Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

‘Boo who.’

‘Don’t cry,’ said Bree. ‘It’s only a joke.’

Jones continued to stare out of the windshield. Bree reached into the glove compartment and took out a Slim Jim and unwrapped it and began to chew. That hadn’t been a success.

‘Slim Jim, Jones?’ she said.

‘No thanks,’ said Jones.

‘OK,’ said Bree, a mile or so later on. ‘Not big on sense of humour. No GSOH, like they don’t say in the lonely hearts listing. Jokes don’t make you laugh.’

Jones didn’t say anything.

‘Jeezus, Jones. I’m trying to needle you here. Throw me a bone.’

Jones continued to look out of the windshield with bland attention to the road.

‘OK. Needle means like… Bone means like… Means say something.’

‘What would you like me to say?’ said Jones.

‘Make conversation.’

Jones left it a while. He seemed to be involved in some sort of mental effort. Bree could have sworn the hand with which he ordinarily smoked – the main hand with which he ordinarily smoked, given he seemed to be ambidextrous in this regard – twitched towards his pants pocket.

‘Knock knock,’ said Jones eventually.

‘Who’s there?’ said Bree.

Jones didn’t say anything for a bit.

‘Who’s there?’ said Bree. ‘Jones, you have to -’

‘Mister,’ said Jones.

‘Mister who?’ said Bree.

‘Mister Jones,’ said Jones. Bree laughed. Jones didn’t.

‘Hah, Jones,’ said Bree. ‘I like it. You were joking… Nice work…’

She cracked open another Slim Jim – they were minis – by way of celebration. Jones continued to stare benignly at the road, but she saw something around his eyes, in his frown, that looked a little haunted.

She waited a bit.

‘You weren’t joking,’ she said. ‘Were you?’

‘No,’ said Jones. ‘I was trying.’

‘You were funny. Sort of… inadvertently.’ After the highway had gone by for a bit more, uneventfully, Bree continued. ‘Knock knock jokes aren’t really funny, anyway,’ she said. ‘They’re more like corny. So it’s funny when they’re not funny?’

‘I know that,’ said Jones. ‘I know other people find things funny. It’s one of the concepts I find difficult to understand. Funny is what?’

‘Do you not laugh, Jones?’

Jones thought quite hard about this; as did Bree, who was trying to remember if she’d heard him laugh since they’d met.

‘No,’ he said eventually, in a tone of voice that suggested that the question was an odd one.

‘Not even if I tickle you?’

‘No,’ said Jones. ‘I think that reflex is attached to anticipation. I don’t have that. But I don’t laugh. I know a lot of jokes. I remember every joke anyone tells me. I remember everything anyone tells me. I have an eidetic memory. It’s one of the things that allows me to function. Someone tells someone else a lie and they laugh. I know that’s how it works. But it doesn’t work for me. If I know the joke, I know what’s going to happen. If I don’t know the joke, I often don’t know it’s a joke. It’s just – nonsense. It confuses me.’

Bree remembered, suddenly, the way her own daughter had been when she was five or six. That was when they’d been living in Washington, again, in the long narrow apartment with the air-con unit in the window at the end of the hallway that made all that noise.

Bree remembered Cass saying two things, the two things connecting up. First was when she had overheard Bree talking to Al, when they were still talking, and Al had said something that had made Bree laugh. A joke, not one of his dirty ones. Bree had been a couple beers in, probably laughing harder than whatever Al had said deserved.

‘What, Mommy? What?’ Bree had repeated the joke, but Cass had just looked confused. Did that really happen? Why not? Why did you say it did?

That phase lasted months – a curiosity about jokes, matched with a total failure to understand them. They seemed to be everywhere. Suddenly her schoolmates were all telling these jokes and Cass would bring them home, wondering, almost to the point of tears.

Cass – prim with indignation, hands behind her back in the blue dress, toe of the red shoe pivoting on the linoleum. ‘No, Mommy. That’s not true. No. That’s a lie.’

The problem was that Cass didn’t understand the difference between a joke and a lie – and Bree, though she knew there was one, had not been able to explain it to her daughter. She had not, come to that, even been able to explain it to her own satisfaction.

Later, when Cass started to lie in earnest, the thing recurred from the other end. ‘Did you do your homework?’ ‘Did you study for the test?’ ‘How was school?’ These routine questions would be answered yes, and yes, and lovely thank you, Mommy. It was only when the teachers called to ask why Cass had failed the test, why she’d come to school without her homework, why she’d bitten another child so hard she’d drawn blood, and Bree confronted her, that she’d protest, ‘I was joking! It was a joke!’

‘Cassie, did you take Mommy’s keys, honey?’

‘No, Mommy, I promise. Daddy took them.’

And Cass would have a blazing row with Al. And then the keys would show up, in Hampton Bear’s bear house in the corner of Cass’s room.

‘I was joking, Mommy! I was joking!’ she would shriek as Bree, especially if it was late in the evening, smacked the backs of her legs red. Long time gone.

‘What’s the matter?’ Jones said.

‘Nothing,’ said Bree. ‘Bit of my Slim Jim went the wrong way.’ She coughed and thumped her chest and wiped her eyes on her sleeve and went into the glove compartment and came out again.

‘OK, Jones,’ she said. ‘Irish knock knock joke. You say knock knock.’

‘Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Mister.’

‘No, it’s -’ she started. Jeepers he was hopeless. Then she realised he was, earnestly, trying. That made her feel…

‘OK, Jones,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother. Just drive.’ Trying, she thought.

The light was going down ahead of them, spreading out over the sky. It was cloudy in that direction. They drove on through Birmingham without stopping, at Bree’s suggestion, and got takeout from a Wendy’s on the outskirts, also at Bree’s suggestion. Jones ordered what Bree ordered, which was one fewer burger than she would have liked. Bree liked Wendy’s. The hot foil wrappings felt classier than Mickey D’s, and she liked the way the burgers were square even though the buns were mostly round. She liked that you could nibble the corners off, salty and greasy and chewy and hot.

They ate leaning back against the doors of the car where it was parked in the lot. The restaurant was light and the light spilled into a kids’ play area with a slide in the shape of an elephant and a see-saw anchored to the PlayCrete by a spring. It had a smiling plastic Wendy face, with ginger bangs and braids, atop the central boss. Wendy’s eyes were dark.

Bree felt tearful. She slurped her big orange soda. Jones, on the other side of the car, smoked gratefully, and the drift of the smoke smelled good.

As they drove, afterwards, Bree stopped trying to establish what went on in Jones’s head. That was Jones’s business, she reckoned. She liked him.

They drove on from the Wendy’s and kept going to Tupelo, where when Bree saw the illuminated vertical beacon of a Motel 6 glowing she asked Jones to pull in and they decided to stop for the night. They would contact Red Queen in the morning. Bree wondered what had happened about the disappearing case – the one he’d had at the airport and then hadn’t had.

They booked two adjacent rooms, both for cash. Jones helped Bree with her small travelling bag, put it in her room for her then came out to the walkway. It was round ten thirty, maybe eleven.