LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL

by Ronan Hession

  Chapter 3: The Romans

  The next day at work, Leonard was trying to rescue a chapter about the Romans in Britain. The first batch of tracked changes had come back from the overseeing author as an assault of red and strikeout. When he accepted all her changes just to see what they looked like, his word count shrank so much that he could have fitted the whole thing inside a fortune cookie.

  In one comment box she had written ‘could we say something original here?’ and in another she posed the question ‘would someone really say this?’ This kind of vaguely disappointed feedback was the norm from overseeing authors who were subject matter experts but who knew little about how kids’ minds or writers’ feelings worked. A game of tracked changes ping-pong required the ability to put up with a lot more than you should. Leonard often felt he was being paid for his patience. It was hard to do his best work when he knew that all his good ideas would be either rejected without being understood, or appropriated and credited to someone else. He tried to keep in mind the advice his mother had once given him, that he should take his work seriously but not personally.

  In general, children’s encyclopaedias about history weren’t as popular or good as other factual books. The best illustrators wanted to work on dinosaurs (if they liked hand drawing) or books about space (if they preferred computer graphics). History encyclopaedias seemed to attract illustrators with more mixed talents. One guy could only draw people facing out from the page, staring at the reader, which made for farcical battle scenes. Another couldn’t draw different nationalities and so depicted everyone looking slightly cross, reasoning, not without insight, that angry people were the same the world over.

  The Romans themselves were a particular problem. Anything that goes from BC to AD is practically impossible to explain to kids. It sounds like you’re going backwards in time to zero and then forwards, which is confusing for children who mark time by counting from birthday to birthday. Also, the Romans’ long names made them hard to relate to, especially as Asterix and Monty Python had used up all the decent joke names, which was really the only way to get over that problem. Yes, there were the usual factoids about Latin, aqueducts, straight roads and slaves, but they had been overused and couldn’t possibly compete with a Tyrannosaurus attack or a supernova explosion.

  Leonard’s real problem though was that the Romans were bullies. The Romans picked on everybody for four hundred years and were only eliminated when they got outbullied themselves by the Goths and Barbarians. To a kid, this is a worrying storyline. You like to think that a bully’s upper hand is short-lived and his fall precipitous and permanent. The true tale of history was worryingly short of comeuppance.

  Running out of ideas, Leonard took off his noise-cancelling/society-repelling headphones and went to the kitchenette for a mid-morning cup, even though he always disliked the awkward wait for the water to boil and the prospect of kettle-related time-killing small talk.

  He checked his mobile and saw that he had a missed call from a private number, which was surely Hungry Paul’s home phone. Hungry Paul didn’t have a mobile and often left epic voicemails, spread over several messages, which at times sounded like one-man radio plays:

  Leonard, hello. It seems that in a world where people compete with numbers, it is the numbers that always win.

  Hungry Paul began cryptically and epigrammatically, like a first-time novelist.

  Ordinarily, I like to discuss delicate matters face-to-face, but I think it best that I leave you a voice message rather than wait until I see you next.

  Leonard noted Hungry Paul’s typically impeccable manners.

  My mother and Grace have talked things through about the wedding, at some length and in some detail, and the thing is, the numbers are tight. I mean if it’s a wedding of ‘about a hundred,’ which is how they have put it to me, though I have no idea— *beep*

  Leonard was used to Hungry Paul’s lines over-running, with most messages being delivered in series format.

  Apologies, I must get better at spitting it all out, so I hope this doesn’t sound too brusque.

  He delivered the last word with a lingering pronunciation, and in doing so ended a lengthy era during which he had pronounced it as ‘brusk.’

  A hundred is really just fifty each for the bride and groom, which is really just twenty-five for each of them plus the partners for each of those twenty-five. While it is perfectly acceptable for those on the outer orbits of the family to miss the cut, they, I mean, ‘we’—I was specifically told to say ‘we’—need to make the numbers work, as it were. *beep*

  As the next voicemail loaded Leonard braced himself for a demotion to an afters invitation, which meant missing all the nice parts of the wedding and attending only the late, drunken bits he disliked. It was unlikely that there would be scope for a commensurate downgrading of the wedding gift, at least not without creating the impression of hard feelings.

  So I, or we, were wondering whether you had any plans for a plus one, because I have already confirmed that I will be unaccompanied on the night concerned owing to a confluence of factors, and if you were in a similar position then perhaps we could be each other’s plus ones, thereby freeing up two spots which I am assured would be made available to guests without whom the whole wedding would be, I think the word Grace used was ‘tense.’ In the circumstances, and given that Grace has never asked me for anything, I’m inclined not to be difficult, so maybe you could think it over and call me back whenever you get the chance. I don’t want you to think— *beep*

  There were no further messages.

  It was an easy non-decision to make. It had been quite some time since Leonard had been a plus one. In fact, these days he was decidedly not himself, so ‘minus one’ was closer to the mark. It had been something of a formality that they had him down for plus one at all.

