The student is still asleep when he takes the ringing phone off the hook and holds it to his ear. The first thing that he is aware of is hearing the female voice.
“Hello, is your middle name Simon?”
“Hmph,” he says. “That sounds about right.” He squints at the clock radio. It is a few minutes before seven in the morning. For about a minute, he mostly listens.
After putting down the phone, he just sits there in bed, unsure of how to react to this news. He turns to face his girlfriend, propped up on her elbow and under the floral doona.
“That was your Mum.”
“And…”
“Your little sister heard them slagging off someone with my name on the radio, just now.”
“How bloody strange,” she says. “Do you think it’s you?”
“Oh, that seems pretty likely. They not only used my full name but read out my complete address, flat number and everything.”
“The flat we’re in right now?”
He opens the phone book and looks for the number for the radio station. Do they have their own section, he wonders. He shakes as he turns the pages. Then he is dialling. Just what do you say in this situation. This is all seems like a very odd dream. The main number rigs out after a couple of minutes. He looks back in the book; the only other number is for competitions. This seems unlikely to produce a result but he dials it anyway. He feels like he needs to do something to prove or disprove this astonishing event.
After three rings, a man from the large cast of this radio show answers the phone. The young man introduces himself by name.
“Hey, we were wondering if you’d hear about what we did.”
“And what is it that you did, exactly?”
“Well, some woman faxed us all this hilarious stuff about some bloke,” and he named a female member of their cast, “wanted to read it out. She really goes for all that man-hating stuff.”
“So when are you broadcasting the apology?” he asks, still finding all of this entirely astonishing.
“Yeah, pretty soon, I suppose.”
“So what did you say about me?”
“Some pretty stupid stuff, really.”
They speak for another few seconds. The radio man tells him that they will leave a copy of the fax at their front desk for him.
The student sits by the radio and waits for the apology. At the end of each song, he sits right next to the radio and listens intently. His anger is rising.
“I need to have a shower at some stage before I go to work,” he says, frustration plain in his voice.
“I’ll keep listening,” she reassures him, “in case get off their arses and do manage to apologise.”
Finally, he is out of time to sit by the radio and get angry. There is half an hour left in the breakfast show and only twenty-five minutes before he has to be at work.
During his morning break, he calls home.
“They did finally say something,” she tells him. “For what it was worth. They said that they were sorry if you didn’t find the joke funny. Has anyone at work said anything?”
“Only every bastard I speak to”
At lunchtime, he walks the three city blocks to the radio station. It is in yet-another glass office tower. He takes the lift to the sixteenth floor and presents himself at the front desk. A photocopy of the fax is there, with the details of the sender and recipient blacked out. The station manager is unavailable, the middle-aged receptionist tell him. He’ll be unavailable for days.
As he reads the typed message, he is both astonished and horrified. His name and address are exactly correct, underlined and all. The rest is fiction: spectacular, slanderous and nasty fiction. He reads about this man with his name and address who is an illiterate, foolish, unemployed pornographer. Aside from his exact factual details, this could not be more different to the mildly over-educated, slightly overworked, uninteresting student that he is. The fool bit, especially at the moment, felt pretty right.
He guesses that this must be the work of an ex-girlfriend. There are only a couple to choose from, and none of them seem this annoyed with him. Still, the truth is unavoidable: someone is not a fan. He folds it in his pocket and waits for the lift down.
Back on the street, he turns towards work, not wanting to be late. He has only gone about twenty yards when a student from his politics tutorial stops him.
“Hey, is your middle name Simon?”