The Bagthorpe Saga: Absolute Zero

Chapter Three

The natural misgivings about Grandma setting off to Bingo with Mrs Fosdyke that evening were not so deeply felt as they might ordinarily have been. The Bagthorpes had something else to think about. They had nearly all added Competition Entering as an Extra String to their respective Bows, and were involved in it as obsessively and single-mindedly as only the Bagthorpes knew how to be. At this stage, each of them suspected what the others were up to but no one could be sure exactly what, so that there was a strong air of guerrilla warfare about the place too.

It was unlucky for Jack and Zero that the rest of the family were so preoccupied, because it meant that Zero’s new feat did not receive due recognition and applause.

“What? Oh, he can do that, can he?” was all Mr Bagthorpe had said at lunchtime. “Well, he needn’t do it at me.”

“I don’t think we want that at table, dear,” was Mrs Bagthorpe’s only contribution.

The only member of the family who seemed unstintedly happy and admiring was Rosie, gleeful in the knowledge that her camera held film of what must surely be the most unusual ‘Me and My Pet’ shots ever taken. So warm was she in her admiration, so many pieces of meat did she hold up for Zero to take, that Jack, had he been of a suspicious nature, must surely have been suspicious. The Bagthorpes respected one another’s achievements but did not usually wax lyrical about them. They saved the lyricism for their personal successes.

The one good thing about the lukewarm reception of Zero’s latest String to his Bow was that no one bothered to ask Jack how it had been achieved. He did not really want to describe how it had been done, and felt certain Uncle Parker would not want this information bandied about either.

Grandma had gone to have lunch and spend the afternoon at Mrs Fosdyke’s, whose half-day it was. The pair of them had gone off looking uncommonly pleased with themselves. They had never been friends before, and it seemed odd to see them trotting down the drive together, Mrs Fosdyke with her black plastic carrier and Grandma wearing her fur coat (though it was unseasonably warm for October) and carrying an umbrella. Mr Bagthorpe had his misgivings about the latter accessory.

“If she doesn’t win,” he said, “and she won’t, she’ll end up laying about her with that umbrella. You mark my words.”

None of the others had said anything in reply because it occurred to them that Mr Bagthorpe could be right about this.

“The only safe game for her to play,” he went on, “is Patience.” (Grandma did play Patience, for hours on end sometimes, and it came out every time.)

Jack was due to meet the two ladies at the bus stop at a quarter past six to escort them to the Bingo Hall in Aysham. Mrs Fosdyke did not usually play there, and was nervous at the prospect. She usually played at a small hall in the next village of Maythorpe. But there were games there only on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Today was Tuesday, and Grandma, once fired by an idea, did not care to be held up by even twenty-four hours.

On the bus Mrs Fosdyke confided in them that what was really worrying about the hall in Aysham was that it was so big.

“Used to be an old theatre, you see,” she told them. “Holds hundreds. What I’m afraid is, that if I shout ‘Bingo!’ they won’t hear.”

“I shall shout with you,” Grandma told her. “I shall shout and attract attention by waving my umbrella.”

Jack winced. Uncle Parker had given him a pound to play with, but he was now beginning to feel that even if he won the Jackpot it was going to be a high price to pay for sitting next to Grandma at a game she would almost certainly lose.

“Another thing, of course,” went on Mrs Fosdyke, “there’s a lot more people. Makes the prizes better, of course, but you don’t stand the same chance of winning.”

“I shall win,” said Grandma with decision.

The hall was certainly very big and had a lot of gilt moulding and red plush about it. Grandma approved of this decor. She said it “took her back”. They arrived five minutes before the start of play and the hall was already three-quarters full. Mrs Fosdyke spent the time giving Grandma last-minute coaching on how to mark her card.

“And remember,” she told her, “there’s a small prize for getting a line, up, down or across, or all four corners. But to get the big prize, you have to get the whole lot.”

“I see,” said Grandma happily. “Is he going to begin?”

Now Grandma had had it explained a hundred times during the course of the day that this was one game she could not hope to win every time. She had been told it tactfully and tactlessly, gently and rudely. She had been told that it was quite possible that she would not win a single game during the course of the evening. She had not replied to any of this, but she had worn a certain look on her face. It was the look that meant that whatever was being said to her was like water off a duck’s back.

None the less, Jack had expected Grandma to stay the course longer than the first game. He knew she would not stand for losing many games, but he had expected her to stand for losing one.

