'Darcy and O'Mara' is a novel by Arthur Cronin.
Click here to buy the paperback or download the ebook for free.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

The Rain


The rain is a bit of a novelty after a month without it. I didn't know what to make of it at first. I didn't know where to put my feet. If I knew where to put one foot the other would follow, but I didn't know which foot I should move first or where I should put it. So I got wet, but I didn't mind.


My cousin Isobel loves the rain. She often stands in the rain and smiles. On a wet May afternoon she was looking at the ripples of rain drops on the surface of a pond in the park when a bird landed on the hood of her rain coat. A photographer from a newspaper was passing by and he took a photo of her. This was the start of a sequence of events that ended with her being cast as a life guard in a film. She got lots of offers for other roles, and she couldn't talk about anything else for a few months, but the thrill started to wear off eventually, and she started listening to her friends again. She caught up with what they'd been up to over the previous few months.


One day she met a friend of hers called Caroline who hid behind a blank expression she wore to match her designer glasses. She adjusted her tone of voice to match the expression, and she didn't speak about things that wouldn't be in keeping with the monotonous tone, but sometimes some thoughts just needed to get out and she found herself almost unconsciously talking about things she wanted to keep inside. She started talking about the dust on the breeze but she wandered into other areas and she ended up saying, "He says his name is Joe or Alan, depending on who's asking, and if Rebecca's asking he's not in the country right now but if she'd like to leave a message he'll get back to her. If Alice is asking, they'll be rowing down the river in a row boat and she'll be saying 'ooh' a lot, or words to that effect. And I was just another item on the list of women's names, someone to spend a weekend in a country guesthouse with, or to go for a trip down the river. I was nothing more to him."


Isobel said, "I could kick his knee for you, if you like."


"That won't be necessary," Caroline said. There was so little emotion in the way she said it that Isobel assumed she really meant 'If you wouldn't mind, thanks'.


So she went to see Alan or Joe and he said his name was Neil. "I've seen you in that film about the mummy," he said. "I thought you made the other actors look like bits of driftwood."


He was tall and handsome and he made her say 'ah', which could roughly be translated as 'I see', which meant 'so that's why the list of names is so long'. He had the good looks she was accustomed to seeing in the actors they put in front of her to tell her to be strong in between shooting helicopters while jumping out of moving cars. He spoke in a way that matched his good looks. This tone of voice made it difficult for him to talk about anything that didn't relate directly to himself, but that still left him with plenty to talk about.


They watched the ships go by on the river and she listened to him talk about the time he fell off a bus. He took her to a lake in the country where he liked to go to relax. They met a man with a greyhound. He wore a brown suit with white shoes. Isobel told him she had a brown dog with white paws. The only way he could think of responding was with the silent words in the cigarette smoke he exhaled. She didn't like what he said. She expected Neil to say something in her defence, but he wasn't able to speak smoke and the words had gone over his head, rising to the sky and dispersing. He patted the greyhound's head and said, "Good doggie."


They walked away through the fields on the side of the mountain. He told her about his own brief film career. He appeared as an extra in a scene where he had to sit in the back of a police van. "They made me wear a hat," he said. "I didn't look like the sort of person who'd be in the back of a police van, at least not in films. People like me must get arrested all the time in real life. Not that I get arrested all the time. I've only been arrested for admirable crimes, like being drunk and disorderly, or verbally abusing an officer. I'm fairly sure the leading man asked the director to make me wear the hat because he didn't want to be outshone by me. From the moment I walked onto the set he was nervous. He said, 'What's this guy doing here?' I said, 'I'll tell ya what I'm doing here...' I didn't need to say any more than that. I didn't actually say anything, but he could tell what I meant in the way I looked at him. He didn't say anything either, but I could tell. I didn't actually look at him either."


They met a farmer who had a shotgun and he told them to get off his land because someone, or something, had been worrying his sheep and he couldn't rule out the possibility that they were the culprits. He showed them the bullet wound in his foot to let them know he wasn't afraid to use the gun. The foot on its own would have scared them off. Isobel was desperate to get away from it. Neil would gladly have left to get away from another man's bare foot, but his vanity wouldn't allow him to be frightened off by a man with a gun, especially not in the presence of a woman who's used to being rescued by men who shoot helicopters.


