Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries

by Barbara Silkstone

  One of Alison’s birthday cards is home-made. It has a pressed cornflower on the front and a cutting from a newspaper inside, telling the story of a young child with defective vision who saw tiny particles of dust in the air magnified many times and thought they were fairies floating in front of her eyes. Optometrists corrected the child’s sight by giving her rose colored glasses to wear.

  The card is from Jeff, Alison’s former downstairs neighbour. He’s moved a long way away in the hope of forgetting her. The card suggests he’s having some difficulty with this.

  Alison takes out a postcard of one of Picasso’s portraits of a woman with a messed up head, bought on a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and writes a simple message to the return address:

  My hands are rough, my lips are chapped. I’m 30, I feel old.

  Help me.

  Alison creeps up to the cot in the next room where Phoebe is having a nap. The child’s arms are thrown back and bent up at the elbow like a 1930s strongman, knees and toes turned out and her head turned to one side. Alison bends into the cot to watch for movement behind Phoebe’s long eyelashes and bluish eyelids as she sleeps. With a sudden deep, reassuring sleepy breath from the baby, Alison steps back and turns away.

  Harvey is sitting in his room in the fading light, hands tucked under his thighs, leaning forward, tensed. He looks like a track athlete practising for a new set of rules that require competitors to start each race from a sitting position on the sofa.

  Harvey’s eyes are closed, searching inward for his earliest memories of himself. He was a weedy child, popular with other children’s mothers because of his beautiful manners. Harvey remembers trying for the first time to grasp the meaning of the events that surrounded and involved him. It was while at school in the seventies, during an era when it was more fashionable to allow children to discover the great truths for themselves than to explain anything to them, that Harvey first tried to make sense of the world. He did this by paying attention to the labels given to everything and everyone by other people.

  Harvey is examining memories of shivering in a purple cotton matching vest and pants set in PE at primary school, fighting among the scaled down toilets in the infant block, queuing for school dinners, winding string around pillow cases and leaving them overnight in buckets of colored water, twisting elastic around his legs then jumping high and clear of it. All these activities were unfathomable.

  Harvey remembers the morning he and the rest of his class spent their time folding scratchy pieces of paper very small and snipping at them with scissors with rounded ends. ‘You’ve made a snowflake,’ the teacher told him. The information gave him some comfort, even though it was a palpable untruth. Once one of the activities had been named he could ask for it again, or avoid it, or measure it against other things with the same name.

  It was only in his nightmares, or under the bed, or behind the curtains in the dark that shapeless frightening things remained, still unnamed.

  A phone call brings Harvey back from the darkness and he opens his eyes.

  ‘Your advertising campaigns for cars are very successful.’

  ‘Well, thank you. I can’t really take the credit. I’m a hired hand - part of a creative team. I’m sorry, I don’t think I recognize your voice.’

  ‘Mine is a lone voice roaring in a concrete jungle.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you know what cars are doing to this planet?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m the one who’s going to make you see that you’re wrong. I’m going to stop the traffic.’

  Harvey walks upstairs to Alison.

  ‘Do you know what cars are doing to this planet?’

  ‘The lead in the petrol makes children stupid. Cars clutter up the streets and knock cyclists off their bikes. The fumes from the exhaust turn the buildings black and they wither the trees at the side of the road. Ask Taron, she goes out morning, noon and night to try and revive the trees.’

  ‘Do you ever feel like campaigning for a cause?’

  ‘No. Causes are for students, politicians and the childless.’

  Harvey lives in Alison’s basement. He likes to talk to her about the need to define and label everything in his life.

  ‘If something doesn’t have a name, how can it be?’ he asks. ‘If you’ve never heard something described or named, how can you know you want it? How can you be sure you’ve ever experienced it? Once you’ve given something a name, you’ve captured it and made something constant in an inconstant world.’

  ‘Like naming stars?’ asks Alison.

  ‘Naming stars doesn’t count. They’re intangible, too far away. It would be like naming particles of dust. It doesn’t contribute anything to our experience of the world.’

  ‘I think naming stars is cute.’

  ‘Yes, it’s cute, but it doesn’t affect anyone except the person who’s named it. No one would ever see the star and wonder what it was called. The whole thing is too remote from our normal world.’

  ‘What about feelings? They’re intangible.’

  ‘Describing feelings is different than naming stars. Feelings influence the way everyone acts and so they make the world the way it is. But I’ve often wondered, if you don’t have a name for a feeling, then maybe you don’t feel it. There’s a word in Welsh, hiraeth, that’s like homesickness but it’s stronger, it evokes a kind of national pride as well. I don’t think English people feel that word. The thing is, if the word existed in English, would it increase the range of people’s feelings? Would some people feel like that?’

  ‘Are you saying that if you don’t know about something then you can’t feel it?’

  ‘Maybe. If you don’t know a place exists, how can you know you want to go there? If you’d never heard about New York, if it wasn’t even called by any name, how would you know how exciting it was? Once a few people have come back and said, “You must go to New York, it is a city that never sleeps,” you know you will go there eventually.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why so many people feel so lost. There’s a place they should be, but they don’t know it exists or where it is or how to get there. Do you ever feel that you’re adrift, Harvey?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know whether you should try to make sense of the small things around you or understand the bigger picture. I dither between the two approaches. I sometimes think the key is to try to convert every unknown thing into something I know and understand.’

