“You know there’s nothing very clever about living with a hernia,” says Bill gallantly, and Jim chimes in, “But operations used to be painful, took months, were often worse than useless.”
“No more!” says Bill triumphantly. “And about time! Nowadays you can walk into the Universal Hernia Centre and walk out twenty minutes later with a brand new, state-of-the-art hernia and a life-long permanent kidney guarantee, and it won’t cost you a — ”
Linda screams. Jim clutches his hair. Bill, inspired, shouts, “I’ve got it! Science! Pure science. E equals MC squared. Poor Albert Einstein.”
“Yes,” says Jim, grinning with relief. “He never could get his head around quantum physics. God doesn’t play dice, he said.”
Bill, chuckling, says, “Remember what Max Planck told him: Don’t tell God not to play games.”
“Was that not Niels Bohr?” asks Linda, who has resumed knitting.
“One or tother,” says Jim. “Einstein never understood that a unified field equation would only be possible in a steady-state universe that would be undistinguishable from an infinite Parmenidean solid.”
“Schopenhauer showed how impossible that was.”
“He did! He did! He did!” says Jim, and the two men are laughing happily when interrupted by Do You Ken John Peel?. With an apologetic shrug Bill tells the phone, “Hello?… Okay… Okay, the demonstrators have you spread-eagled naked and facedown on a tabletop with a funnel stuck up your arse. And?… They are going to pour melted lead down it unless?…” (his voice registers incredulity) “… Unless the government promises to nationalise their factory and reopen it? Why should the government do that?… You’re Gordon Brown’s nephew? What’s that got to do with it? Family loyalty is as dead as Socialism and the brotherhood of man. You’ve got yourself into a mess and there’s nothing I can do to help.” He switches off the phone and asks, “You were saying?”
“Schopenhauer showed how the definition of will as effect, not cause, depended on consciousness itself — a reductio ad absurdum that would reduce the Gods themselves to helpless laughter. No wonder Nietzsche and Wagner loved Schopenhauer. I think Bruckner did too. In a peaceful wood, on a summer afternoon, one’s mood is exactly conveyed by the almost inaudible vibration that opens his fourth symphony.”
Bill nods, says, “Yes, the unity of art and science, hand and eye, is predicated by the past which is our only inevitability. did you know that Phoebe Traquair — evening star of the arts and crafts movement — married a marine palaeontologist who specialised in the asymmetry of flatfish?”
Flinging down her knitting again Linda announces, “I can take no more of this pretentious shit,” and folds her arms to prove it. Jim jumps to his feet points an angry forefinger and tells her, “O yes it’s easy to sit at one side knitting and nagging, nagging and knitting. I hate pretentious shit as you do but I loathe something else even more — that ghastly, brain-destroying silence in which people sit uselessly hating each other. Well, I give up. I’m tired of being the friendly host. I’m leaving Bill entirely to you.”
Jim walks to the window and looks out, hands in pockets. Bill, not at all embarrassed, looks at Linda who smiles pleasantly back, sit beside him on the sofa and asks, “What brings you to this neck of the woods, Bill?”
He slaps his knee and says, “Ah, now you’ve got me really started. From now on you won’t get a word in edgeways. I’ve been sent north by the S.L.I.C.Q.E. because — ”
“Exactly what is the S.L.I.C.Q.E.?”
“Scottish Lice and Insect Corporate Quango Enterprises, which want me to — ”
“Insects are disgusting,” she tells him firmly.
“They are, they are, but from an industrial point of view midges — ”
“The female flesh fly Sarcophoga Carraris,” she says more firmly still, “lays young larvae in the fresh or decomposing flesh of almost any animal. Or in manure!”
“I know,” says Bill patiently, “but why does a salmon as big as this…” (he spreads his hands wide apart) “… leap out of a river to swallow a wee toaty midge as big as this?” and he not quite touches the tip of his thumb with the tip of the index finger.
And at that moment his phone plays Do You Ken John Peel?.
“Excuse me,” says Bill bringing it out, but Linda grasps the wrist of the hand holding the phone and says firmly, “No gentleman should let a telephone interrupt a conversation with a lady. Switch that off.”
Jim turns from the window and stares, amazed by an aspect of his wife new to him. Do You Ken John Peel? rings out again. Bill is too gentlemanly to wrench his wrist from Linda’s grasp by force but the sound drives him frantic.
“I must answer it!” he cries. “If it’s my boss I’ll be sacked if I don’t answer! I have to be on call day and night! Day and night!”
“Is it your boss?” she demands. “Won’t the phone tell you?”
“I don’t know!” he exclaims. “Nowadays anyone who is computer literate can hack into my phone and make it say they’re my boss. I’m bombarded by calls from an ex-employee I picked up in a Thailand children’s brothel. I chucked her out a fortnight ago and now she rings me almost hourly! My life is a nightmare!”
The phone plays Do You Ken John Peel as he begs through tears, “Please let me answer. I’m drinking myself to death.” “With water?” she asks scornfully.
“Water can kill faster than alcohol. Please, please Linda — release me.”
“Only if you switch it off, Bill. It’s probably only strikers who want you to hear your colleague screaming while they pour molten lead into his bum.”
“All right,” says Bill, is released, and switches off the phone muttering, “I only pray to God that you’re right.”
“My my, Bill, what a full life you have!” says Jim, coming over and sitting down with them again. “Tell me, why do great big salmon leap out of rivers to swallow toaty wee midges?”
“Because of their adrenalin!” Bill triumphantly explains. “Every wee midge is a molecule of pure protein fuelled by an atom of adrenalin. That’s why midges are able to stot up and down all day above rivers, lochs, cesspools, stanks and puddles in your back garden.”
Linda tells them stonily, “Cephenorima Auribarbos is a rather flat parasitic fly whose shape and claws allow it to move quickly, crab-wise, across the soft hairy surfaces of ponies and suck their blood. The female gives birth to full-grown larvae, which at once pupate.”
“Very true, Linda,” says Bill, “but what would you have if all the midges infesting the Highlands and Islands were squeezed together into one huge dripping block?”
“What would she have?” asks Jim, fascinated.
“She would have a lump half the size of Ben Lomond and containing enough adrenalin to start a Scottish subsidiary of International Pharmaceuticals, while leaving another half mountain of protein to be sliced and marketed locally as midgieburgers. The working class cannot afford to buy fish suppers nowadays; Scottish beef and venison are for export only, so midgieburgers are going to become Britain’s fastest new food — our economy will depend upon it. And Scotland is in luck. Global warming is turning the Western Isles into the new Caribbean, so S.L.I.C.Q.E. is using lottery funds to shunt pension-less old age pensioners, and the unemployed, and the disabled, and criminals doing community service, into Highland and Island nudist camps where they do nothing but sunbathe and let S.L.I.C.Q.E. cull the midges they attract.”