Neil said, "How was this sheep-worrier worrying your sheep? By telling them about global warming? I'd be worried if I thought I had to wear a thick Aran sweater's worth of wool in a tropical climate."


"I'll give ye ten seconds to leave."


"I'd be worried about that if I thought you could count to ten."


"Well I can definitely count to three, so let's make it three." He aimed at Neil's foot and said, "One..."


"Wait a minute," Isobel said. "I think I know who's been worrying your sheep. He has a greyhound. And he lets the greyhound loose in your fields. We can show you where we last saw him."


They led the farmer to the lake. On the way, Neil kept making comments like, "Have you seen a man with an Al Gore mask hanging around your sheep?"


Sarcasm went over the farmer's head and he said, "No."


They found the man with the greyhound, and this was the start of a short sequence of events that led to the farmer buying the greyhound, and this brought them all to the track to see the dog win his first race, to which the man in the brown suit reacted with a stream of four-letter words.


This made Isobel smile. She weighed up all the pros and cons of her time with Neil, the beautiful sights and sounds, the little whirlpools of adventure and the dust on the breeze in the evening. To balance everything out she had to kick him on the knee, which she did. And then it started raining, another item for the pro column. A slight re-adjustment was needed, so she apologised for kicking him.


The moose's head over the fireplace doesn't have to worry about getting wet or where to put his legs. He seems to enjoy the sound of the rain on the window. He likes the sound of bells too, and of people talking in other rooms. I think he prefers it when he can't hear what they're saying, because sooner or later they'll start talking about how they didn't know where to put their feet, or the jumper they're wearing, or what you'd say to distract Popeye if you wanted to steal his boat. My theory is that you should say 'Someone was telling me you make fountains'. It's not so much a theory -- it's just something I said when a friend of mine had to steal a motorbike.

Friday, April 20, 2007

The Glass Eye


There's plenty to see around the garden, and it's good to exercise the eyes, to exorcise the images on the cinema screen in your head, stupid things like dogs fighting with umbrellas. Or exercise the legs on a country road on a sunny Saturday and take in all the scenery, the hills and valleys, or a yellow sign with a black cross to indicate a junction. The vertical line is slightly thicker than the horizontal, indicating that this narrow road is the major road to the minor one up ahead. We went down the minor one. It's full of twists and turns and hills and potholes. I recorded all the sights and sounds in my head so I can replay them the next time the dog does something stupid.


My aunt Joyce types her thoughts on a typewriter. She's taken a minor road instead of the modern world's major highway. Fridays type a beautiful array of events onto her life and they keep coming until well into Saturday. This is because of the Thursday night before rather than the weekend to come. Her husband, Uncle Cyril, goes to a meeting of the local historical society on Thursday nights. On the following morning they have trouble remembering the history of the previous night, and it's often left to Joyce to deal with the fall-out. She arranges the events in words on the type writer, and brings some order to them.


On one of those Friday mornings he found a glass eye in his pocket. Of all the things he found in his pockets over the years, this was the thing he most wanted to be lodged in someone else's eye socket. Nestling comfortably in his trousers was the last thing he wanted the glass eye to be doing.


Joyce had the phone numbers of almost everyone in the neighbourhood and she called them on a regular basis to say 'hello' and 'I was just wondering how you got on with your elbow'. She started phoning people and asked if they knew anyone with a glass eye. The responses included an interesting variety of 'no's, including one 'no, but I know someone with a funny ear', but then someone mentioned Fintan, to which Joyce responded with an 'Oh God no!'.


Fintan was a stern man, and he didn't suffer fools gladly. He saw the modern world as a conveyor belt for fools. Young people had it too easy, he thought, and foolishness would colonise the brain like ivy if it wasn't cut down by adversity. He believed there wasn't any affliction that pain couldn't cure. Smiling was something only women and horses should do. It was unseemly conduct in a man, and yet some men were guilty of smiles far beyond the capability of a horse. He believed they all needed a spell in the army and that the army needed a general with a clinically proven sadistic personality. Excessive male smiling was the most obvious sign of a brain whose facade is invisible behind the ivy veil of foolishness.


