by David Deans
It was a risk; I had nothing to lose. I proposed Bob a deal. Bob likes doing deals, and so long as I could make it sound like a good one, it might stand a chance. The way things were going at the moment I might not actually see Matilda ever again. The deal, my love for Matilda, Forward with English! both now hinged on how well I could sell this deal: it was that or the bullet. Well, I told him, it appears that for one reason or another we both lay claim to the same role, i.e., the much sought-after role of Bob T. Hash III. By the way, she’s changed to nut roasts these days. I suggested that execution seemed a tad dramatic as a solution. Perhaps we might come to some better, some more reasonable arrangement? It is not a crime to be half a twin. Nor, as far as I know, is it a crime to find gainful employment on the fifth floor of the Acme International Institute of Languages, and to rise through the ranks like a shining white rein-taker. It is a free country, and Remington Drive has a lot to commend it. The deal is that instead of having just one fulltime Mr. Hash, we can have two part-time Mr. Hashes! We can share out duties—at the office, in the coffee shop, at home on weekends. Between us we can effectively halve the workload. “I’m sure Miss Scarlett will be more than happy to sort out some sort of rota, or schedule, for us,” I suggested. “Just think of the opportunities to nip off for that extra round of golf.” And, in the small matter of which version of Forward with English! would get sent to the printers—well, maybe we could come to some kind of gentleman’s agreement? I hinted, nudging the air with a sideways jab of an elbow, that if I took care of his wife, he would be left free to elope at will with Miss Scarlett….
“What on earth do you mean by elopement? What in the devil’s name are you talking about?” he interrupted, with uncharacteristic vehemence. “I have been away on an extended business trip and Miss Scarlett has been injured in a skiing accident.”
And it was true, dear student, Bob had only been away on a business trip, and Miss Scarlett had only been injured on a ski trip. When from the conference foyer Bob had called in to the office, I had been the one to answer the phone, and when doing so I had resorted to my parrot’s imitatory powers to assure him, in the voice of a reliable colleague, that the office was running like clockwork: “Sure,” I said. “So quiet here in the office, you could hear a pin drop, or a brick of asbestos, so you might as well stay on to take advantage of that special offer on at the spa facilities after all….” And when Miss Scarlett, lying in her hospital bed with her leg set in plaster, had called with the sad news of her thigh, I had reassured her—in the voice of Bob himself—that the backlog was well under control: “No need to rush back here, Miss Scarlett. Get thee well soon” (see Thee vs. Thou). In reality, Bob had been away on an extended business trip and from it had now inevitably returned as if he’d been attached by a very long elastic band that had sort of twanged him back in when the elastic contracted.
I’m going to speculate a bit here on how things might have gone on Bob’s return from his business trip. From a short, quite puzzling conversation with his wife that morning as he took off his coat in the hall, Bob rapidly gleaned two salient and terrible facts: that his wife was having an affair, and that the person she was having it with was his identikit double. Fearing instinctively for his precious Forward with English! he had put on his coat again and with the armament of his choice rushed to the office to check on his out tray. His premonition in the line at the airport regarding his parrot was alas coming true. And, regarding Miss Scarlett, he must have learned about the skiing injury from her hospital postcard lying on the desk. My much better version of Forward with English! (eighth edition) that he held now on his desk was the one missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle he’d needed to tie up the picture. (Had my interview with Miss Ratcliffe, had my phone call with the printer, had that article in the Belmont Gazette, had Miss Scarlett’s voice mail itself, only been figments of my imagination? Pah!)
No wonder my suggestion went down like a down-moving thing. Despite the prospect of all that extra golf my offer of compromise was rejected. Greedy Bob would give up neither Miss Scarlett nor his Forward with English! without a fight to the death.
How easily—if Bob’s version of events were true, how easily might I then have been subtracted from the scene and nobody been one whit the wiser. From an evolutionary or biodiversical point of view I was merely a parrot. Parrots fly through windows and go live in the local parks. With what impunity I—the nonexistent, the deceased parrot, the carbon copy, my Gordon Jackson smartly brogued Boswellian foot still tap tap tapping up on the running board of the little coach—could be liquidated and forgotten.
