Happy Ending

- Will you tell me a story?

- What kind of a story?

- One with a happy ending.

- Come here, then.

- Alright.

- There was a village on a far off world.

- Which world?

- It’s called Nyay, and it’s in our galaxy on the far side of the Oort Cloud.

- Wow. What’s it like on their planet?

- It’s a hot, dry planet. Only 29% of their world is covered with water.

- Oh.

- So there are not as many people as on our planet. Only five hundred million or so. Amongst them was a lovely family who lived in a simple home and had kind faces. They had a pet, a skinny brown animal called a nafneng.

- What was its name?

- Chimba.

- That’s a good name. Was it a boy or a girl?

- A girl. The father of the family was called Spoodama. The mother was called Gellim. The children were called Stovit, a girl, and Bijjish, a boy. They were a farming family. Every year, the crops grew all summer in the hot sun, and the harvest was not great but it was enough. The children went to school, and they were happy.

- Okay. And Chimba was happy too.

- Yes, she was a happy dog. She loved her family, and she was not too naughty.

- What kind of naughty things did she do?

- Sometimes if you had a piece of food in your hand and you let your hand down by your side -

- Oh, like Tilda!

- Yes, just like Tilda. If you got distracted, she would tease the food out of your hand and eat it, and when you brought your hand up -

- You’d find it empty, and go, ‘Oh, Til- Chimba!’

- That’s right.

- As the years went by and Stovit and Bijjish grew up and became interested in the world outside the village that their teacher had taught them about.

- Did they learn about us in the school?

- Us?

- Us, here on Earth.

- Yes, they learned about Earth. They learned that our planet is small, wet and cold, and that we have long winters, and they would pretend to shiver in their hot classrooms and laugh.

- Oh, Earth is so cold!

- Yes, like that! Now as time passed, the summers in the village grew longer and hotter. The sun would hang over Spoodama’s back as he worked the fields, and we would water the plants with his own sweat, but he never complained. He loved his family, and he knew that a good person would suffer for those he loved.

- Like you, Dad.

- Perhaps. In any case, as the summers grew longer and hotter, the crops became less bountiful, and the meals of the Nyayvian family grew smaller. Gellim and Spoodama worried but also knew that worrying would not change anything. After a while, Stovit got sick.

- Did she get a day off school?

- She did. In fact, she got several days off school. In total, with all the visits from the doctor, and all the journeys to the medical centre in the nearby village, she did not go to school for one hundred days.

- A hundred!

- And even when she did go back to school, she was still weak and could no longer take part in gymnastics lessons, which she had loved.

- Oh. Poor Stovit.

- Chimba also had less to eat, and so she became skinny and her ribs stuck out.

- Oh. Poor Chimba. What about Bijjish?

- Bijjish did okay to start with, but his stomach rumbled loudly when he was with his friends, and this embarrassed him.

- Burble blurble, oops!

- Exactly.

- Did the summers get any shorter? Did the rains come?

- Spoodama and Gellim hoped very much that they would. They dreamed of cooler days and water landing on their brow from the sky. They looked at each other and told each other that the rains would come. If not soon, eventually. The universe would be kind to them.

- And what happened?

- The cooler days and the rains did not come. The summers stretched on and on. The clouds would begin to gather and darken. Bijjish would go outside to watch them, making spit in his dry mouth. He saw his own spirit run forwards out of him, tearing off its shirt, whooping with delight and being soaked by phantom rains.

- And did it rain?

- It did not. The clouds that had gathered simply dissipated, and summer would go on for more days and more weeks.

- And what about the farm?

- The harvest from the farm was especially poor that year, and the family could only eat two meals per day. And then Gellim got pregnant. Spoodama talked about taking Chimba away to another place and coming back without her.

- Oh no!

- But Gellim forbade him, and he relented. They were all very skinny by now, and then Stovit got sick again, and she did not return to school.

- What, never?! When is it going to rain?

- Well, then it did rain, but it was not good.

- Oh?

- The fields had grown dry and dusty, and when the rains came they washed all of the top soil away and much of the crops floated away. Bijjish came running out of school to try to collect as many as he could with his father, but they were left with very little.

- Oh no. Couldn’t somebody help them?

- Normally, the people in the village helped each other when misfortune fell on this family or that. The elder of the village taught them to do so for the greater good. But now everyone was in the same situation, and there was nobody to help them.

- What did they do?

- News came of another place a long way to the south called Fatam where water ran in the rivers all year and the summers were not so severe. Other families began to pack up their things and set off to Fatam. Gellim and Spoodama argued about this. Gellim thought they should go, but Spoodama looked at her huge belly and at the weak, bedbound Stovit and shook his head.

- Couldn’t they build a cart and carry them?

- They could, and Spoodama knew that, but it would be hard for him and Bijjish to carry them along with all their possessions. And so, with the food running out day by day, they stayed.

