Nicola Barker - Behindlings

‘That’s tough,’ Jo tried to seem sympathetic — she was sympathetic. ‘You can always show me what you’ve got, if you like, and I’ll see what I can make of it.’

Patty carefully considered this offer — munching like a rodent on a mouthful of coleslaw — then grudgingly pushed Clue Five towards her. Jo looked down at it, casually. It was perfectly familiar. She had her own well-thumbed copy snuggled up neatly inside her front coat pocket.

‘Right. Clue Five… ’

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?’