by David Nobbs
'And after you'd slept with him, this process of adjustment proved ineffectual?'
'Yeah. He played last night. He was all over the place. He said to me, "I can't sleep with you no more. It was great sex, but it's fucking up my ranking position." He's the first Dane to get into the Top Ten, see.'
'Yes.' This was a lie. I didn't see. 'Well, how sad.' This was an even greater lie.
'I nicked one of his socks. His left sock. I'll never wash it. It'll go in my trophy cabinet, won't it?'
'Trophy cabinet?'
'Yeah. I got all sorts of things. I got a pair of underpants worn by Rob Crawley, the Chirpy Cockney Boy Wonder.'
'The Chirpy Cockney Boy Wonder?'
'That's what Jake Plimsoll calls him. He's this writer about darts. He comes up with these fantastic descriptions. He's a great writer.'
To my horror the words 'What, the equal of Tolstoy?' came into my head and approached my mouth. I kept my lips firmly clamped.
'I got an initialled handkerchief belonging to Tons Thomas.'
She blushed slightly as she mentioned his name.
'Tons Thomas?'
'The Mercurial Man Mountain from Merthyr.'
'Jake Plimsoll again?'
'Yeah. He's fantastic. But you must have heard of Tons Thomas?'
'Er, yes.' Why was I so pathetic? 'In the . . . erm . . . once again in the . . . er . . . the rather special sense of . . . er . . . no.'
Silence fell between us, as if my not having heard of Tons Thomas had put me beyond the pale. To my astonishment, I found that I did not want to be beyond the pale.
She began to stare out of the window.
'I like looking out of the window,' she said. 'You see things. You see things you'll never see again. A man wheeling a bike. Never seen him before. Never see him again. I like that.'
I could think of no reply.
'Look at that!' she exclaimed.
I looked, though I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to be looking at. I saw a small field, roughly ploughed, very stony, with three burly men in it, and in the field there were posts with string running tautly between the them. The three men were looking at the train. The scene meant nothing to me.
'Marking it up for housing,' said the young woman. 'All be houses next year. Look at them lazy buggers, looking at a train as if they've never seen one before. Any excuse to stop working.'
'You notice a lot.'
'Just because I'm not a philosopher doesn't mean I'm thick.'
'Of course not.'
'My brother, he is thick. He had to have elocution lessons before he could say, ' "Come on you Spurs".'
She laughed. In her laugh there was joy at being alive. She had a wonderfully unaffected laugh. I suppose it was the first thing that . . . 'turned me on' is a bit strong . . . 'inspired an affectionate response' might be more the mark.
A little boy ran up the carriage gleefully, pursued by his angry, worried mother, who grabbed him and carried him screaming back to their seats. Absurd jingles rang out from two mobile phones.
'I bet you're an Alan,' said the young woman.
'Sorry?'
'I have this thing where I can tell people's names. I bet you're an Alan.'
'That's amazing!'
'You are an Alan?'
'Yes. Alan Calcutt.'
It warmed my heart to see her looking so thrilled at getting my name right, and this would have surprised me if I'd thought of it. My heart wasn't that easy to warm.
'I don't always get it right,' she admitted. 'Once I said Darren, and it really pissed him off. He was a Julian. What am I?'
'Sorry, what?'
'What's my name?'
'Oh. I don't know. No, I really . . . it's not the kind of speculation that I habitually . . . I'm really not very good at guessing. I think that too much reasoning has blunted my intuitive powers.' I looked out of the window again. I daresay I could have caught a glimpse of the three slender spires of Lichfield Cathedral, had I had eyes to see, but I was looking only for inspiration. 'Sandra?'
'No! Never in a million years!'
'Ros?'
'Not bad, I could have been, but no.'
'I give up.'
I could tell that she was disappointed in me. I wasn't a good sport. I never had been. Charades? Ugh. French cricket with people's odious offspring? No thank you.
'Ange'
'Ah. I wouldn't have got it.'
'I'm stopping you working, aren't I, Alan? You're busy.'
'No, Ange, not at all.' I was aware that I had said 'Ange' as if I could hardly believe it. 'I'm . . . I'm enjoying talking to you.'
'What's all this writing you're doing then? All them pages?'