Joyce made a few more phone calls and she found out that Fintan was at the pub where the historical society met, and his eye had been stolen there. He took his eye out so someone could punch him in the face. He had criticised a man called Derek for drinking white wine. Fintan suggested he must have been struck by lightning or been smiling too much. Derek responded by saying, "I'd punch you in the face, but you shouldn't punch a man with a glass eye."


Fintan was only too happy to take his eye out because he thought it was one of those situations where the other fella punches you and then you get to break a chair over the other fella's back. And when a man is drinking white wine, getting him to punch someone and breaking a chair over his back is almost a medical necessity. It's like the kiss of life, only at an opposite pole to kissing a man.


Fintan put the eye on a table and turned back for the punch. But Derek refused to punch him because he saw what was coming, and he saw what was going too when the glass eye was stolen behind Fintan's back. Fintan was disappointed when Derek refused to punch him. He was furious when he turned around and saw that his eye had been stolen. He turned back towards Derek to ask who had taken it, but Derek had gone too. He'd been in hiding ever since.


Whoever took the eye must have slipped it into Cyril's pocket. So there was a chance that a man's hand ventured in there with the glass eye. This is why Cyril only considered the possibility that the thief was a woman, whereas Joyce never doubted that it was a man.


She brought order to her thoughts when the type writer ribbon drew beautiful lines in black ink that all pointed towards the same conclusion: just explain the situation to him calmly and rationally and if there's anything calm and rational in his head it'll make him nod and say, "It's not Cyril's fault."


She spoke in a crystal clear voice that was as sharp as a glass bottle broken off the brass railing around a bar. With just a few words she could make people drop the bottle they'd just broken and cry in despair. She was sure she could make Fintan see sense and not blame her husband for the temporary disappearance of his glass eye.


But Cyril wouldn't let her do this. He said, "Fintan won't blame me if there's anything calm and rational in his head. If. That's a huge assumption to make. And he'll wonder why I took so long to return it. He'll be suspicious."


"Okay," Joyce said. "I'll just have to find the real culprit. And I just have to find Derek to find out who took the eye."


But she couldn't find Derek. He was laying low because Fintan was looking for him. During the course of her investigations Joyce heard various quotes attributed to Fintan, such as 'I've dug a pit for when I catch the person who stole my glass eye'.


Her investigations seemed to be leading nowhere, but she discovered the identity of the thief by chance. It was a woman called Abigail. Cyril was over the moon to hear that the thief was a woman, and he was glad it was Abigail too. She was English. She stood and she spoke in ways that suggested the influence of teachers who made her walk with books balanced on her head and repeat phrases about the Jaguar her father owns, and her father's car probably was a Jaguar.


She often went to a small cafe near an old church. She met a friend of hers called Judith who always had long, meandering stories that led to conclusions in lines like 'So I plugged in the kettle' or 'I had to put the cat back on the piano', the sort of everyday events that would be forgotten if they didn't have long stories pointing towards them, like a flashing neon arrow pointing at a tea cup.


Joyce met Judith when she was out for a walk. Judith told her about a fork she found, and she mentioned a minor detail in passing: that Fintan and Abigail hated each other. In the context of Joyce's investigation, this detail had bright red arrows pointing at it.


The animosity stemmed from a turnip. Fintan sold his vegetables at a stall in the market every Saturday. He was proud of his turnips. He had them at the front of his stall. One turnip in particular caught the eye of many customers because of its unique shape. Everyone was complimentary about it until Abigail came along. She said, "If that turnip was a human being, it would be a drug dealer."


Fintan felt deeply insulted. He said, "Your strawberries would be addicts"


"They don't do drugs. They're 100% organic."


"That's even worse. They'd be the first to surrender in a war."


"Your turnips would be the first to pretend to be mad by writing on their faces just so they can be discharged."


"Your strawberries would pretend they're mad to avoid being drafted."


