Behindlings (24 page)

She read the clue out loud, expressionlessly…

‘
Rabbit-duck… Duck-rabbit… Ludwig… Ludwag… Catch me out, honey… And I’ll catch you at it.
’

She looked up, ‘So tell me everything you know.’

The boy cackled through his mouthful of food, ‘You really think I’m
that
stupid?’

‘Not at all.’

Jo was silent.

The boy finished chewing. He took the clue back and pointed to it.

‘Everybody says,’ he told her, lowering his voice, swallowing, glancing over his shoulder, ‘that it’s all about cricket…’

‘That much I realised,’ Jo intervened.

Patty didn’t appreciate her intervention. He clamped his mouth shut like a snapping turtle and stared up at the ceiling.

‘I was…’ Jo paused, trying to make things better (why this ridiculous urge to ingratiate herself with the boy? Why should his good opinion matter a damn to her?), ‘I was brought up in a family of three brothers, which means I’m pretty good at most games involving either a bat or a racquet…’

‘Okay, so the way
I’m
seeing it,’ the boy continued, ignoring her pointedly, ‘is that a Rabbit is when the batter doesn’t score any points…’

‘Nope,’ she couldn’t stop herself, ‘that’s a Duck. A Duck is when a batsman doesn’t score any runs. In cricket they don’t call them points, they call them runs.’

The boy winced, enraged at being corrected in a sports-related matter by any creature of –however approximate –feminine gender, but then he rallied, ‘Okay… so a Rabbit is what they call you when you’re rubbish at cricket, and a Duck…’

‘No,’ Jo shifted in her chair, ‘well, yes,
kind of.
Rabbit is a term of abuse. Someone might say, for example, that so and so
isn’t a complete Rabbit –
which means, in effect, that they aren’t completely useless.’

The boy frowned, ‘So a Rabbit
isn’t
completely useless?’

‘No. No, a Rabbit
is
useless. I was just…’

Jo fell silent. The boy was scowling, furiously.

‘In fact you were right,’ she tried to bolster him, ‘because a Duck
is
nothing and a Rabbit
is
useless. And that’s all pretty much in keeping, thematically…’ (Oh God. Now she’d really gone and lost him.) ‘I mean it fits in. With the other five. With the general
tone
of the other five clues. Kind of downbeat, and very… very evasive… uh… In actual fact I was wondering…’

She struggled to yank herself out of the hole she’d just landed in. ‘I was actually thinking about maybe looking at some kind of map of the night sky. I wasn’t sure whether there might be a constellation of stars named after either of these two creatures. I’m sure there could be a hare up there or something. Or a goose… Well maybe not a goose, but a fowl of some kind…’

While Jo rambled on, Patty eyed her, sardonically, as if it had only just dawned on him that she was clean out of her tree.

‘My surname is Bean,’ she continued, struggling to fill the silence between them, and worsening matters, considerably, ‘which is a breed of goose. An ancient breed. Brown feathered, with a bright orange bill and feet. Black tipped –the bill. Doesn’t come to Britain very often. Its habitat is much more…’ she paused, ‘well…
Central
European.’

The boy continued to scowl at Jo (it was an expression he patently had a long-term investment in), and only when he was absolutely certain that she’d been suitably diminished by his potent disapprobation, did he turn and scowl –methodically –into his bowl of melting dairy dessert, instead. He took a few sarcastic mouthfuls, chewed bitterly, swallowed scornfully, but after a minute or so –and against all his worse inclinations –the infallible Brown Derby seemed to sweeten him.

‘Point is,’ he said, resting his spoon on the table, ‘the clue isn’t about cricket at all, really. Hooch says it’s about the other bloke. It’s about that Ludwig fella.’

The boy pronounced the name with a soft w.

‘Beethoven?’ Jo jumped in, ‘He was a Lud…’ she took care to soften her own w accordingly, ‘he was a Ludwig, wasn’t he?’

‘Yep. But that’s just a cover,’ Patty tapped the side of his nose, ‘and we know better.’

‘Do we?’

‘Hooch says it’s much more likely to be about philosophy.’