'Ah. I've been chosen . . .' I tried not to show how proud I was. '. . . to deliver this year's Ferdinand Brinsley Memorial Lecture.'
We sped through Tamworth Low Level. The station was a blur. Two men in red shirts wheeled a refreshment trolley past us. I said that we didn't want anything, without consulting Ange.
'I'd have liked a Coke,' she said.
'Oh. Sorry, Ange,' I said. 'A Coke, please,' I called out.
The trolley returned.
'It's Pepsi. Is that all right?'
'Is it, Ange?'
I kept repeating 'Ange' in the vain hope that I would get used to it.
'Yeah. Thanks.'
Believe it or not, but I had never bought a Coke or a Pepsi. This girl was already changing my life.
'So what's this thingummy whatsit lecture all about?' she asked.
'Ah. I . . . er . . . I . . . I should perhaps explain that the Ferdinand Brinsley Memorial Lecture is not a strictly academic occasion. It's an opportunity to let our philosophical trousers down, as it . . . as it were. It's philosophy for an audience who are intelligent but not . . . not philosophers or even students of philosophy. It is, I suppose, a trifle . . .' I hesitated before the dreaded word, '. . . populist. You've heard of the black holes of...'
'Calcutta,' she interrupted triumphantly.
'Einstein. I had thought of expanding a little talk I gave in the seventies, when there was still a bit of the maverick in me . . . my conceit was that there are social black holes, where time moves at a slower pace than in other places. Budleigh Salterton, Hove, ironically the whole of white South Africa. Time has moved on, however, and its . . . er . . . its humorous impact has dated. Then I . . . er . . . I hit upon a title which rather intrigued me: "The Social Politics of Incomprehension".'
'I don't understand.'
'Exactly. You weren't meant to. Well done.'
'Oh!' She was pleased.
'But that didn't work either. So then I toyed with the basic principles of logic, but I decided it was all too basic, and . . . er . . . at the moment I'm trying to develop something with . . .
well, with the whole subject of chance. Can there be chance in life or is everything purposive? Do you know what teleology is?'
'Is it where you know what's on the telly without you have to look at the TV Times?'
'No. No! Though that's rather good. No, that is good. No, teleology is a philosophical term, for the belief that all phenomena, all natural processes, are directed towards a goal or have a purpose. A man drops a book out of a sixteenth-storey window. It hits, and kills, a man passing beneath.'
'That's horrible. Poor man.'
'No, no. It's hypothetical. There is no man. There is no book. But if there was . . . if there was . . . could we say that if the man dropped the book deliberately, he caused the other man's death? Let's assume that he dropped the book deliberately, but he had no intention of killing anybody. But he did kill somebody. Did he cause that man's death or was it an accident? Was he responsible for that man's death? And, if he had dropped the book accidentally, was he still responsible? And if he dropped the book accidentally, and killed the man by malign ill-chance, is it possible that, although this was a chance event from his point of view, there is another, greater system of causation within which he had to drop the b
ook, whether or not he intended to? Supposing a man dropped a book deliberately to land on someone's head and kill him, but he mistimed it and killed someone else. You can see that the moral aspects are deeply complex.'
I paused, wondering what she had made of it all. She appeared to be staring out of the window. I hoped that this was to help her concentrate better on what I was driving at. My hopes were dashed.
'I wonder if birds are ever frightened of heights,' she said.
'Sorry?'
'All them birds up there. I was just thinking, it'd be a right old do if one of them was afraid of heights. Like a lark for instance. Fuck up his life a bit, wouldn't it? The old singing and that. Know what I mean?'
'Extraordinary thought. Fascinating. You know, one of the problems of being clever, it seems to me, is that one ceases to have extraordinary thoughts. One's thoughts are too conditioned by one's knowledge of all the thoughts that have gone before.'
I realised my error immediately, and I blushed. This was my second blush in less than an hour. I hate blushing. Thank goodness nobody from the department was there to see it.
She was on to it like a flash, of course. 'Are you saying I'm not clever? You do think I'm thick.'
'No. No!'
'I wouldn't blame you. I didn't listen to all that you were saying about chance, did I? I must be a disappointment to you.'
'Not at all. To be disappointed one has to have had hopes. I have no hopes.'
I didn't mean it to sound so abrupt. I could tell that it flattened her. It was rude, it was thoughtless, and it wasn't even true. I couldn't believe it. It wasn't true. I did have hopes. I didn't know what they were yet, but I knew that I had them.
