Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon?

by Simon Okotie

  He then made a mental note of another convention that was inherent in this regard, as Woman A climbed into the cab. The reader will no doubt remember Marguerite’s surmise that Isobel Absalon et al were moving towards Isobel and Harold Absalon’s house, which was in the north-west of the city. Why, then, when asked silently (in the sense defined) by the taxi driver which direction she was travelling in did Isobel Absalon point directly (more or less) northwards? The reason for this, quite simply, was that there was a shared assumption, a tacit constraint, as it were, placed on the hailer by the taxi driver in asking this question, and that constraint can be expressed by entering, briefly, the taxi driver’s consciousness. Don’t worry – it will only be that part of the consciousness that relates to the specific and narrow question at hand. ‘In asking you silently (etc) the question “Which way you going, love?” I want you to limit your answer to the two directions of this particular road along which I am travelling and, in fact, any roads that are nearby, for example a side road a few yards away from me, but roughly in my (and your) direction of travel, especially where that side road may help me to cause less disruption to other motorists (and, to a lesser extent, to other vehicles such as bicycles, and to pedestrians) in stopping. To relate this to the specific example: you, Isobel Absalon,’ (although the driver was unlikely actually to know her name) ‘agree to respond to my question by either: a) pointing north, b) pointing south, or (more rarely) c) pointing to a nearby side road that I can easily manoeuvre into, given that the road that I am currently travelling along is,’ as was established earlier, ‘a north-south (etc) road. Further, you will point north or south or to a nearby side road regardless of whether your destination is actually in a northerly or southerly direction (or in the direction of the side road). In other words, your pointing is simply constrained by the direction in which we shall set off, rather than the direction in which you ultimately wish to travel,’ which in the case of Isobel Absalon we know is likely to be north-westerly. ‘In the case of my travelling along a one-way street with no nearby side roads you must always point in my direction of travel; in fact, I will always refrain from silently (as before) asking you, in that particular instance, which direction you are travelling in, there being, in fact, no legal alternative to travelling in the direction indicated by the one-way arrow on the road sign. I don’t want to risk losing my licence now, do I, love? Even though the reason I’m asking you the question in the case of the two-way street is to see whether I can do a “U”ey, providing there is not a “no U turn” sign on this particular stretch of road, so that I can help you to board my taxi by pulling up alongside you, given that, at the moment you hailed me I was travelling in the opposite direction to the one in which you were wishing to travel.’ Entering the cabbie’s mind had been a good form of presentation of this issue, to Marguerite’s mind. But it did not help him directly in his continuing pursuit of Isobel Absalon, who was wheeling the pushchair into the cab, assisted, from the inside, by Woman A.

  13

  Marguerite realised, as he continued to approach the taxi, that his problem would primarily be one of transport mode: assuming that he remained at liberty to pursue it, the taxi would travel much faster than him. Taxis had motorised parts – except, of course, for the bicycle rickshaw and the gondola – and this enabled them routinely to travel faster than even the fastest pedestrian. His best hope, he realised, would be for the taxi to get stuck in congestion, as many vehicles did in that part of the city at that time, thereby allowing him potentially to keep pace with it.

  Taxis did, then, travel more slowly on occasion than pedestrians. He had no doubt that Harold Absalon would have reported just this situation to the Mayor on numerous occasions: in other words the issue of there being too much traffic for much of the time in the city in which he worked, which in turn meant that one would be held up quite frequently, in a taxi, say, especially, but not exclusively, in the centre of the city. But this was not of course to say that all vehicles were held up in congestion to the same extent; bicycles and motorcycles, for instance, were narrower than most other vehicles on the road and so could often negotiate their way through congestion in a way that other, wider vehicles could not. There were exceptions to this rule, of course, even setting aside the bicycle rickshaw. One exception was the wide motorcycle – the ‘three-wheeler’ beloved of grebos, say – or the motorcycle with sidecar. These, being wider than most motorcycles, would be exceptions, although it was not clear to Marguerite whether the two particular examples he had just given would actually count as exceptions to the rule that bicycles and motorcycles were generally more adept at negotiating city congestion than most other road vehicles. The reason he doubted whether they were exceptions lay in a closer examination that his mind had been simultaneously undertaking; that is to say an examination that he was engaged in at the same time as he was setting out the examples themselves – it was like a nagging feeling which his mind had turned to, even though he was still in the process of setting the examples out to himself in full. The closer examination of the exceptions followed this broad sweep: firstly, looking at his category headings, Marguerite asserted that bicycles had two wheels and no motorised parts, although, granted, there were vehicles in the modern era that their owners and others would call ‘bicycles’, rather than mopeds, but which to Marguerite’s mind at least, failed the second of his conditions for being considered as ‘bicycles’, namely, they had a motor. This (ie the motor) the riders would use, for instance, to propel them up a hill when the exertion of going up under their own steam, as it were, became too much. In this regard, Marguerite wondered whether Harold Absalon had ever consulted the Mayor7 about a standardisation of the conditions for the term ‘bicycle’, because, to Marguerite’s mind, these bicycles with little motors to help the rider attain the hill were mopeds. How could they be anything else? The people who called them bikes (that is, the abbreviated term for bicycles) – their owners, pedestrians, even the vehicle licensing authorities – the whole lot of them were just plain wrong. He was prepared to go out on a limb on this one. He didn’t give a hoot about whether their speed was about the same as an ordinary bicycle and so for licensing purposes they were classified as an ordinary bicycle. He had already said it: he didn’t give two hoots about that. His point was this: why (why!?), when there was such a proliferation of exceptions to the numerous rules that are so essential to the lawful day-to-day running of any modern city, would one want to create another exception – the ‘motorised bicycle’, if that is what some people called it – when there was already a perfectly acceptable, indeed elegant, to Marguerite’s mind, as well as being descriptively accurate and succinct, term that encapsulated this case in full, with no need for reflections, observations or pontifications of any kind? Moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped moped. Why would anyone want to tamper with the sense of that beautiful term? It was beyond belief (almost).

