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‘Jesus, Mum …!’ Valentine hoarsely chastises her, starting to withdraw her head from under the coverlet, but before she can manage it, her mother – possibly alerted to her daughter’s clandestine activities by the sound of the falling saint – has turned and propelled herself – ‘NOOOOOOOOO!’ – (a howling, rotating, silken-apricot swastika), back on to the bed again.
Valentine gasps as her mother’s knee crashes into her cheek (although this sharp expostulation is pretty much obliterated by:
a) the cotton coverlet
b) the extraordinary racket her mother is making
c) the traumatized squeal of the bedsprings).
She eventually manages to extract herself and collapses, backwards, on to the carpet.
‘Ow!’ she groans, feeling blindly for her nose. ‘I think you might’ve … Woah!’
Her normal vision is briefly punctuated by a smattering of flashing, day-glo asterisks.
‘NO BLOOD ON MY NEW CARPET!’ her mother bellows.
‘Eh?!’
Valentine feels a sudden, inexplicable surfeit of warm liquid on her upper lip. She throws back her head, pinches the bridge of her nose and gesticulates, wildly, towards a nearby box of tissues. Her mother (unusually obliging) grabs a clumsy handful and shoves them, wordlessly, into her outstretched palm.
‘Didn’t you see me?’ Valentine demands, applying all the tissues to her face, en masse.
‘See you?’ her mother clucks. ‘Where?’
‘Where?!’ Valentine honks at the ceiling, through a mouthful of paper. ‘Under the coverlet! In the bed!’
Shocked pause.
‘You were in the bed?’
Her mother affects surprise.
‘Of course I was in the bed!’ Valentine squawks (through her mask of tissue). ‘You just jumped on me! You just landed on me! You just kicked me square in the face!’
‘Did I?’
Her mother seems astonished by this news.
‘Yes!’
Valentine straightens her head and stares at her, indignant.
‘Yes!’ she repeats, removing the tissues. ‘You did!’
‘Oh.’
Pause.
‘Well what the hell did you expect?’ her mother rapidly changes tack. ‘You were crawling around under there like some huge maggot! I panicked! I was terrified!’
‘But that’s hardly –’ Valentine starts off.
‘I mean you wake me up in the middle of the night,’ her mother interrupts her, counting off Valentine’s offences on to her fingers, ‘yell at me, accuse me of stealing the stupid remote …’
‘I never yelled at you!’ Valentine’s deeply offended. ‘I would never –’
‘Then you lure one of your stinking cats into the room.’ Her mother points to the door, dramatically.
‘I didn’t lure the cat anywhere!’ Valentine is gently feeling her nose for any evidence of a bump. ‘The cat simply …’
She shakes her head, frustrated. ‘The point is …’
‘You know I don’t like those cats in my room!’ her mother hollers, almost hysterical. ‘You know how much I loathe them! Petits cons! Les chats sont venus du diable pour me tourmenter! Tu es venue du diable pour me tourmenter! Vraiment!’
Valentine reapplies the tissues to her face again. After a few seconds she removes them and subjects them to a close inspection. The sudden flow of blood appears to have abated. She wiggles her nose and then sniffs, experimentally.
‘I’m very sorry about the cat,’ she finally volunteers, glancing up, ‘it just followed me in here out of habit, I suppose.’
‘You know how much I hate them!’ her mother hisses.
‘Of course,’ Valentine acknowledges, ‘it’s just …’ She hesitates, plainly conflicted. ‘D’you remember that conversation we had the other day about all the various adjustments we’ve been making ever since …’ She pauses, delicately. Her mother simply grimaces.
‘Well, one of the adjustments I obviously need to make,’ Valentine doggedly continues, ‘is to understand that your feelings have changed about the cats, that you’re not –’
‘I HATE THOSE BLESSED CATS!’ her mother yells.
‘I hear you.’
Valentine dabs at her nose again. ‘Although there was a time,’ she murmurs, smiling nostalgically, ‘when you used to actively encourage them into this room. You used to love having them in bed. You used to lie there with them draped all over you. In fact you and Dad were constantly at loggerheads about it …’
‘I don’t care! ’ her mother growls. ‘That was her. C’est hors de propos à ce moment! ’
‘Yes,’ Valentine sighs, standing up. She glances around the room and spots the fallen saint lying in a muddy patch of moonlight on the carpet. She grabs it and returns it to its original place on the windowsill, then cautiously picks her way around the foot of the bed, preparing to make her exit.
On her way out, she bumps into a wastepaper basket and almost upends it. She tuts, catches it before it tips, sets it straight, then impulsively pushes an exploratory hand inside it. Her idly swirling fingers soon make contact with something small, rectangular and plastic.
She calmly retrieves this mysterious object and holds it aloft, balefully, like a down-at-heel court official tiredly displaying an especially incriminating piece of criminal evidence to judge and jury.
‘Huh?’
Ransom’s virile tattoo slows down to a gentle pitter-pat.
‘I know who you are,’ Jen repeats (struggling to repress a grin), ‘I’m just pretending that I don’t to wind Eugene up.’
‘Eugene?’
Ransom’s tattoo stops.
‘Eugene. Gene. The barman. I love taking the mick out of him when someone famous comes in. It’s just this sick little game we like to play …’ She pauses, thoughtfully. ‘Or this sick, little game I like to play’ – she chuckles, naughtily – ‘kind of at Gene’s expense.’
