It’s a complete mystery that every challenge triggers vital forces within us. I really did feel better – only my left leg was still racked with pain, like an electric current, so I was walking on it stiffly, as if it were a prosthesis. But once I had to move the ladder, I stopped worrying about my Ailments. I forgot about the pain.
I stood on that ladder for about an hour with my arms raised, unsuccessfully struggling to replace the gutter in its semi-circular supports. On top of that, one of them had broken off and must be lying somewhere in the deep snow piled against the house. I could have waited for Dizzy, who was coming by that evening with a new quatrain and the shopping, but Dizzy is fragile, he has small, girlish hands, and to put it plainly, he’s a bit scatter-brained. I say this with all due love and respect for him. It’s not an imperfection on his part. There are more than enough traits and Characteristics in this world for each of us to be richly endowed, I thought to myself.
And from the ladder I viewed the changes that the thaw had brought to the Plateau. Here and there, especially on the southern and eastern slopes, dark patches had appeared – there the winter was withdrawing its army, but it was still holding out on the field boundaries and below the forest. The entire Pass was white. Why is ploughed land warmer than grassland? Why does the snow melt faster in the forest? Why do rings appear in the snow around tree trunks? Are trees warm?
I put these questions to Oddball, whom I had gone to ask for help with the Writer’s gutter. He gave me a baffled look but didn’t answer. As I was waiting for him, I examined his diploma for taking part in the mushroom-picking contest organised each year by the Penny Buns Mushroom Pickers’ Society.
‘I didn’t know you were so good at picking mushrooms,’ I said.
He smiled gloomily without speaking, in his usual way.
He led me into his workshop, which was like a surgery – there were all sorts of drawers and little shelves, with a Tool on each one, a special Tool designed to perform one particular task. He spent ages rummaging in a box until finally he extracted a piece of flattened aluminium wire, twisted into a ring that wasn’t quite closed.
‘Hose clamp,’ he said.
Slowly, word by word, as if battling progressive paralysis of the tongue, he confessed that he hadn’t talked to anyone for several weeks, and evidently his capacity to articulate speech had waned. Finally, hawking as he spoke, he also told me that Big Foot had died choking on a bone. Apparently the autopsy had proved it was an unfortunate accident. He knew this from his son.
I burst into laughter. ‘I thought the Police were capable of more astute discoveries than that. The fact that he’d choked was obvious at first glance…’
‘Nothing’s obvious at first glance,’ he snapped with uncharacteristic vigour, causing the remark to stick in my mind.
‘You know what I think about it, don’t you?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You remember the Deer that were standing outside his house when we got there? They murdered him.’
He stared in silence at the hose clamp in his hand. ‘How?’
‘How, how. I don’t know exactly. Maybe they just gave him a fright while he was so barbarously eating their sister.’
‘Are you trying to say it was collusion? The deer conspired against him?’
For a while I didn’t answer. He seems to need plenty of time to gather his thoughts, and then absorb them. He should eat more salt. As I have said, salt is good for quick thinking. He was also slow putting on his snow boots and sheepskin coat.
As we were walking across the wet snow, I said: ‘And what about the Commandant in the well?’
‘What’s your question? Do you want to know what the cause of his death was? I don’t know. He didn’t say.’
He meant Black Coat, of course.
‘No, no, I know what the cause of his death was.’
‘What was it?’ he asked, as if he couldn’t care less.
So I didn’t answer immediately, but waited until we were crossing the little bridge to the Writer’s house.
‘The same.’
‘You mean he choked on a bone?’
‘Don’t mock. I mean the Deer killed him.’
‘Hold the ladder,’ he said in reply.
He climbed the rungs and tinkered with the gutter, while I expounded my Theory. I had a witness – Dizzy. Dizzy and I knew the most, for we had been first on the scene of the incident and we had seen things the Police couldn’t see later on. When the Police arrived it was dark and wet. The snow was melting before our eyes, erasing the most vital thing of all – those strange prints around the well, lots of them, hundreds, maybe more – small and round, as if a herd of Deer had surrounded a Person.
Oddball listened but didn’t answer, this time because he was holding screws in his mouth. So I carried on, saying that maybe at first the Commandant had been driving along, and then for some reason he had stopped. Maybe a Deer, one of the killers, had feigned illness, pretended to be sick, and he’d been pleased to find some wild game. Then, when he got out of the car, they’d surrounded him and started pushing him towards the well…
‘His head was covered in blood,’ said Oddball from above, once he had driven in the final screw.
‘Yes, because he hit it falling into the well.’
‘There,’ he said after a long silence, and began to descend the ladder.
Indeed, the gutter was firmly fixed on the aluminium hose clamp. The old one was sure to be found a month from now when the snow had melted.
‘Try to keep your theory to yourself. It’s highly improbable and it could do you harm,’ said Oddball, and headed straight for home without looking at me.
It occurred to me that, like everyone else, he took me for a madwoman, and it hurt my feelings.
Tough. As it says in Blake: ‘Opposition is true friendship.’
I was summonsed for another interrogation by a registered letter the Postman brought. As he’d had to scramble up to the Plateau all the way from town, he was annoyed with me and did not fail to show it.
‘People shouldn’t be allowed to live so far away,’ he said at the front door. ‘What do you gain by hiding away from the world like this? It’ll catch up with you anyway.’ There was spiteful satisfaction in his voice. ‘Sign here, please – a letter from the Prosecution Service.’
Oh dear, he hadn’t been among my Little Girls’ best friends. They’d always made it very plain to him that they didn’t like him.
‘Well, what’s it like living in an ivory tower, above the heads of lesser mortals, with your nose in the stars?’ he asked.
That’s what I dislike most of all in people – cold irony. It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. Like an impotent man who can’t experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others. Cold irony is Urizen’s basic weapon. The armaments of impotence. At the same time the ironists always have a world outlook that they proclaim triumphantly, though if one starts badgering and questioning them about the details, it turns out to consist of nothing but trivia and banalities. I would never venture to call someone a stupid Person, and I wasn’t going to condemn the Postman out of hand. I told him to sit down and I made him coffee, the sort Postmen like – strong, unfiltered, in a glass. I also offered him some gingerbread that I baked before Christmas; I was hoping it hadn’t gone stale and he wouldn’t break his teeth on it.