  Secondly, and more briefly, in terms of wheels Marguerite doubted whether bicycles had anything other than two (a maximum and minimum thereof). Notice how the tricycle, ie the non-motorised three-wheeler – ‘the trike’ – rules itself out. Only a madman would call a tricycle a bicycle, in Marguerite’s view; this wider member of the bicycle family did not provide any trouble, then. Marguerite felt that the same move could be made, justifiably, for the motorised three-wheeler: he did not feel that it debased the term ‘motorcycle’ too much by defining the term so as to exclude anything with three wheels; and surely people were quite used to the terms ‘motorbike and side car’ (notice that the term ‘car’ naturally sneaks in, thereby immediately implying greater width and more wheels) and ‘motorised tricycle’ (again, implying a tapering at the front and the image of being ‘stuck’ in congestion).

  Note that it did not matter whether a bicycle had a motor or otherwi
se in relation to the congestion issue. But it was a matter of principle to Marguerite, who only now realised that Isobel Absalon was staring straight at him.

  7. Whether it was to do with the downgrading of my role at the monthly meeting, or other factors of which I was unaware, my position in the office eventually became just untenable, largely due to Harold Absalon’s presence there.

  14

  Having noticed that his cover had been blown, as it’s known, Marguerite crossed the road, between moving traffic, and stepped straight onto the open platform of a double decker bus moving in the opposite direction.

  The gently curving stairs at the rear of the bus, which he swiftly ascended on his way to the upper deck, could not be said, except by a maniac of some sort, to consist of a spiral staircase proper; this was for the simple reason, Marguerite thought, as he moved to the front of the top deck, that they did not spiral back on themselves; that is, the staircase was one in which none of the stairs was directly above any of the other stairs. Nor did he feel entirely comfortable, he realised, as he acquired a discarded broadsheet newspaper, with the aforementioned ‘gently curving stairs’, for the perhaps obvious reason that the stairs themselves were not curved – they resembled, in fact, a quadrilateral with the leftmost side much shorter than the rightmost such that each of the steps could almost be said to be triangular, except that each consisted of four rather than three sides; simply put, it was a gently curving staircase that he ascended, and he would leave it at that, at least for now.

  As he sat in a seat on the right-hand side next to a tall man in a suit, he noticed a frisson, a fluttering around his heart and a sudden shallowness of breath. There were any number of physiological or biological reasons to explain these dual symptoms, but to Marguerite’s mind they had an emotional cause: the bus had stopped, momentarily, in traffic; he had assumed that, despite the congestion, he would have had a clear run, that, in short, Isobel Absalon would not have had time to board the bus given the time available; his shortness of breath, the fluttering of his heart and, to add another symptom of his unease to the previous two, his sweating, spoke to him of an uncharacteristic potential error of judgement on his part. The bus rattled and rumbled as it waited for the traffic in front to move off and he wondered whether he had, in fact, been outwitted by Isobel Absalon and whether she was about to emerge at the top of the curved flight of stairs, that being a more elegant rendering to his mind of the ‘gently curving staircase’, to trap him on the upper deck. He wondered whether this error of judgement on his part was to do with his head being turned, as it was known, in Isobel Absalon’s direction; whether, in short, Marguerite’s fine investigative faculties were being corroded in some way by Isobel Absalon’s allure and, indeed, whether allure could have this damp, warm quality to it. He thought that it could and he thought that she was affecting his cognitive systems in this way and he felt unable to bypass the effect that she was having upon him. All he could do, he felt, was to sit and wait for her to arrive.

  15

  As he waited, Marguerite reflected that the spiral staircase was never, in his experience, referred to as a flight, unlike staircases of the curved and/or straight varieties. He wondered whether this was something to do with the fact that birds and other flying creatures did not naturally engage in spiral flying, at least not of the steep variety. Spiral flight could, then, be taken to be a man-made invention – the seminal case being that of the fighter plane during the second world war spiralling downwards with inevitably a crash to ground at the end. And there were perhaps two reasons why the designers of spiral staircases had not adopted the term ‘flight’ in relation to their staircases with this as the model.

