The Wrenboys

We had a heavy frost yesterday morning, so it was a white Christmas of sorts. Santa brought his usual selection of presents. My great-grandfather refused to accept any presents, unless they came in a bottle. He claimed he once found the meaning of life, but a monkey took it and he had to shoot the monkey. All presents seemed like an anti-climax after that. It's Saint Stephen's Day today, so we're expecting a visit from the wrenboys, who go out hunting the wren (which involves dressing up in costumes and going from house to house looking for money).

My uncle Cyril told me a story about the wrenboys who called to his house one Stephen's Day. There were two of them. One was small and one was tall. The tall man was dressed as a member of the gentry and the small one was dressed as a peasant. When Cyril opened the door they started acting out a sketch. The small one said to the tall one, "This little story is about a toe, sir."

"About a toe, you say?" the tall one said.

"Yes sir, a toe."

"Like the ones you find on your feet?"

"Yes sir, them ones precisely, like the ones most people have on their feet, but this one wasn't on a foot. It was in a matchbox."

"If it was in a matchbox, would it be fair to infer that it was a small toe? Or a big toe from a small person, perhaps a child?"

"No, indeed not, sir. A child's severed toe would be a dark place for a story to dwell, especially at this time of year. Especially if the toe was no longer in the child's possession."

"You mean to say that if the child was carrying the toe around in a matchbox, that wouldn't be as dark as an eventuality in which someone else had the toe?"

"Goes without saying. If the child had the toe in a matchbox, that would suggest he's proud of it. He'd show it to people. He'd use it to frighten girls, and he'd take his shoe and sock off on a regular basis to show off his stump."

"That's assuming the child is a boy. I can't imagine a girl being proud of a severed toe."

"Imagining these things is exactly what you're doing, sir. Children's toes have nothing to do with this story. This particular toe was the small toe of a grown man. He wasn't proud of the toe itself because it wasn't much to look at. He was proud of his dogs because they were so good at retrieving the ducks he shot, but the toe couldn't do anything like that. It was just a symbol of his suffering and that's what he was proud of."

"How did he lose it?"

"He didn't lose it at all, sir. He kept it in a matchbox."

"No, I mean how did it become separated from his foot? It was once attached to his foot, wasn't it?"

"You're quite correct in making that assumption, sir. Although I know a man who kept a bit of someone else's finger in his pocket, as a symbol of this other fella's suffering. And he was proud because he had inflicted that suffering. But in this case, yes, the toe had once been attached to the foot of the man who carried it around in a matchbox. The toe would have been much happier in the matchbox rather than being stuck in one of his socks with all those other toes. It was probably glad to be liberated in such dramatic circumstances. This story involves a woman who had a wooden leg, and she nailed five wooden toes onto it."

"Someone once told me that if you add 'toe' to 'woman' you get 'woe to man'."

"That's very true, but having toes without any woman wouldn't be an ideal state of affairs either. Toes are no substitute for a woman."

"I suppose that depends on the woman."

"Quite possibly, sir, but this one was a fine woman. She could be as imposing as a marble statue high up on a pedestal, and she could be as gentle as a flower dancing in a light breeze. She carved her own toes. She thought they looked dull and lifeless when they were just plain old toes, so she carved faces, and she made sure they were ugly faces because that made it easier to nail them to a wooden leg. They resembled gargoyles. The man at the centre of this story entered the proceedings in the pub one night when someone dared him to steal one of her toes. This involved breaking into her bedroom in the middle of the night while she slept. He had no qualms about doing such things. In fact he had something other than qualms, but that's another story. He broke into her bedroom without waking her up, and he removed one of the toes with a claw hammer. He made his getaway, and when he was walking home in the light of the moon he looked at the toe. He saw a face looking back at him. It seemed as if the face was in pain. While he was focussing all of his attention on the toe, he didn't look where he was going, and he stepped into a snare. This is how he lost his toe. He screamed in agony, and when he looked at the wooden toe again, the face on it was laughing."

The small man looked at Cyril and held out a collection box. Cyril normally gave them buttons, but he felt he had to give them money after they had given up so much of their time while he stood there watching. He could have closed the door. He wished he had closed the door shortly after opening it, but they made sure to get the mention of the severed toe in early, and he had to hear the rest of the story after that. It worked on everyone. Cyril thought he was ready for them on the following year. He was just about to close the door when they mentioned a nose that fell off, and he had to hear the rest of that story too.