He stared at Jo intently. ‘Philosophy,’ he confided, ‘is like history but without any dates. And like geography but without any places.’

‘That’s very…’ Jo’s eyes were dancing, ‘that’s very profound, Patty.’

Patty shrugged, disdainfully, ‘It’s only what Shoes told me. Here…’ He rifled through his papers again, ‘I grabbed this from Hooch ages ago when he wasn’t looking.’

‘You stole this from Hooch?’

The boy nodded, unperturbedly, and showed her a scruffy drawing etched in black biro –just an outline.

Jo picked it up. ‘What is it?’

‘Guess.’

Jo stared at it. ‘I suppose it looks a little like…’ she paused, ‘well, a rabbit.’

‘
Ha.
’

The boy was delighted. ‘What?’

‘Nothing. Turn it up the other way.’

‘How?’

The boy showed her.

‘
Now
what does it look like?’

‘Uh…’ Jo rubbed one of her eyes and squinted. ‘A goat. It looks like a goat without legs. Or a llama.’

‘Give
over.
’

Jo stared harder.

‘Then maybe a d…’

‘
Duck,
’ the boy bellowed. ‘
Yes.
A duck.’

Jo had been intending to say donkey (it was a terrible drawing), but she bit the ass back on her tongue and simply nodded, smiling.

Patty dropped down in his seat, kicked out his legs, yanked up his shirt and drummed on his tight stomach.

‘So there you go.’

His grin was all Cheshire.

‘Do I?’ Jo was perplexed.

‘Rabbit-duck, duck-rabbit, you stupid idiot. It’s philosophy. There’s more on the back. Turn it. Take a look.’

Jo flipped it over. There she read:

From Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue Book. The duck/rabbit is Wittgenstein’s answer to the Problem of Universals (Plato) ie Does something have an intrinsic essence? W. says no. He says one thing can be two things at once, and that this disproves the fundamental Platonic notion of ‘ideals’.

‘Good God.’ Jo was impressed.

‘Clever, huh?’

Patty was delighted by the intensity of Josephine’s reaction.

‘Yes. I mean I… And you say you got this from
Hooch?
’

He pulled himself straight again, covered his belly and leaned forward, conspiratorially, ‘He’s not as dumb as he seems, that one.’ He touched the side of his nose and winked. But before she could push him further on the matter he burped then said, ‘So go on and explain it.’

‘
Uh…
Jo frowned. ‘Well it’s… it’s pretty
complicated,
Patty.’

Patty harrumphed as she flipped the paper over and looked at the illustration again, turning it first one way, then the other. ‘So does…’ she finally murmured, ‘does Hooch know you stole this from him?’

‘Dunno,’ Patty was supremely indifferent to Hooch’s feelings, ‘what’s it all about, then?’

Jo frowned. ‘I’m not…’ she re-read the information on the back, one last time, ‘in all honesty, Patty, I don’t really know. But in terms of the general
thrust
of the thing,’ she took another sip of her tea, ‘what I’m actually feeling here is more… it’s much more of an… an
atmosphere
than anything.’

She glanced over at him. Patty’s expression was uncomprehending. He was fast losing patience. ‘I don’t give a shit about atmospheres,’ he growled, ‘I only want to know its
meaning.
’ He split his syllables, menacingly.

‘But that
is
what it means, because…’ Jo battled to explain it, ‘because, well, in effect, what Wesley’s saying here is that the great philosopher –
uh…
Ludwig Witt… Wittgen…’ she struggled, briefly, with her pronunciation, ‘Wittgenstein was actually a bit of a wag –see? Ludwig-Ludwag –and a wag means a joker. Now that’s relevant to Wesley because he’s a famous practical joker himself –or that’s how people see him –but he’s sort of saying…’ she peered up at the ceiling to try and gather her thoughts together, ‘he’s kind of implying that in exactly the same way that a great thinker can also be a great joker, a great joker can also be a great thinker… He’s sort of poking fun at himself but also kind of defending his…
uh…
’ Jo chuckled to herself, quietly, ‘He’s such an unrepentant fat-head. You just have to… I mean you just have to stand back and
admire
it, really.’

She leaned over, liberated the clue from Patty again and quickly re-read it.

