‘Oh, jolly good.’
‘Oh, here’s the postcard, sir.’
‘Thank you Snatchby,’ Quirkstandard said as he took the card and held it up to the light. As he examined the picture side Snatchby spoke again. Sir?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you really like it here, at Crepuscular’s? You weren’t just being polite earlier?’
‘Oh no, Snatchby. I meant it. It’s absolutely marvellous here. Did you know that in the Himalayas, which are mountains somewhere, there are these things like cows, but with, sort of, Astrakhan coats on? I forget what they’re called, but it’s not the sort of thing a chap just learns about and moves on – it absolutely changes his view of the world. And I’ve learnt so many things like that. Oh, Snatchby, if only you could pop in and see for yourself.’
‘I have sir, many years ago. I’m very glad indeed that it’s working out for you. Well, I’d best be off, sir.’
‘Yes, cheerio then.’
As Quirkstandard closed the door he grinned to himself, simply pleased at being back in the shop, with his whole new future rolling out before him.
Chapter 13
The Choice, The Town & The Pirate
When Simone Crepuscular and little Rodney first arrived in the Americas, they didn’t know that they’d arrived in the Americas. In none of the places they’d been to, not in India, nor up the mountains, nor on the plains had Crepuscular ever seen a map or globe of the world. Oh, he was familiar with maps of local places, they’d had those in the army: big dusty papery faded things up on the walls with coloured shapes all over them, but he’d never studied them much at the time or cared: he hadn’t known what they said, and until you know what’s what on a map, which dot is the camp or which bright blue line represents that sluggish brown river outside, a map is just a sheet of variously coloured paper.
So, when they arrived in America he didn’t know they were in America. Since there was no one waiting on the beach to give them directions he was faced with three options. Firstly they could proceed inland and see where that led them (which was more or less in an easterly direction); secondly they could go along the beach toward the north; or thirdly they could follow the beach southwards. Simone couldn’t think which way would be best, couldn’t see any overriding advantage to any one course over the others, not knowing, as he knew, what lay along any of them. He was just pleased to be on dry land once again, at long last, and his stomach had mostly settled.
He looked out at the sea, at the ocean. It was beautiful, he was quite happy to admit, when experienced from the land. So blue, so large. But that didn’t help him decide. And faced with three choices he couldn’t even flip a coin. Had he had one. Which he didn’t.
In the end he lifted Rodney up in the air and spun him round and round, before dropping him onto the sand and seeing which way the dizzy little toddler would stagger and crawl.
He fell over facing south.
*
Sometime later they reached Ecuador. At first, Simone didn’t know it was Ecuador either, but he didn’t let that worry him.
The two of them stopped off one evening in a small seaside town and went into a bar. Rodney was walking now, but was still very short and liked to hold onto things. As he leaned against the edge of the bar Crepuscular tried to order a drink. He and the barman were, naturally enough, confronted by a language barrier, but Simone overcame this in the usual way by pointing to a bottle of something at random behind the bar for himself and then by pointing to little Rodney and raising an eyebrow.
The barman suggested with a clear and easy to understand gesture that they sit at one of the tables as he poured Crepuscular a glass of something vicious and viscous and gave Rodney a beaker of fish juice, which was, had anyone asked, not only a local delicacy but also one of several fish by-products that accounted for the modest poverty of this little out of the way town.
The barman brought the drinks over to their table and then scurried back behind the bar. Some of the locals stared at their table with undisguised interest. Crepuscular thought, as he looked round with a friendly smile, that he hadn’t seen so many scars accumulated in one room in all his days, having never served in one of those parts of the army that ever saw any violent action. He sipped his vile drink, coughed, wept and patted his beard. He took another sip which turned out to be exactly as disgusting. If this rotgut was an acquired taste he didn’t think he was going to worry too much about acquiring it, since he favoured both his sanity and his stomach lining.
Looking around the dim bar again, listening to the piano which had fallen silent as soon as they’d opened the swinging doors and remained so, Crepuscular began to think that maybe this hadn’t been the ideal establishment to have a drink in, but Rodney seemed to like it and was contentedly slurping and spilling his fish juice in equal measure.
Suddenly, from out of the darkness, a metal hook came thudding into the table. Crepuscular looked up in startled shock. Rodney gurgled. Attached to the hook was a sailor. Crepuscular could hardly make out the fellow’s face under the frown that covered it. In the gloomy dark of the room he could, however, make out the eye-patch across one eye, the glint of gold teeth from a troublesome grin and a voluminously feathered hat. The pirate (Simone felt qualified to be able to tell the difference between simple jolly Jack Tar sailors and mean, despicable, low-down pirates by now) extricated the hook from the table (with little difficulty) and leered at Rodney.
