In Competition No. 2594 you were invited to submit a short story beginning ‘It was the wrong number that started it…’ and ending ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise.’ In case you were wondering, the first line is the opening of City of Glass by Paul Auster and the final one is the conclusion to Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. Both rank in the American Book Review’s top hundred first/last lines of novels.
The comp generated a gratifyingly weighty postbag in which transposed digits, con artists and murderous spouses featured strongly. I liked Keith Norman’s snapshot of salad rage, and was equally impressed by Sid Field, Rosemary Fisher and Eric Grunwald.
The winners are printed below and are rewarded with £25 each. The extra fiver goes to John Samson.
It was the wrong number that started it. Bless those crossword compilers. Nothing to do with telephones. ‘Number’ meant that jab done by dentists. Solution was ‘cocaine’. I was clueless. She had been right. In this correct light, May’s eyes positively glistened. Kinsey should have researched the value of cryptic clue-solving as foreplay. Before long, we two were down and across. That’s how the Acrostic of Ruislip began. We recruited similar-worded people; those prepared to put the sin into synonyms. Anagram nights were especially popular; rearranging wives and husbands into rhyming couplets. Simile-only sessions were like fancying like. The image-conscious attended our Wit Watchers evenings and several puns were shed. Inhibitions were dropped along with typographical case. As I said in a thank-you letter to the host of an alliterative saucy spouse-swapping soirée, ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise’.
John Samson
‘It was the wrong number that started it, that Dardanelles shambles. We’d sent shamefully too few men and of course the Turks beat us off. The only good thing about the disaster was our retreat — not a man was lost.’ Monty had been listening intently and moved the salt cellar towards Winston. ‘Of course we won’t repeat that mistake — here are the Canadians.’ Winston sipped his brandy, smiled and moved the ketchup. ‘And the bloody Yanks.’ Before long various dishes were moved around the table, and everyone was laughing, as though they were children in a children’s game. Winston eyed the mayonnaise. The Poles with their passion could be moved into the thick of it — from North Africa to Southern Italy. The following day he penned a brief note to Monty and smiled as he concluded: P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise.
Frank McDonald
It was the wrong number that started it. I was about to hang up when the caller said, ‘Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?’
‘Ha!’ I told her. ‘You stole that line from Thurber.’
‘That’s not all I steal. This is your personal shoplifting service cold-calling you. Want to try me out?’ It was obviously a joke so I joked back with a long wish-list that ranged from Thus Spake Zarathustra to a jar of Hellman’s. Beeg mistake. She took my address, called with the goods, stuck me up and robbed me. By the time she was caught she’d spent everything. In my anguish I didn’t notice that while she’d taken what she shouldn’t, she hadn’t brought everything she should, but she signed off a cheeky letter from jail with ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise.’
Basil Ransome-Davies
It was the wrong number that started it. Culinary, not telephonic. The new Mexican cook-and-serve recipe I was going to try out on the two couples, all old friends of mine, should have said ‘three’ but actually read ‘thirty’ chopped chillis. No time to taste it first. Jim took one mouthful and choked, leading to apoplexy and heart failure. Edna turned out to be allergic to them, and went into (again fatal) anaphylactic shock. George’s wife was so horrified that she had a terminal stroke, lurching into him and knocking him headfirst on to the marble fireplace, breaking his neck. In all the carnage, with police and ambulances, my wife simply disappeared. By her plate was a note, in the same hand as the alteration to the recipe, reminding me of my own allergy to eggs. There was a P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise.’
Brian Murdoch
It was the wrong number that started it. Even 22nd-century technology is no safeguard against silly mistakes, and the message that flashed on to my Eye-Pod was definitely not meant for me. ‘Sugar-Bun, can’t wait to see you. Westminster Bridge, 8 p.m. tonight. Dwayne’. All being fair in love and war, I decided to take ‘Sugar-Bun’s’ place, confident I could persuade Dwayne that blind dates can be fun. He was persuaded. On our first and second assignations the sex was so good that by our third date we were ready for the intimacy of eating together. Dwayne’s idea of a love-meal, though, was just salade niçoise — and served without the anchovies and eggs because he’s a vegan! I thanked him in an Eye-Flash, remarking that the salad would have been even nicer if there’d been something to go with it. Oblivious to my sarcasm and the death of our romance, Dwayne’s next billet-doux had an inane P.S.: ‘Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise’.
Virginia Price Evans
It was the wrong number that started it. Novelist Anita Brookner, cocking her delicate ear to an unexpected tirade of knife-gang patois, discovered a whole new literary landscape. The resulting fiction, Gonna Cut Ya, certainly raised eyebrows. But since it also raised sales, she extolled the virtues of ‘found inspiration’ at every opportunity. Without her evangelism, we would not have seen Salman Rushdie’s bathetic realist masterpiece Things A Bloke On The Bus Reckoned or Rose Tremain’s Misdirected Male, the biography of a neighbour with a taste for lurid pornography and an illiterate postman. This renaissance in realism wasn’t applauded by all; Alan Bennett, blocked and churlish, opined his dialogue was always assembled from snippets overheard in Marks & Spencer. Older now, going deaf, he worked exclusively from a dwindling correspondence. Two years, he’d wasted, trying to wring a Talking Head from ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise’.
Adrian Fry
No. 2597: Head case
You are invited to submit a report written by a social worker on a character from Shakespeare (150 words maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2597’ by 21 May or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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