The moose's head over the fireplace looks very content with a pipe in his mouth and a Santa hat on his antlers. Apparently he got them from the man himself early on Christmas morning. The dog ate his Santa hat. The wife tried to get him to wear it. She got the idea from one of the neighbours, who didn't bother putting up decorations -- he just got a lamb instead. The idea of living decorations could catch on because they're more environmentally friendly.

A Christmas Ghost

The Christmas decorations are up. I've put some lights on the trees in the garden. Decorating trees is a tradition that started over a century ago in this area. A man called Felix decorated a tree in his garden, but he'd never heard of Christmas decorations. He thought the tree looked bare in the middle of winter. Everyone else got dressed up on Christmas Day and the kids were washed. He saw the tree as a human being. He had been staring at it for too long, and he saw poses and gestures in the branches, especially when the wind was strong. His neighbours started decorating their trees too, and rivalries developed. They tried to out-do each other. Felix was horrified. He thought that no one was respecting the personality of the trees. When he was going home from the pub one night, all he saw was hideously dressed trees. The wind was strong at the time, so he pulled down the decorations and he pretended that the wind had undressed the trees. But in the light of day all he saw was naked trees. He was horrified, for a while, but then he started to see the appeal of naked trees. His neighbours didn't share his vision, and they decorated their trees again.

My cousin Alan was short of cash one Christmas. He had bet a small fortune on a horse that couldn't lose. His friend Jonathon told him it couldn't lose. Jonathon had once convinced him to bet on a boxer who 'had to win', but he lost because he injured his head when he fell off his stool. The horse lost too.

Alan went to see Jonathon to complain. "I thought you said the horse couldn't lose," Alan said.

"You can never account for unforeseen circumstances. If you could, they wouldn't be unforeseen."

"What unforeseen circumstances were there in this case?"

"Who'd have thought that four other horses would run faster than him. I thought maybe one of them would, but not four."

"I need to make some money to pay my rent and buy Christmas presents."

"Why not go on one of those TV game shows? It looks like easy money."

"I'd be too scared."

"Most of those contestants are morons. You should never be afraid if you come up against a moron. Unless it's in a dark alley and they're armed. They'll sense that they can't outsmart you. They'll know it subconsciously, even if they can't form the thought in their conscious minds, and they do struggle with conscious thoughts and putting things into words. They'll use force instead of words. These people are stupid enough to go on TV to show how stupid they are. They have nothing. It's like being frisked to show they're not armed, and then handcuffed as well. And stripped naked. They're left with no weapons apart from their intelligence, and that's about as dangerous as a butterfly. They're forced to just smile and show the world how stupid they are. If you're afraid of going up against that, there's something wrong with you."

"Intelligent people can look stupid if they're overcome by nerves, and I'd be too nervous on TV. I need to find some other way of making money."

"There are loads of jobs you can get at Christmas. You could become a Santa."

"That's not a bad idea."

It wasn't a bad idea, but unforeseen circumstances meant that Alan only lasted an hour in the job. He became a Santa in a shopping mall. A German man was playing another Santa in the same mall. His accent confused the kids at first, but when they thought about it, it made sense. Santa wouldn't be from around here. So they were suspicious of the Santas who sounded as if they came from the locality. Alan gave up after an hour of being kicked on the shins by kids.

As a last resort he asked his landlady if she could wait until the new year for her rent. She laughed at the suggestion, but she had one of her own. Her brother owned a shop that rarely closed. He had found a woman stupid enough to get involved with him, and he'd been looking for someone else to look after the shop in the evenings while he goes out with her.

Alan agreed to do the job. Her brother, Dan, reminded Alan of Scrooge. He hated Christmas, kids, and spending money, but somehow he had managed to get a good-looking girlfriend who was ten years younger than him. Alan met her in the shop one evening. Her name was Fiona. He asked her how she ended up going out Dan and she said, "It was an in-depth knowledge of Voltaire that did it for me. For me, an in-depth knowledge of Voltaire would be more important than things like looks or personality."

