Jaspistos
Your Ps and Qs
In Competition No. 2472 you were given ten words or phrases and invited to incorporate them, in any order, in a plausible piece of prose.
In Competition No. 2472 you were given ten words or phrases and invited to incorporate them, in any order, in a plausible piece of prose. Why, when I asked for a piece of prose, did four of you submit verse? Why did Mary Holtby, usually a skilled competitor, substitute ‘plague’ for ‘plaque’? Did D. Gibson think I would accept disposing of Plaque, Pique and Quid Pro Quo by making them three racehorses? And when I lay down ‘quip’ I am not prepared to accept ‘quipped’ or ‘equipment’. Still brooding over those who sadly disqualified themselves, I award Godfrey Bullard the top prize of £30 and the other prizewinners printed below £25 each. All credit to them; it wasn’t an easy challenge.
‘I never mind dogs,’ I protested, signifying a strong reluctance to look after my neighbour’s Pekingese during her absence. Misinterpreting this remark as canophilia, she proceed cheerfully: ‘See you brush his teeth regularly, to reduce plaque.’
They described my play as Pinteresque. I understood this to mean surreal, sinister, deceptively simple. But when somebody told me it might mean boring, derivative, anti-American, I decided to write to the man himself. Here is his reply: ‘I have read your play. Ignore the pipsqueak critics. Everything they write comes from pique. Art is a soaring condor not an ailing quadruped. It flies over the heads of these bitter little people. Peace!’
As the marriage collapsed, our dialogue became increasingly Pinteresque; counsellors assure me it’s a prerequisite of the condition. My wife’s once infuriatingly arousing fits of pique elongated into sinister silences, my unanswered inquiries regarding the whereabouts of my special plaque-resistant toothpaste assumed an echoing, existential absurdity, our patent quid pro quo method of conflict resolution was replaced by glacial refusal to acknowledge its necessity. Nightly, we’d confront one another across the parquet, gunslingers armed only with non sequiturs. Then, one evening, she announced she’d bought a quadruped. At first I assumed this was a quip, then a dog, but it turned out to be a weasel. A substitute, she intimated, for the child I’d failed to engender. She nicknamed it her little pipsqueak, housing it (of all places) under the cocktail cabinet. Feeling something of a square peg, I fled in search of a less surrealistic ménage.
It is an understood prerequisite of their visits that, when my grown-up offspring return home, they may inspect my fridge and my medicine cupboard for any items that have exceeded their life expectancy. I regard this as a quid pro quo for my bossiness in their childhood, but I can’t help a feeling of pique as my youngest, still to me a mere pipsqueak, examines a precious tube of antiseptic. ‘Mummified! Cement!’ he exclaims, casting it out on to the pile on the parquet. ‘And this for dental plaque says, “Specifically for veterinary purposes.” Mum, you haven’t owned a quadruped at all since poor old Square Peg, your pug.’ With this reversal of roles, the situation feels uncomfortably Pinteresque. But, unlike the characters created by that master of the significant word, I cannot think of any answer at all, much less that devastating quip which would re-establish me as the matriarch.
I’d tried everything for Joe. But he’s a hard man, Mr Dinwiddy. After we’d decided to nominate Joe for a blue plaque — doyen of the Blue Boar, finest judge of an equine quadruped this side of the river, first man in Abercrombie Road to install parquet flooring, best chrysanths in Lewisham, what more do they want? — I had to write to Mr D. I tried everything, offering a little perquisite or quid pro quo here, softening him with a merry quip there, threatening him with Pinteresque menace, calling him a bureaucratic pipsqueak and an obstructive square peg in the smooth round hole of good administration. Nothing worked and I was losing my patience with each succeeding letter. It is a prerequisite of the blue plaque scheme, he kept on saying, that its subject must be dead. Well, I’m afraid, in a fit of pique....
I was a square peg as a missionary. It wasn’t my disbelief in God (hey, any pipsqueak divinity student can believe), more my personal style; I hadn’t the prerequisite solemnity. When I said to the bish over a few glasses of Calva (a quid pro quo for the cordial relations we have nurtured with our brothers in Christ in Normandy), ‘Let’s face it, we’re just a pair of mumbo-jumbo men,’ he went quite white with pique and stared at the parquet. He was never one for a quip, but the deep, eloquent, Pinteresque silence told me I’d gone too far. Finally he put aside his cat — a vile, obese, eructating quadruped with plaque on its teeth like barnacles — and called me a drunken blasphemer.