LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL

by Ronan Hession

  In the days since Arno had laid all this out for him, Hungry Paul might have wondered what it was that stopped him disabusing Arno of his mistaken assumptions, and why his usual instinct to recoil from new opportunities had not been triggered. But Hungry Paul was not a man to ponder endlessly the whys and how comes of life. He simply assumed that silence, like yawns and itches, was contagious. The gentle pull of interest which arose within him, unbidden and unexplained, was the awakening of his inner silence in resonance with the powerful external forces of mime.

  Hungry Paul sat himself in the front row of the theatre and waited quietly and patiently. He was wearing his wedding suit but with the shirt from his postal uniform underneath, that being the only other shirt he had which didn’t have double cuffs. In fact it was short-sleeved and didn’t have cuffs at all; whenever he took the jacket off, the combination of short sleeves and a tie made him look like a manager in a fast food restaurant. With no mobile phone, he was not tempted to scroll through his texts or refresh his social media feed. His freedom from restlessness meant that he didn’t explore his nasal cavities or fiddle with his zip. His mental stillness left him untroubled by the passage of time or the spooky run-down emptiness of the place.

  Standing behind the stage curtain, hidden and peeking through a gap, were Arno, Lambert and the chair of the interview board, Mr Davenport from the Arts Council. They marvelled at Hungry Paul’s composure and were humbled by his profound inactivity. After fifteen minutes of observation they were in no doubt that they had their man. They exchanged notes excitedly among themselves and agreed on the outcome, which Mr Davenport had pointed out was no mere formality even though there had been no other candidates.

  The three interview board members emerged from behind the stage curtain and congratulated the successful candidate. Hungry Paul greeted Arno with a handshake, to which Arno responded by miming as if it had been a bonecrusher that broke his hand and made him dizzy. As he lay on the floor, Lambert tried to revive him, before acting out an improvised last rites service and doing a digging action to bury him. Mr Davenport tried to join in, but soon found himself out of his depth, utterly outmimed by the other two, who wore their years of training lightly indeed.

  For obvious reasons, the practicalities of signing the contract and coming to terms was not done through the medium of mime, as labour law did not yet allow for that. The initial contract was to be for eleven months, but Mr Davenport hinted strongly that these things were often rolled over if everything went well. The Arts Council would fund half the cost of Hungry Paul’s salary, with the balance to come from the National Mime Association’s own resources, including corporate and yoga income, as well as gate receipts, if any. Hungry Paul was also offered the bedsit behind the stage once Arno moved out, which was counted as an executive perquisite. He had asked to see the bedsit he was being offered, but this had not been possible as Arno’s girlfriend was still asleep in there, which may or may not have been the reason why Arno had suggested to Mr Davenport that they should conduct the job interview in silence.

  The job spec, which had been prepared in order to get the Arts Council on board, envisaged a panoramic range of responsibilities. Hungry Paul’s main job was to motivate and inspire enthusiasm nationally for mime and the silent arts, excluding living statues and tableaux vivants. He was also to represent the perspective of the mime community in public discourse, as well as answering any mime-related questions that came in to the Arts Council helpdesk. While the Chamber of Commerce prize money meant that Hungry Paul was not particularly concerned about the paltry pay that came with the post, he could still drive a bargain when he needed to. He insisted on two conditions: first, that he would keep his Mondays free so that he could continue to honour his obligations to the Post Office; and secondly, that he would not be required to carry a mobile phone. The National Mime Association and the Arts Council agreed on both counts, as they were only offering the job on a three-day week and besides, they hadn’t the money to pay for a phone.

  With the deal made, Arno left Lambert to brief Hungry Paul on his new position while he showed Mr Davenport to his car. Lambert, unsure of how much time he had before Arno came back, was all brevity and candour. Arno’s return to the Netherlands, he confided, could not come soon enough. The National Mime Association was in a complete mess. The theatre had not put on a show in over a year; what little money came in, went straight back out again; and mime as an art form no longer caught the imagination of the general public, with the younger generation scarcely aware of its existence. The theatre had become no more than a cobwebbed store room, with boxes and old posters lying around, such that even the yoga teachers had started to wonder whether the low hourly rates were worth it. With no sign of Arno’s return—a fact noted knowingly by Lambert—they walked towards to the bike stand where Lambert had parked his black-and-white striped bicycle, which had a bell with the clanger decommissioned. Hungry Paul liked Lambert, and waved him off with the reflection that there was something special about the way that quiet people just seemed to find each other in life.

  The day had been a hectic one by Hungry Paul’s standards. Job interviews can be draining, so it was not surprising that he fell asleep on the train home, his temple vibrating against the glass. When he arrived at Parley View, his mother was on the phone to Grace about the table settings for the wedding, and his dad was on the laptop writing a letter to the editor of the Economist. As Hungry Paul paused at the doorway, reluctant to interrupt them, the urge to break the news about his new job seemed to pass and the announcement slipped back down his throat.

