Nov 16, 2015

Extract from Chapter 32 of mystery-comedy novel, 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual':

‘The Government funds the IPU so long as it delivers, yes?’ said Woo. ‘Well, channel the funding, for we shall transfer it to shore up the department in a different guise.’

‘Which guise?’

Woo threw himself in front of Cohen as if to wave down a potentially destructive locomotive.

‘The IOT – The Investigations of the Traditional!’ he announced.

Woo stepped back to make room for the immensity of the idea.

‘Not this again, Woo?’ said Cohen, raising his voice. Cemetery visitors popped their heads above tombstones like morbid meerkats.

‘Nothing to see here,’ Woo assured the visitors. ‘Back to your grieving.’

The men set off again, past a marble statue of Hope depicted as a lady in Roman toga, atop a monstrous block of red granite. The grave it so happened of the Victorian tight-rope traverser of the Niagara Falls, the Great Blondin. Perhaps a man inadvisably advertising his passing when in life he prided himself in defying death.

‘I set up a major project – an investigation into the traditional,’ confided Woo. ‘We discover everything there is to know. For example, what is a traditional house?’

‘What is a traditional house?’ seethed Cohen.

‘Two up, two down.’

‘We’ve been through this before!’ bellowed Cohen.

One of the cemetery visitors, a gaunt middle-aged man, had not left off staring at Woo and Cohen from the Minister’s previous outburst.

‘You, you there!’ Woo snapped at the gawper, then shielded his mouth to whisper to Cohen: ‘What is that ghastly modernist expression, sir, the one that describes the getting over of an adverse situation?’

‘Closure? You mean closure?’

‘You there!’ called Woo, addressing the gaunt man again. ‘Have you nothing better to do? Have you reached so-called “closure” (Woo winced upon pronouncing the term), is that it?’

The gentleman chose not to reply, but instead knelt down beside a plot and began attending to a grave with a garden trowel.

‘That showed that griever,’ said Woo, indicating with a raised upheld hand the direction of another path, which might take them away from the mourning hoi polloi.