I believe it was Professor Zazzo Thiim who first conceived of a branch of criticism which, in its entirety, was devoted to the criticism of criticism. For a while, only those in academic circles were aware of this new science, and the principals to which it could be attached. The theory of Reverse Criticism, it was hinted at the time, might be applied not only to literature and the arts, but also to other facets of human conscience and philosophic living. It was an interesting concept, and, more than a subtle joke, a hypothesis which demanded attention before, inevitably, it was superseded by the next fashion, the next phase. However, it seems only the one proponent has not completely abandoned the concept, and indeed, has made it the basis of his life work. And this man? None other than Professor Zazzo Thim himself.
I first became aware of his work when I met him at an art gallery. It was one of those evening exhibitions open only to members of the gallery, in which work by a substantial artist, working in water colours,based on the life cycle of the grizzly bear, was being displayed for the first time. I noticed the Professor, a tall, white-haired man with a long scarf, working his way around the room and peering at the notes being taken by various critics. Indeed, it seemed he was more interested in the notes than the actual work hung around us. At last I managed to make my introduction.
‘A civilisation’, said he, ‘Is defined through its art critics. Every facet of its aesthetic life is categorised, pondered, and probed by those who profess to know better, or at least, those who offer advice on the protocols and temperaments observed’
‘And?’ I asked.
‘The point is, most of them have appalling handwriting
I frowned, and started to walk away, but then the old man reached out and grabbed my arm.
‘Think of it!’, he said, excitedly. ‘There are but two layers – those who can, and those who criticise. Remember the old maxim – ‘those who can, do, those who can’t, teach?’
I nodded.
‘What if there was another level? A level of those who can but decide not to? A civilisation in which even criticism is criticised, can only be a better place’.
That night I went back to his office and he showed me some of his work. There were folders filled with script, reviews of art criticism, literary criticism. One critic was pointed out as having a more than average dependency on adverbs, another used too many paragraphs.
The most interesting review was that of a literary critic who, according to Thim’s report, had made the mistake of reading James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ while wearing a hat. ‘A trilby, perhaps’, Thiim had written. ‘Even a beret, but certainly not a bowler! How can one ever have confidence in, or an affinity with, the content of the book they are reading, with a bowler hat perched on the top of their head?
I soon became friends with the formidable Professor Thim and we would meet at least once a week so that I could read more of his Reverse Criticism. Yet towards the middle of this year there was something of a crisis, hinted at only in the fact that his secretary had phoned and warned me not to come for a couple of weeks. When one morning I finally insisted I arrive and carry on with my reading unhindered – using the flimsy excuse of a post-graduate thesis in the role of the critic – she told me that the Professor had been taken ill, and that the department could not be as accommodating as they had previously been.
I arrived in any case, as if everything were the same. His office seemed fairly normal, though there was no sign of the Professor. As was my practice, I sat myself at his desk and leafed through one of his collections, although I did note that the book itself had been rearranged and some of the pages taken out. Half an hour passed with no sign of the Professor, and I was in the middle of making some notes for myself when the door opened.
‘Ah’, said a rather pleasant, middle-aged man. I was led to believe that nobody would be here’.
I stood from the desk, feeling rather sheepish. ‘I rather bullied the secretary, I’m afraid’.
‘Yes’, said the man, leaning back and placing his hands in his pockets. ‘All very sad, isn’t it?’
I asked what he meant, and watched as his face folded first into shock, then a well-meaning affectation of acceptance. ‘Zazzo’, said he, ‘Is very ill’.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It all started a few weeks ago.’ The man sat down on the other side of Thim’s desk and lit his pipe, an object which seemed to juxtapose with his relative youth. ‘My dear colleague had just returned from a production of Romeo and Juliet, and he was anxious to catch the first of the play’s reviews, that he might begin to dissemble them as was usual for him. Indeed, he was particularly excited, having clearly seen one of the critics picking his nose during the balcony scene. How could a critic properly criticise one of the key scenes in such a state? Zazzo wanted to begin work immediately. Ah, the poor fool. How tenaciously he clung to that outdated philosophy, and look what harm it has done him’.
‘What?’ I asked, impatiently. ‘What happened?’
‘While waiting for the reviews he sat down right here and began leafing through that selfsame folder, the one in which he had kept all of his Reverse Criticisms since he had first conceived of it. And what do you think occurred? He began criticising his own criticisms, themselves criticisms of criticisms. And when he had finished that, he looked at what he had written and decided that these, too, needed criticising. But this did not satisfy him, so he criticised the criticisms of criticisms of criticisms of criticisms, until he was literally spinning in circles, frantic that the cycle of event and criticism would never be broken. You see, each new criticism was a separate event, a new work worthy of classification’. My new companion looked down at his lap. ‘The poor man. He hasn’t stopped since.
‘And where is he now?’ I asked
‘He has been confined to the medical centre. A nurse administers whatever help she can, but Thim will not rest until he thinks his job is complete. Yet it does not take a genius to work out that his work will never be finished. Oh, poor Zazzo. Poor Nurse! How she suffers, merely trying to do her job’.
‘Why?’ I asked
‘Because he keeps criticising her!’
For a while we both sat there and pondered the fate of our mutual friend. What a delirious, hateful circle he had invented.
When Zazzo Thiim was judged to have improved sufficiently to leave the medical centre, myself and a few of his colleagues decided to throw a party on his behalf. The middle-aged academic I had met in his room – Doctor Hubert Worthington – had by now become a close friend too, and we had spent the last couple of weeks planning how we would handle the Professor when he returned.
We had decided that there would be no criticism, not the slightest word for or against any aspect of our lives. Worthington suggested we shield Thiim from any work of art but, in an institution such as ours, this would almost certainly be impossible. The most important aspect of his return would be that there was no mention of the illness he had just suffered, or the reasons behind that illness. Apart from this, it was assumed that everything would go according to plan.
The party was held in the main canteen of the building, and it was dutifully and respectfully attended by colleagues and students alike. The illness that had befallen Thiim had been worrying for us all, for he, despite his eccentricities, had always been respected and well-liked.
The tables were spread with a buffet lunch and there were several bottles of white wine on a side-table. The chatter in the room was low-level and jovial, as if everyone was conscious that they were in the presence of a sensitive man. Thiim himself was happy, oblivious to the concern of his contemporaries, and he held court at the buffet table, explaining in great detail the hidden significance of works as diverse as Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, Michelangelo’s ‘David’ and the Postman Pat books.
Of course, I was especially anxious about meeting the Professor again, for our association had been built around the concept of Reverse Criticism, the very theory which had resulted in his illness. Yet the moment Thim saw me he opened his arms wide and greeted me with such friendliness that it was obvious he didn’t blame me at all.
‘My friend’, he said. ‘How are you?’
Choosing my words carefully, so as not to hint at any criticism, I said: ‘How well aren’t I?
‘My word’, he said, throwing the end of his scarf over his shoulder. ‘The weather’s taken a turn for the worse, hasn’t it?’
‘It’s colder than it was yesterday’, I agreed, without the slightest criticism.
‘I must say, I do like your jumper’, he said, bending over and peering at the stitching.
‘Good’, I said.
We stared at each other for a moment.
‘Well’, he said. He looked at his watch. ‘I suppose I’d better mingle. After all, isn’t that what this party’s for?’
‘Yes’, I agreed.
I didn’t see much of the Professor after this, although I could tell from the various conversations he was having with his colleagues that they, too, were as cagey as I had been in their replies to his questions. For some reason, I gravitated towards Doctor Hubert and the Nurse, who were sipping white wine in the corner of the canteen.
‘How does he seem?’ I asked.
The Nurse frowned. ‘It’s hard to say. Some people can be remarkably resilient after a period such as his. I would say, just by looking at him, that he has recovered most of his faculties. However, we must still be careful
‘You mean’, said Hubert, ‘That something could set it off again?’
‘Absolutely. And he could suffer as a result. His illness – I am sorry to say – would be much worse than it was before’.
This was not good news, and I was dispatched round the room to warn the other guests that Thiim could suffer a relapse at the slightest mention of any criticism. However, the mood of the party did not suffer as a result, and Thiim remained oblivious to our sensitivities.
I worked my way around the room and spoke with a good many people about a wide number of subjects. It seemed everyone had an opinion about the world, or about literature and art, and I got into a few heated debates about one aspect or another concerning these. Yet whenever we saw Thiim approach, we would change the subject and begin discussing, in earnest tones, what we could see through the window.
‘A bird!”
‘A tree!’
‘A house!’
‘A lawn-mower!’
It was a tiring event and I wanted, desperately, to go home, to think about something else.
The more I thought about it, the more I wanted no more to see Professor Zazzo Thiim, for I, more than any of his contemporaries, had been closer to the philosophy behind Reverse Criticism. To continue with my studies now, after everything that had happened to the main proponent of that philosophy, would not only be dangerous for Thim’s health, but also my own.
What, I began to wonder, if the same thing happened to me? Would I be as lucky as Thiim?
Would I make such a full recovery? Or would I spin out of control, into a vortex of eternal criticism, unable, ever, to find my way out?
At last it came time to give a couple of speeches and applaud the return of Professor Zazzo Thim. Hubert Worthington took to the stage at the end of the hall and gave a moving – though empty – appraisal of Thiim’s work and career.
‘He became a Professor. He worked hard. He sat at a desk. He marked papers. He delivered lectures. He read books. He went for long walks in the orchard…
And then, suddenly realising that this could, conceivably, be regarded as criticism, he amended his words.
‘A-hem. Sorry. He went for walks in the orchard’.
When Hubert had finished his speech, there was a polite, muted applause, for anything more thunderous or spontaneous might probably have indicated some form of opinion.
It was then the Nurse’s turn to make a speech.
‘Professor Zazzo Thiim is a man. He is a Professor. His name is Zazzo Thiim. I am a Nurse. He was my patient. We both work here’.
Another muted round of applause followed, and the Professor himself stood on the stage.
He thanked everyone for coming, and said how nice it all was, that the food had been good, that he particularly admired the brushwork on the painting over his left shoulder, though not the frame it had been placed in, and that he was looking forward to coming back to work, although his office needed a coat of paint and the radiator smelled. At the end of his speech there was a tentative, subdued clapping, and a buzz fell on the room as various guests began to file towards the door.
Alas, Hubert chose this moment to pick up the wrong cup of tea. ‘Oh god’, he said. ‘That’s disgusting!’
A silence fell on the room and everyone looked at him.
‘No it isn’t’, someone yelled
‘I mean. the purpose of my saying that it was disgusting was
‘Handled with great sensitivity’, someone said, finishing his sentence for him.
‘No it wasn’t’, said the Nurse.
‘Not that it’s important, someone else said.
I could see that the downward spiral had begun. ‘Of course it was important!’ I said.
‘Yes’, someone agreed. ‘Important, but not relevant.
‘The question is not the quality of the tea’, Hubert said, ‘But the fact it had sugar in it, which is, I think you’ll agree, only a product of my own prejudices regarding hot drinks’.
‘No’, a student yelled. ‘The whole criticism itself was not important’.
‘It wasn’t even a criticism’.
‘Yes it was’.
‘He smokes a pipe’, someone shouted. ‘How can someone who smokes a pipe make a valid judgement on taste?’
By now, everyone in the room was shouting and screaming, adding their opinions and criticisms on the original criticism, which had been that Hubert had felt the cup of tea he had inadvertently supped to be disgusting. And while this was happening, Professor Zazzo Thim stood on the stage next to the microphone, regarding us all with a quizzical eye, puzzled, and yet strangely entertained. Indeed, the whole performance was only ended when the Nurse managed to round us all up and transfer us at once to the Medical Centre.
Which is where we remain today, unable to finish our eternal criticism of the main point, the beginning factor, that of the cup of tea drank by Hubert being disgusting. We shout, we scream, we pound on the tables, unable to let go, unable to accept that the problem will never be solved, that the criticism will be infinite.
Professor Zazzo Thim, meanwhile, has returned to work. He visits us every now and then. He always chooses his words carefully.
I believe it was Professor Zazzo Thim who first alerted me to a possible ‘bad quarto’ version of the Shakespeare play, ‘Memflak and Troglium’. It was a cold winter’s night and we had met late in the bar of a theatre where an amateur production of the said play had just come to an conclusion. Professor Thim was clearly the worse for drink, but he was insistent that a bad quarto existed, more insistent still that the production we had just been watching was based on a more sanitised version which came to prominence in the years following Shakespeare’s death, when certain religious leaders omitted various scenes involving a nun and a dolphin. To my surprise the Professor then slumped his head on his chest and began to snore rather loudly. We were asked to leave moments later.
The next morning I received a phone call from the professor. He denied all knowledge about his condition the night before, but was still enthusiastic about the ‘bad quarto’, and he told me that he would like to put on a production of this version, which, written by himself, might possibly speculate as to what the bad quarto might contain. In a rash moment of enthusiasm I agreed to help with this undertaking, although I have never had any training in the theatre, nor have I ever been the sort to embrace exuberance. We met later that afternoon back at the theatre, a gothic building at the top end of a square in the middle of the town, and he told me how much he was looking forward to the project.
“A play much forgotten now”, said he, “Particularly among scholars”.
“It is the subject matter”, I told him. “People don’t much care for the views Shakespeare was seen to be expressing in that work”.
“Ah, yes” , said the Professor, thrusting his hands deep in his pockets and looking up at the lighting. “It has always been one of the ‘problem’ plays, along with Taming of the Shrew and the Merchant of Venice. To say that Memflak and Troglium …”.
“Hush!”, I implored. “Do you not recall the tradition? When in a theatre it is always safer to refer to it as the ‘Latvian’ play”.