Rodney gurgled, giggled and leered back. The pirate reached out with the hook again and chucked the baby under the chin with the flat of its cold silvery curve. Rodney reached down and grabbed it and began to pull it towards his mouth, as he did with almost anything he got his little hands on. Just before the pointed barb passed his lips Simone leapt to his feet. His chair clattered on the floor behind him as the pirate easily ducked the fist that flew in his direction and responded with a jab to Crepuscular’s gut which knocked the wind out of him and sent him stumbling backwards. He tripped over the fallen chair, and as he fell one of his legs came up and knocked the table over, which landed on the pirate’s foot, leading to the eruption of a few choice Spanish expletives and the sight of a be-feathered hopping pirate, jewellery clanking and parrot flapping.
The room burst into strange Hispanic laughter. From every corner came foreign peals of pleasure. Crepuscular recognised a couple of words from his daze on the floor, but most of the chuckles, guffaws and bellows passed over his head. After a moment he felt a hand in his, helping him up and then a firm slap on his back as sailors and fishermen from all over the room came up and congratulated him. Well done, they seemed to be saying, you were very funny. Soon he was sat back down at the reset table with a dozen drinks in front of him. So this, he thought to himself, was how one went about making friends.
Rodney sat happily on the lap of the ruffian who had initiated the whole conversation, being fed bits of mashed up fruit by the pirate who had exchanged his hook for a little spoon. It seemed, as Crepuscular peered closer, to be a sort of Swiss Army Prosthetic and he thought, idly, how useful it would have been to have had something like that out on the plains of Mongolia, what with all those horses and all those little stones.
Since Crepuscular didn’t speak any Spanish, as such, and since no one in this small Ecuadorean fishing town spoke any English, parts of the conversation that evening were long, slow and full of mistakes. It was one of those mistakes that led to Crepuscular finding himself made Mayor of the town and ushered up, as dawn was rising, to a large house on the hill overlooking the harbour. Here he slept off the worst hangover of his life and when he woke a day later found that there were people waiting to have a committee meeting.
*
The duties as Mayor weren’t hugely onerous, the people were friendly and the mandated term of office was only three years, so he decided to stick at it. After that, when Rodney was old enough to be of some real help on a trek, they could set off again. It seemed to make some sort of sense, and, besides, he might
actually be able to do some good while he was here, and that’d be a fine thing.
He appointed the hooked pirate who had started it all to be his deputy Mayor and when they had their first meeting after he’d finally shaken off the effects of the virulent fish spirit he’d drunk he noticed something unexpected. The fellow, in daylight, had a decidedly feminine air about him. And a decidedly feminine shape. And, come to think of it, a decidedly feminine voice. There was, of course, he soon learnt, a good reason for this, which was simply that the pirate was a woman.
Over the months that followed they worked closely together on plans for improving the town. They began the building of a reservoir up in the hills to provide clean, running water; they expanded the local school syllabus to include things other than fish, with Crepuscular even leading a few classes a week himself (having quickly managed to pick up the basics of Spanish); and they instituted a policy of casual days on board all ships operating out of the harbour on Fridays, as both a way of injecting a little fun into the hard lives of poor fishermen and also of raising some funds to cover their other civic projects.
As Crepuscular worked closer with Teresa-Maria (the pirate) on their plans they would often find themselves scribbling away late into the night, or into the early morning, and their arms would brush as they reached for this or that document or pencil or paperweight and soon they found that they’d catch each other’s eye across the fug and babble of council meetings and share a little smile in amongst the chaos and sometimes, even when there was nothing to do officially, when projects were put to bed for the time being and complaints had been dealt with and disputes quenched, they’d meet up for a picnic or a cup of tea anyway. In short, they fell in love. They were married around Christmas 1890 and in the autumn of 1891 Simone’s second son, Simon, was born. And in 1893 when his term as Mayor came to an end he took his family and began to wander eastwards, toward the Andes. With his knowledge of mountaineering and survival skills they made good time and in just a few months found themselves descending into the Amazonian rainforest.
In his office Crepuscular had found an atlas and he’d memorised it as best as he could and so, for the first time in his life, he had an idea of where he was going. He knew which way England lay and how he could get there, and although it involved another long ocean voyage he was determined (since it had been three years or more since he’d been to sea and he’d forgotten just exactly how horrendous he found such experiences) to keep true to his original goal of going home.
Teresa-Maria had always hated her life in that miserable little fishing town, which had been, in part, why she’d become a pirate. Crepuscular had persuaded her to go straight (which included an end to robbery and murder on the high seas, not swearing in front of the children and letting her parrot go free) and much to her surprise she had enjoyed both her job in the council offices and her married life with Simone, and so she was more than happy to head out on an adventure leaving everything and everyone she had grown up with behind. While he was heading back to his childhood, she was running away, and they were both overjoyed.
She’d been less overjoyed, however, when he’d turned down her original plan which had been to commandeer a ship, kill its captain and sail to England via various buried caches of treasure she claimed to know about. Crepuscular wasn’t the sort of man to put his foot down very often, but occasionally, when he felt particularly strongly about something, as he did in this instance, he could be quite persuasive and Teresa-Maria, grudgingly, but not despondently (after all, she might be able to persuade him to change his mind, she thought, once they reached the Atlantic), gave in.
