A spatter of salt is a chess board, and the players sit concentrating on the nothing between them, their elbows on the table and their hands clasped tight beneath their chins. Glum and bored. Clamour from the street sneaks into the restaurant whenever the door opens, on and off like the staccato tuning of a radio.

The nephew’s nothings of thought are sweet, whilst the aunt’s are bitter and sarcastic.

“Go on then, give me an idea,” says the nephew, “something to write this about.”

Rolling her shoulders into a pedantically smug, straight back, the aunt mocks, “Tell a story about two people sat in a café, waiting for an expensive, full breakfast.”

The nephew raises one eyebrow.

“All right.” She pauses. “Tell a story about a boy who meets a rabbit in the park.”

He throws a half-grin aside. “It has to have interesting characters, something sinister too.”

“Gosh, isn’t a rabbit interesting enough for you? All right. A boy meets a girl in the park. And he shoots her.”

“Ha!”

“Or a boy and girl both shoot a rabbit together… in the park.”

“That’s just silly.”

“Well, sorry.”

He sips his coke. “It has to have meaning. S’gotta be deep. Throw in a couple of political undertones and an existential commentary.”

“In America.”

“What?”

“He shoots her in America.”

“Ha ha, right, sure.”

“Well, I’m sorry, just because I don’t have as good an imagination as you young lot do.” She’s still grinning. A waitress summons a clatter as she knocks over a wet floor sign; they turn to observe her throw despair at the ceiling fan. “By heck lad, look at her, afraid God’s unhappy that she’s clumsy and that she’s gonna get smitten.”

“Smote.”

“Smote?”

“Yes.”

“Well, include her, getting smote.” She fails to stifle a laugh. “In America!”

Laying in the centre of the room, before the wide, stone fireplace, the glass coffin became the main focus for the small audience. The only sound aside from the crackling logs came in the form of hushed whispers and the occasional sneeze; all eyes following the tall man as he walked to the fireplace, stooped low and took a long, thoughtful while to light his pipe.

‘Come now, Mr Holmes,’ said the only one of the assembled group to wear spectacles, ‘why exactly have you gathered us here? Some of us have work to get to, you know.’
Several grunts and nodding of several small heads accompanied the words, although the detective appeared lost in thought and temporarily oblivious to any form of complaint.

For the umpteenth time that morning Holmes walked to the coffin and peered through the glass to the unmoving form beneath the lid.
‘Mr Holmes!’
Finally, the detective blinked and looked disdainfully in the direction of the grumpy owner of the voice.
‘Mr Holmes, it’s quite clear who the culprit is here. I don’t see why we have to stand here like statues, while the evil Queen gets away. Why aren’t you arresting her instead of picking on us working folk?’
A low rumble of agreement rose up from the group.
‘I…I do hope that this is not a case of height-ism, Mr Holmes’ stuttered a red-faced bashful fellow, ‘I would really hate to complain to Scotland Yard. I w…would indeed.’
Further grumblings filled the room and once more all eyes were on Holmes as he relit his pipe from the fire, before turning to face the room.
‘Gentlemen, I am of course most utterly grateful for the giving of your time to assemble here and I promise that I won’t detain you a moment more than absolutely necessary.’
Holmes’s words and kindly facial expression did little to appease the small crowd, but before the grumpy gentleman could begin a new verbal tirade, the detective raised his hands in a commanding manner as if conducting an orchestra.