The Professor cleared his throat, as if he were unsure of such superstitions. “The ‘Latvian’ play”, , he said, “Has always touched a nerve. That a love between a man and an elephant should not be portrayed in these modern times is just preposterous”.
He then sat on the edge of the stage and gazed out across the auditorium. “Indeed”, he said, in a wistful voice, “Sometimes I think the play has been forgotten entirely”.
He patted the stage next to him and I sat down.
“I remember”, he said, “Years ago, decades ago… We were serving in India, at the end of the second world war. We were protecting the tea plantations… Churchill quite rightly deduced that a nation deprived of its cuppa would crumble all too willingly, so our stationing was of utmost importance… But we were young lads, and very bored. What else could we do? The Darjeeling region saw hardly any fighting at all the time I was there, and we would wake each morning just to look out across the plantations, the heat rising on an airborne humidity which seemed to seep the sweat right out of us … How bored we all got, how unutterably bored.
“What luck that one of my closest companions was Sergeant Oliver Wahay. A temperamental Welshman, he had a love of Shakespeare and was said to be a scholar of his earlier plays. He suggested we put on a production of Mem. of the Latvian’ play to pass the time, and we would even create some goodwill among the local population by inviting our hosts. Poor old Oliver! Ever excited, he suggested we perform the so-called ‘bad quarto’, and then proceeded to pull out an exercise book filled with his very own version of it! We began rehearsals that very night.
“How enthusiastically we toiled, and contorted out tongues around those iambic pentameters. I played Chief Panda, of course, and it was my duty, in the third scene, to arrest Memflak after his first indiscretion with the elephant. When we could find no woman to play the part of Troglium, Oliver Wahay himself, reminding us that Shakespeare would always have used men dressed up as women, volunteered for the role. You see, Troglium is the most complex of Shakespeare’s female characters, for not only does she begin the play betrothed to a dolphin named Frederick, she then lures Memflak from his shenanigans with the elephant by using such powerful, colourful language, and rhetorical devices, that Memflak has no alternative but to fall under her spell. And the action, of course, finds its way her own bed where – and I am sure you are familiar with the play – they rest in each other’s arms in the moving final scene before being trampled to death by a herd of irate elephants. Such poetry, such masterful language, although. although I have never quite understood why Shakespeare should have populated Latvia with so many elephants.
“Nonetheless, the part of Memflak was played by a handsome young man called Shane, who had joined the army on leaving a well-known theatre company. How overjoyed he was at receiving the part of Memflak! How avidly he practised his soliloquy – ‘Oh that my heart shall race on a flash of grey crinkle-skin, those tusks which should bore me through a chest swell’d’ – while he stood in the tea plantations by the light of the moon… A shy lad, he fell into character by practising his Shakespearean dialect at all hours, which went down a hoot in the mess hall. ‘Thou hast the charms of a warthog’, he once told our commanding officer. We all fell about laughing. I think he got solitary confinement …
‘We practised our lines all summer. Even now, the mention of the words ‘Mem.: -! mean – ‘the Latvian play’, take me back. I hear the insects in the jungle, the foreign accents, the road of the mighty tiger, the fat rain drops falling on fleshy leaves.. Oliver and Shane would shoot their lines at each other while keeping watch: Though hast the manners of a pachyderm. Yet thy skin is soft like that of a dolphin.. Before long it became obvious that something more was passing between them than the usual ten syllables, and they began to be less and less obedient in the company, less vigilant in their duties.
“On the last day of our rehearsal I came down with Grey-Green fever and I was confined to my cabin for twenty-four hours. How sadly I sat next to the window, covered in a mosquito net, listening to the Shakespearean lines being let loose above the jungle. The fever subsided by early afternoon but I was still contagious, frantic with worry and frustrated at being kept inside. I decided to go for a walk in the jungle, where no-one might ever see me.
“I hadn’t gone far when I heard a noise. Through the trees I saw a figure, obviously unaware that I was there. He held a photograph in his hand, and he kept glancing on it admiringly, sighing deeply and running a hand over his eyes as if he could bare something no longer. I managed to get closer, close enough to see that the photograph was of Shane, his colleague, and obviously the object of his affections. At that moment I realised why the play had been chosen, and how much it meant for Oliver that everything went according to plan.
“That next day I was fully cured and we assembled in the middle of the town for the staging of our play. Shane and Oliver were resplendent in their costumes, and they made the villagers laugh and cry in equal measure. I delivered my lines with a workmanlike flair, and I heard a feint ripple of applause when I left the stage. At last we came to the moving final scene and, with the elephant on stand-by, Memflak and Troglium began their avid wooing, oblivious that these would be their last moments alive.
‘And then all hell broke loose… The elephant reared, knocked over the tent support, and set off on a rampage through the tea plantations. The villagers, fearing that their livelihoods would be ruined, set off after it with guns blazing, backed up by our army colleagues who, in any case, were bored of all this Shakespearean rubbish. And where did this leave Oliver and Shane? Suddenly superfluous, they clambered down from the stage, and Shane made his way back to the camp, whistling as if he had done his job well and no more was expected of him.
‘But Oliver was aghast, he beat the ground, swung light fittings around his head, and cried, shouted obscenities into the night.
“What more can I say? Oliver was never the same again. He wore a dolphin costume while guarding the tea plantations, and would spend nights sobbing in his tent, while Shane, eagerly transferred to the coffee groves of South America, was never seen again.
“So you see”, the Professor concluded, “Why this play has always meant so much to me. So many memories, so many deep, deep memories”.
That night I made a few telephone calls and arranged to meet Zazzo Thim at the theatre the next morning. He entered the auditorium, whistling, the jaunty scarf, as ever, wrapped around his neck. He handed me the latest version of the ‘bad quarto’ and I went through his revisions, and marvelled at the extra finesse he had added to the elephant trampling scene. “And now”, I added, “I have something for you”.
At that moment the door opened and two old men walked in, and, with the aid of sticks, proceeded to shuffle down the aisle towards the stage. Zazzo Thim could hardly believe his eyes. “Oliver!”, he said. “Shane! How the devil are you?” An emotional reunion followed, and they spent some minutes in getting to know each other again.
They had met a few times after the war, but had resumed relationships with other people.
Over the years they had kept in touch and had written plays, and sent each other suggestions for their respective acting careers, though this was the first time for over sixty years that they had met in person.
“We have come to tell you not to perform the Latvian play”, Oliver said, “Or at least, not the ‘bad quarto version”.
“I cannot agree”, Thim replied. “The modern generation needs to hear such words. Remember the fun we had in the jungle? Why not recreate that atmosphere here”.
“It should not be done”, Shane agreed.
“But the language! The storyline! The characterisations! This was a monumental work!” Thim said.
“There is no such play”, Oliver announced. Thiim stared at him for a few moments.
“I wrote it myself, or at least, the so-called ‘bad quarto’. And I only wrote it for the one reason”. At this, Oliver looked at Shane, who smiled back.
“Ah”, Thim whispered. “Young love ?”
“No!”, Oliver wailed. “I was a spy, working for the Japanese. At the moment the play was being held, an entire army was waiting to rip the fields of tea to shreds. It was to be one of the biggest operations of the entire war! And I was in the pay of the enemy! How avidly I wrote that accursed play, how diligently I learned the lines! “
“But I saw you, in the jungle”.
“Yes, and I saw you! I was passing secret messages to the enemy, yet the moment I heard you stumble through the undergrowth, no doubt insensitive of your clumsiness on account of your fever, I hastily took the photograph I had been showing them and …well, pretended that I was deeply in love with him”.
“And the raid on the tea plantation?”
“It never occurred. The rampaging elephant put paid to it. The whole evening was a complete fiasco!”
“But.. But…”, Thim stuttered. “The play … Memflak and Trog… The Latvian Play!”
“For goodness sake, man!”, Shane laughed, “She has rumpy-pumpy with a dolphin! Didn’t you think that was at least a bit…..odd?”
“I just thought it was Shakespeare”, Thim said, “Up to his usual tricks again”.
I left the three old men alone so that they could catch up on their lives. I left the theatre and walked out into the mid-morning sun. At that moment a large lorry pulled up from the zoo, its heavy load making the whole vehicle lean dangerously to one side.
“You won’t be needing that”, I told the driver, and I continued walking back to my lodgings.
Professor Zazzo Thim’s experimentations with surrealism have been well-documented, though there are still one or two questions which have remained outstanding from this most provocative and exciting time of his life. Indeed, many historians have assessed the time to be one of great bonhomie among the surrealists, with Thim himself occupying the role of grand master. Yet my investigations have uncovered the truth, and it appears that the determination and the willingness to subvert which we now associate with the surrealist fad was, if anything, subdued.
Jacques Collard was one of the surrealists. An old man now, he remembers the time fondly, though his brow creases into an ugly frown the moment I remind him of Zazzo Thim.
“No, no, no!”, , he says. “The view we have no of Thim’s part in this is all wrong! It is based on Thim’s own testimony! We hardly ever saw him as one of us! If anything, we saw him as an annoyance …”.
Collard paints a picture of the cafe culture prevalent at the time, of the surrealists, united by their subversive acts, holding court at one of the many Parisian bars associated with deep thought, philosophical ideals and literary merit. “We would make such grand pronouncements” Collard says, “Such as proclaiming the death of language, or at least, the terminal illness of the full stop. None of us had a clue what it meant, it just felt good to say it. Bilo was the master at the time – an artist, he had embraced surrealism for all its worth and he created bizarre works which he exhibited here and there throughout the city. We became known for our fine talk, our love of food, and our rebellious spirit. There were always disciples, or tourists eager to catch our glimpse. To start with we thought Zazzo Thiim was one of these”.
Collard leans back and presses his palms together as if in prayer. His apartment looks out over a flower market, a merry-go-round, and the white wedding cake of Sacre Coeur towering above. His voice deepens as he remembers his subject.
“We knew very early on”, he whispers, “That Zazzo Thim was an idiot”.
“Go on”.
“The first thing he said was, I want to be like you. I want to be with you. I want to be a surrealist”. We asked him if he was a surrealist at heart, and if he ever dreamt of lobsters, or bearded nuns. No, he replies, but he did once spend a night in Basingstoke. At this we turned to each other, as if confirming our suspicions. ‘What form of surrealism are you developing at the moment?’, Bilo asked. ‘Literature’, Thim replies, without hesitation. I remember the groan which passed around the cafe terrace. ‘In a medium such as ours, the fullest impact is gained through visual means’, Bilo told the hapless youth. ‘Surrealism is about the ephemeral, the short-lived, the dream-like, the throw-away. You would have to prove to us your devotion to the cause before we even considered you as an equal’.
“I can do it”, Thim said, filled with an unusual confidence.
“Then you have one week.”
“We all waited for Thiim to leave before we fell about, laughing. Oh, how I remember that week! A cold spell had fallen upon the city and we were frozen to the bone. The cafe terrace was warmed by a gas heater, yet the chill and the drizzle still fell from an overcast grey sky. We talked about many things, the surrealists and I. We talked of our art, and the methods we would employ, as we put it, to go beyond surrealism, to the next phase, whatever that might be. We would talk for hours of this exciting time, and speculate as to what the world might look like if surrealism was developed further.
“Thim came back the next night. He always wore along scarf, the ends of which would trail along the cobblestones. ‘See here!’, he said, coming over to our table and standing in our midst. ‘For I have created a surrealistic masterpiece!’
Ms. Muller-Reed, an art critic of note, took a drag on her cigarette and motioned that he enlighten us further.
‘A poem’, Thim said. ‘Called, ‘Ode to a Washer-woman’.
Thim straightened, pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, and began to read. ‘Hippo hippo hippo! Yawn, oh hippo, oh yawn! And then we both swat at a swarm of bees..”
We looked at him for a while, and it was Bilo who spoke first. ‘Merely a pastiche”, he said
“We all laughed. Oh, how cruelly we laughed. Ms. Muller-Reed especially could find no sense in a poem about a hippo and a swarm of bees and she was most vociferous in her condemnation.
“What do you take us for!”, she hooted, slamming her palm down on the table surface. “I’ve never heard such rot!”
“Dejected, the hapless youth slouched off, and we continued our speculations as to the advancement of our cause.
“The next night he came back again. By now it was very cold and there was a light snow falling from the sky. We wore gloves and sat around the heater, shivering, though unwilling to venture inside. ‘A-ha!’, said Bilo, on seeing young Zazzo. ‘Here he comes again with another poem for us!’
‘More than a poem’, Thim replied, ‘But a surrealistic masterpiece!’
Knowingly, Ms. Muller-Reed winked, and we sat back in glorious expectation.
“The Cinema’, Thim said. He cleared his throat and began to recite: In the cinema I cook asparagus. The marching band sneeze in unison. A-tisshoo! A-tisshoo! Here comes my aunt with the Christmas tree.
‘Stop!, Bilo said. ‘Please, stop!’ Dramatically, he placed his hands over his ears. But it was too late, for Ms. Muller-Reed was already roaring with laughter.
‘Oh dear, oh dear! What a marvellous send-up! Never have I heard such a fateful attempt at surrealism! Go, go this instant! Oh dear, I think I shall be quite senseless if this were to continue any longer..!
“The next night he came again, more determined than ever, and he grandly announced that he had a poem which would re-write the rules, and leave them gasping at his abilities. He then proceeded to show them a blank piece of paper. “Here it is’, he said, ‘My poem. At the bottom of the page was the smallest full-stop.
‘Now you’re just being silly’, Bilo said. And they all roared with laughter once again.
