The Trivia Man Read online

  About the Book

  Dubbed ‘brainbox’ by his peers and ‘weirdo’ by his sister, Kevin Dwyer is a middle-aged forensic accountant who has never had a real friend, other than his eight-year-old nephew, Patrick.

  When Kevin joins the Clifton Heights Sports Club trivia competition as a one-man team, and convincingly wins the first round, he is headhunted by the other contestants. But Kevin would prefer to be on his own. That is, until he meets Maggie Taylor …

  Maggie is a Latin teacher and movie buff who’s good at her job but unlucky in love. In fact, she’s still besotted with the man who dumped her years ago. Nagged by her friend Carole about getting out and meeting people, Maggie reluctantly joins the trivia team founded by Carole’s husband, Edward.

  Over a season of trivia nights, Kevin, Maggie and her team will experience arguments and crises, friendships and romances, heartbreaks and new beginnings.

  And maybe, just maybe, Kevin will find his happy ever after …

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Week One

  Kevin

  Elizabeth

  Trivia Night

  Week Two

  Maggie

  Trivia Night

  Week Three

  Patrick

  Elizabeth

  Kevin

  Patrick

  Kevin

  Trivia Night

  Week Four

  Maggie

  Kevin

  Maggie

  Kevin

  Maggie

  Kevin

  Trivia Night

  Maggie

  Week Five

  Maggie

  Trivia Night

  Week Six

  Maggie

  Kevin

  Maggie

  Trivia Night

  Week Seven

  Elizabeth

  Patrick

  Elizabeth

  Patrick

  Elizabeth

  Kevin

  Maggie

  Trivia Night

  Week Eight

  Maggie

  Trivia Night

  Kevin

  Week Nine

  Maggie

  Kevin

  Trivia Night

  Maggie

  Week Ten

  Patrick

  Kevin

  Trivia Night

  Maggie

  Week Eleven

  Maggie

  Kevin

  Maggie

  Trivia Night

  Week Twelve

  Patrick

  Elizabeth

  Maggie

  Elizabeth

  Maggie

  Elizabeth

  Trivia Night

  Maggie

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Reading Group Questions

  About the Author

  Also by Deborah O’Brien

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  For Brenton with love

  ‘Trivia is a serious business, not a social occasion.’

  KEVIN DWYER

  WEEK

  ONE

  Kevin

  Kevin Dwyer didn’t know how to be fashionably late. If he had to be somewhere, he arrived at least fifteen minutes before the starting time. Sometimes it was as much as half an hour. All the same, he knew better than to walk in too early or people would consider him a nuisance and assign him to a sofa or a side room because they didn’t know what to do with him.

  It wasn’t as though he consciously tried to arrive ahead of time; it was simply a result of his planning procedures. Once he had calculated the journey time, he would add a little extra for contingencies – traffic jams, an unfamiliar destination or the difficulty in finding a parking spot. The thought of being late terrified him more than the discomfort of arriving excessively early. And if he was early, he could always hide in his car, poring over one of his notebooks. After all, it never hurt to do some revision.

  When Kevin turned eight, his mother gave him his first pocket money. She had debated with her husband about the amount.

  ‘Ten cents is plenty,’ Michael Dwyer said. ‘He’ll only spend it on lollies.’

  Behind her husband’s back, Brenda Dwyer gave Kevin and his little sister twenty cents each and sent them off to the local shops with an additional fifty to buy her daily packet of cigarettes.

  Kevin didn’t like being seen with Beth. She was in kinder garten and he was in second class. Beth didn’t walk fast enough and she lingered over cats in driveways. So they had come to an arrangement. Kevin would walk several yards ahead and if there was a road to be crossed, he would wait for her at the kerb. After they had negotiated the asphalt, he would stride ahead, ignoring her.

  Despite Beth’s entreaties to go to the lolly shop, Kevin headed straight for the toy and hobby store instead. It took him a while to find what he was looking for, on a dusty shelf at the back among a pile of children’s books: The Complete Book of Fascinating Facts. It was two dollars. He’d been coveting it for months, checking regularly to see if someone else had bought it, but it had remained on the shelf, waiting for him. He did a calculation on his fingers. It would be almost spring before he could afford it. Would somebody else snatch it up in the meantime? The thought filled him with anxiety. He would need to do some extra jobs for his dad to earn the money. But he would do anything to be able to take that book home with him and keep it beside his bed.

  While Beth sighed over a fully furnished doll’s house, Kevin leafed through the pages until he found a whole chapter about meteorology, complete with colour pictures of tornadoes and intricate diagrams showing the formation of clouds. He loved everything to do with the weather: wind speeds, maximum, minimum and mean temperatures, barometric pressure, even grades of frost – not that he had ever seen a frost, living as he did beside a tidal river in a coastal city blessed with a temperate climate. Still, it sounded serious whenever a sheep graziers’ warning appeared in the weather report.

