In the Falling Snow by Caryl Phillips

He stares at his boss, who shrugs helplessly. ‘Oh come on, she was attempting to humiliate me.’
    ‘Undermine you, perhaps. I can work with that, but I’m not so sure about the humiliation thing. Look, give it a few weeks and then maybe it will have all blown over and you two can re-establish some kind of working harmony.’
    Clive Wilson drains what remains of his wine in one gulp, and then he leans in closer.
    ‘To tell you the truth, Keith, I don’t want to push the girl too much. What if she starts sending these emails to head office or to the local press? At least at the moment it’s all reasonably under control, wouldn’t you say? Right now, we both know what we’re dealing with. Another drink?’
    He watches as his boss gently shoulders his way to the bar. On the positive side, a few weeks’ leave means that he won’t have to write the stupid policy report on trans-racial adoption. He assumes that Lesley Thornton will be put in charge of his department, which makes perfect sense given the fact that before her last promotion she used to run Women’s Affairs, and so she at least has some knowledge of his newly expanded responsibilities. Race Equality initiatives will, presumably, be put on hold. Maybe Clive is trying to ease him out, or perhaps he is seeking to increase Lesley’s portfolio? However, the more he thinks about Clive’s motives the more he realises that he simply doesn’t care. Time away from the whole Race Equality, Disability and Women’s Affairs circus is what he needs, and if temporary humiliation is the price he has to pay to escape the clutches of the local authority for a few weeks, then he is ready to pay. A grinning Clive Wilson walks triumphantly towards him clutching two more large glasses of wine, one white and one red. He decides that he will drink his wine quickly and leave Clive Wilson alone in the bar where, as the evening wears on, his boss will no doubt run into old friends or simply make new ones.

II
     
    FOR THE FIRST time since his student days, he is living without a daily structure. Clive Wilson’s suggestion that he take a research break has enabled him to ignore the alarm clock. During his first year at university his erratic sleeping habits inconvenienced nobody for he had no girlfriend and, aside from his lectures and the odd tutorial, his main focus was football training, and that did not start until four in the afternoon. During his second and third years his involvement with Annabelle meant that he had less time for football but, much to his girlfriend’s frustration, he remained unpredictable with regard to the time when he went to, or emerged from, his bed. Thanks to Clive Wilson he has been able to resume the indulgent sleeping patterns of his youth, but after just one unstructured week he realises that he is simply wasting his time. He has filled a yellow legal pad with notes for his proposed book about music, but most of the so-called notes are copied from earlier ideas that he had initially scribbled on Post-its before transferring the nuggets of wisdom into the back of old diaries. The one thing that he has achieved in the past week is to create an office space in the corner of his living room where he has arranged everything in an orderly fashion. The books on the two shelves are neatly divided into fiction and non-fiction, the A4 writing pads are neatly stacked, the Post-its and brightly coloured paper files are easy to reach, and the newly purchased laptop computer and printer-scanner-fax, while not the absolute top of the range, suggest a man who is serious about his home office. He stares at the screen and resists the urge to listen again to David Ruffin’s recordings as a solo artist and then compare Ruffin’s voice to when the singer was lead vocalist of the Temptations. He has replayed ‘I Wish It Would Rain’ three times already, but his written thoughts amount to two sentences. ‘Once he liberated himself from the Temptations there was a