The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard

by A. F. Harrold

  ‘Of course. It’s from my Aunt. Here you are.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Crepuscular held it up to the light and examined the picture. Without turning it over to read the caption he said, ‘Arundel Castle, Mr Q. Is that what it is? I’m never very confident about castles, there’s something very similar about them all.’

  ‘Oh, yes. It is Arundel Castle. You see, that’s where my Aunt lives. Well, not in the castle, obviously, I mean she’s not a King or anything! But she lives in a cottage, just near there. In fact if the picture were a bit bigger and drawn from a different angle, you’d just be able to see her house, if there weren’t all those trees in the way, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Chapter 15

  Baby Names & Epitome’s Plan

  As they hacked their way through the depths of the dark, lush Amazonian forests, surrounded by the noises of giant insects and vines and bats and rummaging things they never saw in the undergrowth and the dripping of old rain still making its slow fall from the canopy to the forest floor, it became increasingly obvious that Teresa-Maria was pregnant once again. According to Simone’s timetable they would reach the Atlantic coast in just another month or two, long before her condition would become a hindrance to their hiking. He was so happy being a family, belonging to something that also belonged to him, with his two sons and his beautiful (if somewhat coarse) pirate wife, that he looked forward to nothing with greater anticipation than the prospect of having a third child.

  They would toss names around as they made their slow progress through bunches of hanging ampelopsis and thick, prickly undergrowth.

  ‘What about Jonathon?’ Simone would say, for example, carrying Simon on his hip and holding Rodney’s hand.

  ‘Jonathon?’ Teresa-Maria would reply, sounding a touch incredulous, as she hacked at a stubborn bit of vegetation with her machete attachment.

  ‘Yes,’ Simone would reply, seemingly unfazed by her tone. ‘You see, I had an Uncle called Stephen when I was a boy, but he always asked us to call him Jonathon.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Well, no. Father asked to see his birth certificate one day and refused to call him by any other name than what was on there.’

  ‘And what name was on there then?’

  ‘Oddly enough, it seemed the registrar had made a spelling mistake, or maybe granddad had made a speaking mistake, because from then on we had to call him Uncle Alberto.’

  ‘How confusing.’

  ‘Yes, mostly for his wife though.’

  ‘All the same, Simone, I don’t like Jonathon. It’s a bloody dreadful name.’

  ‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’

  ‘It just doesn’t have what it takes to be a pirate’s name.’

  ‘Hang on. Cut-Throat John? That sounds all right to me.’

  ‘Oh, well you can do that if you want. I mean, you can do that to any name, can’t you? I think a name just needs to be more bloodthirsty all by itself. More ruthless.’

  ‘Like what then?’

  ‘Well, what about Blackbeard?’

  ‘I’ve got to admit that is piratey.’

  ‘You can’t get much more piratey. It’s good, it’s solid, it’s traditional.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right, but I’m not sure that it’s the sort of name that’s suitable, however lovely it might be in other ways, for a baby, I mean for a child, is it? It’s more the sort of name one might assume in later life, as an alias perhaps or a sobriquet … something to strike fear and worry into the hearts of other pirates and into the officers of the law who are baying, romantically, at your heels, always one step behind your nefarious plans. I’m just not convinced that it would work, for example, for the first, well shall we say, fifteen years of a young lad’s life. He’d be teased something rotten in the playground for a start.’

  ‘A bit of teasing in early life is exactly what makes a pirate grow up to be a pirate.’

  ‘Well, maybe that’s true, but I still don’t think Blackbeard should be on our list.’

  ‘Very well. I didn’t much like it anyway. I knew a Blackbeard once and he was a complete arsehole.’

  ‘Teresa-Maria! There are children present.’

  ‘I should bloody hope so, or it would mean you’d lost them.’

  Sometimes the conversation would subside for a while as they navigated round some awkward obstacle or found an easygoing patch through which they could just stride comfortably, but sooner or later someone would say something else.

  ‘Oh, Teresa-Maria,’ Simone Crepuscular would say, for example, ‘I’ve just remembered a joke I think you might like.’

  ‘Is it about pirates?’

  ‘Why, yes it is.’