  Every night Kevin watched the Channel 2 news – not the boring stuff, just the last five minutes when the weather man pointed to his map and gravely identified highs, lows, troughs and cold fronts. Using a linen-covered ledger book his mother had bought for him, he recorded that day’s information, plus the forecast for the next. In a special column he jotted down the daily reading from his rain gauge and any unusual observations such as localised hail or an occasional rainbow. At seven-thirty, when the news was over, he would check the previous day’s forecast against the actual figures. It worried him how often the bureau got it wrong. After all, meteorology was supposed to be a science, not a guessing game.

  On Tuesday night Kevin had broken his own punctuality record and arrived at the Clifton Heights Sports Club forty minutes early. The club itself was a vast two-storey red-brick building with a flat roof, typical of the 1960s. To Kevin’s knowledge, that particular architectural style was considered so uninspiring it hadn’t been given a name. The building stood precariously on a cliff overlooking the ocean. From his spot in the half-full car park, Kevin listened to the surf pounding on the beach. Like the regularity of a heartbeat, the perpetual crashing of the waves was oddly comforting. After a while he began working through one of his notebooks, recommitting facts to memory, revising lists, recalling names and dates. His concentration was broken by the strident ringtone of his mobile phone. It was his sister, Elizabeth, whom he had always called Beth, in spite of everyone else using her full name, or Lizzie for short.

  ‘Just phoning about Patrick’s birthday party,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Yes, I received your invitatio
n, Beth. I replied by email earlier today.’

  ‘I know. That’s not why I’m ringing. I thought you’d like to know that we’re having a big party this year.’

  Wasn’t last year’s party big enough? There must have been at least fifty guests, half of them adults.

  ‘There’ll be a lot of people you don’t know,’ she continued. ‘So if you want to give it a miss, we’ll understand.’

  ‘I wouldn’t miss Patrick’s eighth birthday for anything.’

  There was a pause. ‘Okay. Just checking. By the way, did you sort out that trivia business? It was getting out of hand.’

  When Elizabeth said ‘trivia business’, she was referring to the three competitions per week that he had been involved in last year. She had nagged him about it being an addiction, like smoking, and had insisted he cut back or people would think him an oddball.

  ‘Actually, I’m starting a new competition tonight.’

  ‘Not four! That’s crazy.’

  ‘No, I’ve dropped the other three.’

  ‘Well, I’m pleased to hear it. And are you planning to join a team this time? Being a one-man band is really weird. You need to interact with other people, Kevin.’

  ‘Trivia is a competition, not a social occasion.’

  ‘You take it too seriously. You should find some other interests. Tennis, golf, ballroom dancing. You might even meet a woman that way.’

  ‘Have to go, Beth. There’s another call coming in.’

  In his rush to end the conversation, he dropped the phone and had to retrieve it from the floor of the car. Oh dear, why couldn’t Beth see he was perfectly contented as he was?

  Elizabeth

  From her bedroom window Elizabeth Dwyer used to watch her brother checking the rain gauge he kept in the veggie garden. Couldn’t he find anything better to do with his time? It was such a peculiar hobby. Her friends’ brothers played cowboys and Indians or kicked a football around the yard, but Kevin wrote numbers in columns. Sometimes Elizabeth couldn’t help herself, sneaking outside when he was busy at his desk to tip out the water after a rain shower, or fill it up when the weather was dry. But Kevin never caught her. Instead, he recorded the findings in his ratty old notebook like one of those crazy professors in the movies, puzzling over the strange results.

  Why did she take such delight in sabotaging Kevin? Because he was a total embarrassment to her. She wished she were an only child. She cringed whenever a schoolfriend found out he was her brother. And the day he was called up at assembly to receive a maths prize, she slid down her seat, trying to disappear. He was wearing his silly glasses with the patch over one eye, his top shirt button done up and his socks stretched to his knees.

  ‘Kevin Dwyer? Is he related to you?’ the boy next to her asked, when Kevin’s name was called out.

  Like Peter disowning Jesus, she denied it. ‘No, don’t know him.’

  She couldn’t wait until Kevin went to high school and she could have the primary school to herself.

  Of course, Kevin did go to high school and two years later Elizabeth found herself at the same place. This time it was bigger, almost a thousand students, and she was certain Kevin would be lost in the crowd. But on her very first day, there he was, wandering around the playground on his own, with his tie done up and shirt tucked in like a mummy’s boy. So Elizabeth adopted a new strategy. Admit the truth and lead the taunts. Not the name-calling, though, because it was inevitable she would be caught and then her parents would be called up to the school. It had to be subtle and clever, something that could never be traced back to her.