He was wrong. Grandma came nowhere near winning the first game because for one thing she said the microphone was too loud for her to hear clearly. She was also confused by the “legs eleven” and “two little ducks” and “sixty-six clickety click” aspect of things. Mrs Fosdyke had told her some of them, but not all, and it really did hold her back.

Everyone else there seemed to be an old hand. They were poised over their boards, some of them playing two or more at a time and flashing their hands about with the speed of light. Grandma was seventy-five and sometimes she got rheumatism in her hands, and even when she did get a number it took her so long to deal with it that she missed the next one.

She then poked Mrs Fosdyke and hissed “What – what was that? Clickety what?” with the result that both she and Mrs Fosdyke missed the next number after that as well. Jack himself was doing quite well, and was only one number short when the first line was called.

The woman who won it was on the row in front, further along, and Grandma glowered at her innocent back.

“Ridiculous!” she snapped. “I’ve only five numbers on my whole card yet. Isn’t he going to do something about it?”

“Sometimes they do win quick,” said Mrs Fosdyke, whispering in the hope that Grandma would lower her voice too.

“I thought you said there was no cheating allowed?” Grandma said loudly and distinctly.

“There isn’t!” hissed poor Mrs Fosdyke. People were beginning to look at them. “Sshh – he’s starting again – you might win the whole game yet.”

Grandma did not win the whole game, though it was not for want of trying. She adopted the tactic, whenever she did not hear a number properly, of marking off one of her numbers at random anyway. She probably thought this was fair. There was no vice in Grandma. It was simply that she couldn’t stand losing.

The second game was about to get under way when Grandma rose in her seat. Jack shrivelled inside his skin.

“Young man!” she called. “Young man!”

The caller, a balding man wearing a cream jacket and red-spotted bow tie, glanced about looking puzzled. Grandma picked up her umbrella and waved it.

“Here!” she called. “Here, young man!”

He placed her, and said into his microphone:

“What’s up, then, Madam?”

“Would you mind not talking into that loudspeaker thing,” called Grandma. “I can hear you much better without it.”

A murmuring broke out in the hall, and it was getting increasingly difficult for anyone to hear anything.

“Ssshh!” hissed the caller into his microphone, and his clients immediately stopped their chatter.

“I simply want to say,” Grandma told him, in her clear, ringing tones, “that I am not likely to win this game the way it is being played at present.”

A deathly hush settled on the hall. Nothing like this had ever happened before, nothing remotely like it. Sometimes the odd drunk would get up and start shouting and have to be hustled out, but Grandma obviously did not fall into this category.

“To begin with,” she said, “I would rather you did not use that loudspeaker. If you just call the numbers loudly and distinctly in your normal voice, as I am speaking now, it will be quite sufficient.”

The bald man’s mouth was slightly ajar now.

“The next thing is,” she resumed, “that I would like you, please, to refrain from adding these peculiar ‘clickety clacks’ and ‘doctor’s orders’ to the numbers you call. We were not taught our numbers like this when I was at school. Also, I am only a learner, and I am not familiar with them. I am perfectly familiar with the numbers up to a hundred, however, and if you would kindly call them in an undecorated form, I think I shall do very well.”

She paused. The caller looked as if he thought he was having a nightmare, aghast and astounded at the same time, and when his mouth started to move, at first no sound came out. At last he managed, very faintly:

“Is that all?”

“I think so,” said Grandma. “Oh – there is one more small point. I am, as I have told you, a beginner. Until I have had a little more practice I would appreciate it if you could call the numbers more slowly. I think you are going too fast. Possibly others here feel the same?”

She looked enquiringly about her and met with total non-confirmation. The regulars gaped back at her with blank, stunned faces.

“Perhaps those who do feel the same, would like to raise their right hands?” she suggested. No one moved. Jack noticed that two large men in uniforms had appeared at either end of the row where they were sitting. They would, he realised with horror, bundle Grandma out at a nod from the caller.

Over my dead body, he thought, and tried not to imagine the details.

On the rostrum there were signs that the caller was beginning to collect himself.

“I must apologise for this interruption, ladies and gentlemen,” he said into the microphone.

“Oh, and do accept my own apologies too,” chipped in Grandma. “I think I have said all that I wanted to say. Thank you.”

She sat down. She looked almost as if she expected a round of applause. She was the only person in the whole hall who looked pleased with herself. The regulars were beginning to murmur again.

“If we are all ready, then,” said the caller, “we’ll start the next game. Eyes down for the lucky winner of another sensational prize. And the first number – wait for it – all the fives, fifty-five.”

