The Quick Brown Fox Read online

  ‘No,’ returned Don smoothly. ‘It was devised by another scientist by the name of Robert Harris.’

  ‘I’d like a word with him,’ retorted Tarrant.

  ‘You’re too late. He’s dead and buried.’

  There was silence for a moment as the information was absorbed into the new Controller’s mind. ‘Well I’m sure we can work something out with this,’ he continued.’

  ‘There’s no point,’ added Don. ‘It doesn’t work.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ rattled the other man. ‘Maybe not in its present form but I’m sure I can work something out.’

  ‘You think so.’ Don could hardly believe the ego of the new man. ‘You actually believe that you can work it out.’

  ‘All in good time,’ came the answer. ‘If man could get to the moon anything’s possible.’

  ‘But did he?’ countered the scientist. ‘Did man ever get there?’

  ‘I think that’s something we might discuss at another time,’ said the Controller moving away from the computer. ‘It looks like I’m the cavalry arriving just in time if you ask me. How successful are you in the field of science?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ responded Don noticing the company security pass pinned to the lapel of the Tarrant’s jacket.

  ‘It’s a simple question.’

  ‘My scientific expertise is not in question here,’ returned Don recognising that there was a personality clash between him and the new Controller.

  ‘I want to know what the arrangement was with David Coleman.’

  ‘There wasn’t one. He was never around.

  ‘Look... I’ve pencilled in some ideas on how we can develop the unit so that it produces something useful. However it’ll be up to you to fulfil that task.’

  ‘You do realise there’s two of us here. Myself and Anya Smirnoff.’

  ‘Ah yes, Anya Smirnoff. The woman from Samarkand. You know I’ve always had it in mind to visit that place. It conjures up such wonderful images of ancient times, golden sun and sands... ’

  ‘It’s interlocked in Uzbekistan,’ corrected the scientist interrupting the other man’s flow. ‘It’ doesn’t have any beaches or sand!’

  ‘Well you know what I mean,’ continued Tarrant completely unaffected by his error. ‘There images of thousands of soldiers on horseback with archers in front of them, all charging across the plains to become embroiled in a bitter battle with the enemy under a clear blue sky with the fierce sun beating down.’

  Don decided to ignore the other man’s musing. ‘What are your plans for the unit?’ he cut in, bringing the other man back to Earth.

  ‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ came the reply, ‘but I do have two or three really good ideas up my sleeve. It’s my role to come up with something to satisfy senior management and that’s what I intend to do. I’ll be in David Coleman’s office if you need me except that in future it’ll be my office.’

  Tarrant left the room leaving Don to sit back to consider the new situation. At least they were not going to close down the brainstorming unit... not with the appointment of a new Controller. That was a blessing! He wondered whether the man had been relegated from another part of the company or had been brought in by senior management to do exactly what he had told him. He seemed to be brimming with new ideas which was a change because David Coleman had been most indolent without bothering to make any headway whatsoever and they had been scraping the barrel for new ideas for quite some time. Tarrant, on the other hand, appeared to be most keen to promote the work of the unit.

  He stood up and went to the coffee machine. It was such a pleasure to be able to eat and drink at leisure after all the diets he had suffered although by now his intake was far more sparing and selective. He had adopted Dr. Sinclair’s advice and it had worked extremely well. He had just finished pouring out a cup of coffee when the door opened and Anya appeared. She was wearing a gorgeous long red dress, her hair was exquisitely coiffeured, she wore red stiletto high-heels and, most important of all, there was no mask. She posed in the doorway in front of Don who stared at her bleakly in awe of her beauty which took his breath away.

  ‘Who are you?’ he managed to say without recognising her.

  ‘Who are you?’ she countered curtly not recognising him either. Suddenly she recalled the tenor of his voice and, for a moment, she lost her pose in surprise. ‘Don?’ she managed to utter.

  He stared hard at her. ‘Anya?’ he gasped almost dropping the cup of coffee. He had always wanted to know what she looked like under the mask. Now that he knew, he was enthralled by her beauty. ‘I didn’t recognise you in those clothes and that hairstyle... and without the mask. You are beautiful!’

  ‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she responded, delighted at the compliment. ‘You look so different yourself.’

  He shrugged his shoulders and smiled at her. ‘A new haircut, different clothes... and no bandages!’

  ‘No mask and no bandages,’ she said smiling at him.

  ‘Well, well,’ he went on in admiration. ‘The woman from Samarkand has finally surfaced to show me her face!’’

  ‘What a coincidence that the day I lose my mask they remove your bandages.’

  ‘Let me look at you,’ he advanced, tentatively hoping she was not sensitive about her image. She came over to him and he touched her face gently, running his fingers over her cheeks. ‘Perfect,’ he told her. ‘It’s a credit to your surgeons that the did such a wonderful job.’

  ‘The trouble is that when I look into a mirror, I see a completely different person to the one I used to be,’ she admitted frankly.

  ‘Snap!’ he retorted. ‘That makes two of us. How about having dinner with me this evening to celebrate. I think we owe it to ourselves. We can make two toasts... one for the mask; the other for the bandages.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ she laughed. ‘We can go to a really nice restaurant...’

