One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  She stood up and walked away. He heard two pops and she returned with two more cans, opened. She seemed lost in thought as she handed one of them to him. ‘That’s very interesting. I wonder who would want to do that?’

  William had no reply to this. He sipped his beer, mulling it over. ‘How long are you intending to stay here?’

  ‘Until my work’s finished, which it nearly is. There’s just one more thing I have to do.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Get into the kassa house. It’s a bit tricky. Women aren’t allowed, it’s a strict taboo. I think if I broke that one, I might have to take back what I said about them being peaceable.’

  ‘What’s so important about getting in there? Can’t you just ask them what goes on? I was there last night, I can tell you.’

  Was it a trick of the light, or were her eyes suddenly bright. ‘Oh, I have lots of first-hand accounts of it. It’s just that it’s so fantastic. It’s unique. There isn’t another place in the world where people claim to commune with their dead friends and relatives. I need to experience it for myself. It will be the making of my book.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  AS WILLIAM WALKED home along the beach from Lucy’s house, or rather than walked, staggered, because his head was still pounding and his legs shaky from a combination of the blow he’d received, last night’s kassa and today’s beer, his feverish mind teemed with thoughts of the Englishwoman. For the time he had been in her house, a matter of a few hours, that was all it could have been, he’d experienced an unaccustomed sense of security that had made him want to remain there. It wasn’t simply that she was attractive, although of course she was, albeit in a sharp sort of way. Actually it was something to do with that very sharpness and the confidence that went with it, the feeling it gave you that if she offered you her protection she would repel all boarders. Indeed she’d suggested he stay at her house rather than put himself in danger any longer at the Captain Cook. She’d told him he’d be very welcome although, for the sake of decency, he’d have to walk to the village at mealtimes and make a point of eating in public. It was all right, she explained, for an unmarried man and woman to sleep under the same roof, even sleep together under that roof (when she said this, he blushed; she did not), as long as they didn’t share their meals.

  ‘It wouldn’t matter if we were fucking each other’s brains out,’ was how she put it – William winced and hoped it looked like a sudden throb from his wound – ‘but eating together here as well would constitute living in sin.’

  He found himself thinking about Lucy’s height. How would it affect their relationship? Not that they could be said to have a relationship, of course, other than nurse-patient, or white-white on an island otherwise peopled entirely by brown-skinned natives, but suppose they did? He was of above average height for a man whereas she was shorter than the mean woman. The mean woman! His disordered brain picked up on the phrase. It could easily have been applied to Lola who had certainly been mean to him after the incident with the photograph of the obese woman and mean too when it came to their divorce settlement. Lola was of almost exactly average height. But then again, had that brought him happiness? Would their marriage have foundered or, indeed, lasted, if not permanently then at least longer, had she herself been longer? Or shorter? He couldn’t think so. On the other hand how would the height difference between him and Lucy affect their sex life? What was he thinking of? They didn’t have a sex life! They didn’t have a life. If only she hadn’t used that phrase, ‘fucking each other’s brains out’, inciting his obsessive mind to confer upon an innocent meeting a burden of possibility and hope . . .

  Suppose he were on top of her, in the missionary position and, well, inside her, would they be able to kiss? Certainly not on the upward stroke, when the tip of his chin would barely touch her forehead, but perhaps on the downward one when the not inconsiderable length of his penis might mean he could bring his lips close enough to hers while still remaining engaged. No, that would depend on the length of his penis being greater than their difference in height, and he thought that unlikely, the latter measurement surely getting on for nearly a foot.

  He stopped dead. What was he thinking of? This was completely over the top! It must be kassa and concussion making him imagine himself having sex with a woman who had shown him only kindness and didn’t deserve to be given a starring role in his fantasies. Unless of course his back was hunched. Could you make love with your back hunched? He wasn’t sure. He’d never seen it in a movie where body parts always seemed to fit perfectly, but then, weren’t a lot of leading men – Tom Cruise, Al Pacino – exceptionally short, or at least shorter than average? He resumed walking. If you could hunch then you could kiss. It hadn’t been a problem with Lola. Had he instinctively been hunching? Or had it been unnecessary because his penis length was greater than their height difference, something he was pretty sure was true, stopping again now to imagine Lola next to him, assessing where she came up to on him and then attempting to visualize his erect penis standing on top of her head.

