Jigs & Reels: Stories

by Joanne Harris

  Eleven-forty – Paul – looks at her. His hand closes over hers with a tightness I can almost feel. ‘You’re not coming back with me, then?’

  ‘Oh, Granddad.’ Her eyes are wet again. ‘You know I can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not? I’d help you with the boy. You don’t need—’ fiercely he struggles with Jimmy’s name, but is unable to speak it aloud. ‘You don’t need that man any more. He’s feckless. He’s violent.’

  Cheryl smiles. ‘I know. I’ve known for a long time.’

  ‘Then why stay with him? Why bother with him?’ His eyes are blazing. I feel I ought to say something to comfort him, but Cheryl’s eyes stop me.

  ‘He needs me,’ she says gently. ‘They need me. Last night I did a lot of thinking. I was all ready to leave then, to run away and begin again on my own. It was possible. I was ready to do it. And then I realized something I’d never thought of before.’ She takes my hand and Eleven-forty’s, and presses them both. ‘I realized that life isn’t a movie. I could spend a lifetime waiting for a Mr Right who never turns up. Or I could use what I’ve got to make things better.’ Her voice, though soft, has an edge. ‘Isn’t that why you made me watch all those films, Miss Golightly? To warn me? To teach me that if I want a happy ending, I’m going to have to write my own?’

  I want to tell her to call me Molly, but somehow I know that it is already too late. I want to tell her that wasn’t the lesson I’d meant her to learn, but she seems so sure of herself, while I have never felt less so. Suddenly I see myself as she does: a lonely, sad old woman, hiding myself in movies, clinging to routine, looking in from the dark. Surely anything must be better than that; even Jimmy and his rages. At least Jimmy is real. And he belongs to her.

  ‘I think he really wants to change this time. Really make an effort. For Paul’s sake.’ She smiles too brightly. ‘He’s not so bad, not once you get to know him. I mean, he’s no Cary Grant, but—’

  At least he’s real. And she must love him, in her way. Mustn’t she?

  ‘Can I bring you some more tea? Yours has gone cold.’

  The simple kindness in her voice makes my eyes sting. ‘No thanks. Maybe I’m due for a change too, don’t you think?’

  She hides her surprise well. ‘I’ll get one of the girls.’

  ‘Later.’ That’s the problem with wearing eyeliner, I remind myself. It runs. ‘I’m going to miss you, Cheryl.’

  ‘Me too.’

  We look at each other for a moment without speaking. Then she gives an unexpected grin. ‘Go on, Miss Golightly. Say it for me. Say the line. One more time.’ She turns to Eleven-forty – to Paul – and hugs him. ‘You’ll see what I mean, Granddad. She sounds just like her. I mean, she could be her.’

  I know which line she means. It’s the one from Tiffany’s, where Audrey Hepburn is talking about the Mean Reds: that terrible feeling of being scared, but not knowing why. I have it now, a frightened, lost feeling, and I wonder if that’s what Polly feels all the time, alone in her little room in the Meadowbank Home, with the bored nurse standing at the door and all her dreams melted away like chalk in the rain. Oh, I know that feeling. When I get it the only thing is to jump into a cab and go to Tiffany’s. Calms me down right away.

  ‘Some other time, perhaps.’

  She is about to protest; but now little Paul is getting impatient; he is bouncing up and down, waving a grubby hand. Next to him Jimmy looks strangely humble, standing there, waiting.

  ‘OK.’ She straightens up, pats her hair into place. ‘Right.’

  Eleven-forty – Paul – retains her hand a little longer. ‘Are you sure, love?’ he asks. ‘You’ll stay in touch? You’ll be all right?’

  She nods. ‘Sure. I’m not saying it’ll be easy—’ Suddenly she is Bette Davis again, waving an imaginary cigarette-holder. ‘He may be a rat,’ she says airily, with the ghost of her dirty laugh, ‘but, sweetheart, he’s my rat.’

  Then she turns to where her men are waiting for her – a straight, comically dignified figure in black ballet pumps and capri trousers – and now I remember who it is she reminds me of: Charlie Chaplin, the indomitable little tramp; often bruised but never broken, eternally optimistic in the face of the bleak, indifferent world. Laughter surprises me; then tears.

