Help the Witch by Tom Cox

Author:Tom Cox [Cox, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783526710
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2018-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

The weekend was much warmer and Helen headed to her favourite spot near the river with a book. Three men in wetsuits swam smoothly with the current, like big pacifist leeches, and tantalising snatches of conversation from passing walkers blended not unappealingly with experimental prose.

‘No way is that a real dragon. I’ve already seen five.’

‘Good old Johnny Two Dicks. Always there when you need him.’

‘So that’s her uncle, right? The one who saw Mandelson at the gym. He has no respect for boundaries.’

‘Is it good?’

It took Helen a moment to register that the last sentence was directed at her. She turned to see Peter standing behind her, looking no more evident in a shirt than he had in his coat the other evening.

‘It’s quite trippy. That might be something to do with the fact that it’s translated from Japanese. I don’t know. Or maybe it would be even more trippy if you read the original Japanese version. I’m finding it slow-going.’

‘I’m a really slow reader. I tend to still read a lot of stuff I loved as a kid.’

‘Nothing wrong with that.’

They walked back in the direction of the city, keeping to the river most of the way. Peter stopped to help two men carry a large canoe out of the water and Helen was surprised at how little exertion he displayed in doing so. She asked him what his plans were. He said he had just fancied a walk in the sun, and had no particular destination in mind. Helen said she’d wondered about catching a film later at the Picturehouse but was playing her afternoon similarly by ear. Peter asked her a little more about her job at the museum. It was closed today for refurbishment, but there was no actual work going on and Helen said she could open up and show him around if he liked.

‘So it’s your job to categorise stuff when it arrives?’ he asked, as Helen unlocked the museum’s archive area.

‘That, and various other stuff. Payroll. Interviews, sometimes. There aren’t enough of us working here that everyone can settle to just one role. A lot of what I do is about rejection. People don’t realise how many donations we receive that are totally worthless or irrelevant. I spend a lot of time gently letting people down.’

Helen showed Peter some of the more interesting recent arrivals: two Victorian eel traps, a hammered dulcimer made by a local craftsman, and a writing desk that had originally been used by a student in the university halls in the late seventeenth century. Whenever a curio was made out of wood, Helen noticed that Peter inspected it particularly carefully, taking time to appreciate its joins and grain. At the pub afterwards, he asked her about her mum’s recovery again, and about the life-sculpture class she had started: another of the resolutions of her deferred new year. His flair for filing away small pieces of personal information for later was as impressive and generous as his selfless conversationalism. He drank two lemonades and she drank two pints of strong dark ale from a local craft brewery.

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