‘The way I see it,’ she told him, ‘this whole Rabbit-Duck Duck-Rabbit thing actually has a
double
meaning. It refers to
both
cricket
and
philosophy, because…’

‘But how?’ Patty butted in. ‘
How
can something mean two things at once?’

The boy shoved his Brown Derby to one side, grabbed hold of the straw from his drink and twisted it, violently, around his middle finger. Splashes of cola arced through the air. Some hit the window –his shirt –the back of his chair.

Jo didn’t notice, though. She was seduced by the clue, caught up, completely, in its simple complexity.

‘But
how?
’ Patty reiterated, even more loudly.

‘Well that’s…’ Jo shrugged her shoulders, ‘that’s sort of the whole point, Patty,’ she spoke distractedly, ‘that’s precisely what grown-up people do when they’re being especially… well, especially grown-up.’

Patty was nonplussed. He still wasn’t getting it. He leaned across the table, snatched back Clue Five and the
duck-rabbit,
then slapped them down, hard, onto the plastic table-top. The china and the cutlery rattled rather ominously. A member of staff looked up from the counter.

‘But what I
need
you to do…’ he told her, the tops of his
cheekbones jerking furiously, ‘is to tell me the
answer.
To
explain
it all to me so that I can get to… so I can… so I can understand the
riddle
part of it, see?’

Jo was un-fazed by Patty’s raging. She took another sip of her tea (it was cooling down. It was lukewarm now) scratched her neat nose and then peered around the room, calmly. ‘Give me a pen,’ she instructed him, ‘and a spare piece of paper.’

Patty took a sip of his own drink (he wouldn’t jump to her command. He was master of his own destiny), hiccuped loudly (to indicate the strength of his passing contempt), then leaned back and pulled a biro out of his pocket and something to write upon –a small, white sheet, which he unfolded, flipped over (little fingers delicately raised, his eyes holding hers, confidently, his mouth half-smiling –like some kind of amateur magician).

Jo snatched the paper (ignoring all his cocky ostentation. Bloody
hell
this child was heavy-going), laid it flat, smoothed it flatter still, grabbed the biro and carefully wrote:
Clue Five
at the top of the page, underlined it, then neatly continued, in her small, well-formed hand:

1)
Wesley thinks that the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was a bit of a joker. Wag means joke.

She glanced up, ‘Okay?’

The boy rolled his eyes.

Next she wrote:

2)
Ludwig invented the duck/rabbit idea as a way of saying that one thing can also be something else at the same time.

For example…

Josephine thought hard for a minute,

… a
friend can also be an enemy. A crate is a crate, but if you turned it up the other way it could also be a chair (if you sat on it), or a table, even, if you rested a cup of tea on it…

She looked up, ‘Alright?’

The boy shrugged. He was unfocussed.

‘It’s pretty complicated,’ she attempted to clarify things, ‘but it’s only a question of applying a little bit of… well… lateral…’ She re-thought her vocabulary, ‘
practical
thinking.’

Next she wrote:

3) By using the words ‘duck’, ‘rabbit’ and ‘catch me out’, Wesley is saying that the Loiter is a kind of game –like cricket –but he is also indicating…

Jo crossed out this word.

… SAYING that whatever it is that we are all looking for –the prize –isn’t actually WHAT IT SEEMS.
That’s the important part.

The last four words Jo underlined three times. On the third underlining she broke through the paper, but then tidied up the small hole she’d created, as best she could, with her index finger. ‘Okay?’

Patty was still staring at her, blankly, his feet banging out a tap-dance under the table. Jo sucked on her tongue (this boy was revoltingly hyper-something. He was crying out for a handful of Ritalin), and then continued writing:

4) In this clue, as in many of the others, Wesley employs…

She crossed out ‘employs’.

… USES
a word that makes the reader think of sweetness. Or confectionery. In this case, ‘honey’. He uses it sarcastically. In Clue One, for example, he uses the word ‘sucker’ –as in lolly –but remember: a sucker is also a word that refers to someone being taken for a fool. Is Wesley warning us of something here?

DOES WESLEY THINK WE ARE ALL…