It really was me but could it really be him? Yes, it seemed.
We went for coffee the next day in a little café on the Perth Road. Bob was now a Modern Studies teacher at the Morgan Academy. Two children, divorced, a new girlfriend — this latter said shyly. Middle-aged, middling happy, a droop to the shoulders. ‘What more is there to say?’ Bob shrugged. ‘Drink too much, smoke too much, try not to think too much,’ he laughed.
We chatted about Kevin — for Kevin Riley is now, of course, the second most famous writer of fantasy in Britain. His latest book, The Balniddrian Conspiracy — the most recent in the seemingly endless Chronicles of Edrakonia — was at the top of the paperback bestseller list.
I told Bob how once, browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Suffolk, I discovered a long out of print book entitled The Invasion of the Tara-Zanthians which was indeed about a group of alien invaders who introduce a currency based on the domestic cat and dog. It had not been written by ‘The Boy With No Name’ but by someone called ‘Colin Hardy’. So that was one mystery cleared up.
We talked, too, of Janice Rand, who dropped out of university and became a geriatric nurse. Three years later she was convicted of murdering her charges (she was ‘sending them home to God’, her barrister said) and sent to a high-security mental hospital. It was Chick who, after doggedly pursuing her all that time on behalf of poor Aunt Senga’s relatives, managed to secure filmed evidence that convicted her.
I visited Ferdinand in prison once or twice but he seemed to have a rather two-dimensional character and I gave up on him after a while. He disappeared a few years ago and Maisie — now a maths lecturer in Cambridge — thinks that he might have been killed over a drug deal that went wrong.
As for the yellow dog, I have no idea what happened to him but I like to imagine him living on, even if only in a book somewhere.
So that’s it.
Bob had to go — he was meeting Robin, now a social worker, for a drink in the Tay Bridge Bar. I declined his offer to join them.
I wondered if Bob’s life would have turned out differently if I hadn’t stolen the meaning of life from him.
Bob discovered the meaning of life one grey day shortly before this story began. When Bob experienced his epiphany he was lying on the gritty carpet, mindlessly practising the Vulcan death grip on Shug. Shug persevered manfully with rolling a joint on the cover of Bob’s Electric Ladyland album. On the television, which no-one was watching, there was news footage of a faraway country that we knew nothing about being bombed.
Bob changed the television channel. ‘Dr Who,’ he explained to Shug, ‘the second episode of “ The Curse of Peladon ”. The Ice Warriors are in it, they’re at this alien gathering thing . . .’ I left the room for a minute and when I came back I found the pair of them in the grip of a strange kind of metaphysical hysteria, flopping around on the carpet like newly caught fish.
‘Wow,’ Bob kept repeating, ‘the meaning of life, that’s like . . . big stuff.’
‘The meaning of Liff,’ Shug said with a grandiose gesture that knocked his tin of tobacco flying across the room.
Unfortunately, Bob and Shug were too wasted to elucidate their momentous findings to me. Bob had become distracted by a pan sitting in the middle of the carpet. The pan contained the remains of a spaghetti Bolognese which, in Bob’s acid-etched brain, had just turned into a pit of writhing snakes. By the time he had recovered from this delusion and stopped screaming, both he and Shug had forgotten their great, arcane secret.
‘Arse,’ Bob said and struggled to his feet to wander helplessly around the room, looking in drawers and under pillows as if the meaning of life was part of the stuff of the material world.
Luckily, at that moment, he tripped over his bootlace and the meaning of life was restored to him. Distressed at finding how easy it was to forget something so important, Bob and Shug spent some time discussing how they could preserve it for posterity. Eventually, I took pity on them and suggested they write it down.
‘Write it down!’ Bob shouted, gripping Shug’s arm to stay upright as he was in danger of falling over from excitement. They both thought that writing it down was a brilliant idea, almost as brilliant as the meaning of life itself, and, after much searching, Bob found a scrap of ruled paper and wrote, although with some difficulty, because every time he wrote a letter it turned into a little cartoon stick-man and ran away. Finally, he managed to tame the little men into a semblance of literacy and after much discussion it was decided to place this precious piece of paper in an envelope in the drawer of the living-room sideboard.
Once the meaning of life was safe, Shug and Bob drank a toast to it, in cans of Tennent’s lager, the ones with the pictures of girls on them — Tracy was Bob’s favourite.
‘Here’s to us, then,’ Shug said with an effort. ‘Wha’s like us?’
Rejecting the appropriate answer — ‘Gey few and they’re a’ deid’ — Bob struggled for his own benediction. He furrowed his brow, he thought hard and visibly and finally declared, with great solemnity, ‘Live long and prosper.’
I found the envelope a few days later when I was looking for my matriculation card. I have kept the piece of paper — it sits now in the drawer of my own sideboard in my Breton home — and I look at it occasionally just to remind myself what the meaning of life really is. This is what Bob had written. Guard it well for it is the meaning of life:
‘When you stand on the table you can touch
the ceiling.’
The Hand of Fate
by
Effie Andrews
Originally published twenty-six years ago, we are pleased to be issuing this special edition of Effie Andrews’ very first ‘Madame Astarti’ novel, The Hand of Fate, to coincide with a major new television adaptation of the series.
What the critics say about Effie Andrews:
‘A Miss Marple for the Millennium’ Woman’s Realm
‘She improves a little with every book’ Yorkshire Post
‘Fascinating’ Whitby Gazette
Other ‘Madame Astarti’ novels include:
The Wheel of Fortune
Mermaids Ahoy!
The Finger of Fate
And the prize-winning Pick a Card, Any Card
Effie Andrews was born in Scotland in 1951. She now lives in France.
In this work of fiction, the characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or they are used entirely fictionally.
Copyright © Effie Andrews 1974
Chapter One
Lady Luck
A lone fisherman up early looking for sea trout found the first body. The fisherman was thinking what a beautiful day it was going to be. The pinkgold rays of a cinematic dawn were gleaming on the dark metallic surface of the sea when he netted the unwanted catch on his little boat, the Lucky Lady. He was not a man given to superstition and yet in the semi-dark he thought he saw silver scales and seaweed hair and believed for one wild, terrible moment that he had caught a mermaid. When he hooked her and pulled her towards the boat, however, he saw it was no mermaid but the bloated body of a woman, draped in what remained of a silver-lamé evening dress. Seaweed was entangled in long hair which looked dark, but by the time he had got her to shore was already drying to a bleached-out blond.
He grabbed hold of her hand to help her on board the Lucky Lady but her skin peeled off her arm like a long satin glove. The fisherman had to leave her in the water a little longer while he retched over the side of his boat. She drifted lazily off, she was in no hurry, she had been dead five days now and was getting used to her watery element. She was already beginning to suffer a sea-change, her bones were not yet coral but her one remaining eye was an opaque pearl and flat strands of seaweed, crimped at the edges like ribbons, adorned her long tendrils of hair. A whole flotilla of tiny, greedy sea-creatures had seen the early-morning mermaid into safe harbour.