"It's always about war with people like you. Even in vegetables you can't help seeing soldiers and generals and conscientious objectors."


"It's always about drugs with people like you."


"I've never done drugs in my life."


"You've probably done yoga, and that's even worse."


"I haven't."


"You've grown organic strawberries, and that's even worse than yoga. It's like bringing your kids up as vegetarians."


"You've probably shot someone, and that's worse than anything I've ever done in my life."


"You would say that."


Joyce made a few more phone calls and she discovered that Fintan had suspected Abigail of taking the eye and he confronted her about it. She was wearing a light summer dress and sandals. When he asked her if she had the eye she said, "Where am I going to hide a glass eye?"


He put a considerable amount of thought into that, considering it was a rhetorical question. He couldn't think of an answer to it, so he walked away.


Joyce went to see Abigail with the glass eye. Abigail admitted taking it, and she said she regretted it. She was worried about having to face Fintan and tell him the truth. Joyce said she'd go with her for support.


So they went to Fintan's house and when he opened the door Abigail showed him the eye and said, "I think this is yours."


"I knew it," he said. "Stealing a man's eye is like shooting him in the back, and that's exactly the sort of thing you'd do."


"It always comes back to shooting with you, doesn't it."


"It always comes back to not shooting with you."


"You seem to have forgotten the fact that the eye is still in my possession. And you won't get it back until you say 'please'."


Fintan made his feelings known by glaring at her with his good eye. She responded by throwing the glass eye into the field at the other side of the road.


"Sorry," she said.


She helped him look for it. They found it after a few days. He got to know her much better in that time, and he completely changed his opinion of her. She thought that most people were fools too, and that few of them could claim to be more distinguished than a turnip.


The moose's head over the fireplace often makes people feel inferior because of the distinguished look on his face. I've never detected any more than a faint smile, but he doesn't look as if he has anything against people enjoying themselves. I try to emulate him by standing in silence and looking distinguished, but it's more difficult than it looks. He's like all great sports people -- they make their game look easy. Whether it's Lionel Messi scoring wonder goals or Christiano Ronaldo doing his step overs just for comic effect, or the moose's head looking refined, sometimes you've just got to applaud genius and accept you'll never reach their heights.



















'The Tree and the Horse' is a novel by Arthur Cronin.
It's available in paperback or as an ebook.
Click here to read the first two chapters.
Click here to buy the book.



Thursday, April 12, 2007

The Detective


It's good weather for tennis, if you're into tennis. It's better weather for not playing tennis. There'a a huge yellow ball in the sky and it's doing all sorts of fascinating things to the garden. It seems a shame to focus all your attention on a tiny yellow ball that feels funny because of what the dog did to it.


My cousin Albert played cards with his friends, George and Neil, and they argued about which one of them could fill Louise's mind enough to make her walk into a door frame. Albert thought it would be him because of his scarf. He wore it all year 'round. He thought it gave him character. It would if he had a few different scarves, but he just had the one. It kept women like Louise away because they could guess what it must smell like. He didn't want to wear different scarves because people would just think he's gay. But no one thought he was gay for wearing just one scarf all year 'round, in the same way that no one thought Felix was gay for keeping a stuffed rat called Alfie in his coat pocket. People just thought they were odd.


But George and Neil were just as odd. George tends to jump for no reason. His jumps are preceded by sudden impulses to jump and sometimes they're accompanied by a sound or a word. Sometimes the sounds or words are succeeded by sounds or words that express the pain of landing on something antagonistic to feet; sounds that make birds fly from trees or words that should be drowned out by sounds.


Neil has a habit of choking on peas, laughing when someone says 'Free Willy' and dropping crisps on the ground to make fun of someone who once did a 24-hour fast for charity.


They knew their presence was unlikely to make a woman like Louise accidentally injure herself (if anything, they'd make her injure herself on purpose). But they were willing to lower their expectations. Any woman would do, even the one with her name tattooed backwards on her face so she just has to look in a mirror to see it. The problem was, even the one with her name tattooed backwards on her face was probably thinking she wouldn't lower her standards to allow her to consider the man who wears the same scarf all year 'round.


