Somewhere in the reptile house, Behind its swivel eyes, The shimmering chameleon, A master of disguise, Just smiled a scaly sort of smile Contented by and large: Invisible to predators Behind his camouflage.
Assured of his ability To disappear from sight, The colour-changing iguania Looked settled for the night. So smug until he realised His final big mistake, To blend in oh so subtly With a lizard-eating snake.
I am always fascinated by the fact that animals in zoos very rarely eat one another. All those fish in an aquarium full of sharks and you can’t tell me that at least one or two of them don’t go missing. Reptiles (are snakes reptiles?) always seem to me to be impervious to zoo etiquette. I remember, as a boy, wandering around a reptile house at the zoo when a keeper came along with a box of beautiful fluffy yellow chicks which he let us pet for a while before he fed them to the snakes. I can recall the trauma today, and my feeling of uselessness at not guessing what was coming and saving at least some of them. I don’t like snakes, but I’m not scared of them (although I’ve never actually encountered anything big and poisonous – this is England, we leave that kind of thing to Estate Agents). I wouldn’t choose to share my life with one…
The whole world has become one, single Zoom generation. Old talk to young – well, as long as the young set it up – and we have all learned to chat with an inbuilt response delay. We have all grown used to the ‘You’re breaking up. No, I said breaking up. You’re… Oh, she’s gone. I can still see her. Has she muted? Have you muted? I said… Oh, she’s gone altogether now…’ conversations. We have all grown used to having the quality of our internet connection questioned. We have all grown used to having an in-depth conversation with a family member’s crotch; to being invited to view the contents of their nose whilst they try to sort it out.
This is the New Normal of only one strand of a conversation at a time; of waiting your turn; of finding that the relevance of what you had to say disappeared whilst Aunty Norma described the shattered condition of her bowels; of finding that your killer punch-line has just lost its feed. It is also the time of seeing yourself as everybody else sees you: of hearing your own voice and realising quite how like an exceedingly camp country bumpkin you sound (although, maybe that’s just me). Nobody wants to see themselves talking – it’s just not natural is it? If God had wanted us to enjoy seeing ourselves talking, he wouldn’t have invented Michael McIntyre. (I’m not entirely certain what I mean by that.)
Zoom has also become the go-to family quiz medium and, as a nation, perhaps as a planet, we have never needed to know what the Patagonian flag looks like as much as we have over the last few months. Zoom has become the medium by which the Family Smart-Arse has been uncovered and reviled. If you are that person – and you will know if you are – don’t think you can mend the damage you wreaked by accusing grandma of cheating and having the Reader’s Digest Compendium at her side, by deliberately getting the Rick Astley question wrong. You cannot. Being the last to close down the connection will not stop everyone talking about you.
Zoom also means that you cannot disguise the fact that you haven’t crawled out of your pyjamas all day and that you really are eating cornflakes out of Aunty Doreen’s Royal Dalton wedding present. ‘What are you eating?’ is the general starting point of every conversation, followed by the more detailed inquisition of whether they deliver, do they charge for prawn crackers and is the batter gluten-free? Such Zoom conversations often take wings, drifting off into questions as diverse as, ‘What did you eat yesterday?’ and ‘What are you eating tomorrow?’ It is never long before all involved are comparing gin and tonics.
The nuclear family has been dissipated and our current travails have, in some ways, dragged us back together. Our own family Zoom evenings have resulted in gatherings of such number that the lights dim all over the village. We get together weekly in numbers that we would have formerly gathered together only on Christmas Day – and nobody is stressed over the bread sauce, the dishwasher has not coughed thirty litres of sludge over the kitchen floor, and little Billy has not swallowed the plastic toy out of Uncle Norman’s un-pulled cracker.