  Leonard rang back and got Helen, who was slightly embarrassed about the whole thing, but who made no effort to talk him out of agreeing to be Hungry Paul’s plus one. ‘So long as I don’t have to wear a dress and dance with him—you never know, I could be your new daughter-in-law!’ he chipped in.

  ‘Thanks for understanding, Leonard. We weren’t sure how to ask, so I’m glad you’re okay about it.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all. Give my best to Gracie—hope she’s not too stressed. We’re all on her side.’

  Leonard hung up and took off the mask of easy conviviality. Standing there in the kitchenette, there was something about the sincerity of Helen’s awkwardness that had brought it home to him. The ‘plus one’ on his invite, received several weeks ago, must have been intended for his poor mother. The thought stunned him gently for a moment as a man in chinos walked in and made disapproving noises at finding mugs left to soak. In a hurry to get back to his noise-cancelling headphones, Leonard put away the tea caddy and finished stirring his own palpable milky loneliness.

  Chapter 4: Grace

  If there is one incident which best captures the relationship between Grace and Hungry Paul, it was when he received a fiver in a birthday card for the first time as a young boy. He stuffed it into that strange pocket-within-a-pocket that denim jeans have: a narrow, impractical feature barely wide enough for a finger. Grace, who was three years older, took him off to the shops to spend it on E numbers and comics. On the way, Hungry Paul spotted one of the neighbourhood boys, probably one of the football-playing jocks who normally ignored him or worse, and called him over, excited to have something to show off for once. In fishing out the note from his ridiculous pocket he tore it in half. The other boy gave a short derisive snort then kicked the ball ahead of him and chased it down the hill, leaving Hungry Paul standing there, frozen with baffled disappointment. Before he had time to compute this latest failure, Grace handed him a new fiver and took the old torn one. He ran after the boy with the ball, delighted with himself and forgetting to thank Grace, who hurried after him in case he went onto the road witho
ut looking.

  Like all eldest children, Grace had been an only child for a time, and thrived under the warm lamp of undivided parental attention; but when Hungry Paul was brought home from the hospital after some delays for tests, she welcomed him with open sisterly enthusiasm. By the time he was a toddler, she was old enough to help look after him in little unsupervised ways, which usually involved rescuing him from himself, as he was a boy who tended to lean with his fingers in the hinges of doors, stick his head into railings and swallow wine gums without chewing them first.

  In primary school she was clever, hardworking and well behaved, all of the things a teacher’s child should be, though her natural charm and sense of fun largely protected her from the pitfalls of that role. It wasn’t all easy. In the early years at school her best friend was a gentle, imaginative boy called Frederick, who devised fantastical games and babbled with inspirational enthusiasm about dinosaurs and outer space. (He pointed out that we didn’t need to go to space as that’s where we live: ‘Where do you think the Earth is, dummy?’) After a couple of years Frederick changed school even though his parents weren’t moving house. Grace was bereft. Even worse, everyone else in the class had settled into little groups in the meantime, and Grace was left friendless. She dreaded lunchtimes, hoping to delay as long as possible eating her sandwich and fairy bun so that she had less time alone in the schoolyard. It is not hard to see how Grace became the family’s slow eater—every family has one.

  Loneliness begets loneliness. As an unattached kid she was not an exciting prospect for other children and so, without anyone doing anything in particular, it became a ‘thing’ that she was just someone who had no friends. She contrasted herself with Hungry Paul who she could see in his junior yard, alone as usual and wandering around inside his own head, except that he seemed at peace with his situation, protected by his own obliviousness.

  During that period, which lasted almost a year but felt as long as the Ottoman Empire, Grace wandered around the yard on her own and at times, out of sheer frustration, she would run around as if to create the illusion of being chased. Once she slipped and fell on the stony old tarmac and grazed the width of her palm, the cut becoming a mix of light blood and small stones that would be painful to clean. Too embarrassed to be asked why she was running by herself, she hid it from the teacher and cleaned it later on at home herself, inexpertly. Helen asked her about it at bedtime but was deflected with vagueness, a pattern that would play out more regularly later, during the teenage years.

  Grace’s position turned on a tragic event. Gary Crowe, a nine-year-old wannabe fireman who sat at Grace’s table in school, died in an accident at home. His father was a mechanic and had been working on an engine on a hoist in his garage when he went off to buy some spare parts. Gary had swung from the chain on the hoist and pulled the engine down on top of himself. Gary’s death stunned the whole class. The shock of the story found resonance in the nightmares of the children who knew him, where it was all too readily reimagined at bedtime after lights out. Two dozen sets of parents spent the next month calmly explaining that there was nothing to worry about and that it was just an accident and that beds and houses and garages were perfectly safe places. For now, the kids were spared the true horror of imagining what Gary’s parents were going through.

  The tragedy galvanised the class and reset its social structure. The playground rules and cliques were shattered, as everybody played with everybody else, barely conscious of the survival instincts that were driving them to disregard their differences. Grace, who felt socially thawed by this change, immersed herself in what she felt might be a short-lived opportunity and laughed at other people’s jokes, played their games and suppressed her own minor preferences in favour of her major preference for being included.

