LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL

by Ronan Hession

  At one stage, when he was removing a paper jam from the printer, he saw the girl with the cherry-coloured hair across the open-plan area. She looked to be in a hurry and a little stressed. He tried to delay so he could figure out surreptitiously where she sat, and therefore who she worked for, and particularly whether she worked for the same company as he did, but she was too hard to track, disappearing between the modular furniture like a fish darting through rocks.

  Things went a little slower than expected in clearing the backlog, as the people he emailed inevitably emailed back with further questions or asked him to do something else. By the time he had freed himself from all of that it was past 1pm and the window for his lunchtime plan was closing.

  He tried to walk languidly over to where he thought the girl’s desk was, planning to say something like ‘No fires today, then?’ which would help him to pick up the conversation right where had had left it. The idea was to shrug off their previous conversation, showing her the sociable, likeable Leonard instead.

  When he got there, two other girls were sitting in a pod for four people. One was on the phone dealing with what sounded like a difficult customer; the other was grabbing up papers to go to a meeting or something.

  ‘Hi there,’ said Leonard in a sort of ‘howdy’ tone of voice.

  The two girls ignored him and continued doing what they were doing.

  ‘Hi. I was just wondering, is there a girl with dyed red hair who works on one of these desks?’

  ‘Yes. Why? We’re busy,’ answered the girl who was going to a meeting.

  ‘I was just wondering if she’s around. She’s the fire warden and I was hoping to get some safety advice. Em… just wondering… em… if it’s safe to leave my phone plugged in overnight?’ Leonard was definitely not good at this.

  ‘Do what you want,’ said the meeting girl without looking at him as she scurried off to the other end of the room.

  Leonard, feeling abandoned but not yet ready to give up, decided to linger and wait for the other woman to come off the phone. He wasn’t sure whether he should catch a bit of eye contact to let her know he was waiting, or just loiter invisibly to avoid provoking her. She made up his mind for him by slamming the phone down and then giving the handset a double middle finger, before swivelling her head and saying ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Hi, there. Someone told me that, I mean, I think I saw the fire warden here earlier, the girl who was fire warden yesterday that is, and I needed advice about a fire safety question, my charger sometimes gets warm, and—’

  ‘Shelley is not in in the afternoon. Mornings only,’ she interrupted.

  ‘Oh, okay. Thanks. I’ll let you get back to it. I’ll try not to cause a fire in the meantime,’ he replied, not yet ready to give up the potential for fire safety to be made light-hearted and conversational.

  Leonard decided to go out for some fresh air and put in some preoccupied laps of the park. His stomach was too overwhelmed by exhausted butterflies to eat anything. He felt drained and disappointed. Now he would have to wait until Monday to see her and explain things. Time had already crawled since the day before and now he had a long, slow weekend to get through before trying to talk to her again. Only now her two workmates had probably already seen through him. They would probably laugh about Leonard to her. It would be impossible for her to go out with someone her workmates thought was a joke.

  He thought it all over, chewing his anxiety into his thumbnail. She worked mornings only. What was that all about? Is it just a part-time job? Does she have an afternoon job or does she need afternoons off for some reason? What did she do in the afternoons—hit the sack with her boyfriend, husband?

  But he did get her name. ‘Shelley.’ Hmm. He said it to himself a few times. A girl who was eating a sandwich on a bench near the duck pond gave him a judgemental look. Had he ever met a ‘Shelley’ before? Was that even a real name? Was it Shelley, or short for Michelle or Rochelle?

  As he circled the bandstand where members of a brass band were packing away their instruments, his thoughts continued to babble through countless leads as to who she might be, speculations to which there would be no answer until Monday at the earliest. His mind was like a bottle of cola that had been shaken and which now needed the air let out of it slowly and carefully. He got back to his desk, enervated and unfed, and tried to work on his book about the Romans, but his concentration was elsewhere. After a while he gave up and decided to ring Hungry Paul to talk through the confusion he was feeling, but when he tried to ring his good friend, the landline just rang and rang. It seemed that his confidant was out of the house. Leonard would have to struggle through the afternoon alone.

  Hungry Paul was, in fact, on his way to the hospital to do some visiting. Helen had launched him on his first independent voyage in that direction on the premise that he was to deliver a tin of Roses sweets to the nurses on her behalf, while she was off getting her roots done. With all the enthusiasm of a man who has no choice in the matter, he set off for the hospital by himself and was almost at the park when he remembered that he had forgotten to bring the sweets. Doubling back to the house, he grabbed a tin of Roses from under the stairs and started back down the road for a second time.

  He stopped at the corner and decided to cross the main street using the lollipop lady, who was holding back the school kids on the other side. She was chatting to an adult and missed several viable opportunities to initiate a crossing. As he waited for the lollipop lady from the opposite kerb, he idly inspected the tin of Roses and, as he did so, he noticed that it was out of date. In fact it was significantly out of date—by more than a year. His first thought was to marvel at how the universe, now knocking on for thirteen and a half billion years old or so, continued to operate through the medium of chance. Hungry Paul would not have noticed the date on the tin but for a delay at the lollipop lady, who would not have been on duty had it not been a weekday. And it was quite out of character for Hungry Paul to even inspect the date on a tin of sweets. He would normally assume all was well with such things and in fact was usually confused by the nuances between ‘best before’ and ‘use by’ dates, each of which seemed to be differentiated with unnecessary subtlety. However, the universe, being senior to Hungry Paul in its age and wisdom—by some degree on both counts—had seen fit to reveal itself through happenstance, and so he accepted the inadvertent discovery as a simple question of fate.

  Had Isaac Newton been waiting for the lollipop lady that Friday lunchtime, he would no doubt have pointed out that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and it was in this Newtonian frame of mind that Hungry Paul considered his next move. Having already gone back to the house once, he was certainly not minded to retrace his steps a second time. It was also clear that he could neither walk to the hospital and poison the workforce of St Matthew’s ward nor arrive empty-handed after his mother had specifically said that he would bring in the sweets the next time he was in.

  Hungry Paul, who was ordinarily a phlegmatic soul—slow to anger or bear a grudge—felt a loss of equilibrium. He was of course clear in his own mind that no blame of any sort attached to his dear mother, who was kind and thoughtful in motivation and deed in this case. His ire, his bewilderment, his sense of injustice, was directed towards the not-so-supermarket (as he sarcastically dubbed it to himself) where his mother had bought the tin of Roses in the first place. This corporate monster was clearly indifferent to the potentially catastrophic consequences that might befall the dedicated nursing staff who walked the wards of the nation’s hospitals to care for its weakest and most vulnerable citizens. Hungry Paul (on behalf of his mother) wanted those brave nurses to be able to indulge in the modest luxury of a Toffee Barrel or a Caramel Dream without finding themselves doubled over one of Armitage Shanks’ best pieces of affordable porcelain. The very thought of it was enough to unleash dark Shakespearian moods within even the most stable of temperaments. Hungry Paul w
as a man who normally stood as a weir, letting the world wash over and through him, but on this occasion he felt the pedantic sanctimony of one who is offended on others’ behalf.

  As he walked by the supermarket, disgusted by the empty customer service promises braying from the advertising hoardings in the car park, he stood and confronted the (admittedly innocent) building with a sense of destiny. He walked into the supermarket and accosted the first operative he encountered, but she brushed him off by saying she was going on her break. A second operative said she was with another customer, which Hungry Paul immediately recognised as a deflecting ploy. Sensing that he would make better headway with a member of his own sex, he found one of the retail man-children that he often saw around the store. ‘I’d like to make a complaint about this tin of Roses,’ he said authoritatively, even rolling his Rs for some reason.

  ‘Eh, I’m on tissues and paper towels. You need to go to confeckshunree,’ he said, waving his hand vaguely yonder.

