Psychological horror · 3 min read ·
Practice Speech for the Interview
A man with a stammer rehearses the answers for a job interview at the kitchen table each night, and the sentences he practises begin to come out of his mouth fluent and calm, in a voice belonging to someone he has never met.
- perspective: close-third
Colin Shaw had a stammer since he was six years old. It had come on after a fall from the swing, his mother said, though he had never been sure. It was worst on the hard consonants, the *b* and the *p* and the *k*, and worst when he was frightened or when someone was watching him try. He had learned to get round it, mostly. He used short sentences. He avoided the telephone. He had worked for nine years in the sorting office at Calder Row, where nobody needed him to talk much, and he had been happy there.
Then the sorting office closed, and the interview letter came, and it was for a job as a receptionist at a dental practice on the high street, which meant talking to people all day.
He practised at the kitchen table every evening after his tea. He had a sheet of paper with the likely questions written out, and a list of answers he had written himself, and he read them aloud in the empty kitchen while the kettle ticked on the hob. *Why do you want this job? Tell us about a time you handled a difficult situation. What are your strengths?* He stuttered through the first answer, then the second. He had to stop and breathe before the third. But each night he got a little further, and each night the answers came out a little smoother, and by the end of the second week he could read the whole sheet through without a single catch.
It was on the Thursday before the interview that he noticed the voice.
He had reached the last question, *Why should we choose you?*, and he had opened his mouth to read the answer he had written, and the words came out in a rush, clear and warm and unhurried, in a voice that was not his. It was deeper than his own, with a faint West Country lilt on the vowels, and a note of quiet good humour, as if the speaker were sharing a joke with someone just out of sight. The answer it gave was better than the one on the paper. It was specific and sincere and a little funny. It mentioned the sorting office, and a particular postman, and the way Colin had once walked a lost child home without being asked.
He stopped. The voice stopped with him. The kitchen was very quiet.
He read the question again, slowly, and the stammer came back, a hard catch on the *w*. He tried the answer on the paper. It stuck halfway through. He took a breath and tried again, and the voice came in under his own, very softly, like a hand on the back of his chair, and the sentence came out smooth.
Colin's wife, Jenny, came down the stairs a little after midnight. She stood in the kitchen doorway and listened to him read the answer for the third time, and she did not say anything. Then she said, quite gently, "That's not you."
He said he knew. He said he was trying to learn the sentence.
"No," she said. "It's the man you'd like to be. I've heard him at night, when you're asleep. He's very patient with you."
He went to the interview the next morning in his best suit, with the sheet of paper folded in his pocket. The practice manager asked him why he wanted the job, and he opened his mouth and the voice came out, clear and warm, and he heard himself say the answer he had not written, about the postman and the lost child and the sorting office, and the manager nodded and smiled and wrote something down.
He got the job. He has been there four years now. He still practises at the kitchen table in the evenings, but he no longer reads from the paper. He lets the voice speak for him, and he listens, and when he goes to bed he can hear the patient, lilting voice in the kitchen below, murmuring to itself, going over the answers one more time, in case there is a question nobody has asked yet.