It is very odd how a pandemic, bent on driving us further apart, has actually pulled us closer together. How we have all discovered that we can easily manage a couple of hours with the in-laws when we don’t have to actually share the same room. How we have discovered that the grandkids understand the limitations of the internet even less than we do. How we have all discovered that we can detect the ‘beep’ of somebody else’s dishwasher through the hubbub of twenty consecutive conversations, three different channels on the TV and the stutter of somebody’s connection as they simultaneously try to stream Game of Thrones and Love Island Revisited*. A zoom lens makes things appear to be much closer than they actually are. For a short time, a Zoom conversation, brings us spiritually closer. It is the only silver lining I can find in our current cloud, but it is one we wouldn’t have had twenty years ago…
*I think I just made that up. Unless anyone can prove otherwise, please consider it copyright.
Oh, and just to prove to James that I actually have no musical taste whatsoever, the music playing in the background as I finish this piece is Zoom by the Electric light Orchestra, and I’m not even going to apologise for it…
Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I had not a single view. I did not publish anything, but they are quite often my best days. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Oh well, I suppose I’ll have to keep on prattling after all…
This is a true tale from my school days. For all manner of reasons I have changed names, but the facts remain… largely factual, as it were, to the very best of my recollection – which, you may well know, is not entirely reliable. The spirit of the recollection is entirely correct, even if the specifics are not. It does not put any of us in a good light, but it was a salutary lesson. It started, as most things did at school, with an argument…
One boy, a fisherman, we’ll call him Jeremy, had brought in a tin of maggots with the intention of using them during an illicit fishing trip, scheduled to occur whilst the rest of us were finding all manner of other methods with which to avoid the cross country run. He flicked the lid open and we all looked in on the squirming technicolour mass within. There was a general feeling of slight nausea at the nature of Jeremy’s bait, that he was prepared to carry it in his pocket all day, and most of all, that he kept it ‘fresh’ in the fridge at home. None-the-less, interest was beginning to wane and the lid was, quite literally, being closed on the subject when Marvin piped up. ‘Why are they all different colours?’ ‘They’re dyed. To make them more appetising to the fish.’ Marvin eyed them doubtfully. ‘Appetising?’ he said at last. ‘They’re bloody disgusting. How does dyeing them make them any more appetising?’ ‘I could eat them…’
The moment.
The voice from the back of the throng. Norman was the class ‘quiet kid’: not bright, not academic, definitely not in any way disruptive. Just quiet. We all liked Norman. The stunned silence that followed his atypical interjection was eventually broken by Marvin. ‘You wouldn’t eat one of those!’ ‘I would!’ There was an unexpected defiance in Norman’s voice. ‘Bet you a quid.’ ‘Make it ten,’ said the now assertive Norman. ‘Alright, but you’ve got to eat twenty – and proper chew ‘em mind. No swallowing whole.’ ‘Deal.’ They shook hands. No turning back for either of them. Norman looked almost sanguine, confident in his gustatory ambitions; Marvin less so. ‘Have you got a tenner?’ I asked him. ‘I’ll get it.’ ‘How?’ ‘We’ll sell tickets,’ he said. ‘Fifty pence a go. We’ll easily sell twenty.’ I looked at him doubtfully. ‘I’ll have one,’ said Paul. ‘Me too,’ said Phil. The process had begun…
The gladiatorial arena – boy versus larvae – was set: a small, seldom used classroom, as far away from staff intervention as possible; a single desk at its centre with all other furniture pushed back against the walls. Standing room only.
The rules were agreed:
The maggots must be eaten, and swallowed, individually.
Each maggot was to be chewed and evidence of this presented.
Water was available for drinking, but not for swilling.
The crowd began to assemble. A total sell-out. Thirty quid! After a period of intense negotiation, it was agreed that, in view of the unforeseen demand, Norman’s share would be raised to fifteen pounds, the rest to be shared amongst the committee – set aside, if my memory serves me, for transmutation into Strongbow Cider and Park Drive filter-tipped.
