The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale (5 page)

On their first date, Samuel had taken Lucy to Pete’s Pies. Everyone loved Pete’s Pies. It was a small pie shop run—and you’re ahead of me here—by a man named Pete. Pete’s pies were perfect pastry constructions filled with meat and vegetables, or just vegetables if you were that way inclined, and just meat if you really, really liked meat. The pastry was as golden as the most perfect dawn, the filling never too hot and never too cold. Pete also made what he called his “dessert pies,” triangles of apple, or rhubarb, or pear that made grown men weep for their sheer loveliness, and grown women weep with them. There was nobody—I mean, nobody—who didn’t like Pete’s pies. No one. You’d have to be mad not to like them. You’d have to be impossible to please. You’d have to be—

Lucy Highmore.

On that first date, Lucy had politely declined to share a pie, and had simply sipped delicately at a glass of water—so delicately, in fact, that natural evaporation caused the level in the glass to drop more than Lucy’s sips.

Now, months later, she and Samuel were still together, but both of them were starting to think that they shouldn’t be, although neither could quite find the words to say it. They were also back in Pete’s Pies. Since Lucy never seemed to eat much, it didn’t really matter where they went. She could choose not to eat in Pete’s Pies just as easily as she could choose not to eat anywhere else. They were the only people in the pie shop apart from old Mr. Probble, who now spent his days reading the
Oxford English Dictionary
in order to improve his word power. He’d started at
A,
and was reading a page a day. This meant that conversations
with Mr. Probble tended to involve exchanges like the following:

“Hello, Mr. Probble. Nice day, isn’t it?”

To which Mr. Probble might reply, “Aardvarks amble awkwardly.”
¹⁷

Samuel stared into Lucy’s eyes, and Lucy stared into his.

“You know,” she said, “you ought to get new glasses.”

“Really?” said Samuel.

“Yes, those ones make your face look a funny shape. They also make you seem like you have trouble seeing properly.”

“But I do have trouble seeing properly,” said Samuel.

“But you don’t want everyone to know, do you?” said Lucy. “It’s like ugly people and hats.”

“Is it?” said Samuel, not sure where ugly people came into it, exactly, or hats.

“Of course, silly.”

Lucy patted Samuel’s arm. To be honest, “patted” might have been an understatement. There were wrestling champions who would have screamed “Ouch!” after being patted by Lucy Highmore. She had quite a swing on her for a thin girl.

“Ugly people wear hats so that people can’t see how ugly they are,” explained Lucy. “The hats cast a shadow, and so they hide their ugliness, and pretty people don’t have to feel so bad about being pretty.”

“But . . .” said Samuel, rubbing his arm. He tried to find his
train of thought, but it had departed the station long before, with a fat lady on the back waving good-bye with a handkerchief and leaving Samuel stranded on the Platform of Confusion. “But don’t pretty people wear hats, too?”

“Yes, sillikins,” said Lucy, and Samuel just prayed that she wouldn’t pat his arm again. He still couldn’t feel his fingers. “But they wear them for a different reason. Hats on pretty people make them look prettier! Everything looks prettier on pretty people. It’s a law.”

“Right,” said Samuel. If you followed that statement to its logical conclusion, then Samuel’s glasses should have made him look prettier—er, more handsome—but only if he was pretty—er, handsome—to begin with. But if they didn’t make him look more handsome—there, got it right the third time—did that mean he wasn’t handsome at all? Samuel sort of guessed that he wasn’t, but he was hopeful that the situation might change as he got older. The fact that Lucy Highmore had agreed to go out with him had fueled that hope.

In a way, both Lucy and Samuel had made two versions of the same mistake. Lucy had agreed to go out with Samuel because, despite what some of the folk in Biddlecombe might have thought or said, he was a kind of hero. He had faced down the hordes of Hell. He had fought demons. He might have been visually challenged, and distinctly awkward, and so attached to his dog that it accompanied him on dates, but he still wasn’t like most of the other ordinary boys in Biddlecombe, and Lucy Highmore felt less ordinary for being with him. It was the same reason that she always made sure her hair was perfect before
leaving the house, and always wore the prettiest and most fashionable clothes, and always surrounded herself with people who were slightly less pretty and perfect than she was. She did it because, deep inside, she suspected that she wasn’t as interesting, or clever, or even as pretty as she liked to believe, but if she acted like she was, and shielded herself with boys and girls who were even more insecure, she might just convince everyone that she was better than they were. If she tried really, really hard, she might even convince herself.