"Or a willingness to spend money."

"Yeah. I'd also place an in-depth knowledge of Flaubert or of Proust above those things. That's not to equate Flaubert or Proust with Voltaire. They're all very different from each other. He hates Flaubert more than he hates Santa Claus. He said that if the entire works of Flaubert could be turned into a nail, it should be hammered into a tree and then the tree should be buried under concrete. He hates trees too."

"I wouldn't have thought he'd know anything about Voltaire. I know nothing about Voltaire, apart from... No, nothing."

"You're lucky you've got looks and personality."

On the following evening, Alan was supposed to look after the shop until eleven o' clock, but it was nearly midnight before Dan arrived back. He had a smile on his face, something Alan had never seen before.

"Your old boss is dead," Dan said. "I'm a new man. Something's changed, and I've seen the light. Fiona's sister organised a party for kids at the hospital. It's on tomorrow, and they were getting everything ready tonight, but someone lit a candle and it set off the sprinklers. The Christmas decorations and all the food was ruined. They only had a few hours to sort it out. Fiona asked me to help, and I didn't want to, but she told me it was one of those things I had to do. I'm so glad I did it. I became engrossed in the work, and when I thought about doing it for all those sick kids, it started to feel rewarding. It was like a dam bursting in me. I've been suppressing the need to do good for years, but now it's out. From now on I'll only do good. I came back to get the food for the party. I'm donating it for free. Sorry about keeping you waiting. You'll be well paid for the overtime."

When Alan met Fiona a few days later he said, "You must be delighted with the new Dan."

"No. It's terrible. He's so boring now. I fell in love with the old Dan, but this is a different person. I've met hundreds of men like the new Dan and they all bored me to tears. It was those experiences that made me more susceptible to someone like the old Dan."

"The old one can't be too far away. He must be lurking just beneath the surface."

"I'd give anything to get him back for Christmas. If you can help bring back the old miser I love, I'll pay your rent."

"Why not copy 'A Christmas Carol', only in reverse. Arrange a visitor in the middle of the night to remind him of his past and suggest that he can't escape it, and that he shouldn't escape it because being a curmudgeon is a noble calling in life."

"He believes in ghosts, so that could work, but only if he was drunk enough to believe that a ghost would visit him to tell him to become a miser again."

She spoke about the sort of people Dan would listen to, and she said he believed that German people had a natural authority in their voices. Alan remembered the German Santa in the shopping mall, and he seemed ideal for the role of a Christmas ghost.

They went to see him and they told him about the job they had for him. He was perfectly happy to help. He said he'd often been asked to visit people's houses in the middle of the night dressed as Santa, but that was just to scare people.

Dan lived above the shop. Fiona visited him one evening and she brought a bottle of whiskey. She made sure he drank enough of it to make the world around him warm and blurry and full of ghostly visions. He went to bed, and just after midnight his visitor arrived. The German man was wearing his Santa suit. Fiona had a key to the back door and she let him in. He went upstairs to Dan's bedroom.

Dan was terrified when he heard the loud German voice. The ghost said, "You must change your ways. You must go back to being the man you really are. Remember when you enjoyed being mean? And you were such a good curmudgeon. You still are, beneath the surface. You can't just change overnight. Or you can, but you'll change back again on another night. And tonight is that night."

"Is that all you came here for?"

"You make it sound insignificant, as if it doesn't matter. I'm telling you something that will change your life. It will make your life better. It will make the people around you happier."

"I'm bored with sneering and scowling and being a miser."

"You can't get bored with who you are for very long. It's your nature. It won't take long before you'll get bored with who you're not. You're probably feeling that already."

"I'm not."

"You are. Admit it. When I told you to go back to your old ways, you were relieved."

"I was relieved because I realised you weren't going to kill me. Or steal my money."

"Aha! You thought about your money. That was an instinctual reaction."

"Just because I've stopped being a miser it doesn't mean I want to be burgled."

"I looked into your eyes and saw the man you really are, and he's not the man you think you are. He's the man you once were."

"So you're saying there's no possibility for change. Forget about self-improvement."

"But is it really an improvement? You've lost your true self and it's been replaced by a self that doesn't burn brightly. There's a tiny birthday cake candle lighting up your lantern. The world around you is a darker place. I'd rather see someone who's true to themselves rather than someone who tries to be something they're not."

