The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard

by A. F. Harrold

  Quirkstandard had begun to feel a little left out of this conversation and raised his hand. Miss Dawn stopped and looked him up and down for the first time, as if she could somehow sense how tidy he was by just such a cursory examination.

  He coughed.

  ‘I’ve been quite tidy,’ he offered.

  She stared a little harder.

  ‘You’ve dripped blood on my floor,’ she said, a cold eye flickering beneath a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Oh. Where? I did try not to drip. I held this cloth to my nose,’ he held up the cloth which turned out, now that daylight had arrived, to be an apron embroidered with a comic inscription suggesting the reader propose marriage to the cook.

  ‘There’s blood on the floor, just beside the kitchen table.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Quirkstandard, crestfallen.

  ‘And …’ she said, drawing the word out, ‘you’ve messed up the pamphlets. They’re not going to like that, you know. They’re not going to like that at all.’

  She sucked at the air between her teeth as she shook her head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he answered, ‘but I was bored and woke up in the middle of the night, or vice versa or whichever the other way round is, and I just found them here. I thought at first they might help me drop back off to sleep, but they turned out to be the most rippingly marvellous things I’ve ever seen. I just had to go on reading and reading. Did you know there was a dolphin washed up in Lyme Regis which could speak English, apparently most of them can’t, and this one was arrested as a Spanish spy, but the magistrate, who was a learned man …’

  ‘Yeah, I heard that,’ Dawn interrupted, swinging her broom to and fro on her shoulder.

  ‘Marvellous,’ Quirkstandard repeated, clutching a pamphlet in his hand.

  ‘Yeah, ain’t they just,’ she agreed with a knowing smile spreading beneath her expressive, fat pink nose.

  *

  As Dawn fried bacon in the back room, Quirkstandard splashed water on his face in the outhouse. He dabbed at the swellings and discolorations on his temple and round his eye. The contusions weren’t as violent or as violet as he’d expected, in fact they were more or less a thick pale dirty yellow. The swellings weren’t as tight and tense as they felt from inside either. As he prodded the bruises, pulses of warming warning sensation flashed into his nerve centres. It wasn’t something you could actively call pain, he thought. It didn’t really hurt when he pushed at them, though it did feel particularly nice when he stopped doing it.

  He prodded again and stopped. Oh, that did feel good. He chuckled at this. He must’ve been bruised and banged at some point when he was a lad, he supposed, but he couldn’t remember when it might’ve been. Had he never fallen out of a tree or been tackled unexpectedly at rugger? He didn’t recall any tree climbing exploits, so maybe he had just read about boys in books who had, and rugger was about the only subject that he got a pass in since his man, who he sent to sit his exams, was much bigger than most of the other lads, which had proved to be an advantage. So any bruises gained in a rugger match wouldn’t have been his own, so maybe he had led a spotless boyhood after all.

  He went to prod the bruise on his temple once more but was interrupted by Dawn calling out from the kitchen to tell him breakfast was ready. He wiped his face with the towel and headed indoors. There, on the same table on which he had spent part of the night, were four place settings complete with crockery and cups. On each plate rested what even Quirkstandard recognised hungrily as a fat and fatty bacon sandwich. His mouth moistened a little. In the middle of the table was a variety of condiments and beside three of the plates sat steaming mugs of tea.

  ‘I didn’t know what your sort drank,’ said Dawn, seemingly to herself.

  Quirkstandard assumed the question to be directed at him, since there was no one else in the room, and set about answering it as such.