  It wasn’t just sex where relative stature mattered. The height difference between him and Lucy would be most apparent when they were vertical rather than horizontal. How would they look, standing side by side? It wouldn’t actually be much of a problem for William himself. How often, after all, did you stand side by side with your partner (partner! it was outrageous, he hardly knew the woman) in front of a mirror? But how would it look to other people? How would the lack of symmetry be to someone else with OCD? Would it be like looking at a picture hanging distressingly askew? The intersection of a thought about fellow OCD sufferers with his musings about relationships immediately brought to mind Sheena who had been tall, almost as tall as he, in fact. Had that had an adverse effect upon their relationship? Maybe so, you could never underestimate the importance of seemingly trivial things. On the other hand the failure of his affair with Sheena was surely due to the obvious fact that they had absolutely nothing in common other than a debilitating mental disorder, probably not the best basis for a romance, when you thought about it.

  They had begun with such optimism too, after that first evening when they drove back from the shore to William’s apartment and he cooked pasta and afterwards Sheena washed the dishes. Twice. And after that they made love, parts fitting together easily, lips comfortably within kissing range, hunching unnecessary. Next morning Sheena simply stayed on, ostensibly just to tidy up a little, but both of them knew she was moving in. And at first it had been a wonderful liberation for them, the fact they both had OCD. They no longer had to pretend. She didn’t have to make up lies or excuses for spending half the weekend in the bathroom. William could openly potter around switching electrical devices on or off as the case might be and rattling doors and windows to ensure the locks were correctly engaged without having to explain himself. He could sit and watch TV with Sheena, blinking alternately to his heart’s content, not having to worry about her seeing and thinking him crazy, but rather merely considering him as someone with a mental disorder.

  For a while William was able to tell himself that although the OCD self-help group weekend had been a disaster for the rest of those involved, it had succeeded for him and Sheena. Of course he was kidding himself. Meeting Sheena hadn’t cured him of his OCD, it had merely legitimized it, allowing him to indulge his irrational urges and, if anything, making them worse.

  When one member of a couple has OCD, there are almost certain to be problems. When both have it those problems are not only doubled but they often rub up against one another too. There is almost bound to be friction in a relationship that includes an OCD sufferer with a personal hygiene obsession and an abode with only one bathroom. If both people have the same obsession and an extra bathroom isn’t factored in, then you’re headed for definite trouble. It doesn’t matter that you understand and sympathize with your partner for needing to spend two hours washing if you have to take a dump, and an iron control over your bowels which would p
ermit you to delay it until you get to work is no help because your OCD won’t let you do it anywhere else but at home. This is a scenario where sympathy and understanding can go out of the window and intolerance of the other person’s obsession creep in.

  ‘But I can’t stop washing now,’ Sheena wailed one morning from behind the bathroom door in answer to his knock. ‘I’ve been in here two hours. If I come out now that will all be wasted, I’ll have to start all over again.’

  William caught himself thinking that the two hours were already wasted since it was totally unnecessary for anyone to spend that much time washing, especially someone who had done it only yesterday. But he checked himself before the thought got any bigger. His own compulsions, he reminded himself, would be just as extraordinary to other people. He said, ‘But if I don’t get in there now I’ll be late for work. I mean, I’ll be even more late than usual. I was making good time this morning. I’ve already got everything checked. If I could have used the john when I finished checking this would have been the earliest I’ve ever been late.’

  He heard Sheena sigh. He knew it was a theatrical sigh because he could hear it even above the sound of running water. ‘I can’t see how taking your dump at work would hurt once in a while,’ she said. ‘Surely their facilities are adequate?’

