The whole match went that way, Donald’s play grew worse and forty-five minutes later it was all over. He had managed to take a game but Sinya had easily beaten him: 9-5, 9-4, 7-9, 9-1. Shell-shocked, he let his opponent prattle on about this and that and then watched with horror as Sinya stopped at the noticeboard outside the court and had the cheek to take out Donald’s name from the top of the ladder and substitute his own. Couldn’t the bastard even have the decency to wait until he was showering?
He drove home and after four hours of silence Susan got it out of him, and of course he agreed that it was only a stupid game and it meant nothing. The next day he went to the court with his new racket and practised serves and drop shots for an hour and called Sinya and asked him for a rematch.
The rematch was on a Friday and this time Sinya took him in straight sets. He realized with horror that Sinya had given him the game he’d won last time as a courtesy, just as he had condescendingly done with the lesser players in his bouts.
They walked back to car park and Sinya stopped at the repulsive Volkswagen Microbus Donald had seen egged by the rag week students.
“Do you want a lift?” he asked. “You’re in Carrick, aren’t you? I drive all the way to Larne so it would be easy to drop you.”
The fact that Sinya lived in Larne, one of the grimmest towns in Ulster, gave Donald no comfort on the silent ride home.
Sinya’s reign at the top began and seemed unbreakable. He was miles ahead of all the players. In fact, if he’d been younger he could well have been an international. Weeks went by and Donald played him on and off with little effect. On a weekend game with Fenton, Donald unexpectedly lost, and after another fortnight he was only at number four on the ladder.
Despite the repeated assurances of his wife, his friends and even, on one humiliating occasion, the university’s psychological counsellor, that it was only a senseless cardboard list of names, he felt that his work, his health, his libido and his mental outlook were all suffering terribly as he slipped down the ladder.
Christmas came and went, term ended and began again.
McCann was no comfort but Donald found himself spending a lot of time with him in Lavery’s or the Bot, enjoying increasingly frequent liquid lunches.
At the gym he noticed now that Peter Finn was cool to him at the door. On a miserable Tuesday morning he played a man called Jennings, lost in straight games and found that he was now last on the ladder. He almost relished this final embarrassment. Now there was no place lower to go.
He slipped upstairs to the cafeteria, called Susan and asked if she could get a lift back to Carrick with one of her friends. He sat, nursing a coffee, watching the sky darken and the lights come on street by street, Sandy Row, the Shankill, the Falls, the illumination moving north to the old shipyards and then down around the university and the City Hospital. In Belfast tonight there would be violence and love and passion and death. People in the hospital would be passing away from cancer, accidents, heart disease, and in other wards dozens of babies were being born. New lives for old.
“It really isn’t that important, you know, old man,” he said to himself.
“What isn’t important?”
He turned. It was Mr Jones, his student from last term’s course on the Elizabethans. He was holding a book called Automotive Engineering Mistakes.
“Oh, I was just talking to myself. Join me. Have a seat. What on Earth are you reading?”
Jones sat. “It’s about design faults in cars. Not just the Ford Pinto. Some pretty famous cars. Even brilliant designers make mistakes.”
He got Jones a coffee.
Something McCann had once said came floating back into Donald’s mind.
“I heard those Volkswagen Microbuses are a death trap,” he said.
Jones grinned. “Oh, yeah! No crumple zone at the front to absorb a crash and the exhaust pipe runs the full length of the floor…oh, boy, you get two holes in the rust and your vehicle’s filled with carbon monoxide. Death trap isn’t the…”
But Donald was no longer listening.
It would be the easiest thing in the world.
Punch a hole through the floor and the exhaust.
Punch a hole. Let fate take over. If nothing happened, nothing happened. But if Sinya got into an unfortunate accident in the long drive from Belfast to Larne, well, it wouldn’t really be Donald’s fault. It wouldn’t be murder, or attempted murder. It was a design flaw in the vehicle, he was helping nature take its course.
He said goodnight to Jones, ran six flights to the ground floor and out into the wet, cold January darkness.
He knew that it would have to be now. Tonight. If he thought about it, he wouldn’t do it at all. He conscience would kick in. His middle-class sensibility. His cowardice.
It would have to be now or never.
He reached the car park. It was six o’clock. Most of the vehicles had gone but the putrid orange Volkswagen was still there. Sinya often worked late. Trying to get ahead no doubt, Donald thought spitefully. He went to his Volvo, rummaged in the boot and found a torch and his toolkit. He locked the boot and walked to the Volkswagen.
“I’m not going to do this, it’s not me,” he said to himself.
He checked that the coast was clear. No one was within a hundred yards.
“I don’t even know what to do. Should have asked Jones for details. Doesn’t matter, I’m not going to do anything. I’m not a killer. What I will do is take a look underneath, just to see if it’s possible.”
He scanned the car park again, turned on the torch, squatted on the wet tarmac and looked under the VW. A great hulking exhaust pipe ran almost all the way from the front of the cabin to the back of the car. The pipe was rusted, the chassis was rusted. A few taps from a screwdriver might do the trick…
He stood, checked the car park one more time.
No one.
He was calm.
He lay back down again.
In five minutes it was done.
He had punched a hole in the top of the exhaust pipe and another through to the cabin. He had connected the two holes with a paper coffee cup he had found lying around – squeezing the cup into a tube. If an accident did occur the cup would burn in the fire, and if it didn’t it was an innocent enough thing to find stuck under your car.
He wiped himself down, got in his car, sped to the Crown Bar, had two pints of Guinness to calm his nerves and drove home.
In his study he had a double vodka and a cognac but he couldn’t sleep.
Susan went to bed and he checked the radio for reports of road accidents, deaths.
He really didn’t want Sinya to die. If the poor man was injured that would be enough. Then Donald could resume his march back up the squash ladder and get his life back in order. Get to the top, stop drinking with McCann, start writing his book, have that talk with Susan about kids again…
Finally he drifted off to sleep on the living-room sofa at about three. He woke before the dawn in the midst of a nightmare. Sinya’s Volkswagen had plunged off the cliff at the Bla Hole just outside Whitehead. Two hundred feet straight down on to the rocks below. The car had smashed and it was assumed to be an accident but the police had found a paper cup wedged in the exhaust. The murderer had left fingerprints all over it.
Five years earlier Donald had been arrested for cannabis possession at Sussex University. His prints were in the database.
“Oh my God,” he said.
He turned on the radio, found the traffic report: a road accident in Omagh, another in County Down, nothing so far on the Belfast-Larne Road.
He paced the living room. What madness had overtaken him? To try to kill a man over something so preposterous as a squash ladder? He had obviously taken leave of his senses. That’s what he would do at the trial. He’d plead temporary insanity.