‘Righto, Barbara. Thanks.’
Then she couldn’t leave me alone. ‘Have you worked it out yet, John?’
‘Not yet. But I’m enjoying not being able to work it out.’
‘Shall I tell you now?’
‘Not yet, if you don’t mind.’ It became obvious that she did mind. The suspense of keeping me in suspense was more than she could bear. She was bursting with it. ‘Tell you what, Barbara. Why don’t you tell me another one? That might make you feel better.’
‘Then can I tell you the answer to the first one?’
‘I suppose so. Is there a time limit? Am I being very stupid?’
‘No, John, it’s not that. Don’t you want to know the answer?’
‘Oh yes, but at the moment I’m enjoying the wait.’
‘You’re impossible. Okay, here’s another one. A man goes into a bar and asks for a glass of water. Instead the bartender produces a gun from behind the counter and points it at him. After a few moments the man says,
“Thank you” and goes out. What’s going on?’
‘Oh, I like that one. It’s even nicer than Antony and Cleopatra.’
‘Well, which answer do you want first?’
‘At the moment I don’t want either, thanks all the same. I’ve got a lot to think about, what with Antony and Cleopatra and the man in the bar with the glass of water and the gun. Have you noticed, by the way, that there’s water and glass in both puzzles?’
‘No, John, I haven’t noticed and it isn’t important.’ Then she stalked off, saying rather irritably over her shoulder, ‘Let me know if you change your mind.’
I’m not an innocent. I knew exactly how annoying I was being. Of course, negation is the only, rather feeble, form of power available to me, the disadvantage being that I can only use it against people who are actually trying to deal with me, and who might be felt to deserve better. Certainly Barbara Broier deserved better.
Storming the citadel of speech
But there was more to it than that. I wasn’t being insincere, though it was intoxicating to see that everyone, potentially, could be strung along. I did enjoy the puzzles as things in themselves. I was almost ready for some Zen koans.
Try to see your original face, the one you had before your parents gave you birth.
The wind is not moving. The banner is not moving. Your mind is moving.
Does your bean curd lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight?
Eventually Barbara came storming up to me and said, ‘For heaven’s sake, John! Antony and Cleopatra suffocated. They were goldfish! The man in the bar had hiccups — that’s why he wanted the glass of water, to cure them. And the shock of the bartender producing a gun cured them anyway — that’s why he said Thank You!’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I thought it must be something like that.’
‘You mean you worked it out, and you’ve been torturing me all this time?’
‘Not exactly,’ I said, doing my most maddening impersonation of serenity. ‘I just thought it must be something like that.’
The answer to a riddle, like the last chapter of a detective story, is at best a crowning disappointment. The only consolation is to pass the riddle on, so as to relive your disappointment at one remove. Or to read another detective story. In practice everyone agreed with me (once they had heard those riddles’ solutions) that they enjoyed the questions more than the answers, but they seemed to think that sooner or later another riddle would have a satisfying solution, as if there was no general rule involved. As far as I could see, though, questions and answers didn’t have much of an affinity. You could even say they were natural enemies.
Home wine-making was one thing I discovered at Barbara Broier’s house. Another was Victor Borge’s ‘phonetic punctuation’, which the two of us heard one Saturday on Radio 2, as the Light Programme was now called. This was a classic comic routine in which Mr Borge spoke the printer’s marks out loud. We loved it, and started to imitate him. We didn’t have the original to consult (or a recording), and I imagine there was a certain amount of drift between the acoustic representations we heard that one time on the radio, and our own repertoire of homage. Our full stop (I can’t vouch for his) was a popping noise made with the lips, our comma a click of the tongue, our exclamation mark a downward-whistle-and-pop.
This was a party trick well suited to my talents, the tongue being the only muscle in my body that was perfectly obedient. The underlying idea was also vastly appealing, this Peasants’ Revolt of underclass marks, the voiceless ones, socially invisible, storming the citadel of speech.
In time, though, it became a compulsion, and my party trick become more like a brush with mental illness. I found it a real effort to leave stops unvoiced, even when answering a teacher’s question during a lesson. The return of the repressed isn’t a process that is easy to put into reverse. It isn’t a straightforward job to put the lid back on Pandora’s Box of punctuation, and that little tic took a long time to die down. It helped if I asked Barbara to sit far away from me in class. Then the hysteria had a chance to die down, though our friendship stalled, rather, with what looked like rejection on my part. Sometimes I would get panicky when she spoke to me, for fear that I would erupt again, a displaced Pentecostalist bearing witness to his molten God not in tongues but spoken signs.
A proper cage of rules
When autumn came the family’s wine-making activities tailed off, since fermentation became too slow for good results. I looked around for a new project to maintain our momentum, and suggested that Dad occupy his time by growing mushrooms in the greenhouse. ‘It’ll give a bit of heat to the plants,’ I said, ‘And the insulating effect will lower our fuel bills.’
Dad might reasonably have answered, ‘When did you give a fig for our heating bills, John, with your taste for leaving doors open in all weathers?’ Instead he buckled down to become a mushroom farmer.
It was a funny old psychology that he had. He liked to know what he was supposed to do, which was easily managed when he was at work. Inside a proper cage of rules he could be very unyielding — so that my phoning him at work was a tremendous liberty that must be stamped on and prevented from recurring. But at home he had less sense of running on rails, and at the weekends he was almost grateful to have me organise his time. He tried to get me interested in what interested him, but at this stage I was fairly resistant and it’s fair to say that the flow of hobbies was more the other way.
Soon I was giving orders, watching him mixing horse dung, straw and organic composting powder, testing the temperature with a hotbed thermometer. We bought the spawn by mail order from a local farm which advertised in Exchange & Mart and even undertook to buy the crop back from us when it was ready. We couldn’t lose.
There was great excitement when we saw bits of the peat casing begin to heave with fungal nodes. Everyone went to look in admiration at the little pearls as they grew steadily bigger. We patted ourselves on the back. All that hard work was worth it.
Finally it was time to pick some of our crop and taste them. ‘Would you care for some mushrooms, m’dear?’ Dad asked, doing a jovial pastiche of what he imagined was Peter’s manner at work. ‘They’re from Chef’s own garden.’
‘Yes please, Dennis,’ said Mum, and then ‘I don’t think this is a good one, though, dear. Can I try again?’ They were none of them good. We couldn’t lose — yet somehow we managed it. Something rather ghastly was eating them before we had a chance. Our fungi had funguses of their own.