  ‘What is it about the unknown that bothers you so much?’

  ‘I think I want everything around me to be solid to stop that drifting feeling you’re talking about. Maybe I’m just worried about missing out on something. Imagine if there’s life after death, for example. There could be a great big decadent party going on in Heaven and we’re all grimly clinging on to life, with scientists finding ways for people to live longer and longer.’

  ‘I know what you mean. I drove for ages on the A3 once expecting it to turn into the M3 and it never did. It’s that horror of being stuck on a dual carriageway when you could be whizzing along on the motorway.’

  ‘Yes. If I know as much as possible about everything then every choice I make will be informed. I just don’t know how I can go about making sure that I know everything. I’m not doing much about it at the moment. I spend my days going to the gym and hanging out with Jane Memory, in between doing a bit of freelance work.’

  ‘I wonder if we’re all just dribbling our lives away?’

  ‘No. Some people live valiantly. Someone called me up just now, someone I don’t know, and told me he was going to stop the traffic. I keep thinking about it. He sounded so certain that he could do it.’

  ‘You were contacted by a voice from the unknown?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With some sort of plan that could change your life?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Do you think that was maybe your one chance to live valiantly?’

  ‘I didn’t see it like
that at the time. I just put the phone down. Anyway I don’t want to live valiantly, I want to live knowing I haven’t missed out on the party being thrown by all the other people who are living valiantly.’

  Chapter Four ~ Heaven & Earth

  Roy’s a little disappointed, although not surprised, to find that life in Heaven is similar to life on Earth. The air is purer, the scenery lovelier, the stars brighter but otherwise it’s pretty much the same.

  Roy thought Heaven would be crowded with all the other people who have already died but there are no buildings other than the one he lives in and no-one around except Sylvia, the angel who caught him as he fell. He wonders if Heaven is different for each person. He has plenty of time for reflection now that he doesn’t have a job to go to. Perhaps you get what suits you. On Earth, he wasn’t sociable, he was always happy just spending time with his wife. Here in Heaven he also has one constant companion - Sylvia.

  Sylvia lives in a stone farmhouse with cool white sheets on the bed and a warm kitchen that always smells of bread. She keeps some chickens, ducks, a cow, a dog and an elephant. There’s a vegetable garden, a flower garden and an orchard. Roy walks out every day and explores his patch of Heaven. It is bordered on three sides by the sea. If he walks inland for about forty-five minutes, there’s a small white fence with a hand-painted sign that says ‘Paradise’.

  Time is the one thing that is endless in Heaven, stretching forward into infinity. It is impossible to imagine beginnings or endings. The days are long, uncluttered by work, unpunctuated by television or radio, by visits from friends or trips to the supermarket. Time is a luxury but it is also awesomely powerful and endless. Every day that ends promises another just like it tomorrow. There’s a sense of power in being able to change the day just by doing some small thing differently, by preparing something different for dinner, by starting a conversation on a new subject matter, by walking in a different direction to the sign on the wooden fence. Waking up in the morning and looking at the blank canvas of the day, for Roy, is like looking at the ocean and contemplating the infinitesimal changes and understanding the timelessness and the not-sameness, the endless variations on being an ocean. Perhaps the physical limits of the Heaven that Roy and Sylvia inhabit are restricted because restriction enhances the ability to comprehend infinity.

  Sylvia pads about comfortably and talks only when she needs to communicate something to Roy, she isn’t a chatty person. Roy isn’t surprised that Sylvia speaks English, or if she doesn’t speak English, that in dying he’s been given the facility to understand the language they speak in Heaven. Roy doesn’t talk to Sylvia about Heaven or what it feels like to be here. The one thing he’s curious about is what kind of life she used to live.

  ‘In my old life, I trained animals for film and TV work. My hero was Rolf Knie, the humane animal trainer. He taught elephants to ride a scooter, climb stairs on their hind legs and use a typewriter. He made history in 1941 by training an elephant to walk the tightrope. He was so famous that Princess Margaret was in the audience when he brought his elephants to London in the early 1950s. My dream was to train an elephant to walk the tightrope. I was always kind to the animals but I know now that it’s wrong.’

  ‘Why is it wrong, if you were kind?’

  ‘Because we were displaying the animals for entertainment. It was wrong. I read a report about it a few years ago that completely changed my life.’

  ‘Well, I used to do something similar. I used to work in a kennels where we bred and trained dogs. They lived like kings. They had everything. There was no cruelty, it was all done on reward. Mrs Latimer was very careful about that.

  ‘Mrs Latimer …?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mrs Latimer, who controls the supply of performing dogs to the film and circus industries?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Roy, I don’t think we should talk about our other lives, before we came here.’

  Although there are no other human people in Heaven with Roy and Sylvia, she has been joined by some of her friends from the animal kingdom. Maybe Sylvia doesn’t need to talk about her old life because she’s surrounded by mementoes. An elderly dog lives in the house with her and an elephant sleeps in one of two hangar-sized barns in the garden. The other barn stores the elephant’s supply of hay.

