Hungry Paul still lived with his parents at the family home he had grown up in. He was now more than thirty years through his allotted three score and ten, and to an outside busybody it might have seemed that he had no ‘go’ in him, or maybe that he was hoping to outlast his parents en route to easy home ownership. But Hungry Paul was a man whose general obliviousness defied gossip. In truth, he never left home because his family was a happy one, and maybe it’s rarer than it ought to be that a person appreciates such things.
His father, Peter, had worked for many years as an economist, but was now retired and living off a pension provided by the invisible hand of the market. He was bald, though it was as if his baldness had been caused by gravity, with the hair drawn from his scalp into his head, now tufting out of his ears, nose and eyebrows. Hungry Paul’s mother, Helen, was a nearly-retired teacher, now down to two days a week. Helen had also taught Leonard for two years in primary school and used to praise his drawings, telling him that he had ‘brains to burn if he would only use them,’ which is the kindest possible way of calling someone lazy. Like any teacher who meets a former pupil as an adult, she always greeted Leonard with a genuine welcoming gladness.
She met Peter after he had stopped one day to give her directions to an art exhibition and then invited himself along. They fell in love effortlessly. Their initial chemistry broadened into physics and then biology, until they were blessed with Hungry Paul’s older sister Grace as their first child. They then had Hungry Paul after two difficult miscarriages and, understandably in the circumstances, they treasured him. As a couple, Helen and Peter continued to share the closeness of two people who have been through a lot together.
On Hungry Paul’s suggestion they had named their house ‘Parley View’ after a French song that he had once heard at a rugby club. Helen had insisted on a bird friendly back garden and bee friendly front garden, while Peter handled what he called ‘internal maintenance’: hanging pictures, changing light bulbs and doing all the things you can do to a needy house without buying much in the way of proper tools. Grace had long since moved out and was preparing for her impending wedding, a project that was being managed with the help of nightly phone calls to Helen, whose role largely involved lots of listening, punctuated by interjections of ‘I know love, I know’ every now and again in a soothing maternal voice.
When Leonard arrived that evening, Peter answered the door with his usual smile and his bright happy-to-see-you eyes.
‘Come on in Leonard, come on in.’
Leonard entered with a needless drying of his clean shoes on the doormat, a gesture of social respect rather than hygiene. In the front room Helen was doing a jigsaw on a tea tray. It looked like a picture of an impressionist painting but it was hard to tell with just the edges completed so far. Her tea was balanced on the arm of the couch in a way that Leonard’s mother would never have allowed. Peter and Helen resumed their habitual couch positions, nestled in like two jigsaw pieces themselves.
‘How’ve you been, Leonard—everything getting back to normal? I’m sure you’ve a lot to sort out,’ said Helen, getting the sensitive subjects out of the way early and gently.
‘Getting there,’ answered Leonard, not specifically referring to the normality, the grieving or the sorting out.
‘It’s good to see you—help yourself,’ she said, pointing to an Easter egg opened three weeks ahead of schedule, the guilt neutralised by sharing. Leonard took a big bit, tried to break off a smaller, more respectable portion, but decided just to eat it all once it broke up into his lap. The TV was paused in the middle of University Challenge, one of Leonard’s favourite programmes.
Peter’s style was to sit in readiness and then shout machine-gun guesses once a contestant buzzed: ‘Thomas Cromwell, NO, Oliver Cromwell, NO…’ just ahead of an impossibly well-rounded twenty-year-old answering ‘Cardinal Wolsey.’ In contrast to Peter’s machine gun was Helen’s sniper rifle. She liked to work on something else—a crossword, Sudoku puzzle or, like tonight, a jigsaw—pretending she wasn’t listening. And then, on some obscure question that had both teams stumped, she would deliver the correct answer from nowhere, hardly looking up. It was usually something unguessable, like an event that had happened in a leap year or that King Someone the Someteenth was a twin. She pretended not to enjoy how one of her coolly delivered correct answers could cancel out half a dozen of Peter’s panicked guesses. One time, Peter recorded an episode and learned the first twenty answers just to blow her mind when they watched it later, which he duly did, although we’ll never know if Helen truly fell for it, or just enjoyed the lengths to which he was still prepared to go to impress her after all these years. Above all, what held their interest in the programme was that the two of them genuinely believed in young people. They rooted for them and forgave them any overconfidence, seeing something pure and perfect in any bright young person who had made the most of a good education.