  Eleven-forty waits in silence until I have stopped. As I look up I see that he has brought a fresh pot of tea; Earl Grey, with milk in the little jug and two wrapped lumps of sugar in the saucer. I wipe my eyes carefully with my handkerchief. It comes away black with eyeliner. I am suddenly sure that neither of us will see Cheryl or her child again.

  The tea is just as I like it. It tastes of childhood and home, dipped biscuits and forgiveness. Anything can be mended, I think to myself, and then I am crying again, with a passion I had no idea was in me. Eleven-forty waits patiently, as if he has all the time in the world.

  I wipe my eyes again. The lids feel swollen, grotesque. I remind myself that I am old; that my vanity is not only misplaced, but ridiculous. But Eleven-forty is smiling, and he takes the carnation from the vase in front of us and pushes it over the tabletop towards me.

  ‘Better?’ he asks. His smile is a little like Cheryl’s, I notice; wide, open and just a little brash. I feel a sudden admiration for that brave smile. I take a deep breath, close my eyes briefly, and when I open them again the Mean Reds have receded a little. It isn’t Tiffany’s, of course, but there is something very safe about Tesco’s all the same: the sunlight shining through the windows, the warmth of baking bread and the noise of the people working. Surely nothing very bad could happen here.

  I pull off my gloves to straighten my hair; fortunately I have a compact in my handbag, and with a couple of deft strokes I manage to repair some of the damage. I’m no Audrey Hepburn, of course; but then again, he’s no George Peppard, and I can tell from his eyes that he approves.

  ‘So,’ I say, smiling straight at him, ‘how do I look?’

  Come in, Mr Lowry, Your Number Is Up!

  It’s no secret that numbers rule our lives. Perhaps this is why I have always hated them.

  I’M A COLLECTOR. It’s my job and also my hobby. I collect risks. I assess consequences. I assemble isolated examples of statistical ephemera and factor them into the great equation. The main purpose of this is quite mundane: to make money for the large insurance company that employs me. The secondary, existential purpose is more closely connected with understanding and – dare I say – enjoyment. As I said, I’m a collector.

  For instance, did you know that a male Londoner aged twenty-five to forty-five – assuming normal health and unimpaired vision – stands a chance of approximately one in eleven thousand of being hit by a car every time he crosses the road? Factor in a stressful job (missed appointment, mobile phone) and the figure leaps to one in six thousand. If he is hit, there is a three-in-ten likelihood that the accident will prove fatal. Interestingly, in central London, there is also an additional five-to-one probability that the vehicle involved will be a taxicab.

  That’s why I’m always very careful when crossing the road. I’m careful about what I eat, too; and I watch what I drink – or I did, until very recently. You never know with statistics; like diseases, some lie dormant for years before deciding to strike; some run at you head-on like charging buffalo. In any case, my life has been spent avoiding the risks I calculate: I do not travel by air; I do not indulge in dangerous sports; I do not eat unpasteurized cheeses, red meat or genetically modified food. Living in London, of course, is a risk in itself; but I go for a health check every six months, I avoid tobacco, I eat oily fish, I examine my scrotum on a regular basis, and by doing these things, I believe I have reduced my chance of becoming a medical statistic without significantly reducing my quality of life.

  My wife thinks statistics are dull. Perhaps she thinks I am dull, too. In fact I have some reason to believe she does. Then again, women lack our precision, delight in vagueness and illogical thinking, indulge in wild spending sprees without proper accoun
tability, and when confronted by these failings, are likely (nine times out of ten) to retreat to their bathrooms in a swirl of pique and Chanel Number Five, declaring that you never let them have any fun, that you are to sleep in the spare bedroom again and, furthermore, that you are a selfish beast who never thinks about anything nowadays but your horrid numbers.

  Notwithstanding my wife’s disapproval, however, it is numbers that rule our lives. Whether the banal miracle of conception (fifty thousand sperm in an epic swimathon towards the golden egg) or the single flamboyant freakish event (man plummeting from crippled aircraft is saved by landing on the back of a giant eagle), every choice, every step of the journey, from crossing the road to boarding that fatal flight, is governed by probabilities of near-infinite elegance and complexity.