Norman entered the room to muted applause – nobody wanted to attract adult attention – like a boxer, draped in his school blazer and a tea towel, just in case. He took his seat and, with minimal fanfare, set about his quest at once. The maggots were consumed one at a time, each demonstrably masticated, as per. The tension that accompanied his first tiny mouthful quickly dissipated and by the time he was about half way through, the audience had started to wander off, but Norman soldiered on. Eventually he popped the last wriggling morsel into his mouth and chomped his last chomp as Mrs Sextant, one of the less liberal of our teachers entered the room with all nostrils flaring. She looked around in disgust. She did not need to be appraised of the situation, we had been grassed up – presumably by some disaffected punter who had expected greater jeopardy for his cash. We were marched off to the headmaster’s office – with just a short pause for Norman to be sick – and chastised soundly with the threat of letters to parents.
And the salutary lesson? Well, the full thirty pounds was confiscated, to be donated, we were told, to some unspecified charity (Save the Embryonic Fly, perhaps) but its exact destination was never revealed to us – although the teachers did appear to be eating particularly luxurious biscuits on the day of our Saturday morning detention later that week…
Since writing down this little incident I have been wracking my brain to try and recall actual details: the real name of the maggot eater, I cannot with any clarity recall. The actual monetary amounts involved, ditto. The teacher who spoiled the day, ditto. The exact punishment for our misdemeanours, also ditto. Even my own specific role in proceedings remains unremembered. As for the bit with the teacher’s biscuits, I’m pretty sure I made that up – poetic licence if any of them are reading… Total fabrication, if they are just about to call a lawyer.
If you have been in any way affected by any of the events depicted in this short article, I’m terribly sorry, I don’t know what to do about it. I do not have a Helpline. The ‘boy’ suffered no long-term health effects. The maggots were less fortunate…
Antipodean creature That burrows underground. Taxonomy: marsupial – I don’t see them around. The countryside in which I live Is definitely not As dry as where the wombat is And surely not so hot.
The native aborigines Called it a worthless beast. Its sedentary nature Made it a dingoes feast. Yet the presence of its predators Is so very strangely sparse As all it has in its defence Is an armour-plated arse.
It was my plan to publish just one of these a week, but seeing as you haven’t had one yet, ‘Wombat’ you said, Herb. I cannot lie: I had to look them up. I had heard of them, of course, but I knew nothing about them. Like almost everything in Australia, they are very strange to anyone who doesn’t live there, but I presume even there, their method of protecting themselves in their burrows is considered somewhat… individual.
For those critics who love the sound of their own tortured vowels…
Even as he lay dying, an unsavoury old man in clothes roughly hewn from sanatorium blankets, felled by a halibut-wielding caretaker, high on a mixture of camphorated oil and Werther’s Originals, Senna refused to hide his contempt for the ‘Art’ that had failed to provide for any of his basic needs for almost fifty years and, turning to his long-time confidante, Layette, uttered his immortal last words, ‘Boil me and egg, Harold, and fetch my teeth from the dog – they will not bite me again.’
To trace the roots of this disdain we have to go back to his eighteenth birthday and the first real indications of a burgeoning talent. Haunted by the butcher’s bill and a landlord who threatened to, ‘Hang him by the ears from a really tall building until he pays his rent,’ Senna put his quill to paper for the first time since leaving school:
‘Dear Mother, This quill is very difficult to write with and leaves large blobs all over the paper. I think it may need a point, but I cannot afford to buy one. If I am to progress as a writer I will need something from a nobler bird. Send money. Love Aldy.’
One can only imagine the consternation caused by this outburst, as not a single one of his contemporaries in the so-called ‘Cellar-set’ felt it worthy of even the briefest of mentions in their own, extensive, missives. It did, however, appear to have a totally debilitating effect upon Senna who did not feel well enough to raise a quill again for over two years.
His first attempt at poetry was an agonising challenge to him. Poverty forced him to drink the first gallon of ink he bought, and the only paper he was able to find came from his neighbour’s walls, none-the-less he forged on, producing his first real masterpiece – only a tiny fragment of which survives today:
‘“I must go down to the sea,” he said. “My boat has sprung a leak. My socks are on the mizzen mast and have been there for a week.”’