  ‘Very well, go on.’

  (Teresa-Maria didn’t have much of a sense of humour, but she would pay attention to Simone’s jokes if they were about something that interested her.)

  ‘Here we go. How do you make a pirate angry?’

  ‘Oh, well that’s easy,’ she’d reply. ‘You kidnap her parrot, or you sink her ship, or you steal her treasure, or you insult her mother, or you …’

  ‘No, no, no. You’re thinking too literally. You’re not thinking about it like a joke, Maria.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. You see, what you do is you stop the pirate from having a ‘p’ and he becomes ‘irate’.’

  Teresa-Maria would stop, at a moment like this, and turn to look back at Crepuscular. The dew would glint on the blade of her machete in a sudden green shaft of sunlight. His grin would shrink. Her face would remain impassive, except for a twitch of the eye-patch. A shiver would surmount his spine as she turned back to slice through a harmless dangling vine. Dark plant juice would drip through the moment’s silence.

  ‘Don’t you get it?’ he would ask meekly.

  ‘I get it,’ she would say, ‘I just think maybe it’s time we stopped for lunch.’

  ‘Oh, fine,’ he would say, relieved. ‘What have we got?’

  ‘How about some vine leaves,’ she’d say, ‘stuffed with some other bloody vine leaves?’

  ‘Lovely,’ Simone would reply without a trace of irony, since he actually rather liked this rainforest staple.

  The family would then sit down on a fallen tree stump or log, or maybe on the earthy floor itself if there was nowhere dryer to hand, after first, of course, having checked for bugs and scorpions. And for spiders, lizards, poisonous frogs, angry birds and bees. And for snakes, worms, giant butterflies, alligators, ants, fungi and sharp stones. And thorns. And giant fly-traps. And then they would tuck into their lunch.

  ‘I think Blackbeard’s probably better than Jonathon,’ he would finally say, after chewing for some time on his vine leaf.

  ‘See, I knew you’d come round in time,’ she’d say, smiling, ‘but really we ought to think of some other names too, just in case it turns out to be a boy.’

  *

  Epitome Quirkstandard spent the rest of the afternoon in the Crepuscular’s shop, browsing more pamphlets, before going off to Mauve’s for a spot of hearty supper.

  He spent the night there, since as Snatchby had said and as Simone had helped him to discover with a cheap pamphlet which happened to have underground and over-ground maps of a number of the great European capitals (including, as luck would have it, London), it wasn’t far away. He slept in one of the guest bunks and woke fresh and refreshed the next morning. After a tiny spot of billiards with his pal Flirtwater, a larger smattering of breakfast and a quick sit down with the map and Snatchby, so that he’d be sure of the way (having noted that if you follow a path in one direction it’s not always so simple to follow it back the other way unless you’ve been turning around and paying attention, since all the buildings look the other way round, as it were, when you go back and it’s easy to end up faced by three roads and not know which one was the one you’d come out of, and you’d have to stand there and smell the wind and gauge the angle of ascent or descent and hope that by such clues you’l
l choose wisely, which isn’t always the case) he went straight back to the Crepuscular’s shop.

  He worked his way through: The Pacific Ocean & Other Great Misnomers (Including Rumoured Remedies For Mal-de-Mer); Keeping Clean In The Amazon Basin & Other Dirty Spots; Stamps Of The World (& Great Britain) & Their Apparent Perceived Relation To The Rainfall Patterns On The South Island Of New Zealand; Spiders, Pigeons & Carnivorous Trees Of The World; and How To Distinguish Pimples, Moles & Boils: A Spotter’s Guide. He sat and turned the crisp sheets over and over in his hands, absorbing every last bit of information (in much the same way as a sponge absorbs – that is: remarkably well at first, but with a lot of subsequent draining away, until eventually it will be, once again, as pristine and empty of water as it originally was). His jaw hung open, a distant gleam flittered in his eyes and a vein bulged in his forehead as his body tried to cope with the increased requests for oxygen arriving from his brain.

  When Dawn brought him his lunchtime sandwich he put down Horses & Houses: Not Merely A Difference Of Letters and walked out into the kitchen. Simone was at the table with a large sheet of paper laid out before him, covered with his meticulous script and diagrams and he was pointing to a sketch in one corner, explaining something about it to his son Simon. They looked up at Quirkstandard as he entered.