‘How’s the job going, Leonard?’ asked Peter. He still retained a retired man’s casual interest in how workplaces in general were getting on since he left it all behind.
‘Not bad, not bad. Keeping busy.’
‘What’s the topic these days—dinosaurs? Ocean creatures? Cavemen? Greeks?’
‘Close—the Romans. And especially their time in Britain and places like that. Pretty interesting actually. The Scots gave them quite a hard time.’
Leonard wrote children’s encyclopaedias and other factual books. While he actually wrote the words, he wasn’t the author as such. That title—and the dust jacket credit—went to the academic charged with overseeing content. Leonard’s role was really about making sure that the main concepts were conveyed in short memorable sentences. Some illustrators liked his way with nutshells and he had slowly built up a reputation as a fact writer with a child’s eye. The job suited him as he was interested in pretty much everything interesting, and he preferred to play a minor part in someone else’s story rather than being his own star. He also liked the underdog credibility that came from being unsung and uncredited, even if the money was a bit less than he would have liked for his stage of life. He worked alone in a big open-plan office shared with people from other companies and the admin people from his own company, who may as well have been from other companies. All this gave him the feeling and appearance of belonging to society, when the reality was that he worked alone and inside his own head most of the time. The illustrators, who were the real breadwinners, added their pictures after he had finished, so he tended not to meet them. His relationships with the overseeing authors were usually businesslike and distant. They gave emailed feedback and tracked comments with formal politeness that was friendly but without warmth. That was okay by Leonard. He wasn’t looking to form professional friendships with the company’s alpha dogs.
‘You should take over the illustrations Leonard—you were always good at that. Then bump off the bossy supervisor and publish books yourself. Move to the Bahamas and write on the beach,’ said Helen, who had spent her career lobbing encouragement in soft little underarm pitches for others to swing at.
‘Maybe someday,’ said Leonard. ‘The problem is that all the factual books have been done over a million times, so it’s hard to say something original. The illustrators are at the cutting edge; I’m just re-boiling the same old factoids. I suppose I’m happy enough—it’s rewarding to think that kids are reading the books and getting excited by them.’
‘There’s nothing nicer than seeing a kid reading,’ said Helen, ‘I remember Grace lying on her belly reading on the rug, oblivious to the TV or the rest of us. I never met a child who didn’t like reading, so long as they’re given a chance. I used to have parents coming to the school telling me that their kids wouldn’t read and my advice was always the same: if the parents read, the children will follow. If you want them to do it, do it yourself. I bet their parents were readers,’ she added, pointing at the paused University Challenge students on screen.
‘Speaking of gifted youths, I don’t suppose there’s any sign of your favourite son?’ asked Leonard.
‘Upstairs—he said to send you up,’ said Peter, reaching for the remote. As Leonard left the room, the TV was unpaused and he heard Peter shout out ‘Magnesium!’ behind him.