- Oh dear. They should have gone with their neighbours.

- They waited until Gellim gave birth to a baby boy, whom they adored from his first breath, and they called him Shask, which means ‘monsoon’.

- Then they did they go to Fatam.

- They did set off to Fatam. Stovit was tucked up in the cart with Shask, and bony Bijjish and Spoodama took one of the protruding wooden rods each and pulled.

- Did Chimba go with them?

- Chimba did go with them,. On the way they passed a small farm with noknoks, which are like our Earth chickens but much sillier. Chimba was so hungry she did something she had never done before. She ran into the farm and snapped at the neck of one of the noknoks and killed it.

- Oh no! Chimba! What’s going to happen?!

- The owner of the farm threw a heavy rock at Chimba which hit her hard on the head. Chimba yelped and ran away. Bijjish saw that she was bleeding. He tried to clean the wound, but it was difficult with the little water they had.

- Poor Chimba. They shouldn’t have thrown that rock.

- Sadly the owners of the farm were scared and hungry, so they resorted to violence to protect what little they had.

- Dad, are you sure this story is going to have a happy ending?

- Let’s see.

- Okay.

- They walked on, hour after hour and day after day past the scorched fields of their country. Bijjish noticed that Chimba was staggering a little and tried to swat away the swarm of vipids, which are like flies, that kept landing on her wound, but it didn’t do much good.

- What would Doctor Belkin say?

- Doctor Belkin would say that the wound should be thoroughly cleaned with alcohol and bandaged up, and that Chimba should be assessed for brain damage from the impact.

- But they couldn’t do that.

- No, they couldn’t do any of those things. In fact, there was only one thing they could do.

- Walk.

- And walk they did. They panted to the top of small hills in the dizzying heat with the small cart and rolled to the bottom on the other side. At night, Gellim, Stovit and Shask slept together in the cart, and Bijjish and Spoodama took turns to sleep under the cart while they other watched the road ahead and behind and the dark fields around them.

- What did they eat?

- They had taken all their food with them when they left the village but, as their neighbours were weeks ahead of them, they had no one to ask how long the journey would take. They decided only to eat one meal a day, except for Gellim, who had to feet Shask. Stovit ate as much as she could but for some reason she was never very hungry. Chimba was always sniffing around for something to eat, but she didn’t steal any more noknoks.

- I hope they get to Fatam soon.

- So did they. Unfortunately, the next night bandits crept up on them so steathily that they were almost upon the cart before Bijjish could raise the alarm. Spoodama awoke at once, and he and Bijjish began to fight them off, but the bandits were armed with knives, and all he and Bijjish had were their farmer’s hoe and fork.

- Did they get anything?

- A lot. They took the family’s blankets, which kept them warm at night, and a lot of their remaining food. And Spoodama was badly hurt.

- And Chimba?

- Chimba was very slow by now and a bit stupid. She ran away and barked at the bandits from a distance.

- At least she didn’t get hurt again.

- Thank goodness for small mercies. Spoodama cleaned up his wounds as best he could and applied a tourniquet. Then the family all tucked themselves in the cart to share body warmth for the rest of the night, but it was too cold for little Shask. In the morning, his little body was still.

- Ohhhh!

- Spoodama cut off a lock of hair from his head and gave it to Gellim, who sniffed it and sobbed, sucking in great mouthfuls of air as she did so, as Spoodama dug a tiny grave by the side of the road. They commended Shask’s spirit to the divine and went on their way, leaving the little pile of stones growing smaller behind them.

- Poor little Shask. No happy ending for him.

- I suppose not. In any case, they were all weaker and skinnier now than ever, and now the way became steeper and steeper, and they were forced to climb the largest hill that any of them had ever seen. It was incredibly difficult for them to push the cart up the hill, even with only Stovit and now Chimba inside and their other few possessions. Every time they thought they were approaching the top, they found it was still further away, and they continued to push and stumble up the hill.

- Oh, poor them.

- One small mercy was that the sun was on the other side of the hill, so it was not too hot, but still they pushed and climbed and pushed.

- Did they get to the top?

- They did. And when they got there, the land flowed all the way down through a valley full of marvellous little buildings and into a great blue expanse.

- The sea!

- They stood there looking down at the sea or a large lake anyway, knowing now that they would make it. But then Stovit said ‘Oh. Chimba.’

- Oh no! Oh, Chimba. Oh no!

- Little Chimba had curled up next to Stovit and grown ever so still and cold.

- But Dad you said it was going to be a happy ending! But Chimba and Shask are gone! How can it be happy?!

The father reached down, touched his son’s wet face and looked into his shining eyes, tears that were not for himself but for the troubles of a family far, far away on a planet called Nyay.

- Don’t you see? It was.

The Thrill of the Case – Part Five

Read part one, part two, part three or part four of The Thrill of the Case.

