‘Of course, Mr Q., of course.’
Simone Crepuscular pointed to each place on the cheque in turn and explained which bit of information belonged there and how it should be written. He then had Quirkstandard repeat it back to him with only minimal prompting. After they both seemed satisfied that something had been absorbed into the deep furrows of the cerebellum (or some similar seat of learning, neither was feeling neurologically fussy) Crepuscular asked Quirkstandard to sign his name down at the bottom.
Naturally this was something that Quirkstandard was more than happy to do. He wanted to show his new friend that he had pre-existing talents, that he wasn’t entirely a hopeless case, because honesty and pride rub up against each other like that and blisters are never pleasant – it’s good to admit your gaps and failings, but no one wishes to look like an idiot.
He had spent long winter evenings practising his signature (they required a gentleman to sign the register upon arrival at Mauve’s and so it was a useful skill to have). In those days there were very few distractions available in the evenings, and even a gentleman of generous private means couldn’t very well spend every night at the theatre, opera or music hall. (Obviously as far as it was a question of finances they probably could, but it was generally considered, among polite society, improper for a gentleman to be seen in the same building as actresses or singers more than once or twice a week, unless he was related to one of them, and even then it was not the done thing for a gentleman to actually be related to an actress or singer, except by illicit sex, which wasn’t really Quirkstandard’s cup of tea at all.)
*
Simone Crepuscular leant back in his chair for a moment and looked out the window at the camp which had been his home for the last twenty-one years. He’d made several friends during his time there. Sometimes he’d danced late into the night to the interminable weird keenings of the Indian musicians and he’d swum more than once with the young elephants as they gambolled among the early morning shallows of the broad slow river. Every inch of the impacted parade ground was known to him, was familiar to him, was a part of his soul, was a page in the story of his life, was a beat in the thump of his heart. He stood up and stepped closer to the window to take in the wider view, leaving the freshly arrived post on his desk for a moment.
He wiped a cobweb away and waved back as a passing soldier saw him and waved up. Billy Smith, thought Crepuscular lovingly: a nice boy with no talents and no ambition, a lucky match. He didn’t think this with bitterness, but with a little envy perhaps, since he now felt undeniable exhortations to move on stirring in his chest. The course Jock Jones had urged him onto had opened his eyes and his doors to a wider world. He knew he couldn’t help but tread the pathways of that world, that there was no way forward into the rest of his life but through that unexpected and unexplored realm of everywhere – everywhere else, that is, everywhere which wasn’t where he was right now. He didn’t feel confident about it, didn’t know whether he really wanted to follow this calling. The climb looked steep and the world so very wide and he felt small, small, small. But at the same time, how could he not move on?
He spun smartly on the ball of his foot, walked back to his desk, took his few personal possessions out of his drawer, popped them into a little rucksack and walked out of the door, leaving two unopened letters on his desk. Without hesitation he walked out of the camp and was a mile and a half up the dusty road that lead toward the distant mountains that sat pale and hazy on the northern horizon when he stopped. How could I have been so silly? he thought, as he turned on his heel once more and marched back to the camp.
Half an hour later he was back in his little office and leant on his desk. He scribbled a note on a piece of scrap paper, secured it to the front of his desk with a couple of handy nails and began walking, once again, toward the distant mountains that still hung pale and hazy on the far northern horizon.
The note just said Gone Home. If he had had any inkling of what lay in front of him, he may well have rephrased the note, but he didn’t, so he didn’t. Though with hindsight he did come to realise the rather irritating value of hindsight.
*
Crepuscular hadn’t thought to sign that note because, he assumed correctly, that anyone finding a note attached to his desk in his office may well have been able to make a rather astute guess as to its origins.
On an object such as a cheque, on the other hand, which would soon be passing into the hands of all manner of strangers unaware, specifically speaking, of its provenance, such an identifying mark is welcomed, if not legally required.