Ransom stares at Jen, blankly, and then the penny suddenly drops. ‘Oh wow …’ he murmurs, instinctively withdrawing his fingers into his fists. ‘Oh shit.’
‘I mean don’t get me wrong,’ Jen chunters on, oblivious, ‘I love Eugene to bits, but he’s just so infuriatingly laid back’ – she rolls her eyes, riled – ‘and gentle and polite and decent, that I can never quite resist …’
She glances over at the golfer as she speaks, registers his stricken expression and then pulls herself up short. ‘Oh heck,’ she mutters, shocked. ‘Didn’t you realize? But I made it so obvious! I mean all the stuff about … about tennis and leeches and … and Norfolk. God. I thought I was telegraphing it from the rooftops!’
Long pause.
‘Oh, yeah. Yeah.’ Ransom flaps his hand at her, airily (although both cheeks – by sharp contrast – are now flushing a deep crimson). ‘Of course I realized! Don’t be ridiculous!’
‘Really?’
Jen isn’t convinced.
‘Of course I fuckin’ realized!’ Ransom snaps, almost belligerent.
Jen grabs his empty beer bottle, tosses it into a crate behind the counter and then fetches him a replacement (flipping off the lid by hitting it, flamboyantly, against the edge of the bar top).
‘Jesus!’ Ransom is leaning back on his stool, meanwhile, a light patina of moisture forming on his upper lip. ‘Jesus!’ he repeats, glancing anxiously over his shoulder, towards the kitchens.
‘Here.’
Jen hands him the fresh beer.
‘Cheers.’ The golfer snatches it from her and affixes it, hungrily, to his lips. Jen watches him, speculatively, as he drinks.
‘FUUUCK!’ he gasps, finally slamming down the empty bottle, with an exaggerated flourish. ‘What a gull, eh?’
‘Pardon?’
‘What a sucker!’
Jen looks baffled.
‘A gull – a stooge – a patsy!’ Ransom expands.
Jen still looks baffled.
‘Eugene. Gene. Your barman. What a gull! What a royal fuckin’ doofus!’
Ransom wipes his mouth with the palm of his hand and then burps, majestically. ‘That poor fucker was totally duped back there!’
‘You reckon?’ Jen’s understandably sceptical.
‘Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely …’ Ransom chuckles, vindictively. ‘He didn’t have the first friggin’ clue.’
‘I dunno.’ Jen’s still not buying it. ‘Gene’s a whole lot smarter than you think. Could just be one of those double-bluff scenarios …’
But Ransom’s not listening. His eyes de-focus for a second, and then, ‘My God!’ he erupts. ‘What a performance! You were completely friggin’ nuts back there! You were truly demented!’
Jen merely smiles.
‘And the stuff about selfish sports was a fuckin’ master stroke!’ Ransom continues. ‘It was brilliant! Insane! How the hell’d you just spontaneously come up with all that shit?’
‘I’m a genius.’ Jen shrugs.
‘Ha!’ Ransom grins at her, grotesquely, like an overheating bull terrier in dire need of water.
‘No joke,’ Jen says, firmly, ‘I am a genius. I have an IQ of 210 …’
‘Pull the other one!’
Ransom kicks out his foot. ‘It’s got bells on!’
‘… which is apparently the exact-same score as that scientist guy,’ Jen elaborates.
‘Who? Einstein?’ Ransom quips.
Jen thinks hard for a moment. ‘Stephen Hoskins …? Hokings? Hawkwing?’
Pause.
‘Hawking?’ Ransom suggests.
‘The one who wrote that book about … uh …’
‘Time travel. A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking.’
‘Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Hawkwing. We have the same –’
‘Haw-king,’ Ransom interrupts.
‘Pardon?’
‘Haw-king. You keep saying Hawk-wing, but it’s actually …’
‘I’m crap with names,’ Jen sighs. ‘People automatically assume that I’ll have this amazing memory just because I’m super-brainy, but I don’t. My short-term memory is completely shot. I’m not “clever” at all – at least not in any practical sense of the word. I’m intellectual, yes – hyper-intellectual, even – but I’m definitely not clever. The embarrassing truth about intellectuals is that we can be amazingly dense sometimes. And clumsy. And insensitive. And really, really tactless. And incredibly forgetful,’ she sighs. ‘It just goes with the territory. Remember Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind?’
‘I saw it on a plane,’ the golfer murmurs, eyeing her, suspiciously, ‘twice. But I fell asleep both times.’
‘Because our brains are generally operating at such a high level,’ Jen expands, ‘that we simply don’t have the space up there for all these reams and reams of more conventional data …’
The golfer gazes at her, perplexed, noting, as he does so, a slight, pinkened area – almost a gentle chapping – on her upper lip. This idle observation sends a frisson of excitement from his inside knee to his thigh.
‘… data relating to, say – I dunno – table manners,’ Jen rambles on, ‘or road safety, or basic personal hygiene. Take me, for example,’ she expands, ‘I actually started reading Aristotle when I was five – in the original Greek. By seven I’d discovered that a particular chemical component in bananas advances the ripening processes in other fruits. A tiny fact, something people just take for granted nowadays. But it was a huge revelation at the time – had a massive impact on the wine and fruit export industries …’ She shrugs. ‘I got my English language GCSE when I was eight, maths A-level when I was nine. But I was actually twelve years of age before I was successfully toilet-trained.’
‘Wuh?!’