  ‘How has your morning been, Mr Q.?’

  ‘Very instructional, thank you, Mr Crepuscular, I never really guessed that there was so much to the world.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a wide place, and broad. That’s certainly true enough.’

  ‘I was wondering,’ Quirkstandard began.

  He paused.

  ‘Yes, Mr Q., go on. If it’s anything I can help you with, I mean anything within reason, then you know, sir, that I shall.’

  ‘Well, you see, I was wondering, because I know a lot of chaps who’re in just the same posish as I was on Monday – you know what I mean, Mr Crepuscular, daft as a plank and about as likely to understand an equation as a horse is likely to marry the king. So, I thought, since I’m here and they’re not and since the front room isn’t all that big really, whether I might, well, take a couple of the pamphlets away and show them to a few chums back at my Club? Sort of give them the boost up and maybe they’ll come and read the next one themselves?’

  ‘Why of course, that sounds a jolly enough idea. You know, Mr Q., as well as I do that these pamphlets (except for a few particular ones of which that we’ve only the one copy left) are as much for sale as they are for reading here, and even if you don’t want to purchase we can always rent off the premises. All that takes is a small deposit and whatever you wish from the shelves can be yours for the day.’

  ‘Oh, smashing.’

  Quirkstandard returned to the front room and began to make a small pile of what he saw to be the key pamphlets that would turn an idle gentleman’s head. He knew he faced a struggle with some of his pals, but he thought if he could find the right angle of attack on each of them then he might be able to start something special.

  He soon found that his pile included all the pamphlets he’d read thus far and this was clearly too much to get through in one evening’s assault on Mauve’s. Sadly he began to whittle them down to just a couple. As he picked each one up to examine it and to make a decision he turned them over and read facts that he’d only read a few hours earlier, and he was surprised to discover that some of them he already knew, though some were (once again) brand new. But the fact, he told himself, that some of it had stuck … well, that had to mean he was getting smarter, yes?

  *

  'What about Veronica?’

  ‘It sounds a bit girly, don’t you think? A bit weak.’

  ‘Bertha?’

  ‘A bit too manly.’

  ‘Hieronymus?’

  ‘Too much like a Dutch painter.’

  ‘Sebastian, then?’

  ‘Too much like a man I killed once in a fit of wrath.’

  ‘Oh, he must have been a bad man to get you angry dear,’ Crepuscular said, treading carefully through the jungle.

  ‘Yes, a truly dreadful man. He was a pirate from a different ship to mine, you see, and we were drinking together in Pedro’s Bar, late one night, when he suggested that his ship was bigger than mine. What did I care about that? It wasn’t my ship, as such, since I was only crewing on her over the summer holiday to pay my way through Pirate College. What did it really matter if his ship was bigger? He was only crewing for the same reason as me. We’d had a couple of classes together that term and he’d always been a bit full of himself. I’d watched him in the Swaggering Lectures and he was rubbish, but had a big brass buckle on his hat, with feathers and beads hanging from it, which always distracted the lecturer who had this thing for cheap baubles, so he’d come out of there with decent marks when he should’ve, frankly, had to do Swaggering re-sits. And it was the same in other classes too: all talk and no trousers. Anyway, I tried not to let his bragging get to me that morning and so when he continued to go on about the size of his ship versus mine I leant over the table and slapped him on the cheek. Just gently enough to make him shut up. But, when he got up off the floor, he picked up his drink and threw it straight in my face.’

  ‘I’m surprised, Maria, that he’d managed to live this long.’

  ‘Well, he’d been drinking mineral water, you see, and those bubbles can sting a fair bit if they get your eyes, which they did, and so I stood there half blinded by the fizzing and I just pulled out my pistol and shot him. It was all I could think to do.’

  ‘Bang. Bang.’

  ‘Yes, a bit like that Rodney darling. Except I had a revolver and so there were six bullets.’

  ‘Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,’ Rodney shouted into the rainforest canopy. A flock of toucans erupted from the trees high above and flew off squawking noisily.

