Octopus, I thought, immediately. Prong. Learning. Don’t come back for a second shock, it might be shocking. Twelve inches. More like a yard.
There before me was a scene straight out of one of those black-spined, mass-consumption pulp fiction books, with purple ghouls and women with carnivorous breasts on the cover. There was a metal frame, reminiscent of the public-access exercise machines in Elche Park near the harbour in Benidorm, the ones where elderly tourists remind themselves where their muscles used to be as a giant flock of white doves collectively fights over the food cast down next to the ‘Don’t feed the pigeon’ signs. This frame, however, was not painted green like the environmentally aware consumer items next to the beach. This one was black, matt finish. It was rectangular with a stainless steel chain attached to each vertex, the lower pair also attached to a bracket about thirty centimetres up the vertical shaft. I really must try to standardise my quantitative assessments so they conform with systeme internationale...
Anyway, the two top chains attached to leather straps, each of which was strapped round a wrist. The lower pair too had their straps, but these were much bigger, wrap-around affairs, clearly secured with wide Velcro closures to offer considerable support. The structure, once closed, started wide at its top and finished in a near point. The whole thus capable of accommodating a whole foot, supporting it like a sturdy bootee as far as the ankle. And there, attached to said chains, hanging in mid-air, his entire weight appearing to stretch splayed arms was Pedro the Mayor. Save for a wide black blindfold and matching gag drawn so tight it held his mouth open and lips pushed back from the teeth, which were just visible at its edge, he was completely naked. He was facing three quarters away from me, but his regular gyrations swivelled him both right and left, allowing me to note whatever detail I desired. Also facing almost directly away from me, towards the heavy blackout curtains that covered the window overlooking the main road was the girl.
She was dressed in black thigh boots, footwear that you, the reader, will have already recognised as familiar, and nothing else apart from a strappy bra that wound everywhere whilst covering nothing, like a pair of braces that might have recoiled at random, having just been used playfully as a catapult. She did, however, wear a mask which consisted of a sheer black stocking that covered her entire head, stretched tight across her forehead and cheeks, but falling loose in folds onto the shoulders. The scene was back-lit by the correctly surmised low-wattage, floor-mounted green spot, and thus both were facing mostly away from the door, which was a relief, because I was sure that the spy-hole orifice was large enough to attract interest from inside. It wouldn’t have served its purpose otherwise, since one must presume that its purpose of preventing the girls pursuing self-employment in a free market would not have worked unless they remained conscious of its use via regular checks. One assumes that the punters would be otherwise preoccupied and so would never register that it was there.
The girl was strutting around like a cross between a shamen and a disco dancer. In her right hand she held a long, thin wand, reminiscent of a horse crop, and in her left a small, stumpy grip, similar to the joysticks children use for killing terrorists in computer games. As I watched, she placed the prong in her right hand close by Pedro’s aasvogel and pushed a little. There was a little click, quite audible, and then a vast wail from the mayor, with the sounds almost completely suppressed by a combination of gag and gagging. The girl moved. She gently pushed the prong forward, presumably towards the scrutable. There was another click and another wail, this time more muted, the application of this experience thus clearly variable and completely under her control. Octopus. Twelve inches.
The girl spoke. It was Olga’s voice. That was no surprise, of course. She also threatened to move to her left to circle around her apparatus and that would place my vantage point on her diagonal across to the door. I moved to the side, but I heard her perfectly. Even without the electric shocks, her dulcet tones immediately began to provide me a reaction in certain places that Pedro the Mayor had without doubt been experiencing himself for a good ten minutes or more.
“Now I give you special Russian one,” she said, in Spanish. My understanding of the language had obviously improved since my first forays into the bar and the Cornish pasty shop, but my recently-acquired vocabulary had less than universal application potential. Another click. Another wail. “And one from my mother...” Click. Wail. “She was a good teacher. Little Olga learns well. Now one for my real mother, the cow...” Click. Wail.