'I wonder what cows think about.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Cows. What do they think a train is? All them black and white jobs in that field. What does a train mean to them? Fuck all, probably. You're annoyed.'
'No! Why should I be annoyed?'
'Because you want to talk about philosophy and all I do is rabbit about cows. Hey, that's not bad, is it? Rabbit about cows. Sorry.'
'No, no, no. You aren't a student. You don't have to listen to me. No, if I looked annoyed, it was because you used that word. The f word.'
'Everybody uses it these days.'
'Exactly, and that's why I don't like it. It's so boring. So lazy. I'm sorry. It's not for me to tell you not to use it, but it's rather spoiling our conversation.'
I could see her brain registering the fact that if a conversation was capable of being spoilt, there must be something in it that was worth not spoiling. It was her turn to blush slightly.
'Sorry,' she said. 'I'll try not to say it. Go on. Tell me some more about . . . what was it . . . chance?'
'Right. Well, let's bring it back to this train. I . . . er . . . I'm interested in . . . in a humorous way, because the Ferdinand Brinsley is basically a light-hearted occasion . . . in the mathematics of chance. How many people are there in this carriage? Fifty? Sixty? If you had asked all sixty, a year ago today, if they would be on this train today, I'm sure that many of them would have scoffed at the possibility.'
'That baby over there wasn't even f . . . wasn't even born.'
'Well, exactly. Good point. Good point, Ange.'
Don't overdo it, Alan. It's patronising.
'I don't think he's three months old. What were the chances of his parents having a fuck that very night . . . oops, sorry . . .'
'No, I don't mind it in that context, it's factual. I only object to it as a meaningless adjective.'
'Oh. Well, I mean you don't fuck every night do you? Well, parents don't . . . and I mean, you don't conceive anything like every time, do you?'
'No. Quite. What were the chances a year ago of you being on this train?'
'Practically nil, cos I had a job last year, till that bitch on Reception started picking on me.'
'Well there you are.' I was astounded to find myself feeling grateful to that bitch on Reception. If she hadn't picked on her, Ange wouldn't have been on the train. Oh, what a lovely bitch. I would quite like to find out where she was on Reception and go and thank her one day for being such a bitch. 'And to calculate the actual odds of everybody being on this train you would have to multiply the odds in every particular case. If your chances were a hundred to one and mine were a hundred to one then the chances of both of us being on the train are ten thousand to one before we bring in anybody else, yet here we all are and it doesn't seem remotely extraordinary.'
'If it is ten thousand to one, we're lucky,' she said.
'Lucky?'
'I've enjoyed talking to you.'
She had echoed my thoughts! I felt curiously moved, and rather embarrassed. Somewhat out of desperation, I offered her a banana which I happened to have in my briefcase. I haven't graduated to a laptop.
'You've only got one,' she protested.
'I'd like you to have it.'
'Well, ta. Thanks.'
She peeled the banana and raised it towards me.
'Cheers.'
'Cheers.'
Silence fell loudly between us. She returned to her magazine, I to my notes, but the words were dancing. They didn't make sense. We must have remained silent for the best part of half an hour, and I realised that after fifty-five years of living I had insufficient social skills to be able to break that silence. Thank goodness she did.
'Virgo.'
'Yes.'
She laughed, and began to read from the magazine.
' "A chance encounter with an interesting man could produce far reaching results." It says "man" cos it's a women's magazine so it's aimed at women, but in your case it would be an interesting woman, cos you're a man. Unless you're gay, which I don't think you are cos I can always spot them. Like down the Black Bull I knew Colin Parsley's so-called wife was a bloke before anybody. Hey, do you think I could be the interesting woman? Do you think I could produce far reaching results?' She began to read again. '"You must be quick off the mark or the opportunity will slip by. A generous impulse could have amazing results." '
We were passing through Watford Junction.
' "A generous impulse",' repeated Ange. 'That could be the Pepsi you bought me.'
'Hardly. You had to twist my arm.'
'The banana, then. You gave me your only one.'
'No. I'm afraid there was nothing generous about that. I hate bananas. No, I never have generous impulses, I'm never quick off the mark, and opportunities always pass me by.'
'Oh well.'