As one, the dwarves fell silent.
‘I will concur,’ said Holmes, ‘that initially it appears that there can be only one assailant in this crime. All fingers point to the Queen…perhaps, if I may suggest, a little too conveniently for my liking.’
Indignant gasps met Holmes’s ears, but his hands dipped quickly into his coat pocket, producing approximately one half of an apple, which he held aloft.
‘According to your testimonies, the victim was visited by an old woman who proceeded to persuade this poor, naïve, young lady to bite upon this very apple, thus rendering her unconscious and in a temporary medical state of comatose immobility.’
Holmes watched the slightly confused expressions with interest, smiling faintly to himself as he noted the one tiny face who was the exception.
‘Before my arrival here, gentlemen, I took the liberty of analysing the available evidence. The Queen keeps only one type of poison, namely rat poison within the bounds of her castle. However, the liquid contained within this apple is an extremely rare combination, formed from specific crystalline compounds…or, as one trained in chemistry might label it, arsenic.’
The silence in the room was broken only by a loud sneeze and a faint hum of snoring.
‘Naturally, the properties of arsenic would be unknown to most people…but then you’re not most people, are you, ‘Doc’? Or should I say, Professor Heinrich Morgan from the University of Vienna and reported leader of the infamous ‘Little Red Handed’ gang?’
The face of the bespectacled dwarf turned bright red and began a faltering, stammered reply, before quickly falling into silence.
‘Wanted by Interpol for jewel thieving in Milan…kitten rustling in Sardinia…small-arms smuggling in Barcelona and now apparently contract-killing in the Enchanted Forest.’
The front door to the compact and bijou home suddenly burst open, revealing a large group of police officers, with Inspector Lestrade and Doctor Watson bringing up the rear.
‘At last, Watson!’ beamed Holmes, “I thought you’d never get here. Officers! If you would be so kind as to remove these gentlemen into the safety of Her Majesty’s custody.’
Holmes jabbed an accusing finger at each culprit as each one was led away; small heads bowed in shame.
‘Farewell indeed, ‘Smiling Boy’ Smith…‘Grumpy Jack’ McDougal…Bob ‘Sleepy Byes’ Brown…’Shy Stan’ Sinclair…Hank ‘Handkerchief-Howling’ Harris…and of course, last but not least, the notorious brains of the outfit, ‘Dopey Dan’ Denton, himself.”
Watson peered at the tiny, cross-eyed face and viewed the tongue peeking from the side of the mouth with disdain.
‘Brains of the outfit? Are you sure, Holmes? The fellow seems positively doo-lalley to me.’
Holmes nodded and relit his pipe from the hearth.
‘Absolutely sure, my dear Watson, Denton might play the absolute fool to perfection, but then the seven times winner of the ‘North England Gurning Competition’ would naturally fool even the most ardent of observers.’
Denton’s face fell and relaxed back into a definite scowl.
‘Damn you, copper! This would have been our last job before retirement. We’d bought a little place on the French Riviera…’
He sighed loudly as a burly officer escorted him from the room, leaving only Watson and Lestrade with a clearly gloating Holmes, who paced the hearth rug in triumphant style.
‘Well…’ said Lestrade, ‘another victory, Mr Holmes. Of all your recent cases this one dwarves all the others by comparison.’
‘Indeed,’ nodded Watson, ‘no small feat at all, Lestrade. Will they get short sentences?’
‘Perhaps, Doctor Watson,’ chuckled Lestrade, ‘after all they were only ‘miner’ offences.”
Ever the perfect professional, Holmes ignored the childish laughter, for his eyes had fallen on the front of a newspaper which lay upon a tiny coffee table; his lips moving as he read the main headline from ‘The Hunter‘s Bugle‘.
‘And what have we here? ’Opportunist Girl Snares Gullible Prince in Glass Slipper Plot‘….hmmm, come Watson, with all haste! There is no time to waste!’

You might laugh me out of the text but I think it is etymological discrimination. Just you check and see how many times little words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ get used compared to me. I understand the argument about conjunctions and articles being used a lot because they are essential to the smooth running of the prose, but what about real meaning? Now, there is something that is vital to any exposition; have you seen what Elmore Leonard used to do to his novels? I never rated them myself, and I think some of the readers who raved about them could be described as me; I mean, he never really even describes his characters properly and leaves out the bits that readers would skip anyway. That’s no good; novels are supposed to be hard work, aren’t they?

I think my basic problem is that I was born as an adjective. Now, what is the essence of an adjective? What is its function? The humans always boast: ‘I think therefore I am’. The most an adjective can say is that ‘I describe therefore I am’. This means that my existence depends on someone using me to describe something or someone else. I have no independent existence; I always have to depend on a noun being available that I can apply myself to.

Don’t get me started on nouns. Do you know how arrogant they are? ‘I am therefore I am’, they always say, relishing their independent existence. And as for gerunds, they are even worse, seeing themselves as upmarket nouns. ‘We can do the job of both nouns and verbs,’ they boast. ‘I am and do therefore I am’. Snobs, all of them.

Yes, I’m afraid I suffer from the adjective’s perennial problem: low esteem. I have been to see my Thesaurus, Dr Roget, but she wasn’t much help. ‘You should just accept your place in the lexicon and be happy with that,’ she said. ‘You have had a good life. I know you were in the Army; the Paras, wasn’t it? That gave you a chance to travel, and I believe Jonathan Swift wrote all about your adventures around the world.’

‘Yes, but even he spelt my name wrong. You’d think a man of the church would go to the trouble of getting that right, wouldn’t you? I think the main cause of my problem is that I am still the only word that has been left out of an edition of the OED by mistake. They made sure I was back in the next edition, but how do you think that makes me feel? What do you think I should do?’