  ‘No!’ he interrupted trying not to be rude. ‘Let me take you back to my place. I’ll cook for you. We can have a candlelit dinner and a good bottle of wine. I’m not a bad cook you know.’

  ‘Anything you say, Captain,’ she responded happily, staring at him closely. She could hardly believe the change in the man. Only a few months earlier, he had been so ugly, always stuttering, awkward and tongue-tied. Now he was handsome, knowledgeable and easy to talk to. Within a few moments, she realised that she was falling in love with him. He was the man of her dreams... and from the look on his face, the feeling seemed to be reciprocated.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The vision of Zelda, his old school friend, had long drifted from Don’s mind like a fading mist across the sea. The events of the past five months had taken its toll on the image he had held for her while his feelings towards her eventually erased themselves from his brain and his body even though they still lodged dormantly deep in his sub-conscious mind. On two occasions, when he thought about the worst days of his life, his mind registered the time when he had dressed up as Father Christmas because he considered that he couldn’t face Zelda directly in the restaurant where he had arranged to meet her. It gnawed away at his conscience that he could have been so foolish, even though he believed that he had reason to be yet, despite everything in his power, there was no way he could expunge the awful memory of the incident. However, regardless of the disappointments and the successes suffered or enjoyed by people in their everyday affairs, life has to continue. As Omar Khayyam had written: “The moving finger writes and having writ moves on!” Although many months had passed by, he could hardly believe that he had rushed out of the restaurant after facing her, holding the collection box in his hand, with tears flowing down his face into the long white beard that had been fixed to it. He had been an arrant coward unable to face life let alone a woman such as Zelda! But everything had changed. He was now a giant in comparison, lookin
g very handsome and fit... ready to take on the world! Zelda had become a figment of the past, someone who had not only been forgotten but a person who had clearly forgotten him. Therefore it was a complete surprise when he received a letter from her a few days later which came right out of the blue. It read:

  Dear Don,

  I was looking through some photographs taken when we were at school together and I came across a picture of the class. It inspired me to think about a reunion. It’s ten years since we left school and I’m sure that we have a lot to tell each other. I can arrange a venue where we could meet with some food and wine. We could have a really good time. Would you be willing to participate? Please let me know.

  Best wishes,

  Zelda.

  He read the letter through twice carefully wondering where the last ten years had gone. Looking back, time seemed to have vanished like an echo in the wind. He had spent a few years at university but, as for the rest, it had simply disappeared into the past annals of history.

  Zelda would never recognise him after his transformation and it was almost certain that by this time she was in a relationship with another person. Having been married very early in life, not long after she had left school, her daughter would be around seven or eight years of age. Somehow, for reasons beyond his knowledge, he had lost all zest for the woman having not seen her since that time in the restaurant on Christmas Eve. He had established a completely negative attitude towards her and surprised himself when he realised that Anya kept creeping into his mind His thoughts were totally of her and he shook his head as he still wondered what she really looked like behind the mask? The vision of her motor vehicle accident passed across his mind and he shuddered at the thought of her face being torn to ribbons as she was thrown through the windscreen of the car at the moment of impact. She must have been in great pain and, for a woman, a seriously damaged face was more than horrendous to have to live with, yet she had survived and was relatively cheerful about her future. Why did he always have such a yearning to tear off her mask? It was idiotic and stupid yet the feeling would not leave him. Not that it really mattered for he had an inherent feeling of emotion towards the woman from Samarkand that he was unable to explain to himself. Often there was an urge to touch her and on one occasion he even placed his arm around her waist at the coffee machine while they waiting for the water to boil. It gave him a sense of elation which passed through his body until she moved away. He tried not to think about her because, after the operations had been completed on her and the mask was removed, she would probably be attracted to another man leaving Don out in the cold. He knew that he shouldn’t build his prospects of a closer relationship with her in case it rested on false hopes. In any case, his agenda was to make up for lost time by playing the field with other women. And why not!

  At the age of twenty-seven, looking handsome and dapper, with a decent job at Universal Energy, he was clearly a prime catch for a woman seeking a serious relationship. But what about Zelda? She clearly wasn’t looking for someone with whom she could share her life permanently. As her letter had told him, all she wanted to do was to invite her old classmates to a reunion after a period of ten years had elapsed since they had left school. The question was should he agree to go or not? When his mind flashed back to his schooldays, he recalled a long period of pain and suffering, regularly cajoled and made fun of by both the boys and the girls, and being bullied by them at the same time. He hated having to go to school and spent many days in tears at the way they had treated him. He now knew, after his transformation, that none of them could hold a candle to him. He was supreme as a human-being, and with no essence of humility, he considered himself far better than any of them! It was quite clear that the wheel of life had turned very much in his favour. No longer was he thebuffoon... the fat ugly fool who dwelt solely on science and ran the gauntlet on everything else. Hywel Griffiths had filled his mind with all the information he needed in life and now he was a far more educated, capable, handsome person than any of them. However there was something more in his mind. It was time for him to get payback for all the pain and suffering they had meted out to him and he felt confident that he could achieve it. His attitude towards them would be cold and harsh. After all, why should he pretend to be friendly at a reunion with those who had mocked and castigated him when he was young. It was also an opportunity where he could face Zelda at last and finally establish closure with her. Consequently, he regarded that the effect of going to the reunion would not be counter-productive. He would gaze on Zelda’s beauty, learn of her new relationship, smile sweetly at her with no emotion, and that would be the end of it! Yes... his mind was made up. He would definitely go and he wrote to her asking for further information regarding the date and the time of the venue.