They needed a change of image, and Neil came up with an idea that seemingly couldn't fail: they'd learn how to surf. He knew a surfer who could teach them. Jerry had learnt how to surf to attract women too, and it worked for him. He was taught by a man called Monty who said his grandfather had spontaneously spilled on a recently installed patio. Monty wanted to spend as much time as possible in the sea in case it ever happened to him. He could become one with the waves instead of seeping through the cracks between the patio tiles.


Jerry agreed to teach Albert, Neil and George how to surf. It was a plan that couldn't fail as long as they couldn't fail to learn how to surf, and Jerry said only an idiot could fail.


He was more diplomatic after they failed. He said they had the wrong type of waves. "But ye don't need to surf to attract women," he said. "I spent a few months in the south of France once. I often met a man in the bar who wore dark sunglasses and designer clothes, and somewhere in his Ferrari there was a tape of a woman singing his name to music, and a photo of her holding up her hair and saying something with her lips that you can hear in the photo. Some people were jealous of him. He was a bit of a twat. I heard him talking to a woman on the phone one day, and some of the things he was saying would make you cringe, but they were obviously making her want to get him out of his designer clothes. When he got off the phone he turned to me and said, 'And all because the lady loves my potatoes.' It's impossible to tell why some men have a way with women and others don't. It's a mystery. You've just got to do your own thing and it'll work eventually."


Albert, George and Neil bought ice creams and looked out over the sea in silence as they thought about what Jerry had said. They went to an old castle and spent an hour walking around the ruins, and then an hour or two looking at a snail. They looked at people in the supermarket car park. They saw an open-air play in the park where a man with a cloak was sweating and pointing. They stood in the library until the sun came down to meet their faces and tell them it's time to go home. On the following day they stood in the swimming pool, lost in a sea of echoing voices and the various sounds of people meeting water, deep in thought in the shallow end. They stood on a trailer behind a tractor, as the driver told them about what he was thinking of wearing on Friday night, his shouting voice competing with and losing to the engine noise. They looked out over the sea again. Albert eventually broke the silence when he said, "It's not much of a mystery, when you think about it. I mean, he had a Ferrari."


"Yeah," Neil said. "We could be waiting a long time before any of us are in a position to buy a Ferrari."


"There must be some other way," Albert said. "I think we should split up and try different things. If something works for one of us, the other two can try it."


George and Neil agreed, and they went their separate ways.


It was a beautiful summer day. Albert walked away through a merry-go-round of scenery, looking everywhere for an idea, like a detective with a magnifying glass, but the detective in Albert's head took about ten seconds to find a suitable femme fatale and a room in a hotel where waiters wore white jackets, men wore black and women wore diamonds to compete with the chandeliers. Albert thought it'd be worth getting shot by a jealous husband just for a roll-in-the-hay in a room with a femme fatale. As long as he wasn't shot in the head. Maybe in the shoulder, or in his foot. A graze on the shoulder.


He knew he needed something with a strong magnetic force that women wouldn't be able to resist. A Ferrari would do the job. He tried to think of something else, and the idea of becoming a detective took up residency in his head. And it wasn't a bad idea. He thought that if he thinks like a detective, those thoughts will pervade his being. He'll morph into the sort of tough, wise-cracking private investigator who are magnets for deadly, wise-cracking women.


He didn't want to be investigating anything that could get him shot in the shoulder. He needed a case without danger, something the cat might have done. It was all about the way he approached the problem. He just needed a mystery, and then he'd apply the skills of a PI to solving it.


He watched his neighbours go off to the races in their top hats and new walks. They were drinking champagne and letting their laugh flow the other way, the laugh they learnt from a man who speaks German, and loves to speak German, and people ask him to speak it as if they were asking him to sing a song. "Will you give us an old blast of the German there Tommy?" He had a musical way of letting the German words fall out. He carefully produced each one, as if he was conceiving and giving birth to them, unlike the effortless way he let the syllables slip out when he was performing his own brand of English.


This provided Albert with his mystery: what was Tommy actually saying?