‘My suggestion is this: accept your place in the order of things and your characteristics that you cannot change. You will always be an adjective, for example, and there is nothing wrong with that. Where would we be without the valuable work that you and your colleagues do? The world would be a very simple and plain place. I suggest that you go back to your home in the OED and make friends with your neighbours. The one before you, ‘the passage by which food passes from the mouth to the stomach,’ sounds like he may have some interesting stories, and the one after you, ‘a ravine or channel formed by running water,’ may have some stories of far-off places that you both have visited.’

‘OK, I’ll try that. Thank you, doctor.’

‘No problem, always glad to help. If you have any more problems, you can always come and look me up.’

I walked out through the waiting room and saw an old friend of mine, Hannah Rayburn, sitting in the corner.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked

‘I’ve been coming here for some time, to see Dr Roget. She is treating me for my problem.’

‘What problem is that?’ I asked, a little indelicately.

‘I get frightened by old-fashioned cookers in big, open plan kitchens,’ she said. ‘The doctor thinks I am suffering from agoraphobia.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I had better let you get on with your therapy then, I can see you have a lot on your plates.’

‘Yes, I’m cooking dinner tonight.’

She knocked on the door and walked in the doctor’s treatment room. I didn’t believe a word of it. Who did she think I was? I’m not a backward Evian. I’ve been around a bit.

I did as Dr Roget suggested and made my home in the G section of the OED. I was getting well settled in when, one day, there was a lot of noise from just overleaf, on the next page. I looked it up and found it was gunfire – the repeated firing of a gun or guns – so I looked across to the opposite page and talked to my guardian – a person who defends and protects something. Yes, I know he is one of those nouns, but he agreed to look after me. I think he was feeling quite proud to be asked, even if it was only by a lowly adjective. He was really a guerrilla guardian from Guatemala who was quite fond of alliteration, so we bonded well as we went fishing for gudgeon together.

That’s what he told me and I, of course, believed him. That is what I do.

“I can explain everything,” Susan promised. “But first, I think we should get out of here.”

Pinned against the wall by her body, Jeremy nodded. In all honesty he was more concerned with the Ford Mondeo currently sitting in the middle of his living room than what was being said to him. Had it really just come crashing through his patio window? Had some random woman really just hurled herself at him to save his life?

“We really, really need to go,” Susan insisted, extricating herself from his lanky frame and grabbing hold of  his hands. She tugged him forward, stumbling as his torso came away from the wall but the rest of him didn’t.

“Oomph!”

She dropped his hands and grabbed his shoulders.

“Okay, okay,” she said, strain showing in her voice now. “Let’s stand up properly shall we?”

Jeremy nodded again, still staring at the car sitting where his coffee table should be.

“It was an antique,” he mumbled, managing to move his feet this time when Susan pulled him forward.

“I’m sure it was lovely,” she soothed, patting his shoulder distractedly while she scanned the ceiling above them. “Oops. Wrong way!”

Jeremy felt the air leave his lungs as he landed, Susan crunching down beside him on the glass a second later.

“What ar-” he was cut off as the ceiling gave a creak, and then a groan, before deciding to give up altogether and simply plummet onto the spot where they’d been standing the moment before.

“Oh,” he said. “You just saved my life.”

“Meh,” Susan shrugged. “Only twice. Trust me, today you’re going to require a lot more than twice.”

Jeremy’s features crumpled into a frown.

“What do you mean?” he asked, finding himself quickly being pulled to his feet and steered back towards his own front door.

“I quite like the philosophy of crossing that bridge when we get to it,” Susan said, gripping him by the elbow now and hurrying him forward. “Granted it does help when one has some for-warning of what those bridges might be.”

Jeremy’s eyebrows squirmed.

“What bridges?” he asked. “Where am I going? Who are you?”

“No one, no one,” said Susan, waving away the question with one hand. “Well not really a no one per say I suppose, I’m someone, but not someone you really need to know. Does that make any sense?”

“No,” said Jeremy. “None at all.”

“I didn’t think so,” Susan sighed. They’d reached the door and she was opening it, shooing Jeremy out of his own house.

“Hey! I think I deserve some answers here!”

Susan hummed at him and pulled the door shut behind them.

“I’ll explain everything. I did promise,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, so you can start with what you were doing in my house!”

“Saving you,” she said.

“But why?” Jeremy demanded.

Susan shrugged.

“I was bored I guess.”

“Bored?” repeated Jeremy.

“Yeah,” said Susan. “Bored.”

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia