The Wrong

Standing slightly apart from the others, I marked him straight off as the probable winner: insouciant, relaxed, with a complexity about the angles of his face, an intense self-contained cool. I went out and put a bet on him, something I’d never done before, filed the slip in my important documents folder, then removed it and hid it in the leaves of a dictionary on the bookshelf. In the office, I listened to my colleagues discussing the contestants with a private smile on my lips; of course they’d plump for the obvious choices, wouldn’t notice him. Only, as I circulated the air-conditioned room, and saw his profile hastily diminished on computer screens, it became clear they had. During tea breaks, his name buzzed the kitchen. He was, as the Head of Accounts put it, the dark horse. Then the market crashed. By the time we tuned in, the competition was in its final stages. Morose, grey-skinned from hours of firefighting, we scoured the line of faces, again and again. The finalists were stirring up the crowd, parading their virtues, staring earnestly at the camera. And he, he’d slipped out in the early rounds, we learned, departing without a struggle, almost the first man down. For a moment it felt like the competition, which we had followed all these years, was inherently flawed, would have to be redesigned from scratch, or abandoned. And for a few seconds, in the whole world, it felt like this was the wrong.

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