“I must admit, I began to feel sorry for Zazzo Thim. A pattern emerged – he would come every night with his latest attempt at surrealism, and we would laugh, and then he would go home, dejected, crestfallen. It became our tradition, and we would speculate freely on what delights he would have for us. It was as if he was trying a little too hard, you know what I mean? Anyway, about a week afterwards I decided I would find where he lived and offer him some friendly advice.
“He was staying in a decrepit hotel in the Quatier Latin. The concierge allowed me in and I took a winding, rickerty staircase up to his room. The walls were damp and the landing was ill-lit, I almost fell to my death when one of the steps gave way underneath my shoe. I knocked on his door and he let me in, surprised to see one of his beloved surrealists come to visit him. I remember the smell of his room even now, a mixture of dust and over-worked electrics, the dampness of his bed-clothes, the mould growing on the window-sill. He motioned that I sit in the one armchair, then asked why I had graced him with my presence.
‘I am concerned’, I told him, ‘That your work may be in vain’.
He sat on the edge of the bed in front of me. That fact that you do not find my work notable in any way’, he said, ‘Does not detract from the fact that it is just as worthy, if not, worthier than you realise.’
‘An artist is always protective of his output’, I told him. He looked up at me, his forehead wrinkled, the scarf still wrapped around his neck. ‘Maybe you should write how you feel, rather than how you want to be perceived’.
‘In this modern world’, said he, ‘Are we not now defined by how we are perceived?”
‘ Exactly’, I told him. ‘And I see in you a serious man, a man of strong, sensible conviction, a man so far removed from the basics of surrealism as to irrefutable sober.”
“At this, Zazzo looked down at the floor and let out big sigh.
‘Don’t you see?’, he whispered. I don’t care about surrealism. I don’t care about the basics of the movement, nor do I care about visual or literary representations. I just want to belong to a group, I want to be surrounded by friends’.
“I got up from my seat. ‘Noble words, indeed’, I whispered. ‘But surrealism is more than just a social club. It is a way of living. And you, my dear friend, are in complete opposition to its aims and philosophies. I must leave you now, for the world here – if you don’t mind me saying – stifles me with its boredom’.
At that moment the door opened and a llama came in. ‘Oh, for goodness sake’, Zazzo said. He ushered it back out into the hall again, and fought briefly, ducking to avoid a globule of spit from the irate beast. He was just about to close the door when a circus clown appeared on the landing from the floor above, inquiring as to the whereabouts of his monkey. I told you before’, Thim said, ‘The last place I saw him was in Papua New Guinea. “But I need it’, the clown whined, ‘Because we are meant to be trampolining for the Duke of Norfolk this afternoon!’ Thim turned to come back into the room when there came the sound of scampering from the stairs and a herd of badgers swamped the landing, jumping over the furniture, flowing en masse as if directed by some primal determination. At last he managed to push the door to, before turning to me again. ‘Sorry about that’, he said. ‘You know, sometimes this place can really get on your nerves’
“The next night he was back at the cafe terrace with another one of his poems. It was about a nun, I remember that. And the nun was having trouble blowing up a balloon, it wasn’t very good. Ms. Muller-Reed made some biting comment about the translation of sense into the senseless, and Bilo snorted back his derision before waving Thim away with a flick of his hand, like a king, dismissing his servant.
‘The trouble with that lad is’, Bilo said, as we watched Thiim walk off to the end of the street, ‘He is far too serious’.
I thanked Collard for his observations, and I went for a walk around the local area. The streets were crowded with tourists, and commercial artists who, running up to me, asked that they paint my portrait for money. I wondered how Thim had acquired this reputation as a surrealist even though he was shunned by the surrealistic establishment, but then I recalled Thiim’s own account of this period, and the opening paragraph of his own autobiography, which begins with the words:
Every day it seemed that strangeness was attracted to me. I became immune to the normal pleasures of living. I would open my brain, and things would be poured in. I didn’t really know what was happening.
I realised that Thim himself had never proclaimed himself to be a master of surrealism, nor had he ever been noted for his surrealistic style, yet the image which has been brought to our consciousness now is of a man so steeped in strangeness as to be wholly consumed by it. And perhaps this was the very form that the cafe patrons were searching for, this one level beyond surrealism, unknowing, unbidden and unconscious. I sat for a while in the park on the steps of Sacre Coeur, and closed my eyes in the afternoon sun. I wondered if it were possible that strangeness can stick to people, that unusual events gravitated only to a certain type of person. How glad I was to be a sober, investigative fellow, inquiring, yet safe from the whims and unconventions of a truly strange world. How satisfying this last thought: that Zazzo Thim was so surrealistic, that the surrealists didn’t even know it. How I revelled in my ordinaryness!
Great excitement greeted the first publication of the volume which, under the direction of that esteemed professor of literary extremism, Zazzo Thim, has uncovered more than the wild-eyed fanatic in all of us. I believe it is time we all express this instant our eternal gratitude towards this most learned individual and the service he has done mankind, in his uncovering of this volume, The Rubaiyat of Viktor Khayyam.
On a wet winter morning I travelled to the distant city of education where I was due to meet him. The moment I got off the train I could feel the cold wind, which seemed to whip around the old, classical architecture and across the wide squares. I made my way down the main thoroughfare to a discreet cafe where we had arranged to meet.
A couple of students watched me enter. I ordered a hot chocolate at the bar and sat down at a table in the corner where the Professor might easily see me. One of the students came over and asked who it was I would be meeting.
“Professor Zazzo Thim”, I replied, with a hint of pride.
“Oh, him”, , they replied, and they slouched off through the door into the rain.
I watched them leave. They walked past the plate glass window and they were both smiling, laughing. How terrible, I thought, that such an intelligent man should not command the respect of his inferiors.
After a while the Professor himself entered the room. I recognised him immediately from the promotional material which went with the book. The long scarf, the heavy coat, the pained expression on his face, the cane which he leant on as if it were the only thing in his life which made any sense. He saw me in the corner and waved, jovially, then ordered himself a cup of coffee at the bar. He then attempted to navigate the room with the cane in one hand and the cup of coffee in the other, a feat which resulted in most of the drink being spilled on the bare wooden floorboards. The bar staff, I noticed, nudged each other in the ribs and pointed to the elderly gentleman, before suppressing giggled comments. How rude, I thought to myself, how unaccountably rude.
I introduced myself and pulled out a chair for the Professor to sit. He lowered himself down as if into a hot bath, then sighed. “Well well well, my dear child”, he said. He took off his wet cap, unwound his long scarf, then placed his palms flat on the table surface. “No doubt”, he said, “You have requested this meeting to add to the ill-feeling, the derision and the scandal. In that case, let the butchery commence
I shrugged, then took out a notebook. I told him how much I had enjoyed the poems, and that their discovery was nothing short of a godsend in this modern age, where word and the power of language have so recently lost all of their power to enchant. The old man leaned back in his chair and made a pyramid out of his fingers, though his face creased into a frown as if he were unsure of my true sentiments. When I told him that he had done the whole world a favour, that he was an explorer akin to those ancient adventurers who had discovered the new continents, strange tribes, buried treasure and the geographical features which now make up our general knowledge of the planet, he let out a big, long sigh and said: “Go on – what’s the punch line?”
“There is no punch line”, I replied, “My sentiments are sincere”.
He hummed, doubtfully.
“How strange”, he said.
He leaned forward and, quite sadly, looked down at his hands. “There has been”, he said, “Some controversy over the last few weeks”
I asked that he explain, and for the first time he looked up at me, looked me straight in the eyes. He told me that he had always assumed there to be a set of poems to be discovered in the ancient city of Tangiers, that the merchants and the council of that distant town had been hiding from the modern world a work of such literary merit as would change the world forever.
“Such beauty was hinted at” Zazzo said, “Such magnificent constructions, I just had to investigate. You see, it all dates back to a Victorian guide book I had come across in an antique shop, some thirty years ago. In detailing the attributes of Tangiers, it mentioned – and I quote – ‘ a wondrous system of oudagogoo veritably produced by his eminence Viktor Bayyam and now kept for the benefit of his excellency the sultan’. How enraptured I was by these words, for l knew that to find an oudagogoo – (the western Berber-derived word for a four-line verse set into a unified system) – would be the defining achievement of my career”.
N. “I left earlier this year for Tangiers. I sailed from Southampton on a steamer filled with chickens and llamas, for the desert tribes have been encouraged to experiment with different kinds of meat. The seas were unforgiving and I spent most of the time confined to my cabin, vomiting profusely and calming my volatile stomach with the image of these verses, these celebrated, yet secretive oudagogoo”
“When I finally arrived at the city I became inextricably lost in the labyrinth of back streets. Strange people crowded me in on all sides and I was hustled in the markets, shouted at, sneered at by unforgiving locals. At once I began to realise that they had already guessed the purpose of my visit, that I had come to steal their precious oudagogoo, that their secret would soon be in the domain of the world at large. The heat was oppressive, and as the sun went down I found lodgings for the night in a small hotel set around an inner courtyard with mosaic tile walls. The hotelier, a genial man who, despite the barrier of language, attested to my every need, allowed me to sleep in the open, under the stars where at night I would gaze up at the constellations, cursing my ill luck to be so near and yet so far.
“The morning brought fresh sunshine and a renewed determination on my part to make this momentous discovery. My host showed me to the library in the middle of the town, where, among Arabic tracts and volumes of luxurious splendour, I found no mention of the oudagogoo. I realised quite soon that the verses, being so timeless and secretive, would never be mentioned so openly in any of these books, so l asked if there were any secret libraries or private collections where information might be gathered. When he took me to the local taxidermist and presented me with the head of a camel, I knew there had been a mis-translation.
“By the end of my third day I realised that I would not find these mythic verses. The heat was getting to me and I longed for the cold winds, the fogs of my homeland. In desperation I kept notebooks and filled them with what I hoped to find in the poems, though the images I created were obscured by the drops of sweat which fell down the side of my head on to the page. I constructed poems about the desert, about the beauty of camels, dromedaries, about the dreams and mystic visions of a traveller who longed only to see the fabled city of Basing Stoke, though at the end of each day I would screw up these vile sheets and throw them in the waster paper basket.
“And then came the twentieth day of my expedition. A knock at the gate of my lodgings, and a mysterious fellow entered, his hair wrapped in a thick turban despite the heat, his body covered by white robes which fell down to his sandalled feet. “I hear”, he said, “That you are looking for the oudagogoo”.
“My heart jumped, yet I dare not demonstrate an over-eagerness.
“And what of it?”, I asked.
“I can take you to them”.
“My word! I could barely speak with the excitement within me. Feigning indifference, I looked at my watch. “I can spare about half an hour”, I said
“Half an hour”, he said, “But a whole lifetime of wonder”.
“He led me through the streets, past markets and decrepit quarters where small children ran barefoot and old men smoked in the doorways of bars. We seemed to walk forever, but at last we came to a nondescript house and a large wooden door, which he opened with a key hung round his neck. When we entered I could smell the dust and the sand, a burning smell as if the centuries were falling away, crumbling before me. At last, rather grandly, he said: “Behold! The most beauteous, divine oudagogoo”
“He turned on a row of lights to reveal a row of laundry baskets.
“Is that it?” I asked
“He frowned and looked at me. “What were you expecting? When word reached us that an Englishman was looking for the oudagogoo, we decided we would not help you in the slightest.
“We have cherished these four baskets for years and have built up a system of mystic belief in their divine protection. But when you went to the local library and kept asking people for poetry, we thought, ‘Well, this isn’t any fun, let’s just show them to him’. So here we are – the oudagogoo of Tangiers”
“‘Oudagogoo?” I asked
“Yes. Laundry baskets. The most splendid laundry baskets for many years. My grandfather quaked in their presence, such was their beauty and power. It is said that an artist, deeply in love with a simple washer-woman, but kept from the woman he loved by his allergies to detergents, could only proclaim his love to her by these splendid laundry baskets, which she would see every day, a new oudagogoo every time she washed the clothes”.
“But there are only four of them”.
“They split after a week. Love can be so fickle. But the story is still, I think you would agree, deeply touching”
“But I thought oudagogoo were … •
“Poetry?” he asked.’
“If this were a western-influenced Berber word, it would indeed mean
‘four line verse’. But ‘oudagogoo’ in eastern Berber means laundry basket’. And you know, we Tangiers folk have a wicked sense of humour. We called these baskets ‘The Rubaiyat of Viktor Khayyam ”
He then commenced a deep bellied laugh which caused him to rock back and forth on his feet.
What could I do? I thanked my host, and returned back to the guest house. But now I was faced with a conundrum. I couldn’t go back to the university empty-handed having promised them such magnificent poems. Tired, I thanked my host and left that very afternoon, taking with me a wicker basket I could show my colleagues in demonstration of my folly.
When I arrived home, seasick and delirious with the llama and chickens the Moroccans had sent back in disgust, I was confined to my bed, though the wicker basket was an object of fascination among my colleagues. Imagine my surprise, when I emerged from my delirium, to find that a whole series of poems had been published, resultant from my travels, The Rubaiyat of Viktor Khayyam. I was intrigued, and tentatively, opened a copy to see that my name was mentioned as translator. Yet the poems were oddly familiar, and dealt with many subjects, including camels, the beauty of sand dunes shifting in the evening wind, and the bountiful, mythical city of Basing Stoke.
“We found them”, an assistant told me, “In the luggage you brought back. How feverishly you must have translated them to have left such stains of sweat on each page! And your madness, evident in the way you screwed them up, and hid them at the bottom of the basket in which you stored your linen, as if you never wanted to see them again”.
I looked at the aged Professor.
“They found out, didn’t they?” I asked.
He nodded, sadly.