I must apologise for the quality of my translation. Unfortunately, I remain at the stage of habitually needing a dictionary alongside me to cope with the regular need to identify words. When speaking to other foreigners, of course, the problem rarely arises, since their command of the lexicon is usually as limited as my own. The inclusion of an occasional gesture or grunt adds nuances of meaning that, in my own tongue, might be supplied by more sophisticated expression. But whenever I converse with a native speaker, I am always stumped by the vocabulary. Meaning emerges like joining dots to create a shape when you miss most of the numbers. Sometimes a recognisable shape appears, otherwise you just seek more clues. As Olga spoke her tantalising, leaping lines to Pedro, I was impressed by the fluency of her Spanish. If I had not known she was Russian, I might have assumed she was a native speaker. Still the words came, and still their meaning almost appeared.
Click. Wail. “...best this side of Urals...” Click. Wail. “Communist in Siberia do this...” Click. Wail. “Communist better than Olga.” Click. Wail. “Not much better.” Wail. “But in Siberia, people get this for free.” Click. Wail. “But my little mayor likes to pay.” Click. Wail. And so the encounter progressed.
She then made a string of noises, reminiscent of communication between a mother and a small baby. There were lots of vowel sounds, especially aahs and oos, an occasional e, with all merging into what seemed like a song sung by a closed mouth, the sound apparently reverberating through the cranium before escaping via the nostrils. I did not look now. I simply stood with my back to the door, the spy-hole still open and a pale green cone of light making a perfect circle on the opposite wall. It was clear that the paroxysms that Pedro suffered were far from pain, at least in his personal interpretation. He too, it seemed, had achieved his goal, my goal, perhaps, and it felt a lot like conceding. A moment later, it was clear that Pedro the Mayor’s personal journey was travelled. He had arrived and on inspection I concluded he had also reached the place where he wanted to go, a second harness attached to the frame making this journey physically possible.
I calculated it might take a minute or two to retrace my steps and let myself out in a manner that would not attract attention. Now unless they were going to do the whole thing from the top, da capo al fine, in which case they certainly did not qualify for the octopus level of intellect, it was likely that there would be a short period of dismantling, followed a longer period of mutual evaluation, which might or might not involve a momentary encounter with something pensile, then I might have five to ten minutes at best. It was time to move.
The way down was now partially lit. It was now dark enough outside for the animated displays of the foyer bar slot machines to light the staircase with a pale yellow glow. I was just in time, having only just closed the door and descended to porch steps before the office desk light came on and Olga, now bare-headed and wearing a lace gown, but obviously still in her professional garb underneath, clearly visible through the loosely-made lace, lowered the shutter to exclude the outside world. No doubt, still naked from the waist down, she was setting about the translation, copying and distribution of the documents on her desk.
Alongside my science course, I was asked to do a broadly-based exercise in philosophy, ethics and morals. F451, Ethical Judgments, Intentionality, Tact, Sensibilities, raised the remarkably difficult moral issues that surround torture. Were there circumstances where an individual should intervene to cease
obvious suffering? And, in corollary, did other circumstances exist where one should not? Had this been torture in a Siberian camp, a Denisovich day when confessions might be extracted along with salt, then the answer, I thought, as I flicked the Raptor’s engine to life and mounted my quad, the answer was “Yes.” But the opportunity, I concluded, would never have arisen, rendering the question hypothetical. If, on the other hand, it was an octopus in a tank, merely fleeing to the other end in shock, then the answer was also probably “Yes.” One should intervene. This would protect the poor beast from more suffering, if suffering is what you feel through eight arms. If, however, the octopus was paying for the privilege, given its highly-developed intellect and demonstrable ability to choose, and if, on dispassionate observation and evaluation, the experience was enjoyed, received gladly with all limbs extended and all extendables erected, then sleeping dogs are best left to lie, even if they are octopi. Twelve inches, approximately thirty centimetres, zero point three metres in systeme internationale.
