In Competition No. 2591 you were invited to submit an extract from either a gripping thriller or a bodice-ripping romance containing half a dozen pieces of inconsequential information.
Your entries not only made me laugh out loud but also armed me with a mine of useless information with which to bring conversations to a grinding halt should the need arise. I have learnt, for example, that it takes four hours to hard-boil an ostrich egg; that Oxford Circus Tube station has 14 escalators; and that Georges Simenon required sexual intercourse thrice daily.
Commendations to Marion Shore, Michael Limb, Steve Baldock and Rosemary Fisher, but top dog this week is Basil Ransome-Davies, who bags the bonus fiver. The other winners, printed below, get £25 each.
The night bus was a 43 — the sum of three prime numbers — and Ryker rode it to the ferry terminal. Night hid the huge cumulonimbus with their mixture of water droplets and ice crystals, atypical for low cloud. In the shadowy terminal building a notice read ‘service suspended due to a technical problem’. Ryker lit a tab and grimaced; an adverbial construction required ‘owing to’. What it meant was he had two hours to get across the Bay, with no transport. Meanwhile, they had Angela… The bar was still open so he ordered a whisky and emptied his glass at once except for the unavoidable residue clinging to it through surface tension. He was on the same latitude as Rome, though not infallible like the Pope (on matters of faith and morals alone, however). He felt sick with fear, or perhaps it was the nausea associated with viral labyrinthitis.
Basil Ransome-Davies
A bullet thudded into the cliff barely a sawyer’s ell above my head. No ricochet, no splinters. The rock was cretaceous, shock-absorbent for 75 million years. Even so, I guessed it was time to abseil into cover. I swung to rest beside a clump of Devil’s Campion. Tenacious stuff, but odd to find it so far north. Climate change, maybe. I belayed myself to it moments before the free rope shuddered as a second bullet hit it. It didn’t sever. The Javanese jute in Mallory triple-twist is proof against most things. Still, I had the wit to scream like someone hurled into a headlong plunge. I mimicked the diminuendo Olivier used in his 1970 Lear. Gratifyingly, the shooting stopped. But I knew the pursuit wasn’t over. Camousin’s grandfather had been a spahi. And the word spahis use for relent is the one they use for die.
W.J. Webster
Rodney’s hands tugged the hem of Lady Olga’s silk briefs. Silkworms had to be boiled to make them, he knew, but did it matter? Right now it seemed trivial, though not in the original sense of a three-way junction. There was only one junction he was interested in. When he found it she yelped, ‘Gadzooks!’ He ignored the archaic allusion to the nails of Christ’s cross and concentrated on sheathing himself, amused to recall that what was a ‘French letter’ to the English became in French an ‘English hood’. By now Lady Olga was moaning crescendo — not yet climactic, as many thought, but mounting in volume — and the whiteness of her threshing body excited him more than ever. As their bodies conjoined in an ecstasy of mutual passion, he was close enough to see the silicone button that closed her perforated septum, a classic symptom of cocaine abuse.
G.M. Davis
He had waited four hours — just long enough to hard-boil an ostrich egg — when the target came into sight, seemingly oblivious. Hooray, thought Gant — he liked Slavic curses, and Hu-raj! meant ‘To Paradise!’ But Gant didn’t care where Pfister’s soul wound up, as long as the body was six feet under. Pfister was mean as a cockroach. And Gant, unlike the superstitious Vietnamese, didn’t mind killing cockroaches. He would wait until he had a bead on Pfister’s head. No fusillade — he had a colleague who preferred 44 shots, like the number of times both cedar and fig are mentioned in the Bible, but Gant was a poplar man. Just once; no more. ‘Too conspicuous. You’d make a poor film extra,’ whispered Pfister in Gant’s ear. ‘Like Fidel Castro at the poolside in Easy To Wed.’ Gant’s terror grew like giant kelp (half a metre daily). He hardly heard the explosion.
Bill Greenwell
His dark eyes glowered fiercely as those of an arctic wolf, that wild creature of the Canadian tundra, which preys mostly on Caribou, but sometimes also on Arctic hares, ptarmigan and lemmings, as well as other smaller animals. ‘A lemming, that’s me,’ she whispered to herself, un-aware that the popular conception of these subniveal creatures as deliberately suicidal is inaccurate. ‘I told you,’ he growled. ‘It is impossible. You should never have followed me here.’ ‘I didn’t follow you,’ she lied haltingly. ‘I came here to research Thomas Hardy,’ she added, since The Hand of Ethelberta is set partly in Bournemouth. Within her, desire seethed like basaltic lava, a variety typified by its ferromagnesian content, and liable to erupt at temperatures in excess of 950°C. He turned away, and with feigned nonchalance picked up a copy of The Spectator, a magazine of general interest founded in 1828.
George Simmers
It was twilight — civil twilight, when the sun’s centre is six degrees below the horizon, not the twelve degrees below of nautical twilight. I stood in the alley beside the jeweller’s shop, watching the pub, recalling that the patron saint of jewellers was Eloi, a sixth-century Bishop of Noyon. Then, from the side door of the Crown (the fifth commonest pub name in London in 1864), a figure emerged. Trench coat and fedora. I knew the hat was named after Victorien Sardou’s 1882 play. And it was a pound to a penny (or a ngultrum to a chetrum, if I’d been in Bhutan) I knew who was wearing it. It was curtains. Halfway down the alley the bullet hit me in the shoulder. Blood started to flow — group A, the same as the majority of cats in the USA. Another of the nine lives gone.
Nicholas Hodgson
No. 2594: Short story
You are invited to submit a short story
(150 words maximum) in which the first line is, ‘It was the wrong number that started it…’ and the final line is ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise.’ Entries to ‘Competition 2594’ by 30 April or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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