  ‘Normally, to be perfectly frank Miss Dawn, I tend to drink whatever I am given. You see, I’ve not always been told the names of things or I forget them, and so sometimes it is difficult to make specific requests and informed decisions. I must say, looking at those papers and whatnots in the front room this morning made me more aware than ever that I seem to have learnt spectacularly little in my life. Oh, they opened up to me whole new worlds. Did I tell you about this dolphin they found once? Crikey Quirkers, I said to myself last night, there are so many of these things, so many of these brilliant pamphlets. Oh, I suspect that were I to look I could find a pamphlet in there, somewhere in there, that would teach me the names and distinguishing features of a vast variety of different beverages from all around the world – England, Iceland and beyond. And if I read such a guide, Miss Dawn, then I could answer your question correctly. I’d be able to lean back and look inside myself and tell you just what it was that I wanted right now, or maybe … maybe I’d just know, instinctively and without a moment’s pause for thought, exactly what sort of drink is ideal for accompanying a bacon sandwich such as that which is laid out here this morning. I would be able to smell a glass of something from across the room and name it, not just name it, Miss Dawn, but know, inside myself, do you see …? I’ll know where and why and when and how it was purchased and made. No more will I be reliant on other people to make …’ At this point Quirkstandard felt the need to stand up to make his point, but since he was already standing up he stepped onto a chair and raised a finger in the air, clasped one hand over his breast and cast a turbulent expression into the future. ‘… no more will I be reliant,’ he repeated, ‘on other people to make my decisions for me, for I shall make them for myself. In this wide open future I see, I shall have the ability and the capability to choose my own drink whenever I choose to choose. I shall be my own master in all arenas of life, no more tossed on the prongs of someone else’s dilemma. No longer a plaything of the fates. My own man. Do you hear me?’ he stared through the ceiling and his raised finger swelled into a clenched fist. ‘This is my dream, Mistress Dawn, I shall be a free man striding wisely through the world, shrinking from nothing and knowing everything, deciding everything …’

  ‘Tea then?’ she asked, rhetorically.

  ‘Er, yes, I suppose so. If that’s what you think I ought to have? I’m sure it’ll be lovely, thank you. Oh, and sorry about the chair,’ he said as he climbed down. He felt a little embarrassed by his outburst. He couldn’t say where it had come from, it had certainly caught him off guard. He’d blustered and gabbled before, going on about things he didn’t understand at length merely because nobody had thought to shut him up, but this had felt different. He’d meant it somehow. It was obvious that the germ of the idea that had struck him two mornings before, at that abortive attempted breakfast, had now taken root and was beginning to poke out shoots. There could be no turning back.

  As his foot touched the floorboards some slight applause reached his ears. Heartfelt applause, but thin due to the solitary nature of the clapper. In the doorway that linked the back room kitchen to the shop stood, although at this point Quirkstandard couldn’t even guess at his name, Simone Crepuscular, the proprietor.

  ‘A fine speech sir, a fine speech indeed. I envy your eloquence and your passion. It is a fine day, today, on which to meet a man not afraid of his dreams. I think,’ he paused to scratch his ear, ‘that we may well be able to make each other very happy.’

  Quirkstandard blushed nervously and nodded.

  Chapter 5

  India, Elephants & A Bacon Sandwich

  It wouldn’t be exactly true to say that Simone Crepuscular hadn’t enjoyed his time in the army, because as he grew up it turned out that he had the sort of disposition which could turn to sunshine the most unlikely circumstances (except sea travel), but all the same it would be true to say there were a few specific things about army life that even he could never come to love.

  The early mornings were one thing, as were the queues for the bathroom. Using a rifle was another: it turned out that they were heavier than they looked and when fired they made m
ost astonishing noise right next to one’s ear. Often he had himself noted down in casualty lists after training with a thumping headache. And uniforms. He never quite came to terms with the uniform. But all these things were, in the end, entirely surmountable when he looked around at the little patch of earth his battalion was encamped on with its sunshine and its elephants and its odd looking trees. Aside from all the marching up and down it really wasn’t such a bad place at all.

  The first four or five years were filled mostly with scrubbing potatoes and washing tea-towels behind the mess, but then he was promoted to the position of Camp Clerk.