He went through all the detective novels and TV shows in his mind and came up with a mental list of procedures. Look at the crime scene, try to glean as much information from the police as possible, talk to the witnesses, question the next of kin and listen to Abba. Ask pertinent questions. "Why am I listening to Abba? I don't even like Abba."


He spoke to one of Tommy's neighbours, who said, "I heard of a woman who once tried to staple his trousers to a chair because of something he said. I don't know if she was upset by what he said or seduced by it. I don't know if he was wearing the trousers at the time."


Tommy's cousin said he heard some people suggest that the German performances were really just a means of passing on messages to Soviet spies.


"Yeah," Albert said. "He's probably trying to tell them the Cold War is over."


"That's just what they want you to believe."


"Who's 'they'?"


"Dinny and Bing."


"Are you still fighting with them over the sugar?"


"Those feckers can rot in hell before they get their sugar back."


Waiting was something else the detectives did. Waiting and keeping their eyes peeled. Albert met a woman called Karen while he was waiting by the beach. She smiled at him a lot, and for him it was like someone shining a bright light on his face. It took a long time for his eyes to adjust. Eventually he was able to look her in the eyes without wearing shades. His mental detective had obviously pervaded enough of his being to draw her in. Or else it was 'Dancing Queen'.


He told her he needed to translate some messages that were being passed on in German. She said she spoke German. Albert wanted to express his approval, but he didn't know how to translate 'I've found the right potatoes' into something she'd understand, so he just nodded, which suited his new image.


He needed to arrange for her to listen to Tommy speak German. He achieved the desired outcome through a series of chance encounters and accidents that left him hiding in the back of a small van with Karen and a knitting needle, and he thought three was a crowd. One of his neighbours was outside talking to Tommy, and she asked him to speak German.


Karen translated it for Albert. "I couldn't understand all of it," she said. "There were some words I haven't heard before. I could make out something about a Martian eating jam. And a wet postbox. Is that significant?"


"Possibly," Albert said. He couldn't say what he really thought, which was that Tommy couldn't speak German.


He took her to hear the neighbours in top hats laughing. She thought it was hilarious. And then they went to a barn dance.


Neil was at the dance with a woman and a robot he made (the woman was one-hundred percent real). He tried to get the robot to dance. He made adjustments and pressed buttons and said, "Damn. Maybe if I try this." And made adjustments and pressed buttons and said, "Damn. Maybe if I try this." And all the time the motionless robot with the cowboy hat looked as if it had been bound to a chair and drugged. And the woman stood there with her arms folded, occasionally adding a 'It doesn't really matter if he can't dance now'. All Neil had to do to get her to dance was to say 'Do you want to dance?'.


George's magnet method was to wear the right trousers and set his legs to their favourite stance. He met a French woman who spoke in a stream of syllables that tickled his ears. She was tall and thin and she didn't have a clue what he was saying to her or to the world as a whole when he spoke to the world as a whole to reinforce what he was trying to articulate with his trousers. His words reflected a 'take on the world' stance and this was consistent with what his legs were doing. He was trying to say to her, "This is who I am." At the very least he managed to say, "This is what my legs are doing."


The legs of Albert, Neil and George all went line dancing that night, and it didn't suit any of their new images, but it didn't make the women run away, and that was all that really mattered.


The moose's head over the fireplace casts an interesting shadow on the wall when the sun shines in on him. The wife's uncle doesn't like the shadow of the antlers. He says it reminds him of a dance teacher he knew who wore a hat with antlers on it, and she frightened him. What's on people's heads is an expression of what's inside, but you shouldn't necessarily expect aggression from someone wearing antlers. The wife's uncle didn't feel the slightest bit uneasy with the raw aggression shown by those who'd shaved their heads, but he was frightened of the dance teacher because he just didn't know what was going on beneath the antlers. You can understand it when someone punches you in the face, but not when they wear antlers and write songs about mice.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

The Trench


When I stand in the garden in the evenings I can hear the faint sound of someone singing in the distance. It must be one of the neighbours, but I don't know which one it is. It's either a man who makes candles or a man who has an unhealthy fascination with fires. I can't hear enough of the songs to gain an insight into the mind of the singer.