  Roy has looked around for his old dead friends, in case they’ve been waiting here for him. There’s no-one and it’s made him realize that he didn’t really have anyone. He thinks sometimes about whether his wife will turn up one day but it makes him uncomfortable. How would Sylvia deal with the situation?

  Possibly he’s over-estimating the likelihood of seeing Sheila again. His wife was always very fond of the theatre, perhaps she’ll go to a thespian Heaven. It seems strange that, now it turns out there is an afterlife, he might not spend eternity with her. If there had been nothing after death, he could have accepted it. But this scattered eternity… At least he recognizes there’s no point in arguing with Sylvia.

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘Let’s not talk about it.’ Having come to terms early on with the theological difficulties of making love to an angel, Roy takes Sylvia’s hand and they go to bed at the end of a day that promises another just like it tomorrow.

  Brian Donald’s wife has sent him round to the flat in Brixton after work this evening to see if Sheila Travers is alright. Brian’s wife is at home looking after her bedridden mother so she can’t go herself. She’s worried because she can’t get any answer from Sheila on the phone and Sheila hasn’t returned any of her messages.

  Brian has always been a bit wary of Sheila. She is a quiet person, with a determination and depth to her personality that he has always shied away from, associating that kind of quiet certainty with people who suddenly become born-again Christians.

  Brian and his wife and his wife’s mother saw a local news item recently about a man whose solar powered roof panels generate more than enough electricity for his own house so that he has been able to sell some of it back to his local Electricity Board. The story reminded him of Roy and Sheila. They formed a happy unit together, as if they didn’t need anyone else. They were so solid together and generated so much happiness as a couple that Sheila persuaded Roy that they had more than enough for themselves and should give something back, which is why they helped out with fundraising at charitable events.

  Brian’s wife wondered sometimes why Roy and Sheila had never had children but it was not the sort of conversation Brian would have been comfortable having with Roy. He couldn’t see a gap in Roy and Sheila’s lives that would have been filled by children. His own son, twenty years old and incapable of doing his own laundry, is still living at home.

  Since Roy’s disappearance Brian and his wife have been wondering about the dark secrets Roy and Sheila’s life must have held. They turned the television off so they could spend the evening discussing it. Brian himself saw Roy float up on the bouncy castle. It couldn’t have travelled far. Roy has either had a bump on the head or he staged the whole thing and he’s run off with someone else. Brian’s mother-in-law suggested that Sheila’s capable manner hides a sexual coldness that drove Roy away. Brian’s wife thought Roy might have gambling debts. Brian wondered whether Roy had fled the country to be a sexual tourist in Thailand.

  Brian will ask Sheila if he can have a look at Roy’s passport, which will put to rest whether or not he has gone abroad if she can’t find it. Brian’s wife told him to buy Sheila a bunch of flowers to cheer her up but he hasn’t bought any in case she isn’t in. Also, Brian has never been alone in her home with Sheila before. He feels a bit uncomfortable about it under the circumstances, especially if she is sexually cold. He can always pop out and get the flowers later.

  Brian rings the doorbell. When there is no answer, he shouts her name through the letterbox. He’s not sure whether she would hear him as she lives on the second floor, but at least he can tell his wife that he tried. If Sheila is not in, he can use the £10 his wife gave him for the flowers f
or something else. If he puts it on a horse and it wins, he will take his wife out for the evening. Their son can look after his grandmother for a change.

  Sheila can see Brian Donald from her window. She has nothing whatsoever to say to him. He is well-intentioned but he would have nothing to say that she would want to hear. He would rattle the coins in his pockets, rise up and down on the balls of his feet and stare at her breasts. Sheila does not answer the door.

  Chapter Five ~ The Message

  Jane Memory is scratching the inside of her right nostril with the rubber on the end of a pencil, briefing the stylist on her mobile phone. ‘The theme is empire builders. I need a great photo to go with this piece. Hold on to empire. See what you can do with it.’

  Jane Memory knows lots of people and phones them all the time to maintain her network. She’s popular because she’s funny, although she has a very critical eye. Every time she attends a dinner party in an unfamiliar house she murmurs a style-magi appraisal of it without stopping to think whether she’s offending her host. Jane is hungry all the time and the hunger makes her irritable and sometimes rather unkind. She’s hungry because she’s very thin, it’s her thing. She doesn’t even take slimming pills, she relies on willpower to resist the foods that pile on the millimetres.

  Venetia Latimer sits where the stylist has left her, on a wooden kitchen chair in the middle of the photographer’s studio. She has a maroon silk turban on her head, with a cameo brooch clipped on to the front, keeping its shape. Her body is swathed in emerald silk fashioned into an extravagant fifties-style dress, the plunging neckline edged in seed pearls exposing the cleft of her bosom. Two Dalmatians stand very still against her glimmering skirt while the photographs are taken. There are so many bracelets on her arm that after careful study of the contact sheets the next day, the photographer will fancy he can still hear them chiming.