"What if I could only be true to myself by torturing puppies?"

"In that instance I'd side with the puppies. They can only be true to themselves if they're not being tortured. But you don't want to torture puppies. You want to be again the man you used to be, and there's nothing wrong with that. You must go back."

The German Santa left and Dan fell asleep shortly afterwards.

Fiona was hoping that the nocturnal visitor would have an immediate effect on Dan, but he was still intent on doing good on the following day. She spoke to Alan about it. He said, "He's heard the theory and now he just needs to see it in practise. He needs to be in a situation where the appeal of being mean is obvious. Is there any way you could get him to dress up as Santa and go to a shopping mall?"

"I doubt it."

"Then we'll have to bring the kids to him. And I know just the two kids for this job."

On Christmas Eve Alan brought his niece and nephew, Daisy and Graham, into the shop to meet Dan. They had their pet duck, Sleepy, who was wearing his miniature reindeer antlers. Dan was delighted to meet them, and he gave them chocolate Santas. Just as they were about to leave, Sleepy fell asleep, and they said they had to wait until he woke up. Dan told them to take all the time they wanted. Daisy and Graham started arguing as they waited. Graham asked questions like 'How many snakes does it take to play Bobby-snob?'. Daisy answered this by saying, "I keep telling you, you don't need any snakes. You don't know how to play Bobby-snob."

Sleepy woke up and took a few steps towards the door, and then he fell asleep again. And the kids started arguing again. Dan was still smiling, but it was obviously a strained smile. Sleepy woke up and fell asleep shortly afterwards, and this finally tipped Dan over the edge. The smile became a scowl and he said, "Either stay in or get out, and if ye're staying in, shut up."

Sleepy woke up and looked around him. Daisy and Graham cheered because Alan had promised to buy them presents if they made his boss angry. Fiona paid Alan's rent and she bought him a present to say thanks for bringing back the curmudgeon she loved.

The moose's head over the fireplace looks confused. The wife's aunt did a painting of him when he was wearing his Santa hat. She depicted him as a scuba diver in a Santa hat. This would be considered normal behaviour amongst the other members of her art class. One man is telling his life story in a tapestry. It started out as something he drew on his hand. The tapestry depicts a strange Santa from the artist's youth. This Santa had long pointy shoes. He appeared every year when the carol singers did their rounds on Christmas Eve. He did a dance and delivered gifts to the houses that the singers called to. His red suit was very tight-fitting and the legs were too short. In the tapestry he has a huge pet rat, but this is just something the artist imagined. The wife's aunt did a painting of this Santa in his sleigh. She depicted him as a tall scuba diver in a van full of fridges.

A Picnic in the Woods

The trees are bare. Autumn's colour show is over, but I like the garden at this time of year. Christmas decorations wouldn't make it any more exciting. The wife's aunt does paintings of the garden. No amount of decorations could make the place seem as unreal as it appears in the paintings. She's started differentiating everything into vans and ghosts and scuba divers, and nothing else. She says the world is much simpler like that. Her paintings of the garden are full of vans and ghosts and scuba divers.

My cousin Craig once went camping with his friend, Tony. At the campsite, they met two women called Maggie and Michelle. The four of them spent a lot of time together, and two couples started to form. Craig often found himself alone with Michelle and Tony ended up with Maggie.

Craig and Tony convinced the women to go for a picnic in the woods one night. They said it would be romantic in the light of the moon.

There was a clearing in the woods where they could sit on rugs and see the stars. This is where they had their picnic, which consisted almost entirely of drink. There was a pond in the woods, and Tony suggested going there after midnight. He led the way. They couldn't see much on the path through the trees. There was an eerie atmosphere, and this affected them. No one said anything.

Maggie screamed when she heard something howling. "Was that a wolf?" Michelle said.

"There are no wolves around here," Craig said. "It was probably just a dog."

"I want to go back," Maggie said.

"We'll be fine," Tony said. "You're forgetting that I once had to shoot a French man." The truth was it was an accident. The uncomfortable truth was that it was a French woman. He shot her in the leg when he was trying to put the gun on a table. She wasn't happy about it. He thought that was just because she was French.