  ‘Except, of course, being blinded I couldn’t see so well and every one of those bullets missed him. One of them, though, was reflected off the mirror behind the bar and flew back down the barrel, which exploded and left me with this.’ She held up her hook hand.

  ‘So, you didn’t kill him then?’

  ‘Not then, no. But I pushed him down a latrine the next night when he’d been drinking harder stuff. He drowned.’

  ‘Golly,’ said father and son together.

  ‘Well, it turned out to be a blessing really. I’d not been doing too good in my classes either (I was never academically gifted), but when I got back to Pirate College after the summer break I graduated immediately with flying colours. All because of the hook, it gets you on a sort of fast track, you see. So here I am.’

  ‘And then I met you …’

  ‘… yes, later on, long after that, you met me.’ She leaned over and kissed him, seeming to be genuinely happy for a moment.

  After walking a little further Simone paused and asked, ‘That pirate, that student, was he called Sebastian then?’

  ‘Do you know something,’ Teresa-Maria said, after a moment, ‘I can’t rightly recall. I think that might’ve been the name of his ship. It’s all so long ago now.’

  They walked on, further into the forest.

  Chapter 16

  The Shop & The Browsers

  After the astonishing success of his first three pamphlets Simone Crepuscular set up Crepuscular & Sons: Educators To The World, his shop.

  The moment he did so the bottom dropped out of the pamphlet market. Demand simply dried up, along with sales.

  At first it seemed that no one was ever going to come into their shop. Then, one day, almost three months after he first laid out his wares on the counter, unbolted the front door and counted out his float, the little bell tinkled and a man entered. In silence he looked at the three titles on the counter, looked around the otherwise empty room and then went out again. Quite swiftly.

  Another three months of uninterrupted quiet passed by before the doorbell tinkled again. Simone looked up expectantly from where he sat at the counter, putting the finishi
ng touches to a drawing for a new pamphlet. It was the same chap from three months earlier. Once again he looked around, didn’t see anything he wanted and left without saying a word.

  This teasing lack of appreciation so upset Simone that he hurriedly set aside his drawings, pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and wrote in his finest large script THIS IS NOT THE SHOP YOU WANT; PLEASE TRY ELSEWHERE.

  This, naturally enough in a city like London where the extraordinary soon becomes ordinary and the ordinary evaporates to humdrum in a matter of minutes, immediately attracted the attention of passers-by, who came in and started browsing, wondering just what it might be that they didn’t want. In a moment of pique Simone tried to usher them out. He was mostly successful in this endeavour but failed, however, to clear the shop entirely before one of these gawkers bought a pamphlet.

  As he placed the penny in the till Simone Crepuscular finally felt the satisfaction of a shopkeeper surge in him. It’s not a question of greed or caprice, but rather a more benign warmth that comes from fulfilling one’s chosen role. In the same way as a baker takes pride in baking bread (and more so when the bread is eaten by someone who gets pleasure from bread) and a train driver takes pride in driving the train (and more so when passengers are moved from one place to another on time), so a shopkeeper is fulfilled, qua shopkeeper, not when he merely keeps a shop which is, of course, a start, but only when that shop is used as a shop by the public. Of course, cash in the till drawer isn’t to be sniffed at either.

  As those first six months of shopkeeping had passed by he had been toying with a number of ideas for subsequent pamphlets. Some were further autobiographical tales, bringing his story, more or less, up to date in the series he had begun so successfully, but he had other ideas too: to investigate some Eastern philosophies that were close to his heart; the mystical experiences and beliefs of other cultures and species (he wasn’t exactly sure what this meant, but was willing to think about it); or, to write about the geography, geology and natural history of various countries around the world that he hadn’t actually visited himself. He had heard of many things, tales and rumours from the people he’d met in his long peregrination, and on Wednesday afternoons, which was half-day closing, he’d made a habit of visiting the British Museum and sitting in the Reading Room, studying anything that came to light. He realised he wasn’t bound by his own experiences, and he realised that not everyone had the time or the patience to sit through some of those abstruse tomes that were brought to his desk, but he could summarise, précis and concatenate the best bits to make them palatable.