  Tired but satisfied, he decided to go upstairs and hang his good suit in the wardrobe, just in case it got crumpled. He took off his Docs and lay back on his bed in just his pants and vest to reflect on the corporate complications he had just inherited. It seemed to him that the mime theatre, in its state of disrepair and irrelevance, had come to mirror the fate of silence itself. But how could he even begin restore the position of mime as a unifying and humanising force in the world when the silent community itself was divided?

  Hungry Paul stared at the stippled ceiling and bathed in the quiet all around him. He tuned his ears to listen to the ever-present silence itself, rather than the bubbles of noise that floated in it. He began to appreciate its profound scale. All major spiritual and philosophical traditions throughout history had emphasised the value of silence. The universe, whether expanding or contracting, does so amidst a vast ocean of it. The big bang sprang from it and will one day return to it. And yet, silence, for all its ubiquity and timelessness, had found itself at odds with the clamorous nature of modern mankind. This noisy opinionated world had made an enemy of silence: it had become something unwelcome, to be broken or filled.

  Staring at the Spitfire mobile on his ceiling, it was as though the answer had been with him all along and was simply waiting to be noticed. He realised that before the public could be persuaded about mime they would first have to be put in contact with silence itself, for the power of mime lies in the its ability to touch the silence within us all. Feeling inspired, he lifted the stumpy pencil from his bedside table and sketched the following:

  Sunday Night Quiet Club

  One Hour of Sitting Quietly

  at the National Mime

  Association Theatre

  Free admission – All welcome

  First Sunday of Every Month at 8pm

  (You may wish to note the above)

  Its simplicity was its perfection. It had taken someone with the special insight of Hungry Paul to realise that the answer to the problem, strange though it seemed, was to get people to do nothing. He also decided to invite the statue artists to attend in full costume and to perform in silence for the duration of the Sunday Night Quiet Club meeting. He hoped that the request, made with deference and a degree of artistic sensitivity, would be enough to persuade them that
a new era of close collaboration was being offered by their friends in the mime world.

  As he heard his parents starting to make dinner noises downstairs, he snapped out of his executive preoccupations and looked for something comfortable to change into after a very adult-feeling day. Though this was all still quite new to him, he could see that making big decisions was just as consequential as not making them. Either way you were committing to something. We are never entirely outside of life’s choices; everything leads somewhere.

  Chapter 22: Pyramid egg

  It had been a long and difficult week for Leonard. Shelley had been off work since Monday and had not been in contact. He wasn’t sure whether she was avoiding him because of upset or awkwardness, or whether she was just at home with Patrick for his Easter school holidays. Perhaps she was even off sick with a tummy bug, or otherwise back to living her life in all the ways that didn’t include him.

  Several times he had drafted a hands-off, solicitous text just to check in, only to think better of it, a misjudged text having been the cause of all this in the first place. He had hoped that, at the very least, she wasn’t mad at him, and that she understood that his clumsiness was not born of insensitivity but inexperience. In time, perhaps they would even be able to enjoy the odd platonic walk in the park or maybe she would tell her future boyfriends that, while Leonard was all wrong for her, at least he was one of the good guys. A mere week ago, he had considered himself to be Shelley’s boyfriend, but now he doubted whether he had even got that far. How would she have seen it? By his own standards, it had been a major relationship, the furthest he had ever got; but perhaps, for a woman of Shelley’s experience, it had ended too soon for him to be considered anything at all. ‘Just any man have I met for a few dates,’ she had said. A ‘no contest’ in boxing, a spoiled vote in a general election. In his imagination—which was located in his chest as much as in his head—he had already skipped forward a few chapters in their life together, but now he realised that they would be written without him. There was a palpable humiliation in having to pack up his ambitions and his fantasies and settle into a new type of dismantled normality.

  After another lonely day at work, Leonard sat at home doodling in his sketchbook at the dining room table, his mouth in the twenty past eight position. He was too restless to concentrate, yet too listless to do anything worthwhile. The one thing that was on his mind would neither leave him be nor resolve itself. He still had many unfinished sections in his book about Patrius and the Romans, but it had become the last thread connecting Shelley to his life. His sadness over the break-up had become a secret new problem that was haunting the completion of the book.

  For some it is the smell of a wet duffel coat at the radiator, for others it is the melting of a madeleine on the palate, but for Leonard it was the simple mistake of sucking the wrong end of a pencil. No sooner had the taste of graphite, so alien and unfoodlike, registered on his tongue, than he was transported back to the first time he had made that very same absent-minded error. It was a time many years ago: a time of power cuts; a time of milk bottle tops being pecked by blue tits; a time before kids’ car seats or Playstations. Doing homework in his room, he got distracted by the shouting of some boys playing outside and accidentally sucked the pointed tip of his pencil. Disgusted by its flavour, he ran out to the bathroom to rinse his mouth using soap, which was a mistake. Muttering a child’s curses, he comforted himself by sitting on the tiled bathroom floor with the Our World encyclopaedias, forgetting the time, or time itself, and nursing himself back to contentment in those pages. Closing his eyes, he swam inwardly towards the memory, not of the books, but of the feeling of reading the books. There, buried amidst the melancholy, he found the original charge that had animated his imagination all those years ago.