  Hungry Paul, not wishing to unload prematurely on the wrong target, overlooked the limited helpfulness of the answer and made his businesslike way to said aisle. There he found another man-child unloading a trolley of Easter eggs, stabbing the wholesaler’s plastic wrapping with the tip of his ballpoint pen.

  ‘Excuse me. I’d like to make a complaint about this tin of Roses.’

  ‘Eh. Okay. I’m not sure what the story is with that.’

  ‘Well it’s more than a year out of date. What do you think of that?’

  ‘You can swap it for another one there,’ he offered with instant capitulation.

  ‘It’s not just the sweets: it’s the principle,’ said Hungry Paul, emphasising the last word to indicate that there was very much a bigger picture here.

  ‘Do you want to, like, talk to a manager?’

  ‘Please. Indeed.’

  The man-child disappeared behind the strange plastic doors that only supermarkets seem to use. He was gone quite some time. A woman who had been standing nearby, and who obviously had a keen sense of impending drama, approached the scene. She was wearing what looked like a self-knitted jumper and beret. Her trolley had several items of confectionery in it already, thereby establishing that she potentially had locus standi in what was about to unfold. ‘What happened, love?’

  ‘I bought this as a thoughtful gift for the kind nurses at the hospital and their suffering patients, or rather my mother did, only to notice that it is over a year out of date! I couldn’t believe it. Something has to be done,’ explained Hungry Paul.

  ‘You’re dead right love. That could have been a disaster. They don’t give a damn here. Not. A. Damn,’ replied the woman.

  Another kindred soul, a heavy-set middle-aged woman who was wearing a tracksuit—Hungry Paul assumed she was a competitor in the shot putt or one of the other sports where it’s an advantage to be stocky—added her voice to the chorus. ‘I bet half the stuff here is gone off. They feed you anything. I’d never check the dates on chocolate. Bread or milk you’d have a look, but I’d never think of looking at sweets.’

  ‘Yes, you did well to spot it,’ added the self-knitted woman, though expressing through her body language that she was a different class of chocolate eater from the shot-putter.

  The man-child returned beside what looked like a football pundit: a man in an ill-fitting suit with a gelled side parting, who looked like he used to be one of the lads when he was younger.

  ‘Are you the man with the Roses? I’m the duty manager. How can I help you sir?’ he asked.

  ‘I bought these Roses, or rather my mother bought these Roses, as a thoughtful gift for the kind people at the hospital only to find that they are over a year out of date. The nurses and patients—some of whom already have stomach and digestion complaints—could have suffered untold miseries because of a moment of thoughtfulness gone wrong, through no fault of my own or my mother’s I might add.’

  ‘I bought bread here once, which was mouldy when I opened it at home,’ chipped in the self-knitted woman.

  ‘Yeah, I once bought a multi-pack of beer and when I opened it one of the cans was missing,’ added the shot-putter with an example that was not quite on point.

  ‘Are you sure you bought them here? Have you got the receipt?’ asked the duty manager.

  ‘Of course I’m sure. My mother has been shopping here for years. She never goes anywhere else. If it’s evidence you want, we can produce that in court!’ added Hungry Paul with a flourish to nods all round him. A small posse of busybodies had started to assemble, some of whom were disapproving facially to an oppressive extent.

  ‘And have you actually eaten any of the sweets? Do they taste off? I mean sometimes these things are good even past their date, you know, the dates can be more of a guideline in some cases,’ said the duty manager.

  ‘Tasted them? Imagine if I had! I’d be writhing around on my bathroom floor, in a fever, clutching the bowl for dear life,’ replied Hungry Paul, with uncalled-for vividness.

  The posse was now circling tighter, as Hungry Paul started addressing his points to them directly, showing a new-found political aptitude. The self-knitted lady was also nodding and making eye contact with the rabble, adopting the role of chief witness in the scene.

  ‘Do you mind if I taste one, just to see whether they’re alright?’ asked the duty manager.