“I have disgraced the university and made it a complete laughing stock”.
Gently, he wiped a tear from his eye. “On the plus side, my designs for laundry baskets have been taken up by a well-known DIY company”.
I left him short afterwards and walked back out into the windy, rainy streets. Students passed me on bicycles, others walked past with heavy volumes tucked under their arms. The whole world seemed darker, colder.
With a sonnet so perplexing as this, there only seemed the one course of action: to call in the literary investigator, Professor Zazzo Thim.
He asked for accommodation on the second floor, where he might afford a view of the lawns and the sculptured hedgerows. He said he wanted to see a peacock. He said he had never seen a peacock, not a real one. I reminded him of the bad sonnet, that he had a duty to perform. I want to see the peacocks first, he replied, dropping his bags in the hall and rubbing his hands together with glee.
I reminded our guest that he had a job to do, that he had been promised a quite substantial sum to analyse the sonnet we had uncovered in our renovating of the library.
“Yes”, he said. “Yes, of course, how silly of me to forget. I am here for a specific reason and your hospitality should not be taken for granted”
The old man was taken to his room and I repaired to the library, expectant of his appearance therein. It was a crisp autumn morning and a mist rolled in from the vales across the lawn in front of the french windows. As a devotee of literature in all its forms, I had been intrigued to discover the sonnet in a notebook hidden in a crevice between two shelves and I was anxious that the work be scrutinised. that any literary merit might be deduced from its faded pages. Upon inquiry as to who might best carry out this investigation, I was told that Professor Zazzo Thim was at the very top of the profession, and I spared no expense at securing his services. I looked out on the mist-shrouded gardens with my hands behind my back, expectant and looking forward to the knowledge that he would impart, only to see his decrepit form ambling across the eastern lawn in hot pursuit of a peacock, waving his arms in the air, and hooting with delight.
Over dinner he showed no sign of his exertions. He leaned his padded elbows on the edge of the table and grinned at me. “You know”, he said, “This whole place exudes a certain atmosphere. I can tell that there might be more to it than just the one sonnet. I fear, my friend, that this whole building might conceal a wealth of literary surprises”.
“How so?”, I asked
“It has a certain feel to it, the same sensation I get when I walk into a library for the first time, or museum, or even a bookshop, and sense that words have been played with here, that language has been exerting itself, contorting into new and uncomfortable positions for the benefit of general entertainment”. He then grinned, and leaned closer. “And another thing”, he said. “You’ve got peacocks here”
“And what of it?”
“Peacocks congregate around places where sonnets have been written. It is a well known fact in the literary community. Wherever you see peacocks, there have been works of great power created. The peacock, you see, operates on the premise of sonic reverberations, and, in particular, the beat created by iambic pentameter. Mark my words, young sir, there are sonnets in this house!”
That next morning we met in the library and I showed him the notebook I had found during the renovations. He sat down next to the fire and, with a quizzical expression on his face, began to examine it in detail with a magnifying glass. The wood crackled and spat, and I stood there, awkwardly, with my hands behind my back. The old man was a sight in himself, every facet of his aged countenance concentrated upon the page, his thin, bony legs crossed at the knee, the long, slender fingers holding the magnifying glass daintily, as if he might lose all thread of his conscience if he were to hold the handle too tightly. At long last he turned to me and he said:
“It’s a sonnet”.
“I know! I know!” I could not help the tone of exasperation in my voice, for I had long imagined this moment.
“Ah”, he said. “You mean, you want me to analyse it in some greater depth?”
“Yes!”
He gave a great sigh and leaned his head back in the chair. “That could take some time”, he said.
“Is this not what I am paying you for? You may have all the hospitality you need, but I want a thorough dissection of this poem so that we might know exactly what it is about, where it came from, and what it means for the history of this house”.
“Fine”, he said. “Give me ten minutes”
I went for a walk around the gardens. The winter chill bit into me and I pulled the coat around my shoulders. The old man was plainly mad and I wondered if he really knew what he was doing. The university department, it is true, had seemed glad to be getting rid of him for a while, or at least, that was the impression I had received from their eagerness to unload him on me. Yet he had not come without his plaudits. I had entered his name on a search engine to find a list of credible achievements in the field of literary extremism, as well as several spoof web sites in which his methods were derided and mocked by affectionate ex-students. The more I thought about him, the more I told myself that he was a gentle man, an eccentric devotee of literature who would, I was now certain, get to the bottom of the mystery of the sonnet.
At this moment I heard a strange hooting sound. I turned a corner to see Professor Zazzo Thim, his arms outstretched, inches behind a peacock, which appeared to be running for its life.
We met again that night over sherry in the grand hall. “I must say”, he told me, “I was surprised and enthused by the sonnet. It is a peculiar work, but it fits all the criteria of a Petrarchan sonnet, with a rather perplexing turn and a couple of cheekily-placed caesura, and a rhyme scheme which lends it a certain credibility. Yes, my friend, you have a sonnet and I think you should be proud of it”
“I am glad”, I replied. “I feared it may have been nothing but a cheap imitation”.
“It is a fine work, which, within its lines, compares the love of a simple country boy for a young milk maiden, for the simple joy a cow feels upon milking. Some of its imagery could be seen as quite daring for its time.”
“Such as?”
And now the Professor quoted, “How joyously, betwixt thumb and forefinger, the teet is squeezed”.
“I see”
“But my friend, there are greater mysteries here, are there not?”
“What do you mean?”
“The peacocks, I note, are particularly agitated in my presence”
“Perhaps that’s because you keep chasing them all over the place”.
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing”.
As I was saying, the peacocks , perhaps knowledgeable of my literary credentials, are loath to let me into certain pars of the garden as if they are protecting something. Have, you ever noticed this before?”
“I can’t say that I have”.
“It is a quite odd manifestation, and I think it should be investigated at this moment. You see, it is my prognosis that the peacocks are protecting another sonnet, perhaps one of such magnificence that its iambic pentameter powers them and keeps them agile in these autumnal frosts. Surely, by now they should be deep in their hibernation”.
“Peacocks do not hibernate!”, I told the old man.
“Then you see, they are being energised by something beyond our control.”
At this, Professor Zazzo Thim pulled on his jacket and slugged back the last of his sherry. “Come, he said, “We shall investigate this moment!”
Indeed, his enthusiasm was infectious. We left the grand hall and, by way of the main front door, entered the grounds of the house. Zazzo led the way, despite the cold, and a frost which had already begun to form on the lawns, a sparkling white which lent an ethereal splendour to the night. How strange that the peacocks should still be so restless, and not confined to their winter hut. For the first time I started to believe that the Professor might even be correct in his assessment, that the peacocks were hiding something, that they didn’t want us to proceed any further.
The gravel paths crunched under our footsteps and the lawns were hard with frost. The Professor was fearless as he pushed his way through the peacocks, their tails fanned as if in some attempt to halt our progress. And it was so cold, down in the hollow where the ornamental gardens were laid, a strong coldness which gripped my body and chilled me right to the bone. Our breath turned to vapour in the light from the torch, while the peacocks followed us down the hill, constant footsteps in our wake. At last we turned a corner to find a barrier of them blocking our path, their tails fanned, an impenetrable wall.
“What should we do?”, I asked, now fully reliant on the old man.
“We must do as they want”
“But we might risk the whole project!”
The beady eyes of the peacocks bore down on us, and, as one, they started to call, their shrill exclamations bouncing back at us from the shrubbery, from the trees and the bushes of the ornamental garden. A cacophonous moment, both frightening and sublime, and, with a force I had never seen before, they guided us, gently but persistently, into the entrance of the maze.
We were running now, running with them right behind us. We couldn’t stop, there would have been no option but to be pecked to death by their beaks. We turned corner after corner in the maze, the scampering feet of the peacocks just inches behind us, until, as if they had guided us, we were in the very centre, the small statue of my great, great uncle which marked the epicentre of the maze.
And there we saw them, hundreds of them. Peacocks lined around the hedges, as if in parliament, and were in the middle of them, just us and the statue.
“This is it”, I whispered, “This is the end”.
“On the contrary”, the Professor replied.
He bent down and began to wipe his hand along the wording on the plinth of the statue.
With a beating heart, I saw as the moss and the dirt began to be flaked off, and a poem be revealed to us, centuries old perhaps, yet persistent in its survival. The peacocks began to crowd around. The stone letters, so regular and formal in the light from our torches, archaic in their construction, their sentence structure.
“A sonnet!”, I breathed.
But the Professor was frowning. He crouched down and worked his way around the plinth, reading as he went. “It has a rhyme scheme”, he said. “And a ceasura, and a definite turn between the sixth and seventh lines. Yes, a sonnet, but….
By now, the peacocks were crowded in on us, as if they, too, were trying to read.
“But what?”
“There’s a syllable missing in the ninth line”.
“Read it to me!” I urged The Professor bent closer.
‘And yet my old heart it be not saved””.
“Nine syllables”, I whispered, counting them on my fingers.
The peacocks were pushing against us now, evil in their intent, crowding around, and they could surely have crushed us if they had the inclination.
At this, the Professor reached into a pocket and pulled out a chisel. And then, using a rock to hit the top of it, carved a small accent over the ‘e’ of ‘saved’ to transform it into ‘savèd’.
The result was instantaneous. The peacocks drew back, satisfied, then began to file out of the exit, allowing us to follow them into the cold night, from where they went back to their winter hut for hibernation.
The Professor and I returned to the Grand Hall and helped ourselves to another sherry.
He left the next morning and I was more than happy to cough up the extra money he demanded from his extra investigations. How happy we both were, to have solved a little mystery and put right the travesty of a bad sonnet. I thanked him once again as he clambered into the taxi, and as it pulled away he rolled down the window and he waved, smiling. His last words to me were:
“The peacocks shall bother you no more”,
I went back to the library and looked once again at the poem l’d found, the old notebook, now so faded as to be hardly recognisable.
I counted down the lines. “Hang on”, I said, to myself. ‘This isn’t a sonnet! It’s for fifteen lines!”
When I heard that the great literary extremist Professor Zazzo Thiim was holding a symposium on the use of alliteration in Antarctic literature, I knew I just had to attend.
I knew that getting to the venue in the first place was in itself was a hard enough job; the convention was to be held in a remote hotel in the mountains which, in the middle of winter, would be cut off from the world by snow drifts, and sure enough, when the week of the convention came, the only way to get to the hotel was by walking the last two miles. As the darkness gathered around me, and large
fiakes of snow began to fll from the black, black sky, I gripped the handle of my suitcase and made my way up the track into the wilderness.
It must have taken a couple of hours to make the journey, and when I arrived at the hotel I was feeling irritable and uncharitable to say the least. My eyes were blinded by the motion of the snow as it had flown across my vision, and my fingers numbed from gripping the case for so long. The first thing I did was to dump my bags next to the reception desk and sit next to the roaring fire, in order that I may thaw my aching bones and curse my stupidity at having set out on such a journey in the first place. Yet only the one thought, of any substance, kept coming to me as I sat there in the orange glow: after all this effort, this had better be worth it.
I soon became aware that an old man was sitting next to me and, after a while, he asked if I was there to see Zazzo Thim.
“Yes”, I replied, “Though I am now beginning to wonder if I have made a mistake.”
The old man wrapped his scarf tighter around his neck and gave a chuckle. “I can assure you that the convention will be well-managed and adequately attended for my needs, for I, myself, happen to be Zazzo Thiim”.
“What makes you so sure that it will be so well-attended?” l asked. It was snowing heavily outside now, and the hotel did not seem to be bursting with guests.
“The subject in itself”, the old man said, smiling gleefully. “Who could fail but be enchanted by such a subject? Antarctic literature, let me remind you, is an expanding genre. I expect there shall be quite a rush tomorrow morning for seats”.
At this, he looked first left, and then right, and then whispered to me in a severe, confidential tone:
“It’s quite possible that some people might not be allowed in’.
At once l felt bad. How close l had been in deciding not to come, yet others might not have been so foolhardy. I knew that there would probably be a limited attendance as it was, yet Thiim was sure that there would be more. I felt a sinking sensation inside of me, the dejection he might feel on walking into the conference centre that next morning only to see myself sitting there.
“I can assure you”, I told the old man, “That we shall all be thoroughly enlightened”
I went to my room and changed for dinner. I decided that I would enjoy myself, and I ordered the most expensive item on the menu, yet the restaurant was virtually empty, with the exception of a table on the far side of the room where Professor Zazzo Thiim slurped, quite noisily, his soup. Every now and then I would look over at him and feel a well of pity deep in my stomach, and I soon decided that something would have to be done. But what could I do? As the waiters kept moving past, as if gauging whether or not we had finished, a plan began to formulate in my mind that I could, somehow, interest other people in the subject of Antarctic literature and perhaps even bribe them into attending. But the plan seemed hopeless, even fanciful.
After dinner I went for a walk outside in the snow. The mountains loomed, black shapes and shadows in the night sky, while gentle flakes fell from above, illuminated by the lights from the hotel. A frost was setting in, and the ground crunched with each footstep. At last l came to one of the chalets, and I was just about to turn around and head back to the main building when the door opened and Zazzo Thiim himself emerged.
“Ah!”, he said. “It’s you! Come in, come in, we shall discuss literature!” Feeling awkward at this sudden invitation, I tried to formulate some reason why I might go back, when all the time I advanced towards his cabin. “What a brave, hardy soul”, he said, “To be out on a night like this!” He held the door open for me and I entered the chalet.
It was warm inside and a fire blazed in the hearth. He motioned that I sit down, and before long he was telling me about his interest in Antarctic literature.
“I have always been interested in a young writer of Norwegian descent, Petter Jansen, a writer of such talent and deftness of touch. He would describe the harsh winters of his homeland and the very essence of being in the snow, a subject I would find most glamorous in comparison to my lowly upbringing. As soon as I could I decided I would seek out Jansen and learn from him the craft of story-telling, of descriptive language and other literary ideals. Only, according to those who worked in the book industry, Jansen was working in the Antarctic, at a research station near the South Pole”.
“Armed only with protective clothing and a set of his works, I joined an expedition by ski-mobile in the middle of the Antarctic summer. The nights were cold and the days long, the sun never seemed to leave the sky, and all the time I was filled with so many questions, so much I wanted to ask. His characters, you see, were fragile beings, brittle, like flowers left too long in the frost, and I wanted to find out why he spent more time describing the weather than he did the emotions and sensibilities of his characters. There were other questions, too: why he
should have spent all his life in cold places, when surely he could have lived anywhere on the royalties from his volumes, and why he had given up writing fiction only to work as a research scientist in the South Pole.
“On the tenth day we reached the Norwegian research station and I was privileged enough to meet Jansen. He was not what l had expected; of course, in the years since he had been published he had become an old man, and he sported the most wondrous beard, which almost reached down to the middle of his chest. He had a gruff accent, a dismissive way of sharing information, and a healthy dislike of anyone, including myself. I followed him as he worked, and watched as he drilled holes in the ice, sank instruments down into packed snow, took readings on electronic devices. He was monosyllabic, non-committal, and despite
everything, I started to wonder if I should have been there at all.
But that night we went to his tent and he shared a bottle of vodka with me. ‘And now’, he said, ‘The real work begins’. Imagine my surprise when he produced from a wooden chest a large manuscript, several thousand pages long, and a pen, whose ink kept freezing and he had to warm by candle-light. ‘What is this?, I asked. He turned to me, wearily, his face lit by oi lamps and the candles, and he said: “This is the finest Antarctic novel ever written. Indeed’, he continued, This is the only Antarctic novel ever written’.
I watched, silently, as he wrote. And with what devotion! He forsook everything in the outside worid, every distraction, and bent his head over the manuscript, writing with a bare hand, the fingers gripped tightly around the nib. For two hours he wrote, diligently, painstakingly, until his alarm clock buzzed and, of a sudden, he put the pen down, gathered the pages, and placed them back in a wooden chest.
The next day followed the same routine: scientific work in the daytime, an evening of vodka, then writing by table light. He didn’t seem to mind the fact that I was there with him – indeed. he almost welcomed my company and the interest I showed in his writing. Finally it came time for me to leave, for my colleagues were due to start the hazardous journey back to the coast, and I decided I would revel in his company for the last time.
“When he began writing I tried to watch the words as they were formed, but he kept shying away from me, positioning his body in such a way that I could not read what he was writing, and when the alarm clock rang to signal the end of his writing shift, he placed the pen down, the manuscript in the box, and he said to me: “That’s it now. Scram. The experiment is over!’
‘How crestfallen I was! It was as if I had been stabbed in the back. I returned to my tent that night feeling hurt, abused, and with a general dissatisfaction not only with Petter Jansen, but with all writers everywhere. That night I could not sleep, and a fierce wind blew up, which rattle the tent and moaned across the barren lands. In the midst of this delirium one thought came and it would not go – that possibly I might sneak into Jansen’s tent and read the manuscript for myself.
‘Two hours later the idea still lived with a bizarre logic. I could take the strain no more, and, as the first rays of the sun began to peek over the continental mountains, I left my lodgings, walked across the snow, and let myself into Jansen’s tent. He slept well, and I had managed to let myself in without him hearing. With the wooden box right below me, I had no choice but to open it up and read the manuscript right then and there.
‘Oh, the power! “The Silken Breath of a Penguin in Repose’ is a work the likes of which I shall never forget! The intense truth, the humanity on display, the concern for a world forever spoiled by man’s eternal folly! The language seemed to ooze like honey poured on from a spoon, and yet the prose was sparse, the words as economical as ice. The book was set in the future, or very slightly in the future, and Jansen himself was a character, a fortune teller who was never wrong. And the final scene, where the mad explorer wipes away a frozen tear to think of the harm his fellow man has done, almost reduced me to an insensitive and indiscriminate howl
of anguish. When I glanced up, I noticed that Jansen was staring right at me.
‘What treachery is this?’, he asked. ‘My private words, spoiled for all time! What is this but an invasion of the lowest order! How dare you spoil these most sacred pages!’
‘I had no choice’, I replied. ‘And in any case, such a wondrous work needs an audience. There is much here that might change the world. How selfish can you be if you keep this from those who need it the most? What I have just read is the most intelligent, the most poetic work ever created’.
‘You have ruined my work!’, Jansen continued. ‘You have ruined me! We had a trust, you and me, a friendship . . .’. .. And then he looked at me for a while. ‘Did you really think it was that good?’
“So we came to an arrangement, right then and there, that I would tell the world about his work, but only if I choose locations and places that would guarantee the audience would be small. And that’s why l’m here now, in the mountains, in the middle of winter, about to host a conference on alliteration in Antarctica Literature. I mean, what kind of sad person would possibly venture all the way out here for such a thing?’
I looked at the old man and smiled. Professor Zazzo Thiim then cleared his throat.
“Apart from you, that is”.
Alas, the conference did not work out exactly as he had planned. I had left messages and notes to most of the staff and the guests of the hotel that the old man needed support, that he would be crestfallen if the conference was overly attended, and that they should do everything within their powers to put off potential attendees, and yet, that next morning, when Professor Zazzo Thiim took to the stage, he was confronted by a hall completely filled with people.
“Well …”, he said, laughing feebly into the microphone, then wincing as the feedback screeched round the hall. He activated the overhead projector to show a picture of a penguin, which then hung on the wall behind him, solemn, ethereal.
“There is . .”, he stuttered, “There is, in the power and beauty of. . .Huh-huh”.
Pleadingly, he looked at me, as if asking that I should remember the reasons why he had decided to hold the conference at this particular hotel. So what else could I do?
While no-one else was looking, I leaned behind me and activated the fire alarms. Everyone got up from their seats and the hall was evacuated in seconds.
The fact is that for some time now Professor Zazzo Thim has been lost, and it is my duty to find him. The manner of his disappearance is, beyond question, one of the most unusual cases I have ever come across. Yet the evidence I have before me, and the testimony of various witnesses, all point to the one conclusion: that Professor Zazzo Thim is trapped, helpless, somewhere in Marcel Proust’s grand novel, ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’.
It did not take me long to deduce the basics of this case. Various students and colleagues of the Professor attested that he was busy constructing some sort of grand device in the basement of the institute in which he was employed. Various noises had been heard from the cellar towards the end of each academic day, and strange lights were seen by those leaving the building, orange in hue and regulating a slow rhythm. Those closest to the Professor could not find out from him exactly what it was he was building, though one colleague, Doctor Hermann Spatt, was most helpful in his assertion that the Professor was constructing a device which would, atom by atom, replicate his body as a series of words, and distribute them throughout a chosen text.
‘How do you know this?’ I asked
Spatt grinned at me from across his desk. I asked my dear old colleague. I came right out and asked him. Of course, he was pretty drunk at the time. But he told me what the machine entailed and what would happen to him as a result. At this, Spatt’s smile faded, and he leaned back in his chair. ‘Such a sad waste’, he whispered
‘You must obviously have been close to your colleague’, I said, gently.
‘Thim? Oh no, I couldn’t stand the chap. What I’m sorry about is that a book so wondrous as a la recherche should be sullied by his ugly mug’
The key to the basement in question remained locked and, on account of the strong, fortified doors to the cellar, I quickly deduced that it would take months, possibly years to enter that sacred room. Yet I remembered what Doctor Hermann Spatt had told me, and I set about reading Proust’s epic tome, that I may find some mention within its pages of the eminent Professor Zazzo Thim.
The institute was good enough to provide me with accommodation during my stay. It was late autumn, and the trees were almost without their leaves. The paths around the park land in which the institute is set were slippery, and it seemed the sky was hardly ever anything but a deep grey. Proust’s volumes accompanied me everywhere. I would take walks in the gardens, or through the woods, with one volume open under my nose and the next thrust under my arm. I would go to the dining hall and sit with the other students, hardly noticing their banter, so engrossed was I in the societal gossip as recorded by the redoubtable Marcel. Even my rare journeys outside of the campus were spent in the company of the Guermantes family, the many minor characters and the overriding sense of times past as recorded in those weighty books. It seemed my whole life had started to revolve around the novel, and I would make lists of the endless family members, associates and contemporaries of the narrator, but each evening I would sit down and study these lists, safe in the knowledge that none of those mentioned bore the slightest resemblance to Professor Zazzo Thim.
At around this time, Doctor Hermann Spatt, with the help of two science students and a Professor in electronics, began to build a machine using the blueprints found in Thiim’s empty office which might, when up and running, be able to rescue the Professor from the depths of the accursed novel. The machine started to take shape in a far corner of the institute’s gymnasium, roped off from the rest of the hall by an arrangement of badminton nets, and each lunch time I would call in to see what progress was being achieved
‘None at all’, Spatt said, despairingly. ‘The machine just won’t function. It needs more electricity than we are supplied’.
‘Then how did Thim’s machine run so effectively?’ I asked.
Spatt pushed back the hair from his forehead and let out a deep sigh. ‘The energy needed to suck a character from a book is ten times more powerful than that needed to throw a character into the narrative. You see, Thim had the advantage of gravity, but we have nothing, nothing at all.
I walked around the machine and looked at it from many angles.
‘It’s looking quite hopeless’, Spatt said, and I swear I saw a tear well in the corner of his eye as he contemplated his missing colleague.
That night I retired to my room. By now the bed was covered with the six volumes of Proust’s masterpiece. My reading of it was haphazard at best, covering the first three sections of each novel simultaneously, so that my understanding of the plot and the order in which Marcel’s life was playing out was tenuous at best. At worst, I didn’t know what was going on.
So many dukes, matriarchs, minor members of the aristocracy, childhood memories, subtle, beautiful women with strangely masculine names. That night I fell asleep and found myself in a nightmare, a dark, dismal Paris street where Proustian characters advanced upon me with their arms outstretched, their eyes displaying a frightening malice, humming, intoning some strange, ritualistic prayer which sounded for all the world like Kylie Minogue’s first hit single, ‘1 Should Be So Lucky’. I woke with a start, frightened into reality yet not trusting the world around me, the darkness of the night, the wind which, ever so gently, was roaring in the trees and felling the last of the leaves.
I got up and walked to the window. I was dizzy, I was sweating, yet the room was cold. It was as if the natural laws which surrounded us all had ceased, that the earth itself no longer recognised whatever constitutions had kept it going for so many years. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the trees, and the leaves falling, one by one, across the sodium light of a campus street-lamp.
‘My God’, I whispered.
Excitedly, I telephoned Doctor Hermann Spatt immediately. He answered on the third ring, and asked, blearily, what it was I wanted.
‘The machine!’, I said. ‘You remember what you were saying? That Thiim had the benefit of gravity?’
‘Hmm?’
‘And that we needed more energy because we were sucking a character out of a book, not throwing one in?’
‘Yes?’
‘Then why don’t we just turn the whole machine upside down? Put the machine on the floor and the book suspended above?’
There was silence on the other end of the line, and then Spatt’s voice came back. ‘My word’, said he, ‘You’re a genius’.
The next morning Spatt, accompanied by his assistants, set to work making the modifications I had suggested, while I, now with the help of three assistants of my own, continued my reading of Proust’s novel. We each took a volume and, starting at the very beginning, ploughed our way through the dense script, using different translations and even the French language original, so that we were working on three separate texts at once. Halfway through the afternoon Spatt rang to tell me that the machine was working perfectly, and all it needed was for me to find Thiim in the novel so that we might rescue him. This news gave us a welcome feeling of progress and we intensified our efforts until, by six in the evening, we were all very tired and our eyes and heads ached.
‘Thank you, lads’, I whispered, as they headed towards the door.
‘Erm, we were wondering’, said one of them, an amiable young man by the name of Adam. ‘Would you like to come out for a drink tonight?’
I smiled at their offer, for it was proof that we had gelled as a team. ‘Thank you, but I would rather maintain my capacities’, I told them.
Their shoulders slumped.
‘And I suggest you do the same, for we need our full concentration if we are ever to find the Professor’
Adam smiled. ‘Very well’, he said. ‘We wouldn’t have gone overboard, anyway. Just a couple of drinks and then back home.’
‘Thanks once again, I whispered
The days were getting shorter, and once I had eaten my dinner, (accompanied, once again, by the ever-present Monsieur Proust), I went back to my room and prepared for sleep.
To be honest, I was beginning to doubt that we would ever find Thim in this mammoth book, and a part of me was content just to sit back and enjoy the experience of being a small part in such a large, well-funded experiment. Though the more I thought about it, the more desperate I started to become, as I realised that the whole project now depended on me and my abilities to wade through the novel for just the smallest clue. Worse still, I was afraid to sleep, for I knew that I would be haunted by Kylie once again, that inane, stupid song, ‘I Should Be So Lucky!’ Timidly, I retired to my bed.
At two in the morning I was woken by a fierce pounding on my door. Hardly able to concentrate, I opened the door and blinked in amazement to see Robert de Saint-Loup.
‘Do forgive my intrusion’, said he, ‘But I was wondering if you had had word of the Duc de Guermantes?’
‘I beg your pardon?’, said I, hardly believing my eyes.