Jack numbly crossed this off his own card and waited for the inevitable. The caller, he realised, was going to carry on as if the interruption had never occurred. He was going to pretend Grandma had never spoken. And Jack knew that when Grandma was anywhere, people knew she was. She was not ignorable. To a point he could sympathise with the man. He was probably not, he reflected, very bright. He certainly had not been able to think of a single word to say in reply to Grandma. But then, if he spent every day of his life calling out numbers, perhaps he was not very good with words any more. Perhaps he had lost his conversation.

What Grandma did next was the worst thing she could possibly have done. Her big mistake was not realising that every single person in that hall took this game at least as seriously as she herself. They were all obviously better losers (they could not be worse) but they were all playing to win. Tension builds up very high in a Bingo Hall after even the first few numbers have been called. If only Grandma had sat and sulked till the game was over, and then stood up and said her piece, the worst that could have happened was that she would have been asked to leave. She might even have got her money back at the door.

As it was, she came very near getting lynched. She, Mrs Fosdyke and Jack could all have got lynched. She stood up, right in the middle of a call of “Lucky for some – thirteen!” and shouted “Stop!” at the top of her considerable voice.

“Sit down!” and “Shut up!” – these, and other less politely phrased requests and exclamations came from all parts of the hall. Several of the players themselves stood up and waved their arms while making their protests and thus set other people off doing the same thing and within thirty seconds flat everyone in there had, with the exception of the halt and the lame, got on his or her feet yelling. The caller was yelling too, into his microphone, but yelling must have affected its vibrations because you couldn’t hear the words at all, only a kind of booming. It was probably as well.

From then on, everything happened more or less as Mr Bagthorpe had predicted it would. A riot broke out. The interesting thing was, and Jack could not help noticing this at the time, that although people started hurling abuse and even hitting one another, nobody did this to Grandma herself. Standing there with her umbrella aloft in the manner of the Statue of Liberty, she seemed in some curious way to be above it all, even though it was she who had set the whole thing off.

Somebody obviously panicked and rang the police, and they arrived quickly, about ten of them, and gradually quietened people down. The bald-headed caller was still booming into his microphone and making gestures with his hands as if tearing at the hair he had once had. When everyone else had sat down quietly under the watchful eyes of the police he sounded suddenly very silly, booming like that, and stopped abruptly.

In the ensuing silence the people on Grandma’s row stood up quite politely and let the trio pass to the gangway, and they were escorted out of the hall by two policemen. In the foyer one of them, a sergeant, took out a notebook.

“Now then,” he said, “what’s it all about?”

“It wasn’t Grandma’s fault,” said Jack instantly.

“Oh, I don’t know, officer, I really don’t know!” Mrs Fosdyke, incredibly, was close to tears. “I shouldn’t never have brought her.”

“I think perhaps we’d better go along to the station,” said the sergeant.

He gave certain orders to the constable, who went back into the hall. Grandma, Mrs Fosdyke and Jack walked in silence to the swing doors. Several police cars were standing out there, one with its blue light flashing.

Grandma had gone very quiet and dignified. Mrs Fosdyke kept sniffing all the way to the station. Jack was torn between enjoyment of being in the novel situation of riding as an apprehended criminal in a police car, and a sinking feeling that he had let Uncle Parker and everybody else down.

At the station Grandma kept up her silent dignity for a while, but after a cup of tea seemed to thaw and consented to give her version of what had transpired. She stood up.

“I solemnly swear that all I shall say will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God,” she began. “Shouldn’t I have a Bible to hold while I say that?”

“Oh, there’s no call for that at all, Madam,” the sergeant told her. “Not at this stage.”

“I think I have seen enough television films about policemen and criminals,” Grandma told him, “to know something of procedure. I suppose I should not be surprised that the Bible is no longer required. It is yet another sign of the times.”

In the end she gave a very good account, Jack thought. And when she told what she had said to the Bingo man, and the requests she had made, they all sounded very reasonable, and nothing like riot-raising speeches. Jack could tell from the policemen’s faces that they were thinking this too.

“First time you’d played, then, was it, Mrs Bagthorpe?” asked one of them. “I can see how it must have been confusing.”

“Precisely,” she nodded. “I simply thought that some consideration should be shown to a beginner. And I thought that young man very rude indeed when he just carried on as if I had never spoken.”

All in all, the interview went very well. At the end of the day, it was clear that the only word Grandma had spoken which could be even loosely interpreted as riot-raising and provocative, was the single word “Stop!”, and even Jack could see that this would not stand up very well in Court.

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