Dandruff Hits The Turtleneck Read online

  Chapter Thirteen

  Think

  Lionel, do you find me .......... interesting?

  Amanda, you intrigue me more than the tactical field changes relating to afternoon point-duty undertaken when directing the Amoeba Society’s annual charabanc trip to Weston Super Mare.

  Lionel, do I fill your dreams at night?

  Amanda, with the exception of every third Tuesday in the month, when I dream of a bloater in a Boston Crab with my ex-sister-in-law, you fill my nocturnal adventures.

  But Lionel, is my sensitivity one that tempts you?

  Amanda, even more than the dichotomy of a cheese grater found in the herb garden of a well-known perch wrangler.

  Lionel, how do you contain yourself when I dress alluringly?

  Dear Amanda. I concentrate totally on the summer timetables of the Bingley and West Yorkshire light railway, in conjunction with the total number of holes in a Peek Freen bourbon.

  Oh Lionel, would you go beyond the limits of the law for me?

  Amanda, not only would I shave totally any Welsh window dresser that you care to name, but happily display the results on Albanian television. Furthermore, the battalions of anchovies dozing in the delicatessen of Mole’s bakery shall no longer sleep soundly in their cabinets!

  Lionel, tell me how I..... inflame you.

  Oh, Amanda, like a knapsack of haggis wrapped in several pairs of Wainwright’s trousers, I crave the fullness of your jam tins. As one who is unable to bicycle upright, you are my velocipede of voluptuousness.

  But Lionel, what about matrimony…?

  Arnold Matson grabbed the remote control and switched off his television set. After the shock of having a conversation in the bar with the apparition of a dead relative last week, Arnold has been trying to keep calm and relax as much as possible, but if what he’s just been watching with one eye closed for the past half-an-hour was supposed to pass as entertainment, he’ll go back to thinking, thank you very much.

  As the anodyne driveling stream of the television had been trickling in one ear and out the other, Arnold, as usual, had been contemplating his miniscule place in this ginormous universe.

  His mind had been mulling over how bees, ants and wasps have an unusual way of deciding who is born male and who female; as you do when you’re sat watching the telly…

  No, the reason these creatures do this is because it gives mothers control over their progeny and leads to unexpected patterns of relatedness. They can make it worthwhile to abandon sex, to slave on behalf of others of one’s own kind, or – now and again – to murder them.

  ‘Control over their progeny,’ muses Arnold, ‘Maybe I’m still tied to my dead mother’s apron strings and she sent the ghost of Aunt Doris in to tell me to find a partner…she wouldn’t dare appear herself and tell me face to face.’

  It is fifteen years to the day since Arnold’s mother, Cecily, was returning home from a shopping trip into town. Laura Richardson, Arnold Matson’s fiancée, was in the passenger seat, having just chosen her wedding gown.

  Neither woman had time to think anything else as they collided with the other car that had spun out of control and cleared the central reservation…