At that moment M. de Charlus bounded down the corridor and patted Saint-Loup on the shoulder. ‘There you are!’, said he. His eyes then focused on myself, standing in the doorway in a pair of boxer shorts and nothing else. ‘Hello!’, he said, twirling his moustache.
‘I say!’, said a voice from the end of the corridor. They both looked up and bowed, courteously, as Albertine approached. ‘Are you not on the way to the Verdurin ball? I proclaim it to be the most whimsical event of the decade!’
Hurriedly, I shut my door, then went over to the window. Oh, what a scene met my eyes!
The quiet park was awash with people, elegantly dressed, bowing, nodding, dancing, chatting in the glare of the street-lamp as if they were in a ball or a turn of the century function. And they were all, I was horrified to note, characters from Marcel Proust’s mighty tome.
I telephoned Spatt and he confirmed my worst suspicions. Some students, drunk of course, had broken into the gymnasium and fiddled with the machine. Instead of pulling the hapless Thim from the depths of the novel, they had, wantonly and without thought to the effects of their crime, pulled out every other character instead.
‘But this is horrendous!’, I whispered.
‘There’s no choice’, said Spatt. ‘We must round them all up and post them back into that hideous novel. Do you know what they’re doing now? They’re in the canteen, holding a mass madeleine tasting. This has got to stop!’
‘There’s only one way we can get them back into the novel’, I told the Doctor. ‘We must break into the basement and use Thim’s machine.’
It took the best part of the night to round up all of the characters. Because we had been using three different translations, there were three of each of them, and the three Marcels had met some time after half four and, indignant that their individualities had been compromised, had challenged each other to a duel, (from which, naturally, each one backed out.) Charlus was the worst, and three of his characters had to be retrieved from the public lavatories and from various male student’s bedrooms before they were all accounted for. At last we had rounded them all up and we were engaged in the act of congregating them around the door to the basement, a tricky act which was achieved only by the entertainment of a piano playing Chopin and the liberal refreshment of champagne. Spatt and I, meanwhile, busied ourselves at the door. The thick oak would not budge to our shoulders, neither to rudimentary battering ram fashioned out of an old roll-top desk. However, when one of the Robert de Saint-Loups saw what we were trying to achieve, he supplied us with some dynamite which, he assured us, was fresh from the Great War battlefields.
The following explosion was deafening. Two of the Mme de Verdurins went flying through the air, their stiff petticoats flaying in all directions. At last we entered that hallowed room and saw Thim’s machine which, somewhat comfortingly, looked not unlike the reverse example we had fashioned in the gymnasium. Yet only now did Spatt and I see the almost fatal mistake that Thim had made. Indeed, the machine functioned well, and had been put together expertly. However, the absent-minded Professor had, one can only assume, accidentally, mistakenly placed within its confines not Proust’s magnificent novel, but a CD of Kylie’s first UK Number One hit, ‘I Should Be So Lucky.
It didn’t take long for the machine to be put to use. How affectionately we said good-bye to all the characters, who each invited us to various balls and society functions for the following Paris season. When they were all quite delivered, Spatt and I took Thim’s CD upstairs to the gymnasium, where we placed it on top of the machine and pulled the necessary levers. Seconds later, Professor Zazzo Thim materialised
‘Oh, my word’, he said, feeling his nervous forehead. I was having the time of my life! I’ve never danced so much!’
‘You realise what you did?’ Spatt asked
‘Oh, the CD? Entirely intentional, my dear friend.’
‘But that’s preposterous!’
‘So many hours l’d spent on that machine, a copy of Proust under my arm. So many years I’d dreamed of meeting those wondrous characters. Yet when it came time to leave, I thought long and hard about it …
‘And?’
‘And I realised I would rather be with Kylie, instead.
‘Good gracious!’
‘Well, my dear Spatt. They’re so stuffy, aren’t they? And Kylie’s much more vivacious’. At this, Thiim looked left, then right, then left again. ‘And another thing’, he said, confidentially. ‘She’s quite a go-er, I can assure you’.
Alas, the story does not end here. The following week, Kylie’s management refused to confirm that a new mix of her original hit single had been mixed, with some quite bizarre vocals by various French dignitaries, mostly concerning the petty discriminations and social faux pas of turn of the century Paris.
‘My god!’ Spatt whispered to me, down the telephone line. ‘We must have sent them to the wrong place!’
Yet not one scholar, student or academic genius happened to notice that Proust’s six-volume masterpiece now seemed not to have a single character at all.
Between the late nineties and the mid 2000s, I wrote hundreds of short stories. This was a very hectic time in my life, and probably needlessly so. In 2000, I moved into a gothic flat near the seafront in Paignton, almost directly over the road from the shop where I worked. I was studying Open University every morning, getting up at 5, studying 6-9, going over the road and working 9-5, then home, and spending every single evening writing short stories. On my day off I’d attend a Writers’ Circle and it soon became apparent that the other attendees seemed drawn to my funnier stories. In one story, I invented a character, a professor of literature by the name of Zazzo, and soon the other members of the writers’ circle started saying things like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see what Zazzo gets up to next week!’ My Open University degree was in Literature, so I’d have to watch a lot of videos (it was still videos back then), and listen to lots of cassettes presented by these eccentric academic types who were a million miles away from the milieu in which I moved. I saw Zazzo as belonging to this community, perhaps barely tolerated by his contemporaries, and often shooting off at a tangent, seeing patterns where there were no patterns, narratives where there were no narratives. Zazzo was a literary investigator. Whenever there was a mystery with a literary element, Zazzo would be there. Skateboarders quoting Shakespeare for no reason? Send in Zazzo! A crab routinely predicting the winner of the Booker Prize every year? Another case for Zazzo! The discovery of yet another Brontë sister? Who do we call? Professor Zazzo! The Zazzo stories were saved on various floppy discs, and then promptly forgotten about for twenty years. I had no way of accessing them for quite some time, but now, thanks to various technological developments (and some paper versions I recently found), Professor Zazzo has been saved from obscurity! My life has moved on since those days. I’ve been working as a comedy performance poet since around 2008, and worked on various other projects, so it was a delight to rediscover this strange world. And I really hope you might enjoy reading some of the stories which I shall be publishing on this blog.
As the train pulled into the station, Professor Zazzo Thiim felt a twinge within him, deep down where he knew his heart should have been. He didn’t want to be there, he knew what was waiting for him. It was here, this very place where, years before – decades before! – he had given his infamous speech in which he had proclaimed the death, as an art form, of the short story. There had almost been a riot.
But the Professor was a sentimental man, and when he had received, in the depths of the University in which he taught literary experimentalism, a letter from a middle-aged lady who had witnessed him that day, fleeing for his life amid the baggage trollies and the tourists, pursued by an angry mob, he knew he had to go, just for old times sake. How lucky that he had given them the slip on platform sixteen, he thought to himself, as the train slowly navigated the last few inches of the track. Would anybody recognise him now, all these years later?
The grand old station was the same as it ever was. The glass roof was a dirty grey, matching the overcast skies outside, while the rusted superstructure was plastered with pigeon droppings. Zazzo pulled his coat collar around him as he stepped off the train on the worn tarmac of the platform. He felt a coldness in the air, an eternal coldness, as if all the emotion from the thousands, the millions of journeys begun and ended here, the lives separated, the people who would never see each other again, had somehow become crystallised and manifested just in him. The Professor began to shiver.
She was waiting for him at the exit of the platform, next to the aerodynamic train engine which throbbed and sizzled as it recovered from its journey. She recognised the white-haired professor from the photographs on the jackets of his various, little-read volumes on the literature of Greenland and the cultural significance of the Haiku in Guatamala. (Verdict: virtually none at all). She stepped forwards and extended her hand, then helped him with the big bag slung over his shoulder which contained the manuscript of his latest novel. They went to the station cafe.
“We talk about it even now”, she said, over a cup of coffee which steamed gently in the slant of morning light.
“I didn’t realise it was such a big event”.
“Big event?” she asked. “It was the only event”
The cafe was filled with travellers, youths with backpacks, old ladies with small trollies, all of them static for this one moment in time before they each went their seperate ways to the furthest corners of the continent. Behind the counter, the coffee machine let off a cloud of steam which moistened the ceiling, while a small radio played jazz in the kitchen. The saxophone made Professor Thim feel sad, though he didn’t quite know why. Something about the passing of the years, perhaps.
“You certainly caused quite a stir” the woman said. “Let me introduce myself. My name is Mathilda, and the day I saw you leaping over the tracks while being pursued by that mob, l was employed in the cigarette kiosk. I remember it now : your scarf trailing in the wind, the papers of your speech flying away behind you, the angry mob piling over baggage racks and the barriers like ants coming back to their colony. Nothing stood in their path! You started a change in me…”, she said, contemplatively.
“What do you mean?” the Professor asked.
“While I was working that morning I was listening to your speech. When I saw you set up on the main concourse with a soap box and a sheef of papers I thought you were just another religious nut, or maybe one of those hopeless politicians. But when you started speaking about the short story, and speaking so eloquently, I might add, I became entranced. I remember it to this day – the way you said that short stories no longer mattered, that we were all philistines because we preferred trashy novels or the television, that all writers of short stories are, in some ways, the chroniclers of the modern world, capturing moments and emotions in subtle
ways which other means can never attain. I remember the way you used to adjust the scarf around your neck as you talked, your face wrinkled in concentration. I was so captured by this! I couldn’t concentrate on my job, and when these people started crowding around you and heckling, I thought – a-ha! He has struck a nerve!”
“It’s nice that you remember” “, the Professor said, fingering his collar where the scarf would have been. He remembered the scarf, he still had it at home, somewhere.
“So I went home and I started to read short stories. Nothing major at first – romance, a bit of light comedy. Then I progressed to Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Chekov. After a few years I wanted more, so I started on James Joyce, Italo Calvino, even dear old Franz Kafka. Borges came next, of course, the master of them all. And now…”
“Yes?” the old man asked, fearfully.
“Now I’m reading Samuel Beckett”
“My word” , he whispered
“And it’s all thanks to you. My life has been enriched by that moment, by the passion and the fury of that one episode. I resigned from the cigarette kiosque, enrolled in university, and I began to acquire literary ideas of my own. Do you know what it means for a character to appear in a short story, for example? The characters believe themselves, for just one moment in time, to be so important as to be forever captured in the reader’s mind, and lodged there forever. Yet they do not have the longevity, the life-span of characters from, say, a novel. Such animosity exists between them! The moment in which they exist is so precious, so pure and concentrated that they could never last a whole novel with the same intensity. Just look at ourselves – if we two were to last a whole novel, we would be exhausted by the end of chapter three”
The Professor nodded, solemnly.
“I have so many ideas inside of me”, Mathilda continued. “And it’s all thanks to you. So when I read a textbook on the use of penguins in the shorter fiction of Virginia Woolf – (in which it was concluded that penguins hardly featured in any of her work) – and I saw that the author was a certain Professor Zazzo Thim, who, years before, had almost been lynched right here at this very station, I thought: T’ have to find him, I have to thank him personally for the life he has given me'”.
The Professor fingered the clasp of his briefcase. He felt so many different emotions. “I’m glad”, he whispered, above the soft saxophone solo from the kitchen. “That I have made an impact on someone’s life”.He opened the briefcase and pulled out a manuscript. “In fact”, he continued, “I would like you to have this . .”.
“What is it?” Mathilda asked, laying an expectant hand on her chest.
“My latest academic work, explaining the death of surprise endings in short works of fiction. It is my belief that all surprises have been eliminated, that nothing more can ever be said at the end of a short story which may shock or confound the reader. I have called it, ‘No More the Lonely Badger'”
“I’m touched”, Mathilda said. Zazzo passed the manuscript across the table towards her and she took it in her quivering hands. “No more surprises”, she whispered, reading the sub-heading. “An investigation by Professor Zazzo Thiim”.
“Just one more thing”, he asked. “Why did the crowd react so badly to my speech? Why did they set about me in such a hostile manner? Surely, the people of this city don’t care that much for the short story as to attack me personally, just because of my hypothesis? I’ve thought about it for the last forty years, I’ve thought about the effect I had and the passion they displayed, you see, and it, too, changed my life, it changed my ideas, and I started to devote my life to demonstrating that short stories do make a difference, and I have used the episode as an illustration in lectures, academic works and after-dinner speeches. Indeed, it could be said that my whole career has been based on this one incident! So tell me, why was the crowd so incensed?”
“Didn’t you know?”, Mathilda asked. “It was your scarf. They thought you were a United supporter.
Twenty years ago, I wrote a novel. And some of that novel had material in it from fifteen years before that. It’s lived at the bottom of a drawer for most of that time. Thanks to technology, I can now bring this to you. I will be sharing a chapter a week.
Here is a brief synopsis:
A comedy novel set at His Nibs, a fictional shop at a seaside town which sells only pencils. Assistant manager Robert once had a steamy and passionate romance with his colleague Matt. Matt is now with Clarissa, and it must be serious because they have got a cat. Meanwhile someone has burned down the pier, which means there are no tourists, and the shop is not making its targets. It rains a lot. Manager Carol has gone off the rails and harks back to the glory days of pencil retail. Robert is determined to win Matt back, or at least recreate the romance with someone else, while area manager Mona is determined to turn things round at the shop. Standing in their way are mystery shoppers, angry refunders, the company auditor, weird customers, light-fingered gang members, the local protection racket, increasingly bizarre memos from head office and the joys of the twice-annual stock take.
