Saturday, June the 4th, 2005

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Wafers, Vile and Otherwise

Speaking of vile wafers, as Antoine Simon Maillard does in the quotation above, reminds us that “vile” is one of the varieties of wafer available from the kiosk behind the post office in O'Houlihan's Wharf. Unlike most wafers, which tend by definition to be thin, the vile wafer is as thick as the old Penguin English Library edition of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville, which, with its introduction and commentary by Harold Beaver, comes to over a thousand pages.

(If I may digress for a moment, I have always been enamoured of Mr Beaver's note on the line “all bats; and I'm a crow” on page 545 of this edition—the note itself appears on page 885. Beaver writes, inter alia, As crow to the house of Cawdor (‘in the whirled woods, the last day of the year!’) Pip prophesies doom; all turned to bats at dusk; all screwy-whirled; all mad.)

According to the O'Houlihan's Wharf Market Research Bureau (whose office, by the way, is a shabby lean-to tacked on to the post office) sales of vile wafers are down this year, a worrying trend given that wafers in general are enjoying peak performance in the economy of this godforsaken hellhole by the boiling sea.

(Forgive a second digression… I know I said yesterday that I would be complimentary about O'Houlihan's Wharf, but sometimes the truth will out.)

Anyone examining the pie charts, graphs, Blötzmann diagrams and other impenetrable flummery in the latest edition of the O'Houlihan's Wharf Market Research Bureau Bulletin Of Underlying Trends In Trading Patterns Of Wafers From The Kiosk Behind The Post Office, as I have done, repeatedly, will find it hard to disagree with the view of one focus group member, who is reported as saying “No one wants to buy the vile wafers because they are as thick as a hefty paperback, and we prefer our wafers thin. Is that so wrong?”

The latest tracker poll suggests that the most popular wafers are hot wafers, clinging wafers, gas-enhanced wafers, pituitary-gland wafers, pip-strewn wafers, and, tellingly, Arpad's special wafer-thin wafers. The latter, for example, outsold vile wafers by more than ten thousand percent, if that means anything, arithmetically, or mathematically, or both. I am particularly charmed by the Bulletin's graphic illustrating this point, because if you turn it sideways it looks like a cartoon face of Jeb Magruder of Watergate fame. I dropped my copy of the Bulletin into a puddle of bubbling, viscous green fluid outside the Convent Of Our Lady Of Resignation And Dismay, so unfortunately I cannot reproduce it here. A photograph of wily Jeb, taken before he went to prison and became a born-again Christian, will have to suffice.

Interestingly, there are distinct parallels between the wafers on sale in O'Houlihan's Wharf and the Watergate scandal, not least among them being that the kiosk's owner's name is Chuck Colson, just like President Nixon's Special Counsel. Our Colson, the wafer merchant, is a lifelong resident of O'Houlihan's Wharf, and indeed has only left that wretched brine-soaked eyesore once in his life, when he was mistakenly called to testify before Judge John J Sirica at the hearings in Washington DC. Thankfully, the error was realised while kiosk-man was waiting at the railway station in Strontium 90 Township, just a few miles away. He returned home the same day, celebrating his near-brush with fame by tucking into a slap-up dinner of baked swan à la Maxwell Davies.

Personally, I find it just a little unsettling that Colson never eats his own wafers, even the wafer-thin ones. I decided to put this to him and wrote a carefully-worded letter requesting an interview, but answer came there none. Now I am not given to harrying wafer-kiosk-persons as a matter of course, but nor will I allow them to vend wafery produce they themselves eschew without giving me a damned good explanation. That's the kind of narrator I am.

Unable to pursue Colson myself, having come down with a case of seeds-in-the-vitals which necessitated complete bed rest, I employed a private detective by the name of Istvan Plunkett to act on my behalf. This Plunkett was a curious combination of elegance, rattiness and allergies. I never did quite get the measure of him. As far as I could gather, he existed on a starvation diet, berries mostly, and rainwater. Certainly he was not a man to feed on swans, irrespective of whether they had been accidentally electrocuted or not.

Tragically, the assignment on which I sent him proved to be Plunkett's last case. I did not hear from him for months on end, and was in any case losing interest in the doings of a self-hating wafer-salesman from O'Houlihan's Wharf, having better things to do with my time, such as trying out that berries-and-rainwater diet myself. Then one morning I read in The Daily Dripfeed a short item noting that an elegant, ratty and allergy-prone private detective had been found dead in a thicket of gorse bushes and bracken. Apparently the wires of his portable metal tapping machine had become entangled in the foliage and he had been too bloody cack-handed to extricate himself. I crumpled up the newspaper and tossed it into a disposal chute, and I said a prayer for Plunkett. It was not a long prayer, nor was it a well-written one. I think it had been translated from Glosa, the artificial international language which rivals Esperanto. Then I went home and opened my copy of Moby-Dick; or the Whale, by Herman Melville and read Pip prophesies doom; all turned to bats at dusk; all screwy-whirled; all mad, and I sank my teeth into a vile wafer, and out in the spinney I knew that dozens upon dozens of swans were gathering, whooper swans, whooping, whooping, magnificent, and so very alive..