Was this an indication of his earliest yearnings for a life at sea, or merely his dissatisfaction at owning only a single pair of socks, both of which, it would appear, he had misplaced? Whatever his reasons, it was a theme to which he was to return throughout his career. It was a mere decade later that he produced his next work, a lyrical evocation of the lure of the sea. Sadly, only two pages of this four thousand stanza meisterwerk survive, all but two lines of which consist of crossings-out and an oblique reference to an unpaid laundry bill:
‘And as they drifted onward ‘twixt lofty sky and shore, He lost his favourite pair of socks and they were seen no more.’
Clearly he now owned more than one pair of socks – that is implicit in his reference to a pair that he held in higher esteem than all others. Various experts have subsequently estimated his sock-holdings at this time as being anywhere between two and thirty seven pairs. As always in the art world, there are dissenting voices. Dyer, for instance, states, ‘It’s two bleedin’ lines from an unfinished ditty about an incompetent sailor. How the hell can you calculate the contents of his sock drawer from that? Besides,’ he goes on to add darkly, ‘We only have Senna’s word for it that the poem was ever longer than two lines in the first place.’
Without doubt, it is one of literature’s great mysteries that such a prolific writer managed to leave behind only two lines from an entire decade’s labours. Some have postulated that his legacy may have been plundered at the time, by a bevy of less-talented contemporaries. Perhaps we can glean some indication from a fragment of a letter that he wrote to Layette on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday:
‘I fear I must leave my rooms. Each night I write a complete novel, sometimes a play, toiling away into the darkling hours, but each morning, the fruits of my labour disappear into the ether as I visit the bucket. I have only my poetry for solace, but I do not know where I put it. Send more money.’
We have nothing left of his mighty legacy from the ensuing decade. He did, at one time claim to have written an entire novel in Sanskrit but, claims Dyer, ‘It turned out to be nothing more than The Arabian Nights written backwards, sent to a publisher who he had forgotten was Saudi Arabian.’ Senna was forced to flee, under the threat of being made overly familiar with the publisher’s Kukri, and he began his opus work You’d Better Look Behind You When You Next Walk Down a Darkened Alley Matey, the very next day:
‘I wandered lonely as an insurance salesman with halitosis Who plies his trade from door-to-door, And if I could find my walking socks I’d really give you what for…’
It was as far as he got, as he reported that his quill had been stolen and it took him almost five years to locate a new duck, by which time he had quite lost his drift. We can, however, surmise much from this literary fragment. He was clearly a poet at the very zenith of his powers: it does not scan, it ignores all basic word structure, it barely makes sense: a man ahead of his time. Artistic licence? Dyer suggests he would have failed the oral. In fact, the intrigue is deepened when we realise that this is the very last piece of work ever officially attributed to him (although Merry claimed to hold a fragment of an old shopping list). Senna, himself, never claimed to have written a single verse from that time until his untimely death, ten years later, at the hands of an apprentice masseur with a grudge.
In reviewing Senna’s contribution to the literary riches of history, we may be forced to review Sewer’s opinion that Senna was ‘Perhaps the greatest poet never to have been Laureate,’ although few are likely to agree with Dyer’s view that he was not even the greatest poet ‘Never to have so much as a single word published.’ History, and a hefty TV advance will tell…
I barely remember writing this at all, but clearly somebody had got deeply under my skin. As I go through it now I have a weird amalgamation of Melvyn Bragg, Brian Sewell and Will Gompertz inside my head. It is deeply unsettling.
Ok, my intention was to do one of these a week, but just for today, and as it was Boo that asked…
Giraffes are really social beasts, They’d go to barbecues and feasts. They’d like to dance the night away, Attend an opera or play. And yet they never take the chance – You’ll never meet one at a dance – And if you want to know just why, The boys look stupid in a tie. (The girls, as well, don’t find it easy, Can’t find a skirt to reach their kneesy.)
Oh tell me lowly little flea* Why did you have to pick on me?