They heard another noise. It sounded like someone laughing. Tony and Craig were terrified. They agreed to go back, but they tried to make it look as if they were reluctant to return, and that there was really nothing to be afraid of.

There really was nothing to be afraid of, until they got lost. They walked for half an hour, and all the time Tony said he knew where he was going, but they ended up at the pond. The water was shrouded in mist. Craig looked into it, and he thought he saw a few sets of glowing red eyes looking back out at him. A man spoke to them in a French accent, but they couldn't see where he was. They looked at Tony, waiting for him to act. He just wanted to run away.

He managed to restrain this impulse and he walked away very quickly instead. The others followed. They kept walking until they met an old woman, who smiled at them and eased their fears. "Are ye lost?" she said.

Tony was going to say, "Well, I wouldn't say 'lost'." But Michelle got there first and said, "Yes, completely lost."

"Follow me."

They followed the woman. She looked as if she was about eighty, but she had a spring in her step. There was a glint in her eyes, and she talked a lot. Her voice was very clear and she was very precise. She put them at ease because she seemed completely at ease with the woods, as if there was nothing to be scared of.

She led them to a clearing, but it wasn't the one where they had their picnic. They saw the heads of dead animals nailed to the trees all around the clearing. This was something to be scared of. The fact that the old woman was smiling was something else to be scared of. "Keep following me," she said. "And don't try running away. I promise you'll regret it if you try. You'll probably regret following me anyway, but all other options will bring you tidal waves of regret."

They followed her. Tony felt helpless. He had wanted to show the women how much of a man he was, but he was at the mercy of an old woman. He felt he had to do something, so he threw a spoon at the woman's back. She turned around and said to Tony, "Did you just throw a spoon at me?"

Tony wondered how she knew it was him. "No," he said.

"If you do that again, I'll find something pointy to stick in your eye." She said that with a smile. The French woman had said something similar with real menace in her voice, but the smile was much more menacing.

They felt utterly helpless. All they could do was wait and let fate do to them what fate was planning to do to them, which was looking like it would involve an eye and something pointy.

Craig thought it was time to get away from the old woman and see how regrettable that course of action would be. When she climbed over a fallen tree trunk, he shouted, "Run!"

He ran back the way they had come. Michelle, Maggie and Tony ran after him. They didn't hear the old woman following them, but they kept running as fast as they could.

As they ran, Tony said to Maggie, "I've always thought that if you know you don't have long to live, you should try to live life to the full in that short space of time. You should do everything you really wanted to do. You should go out with a bang."

Maggie said, "The very fact that you're trying to sleep with me in a situation like this is so off-putting. I wouldn't sleep with you if you were the last man on earth."

"In effect, myself and Craig are the last men on earth."

"What you're saying is that myself and Michelle are going to die before we see another man. What happened to your 'Don't worry, I shot a French man' line? Now it's 'We're all doomed. Doomed! We're all going to die. Because we're all lost in the woods with a psychotic old woman, we're all going to die. Die! Will you sleep with me?'."

"I wouldn't put it like that."

They ended up back at the clearing where the heads of the dead animals were, but since they were last there the animals had acquired bodies and had come to life. They could see where the heads had been stitched to the bodies. Some of the heads and bodies didn't match. The animals had an evil look to them. They encircled Craig, Tony, Michelle and Maggie, and they closed in on them. "I wish I hadn't thrown away that spoon now," Tony said.

"Even a mouse wouldn't fear you with a spoon," Maggie said.

"That was the old me. I feel a new me emerging. I should have taken things into my own hands a long time ago. It's time for action. No more being pushed around by old ladies and furry animals. No more pushing around either. No more pussy-footing with pushing; we're going to bulldoze our way out of this. Follow me."

He looked around for the weakest animal. He chose the squirrel, or at least it had the head of a squirrel. They couldn't say where the body or the eyes came from. Tony ran towards the squirrel and kicked it out of the way, as if he was kicking a rugby ball, and it was a good kick too. Even the squirrel acknowledged that in the sound it made. It was sweetly struck. He kept running and the others followed. Tony grinned the grin of a man who's about to escape death and have hours worth of stories to tell for the rest of his life, stories that portray him as someone who could shoot any number of French men who deserve to be shot. But the grin was removed from his face and replaced by something more sinister, something furrier, something with a black heart. The squirrel landed on his head and clung to his face, muffling his screams. Craig got a stick and started hitting the squirrel/face. Before that night, he'd have felt sick at the thought of hitting a squirrel, but that wasn't the first time he had to hit Tony's face. The squirrel eventually let go and accepted defeat. It ran into the undergrowth.

