‘Hugo! Hugo! Hugo! Hugo!’ The beery chants went thumping through her brain. He looked at her, helpless but happy, captured by the resident Meerkats, their heads up for the Christmas final. The locals had needed fresh blood: an educated incomer on their team, to even out the numbers and boost their jackpot score, and Hugo had, as ever, been generous with his expertise.
The Spangles were three old school friends visiting for the night. They’d kept her on their side to balance out his intellect. You went to university. You ought to know your stuff. So creative too, you are, left brained to his right. He’ll be OK without you. He’s loving it, you see. We need someone with A levels, and a degree. Annie, Bea and Kay had followed a different road but found their fortunes none the less. Now they were back, to reinvent old times, jolly their hosts to the nearest bar and subtly recalibrate their relative success.
The house was nice, they had observed. Wreath on the knocker. Double garage. Ice on the little pond. There was clearly money in that research he did. Shame about the car and his haphazard sense of dress. But he was in his element, firing off answers without pause for breath, still attractive as he scrunched the sandy whorls of his chaotic fringe, half the explanation for his offspring’s striking hair.
But she? She seemed already defeated somehow. Not the vibrant, clever, A-team girl with tightly buoyant curls, who’d swept the board at prize day, edited the sixth form news and made them envious. They sipped at their Prosecco; rubbed the sparkles on their nails. They’d lost touch with the combatants: hardly seen them since the wedding almost sixteen years ago. But the marriage of minds between the ex-deputy head girl and her partner was still a source of fascination. This would be a tournament worth seeing, they were sure.
Sofia smoothed her stupid skirt down over her thighs. She hadn’t bargained on being hoisted up onto a bar stool, with tinsel round her neck. The first round the girls covered her: TV Serials, Sporting Stars and Top Ten Festive Hits. Easy pickings for them but from that trove of popular culture which had somehow passed her by. Now it was science and nature, her area, the reason she’d been picked. Hugo looked across, oddly comfortable with strangers, pleasantly confident in battle.
What does RNA stand for?
Candy for a post-grad biochemist. The Meerkats must have got that one.
What acid is used in fizzy drinks and baking powders?
He’d known that one since primary school. She knew it because she cooked. Then she struck lucky with questions from her own specialty. Operant conditioning. Gestalt theory. Dermatophobia. The friends were left behind, impressed, and she had found her way. Hit singles might have stumped her, but she knew about the human mind, the workings of the brain.
Trays of mince pies went clockwise when it was time to check the scores, and papers went the other way, swapped between the teams. The Spangles leapt upon the Meerkats’ sheet. Sofia was glad only the Snowmen could read what she had written. She’d gone cold to see the correct responses, all in Hugo’s hand. That was her field, the things she knew. She hadn’t known he knew them too.
Meerkats and Spangles tied joint first. Mulled wine on the house. Hugo’s encyclopaedic abstract knowledge and the locals’ in-depth love of sport could not quite compensate for the Spangles’ superb performance in music and TV trivia and Hugo’s bafflement at logo rounds: he paid scant attention to the labels on his jumpers or his car. Sofia wasn’t sure if she had helped the score. The years of university, the research, the MA. It seemed they’d made no difference in the end at all.
The girls still had a use for her. ‘Jackpot! Jackpot round! You be it! Come on!’ They lifted her and the high stool to a new arena in front of the bar, handling her with intimacy borne of too much wine, retying the tinsel to make a scarlet crown. She moved awkwardly from buttock to buttock, shuffling herself back to keep her skirt hem forward, laughing in a panic and flicking back incorrigible springs of auburn hair.
The other masterminds were pushed forward too. Hugo was relaxed; his legs draped easily to the floor. The lead Snowman found his Christmas jumper tight under his bomber jacket and struggled to climb up on his stool holding his pint of beer. Nine rollover questions, picked from a hat, three for each team. A tiebreak question if required. First to shout it out. The jackpot stood at £70. A round of drinks at least.
Sofia hadn’t had a drop. She couldn’t fail tonight, not in front of her past. They only knew her former schoolgirl self. Composed. Intelligent. Naturally good-looking. Trained in all the disciplines. Maybe, she hated to think it now, slightly superior. She assumed the dazzling smile she thought she might have worn back then.
The barman tinkled for silence with a spoon against a glass.
