Emotionally Weird(120)

As for the yellow dog, I have no idea what happened to him but I like to imagine him living on, even if only in a book somewhere.

So that’s it.

Bob had to go – he was meeting Robin, now a social worker, for a drink in the Tay Bridge Bar. I declined his offer to join them.

I wondered if Bob’s life would have turned out differently if I hadn’t stolen the meaning of life from him.

Bob discovered the meaning of life one grey day shortly before this story began. When Bob experienced his epiphany he was lying on the gritty carpet, mindlessly practising the Vulcan death grip on Shug. Shug persevered manfully with rolling a joint on the cover of Bob’s Electric Ladyland album. On the television, which no-one was watching, there was news footage of a faraway country that we knew nothing about being bombed.

Bob changed the television channel. ‘ Dr Who ,’ he explained to Shug, ‘the second episode of “ The Curse of Peladon ”. The Ice Warriors are in it, they’re at this alien gathering thing . . .’ I left the room for a minute and when I came back I found the pair of them in the grip of a strange kind of metaphysical hysteria, flopping around on the carpet like newly caught fish.

‘Wow,’ Bob kept repeating, ‘the meaning of life, that’s like . . . big stuff.’

‘The meaning of Liff,’ Shug said with a grandiose gesture that knocked his tin of tobacco flying across the room.

Unfortunately, Bob and Shug were too wasted to elucidate their momentous findings to me. Bob had become distracted by a pan sitting in the middle of the carpet. The pan contained the remains of a spaghetti Bolognese which, in Bob’s acid-etched brain, had just turned into a pit of writhing snakes. By the time he had recovered from this delusion and stopped screaming, both he and Shug had forgotten their great, arcane secret.

‘Arse,’ Bob said and struggled to his feet to wander helplessly around the room, looking in drawers and under pillows as if the meaning of life was part of the stuff of the material world.

Luckily, at that moment, he tripped over his bootlace and the meaning of life was restored to him. Distressed at finding how easy it was to forget something so important, Bob and Shug spent some time discussing how they could preserve it for posterity. Eventually, I took pity on them and suggested they write it down.

‘Write it down!’ Bob shouted, gripping Shug’s arm to stay upright as he was in danger of falling over from excitement. They both thought that writing it down was a brilliant idea, almost as brilliant as the meaning of life itself, and, after much searching, Bob found a scrap of ruled paper and wrote, although with some difficulty, because every time he wrote a letter it turned into a little cartoon stick-man and ran away. Finally, he managed to tame the little men into a semblance of literacy and after much discussion it was decided to place this precious piece of paper in an envelope in the drawer of the living-room sideboard.

Once the meaning of life was safe, Shug and Bob drank a toast to it, in cans of Tennent’s lager, the ones with the pictures of girls on them – Tracy was Bob’s favourite.

‘Here’s to us, then,’ Shug said with an effort. ‘Wha’s like us?’

Rejecting the appropriate answer – ‘Gey few and they’re a’ deid’ – Bob struggled for his own benediction. He furrowed his brow, he thought hard and visibly and finally declared, with great solemnity, ‘Live long and prosper.’

I found the envelope a few days later when I was looking for my matriculation card. I have kept the piece of paper – it sits now in the drawer of my own sideboard in my Breton home – and I look at it occasionally just to remind myself what the meaning of life really is. This is what Bob had written. Guard it well for it is the meaning of life:

‘ When you stand on the table you can touch

the ceiling. ’