Craig said, "If that was a rugby kick, it would have been a perfect up-and-under, a Garryowen. You caught it brilliantly."

Under normal circumstances, Tony would have appreciated the rugby reference and he would have loved the compliment about his catch, but these stopped being normal circumstances shortly after he threw the spoon at the old woman.

They ran, and they were determined to keep running until they got out of the woods, but they came across the old woman again. She was blocking their path. She smiled at them, and Tony lost the will to bulldoze his way out of this situation.

"Well, well, well," she said. "No, I can't believe I just said 'well, well, well'. I said that before and I thought, 'Don't ever say that again.' I read these things in books or see them in films and they come out when I'm in similar situations. I might as well add 'What have we here?'. I should say something original, like 'Ye forgot the lemon'."

"What lemon?" Craig said.

"I should say something like 'Ye forgot the lemon', but not that, because there is no lemon."

"Do you want to take a moment to think about what you want to say?"

"Yeah, just give me a moment."

Tony said, "Let's run her down. Rugby style. She's the full back and the ball is heading for her. We can even throw a squirrel at her to make it more realistic. The try line is behind her. We don't even need possession of the squirrel -- we're just heading for the try line."

"I don't know," Craig said.

The woman kept smiling.

"She's more afraid of us than we are of her," Tony said.

"She isn't."

"Do you want to wait around to see what she'll do next?"

"Ye don't have to wait around to see what I'll do next," she said. "If ye want me to do it now, I will. It doesn't really matter what I say. I can think of that later; I'll come up with some brilliant line, and when I'm telling people the story I'll say I used that line. I'll say, 'The stupid one came up with a plan to run right through me, like in rugby. I said...' And that's where my line would go. I could continue with that little story now, but then ye'd know what I'm going to do in advance, and it would ruin the surprise."

"You already know what we're going to do," Tony said. "Has it ruined the surprise for you?"

"No. I know what ye think ye're going to do, but I know how it's going to end. There was never going to be any surprise for me because I've always known how it was going to end."

Maggie started crying. The woman said, "Are you crying because you've known all along that it was stupid to go into the woods with morons?"

Maggie nodded. Tears streamed down her face. Craig thought about turning and running again, but he could hear the animals approaching from behind them, and then he saw countless red eyes emerging from the darkness behind the woman. The eyes belonged to wolves. Craig thought this was The End, with a capital T and an E. But the wolves attacked the woman. The other animals ran past Craig, Tony, Michelle and Maggie, and they fought the wolves. This was when Craig turned around and ran. The others followed. Within a few minutes, they had found the clearing where they had the picnic, and they were on familiar ground again. They didn't stop to gather their things. They ran out of the woods and returned to their campsite. They spent the rest of the night in their tents, listening to the sounds of the countryside around them, but they heard nothing out of the ordinary.

The moose's head over the fireplace got a new pair of glasses. He finds it much easier to read the newspaper with them. I have to hold up the paper for him. The wife's uncle says he once went to an optician and a woman examined his nose. He told her she needed to get her eyes tested, but she said they weren't really hers, and neither were her feet -- they came with her shoes. He asked her out on a date because in his younger days he had a policy of asking women out before they got their eyes tested. As he got older he realised that he didn't have to rely on poor eyesight to attract women. A glint in his own eyes was enough to make them weak in the knees.

Something Pointy

We've had some very strong winds over the past few days. The weather forecasters can predict how strong the winds will be but it's impossible to predict what I'll see being blown across the garden by the wind. A friend of mine became a weather forecaster. He got struck by lightning and he pretended he knew that was going to happen. He gave up weather forecasting shortly after that because it had lost its thrill. He felt he should be out in the field, feeling the effects of thunder storms, rather than predicting the storms from the safety of a studio.