My cousin Alan and his brother, Ronan, were walking down the road near their house one day when they met George, one of their neighbours. He managed to talk them into digging a trench. They didn't know how he did it, and they started blaming each other as they were digging the trench in George's back garden. But after an hour of digging, they were able to talk their way out of it when he mentioned that he was hoping to lure someone into it. Alan said they were pacifists, and they could have no further part in such a plan.


George was delighted. He didn't support pacifism, but he supported pacifists because their presence offered all the enjoyment of hitting people without the pain of being hit back. He was determined to show his support, but they left when he went inside to get a stick to hit them.


They walked away down the road, but they had to run when they heard the sound of an engine and they turned around to see a happy George on board his moped. He was always happy on his moped, but he was even happier then because he had his favourite stick and he was bearing down on two pacifist bipeds.


They climbed over a gate and ran through a field. He had to leave the moped behind and run after them, but they were able to get away because they could run quicker. Eventually they slowed down, and then started walking, and they stopped when they met two friends of theirs, Malcolm and Paul


Nothing much had happened in Malcolm's morning. He turned the page to see the afternoon, and it was just like the previous page until he got to the second paragraph. He found a small box outside his front door. He took it inside. His first name was written on the box, but there was no address or stamps on it. He opened the box and saw a cake inside. The words 'Hapy Birthday' were written on the cake.


It turned out that there was a perfectly simple explanation for it, the sort of thing you'd expect to find on page one of this day. At the time, Malcolm was able to come up with various simple explanations, but they were the sort of thing you'd expect to find on page two-hundred of a spy novel. He decided he'd be safer on the same page as someone with a gun, so he went to see Paul.


The cake was actually left there by a friend of his called Sarah who makes birthday cakes. She had just finished one when she realised that she had left out a 'P' in the icing, so she started work on another. She got the icing right the second time, even though she was rushing. She thought she'd just have enough time to deliver the cake before the party. Malcolm's house was on the way. She stopped there, and she left the cake outside the door. She didn't have time to ring the doorbell and explain what had happened, but she thought he'd put two and two together (one 'two' was her poor spelling and the other one was the fact that she makes birthday cakes).


The above explanation never crossed Malcolm's mind as he went to Paul's house. The mystery of the box frightened him, and made him consider the sort of explanations that involved assassainations. The missing 'P' only made him more paranoid. He made Paul nervous too, with questions like, "How quickly could you load your gun when someone knocks on the door?"


Paul thought he'd need to be holding a loaded gun if he was going to be on the same page as Malcolm.


They went for a walk through the fields to make it more difficult for anyone to track them down. Paul pointed out all the things he could shoot, and he came very close to pulling the trigger once. Alan and Ronan's claim to be pacifists nearly got them shot when Paul saw two men running through the fields. But Malcolm recognised them in time, and they were saved.


Alan and Ronan were delighted to see Paul with his gun. It meant they could stop running from George with his stick. When George caught up with them, Alan said, "You're going to have to do better than a stick."


George said, "What sort of pacifists are ye if ye've taken on a man with a gun?"


"We're only armed as a means of defence. It's a deterrent against attack."


"My trench is just a means of defence too."


"Are you expecting a German infantry division?"


"No. It's much worse than that. I'm expecting Percy."


Percy was a bookie. He never needed a calculator to work out odds or winnings. He was able to compute everything in his head, and he always imagined a game of table tennis in his head as he worked out the sums. You could see him moving his eyes from side to side just before he came up with the figure.


He was taking bets at a local table tennis tournament, but the matches seemed to be interfering with his computational skills. George won when he bet on a player who made his bat out of a table mat someone threw at him. He thought it would bring him good luck, and it did. Or else his opponent suffered more bad luck because of his lucky headband/blindfold. A table tennis match was in progress when Percy was paying George, and he found it difficult to concentrate. He ended up paying George twice as much as he had won. George didn't say a word about it, but Percy eventually realised his mistake. He demanded the return of the money, but George refused on principle. Percy gave him twenty-four hours to pay. Percy often gave people twenty-four hours to pay or to return something or to leave town. He believed that the threat was implied when he said, "You have twenty-four hours."