‘OK, ladies and gents. Buckle your seatbelts for the final jackpot round. Seventy pounds in the pot, ladies and gentlemen, which cannot, I repeat cannot, be carried over into the new year, plus free tickets for our Christmas Draw in just one week’s time. So, without further ado, three questions for each team, selected at random by our lovely assistant here.’ He ruffled the hair of a black-aproned youth, wearing a Santa hat and holding a lidded ice bucket filled with folded slips: yellow for geography and history, red for sport and entertainment and green for both their specialties – science and nature.
‘OK, Meerkats,’ the barman cleared his throat, ‘here we go. There are two Christmas islands. Name the oceans in which they are located.
‘In which century is Star Trek set?
‘By what common household name and initials do we know trichlorophenylmethyliodosalicyl?’
Hugo’s new-found followers leaned forward to whisper in his ear, but he’d answered every question before it left the barman’s mouth. They weren’t difficult, Sofia told herself. Two and three were a gift for a serious scientist with a love of sci-fi comedy, and a man who travelled the world as much as Hugo must surely know his famous archipelagos from the air.
The Abominable Snowman fared less well. Yore One Yawn is an anagram of which famous sportsperson? yielded Rooney straightaway, and with a little help from his friends, he came up with shoulder blade as the common name for the scapula bone. But when asked for the names of the three wise men in western folklore, his tongue got the better of him. After a great inner struggle, he came out with Balthasar, Caspar and Myrrh. No one had thought to help him. Broca’s aphasia perhaps, Sofia thought privately, although he seemed too fluent for that. He knew what he’d done straightaway, clasping his face and thumping a frustrated fist into his thigh, and acknowledged defeat with a chivalrous bow as he dragged his stool back into the crowd.
It was the turn of the Spangles again.
‘What is the capital of Sicily?
‘Whose album X was a hit in 2014?
‘The scientific name for which well-known extinct creature means “rapid thief” when translated?’
Sofia looked around helplessly. Luckily, Kay had been to Palermo on holiday. Bea was a Sheeran fan. For the third question, Sofia cast her mind back to Tim’s bedroom. Extinct creatures, in the form of dinosaurs, were very much his thing. It had to be one of them. Her brain clicked through the possibilities. Rapid. Speedy. Speed. Velocity. Velociraptor.
It shot out of her mouth, and she smiled, surprised at herself. They’d done it. She’d done it. Saved face in front of everyone. And now it was just her and him. The tiebreak. No conferring.
‘Hugo! Hugo! You go! Hugo!’
‘Sofia! Sofia! Sophea! Sphere!’
The chants began, mutating in a marinade of cider, beer and wine. Then the whole pub was swaying, leering, cheering. Bawling Christmas hit lines with amiable hooliganism. The killer question might be on anything at all, lurking in the ice bucket for several weeks gone by. The barman tinkled the glass and raised his fist to quiet the din.
‘OK, ladies and gents, this is it. For the ultimate prize – a seventy-pound jackpot and free tickets to our Christmas Draw – the tiebreak question is…’ He paused for an uncomfortably lengthy stretch of time, copying the format of a thousand talent shows. There was some artificial coughing and a whistle at the back. Then he shook the folded paper and carefully read it out.
‘Retrograde, infantile and anterograde are all forms of what?’
Hugo paused for a second. Not his area, not at all, but his scientific life was simple and clear cut. If a person knew the answer, he came right out with it.
‘Oh, amnesia,’ he said brightly, seeing it just like that.
She should have found it funny, forgetting about memory, failing a question on her specialist subject, but she felt as if he’d shot her with a ray gun or punched her in the chest. He didn’t see, didn’t feel the stab of instantaneous deflation, as her ego imploded into total nothingness.
‘Amnesia it is, Meerkats!’ confirmed the barman in his best showman voice. ‘One seventy-pound jackpot, my good man.’ He handed over the envelope. ‘If I could just get your scribble here to show it’s been received.’ The Meerkats went wild as the Tannoy sang “Merry Christmas Everybody”. With more space and sobriety, they’d have hoisted their mascot above their heads and paraded him around. Hugo handed them the money. He’d had his pint of Speckled Hen.
Annie, Bea and Kay were shocked. This wasn’t the ending they’d expected when they started out tonight. Sofia smiled bitterly and gulped saliva over the molten barrier rising in her throat. Her mouth crumpled like a child’s into an upside-down “u”. Then she brushed the sparkling crown down from her head and ran into the ladies’, to hide her face and splash away her hot and angry tears.