  Take this one, for example. In 1954, a Frenchman called Joseph Dumont decided to commit suicide by leaping from the Eiffel Tower. He stepped off the first platform and fell fifty-seven metres, but at that moment a giant gust of wind caught Monsieur Dumont and blew him right back towards the tower, depositing him safely on a girder of the infrastructure, at a risk factor, as far as I can calculate, of something approaching a million to one against, taking into account weight, age and general fitness, atmospheric conditions, time of day, the velocity and angle of the fall, and of course the X-factor – the hand of God, that infinite (one might say imaginary) number – which is unquantifiable, unidentifiable, ineffable and all that crap.

  Others have not been quite so lucky. Of the three hundred and sixty-nine suicide attempts from the Tower to date, most hit the Tower as it widens on the way down. Frequently, the bodies become entangled in the latticework until firefighters can remove them. In 1974, in a similar incident, a man jumped off the Tower in a high wind and, as in the case of Monsieur Dumont, was blown off-course towards the Tower, where he was impaled on part of a safety barrier and lay like a trussed chicken, with his femurs sticking out from between his collarbones, for almost an hour and a half before he finally expired, thereby demonstrating first, that the X-factor is not always kind, though it is not without a sense of irony, and second, that it never pays to disregard the weather.

  I never managed to find out whether Monsieur Dumont, awed by the miracle of probability to which he had unwittingly contributed, decided to go off in a different direction, perhaps leading a wholly different life filled with variety and joy, or simply elected to step off the Tower again and finish the job he had set out to do. In any case, the odds of that particular event happening again are so negligible as to be virtually non-existent – rather like those of a single individual winning the lottery – and so Monsieur Dumont leaves our stage for ever, undistinguished but for this one, freakish contribution to the folklore of extreme probabilities.

  Oddly enough, no one seems to consider this when buying lottery tickets. I have a neighbour, Mrs Parsons, a pensioner of limited means, who has bought a ticket every week since the Lottery began – choosing always the same numbers, in the mistaken belief that this way, her chances are improved. Always the same numbers: her birth year; the year of her marriage to the long-defunct Mr Parsons (whose number came up in an accident at work; unfortunate, though not particularly freakish, if we consider his history of carelessness and the fact that he rarely observed the safety code); and, most importantly, what she refers to as ‘my lucky number’, the number seven, custodian of the all-important X-factor which will one day (she believes) raise Mrs Parsons to the ranks of those touched by God.

  I consider telling her that in any random sample of Europeans aged between eighteen and sixty-five, eighty-two per cent will reply ‘seven’ when asked to name their lucky number. But Mrs Parsons is so adamant and so hopeful that I really don’t have the heart to tell her, or to alert her to the fact that the chances of her – or of any particular individual – ever winning the Lottery are so remote that actually buying a ticket barely improves the odds. The probability of finding the winning ticket in the street, or being given it by a friend, and thereby winning the jackpot, gives almost the same chance at the prize as poor Mrs Parsons, who has bought a ticket with religious commitment every week since the Lottery started. All the same, she has not lost hope, which is, I suppose, the whole object of the game. After all, what else does she have? Church on Sunday, The Archers every day, seventy quid a week from the Government (being sadly ineligible for Mr Parsons’s accident-at-work benefit – protective clothing must be worn), the hairdresser’s once a fortnight (shampoo, rinse and set, four pounds fifty, just as Mr Parsons liked it), and the enduring, golden hope that her very own Lucky Number Seven will one day come in, like one of the heroes of her favourite romances.

  Perhaps it will. I hope, for her sake, that it does. But happiness is not a number. Take twenty-two, for instance. Twenty-two years of marriage until the girl you loved – eighteen years old, 36-28-36, now reduced by Time’s terrible alchemy to a fat and joyless woman who only comes alive for Friends and the occasional takeaway – declares that she wants to find herself and leaves, taking with her the children (nine, sixteen), the family home (one hundred and twenty thousand), the dog (eighty-five, dog years), the car (Nissan Sunny, 1988) and the mysterious X-factor – the smell of her hairspray (Elnett, £5.99), the TV blaring all hours, the sound of a house with someone in it and the residual warmth on her side of the bed on cold mornings, when she got up to go to work and I stayed for another five minutes, enjoying the stretch and waiting for the smell of coffee.

  Finding herself, of course, means finding someone else. In this case a Bloke From Work (five foot nine, thirty-one). Loves kids, you’d really like him, we can still be friends – in a random sample of a hundred divorcees, ninety-one per cent report hearing – or speaking – these very platitudes. And here I am, the one in four; still living by numbers, but without that mystical X-factor which Mrs Parsons still enjoys and which launched Monsieur Dumont on his famous flight.