Thirty Four
I was always a dab hand at Happy Families... - Don recalls family life as a child and his love of a card game he never actually played. He describes how the game promoted his acquisition of mimicry skills. Later, he uses these skills to make telephone calls. He learns something he did not expect.
I was always a dab hand at Happy Families. I could surely have turned professional. I never actually played the game, of course, since none of my so-called friends would ever stoop so low. What I used to enjoy was dealing out the cards and slowly, methodically, matching up the families. After that, what I enjoyed even more was mixing them up.
I used to set them out across the oil-cloth that covered the kitchen table to protect it from spills. In cold weather the cards used to stick and you couldn’t easily gather them in after a game. My mother and grandma would be busy around the house and would pause on their way past to glance over my progress. Invariably, they would share a joke about the grocer looking just like Ernie at the Coop, about Mrs Cod the fishmonger’s wife looking like what’s her name from down in the council houses, how the policeman’s boy was the spitting image of that Joey Stokes and how my portrait of the doctor’s wife had the same smirk as the stuck-up lah-di-dah from the top of West Lane always wore. Just a few years later they did precisely the same thing with moving images when they matched newly-emergent Coronation Street happy families with local reality.
It was this habit of my maternal lineage that developed another facet of my abilities, a facet I retained, indeed cultivated. Inadvertently, it taught me how to listen. I listened not only to my mother’s and my grandma’s likening of my Happy Families to real Kiddington characters, I listened also to the people they identified. Whenever I encountered them around the village, and whenever I heard a name I could match with memory, I used to concentrate on what was said. I used to watch for mannerisms, analyse, remember and then try to copy. I noticed patterns in the words that some people used. There was one woman, for instance, who would avoid saying anything remotely coarse, preferring to ask the butcher for stomach pork when she meant belly. There was a man who always used the word ‘presently’ correctly, which, of course, sounded wrong, as it still does. My grandmother’s inability to say the word cemetery was legendary throughout the village. It always came out as symmetry. I wasn’t very old and I had problems of my own. I remember not being able to say ‘shoulder’, it always emerging as ‘soldier’.
But I did more than note linguistics. I also remembered what people talked about, their favourite subjects and their pet hates. I noted opinion at an age when most don’t realise there’s anything other than fact issued by adults. I noted timbre, intonation, animation and crescendo, sensing rhythm and style even in the whispers that women used to use when they wanted to talk about something that should not be ‘in front of the children’. My aim was to mimic, so I could play my Happy Families at the kitchen table and then add suitable commentary in an appropriate voice whenever a comment on likeness arose.
So, quite soon, I had learned to place a card and wait for the comment that habitually it generated. “That’s just like Elsie Wotsit,” my grandma would say and thus, on cue, I would become Elsie Wotsit, not only aping manner and voice, but also recalling the content of her last conversation with my mother. The reactions this provoked were, of course, ones of hilarity and this merely reinforced the habit. And it never ceases to amaze me how, once learned, these little skills can prove so eternally useful.
Mr Bun The Baker was always my favourite, because I was really into sweets. He was a portly soul. His pin-striped trousers had bunched folds above the ankle, suggesting that they might be falling down, a fact that could not be established because they emerged from under a vast white wrap-around apron. He wore a chef’s hat, far too big for him, and cocked to one side on a head that was surely bald underneath. An opera singer’s moustache cut across a pair of rosy cheeks, whose colour was clearly exaggerated by the exertion of supporting, one-handed, a vast tray of sweets. Now sweets, of course, I liked.
But it wasn’t the coloured, sugar-frosted garish rocks that adorned the matrix of clear glass bottles at the back of the grocer’s counter that interested me. Neither was it chocolate whirls, pre-wrapped bars or toffee that made my heart run. It was real sweets that interested me.
