DAN astonished himself by the answer he gave the woman.
“My wife’s just left me, I’ve come here to kill myself.”
She didn’t bat an eyelid.
“I thought about running out in front of a car but just couldn’t do it. Then I saw these huge big stands that you have here and thought I could jump off, you know, end it all.”
It was such a stark statement, but he wasn’t being entirely honest. The fact that Dan had been dumped in favour of another man was hurtful enough but for an Englishman! He had always disliked the English and their prissy mannerisms. What better way to end it all than by desecrating that most English of institutions, the cricket ground.
Dan gazed around the giant stadium with its rows and rows of white seats which glistened in the summer sun. It was sparsely populated with a mainly middle aged or elderly, male crowd dotted sparingly around. It definitely needed a splattering of colour he thought.
Dan had been told the English like their irony, how ironic would it be for Nigel if Mel’s estranged husband leapt off a stand at Trent Bridge and crashed onto the concrete below, leaving a massive blood-red stain. That would certainly blow a hole in his English cool.
“Oh you can’t do that, absolutely not,” stated Alice quite firmly.
“Notts are bowling very well at the moment, they’ve been keeping a fine line and length all morning and I’m not going to have their concentration spoilt by some over emotional Yank. “No, young man if you want to be all dramatic and Hollywood, you’ll have to find somewhere else, this is a cricket ground, one of the best in the world. For God’s sake, we stage Test matches here. Do you know who’s played on this hallowed turf, Botham, Richards, Sobers, the greats, oh no we DON’T do suicides here.”
With that, she looked away from him and continued scribbling. A moment later she said: “Anyway why would you want to do something that silly?”
In the background Dan could hear the noise of leather against willow, bat against ball, and the occasional shout from one of the cricketers. The men, dressed in their regulation all-white outfits, either threw the ball or hit it with their wooden bats ferociously and ran about energetically. To what purpose he hadn’t got a clue.
Surprisingly, Dan found it easy to pour his heart out to this stranger whom he had only just met. He opened up like he had never done before about his love for Mel, about his anguish that his marriage was over, about the hurt and anger that was burning a vicious hole right through him.
It was like talking to someone you would meet in a bar or on a bus or train, someone you knew you would probably never meet again and he found it liberating, a great release.