Chapter One
The Stock Take
We haven’t sold a pencil in hours yet we’re not supposed to start counting them until six o‘clock. It’s quite worrying that we haven’t sold a pencil in hours because the whole shop exists just to sell pencils. It’s a pencil shop. Pencils and the very minimum of pencil accessories. Pencil sharpeners. Pencil erasers. Pencil cases. And pencils. If we sold some pencils then there would be less to count, obviously. If we sold two pencils in the last hour then that would be two less pencils. The shop has probably got thirty thousand pencils in it. We will find out in the next six or seven hours. How long does it take to count one pencil?
But that’s life. The tills are all computerised now and if we were to sell a pencil after the stock take had started, then it would bugger everything up. The count would be wrong and we’d have gaps in the stock list where more pencils should be. And the area manager, Mona, she would get awfully sarcastic and make us do it all over again. And a part of me would understand the world a little better while simultaneously bemoaning its perpetual unpleasantness. A part of me would wish that the world would have less pencils in it. A part of me would want to be at home luxuriating in the freedom associated with a man who does not have to do a stock take. For some reason the company likes to know how many pencils it has.
‘Right, I’m off home’, Carol says. ‘Let me know how it goes’.
Carol’s the boss, the Manager. Carol is a canny operator. Carol has come up with a theory that when it comes to a stock take, it’s more accurate to have two people doing it instead of three. Two people can easily get on and do it. Three people would just complicate things. That’s what Carol says. And she lives furthest from the shop, so it only makes sense that she be the one to forego such nocturnal delights.
The door closes behind her. She locks it on the way out.
I’m not looking forward to it, obviously. One pencil starts to look like another after a while. There’s really been no innovation in the pencil industry for quite some time. Some have got rubbers on the end and some haven’t and that’s really the only source of variety, otherwise they’re all straight and made of wood and they’ve all got a pointy end which draws or writes. I’ve been working in pencils for over ten years and I still don’t know what the pointy end which draws or writes is called. I mean, the technical term. It’s easy to lose enthusiasm for pencils when you’re around them for as much as I am.
I’ve got Matt helping me with the stock take, though. That’s something, at least. I like Matt for a number of reasons. The first reason that I like Matt is that he’s accurate and occasionally conscientious. The second reason that I like Matt is that we’d sometimes stop counting for a bit and lose ourselves to the simmering sexual tensions that have existed between us since the very first day he walked into the shop with his CV and his boyish grin and his impetuosity and his fashionable hair and his love of life and the rumbling sense of innate masculine ecstatic oblivion I feel whenever I’m in his company which makes each nerve tingle and the air itself crack with hormonal longing. The third reason I like Matt is that he lifts some of the heavier boxes.
Alas, the chemistry between us has been somewhat depleted these last few months.
‘How’s Clarissa?’ I ask.
Because it’s only polite to ask.
‘She’s great’, he replies. ‘She’s perfect. We‘re thinking of buying a cat.’
Which is disappointing, because as well as being conscientious, masculine and impetuous, Matt is also alarmingly moral. Our stock-room trysts, foibles and peccadilloes are now a thing of the past. Clarissa is his life. A cat only compounds that.
‘Let’s start this thing’, he says, picking up a pen and a clipboard. (Carol doesn’t like us using pencils during a stock take for fear of accidentally using shop stock). ‘Let’s put this baby to sleep!’
It’s an unusual metaphor. This baby wont be asleep for another six or seven hours just yet.
Dextrously, Matt’s fingers pour over boxes of stock. His large brown eyes – the eyes of a particularly obedient puppy, eyes which have always seemed far, far too big for the rest of him – concentrate on the task at hand. One pencil, two pencils, et cetera. There’s no guess work, no cutting corners with Matt. He always goes for the maximum. If he wants it, he gets it. He does things properly.
I think back to a couple of years before, when Matt brought a sudden burst of romance into my life. Perhaps he was drunk on the wooden smell of all the pencils. He couldn’t control himself. What started out as a gentle re-organisation of the pencil case shelf in the stock room blossomed into full-blown rumpy pumpy. He became a floppy love machine, curling himself around me and oozing warmth and sensuous impossibility, it was all I could do to put down the pricing gun.
This happened again the next night, after Carol had seen the reorganised pencil case shelf in the stock room and told us to put it all back again. And then it happened once more the night afterwards, though we didn’t touch the pencil case shelf or reorganise anything, and Matt had brought some whipped cream along with him, you know, for some added pizzazz. It was only on the eighth night that we began to ask ourselves why we were using the stock room of a pencil shop when we could easily just go back to my flat and use the bedroom.
It kind of slowed down a bit after that.
But every now and then, perhaps excited by the sight of so many pencils in a kind of as yet undiagnosed drawing implement fetish, Matt and I would give vent to all kinds of ingenious desires, until Carol got suspicious at all the time we were spending together and thought that we were only doing it for the overtime. Then Clarissa sauntered in one day looking for a pen, (seriously!), and Matt didn’t seem to get quite so excitable around me any more.
‘1147367’.
‘HB hexagonal shaft blue with a white stripe?’
‘Six’.
‘1147374’.
‘HB hexagonal shaft red with a white stripe’.
‘Nine’.
It took us two hours to work out that all of the numbers started with ‘1147’. The stock count started to go a little bit quicker after this.
‘479’.
‘HB hexagonal shaft yellow with rubber’.
‘Seven’.
Matt is seemingly unflustered by the fact that we shared so many intimate moments in this very room. Yet I cannot get over the lack of passion he now shows. I pretend to count, gazing up from the boxes of pencils, and I cannot envisage anything beyond the madness to which we would willingly succumb. There are seven pencils in the box but I manage to lose count, and he makes me do it again. Two years before, we would have been all over one another. There’s nothing more sensual than a box of pencil sharpeners when you’re both naked and gagging for it. His new-found professionalism is an affront to the memory of our passion. If only a switch might be activated ensuring his sudden interest in matters other than the rigours of a damn good stock take.
But there’s no let up in his demeanour. Never before have I seen anyone so intent on the counting of pencils. It’s not that he wants to finish the job any quicker, though. It’s almost as if he relishes the opportunity to lose himself in stationery. This cheers me up for a little while, repays some of the faith that I have previously lost in the human spirit. But then I realise that he’s probably concentrating so intently so as to ward off some of the emotion he might otherwise feel on returning to the scene of our many romantic escapades.
‘45, er . . .’.
‘Yes?’
The thought has jarred me a little.
‘458. No. 459’.
‘So what is it?’
‘459’.
‘There is no 459’.
‘Ah. It’s 458. There was a bit of dandruff or something on the code number. It made the eight look like a nine’.
‘How many?’
‘I don’t suppose it matters’, I tell him. ‘There’s only one. And it’s snapped in half’.
‘It’s still got to be counted’.
‘But it’s snapped. It’s either one, or two halves. It wont make any difference in our overall figure whatever we decide to do with it’.
‘We will have to write it off. But first we need to count it. The Damaged Stock Form will arrive at head office after the stock take, so it’s officially still a part of the stock’.
‘I can fill out the Damaged Stock Form now and send it this moment. Then we wont have to count it at all’.
‘But it would be wrong’.
‘It’s one pencil’.
‘You know the procedure’.
‘It will cost more in postage and work hours filling out the form than the worth of the pencil’.
‘Procedures must be adhered to’.
‘Why don’t I just buy the pencil?’
‘The shop isn’t open. So therefore the pencil is officially part of the shop’s stock at the time of the stock take’.
Matt does not appear very happy for someone with a girlfriend and the chance of getting a cat.
As the evening wears on I feel the insanity of our chore become ever more evident until I cannot see the world except through the subtle variations and design of the pencils that we are counting. Chair legs, skirting boards, anything straight or wooden or both present themselves to my mind which then, automatically, starts looking for a serial code. Another hour and life itself – nay, existence – seems secondary to the task of counting all the pencils in the shop. 1147001, big bang, celestial detonation : one. 1147002, universe, (expanding), infinite : one. I start to wonder if counting the universe in our stock take might automatically nullify the need to carry on with the stock take, but Matt says no. It has to be done. It is the reason why we are here. It is our aim and our purpose. Without the stock take, we are as nothing.
And then a secondary madness takes over in which it becomes obvious, or at least, it feels obvious, that those at His Nibs head office damn well knows how many sodding pencils we have and that this is all some kind of cruel test or punishment inflicted on us just because we had the temerity to work for their company. And the company, oh, how it becomes in our minds so powerful and so all-consuming, directing us with its bulletins and conducting the whole shape of our lives with the list of items that we, us mere mortals, have to count, through the fabled, legendary stock take sheets. There’s no room for error, no room for improvisation. How deliriously do our managers sit in their offices compiling this list, laughing at themselves as they envisage the mayhem that it will bring to our lives! Oh, great and mighty stock-take co-ordinator, oh, you saintly powerful all-knowing New Goods department, how we aim to please you with our pitiful late-night counting!
A couple of years before Matt had been a completely different person. There had been something sly about him. It was as if he were throwing subtle hints all the time. I would catch them in the way that he would look at me at certain moments, or the way he’d brush a stray hair away from my shoulder while we were making a display of pencils, or perhaps it was the fact that whenever we were alone he’d run his hands under my shirt and beg for ten minutes of ecstatic human physical companionship as if enraptured by the pounding, constant sensuality conferred on all like-minded sexed-up individuals. Such subtlety. But things are much different now. There’s nothing.
I find myself looking at him as we embark into our fourth hour of counting. The clock on the wall nudges inexorable towards midnight. He opens boxes of pencils and spends a couple of seconds running his fingers lovingly through the stock within, and it is the first sign I’ve seen of him wavering from his professionalism. He’s almost mesmerised by the pencils. He used to be mesmerised by me. But this was all before Clarissa and the promise of a kitty.
‘Are you OK?’, I ask.
‘Often’, he says, ‘I get a feeling of . . .’.
An achingly long gap. He doesn’t say anything. Oh, the emotion, it must weigh heavily on his soul. My heart pounds with excitement.
‘Yes?’
He puts down the clipboard. This alone is significant. And all of a sudden I can feel the last two years peeling away. This is how we used to be, so eager to share our private feelings and comfortable in each other’s emotional presence. He was so unsure of himself back then, so driven by the needs of the moment. He needed guidance in the ways of the world and I was always there for him. The night starts to feel slightly different. It’s as if Clarissa and the cat don’t exist at all. I can feel that he wants to say something significant, yet the new version of himself that he has created over the past couple of years would never be so forthcoming.
He lets out a big sigh.
‘There are things in this life’, he says, ‘That I’m really not sure of’.
‘Such as?’
Silence again.
‘You can tell me’.
Much silence.
Emotional silence is all very well, but this is bordering on plain rude. At last, he says:
‘Have you ever looked at the world and thought that it’s been put together just ever so slightly askew? And that certain components of it were – how do I put this? – meant for some other plain of existence, and used in a kind of half-hearted attempt to cobble the world together – and by ‘the world’ I mean the way that we live our lives, the philosophies and strictures which we adopt to govern our behaviour?’
It’s not the most coherent question I’ve ever been asked.
‘What I mean is, do you often think there’s more to living than just this?’
Not going so well with Clarissa, then, I feel like saying.
‘Well . . .’.
‘Because for a while I’ve thought that even though I’ve got all the things I’ve always wanted, I’ve still been missing out on . . .’.
‘Yes?’
‘Life’.
It’s not the sort of thing that I’d been expecting him to say. I’d seen him become a machine over the last couple of years, a unit designed for living normally. And yes, I want to agree wholeheartedly with his sentiments. He’d gone chasing after the life that culture has told him to live, quite forgetting that he would still be the same person underneath.
‘Do you remember how it used to be?’ I ask. ‘The fun we used to have? Do you remember?’
‘To be honest’, he replies, ‘Not entirely’.
‘All those nights reorganising the pencil case shelf?’
‘Doesn’t ring any bells’.
‘And you’d say, gosh, it’s so hot, do you mind if I take my shirt off?’
‘Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I’d say.’
He’s right, of course. It doesn’t. Not any more.
‘And anyway, what’s that got to do with . . With what I’ve just said?’
‘I’m just trying to remind you of the times that we used to have together, the fun and the physical nature of our relationship, and how you used to live for the nights and you’d come in to work and you’d whisper to me, hey, let’s reorganise the pencil case shelf tonight, and all day long I’d be longing for the moment when Carol went home and we could lose ourselves to the absolute bliss of each other’s company, and some times we got so into it that we’d finish reorganising the pencil case shelf and then start all over again, and the world seemed right and the night stretched before us with all its promise, and we’d be both so incredibly happy that we’d had the fortune to find each other, that the world should be a place where constant adventure could happen right here, right here, in this crappy little town’.
‘To be honest, I don’t remember any of that’.
‘You don’t remember?’
‘Not in the slightest’.
‘It was the highlight of my year!’
His eyes narrow.
‘If you must know’, he says, ‘It sounds a bit far-fetched’.
Far-fetched. I can remember every second of our many encounters. Emblazoned as they are on my memory in all of their vivid detail, there can be nothing more real than the exquisite mix of heart-felt longing and rampant masculinity, blending as they did into a fine madness into which we both so willingly succumbed. And yet, yes, he’s right. It does all sound magnificently far-fetched.
‘Often’, he says, ‘When something is very horrific, the mind shuts it out completely’.
‘But you must remember some of it’.
‘Well . . .’.
More silence.
‘What has all this got to do with what I was saying? I trust you enough to delve right down to the deepest part of my soul and you highjack the moment just to concoct some bizarre story about us having a relationship which I can’t even remember. It can’t have been that special, really. That’s what I’m thinking. It probably wasn’t even with me, was it? I don’t go around shagging work colleagues in the store room of a pencil shop. And just at the moment when I need some help in trying to understand the world, you go and make it even more complicated. Well, thanks. Thanks for that.’