George certainly perceived the threat, but he was still determined to hold onto the money. His plan was the dig a trench and pretend to be hiding in a tree at the back of his garden. Percy would arrive after the sun had set, so it would be difficult to see the trench. He wouldn't spot it if he was looking up at George in the tree. With Percy in the trench, George could make whatever demand he wanted. He hadn't decided on the wording of the demand yet, but he knew it would include the words 'You have twenty-four hours'.


But he didn't need to do that now that he had an armed Paul. Instead of hiding in the tree at the back of his garden, he could proudly stand on the lawn in the front.


Alan, Ronan, Malcolm and Paul all returned to the house with George. They stood on the lawn and waited for Percy. When he arrived, George said, "You have twenty-four seconds to get off my property."


Percy lit a cigarette and thought about the problem. After about two minutes he said, "Okay," and he left.


"Did ye notice the way his tail was between his legs?" George said when Percy was out of earshot.


George spent the next ten minutes telling them his version of the way he outsmarted Percy, but the ending was cast in doubt by the return of Percy. He was with two men. They were cousins of his, and they both had guns. Percy said, "I thought to myself, what do you do when you're up against a man with a gun who's insisting that you do something you don't want to do? When you're facing one gun, you get two guns. It's one of the basic laws of nature."


Malcolm could only see one possible ending, and he finally cracked. He screamed and ran away around the side of the house. They could hear him falling into the trench at the back.


George said to Alan and Ronan, "This is where pacifism gets you."


"This is where greed gets you," Alan said.


"I suppose you're against capitalism as well."


"No. And we're not really pacifists. We just said that to get out of digging the trench."


"That's completely typical of pacifist anti-capitalists. 'I want to get out of that war. I don't want to work. I want to live in a tree.'"


"It's your bloody trench," Ronan said. "You should have been digging it."


"You have a trench?" Percy said.


"I have a sort of a trench," George said. "The sort of trench you get when you hire half-arsed pacifists who couldn't be arsed."


"Hire?" Alan said. "You 'hired' us? Wouldn't that imply some sort of payment for the work?"


"Work? Wouldn't that imply some sort of... work?"


"We spent an hour digging it."


"Ye're pacifists when it suits ye, and ye're capitalists when there's money involved."


"I get paid when there's money involved," Percy said.


"George gets laid when there's money involved," Alan said.


"Right," George said, and he picked up a shovel. "Let's see if I can beat any remaining vestiges of pacifism out of you."


"Fine," Alan said. He picked up another shovel. "I'm going to make you want to spend the rest of your life in a tree."


"Wait a minute," Percy said. "As much as I'd like to watch ye fight with shovels and take bets on the outcome, I'm interested in this trench."


They went around the back to see the trench. Malcolm was lying in it. He had started to see it as his grave, so he wasn't surprised by the arrival of the mourners, some of them holding shovels.


Percy said, "I have a compromise solution that should be satisfactory to everyone. I want to build a swimming pool behind my house, but I'm having trouble digging the hole. I can't get any sort of a mechanical digger around the back, not even a small one. The wife has a very elaborate garden with flower beds and paths and God-knows-what. She won't allow me the pleasure of driving a digger through it. So it needs to be done manually. If ye dig the hole, I'll forget about reclaiming the money."


"It's a deal," George said. He was delighted with this solution. Alan and Ronan weren't too happy, but they didn't want to say anything in front of Percy.


Malcolm felt he was saved by their accord. They helped him out of the trench, and it felt like a new lease of life, as if this was the date of his new birth. He went home and ate his birthday cake.


Percy was also hoping that Alan, Ronan and George would fight in the hole, but there was no animosity between them. George had to pay Alan and Ronan, so they weren't angry with him. It cost him much more than repaying Percy, and they kept reminding him of this as they dug the pool. But he didn't seem to mind. He kept boasting about how he got one over on Percy.


The moose's head over the fireplace is enjoying all this sunshine. He's been wearing his shades a lot recently. The wife got him a cowboy hat to keep the sun out of his eyes, but because of his antlers, he just looks like a hat stand.