Split Code Read Free Page A

raccoon hoods and new cross-stitched parkas they were still twice as wide as anyone else. The Professors, who were thin and bearded, sat lodged between them like piano keys, but the Booker-Readmans chose the opposite sofa with Johnson.
    I claimed the Ukrainian and he turned out to have lots of chat, which was a bonus. His name was Vladimir, and he painted ikons and ran a launderette in Vancouver. We got deep into the launderette, over which I could hear a learned discussion about Angmagssalik sculptures passing to and fro between Booker-Readman and the Professors, interspersed with a six-sided ding-dong about the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ chance in the Grey Cup between Johnson, Rosamund and the Numerate Four who were drinking like pails, and showing a tendency to kick their feet into the air.
    They had a table-lamp over twice before the steward came through to announce that dinner was served. Then E1-27, tripping up on the way to the dining-room, hit the end of the buffet table with his chin and ran straight up the spare ribs and salmon in aspic, ending unabashed with his head in a flower bowl. E2-46, volunteering to wipe him off, discovered E1-27 was ticklish and they both descended sagging and chortling to the floor, where they rolled about for a bit. My Ukrainian, with his friendly smile, walked over and lay on them. They all three went to sleep, abruptly.
    ‘Mr Johnson?’ ventured the steward.
    Johnson, who had stepped back to survey the passage, re-entered the dining-room and addressed the affronted Booker-Readmans. ‘The other two Nanooks, I’m afraid, are out cold as well. Should we put them to bed?’
    I could hear the cream of the Bureau of Canadian Ethnology putting the other two, puffing, to bed. I got down on my knees and took hold, with resignation, of Vladimir. By the time I got him into a bunk, Johnson and Booker-Readman had tidied the other two numbers away and the steward had redistributed the aspic. We all sat down to dinner, Simon, Johnson, Rosamund, the two Professors and I. The candlelight pulsed on the stuffed peaches and cherries, on the dishes of roast beef and cob corn; on the fingermarks on Simon’s mohair suiting and the lard-stiffened folds of my silky-knit, which felt like a fire curtain. One of the Professors was going to have a black eye.
    Not that the Eskimos had resisted. In fact, they had wanted to go to bed more than anybody, but not necessarily alone. For it is a well-known fact that very cold air will sober you, if you have been drinking heavily, whereas the first drink indoors afterwards will send you straight up and over the moon.
    At least, Johnson said it was well known. He described his last client, who had been a Chinese dipsomaniac, and the one before that who had been a horse; and the one before that, who ought to have been a horse but in fact acted in koala westerns in Sydney.
    It began to feel like a party.
    At half past ten, over coffee, Rosamund Booker-Readman said, ‘Oh hell. What’s the time, Simon?’
    ‘Eleven,’ I said. It was none of my business, but I did go that far.
    The Booker-Readmans looked at one another. He said, ‘Why disturb him? He’s sleeping.’
    One of the Professors said, ‘They’re all sleeping. You don’t have to go, surely?’ Rosamund, as I hope I have indicated, was as well as select, quite excessively dishy.
    Simon said, ‘We can stay for a bit. It feels like being let out of clink.’
    ‘That’s my line,’ said his wife. ‘You haven’t been stuck with him for four days. Have you a wife, Mr Johnson?’
    ‘No,’ Johnson said. ‘Although I rather like the sound of E4-257, who does twenty-foot stone-cuts of birdmen. We could set up a Druidic dovecote at Rankin with her models in twenty-foot pigeonholes.’
    The Professors were unmarried also and had to spend their weekends with their mothers, fixing the plumbing and having their underwear mended. One of them asked. ‘How old is the offspring?’
    Rosamund Booker-Readman was impatient.