  ‘Be my guest,’ answered Hungry Paul, sensing that a denouement was imminent.

  The duty manager reached for the tin. Hungry Paul turned towards the rabble in preparation for their reaction.

  The duty manager expected to see a box of sweets that were perfectly fine and edible, but he was wrong.

  Hungry Paul expected to see sweets that were mushy and gone off, but he was wrong also.

  The posse expected an ending and a resolution, which is what they surely got.

  The duty manager prised the lid off, slowly popping around the rim.

  Inside, it could be seen plainly that the tin was stuffed to the brim, not with chocolates in a state of perfection or deterioration or any stage in between, but with all of Helen’s sewing stuff.

  The shot-putter burst out a braying laugh in which a shower of spit rained on Hungry Paul’s jacket.

  There were some other giggles, but mostly the posse broke up in hurried dismissal of Hungry Paul as an egregious timewaster. The self-knitted lady abandoned him in a sudden undoing of what she had only just started, a trick any knitter would know.

  For one seemingly eternal moment, Hungry Paul stood still, feeling strangely out of body.

  ‘Well, it seems that it’s an honest mistake,’ offered the duty manager nobly. Under normal circumstances, he might have felt triumphant at exposing a petty scam. However, the drained look on Hungry Paul’s face, his frozen expression, his mouth half-moving without any sound, all told him that he was dealing with a man beset by tragicomedy.

  ‘No hard feelings. Glad no harm was done,’ said the duty manager cheerfully. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you take an Easter egg home? As a goodwill gesture from the shop. Here’s a Buttons one. Hope to see you back again soon.’ And with that the duty manager disappeared through the strange plastic doors.

  Hungry Paul stood there at his most alone under the flickering tube lighting, holding a Buttons Easter egg and a tin of sewing stuff, while the man-child resumed stabbing the clear plastic with his pen.

  Hungry Paul doesn’t remember much about what he said next, how he left the store, or how he dreamed his way through the long walk home.

  As he arrived back at the house, leaving his Easter egg, the tin and his keys beside the letters on the hall table, he slunk in to the back room where Helen, with her roots done, had his suit trousers out on the back of the chair. ‘How are things love? How did you get on at the hospital?’

  ‘I didn’t get to go in the end. I’ll go over at the weekend,’ he answered meekly
.

  ‘Oh, okay. Don’t forget to bring the sweets. Sorry for heading off without telling you where they were, but I had driven half way to the hairdressers before I realised I had them in the boot.’

  ‘Not to worry. Probably for the best.’

  ‘I was just going to take up your wedding trousers, but I can’t find my sewing box,’ said Helen.

  ‘It’s on the hall table.’

  ‘Oh, great. I must have walked right past it. God bless your eyesight.’

  Hungry Paul sat slumped in the sitting room and stayed there for most of the evening, catatonic with failure and looking out of the front window as car after car ran over a lost glove on the road.

  Chapter 10: Filling the weekend

  That Saturday Grace’s body woke up according to its weekday discipline. It was used to getting up early even when it needed rest and even when Grace willed it to decommission and go back to sleep at nine-minute snooze alarm intervals. She had gone for a drink with the work crowd the night before and, while she didn’t stay out too late, she had missed dinner and fell into bed hungry, forgetting to ring Andrew at his hotel in Amsterdam as she had promised. There were no missed calls on her phone the next morning.

  She got up slowly and walked around the house opening all the curtains and windows, letting the light in, the stale air out, and generally bringing the place back to life after it had been barely lived in during a week of long hours.

  After making her way downstairs in her pyjamas, Grace carried the hunger from the day before into the kitchen and had a long, frank look at the shelves, which were in a state of neglected depletion. Unwilling and unready to break her cosy solitude, she decided against a trip to the shops, and instead sat at the kitchen table and took an improvised breakfast of tea (no coffee left), Weetabix (no granola left) and cracker bread (no bagels left), reading the news on her phone.