Long, long ago, when I was younger and much more nimble of mind, I had a party trick in which I asked people to give me an animal and I would immediately give them a short comic verse about said beast. (Doesn’t sound much, does it, but I could not sing, I could not juggle and the only thing I ever pulled out of a hat was my head.) During the course of this game, people would start to name ever more exotic animals in the hope of tripping me up, but as long as I knew what they were, that was actually ok. What would have defeated me was if they had all given me the same animal. (Try making up, for instance, ten different verses about a cat. I know T. S. Eliot did a book full, but he had ages and he wasn’t drunk at the time.) Anyway, I thought that I’d test myself: could I still do it? Well, in a word, no – everything takes a little longer these days – but I can still produce a little nonsense rhyme if you give me a couple of minutes. I like animals, so I thought I might give you a zoo on a ‘blank’ day for a little while – although like all things zoological, it will almost certainly evolve into something else along the way. I’m not sure how long it will maintain my interest. It might be a very small zoo, a zoo-ette perhaps, we’ll just have to see how it goes.
I won’t go for alphabetical order (although I am starting – below – with a double A), because I’m bound to think of something else after the letter has gone, so they will appear more or less as they occur to me. They will usually be very short, way below tea and biscuit length, so don’t expect a huge diversion. I have written about a dozen today, so we have a week or two in the bag, although I will, without doubt, have lost faith in many of them and hit ‘DELETE’ long before they get published. They are all strangely, childishly, innocent, but currently, I rather like them for that…
AARDVARK Aardvark have such funny noses, Look like hairy, wrinkled hoses. Why they have them, goodness knowses, They must need them, I supposes.
*Not strictly an animal, I know, nor strictly a verse. I feel that it is probably a stretch to even call it a couplet, but it makes me smile and, let’s face it, the zoo must be full of them. For years I have had this in my files, convinced that it was written by somebody else, but I have searched and searched, and it was not. It is a small thing, but all my own…
I wear contact lenses, largely due to the nature of my work. They are, at times, a total pain, but they do come along with a number of distinct advantages over glasses. They mean that I can hold my head up in society at large: when it rains, I can walk without staring down at my feet in order to keep the rain off my spectacle lenses. I can enter a building without steaming up. I can play sport; I can play with my grandkids without having to constantly reach for the superglue. When I emerge from the horror of the Public Swimming Baths changing rooms, I can see more than a Technicolor swirl of unidentified flesh and ill-advised costume. I do not need my family to come and find me and lead me, like some grotesque bespectacled walrus, towards the chlorine/urine cocktail of the pool. I even swim in my contacts. I know that I shouldn’t, but it does mean that I do not spend my whole time in the water apologising for swimming into people.
Lenses are not without drawbacks: especially after a long night, when I can’t get them in, or after a long day, when I can’t get them out, but the modern soft toric lenses do not come close to the tiny slivers of glass I used to insert into my eyes in days of yore. Each pair lasted a year, so losing one on the bus was a nightmare – but not as much as losing one in your own eye. The increasingly desperate attempts to locate, and subsequently extract, the errant lens often left one eye looking like, as my friend described it, a bulldog’s bollock (or bullock as my spellcheck is desperate to persuade me). From that I could only assume that he had some intimate knowledge of the aforementioned canine’s testes, and that they were, indeed, red, swollen and angry-looking. I never asked. Stray over your maximum twelve hours of wear in those miniscule head-lamps and you felt like someone had sandpapered your eyeball. Whatever vision remained was shrouded in the kind of fog that would have stopped the London buses.
I have spent my whole life battling with the right/left conundrum: never quite certain of which is which. Consequently, my morning contact lens routine can be a little fraught. For a start, my lenses may not be in the correct sides of the case from the evening before. If they are, they may not go into the correct eye in the morning. (One of the rare occasions where two wrongs really do make a right.) For thirty years or more I have tried to help myself by singing my own version of the bloody awful ‘(B)right eye(s)’every time I remove/insert what just might, possibly, be the right contact lens. It serves no-one – least of all Art Garfunkel – well.
These days, as my vision, like my common sense, fades into oblivion, I wear varifocal glasses when I do not have lenses in. These little miracles mean that I can see the world in general with a certain clarity whilst still being able to read books, signs and mobile phones, without having to have a second pair of specs suspended around my neck on a spangly little chain. The great skill being in locating the sweet spot on the lens that allows me to see in close enough detail to do things without rendering myself blind to the on-coming lorry.
The somewhat unique shape of my eyeballs, following a pre-full face helmet motorbike accident in my feckless youth, means that I cannot wear varifocal contact lenses – please don’t ask why, I don’t know – so I have, in one eye a lens that allows me to read and, in the other, a lens that allows me to see. My brain, apparently, sorts it all out. I don’t know how when it constantly loses track of the plot in Vera. Until the point of that particular teenage impact my vision was fine – although not good enough, you might quite fairly point out, to see the tree – and I found out that I would need to wear glasses after leaving hospital. I remember, so vividly, wearing them for the first time and realising that trees still had leaves, but being incredibly confused by the fact that they all appeared to be falling over. It would have been very useful if the tree I had hit on my bike had done so. I like to think that the slight asymmetry I now have makes my face more interesting, although, in honesty, I think that lop-sided is probably nearer the truth.
Possibly because of that, I have grown to like the look of my face better in lenses than in glasses which never quite seem to be on straight, but I’m guessing it’s only because I can’t see it as well. Although, rather like a woman with a bra, my lenses are the first thing I want to get out of when I get home in the evening. They become more uncomfortable as the day drags on; they seem to serve less purpose as soon as I get behind my own front door; it feels good to let my eyeballs resume their normal shape and to give them a little air at the end of the day.
Now, during the course of my daily toils I currently wear a mask all day and I spend that time with people who are also wearing masks, and more often than not, the eyes alone do not give me nearly enough information for the rest of me to have the faintest idea of who I am talking to*. My facial recognition is notoriously bad, but robbed of three-quarters of the relevant information, it just gives up and goes home and, in this respect, unusual spectacles are a godsend. The more Elton John, the better. (I’ll be honest here, E.J. wasn’t the first person that popped into my head, but I thought that there was a better chance of my international readers knowing who Elton was, rather than Timmy Mallett.) In these days of severely limited contact and muffled voices hidden away amongst lips and nostrils, these tiny plastic windows on the world are often all I have to go on when I try to identify a face that I vaguely recollect. If it is you, and if you decide by any chance that you too want to be able to see in the rain, I, for one, will no longer have any idea of who you are…
*…to whom I am talking. For Mr Wells-Cole, to prove that I did, indeed, learn something at school…
The first thing that crossed Dinah’s mind when she woke that morning was that the head on the pillow was almost certainly not her own. The second thing was that neither was the pillow – nor the bed come to that. The third thing, as she was counting, was that, wherever she was currently lying, she smelled like she had been there for a week.
‘Sorry about the T-shirt,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s all I could find.’
Dinah’s eyes snapped open and her brain recoiled from the light that flooded in. It actually banged a drum between her ears. Her mouth opened and closed, as if in speech, but as she could not even think what to say, she emitted no sound. She pulled the sheet up around herself, before venturing a little peek under the cover. Well, at least she was wearing something, even if it was clearly not her own. She peered down inside the neck. Oh God! She screwed her eyes tightly shut and breathed in as deeply as she dared in the circumstances.
‘You were a little… soiled,’ explained Shaw, and Dinah felt herself bridling at his obvious ability to read what was left of her mind. ‘You managed to get most of your clothes off yourself, in the end. The rest I left.’
Dinah shuffled down, uncomfortably in the bed, relieved to confirm that she was still wearing the rather dog-eared pants that she remembered deciding would suffice the day before. ‘Oh Lord,’ she groaned. I suppose you’re going to tell me that you’ve washed and dried all of my clothes, are you?’
Shaw was dumbstruck. ‘Me? Good god no. They’re in a bag outside. I think when you see them you will probably wish I had burned them. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Oh yes please,’ Dinah croaked in reply, realising for the first time that her throat was in drought.
‘Don’t suppose you’ve any idea where the kettle is?’
Dinah opened one eye, to try and limit the amount of light that assaulted her, and tried to take in the room. Slowly, feature by feature, she recognized it as the back room of the office she shared with Shaw. The bed, she realised, was what her mother used to call a put-you-up. ‘Do you always sleep in here?’ she asked.
