Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson

Author:James Hamilton-Paterson [James Hamilton-Paterson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: rancid_pansies
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

The instant I meet Joan at Pisa airport I am reassured that I haven’t made a sentimental mistake. She really is the sort of person one needs to have around when there’s rough work afoot.

‘Whew!’ she bellows as she bursts from the ‘Arrivi’ gate like a bull newly released onto the streets of Pamplona. ‘Am I well out of Blighty! As much as I could do to get here without being lynched. Take a gander at this,’ and she thrusts a copy of the Chichester Observer into my hands and thumps a nicotine-stained forefinger onto a headline. ‘Backyard Funeral With Flair!’ it reads. ‘“Flair”, geddit? Basically, I’ve been shopped.’

‘The neighbours?’

‘The buggers. They’ve got one of those adolescent kids who spends most of his time dozing in bed, like –’

‘Rip Van Wankle?’

‘– Ha! Exactly. But that night I put down the poor old Bo’-sun, their bloody boy must have been awake long enough to go snooping and prying and now he’s claiming to have watched it all through a hole in the fence.’

‘You didn’t think letting off a twenty-five-thousand-candela distress flare in a suburban back yard at night was likely to catch someone’s eye?’

‘So? What damned business was it of his? And now look at this’ – and she produces a copy of the Portsmouth News. ‘This is today’s edition. “Flare-Up Over Pet Death”. In a few days I’ve gone from being an amusing eccentric to a dog-torturer. Tomorrow the story will go national, bet you anything. Even as we speak I presume my house is besieged by reporters trying to get a shot of me toasting kittens with a blowlamp. They won’t drop by the local kennels and check my other dogs, as friendly and well-nourished a bunch as they’ll ever have seen. Oh no. Of course they won’t; no sensation there. I tell you, I’m out of it in the nick of time. I shall have to stay here until the lynch parties turn their attention to some other blameless citizen. Anyway, bollocks to the lot of ’em. How are you, Gerry?’

‘All the better for seeing you, Joan,’ I tell her truthfully. By now she has blasted a passage through the mass of reunited couples shamelessly embracing so as to block emerging travellers, as well as past the usual doleful, sweaty men holding aloft squares of cardboard bearing felt-tip legends reading ‘Mr Ali Muntasser’. ‘As one exile to another, I’m happy to be able to offer you asylum. We victims must stick together.’

‘It’s either me or the old country that isn’t what it was.’

‘It’s not you,’ I tell her. Joan is possibly the last person in Europe to carry her own luggage. Not for her the wimpy little wheels and embarrassing clackety-clackety noises of suitcases that modern urbanites haven’t the strength or dignity to carry. She refuses my help and soon we are stowed in my rental car, her respiration rate unchanged. Mine, though, starts changing as soon as we’re aboard the sun-heated car and an astonishing canine bouquet builds up.

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