  He began typing and sketching, transcending the space between his adult self and the young Leonard. A rediscovered magic energised and propelled him, as pages upon pages of imagination poured out of him. His touch for drawing came back to him, as he created tender scenes of Roman boyhood: the subtle expressions of wonder on the face of Patrius, as he pulled a frog from a well; a great double-paged scene of the boy’s mother sitting on a chair in her gladiator gear, watching him practising his handstands; and a carefully shaded look of sad awe on the boy’s face as he heard about his brave paterfamilias, who had loved him very much before he went off to fight the Goths all those years ago. Leonard emptied himself into those pages, smashing open his personal experience to release the universal experience within. He finally finished the book during that time which could be called very late at night or very early in the morning, and collapsed into bed with a feeling of sublime but exhausted calm, as if after a vomiting fit.

  The next morning, Holy Thursday, the office was quiet. Leonard intended to sit at his desk for a few hours before packing up and going home to sleep through the weekend until the wedding on Monday, after which he had no idea what he would do with his book or his life.

  He logged on and saw an email from Mark Baxter BEd:

  From: himark@markbaxterbed.com

  Hi Lenny,

  Love, love, loved the pitch you sent me. Totally cooking my man. It needs a bit of work, so I think I’ll need to wave my usual magic wand over it, but we’re definitely on to something. I’m always into being innovative and disruptive. Let’s blow the whole Roman scene open, that’s what I say.

  I’m off to the coast for the weekend. Some of the girls on the team managed to talk me into teaching them how to surf. I agreed as it’s a good teambuilding exercise. You and me are the last two good guys left Lenny! If we don’t give the girls a break it isn’t going to come from the bozos at Factorial Publishing, that’s for sure! I shouldn’t trash talk them though, they’re okay – they’ve got some really good guys over there. Real innovators, huge into disruption. I’ve actually got them lined up for a call on Tuesday – I think they’re going to love our book my man!

  You may wish to note the above,

  Mark Baxter, BEd

  Leonard started clearing through the other unread messages that he had been ignoring all week. Not a single email was from someone he had met personally. A handful needed a response, but they were mostly just memos about internal procedures. There was a lengthy email thread between two people who had a professional disagreement about some editing point—Leonard was among the spectators in the cc line. Inevitably, there was a series of emails about the expensive, bipolar accounts system, which was down for a few hours, then back up before finding itself back down again.

  Leonard ran off a mock-up of the book on the good colour printer, just to see how it looked. As he sat back in his ergonomic swivel chair, he read through it slowly, page by page. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever done, even if it nearly broke him to do it. He put all the pages in order and sealed them in an envelope with ‘Shelley’ written on the front. He wanted to leave it on her desk, along with a pyramid-shaped Toblerone Easter egg for Patrick.

  Her desk was unoccupied, as he expected. Helpdesk Greg had a cereal bowl in front of him and was chopping a banana into what looked like dog food. He was wearing a paisley pyjama top.

  ‘Hey Len. Long time no see. I’ve been checking through your internet history. Just a standard audit. We can talk more privately next week unless there’s anything you’d like to confess now, just to get it over with.’

  ‘Hi Greg. I see Shelley is still out.’

  ‘Woah! You didn’t know? Trouble in Eden? Oh, I’m sorry my man. Still, at least we have each other. Do you want me to mind that Easter egg? And your little A4 love letter in the envelope. You can trust me with your life, you know that.’

  Leonard thought better of leaving the book and egg on Shelley’s desk. Margaret, one of Shelley’s colleagues, came running back to her desk repeating a series of expletives.

  ‘Hi, I w—’

  ‘What? What is it now—and shut it you,’ s
he said, pointing to Greg without looking at him.

  ‘Hi, I was just saying, do you know if there’s anywhere I could leave this for Shelley? Somewhere private maybe?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just some personal gifts.’

  ‘Is the Easter egg for her?’

  ‘No, that’s for her son. The envelope is for her. Well, and for him too.’

  ‘Give it here.’

  Leonard handed it over, not sure if he was doing the right thing.

  ‘Okay, thanks. Will it be okay like that?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll see her over the weekend. I’ll give it to her.’

  ‘Okay, okay. If you don’t mind. That would be great. Thanks.’

  ‘That all?’ she asked, looking at her screen, printing something.

  ‘That’s it. Happy Easter.’

  He turned to say goodbye to Greg, who was mixing up a protein shake on his desk. Greg showed Margaret the Star Trek gesture for ‘live long and prosper,’ before swivelling it and flipping her the bird.

  ‘Happy Easter, Greg,’ said Leonard.

  ‘Hey Mr Encyclopaedia. We’re going to have a history lesson next week. Internet history. Don’t miss it.’

  Leonard packed up, went home and slept like a corpse for sixteen hours.