Page 12 of Statistically Speaking
I look down at the tile-topped table. It’s a mosaic of blues and greens, swirled with patterns of seashells. I start to count the individual squares and reach seventeen before I lose track and have to start again. I can’t believe I’ve sat here so many times and never done this before—I must be slipping.
“You’re probably right, love,” she says, patting my hand. “Bubble and squeak is made from leftover cabbage and spuds, and it’s one of my favorite ever meals! Ignore me. I’m just a silly old moo tonight. Let’s have another drink, and raise a toast to the moon, and look forward to the return of the sun.”
There is a touch of the pagan to Margie, I’ve always thought.
We raise our toast, drink some cold tea and whisky, and I wonder how to lift our mood of melancholia. I realize most people would share, would tell their own story, would parcel out that sadness in order to make it smaller and more manageable.
But I also realize that I am not capable of such sharing. That I hoard my story, keep it close to keep me safe. I am not capable of reaching out, and I am not capable, right now, of a pep talk. So, instead, I dig inside my always-crowded brain and find something I am capable of.
“Margie, did you know,” I ask, “that on this day in 1960, the actor Colin Firth was born?”
“I did not know that. We should mark that joyous occasion though, shouldn’t we? Colin Firth has brought a lot of pleasure into my life over the years.”
“Mine too. Shall we go inside, finish these chocolates, and see if we can findPride and Prejudiceto watch? I’m no doctor, but I firmly believe that there are very few ills that can’t be cured by the sight of Mr. Darcy in his sopping-wet britches. We might be scraps, Margie, but we’re scraps with taste!”
Chapter 6
Eighteen Downward Dogs and One Enormous Shock
A few days later, I finally make it to a yoga class, and I have enjoyed it. I like yoga—it is physical enough to distract me, but calming enough to relax me.
The only part I struggle with is this—the bit at the end where we all lie on our mats in corpse pose, and the instructor starts to take us through a mind journey to complete stillness. She is talking about a flower-lined path leading to a tiny cottage, and I let her get on with it while I add up how many arms and legs there are in the room. We all have our own ways to relax.
As the teacher progresses to the front door of the cottage, and admires the lilac wisteria winding around the frame and the red roses cascading toward her, the woman on the mat next to me lets out an enormous fart. And I mean enormous. Absolutely rip-roaring.
It seems to go on for minutes, and is loud enough to shatter eardrums. There is a communal intake of horrified breath in response. The gasps are followed by a shocked silence as people are brought out of their various states of Zen and into the more familiar state of embarrassed Englishpeople not knowing how to react to something slightly rude.
The teacher, Olivia, quickly regains her composure and encourages us to reach out and open the door to the cottage. I’m not sure what we’re expected to find inside—the lost Ark of the Covenant? The Holy Grail? A great big cake? I suppose it might be different for everyone.
I don’t make it through the cottage door. I was probably never going to, but after that extraordinary breaking of wind, I’m definitely going to be doing nothing but choking on my own laughter.
I try to suck it in, to squash it down, to tell myself to be mature—but it feels impossible. I am not mature. I am, apparently, a fifteen-year-old boy. The more I try to stifle it, the worse it gets, and I am soon choking on my own glee. It doesn’t help that I glance over to the woman next to me, the perpetrator of this foul deed, and see that her eyes are overflowing with tears of amusement.
We look at each other, and it’s suddenly uncontrollable—we both start giggling. We’re trying to keep it quiet, but it’s like some kind of runaway train, getting louder and louder and more out of control by the second. I’ve seen this happen with groups of students, when I talk about someone called Dick or Fanny or have to use the number sixty-nine in a date, but I hadn’t realized quite how difficult it is to suppress.
I hold my hands over my mouth, pressing the laughter back in, not aided at all by the fact that she starts making wafting gestures over her own torso and holding her own nose.
I hear a few other sniggers spreading around the room, and know that we have infected our fellow classmates with our hysteria. We are bad, bad yogis.
Olivia wraps up her imaging session perhaps a little faster than usual, and finishes with a slightly resigned-sounding “Namaste.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a yoga class pack up so quickly. It’s mainly women, but there are a few men, and they are all up and rolling their mats or hanging them back on pegs as quick as a flash. A few walk past us, and those who were in the immediate vicinity cast quick glances at my neighbor.
“Yes! It was me!” she announces. “I am Fart Woman!”
There are some laughs, some smiles, some looks of horror as the rest of the class streams past us.
I am taking my time, avoiding the crush, and we end up alone in the room. Fart Woman and I.
“So,” she says, grinning, “that was quite funny, wasn’t it? I mean, it can’t be the first time it’s happened...”
She is a tiny human being, possibly just about scraping five foot, but possibly not. She has white-blond hair and pale skin and vivid blue eyes, and looks like a pixie out of a Norse legend. The kind of creature you’d encounter hiding behind a waterfall in a fjord, or offering you magic beans. I am five foot eight, so we make quite the odd sight.
“It was possibly the funniest thing that has ever happened in the entire history of time,” I reply, tucking my rolled mat under my arm. “And no, it can’t be the first time—you can’t put your body in all these weird positions and then tell it to relax and not expect the odd squeak to emerge.”
“I wouldn’t have minded a squeak,” she says, seeming both delighted and mortified with it all, “but that was more of a... what, an earthquake? A train crash?”
“An explosion, maybe. Or that big boom that planes make when they break the sound barrier.”