  When he first heard about it he assumed it was (just) a practical joke, since he’d long become accustomed to his mates making fun of his ‘accidental enlistment through distinct illiteracy’: to put such a man in charge of the entire battalion’s paperwork seemed just the sort of lark he’d come to expect. However, as it turned out, it was nothing of the sort.

  The Major, in his wisdom, had noticed that the previous clerk had died of a fatal encounter with some wildlife and that, therefore, it followed that the position needed to be filled and rather pronto. Not being one to delegate the important jobs he set about reviewing the files of each man in each platoon in order to find the most suitable candidate, and very soon grew bored. After all he’d written most of what was in the files at each man’s annual review and he knew that he always wrote the same thing, which since the files were private and never consulted by anyone other than himself was not, in the normal course of things a problem. Eventually he spread a handful of files out on his desk, closed his eyes and scientifically jabbed with his finger.

  When he posted the announcement most of the men and officers felt very similar emotions to those that Crepuscular felt, but then they noticed that the Major wasn’t smiling, or at least not in the way that suggested he’d made a joke. In light of this no one opted to disagree with the Major, especially since, after all, he was the Major and they weren’t, and so the promotion went through just like any other promotion.

  For the next few years all correspondence, dockets, chits, chitties, memoranda, forms, documents, accounts, bills and divers other extraneous bits of paperwork in his unit consisted solely of Simone’s impressionistic imitative squiggles, patterns and crosses. From a distance and through a squint in the dark these could be mistaken for some sort of writing, but close up they soon became a meaningless tangle of complex enigmatic quasi-pseudohieroglyphs. Even the British Army’s enemies’ most highly trained and intuitive cryptographers, strategists and accountants, who routinely intercepted the secret military post as it passed through their sorting offices in Berlin, Paris, Moscow and Washington, could cast no light on the presumed meaning locked deep within.

  Nevertheless wages in the battalion were still paid, supplies still arrived (since no orders to the contrary were ever sent home) and the weather was warm and bright, with a cool breeze that rolled down from the foothills in the early evening and the camp became an oasis of peace in an increasingly fraught world. No orders to combat were ever received. Or if they were received nothing was ever done about them since Crepuscular simply pretended to read incoming post and filed it as the whim took him, and since the officers didn’t want to look as if they were interfering with the Camp Clerk’s work, no one ever checked.

  In time Simone found that he could fit a whole day’s work into just a few hours in the morning, ‘copying out’ orders passed down to him from the Major, scribbling on a half dozen official forms and filing the post. He’d squiggle artistically on a couple of envelopes, pop a few bits of paperwork inside them and then drop the sealed missives into the mail sack which was collected twice weekly by the military postman.

  His role as Camp Clerk freed Crepuscular from all the menial jobs he’d been doing and now, once he had finished just as much ‘paperwork’ as he felt was necessary for any given day, he’d leave his hut and go get on with things that he thought to be more pressing. For example, he’d often go down to the bank of the local river, much broader and browner than any he’d sat beside before, and he’d strip off his uniform and hang it over a nearby branch of just the right height. With the wind on his skin he felt a freedom pump through his veins and he’d watch the world pass by from a seat somewhere halfway up some enormous foreign tree.

  The world did pass by, most assuredly, but it went by slowly in this part of India, just drifting along, without making any fuss, allowing itself to be picked up and examined and put down again with a gentle touch. He found in it a meditation and a comfort after all the hectic squiggling he’d spent the morning performing on bits of paper.

  The local women who came down to the river to wash their clothes would giggle shyly and coyly wave up at the naked Englishman in the tree who sometimes, if his mind hadn’t wandered off entirely, waved back.

  *

  Quirkstandard looked up at the man who stood in the kitchen doorway praising him.

  The first thing he noticed was the fellow’s bald pate which the morning light glinted off. It was a shiny dome, surrounded by a fine haze of unkempt hairs that provided a sort of corona or halo to his face. He next noticed the man’s excessive white and grey beard. This started just above and behind his ears, trailed woollily down the sides of his face, circled his mouth and spread down, down over his broad chest, before fading away, first into wisps and finally into air, somewhere just above his navel.