‘Forlorn’, thought Zagonella as she took another piece of shortbread from the packet and dunked it into the warm brown liquid in her cup, was easily the saddest word in the English language. First, it was the way it captured the exact moment when hope dissolved like a biscuit in a hot drink. ‘Crestfallen’, of course, attempted much the same trick but rather evoked the comic image of a cockerel’s crown flopping sideways. And then there was the sound of it, two falling notes, the second one longer and deeper and sadder even than the first as the devastation of a once shining dream was realised.

And forlorn had indeed been the expression on poor Everarck’s face after he’d told her in a state of great triumph and agitation about this dodgy-sounding start-up so-called Court, which she imagined being run out of a van with the engine constantly running, and then she’d told him what she thought of it.

‘A silly game for silly boys,’ is what she’d said in the face of his glistening hopefulness, which was in fact Everarck’s own face, ‘I told you already that you do all these things just because you care so much about what other people think of you, all because you have no idea what to think of yourself. You’re a clever man, Everarck, but you waste it. You waste it on stupid things like this.’

And then Everarck had looked forlorn, and she’d regretted every word just as much as she’d been convinced that each one was necessary before she’d said it.

What was it about ‘forlorn’ that made her so sad? As she wondered, another face came to her, one from long ago that she could remember looking up at, from a distance, on an old man, instead of a young one. There had been a man who had rushed to greet his wife and give her a hug out of the sheer pleasure of seeing her again, for the 16,000^th time in their long marriage, but who had forgotten – again – that she no longer took pleasure in these embraces.

With the benefit of years and studies in psychology, Zagonella understood that her grandmother felt betrayed by her grandfather’s forgetfulness, that she was always angry with him, and that even the odd moments when he recognised her without assistance were, to her, just as symptomatic of his disease as the moments when he didn’t. Even so, the memory of her grandmother standing bolt upright as her grandfather hugged her, and just that same transformation of happy anticipation to confusion to realisation to sadness like a snowflake melting in the palm of your hand; that memory, every time it came to her, was a bullet through the heart.

And here she was, working in this hospital which specialised in mental illnesses, trying to cure that bullet wound every day of her life. And there she was with this man, this half-man, half-boy, sweet and innocent, unworldly and talented, rudderless and impulsive. She loved him, and she could not wish she didn’t, but what was she supposed to think; what was she supposed to do when he presented her with this contract, its incomprehensible black on glaring white, and she’d snatched it from his hand and flicked back page after page until she got to the last and found his strange squiggly signature sitting at the bottom on its hard horizontal line? Just what, in the name of God, was she supposed to do?

Read part 6 of The Thrill of the Case.

The Sack of Dirt

Upon hearing that one would 'eat a peck of dirt before they die', a man purchased a large sack of earth, placed it in his wheelbarrow and carried it everywhere with him. Each day, he measured the contents to ensure that none had somehow escaped from the sack and got into his food. Each day, he confirmed that the sack remained full.

A year passed, and the sack was no emptier than when he'd bought it. He felt great elation that he, a simple man, had solved the problem of mortality so cheaply and so easily. He realised that, with this simple trick, he could live forever. He told no one of his discovery, but many noticed his beaming happiness as he went about his modest business.

As the years passed, he grew older and his hair went grey and his skin became wrinkly, but still the sack was full, so he didn't worry about death or mortality. In fact he remained blithe and generous for he could give away nothing of which there was not an infinitude.

After a few more years, he became sick and bed ridden. Friends and relatives visited to whom he cheerfully explained that this was temporary, and he'd soon get better. They admired his sense of humour and asked him if he had any last words. He responded by asking if a river had last words. No, it does not, he said, when they could not answer him. It goes down to the sea, rises into the clouds and falls again in the mountains. So the river is not in need of last words.

His friends continued to look dumbfounded, so he told them to go and inspect the sack of dirt in his wheelbarrow and tell him if it was at its limit of contents. They duly did so and reported that indeed the sack was full. There you go then, said the old man, I have not eaten my peck, and so I am not yet to die. But you are old and frail and lying in your death bed, they complained. Clearly your time has come.

No, I am not to die, he replied, beaming at them all, don't you see? They looked at his old, grey face, and still they did not know what to say. Imperturbed, he rested his eyes and there, still smiling, his breath grew fainter and fainter until, finally, there was none.

The man's funeral, testament to his spiritual and material generosity, was well-attended. In her eulogy, the minister, who had known him well, mentioned that the man had been known to carry a sack of dirt with him everywhere he went, that he'd believed that, while it remained full, he would never die, and that this was the secret of his happiness and his success.

Understanding at last this curious fact, the mourners had a statue of the man made, and now he stands on a plinth in the centre of the town. Every day, with the stone-hewn sack of dirt in his sculpted wheelbarrow, he smiles down on the people of that town. The tale of his happiness and kindness is passed down from generation to generation. And so it seems, that in the hearts of the townspeople who love him, he shall never die.