At this point a puppeteer’s invisible wire and harness arrangement made me edge backward, dragging my Hush Puppies along the carpet, like there were a magnet in my back. The word in English is “stagger.” Presently, one puppet string pulled on my jaw and made me say, “No, Bob”—fairly disingenuously—“I don’t think I need that flip chart after all. Come to think of it, we’ll just use the overhead projector.”
“Not so fast, my dear Mr. Hash”—sibilating on the last word like a thespian priest. “We are not quite finished yet. We are forgetting about our course book. By the way, the overhead projector is in room 508. Miss Slowcomb was using it for her talk on motivational strategies this morning.”
Here is the scene where the mad scientist, thwarted at the last moment from blowing up the world, in turn unmasks and disarms his thwartee—just in time to see his original plan through: so sit back and relax. There could well be a car chase or an underground lair with bleeping computers and a white-tailed shark in a pool. Well, in any case, from the faded leather battered briefcase with a bashed-out clasp that had been lurking at his feet, Bob took out—no, not the famous pre-Columbian copy of the primer thought lost to the mists of time but his own whacked-out version, a photocopy that he must have kept with him for posterity’s sake and which thus, like a phoenix, had survived the barbecue embers. This he laid with a small thud beside the sheaf already lying there on the desktop. Student, Rex, please now take note: two identical sheaves of paper side by side—identical twins ruling their fate.
“I think the printer has been waiting for this—and should be rewarded for his patience,” announced Bob (tapping one or the other of the sheaves, forgetting, already, which one was which).
“My Chèr Herr Caro Signor Señor Pan, my dear Mr. Hash,” Bob continued, getting up at last from the desk, “take a seat. Your desk”—giving the chair a triumphant shock-absorbed swivel—“is now free!”
“We shall have you commit suicide, said he with a flourishing bow. This will boost sales of our latter-day primer! ‘Sympathy sales’ is the technical term. No, you cannot phone the suicide hotline just now. They’ll be busy. Please listen carefully. I’m going to have two households to run now, you understand. Who knows, maybe some more mouths to feed in the future. An impostor Mr. Hash will have shot himself in his office. Oh, I don’t know why. Tragic sales figures, personal problems, looking like Bob T. Hash does; the reason’s not important. The important thing is our little primer, my little primer, will be safe. It will sell like hotcakes, Mr. Hash, rest assured. Our nice bland Forward with English!
“Such a pity we’re not going to have time for that round of golf,” he said, checking me with a flick of the barrel. “Unless, that is,” he taunted, “your clubs make it here in time from their round-the-world tour…”
Bob’s own fatal, landmarking mistake was his insane attempt to dispense with my Forward with English! prior to taking care of his enemy and rival—what some might call an example of hubris. I was keeping a parrot’s eye on those sheaves, to make sure there were no sleights of hand. I saw him pick up the wrong sheaf. Instead of my nice bowdlerized Forward with English! he had picked up the only surviving copy of his own bogus version. Being a humane kind of plot merchant, Bob wanted me to exit this world with the indelible understanding that his was the version of Forward with English! that would triumph and that my attempt to save the course book had failed. �
��No need to worry, you also-ran,” he said, tapping the (mistaken) manuscript. “I’ll make sure the right version reaches the printers. Just leave that up to me.” I almost felt sorry for the poor chap.
With that, already in piedi, Bob started backing away from me (also in piedi), reversing toward the back window, the wrong sheaf of paper in his free left hand, the gun in the other, the right, trained on the author of this sentence—the idea being to kill the sheaf first by ditching it out of the window. Only then to kill me…No, Bob, I’m afraid the shredder’s still out of order.
What Bob wasn’t aware of, however, apart from the fact he wasn’t holding the version of Forward with English! that he thought he was holding, was that during his absence (Acapulco/extended business conference?) the office windows had undergone something of a Verwandlung themselves. A team of glaziers had been called in to replace the old-style windows, grown rusty and stiff with age (quite possibly not replaced since the era of Mr. Cotton). The old windows, which had swiveled on a horizontal axis, had been replaced with a new kind of window, which swiveled on a vertical axis instead. So, when Bob came to give the window the proverbial good old shove (as he would have done with the old stiff framed ones), there was a sudden, unexpected give and a consequent rather dramatic loss of footing….
