Nicola Barker - The Yips

At Esther’s intervention, the skinny man — who is twenty-five years old and whose name is Toby Whittaker — blushes right down to the roots of his hair.

‘Fuck me, Esther,’ Ransom snaps, exasperated, ‘either join us or butt out, will ya?’

Esther promptly returns to her puzzle book.

The second man — older, heavy-set, blond, charming, expansive, slightly degenerate — chuckles under his breath. ‘Don’t you just love her?’ he murmurs, eyeing Esther, appreciatively.

‘Love her? Oh yeah. Like a dose of the bloody clap,’ Ransom rejoins.

‘S stands for simplicity,’ Toby continues, somewhat haltingly.

‘Well ya certainly know all about that …’ Esther grumbles ( sotto voce , but still clear as a bell over the clatter of cutlery and the ceiling fans). She places down her puzzle book and commences checking the messages on her phone. ‘James Ray just message me,’ she calls over. ‘He want forty-four per cent an’ a first-class flight from Dublin on top …’

‘ Forty-four per cent?! ’ Ransom’s agog. ‘Just for humping my bag around like some glorified friggin’ hod carrier? Has the world finally gone mad?!’

‘You got a better idea?’ Esther demands (rotating her head — with the full complement of Jamaican sass — like some kind of enraged cobra).

‘I do, as a matter of fact.’ Ransom glowers back.

‘Yeah?’

A difficult silence follows.

‘Are we talking mind-control techniques, here?’ The blond man — a journalist called Terence Nimrod — tries to jolly things along.

‘Uh, no. More like methods of persuasion,’ Toby explains (still pink from Esther’s earlier insult), ‘ tools of persuasion.’

‘Gotcha.’ Terence Nimrod picks up his coffee cup, notices that it’s empty, then puts it down again, slightly deflated.

‘Sorry, Tobe old boy’ — Ransom inspects his own cup (still half full) — ‘but whose bullshit idea did you say this was again?’

‘There you’ve got me.’ Toby looks abashed. ‘I heard him on the radio while I was driving down, but I didn’t quite catch —’

‘You passed your test! Hallelujah!’ Ransom proffers a high-five.

‘I got a lift.’ Toby pulls his collar away from his throat with a nervous finger. ‘My mother drove me. She has an old college pal in Dunstable …’

‘Don’t you find brushed cotton a little warm during the summer months?’ Nimrod queries.

‘I love brushed cotton.’ Ransom lowers his hand, his expression wistful. ‘My grandmother always had brushed cotton sheets on the beds when I was a kid …’

‘S for sincerity, was it?’ Nimrod rapidly changes tack (keen to forestall one of the golfer’s interminable childhood reminiscences).

‘Simplicity,’ Toby gently corrects him. ‘In order to persuade people in an effective way, your ideas need to be really simple, straightforward and easy to grasp …’

‘No one ever bothered asking Attila the Hun for his exam certificates,’ Ransom smirks.

Toby opens his mouth and then closes it again.

‘Yeah. I hear old Attila could be very persuasive on his day,’ Terence Nimrod deadpans.

‘A phenomenal diarist, by all accounts,’ Toby chips in.

‘Diaries?’ Ransom idly fingers the cover of the copy of Bruce Lee’s Artist of Life (which is sitting on the table alongside his placemat). ‘I bet those babies’d be worth a quick squizz …’

He reaches for the pencil resting on top of Nimrod’s trusty notebook, grabs it, scribbles something on to a paper serviette, folds it up and places it into the top pocket of his shirt.

‘S for simplicity, then,’ Toby quickly reiterates (a somewhat stricken expression on his face — although the note on Ransom’s napkin merely says ‘Lamisil Once’), ‘followed by P which stands for perceived self-interest …’

‘Not actual self-interest?’ Nimrod’s momentarily engaged.

‘Uh, no.’ Toby shakes his head. ‘I don’t suppose it really matters why you’re persuading someone — what your motivation is — so long as you’re doing it effectively. There’s nothing explicitly moral about this technique …’

‘Nobody ever made a million from selling people anything they actually need ,’ Ransom muses (ever the cynic).

‘Aspirin,’ Esther pipes up from her adjacent table (a line of cappuccino foam on her upper lip).

‘Ballpoint pen,’ Nimrod expands.

‘Peer pressure plays an important role,’ Toby steps in. ‘I mean you’re more likely to be able to persuade people of something if they see that their peers have already been convinced.’

‘Think the Rwandan genocide,’ Nimrod solemnly opines (trying to raise the conversational bar).

‘Think Diet Coke,’ Ransom counters (automatically lowering it).

‘The I is quite an interesting one …’ Toby struggles manfully on.

‘Is that a new edition?’ Nimrod jabs a plump finger at Ransom’s copy of Artist of Life . ‘I read it years ago. From what I can recollect, the poetry’s pretty torrid …’

‘I’ve a signed first edition at my house in LA,’ Ransom promptly fibs. ‘Lee’s thoughts on “plasticity” struck a real chord with me. This industry’s always been chock-a-block with cock-suckers and phonies …’

Nimrod grabs the book and quickly flips through it. ‘Just promise me you’re not embarking on another of your interminable Eastern phases,’ he pleads, ‘the raw fish diet, the atrocious headbands, the enigmatic press releases …’ He rolls his eyes. ‘How’s a hardworking hack ever meant to scrape together any decent copy from that?’

‘Now I come to think about it,’ Ransom ruminates (apparently oblivious to Nimrod’s pleas), ‘I suppose martial arts might easily fall into the “Individual Sports” category …’ He glances up, visibly jarred by the notion. ‘D’you reckon martial arts are selfish, Tel?’

‘Selfish?’ Toby echoes, bemused.

‘ All arts are selfish.’ Nimrod throws the book back down again. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Jesus was a humanitarian, not a watercolourist.’

‘Be that as it may,’ Ransom persists, ‘I read something pretty deep in there last night — pretty amazing — along the lines of’ — he clears his throat and simulates a reverential mien — ‘“Without the black sky there would be no stars, and without the little stars we would have nothing to compare the big ones by …”’

Nimrod listens to Ransom’s cod philosophizing with a measure of forbearance, then turns towards Toby with a conspiratorial wink. ‘It’s all downhill from here, Tobe,’ he murmurs. ‘Next thing we know he’ll be quoting gnomic chunks of unintelligible bullshit at us from The Art of War — like Paul Robinson on Neighbours .’

Ransom grabs the book back, infuriated (his flush truly busted). ‘I was given it by a fan if you must know,’ he growls, ‘just some stupid kid. I was telling him about my brief correspondence with Linda Lee Cadwell —’

‘Correspondence?’ Esther glances up from her novel with a snort. ‘You was legally oblige to send the poor woman a letter of apology after you get chuck out of a book-signing, drunk.’

Ransom glares at her, darkly.

‘I studied Wing Chun for almost fifteen years,’ Nimrod shares.

‘Fifteen years?!’ Toby rocks back in his chair. ‘Are you serious?!’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ Nimrod asks ( faux -offended).

‘No reason,’ Toby flounders. ‘I just …’ He clears his throat. ‘I just didn’t have you down as a big martial arts fan, that’s all.’

‘So what did you have me down as?’ Nimrod wonders.