  In the third week of high school, Elizabeth and her girlfriends came up with a bright idea – to send Kevin a Valentine’s card. They found a particularly large and sentimental number at the newsagent, heart-shaped and featuring a pair of kissing cupids. The four of them shared the cost. After it dawned on them that Kevin would recognise Elizabeth’s handwriting, Shelley volunteered to write the message instead:

  Dear Kevin,

  I think you’re cute.

  Love and kisses,

  You know who

  Elizabeth slipped it in the letterbox when she came home from school, but nothing happened for a few days. Then she could bear it no longer.

  ‘I saw a Valentine’s card on your desk, Kevin,’ she said, having searched his room while he was out reading his rain gauge. ‘Do you have a secret admirer?’

  ‘What were you doing in my room?’ he shouted in such a fierce voice Elizabeth was suddenly scared of him.

  ‘There’s no need to raise your voice, Kevin,’ their father said, barely looking up from his newspaper.

  ‘Leave my things alone, Beth,’ Kevin said, storming off to his room.

  ‘Calm down,’ she called after him. ‘I was only looking for a pen.’

  A few weeks later the girls implemented stage two of their plan. One Friday afternoon the phone rang at the Dwyer house and Elizabeth, who had been anticipating the call, raced to answer it.

  ‘Kevin, it’s for you,’ she called out. ‘I think it might be your admirer.’ Then she went into the sunroom where she carefully picked up the extension and listened in.

  ‘Kevin Dwyer speaking.’

  ‘Hi, Kevin. Would you like to go to the beach with me tomorrow?’ Shelley could do a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice better than anyone.

  There was a long pause, followed by: ‘Okay.’

  In the background Elizabeth was certain she could hear giggling. Surely Kevin would work out what was going on.

  ‘Meet me at the station at ten o’clock,’ the female voice continued.

  ‘Who’s speaking?’

  ‘Oh Kevin, you’re so cute. Pretending you don’t know who it is. See you tomorrow. Bye.’

  There was the sound of a kiss. Then click.

  The next morning, when Kevin headed out the door in board shorts and T-shirt, carrying a duffel bag containing his towel and sun cream, Elizabeth had to go to her room to hide the waves of laughter contorting her body. But when he returned home that afternoon, angry and lashing out at her, she was worried he had caught on to their scheme. Or that he soon would. Things had gained their own momentum and she was no longer in control.

  ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ she told the girls.

  ‘But it was your idea in the first place.’

  ‘It used to be fun, but it’s getting out of hand.’

  Nevertheless, she listened in as they plotted their next move. It would be an apology for not turning up at the railway station. They spent ages thinking of an excuse and finally decided on a dental emergency. Then they added:

  If you forgive me, meet me on Tuesday. Five-thirty at Bennett Park near the slippery dip.

  Shelley wrote the note, placed it in an envelope and put it in the letterbox. On Tuesday afternoon Elizabeth watched as Kevin slipped out the back door of their fibro cottage. A brisk southerly was blowing and for a brief moment she felt sorry for him, going out in the cold to meet a phantom admirer.

  Trivia Night

  At 7.23 pm Kevin decided he had lingered long enough. He placed his notebook in the glove box, locked the car and headed for the double doors above which a neon sign bore the name ‘Cliffies’. The auditorium was on the first floor, beyond vast banks of poker machines. On the stage a tall man with curly grey hair almost to his shoulders and a tuxedo with narrow, glittery lapels was seated at a table. A board was propped next to him, saying: ‘Register Here for Trivia’. Beside him sat a woman, at least a head shorter, with white hair, vivid red lipstick and a skimpy dress. She might have been any age between forty and sixty.

  It turned out the man liked to be called ‘the Professor’ and though he looked vaguely familiar, Kevin couldn’t quite place him. The Professor introduced the woman as his wife, ‘Miss Kitty’.

  ‘Fifty dollars per team to register,’ said the Professor. ‘And the prizes are awarded at the end of the twelve-week season – like a sporting competition.’

  Kevin nodded
and handed over the cash.

  ‘What’s the name of your team?’ the Professor asked.

  ‘One-Man Band.’ It was the name Kevin had used at the other venues. He was his own team; it had always been the case. If he was an entity unto himself, there were no egos to assuage, no conversations to decode, no silly small talk to distract him.

  ‘So it’s just you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve never had a one-man team before,’ the Professor said. ‘Though it’s not against the rules. There’s an eight-person maximum, but we’ve never imposed a minimum. You won’t want to get sick though, unless you can find a stand-in.’

  ‘I’m never sick,’ Kevin said.

  Kitty typed the name into a computer and suddenly it appeared in the left-hand column of a chart projected on a large screen set up on the stage.

  ‘You’re table eight,’ she told him.