But the main reason that Lucy had agreed to go out with Samuel was because Maria Mayer, one of Samuel’s closest friends, was more than a little in love with him. Everyone knew this—everyone, that is, except Samuel, who was a bit thick when it came to girls. If Maria wanted Samuel, thought Lucy, then there must be something there worth having, even if Lucy wasn’t entirely sure what that was.

And Samuel? Well, Samuel had always been happy with himself. I don’t mean that he was smug, or self-satisfied. He knew he was awkward, and didn’t see very well without his glasses, and that, in his case, his best friend really was his dog, but he didn’t mind. He got on well with his mum, and with his dad, most of the time, even if his dad now lived in Norwich with a lady called Esther who wore so much makeup that, when she smiled or frowned, or even when she spoke, cracks appeared in her face and cosmetics avalanched to the floor. She had kissed Samuel the first time that they met, and the left side of his face had turned brown.

But he had looked at Lucy Highmore, who had never so
much as glanced at him before all of that demon business, and wondered if being with her might make him feel just a bit less awkward, and a little less like an outsider. Who knew, she might even help to make his hair do what he wanted it to do. (Samuel’s hair never seemed to want to do anything other than slouch lazily on his scalp like a flat, yellow animal; he had tried using gel on it once, and it had ended up looking like a flat, yellow animal that had somehow become frozen in place just as it was about to attack someone from the top of a small boy’s head.) She could advise him on how to dress so that his shirt matched his trousers, or his shoes matched his jacket, or even so one sock matched the other. In the end, Samuel had wanted Lucy to make him better than he was, ignoring the fact that he was doing perfectly well just being himself. The result was that, because she was secretly more unhappy than he was, she had just ended up making him feel worse: about his hair, his clothes, his friends, himself, even about Boswell.

Lucy Highmore wasn’t a bad person. She was slightly vain, but she wasn’t mean. Samuel wasn’t a bad person either. He was just insecure, and tired of being the odd kid out. Together, they were a small mistake that was rapidly becoming a bigger, more complicated one.

“If you like,” said Lucy, “I’ll go with you to help you choose your new glasses. It’ll be fun.”

Boswell, lying on the floor of Pete’s Pies beside his beloved master, put his head between his paws and sighed a long dog sigh.

15
. Similarly, a century ago you would not have been happy to find that one of the passengers on your ship was Violet Jessop. Ms. Jessop, a stewardess and nurse, was on the
Titanic
when it sank in 1912. She was also on the
Brittanic,
which was hit by a mine in 1916, and she was on board the
Olympic,
the
Titanic
’s sister ship, when it collided with HMS
Hawke
in 1910. If Violet Jessop was one of your fellow passengers on a voyage, you might as well have jumped overboard at the start just to get the whole business out of the way.

16
. To quote the title of a famous song, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” and people find all sorts of ways to do it. If someone is breaking up with you, they may tell you that “it’s not you, it’s me.” This will be a lie. If someone says that it’s not you in order to stop going out with you, then it is you. It doesn’t matter if they tell you that they want to go off and help little orphans in some obscure part of the world, or sign up for a dangerous experimental space mission, or become a monk or a nun, and this is why it’s not you, it’s still you. You, you, you. Believe me, I know. I’m not bitter, though. Not really. Okay, maybe a bit.

17
. Until he moved on to the letter
B,
when the reply became “Aardvarks amble awkwardly
but briskly . . .
”

In Which We Are Reunited with Some Old Friends, and Keep a Close Watch on Our Wallets

T
HE CITIZENS OF
B
IDDLECOMBE
woke one morning to find the windows of Wreckit & Sons blacked out. From inside the store came sounds of drilling and hammering, but nobody knew what construction company was in charge, and no one was seen either entering or leaving the building. But the work went on, day and night, and from somewhere in the depths of the store orders were placed for dolls, and games, and model trains.