Since my dad worked in Bromaton on Saturday mornings, the three of us, him, me and mam, took to going into town together. If you were early you could always park easily in the cobbled streets behind the Springs. Dad would go off to work and mother and I would tramp around the market buying bits and pieces, vegetables, meat and fish, and occasional pairs of shoes, or sweets for me. I have fond memories of being pinned like a crucified Christ to the front of a market stall, arms outstretched, while mother selected shirts off the pile and then hung them in front of my arms to see if they might fit. The Market Hall seemed so vast to a child, its hanging tungsten filament lights providing about enough light for a living room, nowhere near enough to brighten the cavernous interior.
Its sounds are etched into my memory: the hollow, clipped rattle of hard sweets being poured loose from jars into the brass pans of scales; the gravel in the voice of the man who bulk-sold boxes of chocolates from a van that parked just outside - “and I’ll throw in a box of Maltesers, one of Cream Whirls and how about a tin of Quality Street as well? I’ll ask not five, not four, not three, not two, not even one... Not ten bob - give me five bob the lot! Just two half crowns for all this! Thank you ... one over here, one over there, one for the gentleman in the raincoat...” he would say as assistants in brown coats (his was white) struggled through the apparently permanent crowd with armfuls of boxed sweets. His patter was sublime, his sound near evil. And it was always to the ladies that these invitations to buy were addressed, despite the fact that the money was always handed over by a man. Up and down the ranks of stalls we shuffled, my face at asinine height, my hand firmly grasped by my mother’s fingers.
And when I could see beyond the trousers and skirts, I would notice something brightly coloured and plastic-wrapped, such as a new Lone Ranger mask and gun, complete with six silver bullets, a Davy Crocket cap, a Laramie marshal’s badge, a pair of Rawhide leggings, a Dan Dare suit or some other traditional toy, and I would point and plead, laugh and jump, only to be told we couldn’t afford it as my mother tugged me back into the flow. I would cry, of course, prompting my mother to slap me hard to make me stop. Minutes later, the inevitable comparative exercise would be used to generate pressure for social conformity. “Look,” my mother would say, “there’s another little boy and he’s not crying.”
“He’s already got his William Tell crossbow,” I might say, before continuing to moan, getting another slap and then wailing even louder.
My world would spontaneously shatter, as free-flowing tears fell, still bemoaning my mother’s denial of my access to a new Hawkeye suit. And then round the corner there appeared the cake
stall. Premeditated motive was suddenly forgotten, superseded by the proximity of a more pressing, immediate and sublime prospect. She would lift me up to her height for a better view of the confectionary paradise, and my tears would stop as quickly as they had started, as soon as the wonderful prospect of chocolate, cream, custard, cake and pastry registered.
There were cream horns dusted with icing sugar, sponge cakes, sandwich cakes, chocolate cakes, coffee cakes with butter icing, Bakewell tarts, custard slices, apple pies, angel cakes, cream buns with butterfly wings, jam doughnuts, cream doughnuts, fruit flans, candied nuts and the ultimate gooey experience, treacle tarts. “Now which one will little Donald have today?” would prompt a determined raising of my finger in the direction of the treacle tart. A piece about the size of my mother’s handbag would be passed my way and I would be blissfully quiet for the next half hour. I then generally cried again because my mother would wipe the debris from around my mouth with a spit-wetted hankie, her determined strokes just a bit too strong for my infant dimensions.
But Mr Bun the Baker had noted qualities in addition to his tray of my beloved sweets. “He looks like Cliff Watson,” my mother would say as she passed by en route, no doubt, from boiling tub to mangle, or on some other suitably stereotypical journey.
Cliff Watson was the rather slow-witted, rather flabby, habitually grunting father of Geoff and Mick. He used to come with my dad and I in the car to watch Bromaton Quartet play on a Saturday afternoon so, more than most of Kiddington’s inhabitants, he presented me with ample opportunity to perfect my mimicry. On the other hand, like most Kiddington males, he was a man of few words, the silences in between often conveying most of the intended meaning, and that still implicitly.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 38