Epitome Nebulous Quirkstandard enjoyed having such a long name. As he took the chequebook and laid it out on the table he flexed his wrist in preparation for the act of signing it.
When the paper was flat to his satisfaction he stood up. This was his moment. With the pen in one hand he leant over the cheque and made a few exploratory gestures, much in the way that an inexpert golfer will pretend that he missed the ball intentionally on several downswings before finally connecting with a solid thwack into the second cut of rough. Closing one eye he stepped back. Then he stepped forward again, like a swift swooping hawk, deadly and with one eye open, and quickly, fluidly he signed.
There was a blur of action. Quirkstandard’s left elbow flew out to the side as his right hand impacted with the cheque. His tongue ravaged his lips, poked about in the inside of his cheek, flicked at the back of his teeth, and his one open eye flickered in concentration. The scritch and scratch of the pen as it changed angles, directions and declivities dominated the atmosphere – round and around it sounded, making letter after letter. D after R after A after D and so on. With a final flourish, much like a matador placing his tired foot on the haunch of a vanquished but worthy opponent, Quirkstandard stepped back, stood upright, with his hand on his breast, ink splashed across his cheek, pen at attention. Proud, handsome, triumphant.
Simone Crepuscular felt like clapping again, but didn’t, just in case his new patron felt he was taking the Michael, which he didn’t intend to do. Instead he just said, ‘Well done, sir.’
‘Er, well, actually,’ said Quirkstandard, as he leant forward to examine his handiwork, ‘I was rather wondering if we might go through that again … I mean write another cheque that is, since I seemed to have gone and signed the wrong name on this one.’ He paused before looking up and meeting Crepuscular’s eyes. ‘I must have been rushing. Sorry.’
He blushed just a little.
*
Crepuscular certainly didn’t rush when he left the army. He walked away (for the second time) at a gentle pace, allowing the placid breezes to ruffle his chest hair and push complacently at the small puffs of dust his feet raised from the dry earth road. From time to time he’d sit down in the shade of some broad spreading tree and sip a little water from his canteen. Sometimes he’d stay under the tree for a few hours and read from one of the books in his rucksack or chat with peculiarly wizened old men. He carried with him a notebook and a stub of pencil and would practice his writing by taking dictation. When enough time had passed, for example when he’d finished a chapter or when the fakir had grown bored or boring, he would simply get up once more and carry on walking towards the north.
In the back of his mind was a general intention to return to England. It wasn’t that he wanted to see his parents or his home again, and he didn’t know anyone else who lived there, but somehow it seemed to him to be the right place to aim for. All those years ago he’d left it, but he hadn’t chosen to leave it, and he wondered, had he stayed longer in England, whether he would have wanted to leave it of his own accord. So by going back he could restart his quest, in a way, reset the pedometer and be in a position to know or to discover whether he ought to go travelling again. These were the guiding principles of his journeying, and although some days they seemed to make more sense to him than they did on others, he stuck by them.
It took Crepuscular a while to get home, partly because the distance between Ind
ia and England was quite large, but mainly because he didn’t know the way. Walking north brought him, after a few weeks of meandering, into the foothills of the Himalayas. And a few weeks in the foothills brought him onto the lower slopes of the mountains. As the ground rose the air became cooler and he took a length of cloth out of his knapsack and wrapped it around his neck in a loose knot. It was a lovely scarf he had bought at a market in the last town he’d passed through. It smelt vaguely of patchouli oil and had glittery little bits of mirror sewn into it and an expansive tasselled fringe at either end. He thought it would keep him warm as he walked.