‘Well, not always, said Shaw.
‘Only I’ve never seen a bed in here before.’
‘It folds up behind the curtain. I usually use the armchair.’ He indicated the sagging remains of a once-upon-a-time chair that appeared to be decaying in the corner of the room. As her eye became increasingly accustomed to the light, she could see that it was, itself, draped in a recently vacated blanket.
‘What on earth have you done to this T-shirt?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Shaw. ‘As I said, it was all I could find. I may have used it a time or two undercover. I had to get you… you know.’
‘What do you mean undercover?’
‘I may have slept in it… a time or two.’
‘Under a flyover, from the smell of it.’
‘It’s possible…’ he said.
She thought about this for a long time before asking the question she most needed answering. ‘What happened last night?’
‘Last night? Oh nothing…’ She gave him a hard stare. ‘I found you in the park,’ he said, trying to make it sound as routine as he could.
‘The park?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was I doing in the park? What were you doing in the park?’
‘I was looking for you, of course.’
‘But why?’
‘Well, I’m not entirely sure. It just seemed to be the right thing to do.’
Not for the first time, Dinah found herself staring open-mouthed at this man to whom fate had tethered her cart with a mixture of bemusement and amazement. Not for the first time did she feel that he could actually see inside her head: as if he was stirring up the contents like a Cup-a-Soup.
‘You seemed a little out of sorts,’ he said.
‘It was my birthday.’
‘You never said.’
‘I don’t celebrate it.’
Shaw raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘It was more in the way of a wake,’ Dinah responded. ‘In memory of so many wasted years.’
‘Who were you with?’
‘With?’
‘Ah,’ Shaw gave her a look that was intended to say Ok, the subject is closed. I won’t ask any more. Of course, if you choose to volunteer any more information… Dinah did not, but she was curious.
‘What, exactly, was I doing when you found me?’
‘Crying, mostly,’ he said. ‘Bit of shouting. You threw your shoes in the pond.’
‘I still don’t know why you were looking for me.’
‘Like I said, you seemed out of sorts.’
Dinah knew Shaw by now. She knew that questioning would take her nowhere. He liked to preserve the mystery: liked you to believe that there was more to him than there really was. The trouble being that there actually was. She tried to think what had brought her here, to this point in her life, but the effort was too great. ‘The kettle’s in the office,’ she said at last. ‘You’ll have to fill it in the toilet… Not from the toilet.’
Shaw smiled and left the room. Dinah suddenly felt alone and vulnerable. ‘Shaw!’ she shouted.
‘Still here,’ he soothed. Infuriating!
Dinah propped herself up a little on the pillow, a tiny doubt began to nag in her head. ‘Shaw!’ she yelled again.
‘Yes?’
‘Where’s my bra? Is it with my clothes?’
‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘But I think it is with your shoes.’ He came back into the room carrying a jam jar and a measuring jug filled with something that approximated tea. ‘I couldn’t find the mugs,’ he said.
Dinah took the jam jar gratefully. ‘Was I naked?’ she asked.
‘Not completely,’ he said. ‘Otherwise the police would have arrested you, I think.’
‘Oh Lord.’
‘Because it was only your top half, they let me bring you home.’
It was Dinah’s turn to raise an eyebrow.
‘I told them you have eczema…’
Dinah sipped the massively over-sweetened tea appreciatively. Here, hung-over, in a strange bed, drinking what amounted to brown sugar-syrup from a jam jar, in the company of – he would admit himself – a very strange man, Dinah suddenly realised that she felt safe – and stupid – but mostly safe.
‘I’ll go and get you some clothes,’ offered Shaw, uncertain of how, or from where.
‘No need,’ said Dinah. ‘Bottom drawer in the desk. I always keep a spare set, just in case.’
‘Of course you do,’ grinned Shaw. ‘I should have known…’
This segment of the story came about after a comment by Herb set me thinking. I wrote it immediately after publishing episode 5, but I wanted to leave a little gap before we went back to them. To give them some air. I’m pleased I did. I think this is probably my favourite segment to date.
Getting On 