A= From the Hip chapter 1

From the Hip

Andrew Pack

"Barker, " asked Auberon Quinn, suddenly, "where's your red cockatoo?
Where's your red cockatoo?"

"What do you mean? " asked Barker, desperately. "What cockatoo? You've
never seen me with any cockatoo!"

"I know, " said Auberon, vaguely mollified. "Where's it been all the
time?"

G K Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Frontispiece

People think that only very ancient cultures, or people far away from
England have folklore, tradition. That such superstitious nonsense has
died out. Those people are wrong. People are wrong about an awful lot,
when it comes down to it.

The truth is simply that the select groups who have myths and tradition
tend to keep quiet about them.

Hairdressers secretly believe that letters carry with them a vapour, a
light gaseous essence of the feelings poured into them. That is perhaps
why they are so fascinated by holidays, as postcards don't trap the
vapour in the envelope and are the only mail that a hairdresser can
read without trepidation or doubt.

Bills pollute the atmosphere with grasping, choking clutching fingers
and should be opened outdoors, certainly never in the kitchen. But
central to the belief of hairdressers is that an unopened love letter
is a dangerous beast. All the passion of love, all the pain of
rejection, regret, faint violet hope, all these are muddled and swirl
inside the envelope. There is no love that does not pierce the hands
and feet, as Winterson says. Unopened love letters, believe those who
trim and blow-dry, contain emotion at its most red and bloody for the
vapours within them sour and embitter over time.

The longer they are left, the more what was good turns ill.

The legend has it, therefore, that an unopened love letter should not
be opened, by the recipient or anyone else and should not be burned or
thrown away. The only thing to do with it is to place it within another
envelope and post it to someone else. Keep it moving, keep it
circulating.

If there is malice involved on the part of the hairdresser, it will be
sent to someone outside the profession, who may inadvertently open it
and bring all the ill-favour upon themselves. More usually, however, it
will be sent to another hairdresser, who will know well enough to keep
the double-enveloped-letter for a brief time, and then seal it into
another letter and send it off again.

It is for this reason that at any time there are seventy or more
Russian-doll letters circulating around the British postal system, that
hairdressers tend to be both more careful and luckier in love than
others and that you should never, ever open an envelope that seems to
have other envelopes inside it. If by misjudgement you open the first
and there is another envelope inside, bearing the name of another
person, stop opening it at that very point. (It is also the reason that
children of hairdressers find themselves uncomfortable and anxious
during pass-the-parcel, though they know not why).

Butchers believe that it is bad luck to inadvertently get someone
else's holiday photographs in place of your own, and if this happens
and you should happen to see a person in the street that appeared in
one of these Cuckoo Photographs then either your death or theirs is
sure to follow. If you ever stand behind someone in Boots who is
shifting from foot to foot in the queue and sweating at the back of the
neck, it will be a butcher, fearful that his holiday snaps will instead
be his death warrant. In the months of September and October,
superstitious butchers who have holidayed abroad will not tend to
socialise and when they leave the house will keep their eyes lowered to
the pavement.

Typists know that if you stay awake for forty hours, looking at a
wall-mounted clock with a white face and black hands, that there will
come a point when the hands of the clock will move backwards, only for
a minute. During that minute, any decision you make will be blessed
with more than usual prospects of success. We are not talking about
wishes. Nobody grants wishes to typists. Not any more. Quiet accounts
say that the last wishes caused substantial problems, but that is a
different story.

There are many stories in the city. Places not on maps, songs you don't
know, fruits you've never tasted, professions you will never have heard
of, shops that stock jars containing items you wouldn't recognise. It's
not your fault; you're not to blame. Secrets are secretive.

For example, you might be foolish enough to doubt that there are still
people who use the traditional methods of predicting the future from
the movement of (or more gruesomely, the innards of) birds. You would
be wrong. In Hammersmith alone there are two particularly decent
haruspexes, who will slit you the throat of a pigeon, or better yet a
seagull drawn down from the docks by a lure of salted bacon, push their
entrails around on a silver-plated round serving tray and tell you what
the future holds. It is not the most accurate of things and will often
predict the future for people you neither know nor care about, but
every once in a while; something of relevance may emerge.

Old Sullivan and Young Sullivan (for they are the haruspexes - and are
not related and mislike each other) are also both Coin-Sifters. This is
a fairly modern ritual, hit upon just after decimalisation. If you take
a handful of two pence pieces, there will always be one that gleams
that shines, that is more copper-coloured. The Sullivans both sort
through handfuls of two pence pieces and put the bright chosen ones
into a jar. Now, oddly, two pence pieces are fractal, meaning that when
you pull out a handful from the jar of gleaming ones there will be one
in the handful that still stands out as far superior. And the Sullivans
will then throw away the rest of the handful and keep that shiniest of
the original collection. And so on and so forth.

Eventually, by this process, they hope to find the shiniest of all two
pence pieces. It is not known to me what is considered to be the
benefit of this, but Young Sullivan and Old Sullivan take it very
seriously. The payment for their fortune-telling is always shiny two
pence pieces.

Another. All persons who own a Nissan Micra or who have considered pet
insurance in the West London area believe, even if they don't know it,
that if you construct a love letter to someone in the form of knitting,
the love will endure and flourish. The reason for this is that Rebecca
Montague believes this and she works as a typesetter and graphic
designer. When she worked on the design of the Nissan Micra owners
manual and various pet insurance leaflets, she put in the following
phrase _

She put it in, much, much smaller than that.

.

No, smaller even than that.

And it sank and seeped into the minds of those who had seen it, even
those who took it for a dash or a blemish and gave it no more thought
than that. Many never owned a knitting needle, so it was a meme, an
infectious thought, that does little harm or good, but for some people
it does result in an urge to knit again.

It is not known to me why it is that Rebecca Montague believes this or
why she seeks to disseminate this belief, but I am aware that her past
boyfriends still shudder when they think of knitwear. There is no love
that does not pierce the hands and feet, as I have already
remarked.

If I had only been around the morning that the post delivered to the
Twins a swollen soft parcel for one that made him think of Christmas
presents and on the same day to the other an A4 envelope containing
Russian-doll letters which he was foolish enough to open; then perhaps
a great deal of what follows could have been avoided?

Or perhaps everything I have told you about is fabrication and
superstition.

Don't count on me being honest.