And so it was they plunged into the noisy, dark heart of the rainforest: a man, a woman, a child and a baby. Prepared for absolutely anything, except, naturally, for what actually happened.
Chapter 14
Aunts & Postcards
Epitome Quirkstandard turned his Aunt’s postcard over in his hands.
He’d sat back down at the desk he’d been studying at all morning, but now he leant back in his chair with a less serious look on his face.
He loved hearing from his Aunt and wondered which exotic and exciting part of the world she had written to him from this time. She was exactly the sort of woman who was never still, always rushing off here and there, but wherever she ended up and whatever she did when she got there, she always thought of him, even now when he was all grown up and she had discharged her responsibilities toward him. He knew of chaps at the Club who were terrified of their Aunts (he also knew some chaps who were terrified of his, but that was quite a different story), who hid whenever they came calling and dreaded the tasks they were likely to be landed with by the dour sister of one or other, or in some cases both, of their parents. He shook his head with sadness and wonder at this, since his own Aunt had never been anything other than jolly special to him.
He loved getting post from her, though he preferred a letter to a postcard, because then he got the thrill of opening it, as if it were really a present. With a letter you never knew, he thought, what you were going to find inside, whether it would be sweet or savoury, plain or sparkling; you never knew how long it would take, whether there would be one sheet folded with big writing, or a bundle of sheets with all the words crammed onto them, as if there’d been a sudden late rush. Oh, he loved those letters. He’d hold the envelopes and look at the stamps and try to read the postmark. Sometimes he could tell what country she’d been in by doing so, but sometimes the ink was blurred or the stamps written in a foreign language and all he’d have would be a smudged idea, which would be confirmed or corrected by the contents.
A postcard, on the other hand, didn’t have quite as much mystery. There was less deferred gratification possible. There was the picture and there on the other side were the words and, really, that was it. And the messages she would write on postcards differed to the stories she would tell in letters. Postcards tended to be short and to the point, often with a postscript for the postman and another for the management of Mauve’s. With a postcard Aunt Penelope knew her wider audience and spoke to them all, often quite rudely (so that several postcards had never reached Epitome at all but had instead ended up in court, but fortunately a postcard eaves little room for a return address and so charges proved impossible to press).
This particular postcard wasn’t as exotic as they sometimes were, featuring a pen and ink sketch of Arundel Castle on one side and short message on the other which read: E. Home for a month. Sun is shining gloriously. Walkies? P.P.
P.P. was Penelope Penultimate, his Aunt. E. was Epitome Quirkstandard, him. The rest of the message he understood just as quickly. She was home, but only for a month. She considered the weather to be very pleasant at the moment and was inviting him and Nigel Spiggot down to stay.
Immediately his heart beat quicker. He loved going down to the country to visit her. She had a small cottage, not one of these grand country houses where you had to dress for dinner and it took half an hour to walk from your bedroom to the dining room (if you could find it amongst all the doors), and so it made a very smart change. There was little ceremony at Aunt Penelope’s house and, in fact, very little to do at all. They’d go for walks along the river and they’d read books in the garden and they’d drink tea and eat sandwiches and then they’d go for another stroll and he’d tell her about what had been happening in London, as far as he knew such things, and chat about what some of the fellows were getting up to at the Club and she’d swear and say rude things about them all and then they’d go off to their respective beds and get up the next day, stretch out in the sunshine, have some breakfast and do it all over again.
Aunt Penelope didn’t approve of his friends. Not to say that she resented him having them, after all they were the boys he’d grown up with at school and who were his peers and always would be, but she didn’t believe they added much in the way of value to the world. To be utterly truthful, she didn’t think that Epitome added very much in the way of value to the wo
rld either, but she had a soft spot for him all the same. She knew, at least, that he wasn’t actively making the world a worse place and that was something. She’d always steered him away from entering into politics or business and was quite happy for him to be a gentleman of leisure. The only friend of his that she liked was Nigel Spiggot who she believed needed the fresh air of the countryside from time to time. To have a run around a London park, she said, was all well and good as far as it went, but it didn’t really go very far did it? The air was much cleaner down in Sussex, as was the river, and Spiggot vociferously agreed, and always showed as much by leaping into the water at the first opportunity he had and dragging out the biggest stick and chasing rabbits and collapsing exhausted long before bedtime.
Reading the message Epitome thought of how a jolly outing to the countryside might be just the thing to brighten his weekend, but then he suddenly remembered, with a thump, where he was, in the middle of all these brilliant pamphlets, surrounded by all this learning, all this reading. He felt torn in two. He wanted to go to the country and laze in the sunshine and watch Spiggot splash after ducks in the river, and, confusingly, at the same time, he wanted to stay here in the shop and read as much and learn as much and know as much as he possibly could. He’d never found himself on the prongs of two such disparate paths before and wondered how it might be possible to reconcile them.
Simone Crepuscular stepped out of the backroom.
‘Was that the door I heard, Mr Q.?’
‘Yes. It was for me. A postcard.’
‘Oh, that’s good. Can I have a look?’
The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard Page 10