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Active vs. Passive
(proficiency-level students only)
Examples:
• A banana skin was placed near the window. (passive)
• The clitoris was discovered by Renaldus Columbus in 1559. (passive; remote past)
• The course book has been corrected and is now safe for consumption. (passive)
• He slipped and fell out the window. (active)
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The impression of Bob that will stick most in my mind is much like the one from the Everyday Accidents and Domestic Mishaps section in the picture book, where he slips on an icy sidewalk on the way to the post office—necktie over his shoulder astream in the updraft, his startled eyeglasses jumping off the bridge of his nose, his legs backpedaling in midair—except in the current case he’s a lot higher up from those bone-smashing flagstones. And, during that short slapstick flight before he crumpled like a pack of cards, you can imagine passing through Bob’s mind a number of vignetted scenes from his picture book past, the way ex-drownees say a drowner’s life will pass before him as he’s drowning, or as she is—in a whirling dervish of Scheherazadian images: the still life of a breakfast table (an apple gleaming in sunlight; a Vermeerian milk jug; the window of clear dear blue sky reflected in the convexity of his cereal spoon); buying a cranberry-and-bronze necktie at the department store; sharing the children’s trampoline on the weekend with three-feet diameter, tumbling terpsichorean clock faces; and inevitably packing his business-trip suitcase. like a Sideshow Bob teetering at the top of Wittgenstein’s ladder, doffing his trilby in a final farewell to the milliner’s wife…Breath of fresh air will do you the world of good, Bob.
Still in shock, and without further descriptive ado (it hadn’t helped that there was a banana skin on the floor under the window either) I dashed across to the window to see how I might be of assistance—a bit optimistic, that, I suppose—half dreading the possibility he’d be twitching like a botched slaughtered pig or a crash-test dummy phantom limb in the oblivion below.
Luckily, Bob had not fallen on the concrete flagstones at all. Yet, equally fatally, he had fallen like a sack of Irish potatoes (now, there’s a “moving-down thing” if we need one again) clean into one of the big recycle drums, whose lid, by the force of impact, had conveniently flipped shut behind him. By virtue of his weight he had reached the ground first. But the white sheets of foolscap on which the one extant copy of his own babbling compositions was in print were still for the most part making their descent, seesawing down through the air, like at the ticker tape parades for a returning cavalcade of astronauts. All would get turned into mush.
Under pressure, in moments of crisis, as cool as a cucumber, I can be as brisk as a honky-tonk piano. Assured by the total quietness coming from the bin that Bob was 100 percent dead, deceased, ex, etc., like that parrot in Monty Python, I went back to the desk where my own bowdlerized version lay. (This is the bit near the end of the episode of Commissioner Rex where, clutched between his canines, paws up on the desk, the eponymous tail-wagging Rex would bring me the correct and rescued version of Forward with English!) With my trusty Parker, I made the written adjustments (a last crowning nip and tuck) that would keep course book Bob installed at that desk: the last little amendment that I’d come to the office to make. I put the pages inside the manila envelope, checked the address, and settled it for posting in my out tray with Zen-like precision.
Next thing (“Oops, a bit drafty there. Would you mind if I closed the window?”), I was striding through the maze of eerie partitions and abandoned desks in the direction of the lift shafts. There was not a great deal of time to make a big list of things I’d noticed along the way to tell you about, but I did at least have time for two: a phone with tinsel wrapped round it, which rang three times and then fell silent; and a photocopier that someone had forgotten to switch off—a tiny light flashing to show a helpless sheet of paper had been mangled in its rollers. Well did I know that flashing pinpoint of light.