Sometime later he was trudging through snow and his feet were turning increasingly blue. He sat down wearily on a large flat rock and tried to bring some warmth to his shivering toes by breathing on them. Unfortunately he wasn’t supple enough to reach them with his mouth and had to make do with rubbing the exposed flesh between the thongs of his sandal with his fingers, but since they were almost equally cold the heat produced was minimal. As he held each foot between his palms he tried to think of a plan. He hadn’t counted on the journey taking this long and for the first time began to have doubts about the direction he had chosen to head off in. His sandwiches were all gone and he knew that the nearest village was more days trek behind him than he cared to think about. As he sat, drooped in dreary thought, he heard heavy footsteps coming up the narrow and rocky path he had been following, and suddenly a warm, wet, vegetable smell wafted over his shoulder and onto his cheek.
He turned around slowly to see a giant, shaggy, bovine face staring into his with deep black eyes that gazed out implacably from underneath a matted black fringe. It half-sneezed its hot digestive breath into his face and he reached out with one finger and prodded its enormous damp nose. With a speed that seemed at odds with its size the yak whipped out a long rough-edged tongue, pushed Crepuscular’s finger away and lowed mournfully. It was a low low, a rumbling that echoed around Crepuscular’s bowels, rising as slowly as a Buddhist’s temper into his ribcage. Of course, he had seen the smaller domesticated relatives of this beast working in the fields down on the plains, but those animals, he realised in his pre-scientific manner, had been crossed with common docile cattle, bowdlerising the pure strength of the rugged true yak genes. Its eyes shone darkly and Crepuscular understood, instinctively, that he was not going to come to any harm.
As this realisation swept into him, causing his shoulders to relax and his lungs to exhale, the yak turned its gigantic broad shoulders and started to wander off along the ridge-path, leaving him behind. One horn caught the strap of Crepuscular’s backpack and it swung away, tantalisingly out of his reach, dangling over the long fall down the mountainside below. There was nothing to do but follow.
With surprising grace the yak picked its way through the icy rock fields, always seeming to find the easiest path, pausing only occasionally to tear up a stray stem of gorse that had nudged its way through the powdery snow and Crepuscular followed on behind.
By the time they settled down for the night, however, the excitement had ebbed away and his feet were just as cold as they’d ever been and his legs ached violently from the large steps he’d had to make to keep up on the last upward push. As he sat down in the sudden darkness, the sun having dipped below the other side of the mountain, the yak carefully ran his sandpapery tongue over Simone’s feet in a gesture that was more friendly than useful.
As a rule yaks typically sleep standing up. Like horses they lock their knees into position, shut their eyes and fall into ineffable bovine dreams. (Obviously, to be scrupulously correct, very few (which isn’t to say no) horses dream ineffable bovine dreams. The majority tend to dream quite effable equine dreams: they gallop over tediously green plains, manes and fetlocks glimmering freely in the dew of the morning; they imagine themselves to be in dappled woodland glades, beside a tinkling silver stream, with a single horn sprouting from their foreheads; and sometimes they hammer nails into the feet of blacksmiths.) The yak, however, on this particular night decided to lie down. He had led Crepuscular to a shallow cave on the east side of the mountain, out of the wind. Snow had drifted out from one wall, which closed the cave off even more and as they lay down it seemed as snug a little exposed shallow cave on the side of a mountain as they could ever hope to find. Simone tucked his cold feet into the belly fur of his hairy bed companion, covered his shoulders with his slight scarf and drifted into brilliantly untroubled sleep.
He was woken the next morning by the sun streaming into his eyes. His companion dropped a pile of shrubs at his feet and wordlessly suggested that they share breakfast together. As Simone chewed thoughtfully he gazed out at the view. In front of him, to the east, stretched the utter immensity of the mountain range, rugged rock and smooth faces of glinting snow silhouetted before the sun, as far as he could see – peak after peak, reaching to heaven. To his right he could look down into the distance of India, far-off blue-tinged India. A country he loved as his own, but which wasn’t home. From up here, he thought, it looked flat and peaceful and quiet. He thought of the thick winding river he knew and of the smiles of the local girls as they washed their smalls in front of him, pretending to forget that he was perched in his tree.