  From his navel Quirkstandard’s eyes continued their downward plunge and he noticed, almost instantly, that the man he was meeting wasn’t wearing a waistcoat. He also wasn’t wearing a shirt, a jacket or trousers. Or a kilt or a skirt, Quirkstandard added mentally, or, come to that, long johns (though it was high summer and such things weren’t entirely necessary, he admitted). The man opposite had a white piece of cloth somehow perched around his parts and nothing else at all.

  Epitome Quirkstandard wasn’t sure where to look and scratched his bruises for something to do.

  The man stepped from the doorway and sat down at the head of the table. He picked up his bacon sandwich.

  ‘That happened to me yesterday,’ Quirkstandard finally said, still standing up. ‘Oh, no, actually it was the day before yesterday now …’ No one interrupted him, so he went on, ‘I was thinking, for a moment, that today was yesterday but that’s wrong of course. It’s just that yesterday passed in rather a haze and this day and that one have sort of blurred into one. It’s a little as if, I suppose, yesterday was a mistake and had been rubbed out and we’ve started afresh this morning all over again. You see, I didn’t sleep very well last night and I don’t seem to have eaten since lunchtime, until this young lady made me this sandwich, and three meals are what mark days as being days, don’t you agree? And so this sandwich seems to be catching up the meal I missed yesterday evening, because I didn’t have it then and so it sort of slips backwards to fill the gap and so the day before yesterday isn’t yesterday at all, and I wonder if there’s a special word for it? Like yesterday but, you know, sort of one more than yesterday?’ He paused for a moment and looked around. ‘I’ll just be quiet now. Sorry.’ He felt a little foolish because the man with the beard was staring at him intently. Quirkstandard couldn’t tell what the look on that face meant, hidden behind his beard like a child peering over the edge of a big salt and pepper rug.

  ‘No need to apologise, dear sir,’ the man said in a kind voice. ‘Life is a confusion, and sometimes it does the soul good of a morning to express it as such.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Quirkstandard who was learning a lot of new things already.

  ‘You see, sometimes you’ll find, my dear sir, that days and days go by without you noticing them pass at all, and then one day you turn around and it is already years later and you can see, you can almost touch something that happened to you so long ago, and it seems so easy, so near. They might be days of joys, they could be happy days that are now long gone, or they might be days of darkness, days of horror and darkness. It doesn’t matter, bec
ause there are some days that will live with you forever and that you can’t shake off, despite trying, and then concurrent with those are patches of time that seem to vanish, to evaporate, that seem to slip out of conscious recall. Days and times and years grow dim and grey, rarely thought of, rarely recalled. But things don’t remain static, dear sir, never do they remain static and you never know, can never say whether today is a day or not on which you might not yet turn around and find a year has gone by, or maybe two, or maybe thirty years have passed by, and suddenly every moment is clear once again, every bead of moisture sparkles on your brow, every flower’s perfume smells strong in your lungs, every vanishing cry rings brilliant and shocking in your ears …’

  Dawn coughed gently from the sink.

  ‘Ah,’ said the great beard, taking a deep breath, ‘my early warning. Apparently I am becoming verbosely stentorian again. It is my turn to apologise, dear sir. Sorry.’

  Quirkstandard sat feeling a little dazed by the whole experience. He had never been spoken to in quite such a way, or held by quite so electric an eye as he had just been held by. He hadn’t followed much of what had just been said to him, he had become a little lost around the second conjunction (something about turning round), but the tone in which it had all been said was so authoritative, yet kind, yet intense, yet quiet, yet strong, yet soft … filled with humanity and a clear case of caring for another human being. It had struck Quirkstandard as being bright and intelligent and he’d recognised something of his own yearning for learning in there. For a moment, in just a moment, he had discovered a fellow traveller, but one who was, clearly so much further down the road than he was.