ignition, until it flashed and exploded from his mouth, simultaneous with Elizabeth’s. Just at that moment the egg slipped in Uncle Hughie’s perspiring hands and burst. Egg-yolk exploded dramatically like shrapnel, and catherine-wheeled in all directions. It spattered sideboard and mirror. It clung like a canker to an artificial flower. A fragment of it fried merrily in the fire. It spotted Uncle Hughie like an exotic acne. The laughter of the other three overtook the last particle of it before it found a resting-place. They hosed Uncle Hughie mercilessly with laughter, while he stood in the centre of the floor, dripping egg. They laughed and coughed and gasped for breath and laughed again. Charlie fell off thesettee on to the floor and lay there helplessly, epileptic with laughter.
‘For my next trick . . .’ Uncle Hughie said.
And they became a quartet of laughers in unison, modulating, improvising, giving new interpretations to the situation through their laughter, until Uncle Hughie went through to get washed and returned spruce and eggless. While he was putting his shirt on again, Charlie’s father tried to give him back his money but he insisted it had been fairly lost. In the end it was decided that the money should be given to charity, namely Charlie and Elizabeth. The incident had generated laughter that lasted throughout that night and beyond.
As he remembered it, Charlie’s smile was an ironic echo of that laughter. Lying alone in his room, he thought himself through that occasion and others like it as if it were a form of penance. Since his father’s death he found himself brooding over past incidents like that, fingering them over and over in his memory, like rosary beads, as if mysteriously they could somehow help him to understand what had happened to him, help to resolve the enigma his feelings had become even to himself. Something about all of these moments drew him, seemed to promise to help him come to terms with the amorphous feeling of utter deception that he felt. Somewhere in them was the reason for his inability to participate as he had done before in his own life. And the incident of the ludicrous egg-breaking contest was typical of them all.
He remembered how they had all felt after it. They were all conscious of having made something among them. A night had been baptized. That was The Night That Uncle Hughie Fought The Egg. It was salvaged from the anonymity of other nights. It would be remembered, along with The Night The Dog Took A Fit, when John, playing vets, muzzled Queenie with an elastic band, and its head inflated ominously and it frothed like a drawing pint, charging chairs, butting sideboards, running a canine reign of terror until his father came in and unloosened the elastic; The Massacre Of TheChickens, when his father put a hundred day-old chickens in a ramshackle hut with a floor like a sieve and during the night the cats pulled them down through the floor like manna and his father came out next morning to a cenotaph of feathers; The Siege Of The Lavatory, when Elizabeth locked herself in the toilet and couldn’t get back out and the rest of the family spent most of an hour huddled round the door broadcasting instructions to her and sending messages of hope, and in the end his father had to climb the rone and break a window to get her out, tear-stained and penitent; The Quest For The Canary, when the pet canary, which had the run of the house, flew out of a window inadvertently left open and the scheme turned out to watch his father, holding aloft a cage and rattling a packet of birdseed, wander the streets calling ‘Joey, Joey, Joey’, to the roof-tops until Joey alighted on his head and he nudged him back into his cage and returned home in an aureole of Franciscan awe.
To their canon of occasions another night had been added. That was how they had felt. That was how they all remembered each other, haloed in a certain incident, incarcerated in an anecdote. They met
‘For my next trick . . .’ Uncle Hughie said.
And they became a quartet of laughers in unison, modulating, improvising, giving new interpretations to the situation through their laughter, until Uncle Hughie went through to get washed and returned spruce and eggless. While he was putting his shirt on again, Charlie’s father tried to give him back his money but he insisted it had been fairly lost. In the end it was decided that the money should be given to charity, namely Charlie and Elizabeth. The incident had generated laughter that lasted throughout that night and beyond.
As he remembered it, Charlie’s smile was an ironic echo of that laughter. Lying alone in his room, he thought himself through that occasion and others like it as if it were a form of penance. Since his father’s death he found himself brooding over past incidents like that, fingering them over and over in his memory, like rosary beads, as if mysteriously they could somehow help him to understand what had happened to him, help to resolve the enigma his feelings had become even to himself. Something about all of these moments drew him, seemed to promise to help him come to terms with the amorphous feeling of utter deception that he felt. Somewhere in them was the reason for his inability to participate as he had done before in his own life. And the incident of the ludicrous egg-breaking contest was typical of them all.
He remembered how they had all felt after it. They were all conscious of having made something among them. A night had been baptized. That was The Night That Uncle Hughie Fought The Egg. It was salvaged from the anonymity of other nights. It would be remembered, along with The Night The Dog Took A Fit, when John, playing vets, muzzled Queenie with an elastic band, and its head inflated ominously and it frothed like a drawing pint, charging chairs, butting sideboards, running a canine reign of terror until his father came in and unloosened the elastic; The Massacre Of TheChickens, when his father put a hundred day-old chickens in a ramshackle hut with a floor like a sieve and during the night the cats pulled them down through the floor like manna and his father came out next morning to a cenotaph of feathers; The Siege Of The Lavatory, when Elizabeth locked herself in the toilet and couldn’t get back out and the rest of the family spent most of an hour huddled round the door broadcasting instructions to her and sending messages of hope, and in the end his father had to climb the rone and break a window to get her out, tear-stained and penitent; The Quest For The Canary, when the pet canary, which had the run of the house, flew out of a window inadvertently left open and the scheme turned out to watch his father, holding aloft a cage and rattling a packet of birdseed, wander the streets calling ‘Joey, Joey, Joey’, to the roof-tops until Joey alighted on his head and he nudged him back into his cage and returned home in an aureole of Franciscan awe.
To their canon of occasions another night had been added. That was how they had felt. That was how they all remembered each other, haloed in a certain incident, incarcerated in an anecdote. They met
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