Upstairs, Hungry Paul’s room was unoccupied. Unsure of the rules for entering another adult’s bedroom platonically, he paused at the doorway, lingering as comfortably as is possible for a man who can hear his friend emptying his bowels at a distance. He took the opportunity to scan the details of Hungry Paul’s bedroom, a place he hadn’t really ever been in before. Beyond the age of twelve or so, men tend not to see each other’s bedrooms as it can be difficult to contrive a plausible premise for asking. The room was a mix of eras, with a general half-hearted adult gloss undermined by scatterings of boyhood fascination. Action figures stood in action poses on shelves where Hungry Paul’s parents had surely hoped great books would one day sit. A homemade cardboard mobile of a Spitfire dangled from the room’s only light. The walls were painted a pastel green, the shade you might choose for a nursery if you didn’t know the sex of the baby. The curtains and bedspread were of a generic home store type: leaves and whatnot in graduated blues and greys. On the walls were some of Hungry Paul’s own artworks, including a wobbly paint-by-numbers portrait of The Laughing Cavalier and a Where’s Wally? jigsaw he had had framed and mounted as a testament to its difficulty. Though not untidy, the room had that random look you sometimes find among the bedrooms of former children who are still in residence.
Hungry Paul emerged from the bathroom wearing a white fluffy bathrobe tied with a white belt, tracksuit bottoms and flip flops with some tissue paper stuck to them. He was shaking his wrists and wore the look of intense concentration that is characteristic of a man with wet hands looking for a towel. The fact that he was in the unlikely position of wearing clothes made from the very material he needed might have tempted a lesser man, but, having already run the risk of doing a sit-down toilet while wearing white, he was not minded to capitulate under a lesser challenge. He resolved his difficulty by retrieving a t-shirt from the linen basket and drying his hands on it, his assessment being that clothes that were clean enough to wear only a short time previously were unlikely to have become too dirty to use in the meantime. There is much pleasure in relief and, as Hungry Paul noticed Leonard, he welcomed him with genuine warmth.
‘Hi Leonard. They sent you up. Great, great. How are things?’
‘Good thanks. What’s with the bathrobe?’ asked Leonard.
‘Ah, I have begun training in the martial arts–how do I look?’
‘You look like the real thing all right. What has brought this on? It’s not like you to do something violent.’
‘Oh, I haven’t changed my mind about violence, but the martial arts are more about stillness in action. Calm in the midst of combat. It certainly is physical, but the mind remains still and peaceful. There is no mental violence; no ill will, which is the worst part of violence. And besides, it’s judo, so there’s no punching in the face or anything like that.’
‘And how do you feel about rolling around with Neanderthals? I thought you didn’t like people touching you, never mind twisting your limbs into a figure eight.’
‘Well there is that. I actually thought it might help me with my personal space issues. As you say, it is one of the more intimate combat sports, hence we wear sleepover gear rather than, say, black tie. But to be honest, there is also my personal fitness to think of. I can’t very well tackle a black belt if I can’t even tackle stairs without panting.’
Hungry Paul then dropped to the floor and started a push-up on his knuckles. There was a cracking sound, followed by some oaths, and then he started again, looking like a break dancer doing the caterpillar.
‘How many do you have to do?’ asked Leonard.
‘My sensei says I should keep going until I find my limit, and then go beyond it. To be like water. It was easier in the class with the spongy mats, but my wooden floors are actually quite hard. Maybe I’ll try it with grippy socks instead of flip flops.’
‘You look good in all the gear though. A white belt – that’s pretty impressive. What sort of moves have you learned so far?’
‘So far it’s steady as she goes. The first thing they teach you is how to sign a waiver form, and then they teach you how to break a fall, so you don’t get hurt, although I suspect whether I get hurt or not is as much up to my future opponents as it is up to me. Then we did some drills with the others. Most of them are a bit bigger than me, so I was mainly practising my defence.’
‘I suppose it should be good for your mental strength too. The martial arts are known for emphasising oneness of mind and body,’ said Leonard, who had actually written something on the martial arts in a children’s encyclopaedia about the Olympics, though the combat sports got only a brief section at the back along with shooting, weightlifting and a fact box about steroids.
‘Funny you should say that—I was actually quite light-headed after the class, which often happens whenever I try new things. Still, it’s only my first lesson. I asked the sensei about my potential and he said that if I upgraded from my bathrobe and tracksuit bottoms to buying a gi—that’s what they call the proper judo outfit—it would be a real sign of commitment. I can tell it will take many tournaments to win his respect.’
