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THE LICHTS O' ETERNITY

By Hamish McLaren
Contact the editor by e-mail at christopher.johnstone@ntlworld.com

Last night I dreamt I was back at Manderlay. It had been turned into a community mental health facility. I stood up nervously in front of my support group, shoulders slouched, in my cardigan and slippers. The cardigan buttons were in the wrong holes but I had become indifferent to such matters. My watery smile collapsed. My voice was trembling.

"Hello. I’m Calum.* I... am a cruciverbalist."

There was a polite smattering of applause. The counsellor came over and gave me a friendly pat on the back. Most of the group stared vacantly into space, preoccupied with their own thoughts.

I had to admit it was a tremendous relief. To say it out loud; to own up; to admit it even to myself. A first step. What now?

The counsellor said, "Tell us your story, Calum."

I had started out innocently enough. Just the simple crossword in the daily newspaper to while away a train journey, a coffee break. Some people even said it was good for you. Mental gymnastics. There was some evidence that it staved off Alzheimer’s. It was like playing Scrabble with your mother. Wholesome.

Others knew better. A colleague, spying me one day, pen in hand with The Daily Record, said sharply, "I‘d be careful of these if I were you. They are a gateway to the hard stuff. Cryptics. D’you know what I’m saying?"

But I ignored the warnings. I was sure I’d never graduate into that dangerous territory. My colleague persisted. "Did you know that George Best was a tremendous crossword fan? Doesn’t that speak volumes to you?"

But I was deaf. And the compilers were very subtle. One day I found myself looking at a conventional 15 by 15 grid, with its beautiful symmetrical pattern of black squares. The simple clues were to the left, the cryptics to the right. You had a choice. A parting of the ways, a crossroads, a crucial and decisive moment in your life. I, like Oedipus, a plaything of the gods, paused at a meeting of ways, outside Thebes.

He falls. He falls headlong.

My eyes slid to the right.

Owl specs inside hospital allowed (6). Suddenly my whole world went haywire. Awful pretty? Quite the opposite! (6,5). I have no idea how long I lost myself in the labyrinth of clues and half clues. False scents, ambiguities, doubles entendres. Was it a flash, or an age? Was it mind expansion, or mind distortion? I could not tell. Periodically I would click back into the humdrum of quotidian experience, and then I’d relapse. I would take the elevator to the roof and go for a fly.

When I eventually came to, I had filled in the grid. I had a fit of the munchies. Sausages! (They are the boys (8)).

And that was it. One hit was enough to ensnare me. The thrill of the search for le mot that is juste! To wrestle the best of 3 falls with words. What else mattered? Certainly nothing else in the papers. Politics? Sport? Opinion? Acres of wordage of doubtful intent. Besides, all that stuff was just a blind. It was packaging. Even all that tiresome Sudoku and Hitori stuff was like bubble wrap. The newspaper offices of Renfield Street and Holyrood Road were transmogrified to the palatial and heavily fortified estancias deep in the foothills above Bogotá. They ran, up front, a sham enterprise. The real business resided in the lights and half-lights I craved. The Afghan crop. The proprietors were aptly named Barons. They ran a huge concern. The supply routes reached to every mews, every cul de sac. The paper boy was my courier, my mule.

Just when you think you’ve reached rock bottom, you find another abyss opening beneath you.

Designer crosswords. Playthings of the middle classes. The wee stinker, the skeleton. And then the 12 by 12 puzzles of the Sunday broadsheets, that had bars instead of black boxes, so that they looked like a plan of Hampton Court Maze. The aptly named Mephisto (for was not my soul in jeopardy?) and, finally, the last saloon of degradation.

Enigmatic Variations.

...with their bizarre legends, their arcane rubrics.

No DCLXVI: Do the right thing, by Faust.

To escape the maze, solvers must identify and eschew the blind alleys in each clue which, redefined in a specific (but widely applicable) way, provide a key by which one may be permitted to DO THE RIGHT THING. Clues are alphabetical; one phrase in common usage does not appear in Chambers...

My brother said, "Come to church with us."

"No thanks. I’m just going to curl up with the Sunday papers."

"I beseech you. Do not enter that maze. Please."

I lifted my baleful eyes from the page. I could not disguise my torment.

"I must."

It was my appraiser who turned out to be my salvation. I’d signed the health and probity clauses; he could so easily have turned a blind eye. But everything in my supporting evidence had been so heavily encrypted that he knew something was wrong. He said, in his quiet way, "Do you mind if I ask you a few silly questions?" I recognised the tone. I had used it myself in exploring patients’ cognition. Day, month, year, current PM, President of the USA etc. "Let’s try some free association."

I giggled. "Why not ink blots? Whatever. Go ahead."

"Monday."

"Dynamo!"

"Orchestra."

"Carthorse!"

"Thank you." He closed the file. "I’m going to bring the appraisal to a halt now. I need to tell the regional adviser we have an issue here" "Thank you, Calum."

I sat down. There was a lull. The counsellor was writing up his notes. I had a captive audience of fellow obsessive-compulsives. I couldn’t resist it. Give a gambler a pound for bread and he will be back at the roulette table. I sprang up.

"Mad tail! (8,7.)"

Suddenly the company came to life. Pencil and paper, materialising, everywhere. Humming and hawing. Head rocking and lip biting. The counsellor put his head in his hands.

The answer to this conundrum is in my mobile phone ring tone. See. I’ve lost it.

* not the author's real name