My cousin Ronan read his horoscope one morning, even though he didn't believe in that sort of thing. It said 'You will sit on something pointy'. He chose to dismiss that, but he couldn't help thinking about the pointy things he could possibly sit on, like hedgehogs or thumb tacks or forks. He was careful about where he sat.

He kept thinking about pointy things until he was walking down a street in the afternoon. He was watching his shadow in front of him on the footpath. Both Ronan and his shadow stopped when he heard music. He looked into a garden and saw a man sitting on a lawn. He was wearing a top hat and playing a tiny piano.

Ronan couldn't stop thinking about this until he was in a record shop and he heard the sound of music again. He looked around and saw a man playing a piano, but this one was a grand piano and there was a woman lying across the top of it. She was launching an album. This image didn't erase the one of the man playing the tiny piano. Ronan couldn't help thinking there was a link between the two.

Ronan's nephew, Graham, used to give names to spiders based on his first impression of them. He heard that you could tell a lot about people by your first impression and he was convinced that this applied to spiders too. Whenever he saw a spider he gave it a name within two seconds of first seeing it. He couldn't do this with people because they already had names. He became good friends with a spider called Star Trek. They weren't good friends in the same way Graham was good friends with his best friend Owen. Graham and Owen often kicked each other, but you couldn't kick a spider, no matter how friendly you were with it. Graham tried to teach Star Trek how to do tricks. The commands 'sit' and 'fetch' were never likely to make Star Trek do anything. The only thing Star Trek was likely to go after was a fly, and he wasn't going to bring it back. He didn't live long enough to learn how to retrieve flies without consuming them. It's difficult enough to teach dogs how to do that when they find a shoe. Although in fairness, if a spider goes to all the trouble of building a web, it should be able to eat whatever it catches. If you shoot birds for fun, a well-trained dog should bring the corpse to your feet. Your web is the shotgun, and though you didn't build it yourself, you bought it with your hard-earned money, or else Santa brought it. You could retrieve the bird yourself, but you've only got two legs, and even if you add on the additional four legs of the dog, you're still two short of the spider.

When Star Trek passed away, assuming he did pass away (one day he wasn't there, the next he was there and Graham named him Star Trek, and the next day he wasn't there again) there was no corpse to bury or eat. Graham imagined him floating away in space. Daisy, Graham's sister, thought it was more likely that Star Trek was eaten by an owl.

"Why an owl?" Graham said.

"Why not an owl?"

"Owls can catch mice. Why would they be interested in dead spiders?"

"People eat big cakes and they eat sweets as well."

"Dead spiders are nothing like sweets."

"And mice are nothing like big cakes, so what's your point?"

"I don't know. What's your point?"

"That Star Trek was eaten by an owl."

"You have no evidence for that."

"It's just an impression I have. You have no evidence that his real name was Star Trek. And my idea of him being eaten by an owl is much more likely than your idea of him floating away in space."

Ronan went to a Chinese take-away that evening and he ordered some food. He sat on a chair near the window while he waited, and this is when he sat on something pointy. He stood up and looked down at the chair. There was a plastic bride and groom on it. The groom's head was missing. A few seats away, there was a real woman in a wedding dress.

"Sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have left it there."

"No, I'm sorry. I think I broke his head."

"I broke it. I wish I could do it in real life. If there's any justice, that little plastic man will be like a voodoo doll, and for the rest of his life the real one will be a little plastic man with a broken head."

"I take it your wedding didn't go according to plan."

"Not according to my plan anyway. I don't think I was asking for too much. If you organise a wedding and turn up on the day in your wedding dress, it's reasonable to expect a marriage. But he always has to be awkward. Last week he decided he didn't like the band because they all look like teachers. I should have seen it coming. I should have broken his head then. Today he decided he didn't want to marry me after all. He says he has to be with someone else. He doesn't want to marry her either, but he has to be with her."

"It sounds as if his head was damaged before you did this to the plastic man."

"There was definitely something wrong with him. It's his fault that I'm here getting a Chinese take-away when we have a wedding cake and enough food to feed two hundred people."

"You're better off without him."

"I had an inkling of that when we were at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was criticising everything and I wondered if there was something deeper going on."