Leonard admired the way Hungry Paul had immersed himself in something that was so culturally alien, and, on reflection, he agreed that it was best to buy a proper gi, as the bathrobe probably looked a little too fluffy to intimidate any experienced judoka.
‘If you’re still practising, maybe I should wait downstairs?’ suggested Leonard.
‘Not at all. I can finish this later. Let’s go down for a while and have a chat.’ Hungry Paul tightened his white fluffy belt, using the same type of knot used for tying shoelaces.
Hungry Paul chose the kitchen rather than the front room, yelling ‘We’re in here’ for the benefit of his parents, with Helen chirping ‘Okay, love’ from the other room. He flipped on the kettle and disappeared into the cubbyhole, an off-shoot from the kitchen which was probably intended to be used as a pantry, but which in this house was used to store board games. He scanned the battered spines of the stacked boxes like a sommelier looking for the right vintage. Within the time it took for the kettle to boil, he stuck out a disembodied arm from the cubbyhole and called ‘This okay?’ from within. He was holding out Yahtzee, a game they hadn’t played in a very long time.
‘Good choice. You’re in a very oriental mood this evening. Making plans to buy a gi, making yourself what looks like green tea, and now playing Yahtzee. Is this a new direction you are taking in life? Western civilisation no longer inspires you? Oh, and I’ll have normal tea by the way please.’
‘I think that I need to be a little immersive with regard to the cultural context for judo if I want to avoid getting beaten up by sixteen-year-old girls again next week. I think there was something important missing at my first lesson. I mean apart from things like balance and motor skills, I felt I was missing something of the essence of the judoka,’ said Hungry Paul. ‘Now, it’s been a while since we played this. How does it go again?’
Hungry Paul laid out the bits and pieces: a circular playing area with raised edges, all covered in faux-Vegas red baize; four dice, which meant that one was missing; a black cup for shaking them in before rolling, which lent that characteristic hollow rattling sound to the game; and a set of impossibly complicated score cards, listing what the players should be trying to achieve.
‘It doesn’t look very oriental’ observed Leonard about the game, which was invented by Canadians and commercialised by Americans.
‘Probably a prisoner of war game in Japanese camps during World War II. Do you recall how to play this? I’m starting to remember why we haven’t taken this out in so long. I think the last time we tried this we gave up and ended up playing something less complicated like Risk, which is saying something.’ Hungry Paul lived on a knife edge between a passion for board games and an aversion to instruction booklets.
Leonard explained the basics insofar as he could recall them. Hungry Paul, who himself lacked a Eureka face, nodded in false understanding.
‘Why don’t you just go first and then I’ll see how it works. I’m sure it will come back to me. It’s just the rules are all a bit like card games, which I can never understand. Oh, I had better get an extra die.’ Hungry Paul disappeared back into the cubby hole and removed a die from another set, the board game equivalent of cannibalism.
The game got under way with Leonard rattling the dice cup, which is used two-handed as if the player were shaking cocktails in it. His first attempt was at a full house but he rolled five different numbers. Hungry Paul decided to try for a full house also and quickly popped a digestive biscuit into his mouth in order to free up his hands, having already dropped several crumbs on his judo bathrobe, which was opening at the chest under the pressure of the moment. He rolled two twos, a three, a five and six. He had no idea what that meant.
‘Oh, I remember—do I call out “Yahtzee”?’ he asked, for want of any better ideas.
‘Not quite. You might be thinking of Bingo or Snap,’ Leonard answered, before interpreting what Hungry Paul’s roll meant and talking him through his next few goes.
As they both played board games regularly, and switched between them often, it was not unusual for games to start slowly whenever they changed to something new. It was perfectly normal to have a warm-up period, like the way a polyglot who has just arrived at the airport needs to hear the local language spoken around him before he can regain his own fluency in speaking it. Before long, the game settled into a steady rhythm of clacking dice and turn-taking, interspersed with uninhibited rallies of conversation between the two friends, both of whom were free thinkers with a broad range of interests.