  A month later he received a further letter from her. It read:

  Dear Don,

  Thank you for your letter. Sorry I haven’t got back to you earlier but there have been many arrangements which had to be made. So far seventeen of the twenty-five pupils in our class have agreed to come so it should be a good crowd. Sadly, Joan Hereford passed away recently as a result of cancer at the early age of twenty-seven. It has shocked all those who knew her. She will be sadly missed. The date of the venue is the twentieth of July at the Euston Hotel in St. George’s Road in London and the time for us to meet is seven to seven-thirty. I very much look forward to seeing you there.’

  Love Zelda.

  He stared at the bottom of the letter again. Love Zelda? Had she written with the same farewell response to everyone in the class or was it just to him? Women sometimes wrote with such emotion but they rarely did so to men unless there was an ulterior motive. Did this mean that she had second thoughts about him even though he had looked so ugly and had let her down. He shook his head slowly as the idea passed through his mind but he didn’t really know what to make of it. Maybe it was simply a general comment of endearment... but then maybe it was not. It was something that made him extremely uncomfortable.

  He arrived at the hotel at the appropriate time on the date of the venue and he stood outside the splendid entrance hesitating as the thoughts of all the evil perpetrated against him at school flooded back into his mind. It was an experience of negative nostalgia. In an instant he reflected on the time when one of the boys had pushed him repeatedly against a brick wall in the playground so that when he got home his back sported a number of horrific bruises. There was another occasion when a boy had brought a whip with him to school and kept hitting Don around the legs so that he went home with nasty welts across them. And there was the nickname that one of the girls had thought up for him with which they kept taunting him. It was Quasi... short for Quasimodo... the Hunchback of Notre Dame which became so famous in literature. The awful treatment by his peers at the time had been horrendous and now he was going to face them all again... ten years later. Then, suddenly, the overwhelming feeling of despair left him. Everything was different now. He had changed; they had changed. Schoolchildren were often evil to each other but they left it all behind as they grew up. In any case, Zelda had told him in her letter that only seventeen people had responded initially but their agreement had not been confirmed. It was possible that only a dozen of his classmates would turn up. He realised that once he had gone in to meet them all, there was no compunction for him to stay. Therefore, after hesitating for a few moments he took the bull by the horns and, overcoming his fears, he entered the hotel to walk boldly into the room where the reunion was being held. He was less than delighted to note that it was full of people. Practically all the class had turned up. There had to be at least twenty-two of them and he hardly recognised anyone at all. Their images as children had altered as they matured. They were all much taller and larger than when they had attended school and, in addition to their size, their faces had become practically unrecognisable.

  He helped himself to a glass of wine from the table and stood staring a
t them. No one stood out in particular and many were dressed very casually which he thought was in very poor taste. After a short while, a man in a shabby blue suit wearing no tie approached him holding a glass of wine in his hand. Quite clearly he was slightly inebriated walking unsteadily across the room through the influence of alcohol.

  ‘Hi!’ he greeted. ‘I’m Eddie Doyle! Don’t seem to recognise your face, old man.’

  ‘Don Wise,’ stated the scientist bluntly looking at him with disdain.

  ‘Don Wise?’ repeated the man leaning slightly towards him. He hesitated as his sodden mind reverted back into the past. ‘‘No... you can’t be. Don Wise was that fat ugly fool who everyone laughed at. You can’t be him!’

  ‘That’s me all right! I’m the fat ugly fool... the one you use to make fun of at school and bully in the playground.’

  The other man blinked twice drunkenly. ‘Really?’ he uttered with an element of disbelief. ‘My... you’ve changed Don. You’ve really changed!. I remember you well but you looked so different. Yes... you’re the one I could never forget.’

  ‘And I’ll never forget you, Eddie,’ returned the scientist coldly. ‘You see I hold a grudge against everyone in the class who caused me so much heartache.’

  ‘I don’t remember any heartache?’ rattled Doyle drunkenly, trying to set his mind back into the past but failing to do so. ‘Well,,,,you know what young kids are like. They don’t realise what they’re doing half the time. It’s what happens before they grow up.’

  ‘And what about their victims?’ snapped the scientist. ‘What about the people they hurt on their way to growing up. Don’t they have a right to avenge themselves in later life? You owe me. All of you owe me!’

  ‘Owe you,’ uttered the other man after sipping at his drink. ‘What can I pay you? I’m broke. I’ve lost everything. My wife, my family, my home... the lot. I’m busted and it’s all because of drink. They tell me I’m an alcoholic. I suppose I am. So I can’t pay you anything. You won’t get anything out of me.’.’