, well, frizzy hair and wore huge glasses. It was impossible to guess her age. No papers ever said whether she was married or single. Fiona was one thing and one thing only: the frenetic drama of her own programme.

She sounded anguished about the problems that came her way twice a week. This boy who had intercepted his school report because he knew it would be bad. Now his parents were going to the school tonight to check. What should he do? There were only a couple of hours left before he had to act.

This girl who had told her friends she knew all about boats had been invited out on a yacht this weekend. There were only two days for her to become an expert.

And people rang in inviting the would-be yachtswoman out on their boats or getting the report-stealer to re-post the envelope again and it would be delivered eventually.

Fiona’s ratings were high. The station considered putting the programme out more frequently but Fiona said there would be a danger it would falter and flag, better to leave them wanting more. And still the programme went from strength to strength.

A woman who was afraid to go into her house because she thought that there might be intruders inside rang Fiona; she said she didn’t want to bother the Gardai in case it was a false alarm. In minutes she had a posse of people to escort her, and it turned out that there were burglars inside who were caught red-handed.

There was a lot about Fiona and her programme in the papers on that occasion, but her only quote was to say that it was further proof that it was the listeners who made it all such a success.

Rory had always been very interested in Fiona and her programme, as he had been one of her very first callers. His ex-wife had suddenly decided to let him have their nine year old daughter for the whole weekend. She would be arriving in two hours. Having only been able to see the little girl for three hours on a Saturday up to now he had no idea what a nine year old girl would want for a whole weekend. The airwaves were swamped with advice, all of it marvellous.

His daughter Katie had an unforgettable weekend and even attended two children’s parties. It had formed the basis of all her future visits to him. He had written to thank Fiona and got a businesslike little postcard in return.

He listened to her programme regularly and twice he was able to help people who called in. He minded a cat for a weekend for an old woman who wouldn’t have gone away to a wedding otherwise and he had faxed clear instructions on how to programme a video for someone who needed desperately to set the timer and couldn’t manage it.

Rory had always hoped that Fiona would remember him when he called in, that she would say… you’re the man with the nine year old girl, how good of you to come back to us. He even fantasised that she might ring him and suggest they meet for a meal so that she could say a proper thank you. He would be wonderful and lively and restless and the meal would be interrupted from time to time with calls on her mobile phone and requests from other tables and waiters asking for her autograph.

But Fiona never thanked him personally at the end of her programme: she thanked all the good kind people out there who proved that we were really all one big community dying to help each other if given the opportunity. And then breathlessly she would say goodbye rushing her words at the end to be finished before the time signal and the next programme started.

Rory envied her so much – busy, active, caring, rushed off her feet. Perhaps it was just as well that he would never meet her. She would scorn him as his wife Helen had eventually scorned him. A man without passions, without interest, without any sense of living, that’s what she said he was when she left with their daughter Katie. Helen had once thought there were depths there, depths that apparently didn’t exist.

Rory was philosophical about this, it was probably true. He didn’t support any causes, he was on no committees, he had never carried a placard, he didn’t always vote at elections, he was not a member of a trade union. He read a little, watched some television, he cooked simple meals like lamb chops or else bought convenience foods. Rory thought of himself as Mr Average.

Friends had introduced him to other women since Helen had left. But somehow he never followed anything up. He thought that people might describe him as perfectly pleasant. Which was fairly damning these days. It was funny that he could not get Fiona and her afternoon talk show out of his mind. He would love to do something to impress her. Something where she would have to take notice of him. But he couldn’t think of anything. Not anything that didn’t need an accomplice. Maybe if he could meet her socially and tell her that he had minded the cats and set the video… but they didn’t seem very brave things to have done. Yet he would dearly love to meet her. He might get some more life in him just by talking to her. Some sense of purpose, a share in her electricity.

It was perfectly possible that he could meet her. This was Ireland, not New York – why shouldn’t he meet Fiona of the Phone-In?