Hungry Paul had always been fascinated by the world around him, viewing it as something fantastical. It was as if he saw the body of scientific understanding as an anthology of legends, something so wonderful and impenetrable that it might as well be a myth. He liked borrowing copies of National Geographic from the library, sometimes months in arrears, not that it mattered when he was reading articles about carbon dating or the Persians. In this way he maintained a lively interest in the wider world, while staying above and apart from what is generally described as current affairs. Leonard, very much the autodidact, held a subscription to New Scientist, which had been his annual Christmas present from his mother for many years. He also liked to read Yesterday Today, for all the latest developments in ancient history. For the two friends, the bleaching of the coral reefs was as current as the latest general election; the discovery of new dwarf planets was as relevant as last night’s penalty shoot-out; and Marco Polo was discussed as others might gossip about the latest red carpet ingénue. Their conversations combined the yin of Leonard’s love of facts with the yang of Hungry Paul’s chaotic curiosity.
‘Do you remember the Edvard Munch exhibition we went to last year, with all those haunting paintings of sick children?’ asked Hungry Paul.
‘Indeed I do. I see you still have the fridge magnet of The Scream you bought afterwards as a memento. It’s not just any artist that makes it on to that fridge.’
‘Well, I was reading an article about that very painting today and guess what? Do you want to know what the most fascinating thing about it is?’ tantalised Hungry Paul.
‘Okay, let me think. The orange background is related to the eruption of Krakatoa isn’t it? Is that it?’
‘Interesting but that’s not it.’ Hungry Paul was rattling his dice in the cup the whole time, adding to the sense of suspense.
‘Okay, I give up.’
‘The figure in the painting isn’t actually screaming!’ Hungry Paul spilled his dice on the board as he revealed this; a little too enthusiastically, as one of them had to be retrieved from under the table—a four, which did him no good.
‘Really, are you sure?’
‘Absolutely. That’s the whole thing. The figure is actually closing his ears to block out a scream. Isn’t that amazing? A painting can be so misunderstood and still become so famous.’
‘Really? I must confess that I think I have made that mistake myself in several encyclopaedias. Never mind. It will be an interesting thing to include the next time we do a revised edition.’
Leonard rolled his go and completed his four-of-a-kind. He drank from his mug, but the tea had gone cold without him realising, leaving him to swallow a mouthful of nauseating leftovers.
‘I don’t suppose you saw the documentary about Edwin Hubble last night?’ asked Hungry Paul, now entering a state of flow. ‘Dad and I watched it after judo while Mam was on the phone to Grace. I must confess that, without television, I would never understand anything about space. Thank heavens for those enthusiastic Oxford dons doing all those BBC documentaries on the side—earning a bit of egg money I suppose. TV and space were made for each other. Dad and I were so absorbed that we ate a whole Toblerone between us—one of the big ones that you get at the airport.’
‘I’m sorry I missed it. One thing I could never quite get right in my encyclopaedias, even after reading about it many times over the years, is the expansion and contraction of the universe,’ Leonard confessed. ‘I mean I couldn’t begin to understand the physics of it, but the idea that the universe is surrounded by something that is not the universe, and which it expands into, or is it that the universe isn’t expanding but space is expanding? How do you explain that to children without leaving them with a million unanswered questions? Never mind the idea that it will snap back like an elastic into a small little pinhead again, which would terrify any sensible child. How can we just walk around leading normal lives when we know that that sort of thing is going on above our heads? We’d all be a little less precious about our lot if we truly appreciated that the whole thing was going to end up as some sort of tiny full stop eventually. I suppose you just have to trust the science, but it is blind faith really beyond a certain point, at least as far as I’m concerned.’
Hungry Paul’s brow became corrugated. ‘I find the whole expansion of the universe disheartening to be honest. It’s as though Mother Nature is trying to push everything away from everything else. Hardly maternal. The universe might well be expanding, but it’s expanding to get away from us, leaving us more alone, and our world feeling smaller.’