Ronan provided a sympathetic ear as she told him all about the last few months of her engagement, presenting all of the evidence of damage to her ex's head. Before Ronan left, she gave him her phone number and said, "Give me a call if you ever want a night on the town with a woman who's trying to forget a man with half a head."

Ronan felt like strutting. He'd just induced a phone number from a woman who'd been left at the altar, had an interest in modern art and once met Salman Rushdie. All of his friends could only induce a carefully placed kick from women whose world didn't extend beyond childish things like getting drunk and buying clothes. They've all been to New York to get drunk and buy clothes.

When Ronan got home to his parents' house in the country he went to his room and he immediately noticed that something was wrong. He had small plastic Star Trek figurines on a shelf, and Spock was missing. Ronan was horrified. He looked all around the room, but there was no sign of Spock. He was just about to start emptying out drawers when he remembered the woman he met at the Chinese take-away. The missing Spock was symbolic. There was a big pointy thing pointing at this. The plastic Spock wouldn't go with the plastic bride. Few human women would marry a Vulcan. The pointy thing was telling him to leave these childhood things behind. The woman represented the adult world.

Ronan forced a smile and said to himself, "I don't care that Spock is missing. Collecting Star Trek memorabilia means nothing to me anymore."

But he couldn't convince himself of this. He looked out the window and saw Daisy and Graham in the garden below with their grandfather, Harry. It looked as if they were up to something, and Ronan guessed that they were behind the disappearance of Spock.

He went out to the garden and asked them what they were doing. Graham told him that they were trying to determine if owls eat dead spiders. Harry had seen an owl in the garden before, so Graham collected some dead spiders to give to the owl. His method of collecting dead spiders was to kill them. He had to flatten them as soon as he saw them. If he didn't, he'd form an impression and give them a name, and it would be difficult to kill them then. He had left the dead spiders in a pile, and he had added in the plastic Spock, just in case the owl would take that and leave the spiders. He felt sure that Star Trek would have appreciated this gesture.

Ronan was relieved to see that Spock was safe, but he started to worry that the owl really would take it. He knew it was unlikely, but he also knew that he'd only stop worrying when he had Spock safely in his possession again. He thought about creating a diversion to distract Harry and the kids, allowing him to take Spock. The kids would think that the owl took it, but that would be a good thing. They'd be filled with a sense of wonder. It would be like finding evidence that Santa exists. There was nothing childish about that, Ronan told himself. Creating the illusion of Santa for kids was inherently adult.

Ronan said, "That's a funny looking cat," and he pointed towards the orchard.

"I didn't see anything," Daisy said.

"He just went into the orchard. I've never seen anything like it before."

They started walking towards the trees. Ronan went with them as far as the start of the orchard, and then he said, "Look, there it is, hiding behind that bucket."

"Oh yeah," Graham said. "I see the bucket."

As Daisy, Graham and Harry crept towards the bucket, Ronan turned around to rescue Spock. He was just in time to see the dog running away with Spock in his mouth.

Ronan chased the dog all around the garden. The dog started to get tired after half an hour, and he finally stopped, but he moved away every time Ronan tried to get near, and eventually he got bored of this game and he ate Spock. Ronan started crying.

Graham said, "It's just a bit of plastic. It's not like a spider, or even a bucket. You can't form much of a first impression of a piece of plastic."

Ronan knew he'd never call the woman he met at the Chinese take-away. She belonged to a world that was still out of his reach. A few weeks later he met his current girlfriend, Audrey. She provided a smoother transition into the adult world. She had her own car, but it was full of stuffed toys. She had given names to each toy based on her first impressions of them, and she often had conversations with them. Ronan used to make fun of her because of this, but he never told her of the conversations he had with his Star Trek characters, and he never told anyone that he'd bought a replacement Spock on the internet.

The moose's head over the fireplace likes looking at the things blowing by on the wind. A vinyl record blew by yesterday. I've no idea where it came from. The wife's uncle said he'd investigate, but he decided he'd be better off next to the fire with a glass of brandy rather than outside in the wind. He enjoys investigating things, especially if he can do it from the comfort of an armchair by the fire. He set up his own detective agency once. He was good at attracting the femme fatale type characters. He says he solved over twenty murders and he was the victim in every one of them. The murderer was always the femme fatale. He has a way with women.