A day spent hanging outside the entrance to the radio and television station did him no good. There wasn’t a sign of Fiona. He watched the cars, the bicycles and pedestrians come in, he saw a lot of famous faces but nowhere the frizzy hair and big glasses of Fiona, solver of the nation’s dramas. He didn’t like to ask the security guards or people at the information desks. They might suspect he was some kind of pervert or nutter. And there was no point in writing to her saying he was a constant listener and would she like to join him for a supper one evening. No it would have to be an accidental meeting or nothing. But what kind of places did she go? She sounded as if she must know all kinds of people in every different class and age group. Nothing was alien or difficult to Fiona. She might be having a hamburger or she could be in a big posh restaurant. Was she at the theatre or the cinema? At a party with her boyfriend? He didn’t think of her as married. A husband had never been mentioned.

But then he began to wonder if he were becoming fixated on her. It was bad enough to be dull and sad and ordinary – he didn’t want to end up like something from Psycho.

Rory was invited to a colleague’s wedding. Brian, the bridegroom, sat beside him at work, and so he had been through all the highs and lows of the romance with Maureen, the dramas of the courtship, the on-off nature of the engagement, the throwing away and retrieval of the diamond ring. Now the day was almost here.

'You know I owe it all to that girl Fiona on the radio,' Brian had said unexpectedly the day before the wedding. Rory blushed as if he had been found out. Fiona was his secret he didn’t want her shared with everybody. Not in a personal way.

'Did you phone her show?' He could hardly believe it – he thought he was the only one in the office who listened to Fiona's programme.

'No, but Maureen did, she rang her last week and said she was so nervous of giving up everything, and changing her name and becoming a chattel, all the usual crap and Fiona was great to her.'

'What did she do?'

'Oh she sent some mousey woman round to talk to her, the two of them got on like a house on fire. The mousey woman said that Maureen didn’t have to change her name and she and I should be partners and friends and suddenly since last week everything is just magical.'

'Good for Fiona then,' croaked Rory.

'No, good for the Mouse, I say. She is coming to the wedding by the way, but don’t tell anyone'.

At the wedding the groom Brian, red-faced with happiness and drink introduced his friend Rory to the quiet slim woman, with short straight shiny hair and a diffident smile.

'This issh the woman who saved my marriage,' he said and left them together.

'I’m Fiona,' she said simply.

It was the same voice, the one off the radio, not so urgent and strident but it was the same woman.

'But I thought you were the mouse, the mouse who came to sort out Maureen.'

'I’m both,' she said.

But where was the hair, the glasses?

'I wear them as a disguise,' she said. 'You see I’m actually not that sort of person at all but someone I loved – or used to love a time ago – said I was so dull and ordinary that I should try to get a job as an actress or something to liven myself up. So I invented this personality…'

Rory looked at her in amazement. 'Was it a long time ago?' he asked.

'That I got the job?'

'That you loved the other person, the one who said you were ordinary.'

'Oh ages ago, I don’t love him any more. I didn’t have the show and the false personality and everything just to get him back, I just thought he might be right that maybe I’m very dull and ordinary.'

'No, you’re not, you’re terrific, you sorted Maureen out…' he waved at the dazzling, happy bride.

'Oh that was easy. I do a lot of other things… I often get involved in a sort of quieter way myself to sort out people’s problems. I quite enjoy it.'

He wondered for a moment had she suggested the woman who had asked Kate to the birthday parties. Did he dare to ask her? Yes of course he could. Shyly he said he knew it was a long shot. But he was right, one of them was her sister Angela who just loved little Katie, in fact Fiona had met Katie at the house when she was doing her conjuring tricks.

'You were the conjuror?' Rory cried. Katie had talked of nothing else for weeks.

'I bought a book of conjuring; it was part of trying to be less dull.' Her eyes were anxious. He reached across and took her hands authoritatively.

'You’re not dull, you’re marvellous,' he said, pure admiration shining from his eyes. 'Even better than I dared hope.'

It was quite a drunken wedding and the bridesmaid did an entirely uncalled-for striptease which she would probably regret for the rest of her life. Brian was rather too appreciative of the bridesmaid’s displayed charms, there was an argument about Trade Unionism that did no favours to either side but alienated a lot of people permanently. Three of the pageboys were sick and the bride’s father got into a poker game where he lost £500.

But in the middle of this and all the music Rory and Fiona celebrated the fact that nobody is or ever has been ordinary. Not since time began.

© Maeve Binchy

© Copyright on all webpages Maeve Binchy 2002