The two friends then settled into one of the long pauses that characterised their comfort in each other’s company. They could sit quietly for extended periods without the need to hurry back to whatever it was they were doing, allowing the silence to melt away in its own time. However, on this occasion, Hungry Paul’s extemporising on astrophysics had struck a melancholy note inside Leonard. In the weeks since his mother had passed on, Leonard had noticed a distinct shrinking of his own personal universe. His evenings were less occupied, his social options had become more limited, and his mind seemed diverted inwards towards a vague, dreamy melancholy. As Hungry Paul got up to boil the kettle again and rinse the mugs, Leonard broached the subject.
‘Maybe it’s not just the universe that expands and contracts,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the same applies to us—you know, that as we get older, our lives start shrinking.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The thing is, as a child the world looked huge, intimidatingly so. School looked big. Adults looked big. The future looked big. But I am starting to feel that over time I have retreated into a smaller world. I see people rushing around and I wonder—where are they going to? Who are they meeting? Their lives are so full. I’ve been trying to remember if my life was ever like that.’
Hungry Paul paused a moment. ‘I think I know what you mean; but for me, the bigness of life was always the problem. I have spent over three decades hacking a safe path through the wilderness, as have you to some extent. The path may be a little narrow in places, but is that really so bad?’
‘It’s not just external circumstances,’ answered Leonard. ‘I feel myself getting smaller. I feel quieter and more, I don’t know, invisible. There is this palpable sense of physics; that my life is being pulled inwards. One thing has led to another and now I feel that if I don’t do something, I’ll just carry on some minor harmless existence.’
‘There is a lot to be said for that. As you know, I have always been modestly Hippocratic in my instincts: I wish to do no harm. My preference has always been to stand back from the world. Much like the Green Cross Code, I like to stop, look and listen before getting involved in things. It has stood me well and kept me on peaceful terms with my fellow man. It’s certainly better than trying to make my mark on the world, only to end up defacing it,’ said Hungry Paul.
‘I am not about to start chaining myself to railings or throwing bras at policemen, if that’s what you mean. There is no shortage of people willing to take that path. But I just can’t help feeling that I need to open the doors and windows of my life a little.’
Hungry Paul hesitated, holding his biscuit over his tea just a fraction too long and despairing as a half-moon of digestive sank to the bottom of his mug. ‘That may be so,’ he said, ‘but the trick is to know how much of the world to let in, without becoming overwhelmed. The universe, as Edwin Hubble taught us, is a hostile place.’
‘Indeed. And sometimes it’s difficult to know whether you want to scream or block out a scream,’ said Leonard.
It was hard to say whether it was the Yahtzee talking, but both men had found themselves in one of those flowering conversations where one thought opens another. Perhaps they could have discussed the subject all evening, if only it had been hypothetical. Things being otherwise, the natural pause in the conversation gave them a moment to check themselves. Even among close friends, there are still some thoughts that ought to be allowed to ripen in private.
They finished their tea and reached an unspoken decision that, after a pleasant evening’s play, and with both their score cards looking a mess, they would call it a night.
Leonard popped his head into the sitting room to say goodbye. Helen had finished the jigsaw—Monet’s Lilies, a painting Leonard had written about in the World of Art encyclopaedia—and was on the phone to Hungry Paul’s sister Grace, discussing wedding DJs. Peter, with saintly patience, had the TV on pause again and said goodbye with a thumbs-up.
Hungry Paul saw Leonard off at the door.
‘G’night then,’ said Leonard.
‘G’night Leonard,’ said Hungry Paul, closing his judo bathrobe at the throat to keep his chest from getting a chill.
Without thinking, they both looked up at the inky universe they had just been talking about, as the big torchlight moon shone down on the snails criss-crossing the driveway. Leonard stepped over them and made his way home, carrying with him the things he had said over the course of the evening; things he hardly knew he knew.