  The bathroom door remained resolutely locked. William left and spent an uncomfortable day fighting his body’s demands. At times it was all he could think about and he knew it was affecting his performance. When a colleague said to him, ‘You’re full of crap today,’ William could only return a tight-lipped smile of agreement.

  But the washing and the dumps problem could have been overcome. They could have worked something out, especially as William’s bowels were so regular and predictable. It was a scheduling problem, when all was said and done. They could maybe even have moved to a two-bathroom apartment, had the will been there. But, in the end, it wasn’t. What drove them apart wasn’t that they had nothing in common, true though that was. William was interested in current affairs. He was pretty cultured. OK, we know that theatre wasn’t his thing, so much so that he couldn’t even remember if he’d seen Hamlet, but he loved classical music, or he thought he did, although it was possible that really he only liked collecting classical music CDs to satisfy his hoarding instinct. He liked to read novels, good novels, too. Sheena, by contrast, liked to watch daytime TV. She was actually much too intelligent for it, but she didn’t know that. She had it on all day while she tidied and cleaned the apartment, which of course didn’t bother William because he was at work. William liked to go to the cinema. He liked foreign movies whereas Sheena couldn’t read the subtitles without spectacles but thought they made her look old-maidish and wouldn’t wear them in public even in the dark. Sheena was so gorgeous, with her waist-length blonde hair and her don’t-know-when-to-quit legs, that William would have been proud to be seen with her anywhere, spectacled-up or not. He considered just having her on his arm as showing off. But Sheena knew her accent and speech marked her as socially inferior to William’s colleagues and friends. She knew that on the rare occasions she accompanied William at social gatherings his friends would be saying, ‘Yeah, but what would you talk about with her afterwards?’

  None of this would have mattered any more than the conflicting demands of their different OCD problems would. What drove them apart was the OCD problem they had in common, not only with one another, but with millions of their fellow OCD sufferers: it was that they both had to do certain things in a particular way.

  For instance, the way they made toast for breakfast: William always put the toast on a dinner plate to spread the butter on it. He did this because any crumbs that were brushed off would end up on the plate not on the kitchen counter. He then transferred the buttered toast to another dinner plate and left the butter-smeared knife on the first dinner plate, ready for another slice later if so desired. He left the butter tub, lid off, in readiness for that event. Sheena, on the other hand, placed her toast on a small side plate to butter it. Well, there was never any hope of keeping crumbs off the counter if you did that! But that didn’t bother Sheena. She was going to clean the worktop six or seven times anyhow. What did a few crumbs matter? If anything they improved the situation because they gave her a valid excuse for cleaning the counter. At the same time, she too considered it messy to leave a butter-smeared knife on the counter, but her solution was to always have a sinkful of hot soapy water to hand and to wash the knife and place it on the drying rack. If she decided on more toast, she would dry the knife with a dish towel and reuse it. This drove William mad. To him it introduced an unnecessary task into the proceedings. But Sheena couldn’t understand his objection. How could washing something smeared in butter ever be unnecessary to a woman who spent half her life washing things – including herself – that were already clean? Another thing Sheena couldn’t stand was to see the butter tub left on the worktop with its lid off where it was bound to attract the attentions of germs. She would replace the lid after each use and return the tub to the refrigerator. It was of course a kind of hell for each of them to suffer the other’s way of doing things. Sheena couldn’t bear to see that slovenly butter-smeared knife, that plate covered in crumbs, the exposed butter in the unlidded, unreturned-to-the-fridge tub. She just had to wash the plate and knife. William couldn’t stand seeing toast sitting on an inadequately sized plate, with all the crumb-spilling that inevitably entailed, and would have to swap the small plate for a large one. If you had taken them aside and said, ‘Does any of this really matter?’ Or ‘Are you really concerned enough about crumbs on counters/butter on knives to jeopardize an otherwise promising relationship or is this just because you’ve always done things this way?’ they would probably have answered ‘No’, ‘No’ and ‘Yes’. But that didn’t mean that they could stop themselves.