At the lifts, I encountered an ill-paid, unmotivated cleaning lady with again a Duane Hanson look of bedraggled exhaustion, wringing out a string-wig floor mop that reeked of disinfectant. The cleaner can’t have recognized me, otherwise she’d have gone Nighty night, Mr. Hash. Have a good weekend. You just put your feet up now. You deserve it, Mr. Hash! On the spur of the moment, and in a spirit of magnanimous generosity, I offered the cleaning lady a (pre-payable) course of discounted language instruction as dispensed by upstanding pedagogue, etc.—or at least that’s what I tried to offer her. Not speaking English, she did not understand me and there was hardly time for me to go into all the ins and outs of my offer very slowly. And, in any case, I had just used up my remaining resource of mental patience by observing the bleeping photocopier and that symbiotic tinsel phone.
It didn’t really matter though. With the new unblemished eighth edition of Forward with English! at last ready for the printer, the last threat to its safe expedition now removed, my career as troubleshooter had effectively come abruptly to a halt. I did not have to give the lady lessons to keep the wolf from the door. From an editorial point of view, my services as a supply Bob were no longer required either. If I so wished, I could simply drive out of picture book Belmont and shack up with Matilda in a hippie camper somewhere in the Nevada desert—secure in the knowledge that Forward with English! was safe and out in the Belmont Barnes and Noble.
But apart from any invaluable involvement in the course book’s composition, being Bob T. Hash III and thus Matilda’s good husband was a role I’d indeed grown to like. “Yes,” I said, in my imitation screechy parrot voice when I was back inside the lift and no one could hear me (except for that little microphone in the corner), “I quite like being Lord Macbeth, Bob, I dare say”—in a bluegrass accent out of the blue. Yes. There was more to life than power-correcting a scrambled-up language course after all!
My labors on the course book were now over. My humbler day’s duties in the office were now done. It was time to return to Remington Drive and the Friday night nut roast.
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Brush Up On: Places to Wave From
Examples: at the quayside, on the railway station platform, at the departure lounge of Belmont International Airport.
—Matilda was waving at Bob from the veranda.
—Bob waved back from the car.
Now read the dialogue and answer the following question:
Which Bob T. Hash III waved back from the car as it cruised up Remington Drive?
Discuss in class.
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To round this all up then, I think we’d agree on one thing at least. We’d agree that, generally speaking, I have put my metamor
phosis to the good. Other parrots finding themselves turned into a Bob T. Hash III might have had a right old time stirring things up: vertiginous cribbings, voice hoaxes left, right, and center—the pick of the stenographer pool…(Hey, hang on a minute, wasn’t there something back there about parrots being monogamous?)…not to mention the additional fun and games they too—like Bob—might have had with the new eighth edition of Forward with English!
“Thanks, Bob, we appreciate the work you did on the new edition of Forward with English!—it’s awesome!” But by no one are my efforts going to be more appreciated, more welcome than by Matilda, my wife.
Imbued, therefore, with a great sense of Zen-like equanimity (re: the manila envelope, for example) regarding the present and with optimistic Olympian-like visions for the future, I steered the Plymouth Fury homeward, top down, with warm evening air once more swishing gracefully through my hair like an advertisement for the banishment of dandruff. And now that the business with the dodgy course stuff was done with, I knew the one thing left to do was to tell Matilda what had become of her parrot. With Bob dead and the primer back in the weekend out tray I knew also that the time to tell her was now at last come.
I was thinking about all this, how strange and marvelous a story it all was when, halfway along Remington Drive in my electric milk cart, I caught sight of Matilda. She was outside the house waving at me from the veranda.
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Advanced Certificate
further possible ways by which you might have infiltrated the picture book world of the course book
a) You are an incorrigible African gray parrot with a crimson-tipped tail. Through a casual discovery, the main protagonist of the language course book discovers he is able to “Jekyll-and-Hyde” himself into your doppelgänger parrot, and as such has been trying to dislodge you from your perch—with the intention of usurping your position as domestic pet in the picture book protagonist’s house, thus mascot to the primer. One of the twin parrots now appears to lie dead at the base of the bird stand. The aim here is to prove that you, as opposed to the dead body underneath the bird stand, are the real and original Comenius, favorite son of Belmont.