  Here are some of the numbers that make up my life:

  Forty-five thousand (pounds gross salary).

  Two hundred and fifty (rent on small bedsit in Shepherd’s Bush).

  Two hundred and fifty (daily hair loss, mostly at crown).

  Forty-eight (age in years).

  One hundred and thirty over ninety (blood pressure, at rest).

  Eight-fifteen (Tube to Hammersmith).

  Eight-thirty-five (Tube to Leicester Square).

  Eight-forty-five (short walk to office).

  Eight-forty-seven (random discovery of small rectangle of paper stuck to underside of shoe).

  It was a lottery ticket. I put it into my pocket. That was three weeks ago.

  Mrs Parsons seems genuinely delighted for me. I suppose that to her it confirms her belief in the all-important X-factor; besides, as she puts it, it means the numbers are getting closer. Ten million pounds – ten million, at a probability of fifteen-million-to-one against.

  I have refused to speak to the newspapers. My wife – ex-wife – has no such reservations. My soon-to-be-ex-colleagues, too, have had their say. The landlord of my ex-flat has painted a moving picture of my ex-life – my punctuality, my politeness, my quiet desperation – as have my ex-neighbours, some of whom might actually have recognized me from my photographs.

  Only Mrs Parsons has stood firm. ‘Leave the poor man alone,’ she shouted to the cluster of photographers that greeted me on the way to work. ‘Let him live his life in peace!’ But the more I resist them, it seems, the more they want me. I have moved to a still-unfurnished mansion flat in Knightsbridge; I have taken three weeks’ holiday from work in lieu of notice and shaved my moustache. There seems little else to do. I feel like Monsieur Dumont, unexpectedly swept off-course and forced to reassess my trajectory. Was he grateful, I wonder? Did he stagger, numbed and trembling, to the edge of the platform and look down in awe at the drop?

  The first days were a kind of euphoria. For the first time in my life I went shopping – not for food or for necessary clothing, but for the sheer and
frivolous pleasure of collecting numbers. I bought the following items:

  For my wife, one Patek Philippe watch, with diamonds (£12,500).

  For my daughter, one cocktail dress, black, size ten, Miu Miu (£800).

  For my son, one electric car, Hamley’s, remote controlled (£299).

  For my colleagues at work, small case Veuve Cliquot non-vintage champagne (£150).

  For Mrs Parsons, one scarf (Hermès, £150), one raincoat (Aquascutum, £490), one bouquet roses (pink, £95), a subscription to the magazine True Romance and a lifetime’s supply of lottery tickets (numbers specified), to be sent to her address every Monday morning without fail.

  I rather enjoyed that one; but after that I began to feel oddly drained, like a child in a toyshop who has been told that not only the shop, but the entire factory now belongs to him, thereby making his fifty pence weekly pocket money (preciously hoarded since last Christmas in expectation of the purchase of a new Hornby train carriage) rather ridiculous.

  For a day or two I rallied; bought a sleek and lovely stereo system from Bang & Olufsen, a bubble-gum-pink Smeg fridge from Harrods and a small but beautiful Turkish carpet from a boutique in Knightsbridge, adding to this a selection of silk ties, six shirts from Thomas Pink, a set of Paul Smith cufflinks, some Lobb shoes and three suits from a bespoke tailor on Savile Row before realizing that, as I no longer had a job, there would be little opportunity to wear them.

  After that I phoned my wife. Unsurprisingly, the elusive X-factor has struck there, too, as she speaks of a possible reconciliation, whilst eyeing the top pocket of my new suit with the interested and acquisitive eye hitherto reserved only for Friends and certain types of chocolate ice cream.

  But the intimacy she promises reveals itself quite rapidly to be on a quid pro quo basis – several thousand of my quid, to be exact – and I am left, a number of boutiques later, with the growing conviction that she sees me not as a man, or even as an ex, but as her very own Lucky Number Seven, ready to waft her into a world of Chanel frocks and Graff diamonds and world cruises and secret liposuction and furtive, thrilling liaisons. The Bloke From Work, she says, is history. I believe her – suddenly there are more exciting worlds to discover – but I do not flatter myself that it is I that have changed her view. In fact, I feel more like Monsieur Dumont than ever.