  On one memorable morning, stressed no doubt by the length of time it had taken to get into the bathroom for his dump, William’s tolerance of Sheena’s – to him – unreasonable way of doing things snapped. He saw her slice of toast overlapping the little plate it rested upon and he just couldn’t take it. He grabbed a dinner plate, seized the side plate, tipped the toast onto the larger one and tossed the small one into the bowl of hot soapy water Sheena had waiting. Sheena, whose back had been momentarily turned washing her butter knife, was alerted by the splash of the flying plate (flying saucer William would have called it because in his lexicon its size hardly qualified it for the description of plate) to what he had done. She immediately washed the small plate three or four times, dried it and reversed William’s actions.

  ‘Stop it!’ he cried. ‘Now look what you’ve done. You’ve put crumbs all over the counter.’

  ‘So? I’ll wash them off.’

  ‘If you didn’t get them on there in the first place you wouldn’t have to wash them off.’ He was momentarily distracted as his own toast popped up. He took it from the toaster, snatched his dinner plate from Sheena’s hand, slammed it on the counter and, holding it with one hand so she couldn’t remove it, stretched his other hand to the refrigerator, flipped open the door, took out the butter tub that Sheena had recently replaced there, and then proceeded to butter his toast.

  The moment he was finished Sheena grabbed the butter tub. William snatched the lid.

  ‘Give me that!’ said Sheena.

  ‘No!’ said William.

  ‘I can’t put it back in the refrigerator until I have the lid.’

  ‘Then don’t put it back in the refrigerator.’

  ‘I have to.’

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  She suddenly crumpled, her tall form folding on itself. Tears jewelled her long eyelashes. ‘You know why.’

  Instantly, William felt sorry for his behaviour. He took her in his arms. He took her in his arms but he was unable to put down the butter lid. As he held her to him, the buttered lid was pressed against the back of her head.<
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  They kissed for a long time. When their lips parted Sheena gave him a wry little smile. ‘Where did you put the butter lid?’ she said, coyly.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ William lied.

  ‘You’re holding it,’ she said, trying to preserve the mood, to sound teasing, but failing to keep the rising note of anxiety out of her voice.

  William held up both his hands to show they were empty. The plastic butter lid was stuck to Sheena’s gorgeous blonde hair.

  William went off to work and Sheena spent a miserable couple of hours hunting for the butter lid. It was only later in the shower, when she discovered it at her feet, that she realized she and William could not survive.

  Every relationship is built upon compromise. It’s about being able to make room for the other person in your life. If you always have to do things your own way, then it will never work. In the end it’s how you put the spiky differences together that matters. It’s not enough that when your sexual organs are fully engaged you see eye to eye and meet perfectly lip to lip. It doesn’t mean you fit.

  The evening she left, William sat in the dark and listened to one of his favourite recordings, Bruno Walter conducting Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in Vienna in 1938 on the eve of the Anschluss. The only background noise was the hiss of the ancient recording. There was no sound of scrubbing from the bathroom, no Hoover in the hall. The only discordant notes were those of the music as it struggled to find its beginning; the only distraction the coughs from the audience, which, for an instant, stopped William thinking of Sheena, of the golden shawl of her hair over her naked back when he came upon her in the bath – as, of course, he often had – and made him speculate on whether those same coughers he was hearing were soon to perish in a Nazi death camp, and then to the sad thought that it really didn’t matter, that after all these years they would have been dead anyhow. In later days he would notice the absence of Sheena in the presence of dust upon his hoarded, unplayed CDs. He would miss her when he noticed one morning as he washed how dirty and untidy his surroundings were because, anally attentive though he was, he didn’t care about the state of the bathroom. For now, he recognized his loss as he listened to his recording undisturbed and understood how his human contact was diminished, from the presence of a vibrant, beautiful woman to the plaintive coughing of possibly soon-to-be-gassed Austrian music lovers. The Mahler was wonderful. But somehow, he knew he had gotten a raw deal.