As he finished his last bit of bitter-tasting (but slightly welcome all the same) root he stood up and stretched. The yak was already wandering off northwards again, along the ridge-path, and Crepuscular did what he had to do: he shouldered his rucksack and followed on behind.
*
When Quirkstandard had eventually signed the cheque correctly Simone Crepuscular led him back into the pamphlet room. He stood in the middle of the shelf-lined space and, turning to face Quirkstandard, opened his arms wide to the walls.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is all my own work. Everything is here. I have written it all down, everything I’ve learnt, everything I’ve experienced. It’s here. So, Mr Q., what is it you’d like to know?’
Epitome Quirkstandard didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t, he thought, that there was anything in particular he wanted to know, as such, but rather that he thought he wanted to learn about anything. And so after a moment’s pondering he said as much.
‘A wide and free-ranging autodidact, and in my shop too. Wonderful, Mr Q., just wonderful.’
‘Where do you recommend I begin?’
‘Well,’ Simone answered after a second, ‘why not begin where I began? Begin at the beginning, as was once traditional?’
He pointed with the index finger of an inky hand to a high shelf just beside the front door. Simon Crepuscular, the taller of the two sons, reached up and brought down a yellowed and much creased piece of paper. He handed it to Quirkstandard.
‘What I Did In India,’ he read out loud.
‘Yes,’ said Crepuscular, ‘you see that’s where it all began for me. I’m afraid that’s one of the last copies now, so I can’t let you take it out of the shop, but you are, of course, more than welcome, to take advantage of our browsing facilities.’ He indicated a small table and chair in one corner that Quirkstandard hadn’t noticed the night before. ‘Please, sit down, have another cup of tea if you wish, and read away to your heart’s content, Mr Q., I think you’ll find that one an enjoyable start to the day.’
Quirkstandard sat down in the chair, which happened to be in an oblong patch of sunlight and already warm, and opened the pamphlet out on the table before him.
He stretched once, scratched at his bruises, smiled at Simone Crepuscular, and began to read.
Chapter 8
Mountains & Monks
After a week of following the yak, of sharing its food and bunking up with it at night, Crepuscular turned one final rocky corner.
There, below him, lay a deep living green valley. On either side jagged heights of jumbled rock reared up, grey-white and indomitable, but there, beneath his feet, down a single narrow path lay, verdant and smelling of early morning dew, a growing green valley. The yak led him down this one last path, as he had led him along
so many others previously, before leaving him in the care of a young sky-blue robed monk. A monk, moreover, who seemed to be expecting him and who bowed and smiled as he approached.
‘Come with me, please,’ he said in perfect but accented English.
Understanding his place by now Crepuscular followed this new host. He glanced over his shoulder just once as he began to walk and saw the large rear end of the yak (a sight he had grown fond of, since it had been the one unchanging view in his new and changing world) dwindling in the distance. The great beast paused, cocked its head to one side to sniff at a succulent, green-stemmed sapling, all fresh and juicy with new leaf growth. It turned away without nibbling and wandered slowly back to the near-barren mountainside in search of some prickly, dry scrubby gorse bushes. Crepuscular smiled sadly as he saw his silent friend vanish round the same corner he had just turned.
He turned again and found the monk waiting for him a little way down the path.
He was led down and down through the fields and gardens of this hidden country, which was larger than it had looked from so high up, and after an hour they stopped outside a square yellow brick building that sat in the centre of the small cluster of buildings that sat at the centre of the valley. As they’d passed through the fields curious faces had looked up from their hoeing and digging and weeding. Crepuscular had noticed the eyes of many different nations in those faces, rounded eyes like his own, almond eyes like those of his guide, dark eyes like the Indian friends he’d left behind at the army camp. All their faces though were shaded a dusky brown through long exposure to the sun, much as his own had been after all the years he’d spent on the subcontinent. He wondered how they had all found their ways here. A few people had waved. They had all seemed to smile.
The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard Page 6