  Those friends that Grace made at primary school were ‘survival friends’ rather than real friendships—none of them would be at the wedding—but they helped her to steady herself and begin to like herself again. They lasted her through secondary school during which time she started to individuate by immersing herself in student communism, Inspector Morse novels, Judee Sill albums, and by taking long, long, long walks that would have any conscientious parent checking news bulletins. Her teenage years were exploratory and, broadly speaking, mild tempered. While there were some mood swings and a bit of door slamming, it seemed she was just trying all that out of curiosity, sensing that she had some wild cards that it would be a shame to leave unplayed.

  Her relationship with Helen was at its most difficult during those years. Grace and Helen had always been close and had an intuitive communication channel through which they shared jokes, looks, hints and understandings, like a vaudeville double act that had learned each other’s side of the routine to a transcendental level. During her teenage years, and without any identifiable starting point, Grace tuned out from Helen and instead turned inwards. She became hard to reach and connect with. Though not unhappy or sullen, she sought nourishment from within herself, in her nascent ideas and emerging preferences—it was simply not something Helen could share in. As the eldest child, everything new to Grace was new to her parents, and Helen perhaps suffered from the classic teacher’s mistake of thinking that, when it came to children, she had seen it all. The more she tried to reach Grace the more she compounded her lack of understanding of her.

  As is so often the case, when one parent struggles the other steps forward, parenting being a team sport played by individuals. Peter, who could be deep and introspective himself, became closer to Grace during that period. He had always been a friendly and warm presence in her life—biting the bruises off her bananas or letting her pluck the hair in his ears—but at times he had been guilty of acting as a deputy parent, aping Helen’s approach rather than finding his own groove. He was naturally and happily introverted. Silences, solitary moments and stillness energised him. Loneliness was not something to overcome, but something to befriend and look into. And so, Grace switched her connection from Helen to Peter during those years, as they were happy to share long silent car journeys together or read books at the kitchen table without feeling the need to have or share views about what they were reading.

  Though Grace wouldn’t necessarily have agreed, it was generally said of her that she had turned out well. It had something to do with her talents being offset by being down-to-earth, and her achievements being the result of hard work rather than advantage. The compliment was part of a mentality found in people who believed in praise only when it didn’t imply elevation. Had Grace been asked at the time, she probably would have said that she was neither happy nor unhappy, like everyone else, and that she was still trying to feel her way through life. One night at a friend’s birthday party, during the college years when they were all still getting used to drinking, she was asked, while being recorded on a camcorder, what she would wish for if she could have anything in the world. Without taking time to think or be funny, she gave an answer which her friends said was ‘pure Grace.’ She looked straight into the lens of the now-obsolete camcorder and said ‘I would like… whatever is good for me.’

  Chapter 5: Regards

  It had been a quiet few days for Hungry Paul since his Yahtzee conversation with Leonard, quiet days not being uncommon in his schedule. This had given him the opportunity to ponder the expansion and contraction of the universe as observed in localised form in the life of his best friend. Edwin Hubble, had he looked inside Leonard with his telescope, would have recorded that everything was just as the universe would ordain it. The thing is, for Hungry Paul the world was a complicated place, with people themselves being both the primary cause and chief victims of its complexity. He saw society as a sort of chemistry set, full of potentially explosive ingredients which, if handled correctly could be fascinating and educational, but which was otherwise best kept out of reach of those who did not know what they were doing. Though his life had been largely quiet and uneventful, his choices had turned ou
t to be wise ones: he had already lived longer than Alexander the Great, and had fewer enemies, too. But he had now become awakened by the thought that, no matter how insignificant he was when compared to the night sky, he remained subject to the same elemental forces of expansion. The universe, it seemed, would eventually come knocking. And so it was that over a mid-morning scone he read a short article in the local freesheet with a sense of cosmic destiny.

  The Community Voice was a paper delivered door-to-door on the generous interpretation that it was excused from the ‘no junk mail’ signs on the letterboxes of the community it voiced. Typically there was a picture of an old woman or young child in a wheelchair on the front page, holding up what we would be led to believe was a disingenuous letter from the Council. The outraged headline usually left limited room for the reader to draw alternative conclusions. Inside there were blatant advertisements presented as articles, pictures of medals being presented, an advice column from the local doctor, and a helpful chart showing which bins were to be collected on which Mondays, alternating between refuse and recyclables.

  The article that caught Hungry Paul’s interest had been written by the Chamber of Commerce, a group that he assumed had some relationship to the Chamber of Horrors at the wax museum, presumably displaying wax likenesses of entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson or Uncle Ben. The article posed what Hungry Paul considered to be a very modern quandary. In the world as we know it today, including in the business world where everything is more so, communication was now primarily conducted through email. Years of effort spent teaching the greatest business minds how to write template letters was coming undone, as the art of expression had not kept pace with technological developments. A lexicon of classic phrases, once thought perennial, was now facing obsolescence. The writer of the article—a Mr H. Means, Community Affairs Editor—had given the whole thing quite a bit of thought: