Malcolm James Thomson - TheodoraLand

I happen to be unable to carry a tune with any accuracy. I have, however, been known to sing at the top of my voice when bombing downhill on my board from Säntisblick to the valley floor a kilometre below.

We Are The Champions!

That had been my choice for my once-only just-after-midnight naked run, an excruciating rendition. Hans-Peter Danner was a local admirer of long standing. When we had both been just thirteen or fourteen he had turned my head with his obvious and precocious ‘bad boy’ posturing. With him his moronic but loyal best friend Rico Bley last year I had that night drunk far too much Obstler. Hans-Peter had captured my exploit on his camcorder, leaning over the boot of his Golf GTI convertible while Rico drove the car down the hill ahead of me. I was told afterwards that we had reached a speed of eighty kilometres an hour. A tumble would have had serious consequences. It had been unforgivable recklessness, but also tremendously sexy. YouTube found the graphic documentation of my mesonoxian madness too explicit but it was present on a few other video sites, fortunately with my dire singing replaced with some dismal Swiss synthy-pop. I thought I might ask Bea if she could take the clip down.

That was within her capability, I was certain.

“The firm has a policy which is inspired by Google. Segirtad allows us to devote a percentage of our time to projects of our own. So I thought… hey, maybe there’s stuff I can do with those books… I can call on tools which didn’t exist forty years ago, use analytical models which are still in beta.”

Ursel nodded as if she understood what being in beta meant and then moved on from the alphorn to the Schwyzerorgeli (a Swiss accordion with a diatonic right-handed keyboard and a chromatic left-handed one) and its suitability for the playing of Alpine melodies in the Lydian mode.

Poor Dirk! He might have given up and decided to find a story idea in the nexus between football and musicology.

We had stopped at a tiny café in an even tinier village for refreshing Süßmost, cloudy apple wine. From Aunt Ursel Dirk was learning much about the singing of football supporters, specifically the musical taunts exchanged by fans of teams whose rivalry is more than sporting, an expression of racial or sectarian allegiance.

The sun was high, summer had returned, the shade of a parasol welcome and the view down to Lake Constance and across to the German shore in the far distance worthy of a picture postcard. Both Bea and I decided that our legs called for the application of sun lotion.

“So coming here… to help me… is part of your work?” I asked her.

“In a way. Although it’s a wonderful excuse to see you in your Swiss hideaway… which is something far beyond what I might ever have expected. As for my work… it’s about solving puzzles. You know about 1972?”

“Sure… Deep Purple… you mentioned it earlier. And it was the year when Ursel and Louie Lessinger split up, I guess.”

1972 was also the year when the premises adjacent to Brunnenbach Bücher on Marktplatz in Weinfelden had not housed an establishment as ambitious or sophisticated as Wystübli. The Golden Bowl had been as disreputable as the food served was inedible. It was said to be a front for all manner of illicit activities profitably perpetrated across Canton Thurgau by a Chinese clan which had no lack of gangland enemies.

It had been the conclusion of the Kantonspolizei that one such hostile grouping had not merely opted for overkill but had also demonstrated remarkable stupidity. The hit had devastated not The Golden Bowl but the bookstore next door. Brunnenbach Bücher was well insured and was soon refurbished and modernized. The Golden Bowl was closed down for repeated contravention of hygiene regulations, but many years later.

Life goes on.

“You did some homework before coming here. Weinfelden 1972? As well as shopping for the new two-point-zero look,” I suggested.

Bea frowned at the frayed hem of her hiking shorts.

“Contact lenses again, rather than glasses. Shopping was not involved, Thea. Unlike you I am not well-off, far from it. I just went back to how I was before I took on the goody-goody ‘greige ghost’ persona. That was… seen as needed for my work with one particular… client.”

“Lost a client, have you?”

“The project was productive and then terminated. So I can move on.”

“Feel free to rummage through my wardrobe. There’s some gear from last year which is very two-point-zero… borrow what pleases you. Tell me… being so prim and engaged to Dirk… was that all play acting, too?”

That got me a very no-nonsense look.

“Marriage may not be on the cards. But he’s not available for borrowing this summer. Okay?”

I supposed it was. I didn’t feel much like arguing the point with someone who might have undergone military training in Texas and had so compellingly impersonated the greige ghost, who had gone undercover for a long two years for reasons I dared not even begin to guess.

We had reached the spot where we would picnic after a liberating al fresco dip.

The gravel pit had last been worked in the fifties and early sixties and had been almost completely reclaimed by nature. Only the forlorn, rusty jib of a crane had been left behind to remind of earlier commercial exploitation. The northern lip of the depression was shaded by large oaks and a flat shelf just below was a popular picnic spot. Charred bricks were scattered around begging for re-assembly as an improvised barbecue grill.

At the far end of the excavation there were still traces of where motocross bikes had disturbed the tranquillity of the clearing. But this activity had been more strictly dealt with than the transgressions of shameless unclothed bathers.

Dirk had our attention. After his abject failure to extract from Aunt Ursel any answers to his questions he now sought to cover himself with glory by reciting some highlights of his still young journalistic career. He could not cover himself with much else, nor did he seem much inclined to. Nor would we have wanted him to. He also had a very well formed arse.

He had in truth shown precocious investigative promise by ignoring the maxim which adjured that one was ill-advised to shit on one’s own front doorstep. The door in question was that of the posh boarding school (even more snobbish than my own) where Dirk had been in his final year.

That for sons of Gulf state princelings passing grades could be had for a pecuniary recognizance was to be deplored. Dirk did so with a couple of thousand well chosen words in a malicious and snarky exposé.

Thus it was that (together with sundry carefree sons of Araby) he failed to pass his Matura, the Austrian equivalent of the Abitur, the German certification that secondary schooling had been satisfactorily completed.

There followed Dirk’s first success as a junior reporter, the dismantling of a Munich edifice, that of a very wealthy club owner who was as much part of the Bavarian jet-set Schickeria as his clientele. Sepp was outed as a supplier of recreational drugs on a grand scale, looking after the needs of the rich and infamous. The three-part story was praised by the Polizeidirektion München although thereafter Dirk himself was obliged to find a new dealer.

That the marriage of two socialites served only to mask the fact that both husband and wife also had long-standing and ongoing same-sex liaisons was story the tabloids took up and ran with for weeks. I forget which of the protagonists was a cousin Dirk loathed.

Then there was the well researched investigation of the manicure salons proliferating like rabbits all over Germany. Hot button issues like human trafficking and illegal immigration were touched upon. That story had occasioned Dirk’s first experience of being ‘warned off’. It had cost him the painful extraction of a toe-nail.