  The first reason was that they perhaps thought that this would be the wrong sort of message to send to potential purchasers and users of the staircase in question, purchasers and users who were perhaps conservative in relation to incremental elevation devices in general having only ever seen, up until the moment of the emergence of the spiral staircase, either straight or gently curving flights of stairs. The thought that one step of this new and curved invention could be directly above another and – this is the crucial point, one that was omitted earlier on – within a few steps of each other rather than within many steps of each other, as in the case of staircases in a stairwell of greater antiquity where that stairwell is designed to transport you to the various floors of a multi-storey building, might alarm more moderate staircase-users, and use of the term ‘flight’ might further exacerbate this alarm. He thought, then, that the inventors etc of the spiral staircase did not wish to conjure up in the mind of their potential purchasers or users the only reference to spiral flight that they had hitherto seen, namely that of the nose-diving World War II fighter plane with its concomitant loud and, some would say, somewhat nasal whine and smoke, the ‘loud and some would say somewhat nasal’ only referring to the whine, note, and not referring to the smoke, although this did make Marguerite wonder whether there was a World War II fighter plane, perhaps known as the dragon, which blew flames from its ‘nose’, an orifice that was also, in this case alone, capable of whining, in which case the ‘loud and some would say somewhat nasal’ could also refer perhaps to the black – as it would be – smoke that accompanied the plane’s rapid spiral descent.

  The second – and more important – reason that the manufacturers etc did not use the nose-diving, spiralling World War II aircraft as a prototype for the use of the term flight in relation to their new invention was, quite simply, that this war had taken place after the invention of the spiral staircase. They couldn’t wait, in short. They wanted to get their staircase onto the market immediately and if others were to be in a position to refer to it and order it, as no doubt the manufacturers wanted them to, then the manufacturers, designers and/or salesmen would need to have an agreed name for their new invention, Marguerite thought, as the bus finally started to speed up, and one that did not depend upon numerous future technological, socio-political and other factors for its emergence.

  16

  Marguerite felt regretful but relieved, as the bus continued to speed up and Isobel Absalon did not emerge at the top of the curved flight of stairs to confront him. This did not of course rule out the possibility that she was sitting downstairs vigilantly guarding the platform, constantly surveying it, whether covertly from behind a newspaper with or without the aid of a cunning disguise, or overtly and without any disguise, unless one could take her lipstick, mascara and other make up as ‘disguise’. Other alternatives for her, Marguerite thought, included hijacking the bus, as it was known (that is ‘hijacking as it was known’ rather than ‘bus as it was known’). This involved taking the controls of the bus by force or the threat of force, this latter option relying on the imagination of the driver and perhaps also the conductor, and then driving it to a different destination with perhaps fewer, if any, stops along the way. It had to be a different destination, Marguerite thought, otherwise the danger involved in the hijacking would not be justified; in other words, if someone hijacked the bus and proceeded to stop at all of the bus stops along its predetermined route, then one would question their motives and would perhaps, during your investigation into the hijacking, ask their parents or parent, depending on whether one or both of them were alive and capable of being tracked down (as it was known), whether their son or daughter, now referred in the press as ‘the hijacker’, perhaps had simply wanted, as a child, to be a bus driver, and whether this early desire had been frustrated in some way during the course of the child’s passage into adulthood.

  Another option open to Isobel Absalon was persuading the conductor to swap clothes with her or, if he could not be persuaded, forcing him to do so, leaving him bound and gagged in the area under the gently curving flight of stairs that was ordinarily reserved for folded pushchairs. She could then move to the upper deck, although in using this formulation Marguerite was not implying that she was capable of levitation or that s
he would ascend in any way other than the traditional means in such contexts of putting one foot in front of and at a consistently greater height than the other on the gently curving flight of stairs designed for that very purpose. She might also disguise herself further by pushing all of her lustrous hair into the conductor’s peaked cap just before finally donning it and by drawing or affixing fake facial hair in the appropriate place, ‘the appropriate place’ here referring to a more specific location than just ‘the face’ referred to in the previously referred-to adjective.

  Her still not appearing at the top of the flight of stairs led Marguerite to conclude that she had either missed the bus, literally and figuratively speaking, or that she was indeed biding her time by simply waiting for him on the lower deck. He ruled out the options that involved force or the threat of force forthwith and sat, his breathing and heartbeat slowly returning to normal, whatever that meant, his perspiration remaining on his skin but not being added to significantly from his internal saline stores, if they can be referred to in this way, looking out of the window as the bus picked up speed and they left what was primarily a retail area to wind around one of the city’s landmarks, through a set of traffic lights and onto a broad avenue with expensive showrooms, as they are known, to the left and a great expanse of parkland to the right.