‘So you don’t remember any of it, then?’
‘The only thing I remember is . . .’ He stops for a second. ‘Did you hear something?’
‘We need to talk about this. I don’t think you understand how important this is to me’.
‘Can you hear it? Movement, out the back. And it sounds very much like . . .’.
Please, no. Of all the times.
‘Bin robbers!’
‘You said yourself, Matt. You said that you weren’t sure about life. You said it just now, that there was something else. Well, there was. And you don’t remember any of it. I showed you what it was that you were missing. I showed you, two years ago, but . . .’
‘Bin robber!’
They come every night, the bin robbers. They rummage, standing on upturned milk crates in order to delve deeper into the mysterious delights of the pencil shop skip. They’re looking for pencils, obviously, or anything else that may have been thrown away during the day. It’s a wonder they find anything amid the boxes and the packaging and the assorted detritus of a pencil shop skip, but every now and then they find what they’re looking for. Pencils. Only the pencils have been broken in half, as per company guidelines. Go to any car boot sale and you’ll find a stall of short stubby pencils, sharpened, perhaps, at both ends. Discontinued lines from pencil shop skips, pencils with health and safety issues now illegal to trade, dug out from the bottom of pencil shop skips and sold by shady looking gentlemen with stubble and inappropriate piercings. Some of these gentlemen might even have tattoos. There’s money in pencils, obviously. The internet hasn’t killed everything.
But they’re nasty, too. There’s many a report of bin robbers threatening shop staff, managers holed up in their offices on the phone to the police or, god forbid, violence against any hapless employee who should go out after dark to empty a waste-paper bin and come across a bin robber. Territorial, occasionally hyped up on various concoctions, there are even stories of rival bin robbers fighting each other in front of bemused His Nibs shop staff. They leave a mess behind them and throw the non-pencil-related skip contents across the back yard in order to get to their bounty. Sometimes they even turn the bin upside down and empty it, which is no small task what with it being made from solid steel and as large as a small car. They threaten anyone who tries to stop them. Many a time a lowly His Nibs shop employee has had to call the old bill because a particularly nasty bin robber has promised some admittedly quite inventive form of personal injury while filling up their pockets with faulty pencil sharpeners or pencil cases that have been withdrawn from sale due to copyright issues. Illegally mass-produced Scooby Doo pencil cases that head office have bought cheaply and sold at quite a mark up until threatened with court action by the intellectual property owners of the Scooby Doo franchise, now filling up the Lidl’s carrier bags of the common bin robber. It’s a vicious circle.
It’s recycling, at least.
And tonight’s is a fine specimen. In his woollen cap and bomber jacket, he looks every inch the scrote. We watch through the back door as he sets up a powerful torch, climbs on his milk crate, then dives into the bowels of the skip, his army boots sticking out as he has a good rummage. You might think that it would be safe just to let him get on with it, but there are moral forces at work, a sense of personal violation which comes from seeing such an atrocity, particularly in the private enclosure of the back yard. Indeed, as the police have pointed out, each pencil sold by a bin robber feeds violence and drug abuse, underhand dealings, and the powerful local organised crime syndicates, and that it is our duty to prevent all further bin incursions. The police have better things to do.
Matt’s fingers reach for the door handle.
‘It’s not safe’, I tell him. ‘He might get violent’.
‘He’s upside down in a bin. We’ve got the tactical upper hand at the moment’.
‘He might have an accomplice’.
‘It’s a chance we have to take’.
‘We don’t have to. We’re not here to fight crime’.
The bin robber throws a sack of waste paper over his shoulder. It lands on the ground and scatters everywhere.
‘If we don’t make an effort’, Matt says, ‘Then it will just carry on’.
‘He might be armed, and dangerous . . .’
‘What better way is there to go?’
I can think of several other options rather than being knifed by a bin robber next to a rubbish skip out the back of a pencil shop at two ‘o’ clock in the morning in a deserted seaside town. It’s not an iconic death. But Matt is starting to open the door now.
‘Matt!’
‘Tell my parents that I love them’.
‘And what about Clarissa?’
‘Yeah, her to’.
I can only assume that the worst will occur. The bin robber will lunge at him, perhaps shouting, perhaps incomprehensible, no doubt far too stoned for any rational response other than shooting at us with a concealed weapon, or perhaps a bow and arrow. (The mind does funny things during moments of stress). And already I can envisage having to phone Matt’s parents and telling them the bad news, the police helicopter hovering overhead with spotlights trying to track down the ruthless bin robber, the whole thing conveyed live to local television.
‘Hey!’, Matt says, whipping the back door open.
‘All right?’, the bin robber asks.
‘What you doing?’
‘I’m robbing your pencils’.
‘From the bin?’
‘Yeah’.
‘But they’re broken’.
‘That’s the thing with pencils’, he replies. ‘They’re never really broken. You just sharpen the jagged ends and you’ve got yourself two new pencils. Hey. My name’s Dave’.
Dave holds out his hand and, amazingly, Matt shakes it.
‘That’s all very well’, Matt says, ‘But then you’ll end up with stumpy pencils’.
‘I know’.
‘What good’s a stumpy pencil?’
‘There’s a lot of people out there with SFS. Horribly afflicted. They can’t handle full sized pencils. They’re crying out for shortened pencils. I’m only happy to help them’.
‘SFS?’
‘Stumpy Finger Syndrome’.
‘You know, you really can’t do that. It’s stealing’.
‘But you’re throwing them away’.
‘It’s still stealing. That’s the law. And I’m here to uphold the law.’
‘It’s recycling. That’s what I’m doing. Otherwise it would all go into landfill, and do you know how long it takes for a pencil to biodegrade? I‘m saving the planet, my good friend, that’s what I’m doing’.
‘Go on’.
‘What?’
‘How long does it take for a pencil to biodegrade?’
‘Hey, I’m too busy bringing hope and comfort to those with SFS to worry about minor details like that’.
Dave takes out two more pencils from the bin and holds them up to the light.
‘Right, then. I’ll wish you two gentlemen a pleasant evening’.
He closes the lid of the bin and saunters away. Matt watches him leave for a couple of seconds.
‘Well’, he says, ‘I don’t think he’s going to mess with us again’.
This whole night has been profoundly confusing.
We count through the night. The Earth spins round one more time. The count is completed by five in the morning, the last pencil located in a plastic display case next to the till area at the front of the shop. What mystical powers that one pencil holds! I place it back in its case feeling a sense of ceremonial duty, for now we have completed our task. Yet the world seems just the same. I look out the plate glass window at the front of the shop floor at the dark, deserted street, the sodium lighting and the parked cars, the fascias of the other shops unlit, silent fashion shop dummies just standing there like memories of parties past, and it all looks like hardly anything has changed at all.
‘We are free’, I whisper.
Two hour’s sleep, and a new day starts.
It’s just as well that my tiny flat is over the road from the shop itself. It’s a constant joy to open the curtains each morning and see the little shop sitting there, taunting me with its pencils and its sense of constant dread. I dream of bin robbers screaming through several surrealist situations, none of which I can particularly remember within seconds of waking.
One of the eternal mysteries of retail is the stock count. The head office New Goods department has a figure which is supposed to match the number of pencils held in stock. In all likelihood, the shop will have this figure with a slight margin of error. Yet it all depends on how great this margin of error is. If it’s a lot more or a lot less, then there will have to be an investigation and it will be assumed that the stock has gone missing, somehow. If there are three thousand less pencils in stock than the paperwork says, then it means that someone has come in and robbed the shop of three thousand pencils. And this is rightly seen as an example of gross misconduct on behalf of the shop staff. But if the figure is, say, out by fifty or so, then that’s seen as officially All Right. It could easily be a mis-count. Fifty-one or more and there’s a problem. The area manager will demand that we do it all over again.
Our total is out by two hundred and fifty six.
This is when it’s wise to begin a subtle manipulation of the paperwork. The first thing to do is to look at the last Breakages list and assume that it hasn’t got to Head Office just yet. So if there’s eight pencils on the Breakages list, then these can be added to the stock count, therefore making it out only by two hundred and forty eight.
Then one has to look at the other stock that has been written off. Out of date pencils, deleted pencils, pencils that have been recalled due to various health and safety investigations. If a child somewhere gets a splinter from a pencil, then the pencil is withdrawn from sale. If an artist on a remote island artist’s community puts a pencil in their mouth and has an allergic reaction to the paint, then the pencil is withdrawn from sale. This can usually add another twenty or thirty to the final figure. And then there’s the stock that has been transferred to another branch. If shop A phones up shop B and asks for a box of two hundred HB red and white striped pencils, they will often be so relieved to receive the stock that they might quite forget to process the paperwork that comes with it until a couple of months later when it’s found at the bottom of the in-tray next to a mouldy bacon sandwich, the one that’s been funking up the office for the last few weeks. So these transfers, also, and quite cunningly, are added to the grand total of the stock count.
But Head Office gets its revenge. The stock count sheets themselves are incredibly long, a concertina of computer print-outs. A fully unfolded stock count sheet will stretch from here to halfway down the street. On each page are fifty serial codes of the different types of pencil held in stock, and there are three columns which must be filled in: stock in shop [A], stock in store room [B], and total stock [C]. Easy enough, you might think. But for a start, column [A] and [B] must add up to column [C], and each column must add up to the sub total at the bottom of each page, and then each page must add up to the grand total.
There are so many serial numbers that most of them will not be carried by the shop in question. Therefore, the total for each column will be zero. Except Head Office doesn’t like the number zero. They say that it can easily be mistaken for a six, especially if written hurriedly. Every time a zero occurs in the paperwork, the word ‘zero’ has to be written in the space allocated, rather than the number. A typical row will therefore read ‘zero zero zero’, which means that most of a stock count is taken up not with counting, but by writing the word ‘zero’ a couple of thousand times.
Oh, the unique joys of the stock take.
There’s always the dread of the familiar on arriving back at work, whatever the circumstances. The shop seems just to sit there over night, ostensibly inanimate yet filling itself with more reasons for you to hate it. There’s a crushing sense of obligation in every detail as if it’s playing with you, saying, ‘Forget any hopes and dreams you might once have had, forget anything else which might seem important in your life, because you exist for me now, and nothing else’. And while some might argue that in the modern economic climate it might be seen as advantageous and perhaps even privileged to have a job at all, there’s also something emasculating about putting so much energy and thought and worry and paranoia and everything else which makes us human and makes us function as individuals into the selling of pencils. As if to compound the delirium, there are emails from Mona.
She does a good line in sarcasm.
Indeed, it seems a pre-requisite that an area manager should dabble in the black art of sarcasm. Perhaps they teach it at Area Manager School. And like any art movement, it’s not just dependent on content, but also the circumstance and the delivery. An Area Manager standing in the doorway of a shop and saying ‘it looks like a herd of bulls has rampaged through this place’, seems to have a greater effect than merely, ‘Looks like you might need to tidy up in here’. Or then there’s the old classic ‘am I speaking a foreign language? Do you want me to provide a translation?’ This one works especially well when the simplest command has been seemingly ignored, Mona once again standing there with her hands on her hips, demonstrating that as well as being an expert in retail management, sales patterns and category space analysis, and all those other minutiae which make such middle managers feel important in the grand scheme of things, she is also something of a comedian. This morning’s email is profound with such literary shenanigans.
‘Yet again it would seem that most simple of tasks – counting stock – is beyond your capabilities’, is the cheerful phrase she uses to begin her message. I imagine her sitting at home, a plate full of cream buns next to her laptop and Wagner playing on the stereo, firing off this latest communication. ‘It’s not hard to keep a tally. Maybe I should run a seminar on it. Or perhaps not. Go into any good book shop and they will have a volume on simple mathematics’. She then has the sense to end the email with the phrase, ‘kind regards’.
Carol has called in sick. She always calls in sick the day after a stock count, you know, just in case. We open the shop. Matt goes on the till and fumes to himself for the whole of the morning. We have one customer in the first hour, getting a refund on a 25p pencil sharpener that she bought in another branch. Matt is somewhat abrupt with her. Then he’s somewhat abrupt with me when I quip that this is one more pencil sharpener that we will have to count. The fluorescent lights make my eyes hurt.
By midday we have come up with a plan to do the count again that night.
‘We’ll have to be more methodical’, Matt says. ‘Every time we count a box, I will attach a yellow sticky notelet to the side of it so that we can gauge where we have been and what has been counted’.
‘Oh yes, so that’s going to be the answer to everything, is it?’
‘I can’t see you coming up with any better suggestions’.
‘To be honest, I’m beyond caring’.
‘A sticky yellow notelet. And then we will write on all of these notelets, ‘counted’, which will act as a double check’.
I yawn.
‘You’re right’, I tell him. ‘That will be the answer to everything. Problem solved. Every problem the world has ever had, solved, just like that. Sticky yellow notelets’.
‘And they have to be yellow. No other colour will show up in the dark confines of the stock room’.
‘Another night together, then’.
He smiles.
The prospect of spending it in such a way fills me not with dread, but with a rising sense of excitement, especially as the afternoon rolls on. It’s all I can do to stop my heart from beating, seeing him there and knowing that we will be together again. Maybe it’s sleep deprivation, but the world seems suddenly filled with promise and excitement. Because last night, oh yes, last night, Matt came so close to admitting the truth. So incredibly close. And if he doesn’t do it again tonight, I might just sabotage the result myself just to make sure that it all goes in to a third night.
‘Yellow’, I repeat, ‘Notelets’.
Early evening, I find a box of two hundred and fifty pencil erasers in the kitchen microwave. I decide to hide them. Often it’s best not to admit to such things.
Robert Garnham 