The rumor was that Wreckit & Sons was about to reopen as a toy shop.

• • •

Sometimes, Dan wondered if he was right to be so upbeat all of the time. He had always had a sunny disposition. If life gave him bruised fruit, he made jam. The glass was always half full, even when it wasn’t, because Dan would get down on his knees
and squint at it from a funny angle until it appeared fuller than it was. Even if there was no glass at all, Dan assumed this was only because someone had taken it away to fill it up again. If he had been told that the world was ending tomorrow, Dan would have shrugged his shoulders and waited patiently for something to turn up to prevent it from happening. The asteroid that was about to destroy the Earth could have been visible as a flaming ball in the sky and Dan would have had a scone ready on the end of a fork so he could toast it without switching on the toaster.

Lately, though, it had been hard for Dan to keep a smile on his face. He had been a happy undertaker for many years
¹⁸
but had grown tired of having nobody to talk to. (Well, he did have people to talk to, but they didn’t answer back, and even Dan might have been a bit concerned if they had started to.) He had then bought an ice-cream van on the grounds that he had always liked ice cream, and lots of other folk liked ice cream, too, and therefore he was likely to spread good cheer by selling it to them while his chimes played “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” over and over. At the very least, it was likely that people would buy his ice cream just so that he would move on and they wouldn’t have to listen to “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” any longer.

Unfortunately for Dan, he and his ice-cream van had been
dragged to Hell and, although both had returned, the van had been considerably the worse for wear when it got back, and Dan’s insurance didn’t cover unexpected trips to Hell. But, as always, something had turned up. Actually, four of them had turned up: Jolly, Dozy, Angry, and Mumbles, known collectively as Mr. Merryweather’s Elves, or Mr. Merryweather’s Dwarfs, or by whatever name the police were NOT looking for them at any particular moment in time. Currently, they were known as Dan’s Dwarfs, which had seemed like a good idea, Mr. Merryweather having abandoned the dwarfs for a number of reasons, but mostly because he hated them.

So now Dan drove the dwarfs round in a very old van, and tried to find them work. And keep them sober. And stop them from stealing. All of which was a lot harder than it sounded, and it already sounded quite hard.

Today, Dan’s Dwarfs were on their way to the grand opening of Honest Ed’s
¹⁹
Used Car Showrooms just outside the town of Biddlecombe. Why Honest Ed felt that a quartet of surly dwarfs would help him sell more dodgy cars was unclear, but Dan took
the view that his was not to reason why, but just to take the money and run before something bad happened, which, when the dwarfs were involved, it usually did.

This was why, as Dan drove the dwarfs to their latest job in his rattling van, he was wondering if you could really continue to be upbeat when you were responsible for four dwarfs who appeared set on proving that good things did not always come in small packages.

“Lot of traffic today,” said Jolly, who often wasn’t.

“It’s moving fast, though,” said Angry, who often was.

“Anyone in a car that’s moving fast mustn’t have bought it from Honest Ed,” said Dozy, who often was as well. “His cars are so old, they come with a bloke to walk in front of them waving a red flag.”
²⁰

“Nwarglesput,” said Mumbles, which is self-explanatory.

“Listen, lads,” said Dan. “Let’s not have any trouble, right? We go in, we dance around the cars, we look happy, we collect the check, and we leave. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.”

“What do you mean ‘we’?” said Angry. “You’re not going to be dancing around in a funny hat, only us. There’s no dignity to it.”

“There’s fifty quid each to it,” said Dan.

“I suppose so,” said Angry. “It’s still no job for a grown man.”

“You’re not a grown man,” said Dan. “That’s the point. If you were a grown man, they wouldn’t be paying you to dance around a car showroom wearing a hat with bells on it and a shirt that says ‘Honest Ed’s Cars—the Lowest Prices Around!’ ”

“We’re not actually low,” said Jolly. “We’re small. There’s no reason why we should be wearing shirts advertising low prices. Small prices maybe, but not low ones.”

“You’re small
and
low,” said Dan. “You’re low to the ground. Can you reach things on high shelves without standing on chairs? No. So you’re low.”