THE PLOT – JUST LIKE THAT
I misunderstood what he said, when Tommy Cooper said it. But then he added: “There were several traitors in England throughout its history, but have you heard of the purple one?”
I shook my head. In some history books, however, I knew there were theories about various traitors – like Lord Haw Haw, and Guy Fawkes, or Lord Lucan or John Stonehouse, or Blunt, Burgess & Maclean, even slapstick comedians like Charlie Drake.
Some of the more dangerous ones were given colours to keep their identities safe, a bit like M, Q and Nadine’s Dr No in the James Bond annals . My understanding of the Traitor known as Purple was a comedian like Charlie Drake, Jasper Carrott, Dave King, or even Sid James. To make us laugh so much did seem pretty treacherous bearing in mind what life was really like!
You see, unbeknownst to Tommy Cooper who mentioned it, I had myself made a study of all the colour traitors. In fact, I became the leading expert – and I had tipped the imagecorner of each page in a book I kept about these traitors, tipped them with different colours as a way of coding – so that one day they would be revealed to someone not as clever as me. In fact revealed to the Purple Traitor himself, clever enough to fathom my colour codes but stupid enough to betray himself by showing that he could fathom these codes. A clever ruse on my part, eh?
I left the book on the arm of my settee when I expected Tommy Cooper to come round again, whom I had worked out as being the Purple Traitor. Arthur Askey had nothing on him.
I invited him into the lounge and asked whether he would like a cocktail. He nodded.
“Green Safecrackle or Purple Hazard?” I asked.
Of course, he opted for the first one, so I now definitely knew who he was. A double bluff. Even a quadruple one. Hardly a triple.
Then I left the room to make the chosen cocktail. But I left a spy-crack between the doorframe and the door to watch him leaf through my colour-coded book. He seemed to study the strange patterns that the words made, while triangulating one of the imageacrostics with his finger. He naturally ended up on the page I expected him to be on, i.e. the one you would least expect him to be on if he was the Purple Traitor.
I plunked the purple umbrellas into the tall glass and re-entered the room with it.
“That’s the way to do it,” he said with sufficient breathiness. And he swallowed it in one gulp. Umbrellas and all.
“Just like that!” I replied with a studied grin, and I smartly placed the handcuffs on MYSELF as the perpetrator.
***
It is sometimes a precariously foolhardy task for you to copy and paste large amounts of text with a finger, in tactile contiguity with a screen, dragging itself across the surface of a page without upsetting ‘the apple cart of what’s begun needing to be finished’ alongside an unfaltering steadiness of purpose, before releasing the store of words upon another page without, in the interim, losing it all into a void where words could be lost forever or even vacuumed up in other dimensions by creators of alternate worlds. But the greatest slip between cup and lip that stems from this process of dragging the finger is dragging the very heart out of the text, and when it is thought to be successfully released as a paste from the past you see the pulsing heart slipping, from top to bottom, through the fingers of the text and then falling off the edge of the page into areas where no screen dares to go and eaten by the ghosts of starving copy cats that have gathered at your feet by the scent of your genius. Apologies to real cats
***
I have long enjoyed chance and coincidence, and random luck. But these times have been ones of frustration; in fact, that particular f word has been building in strength over a longer period, just as the word itself is longer than the more usual f word everyone seems to use these days, even those you don’t expect to do so especially when their luck runs out….
I was interrupted in writing the above essay upon modern mœurs, by the arrival of my own version of starfruit on nothing as carried by nobody, making this difficult to make a meaning relevant to anybody reading this. I turned to my assistant who usually kept things away from me while I tried to concentrate on today’s subject in hand, and I watched gradually my already written words pulling back along their staves like music notes cringing at what was approaching from the right hand side as symbols of illicit tone and key. To the extent of my utter frustration at such a turn of events, until I managed to turn it around again. My assistant whispered her own pet expletive under her breath, as if readying herself for something beyond the range of hearing as well as smell and sight. Giving me a clue towards rescuing what I had already written. Taste and touch were often a last resort. What happened next was the resumption of my essay as I diverted into more arcane Games of Fate and Frustration with no dice shakes and plenty of dying snakes upon collapsing ladders. The fell lottery of postal codes. The bingo blight of life’s unnumbered mischances. The carambola of catastrophe and chaos. Luck running back in time to clinch the final rhyme.
***
Time to emote. Time to rethink things. To remember that longer arms meant bigger elbows, and even bigger heads to match. There was not a thing that could be done about it inside such a large contraption that had no outside to it. One of them grabbed the remote, remembering at the last moment that was what it was. The remote what? asked the other, who had forgotten the child left behind. Not a single thing that would change things. The need to re-shorten and to re-earth. Slowly, by half of a half of a half of a half forever, the outer contraption felt as if it moved on tracks that would not take traction. Circling a moat with no drawbridge and no boat to cross it. To be taken across entailed more than just a strength of mind over matter. It simply took a look at each other to reshape whatever had trapped them here by carvery as well as welding. Elbow empowering while arm twisting and head banging to force the mind’s motion to be recruited in the same battle of moving onward through more than just a metal machine with a resistant track’s trickery of obdurate flesh. The thing that was the same thing. The only thing to rethink. Until they heard the child’s first baby cry.
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