The Restless Supermarket by Ivan Vladislavic Page B

proprietor and customer (custom, like costume, from the ME and OF custume ,from the Latin consuetudo ),was both more formal and more at ease. It was through the kind offices of Mrs Mavrokordatos that I found a neater, less bothersome solution to my dilemma with the crossword than the wretched ripping I had been reduced to. When I arrived at the Café in the afternoon, I would hand her the newspaper and she would snip out the straight clues with a pair of scissors, giving me the little patch of newsprint, considerately folded clue-side-in, to store in my wallet. This arrangement had a couple of advantages, in addition to the embarrassment it spared me. If there was some important information on the reverse side of the page, some damaged article I would only discover later that evening or the next morning when I was trawling for typographical errors, I could easily restore the excision, snug as a jigsaw piece. This very thing happened on more than one occasion. And in the unlikely event of my not being able to complete the puzzle, I could consult the straight clues. In my opinion, it was better to finish the puzzle with the aid of the simple clues than not to finish it at all. This proved to be one of the matters on which Spilkin and I held diametrically opposed views. (Dress sense was another. Not to mention … no, let me not mention it.) It wasn’t that we differed on the status of the straight clues themselves: in his book, as in mine, the straight clues were for simple minds. But we did not attach the same importance to completion, to finalization. He was quite happy (although it very seldom came to this) to leave a puzzle unfinished; whereas I could not get to sleep at night if a clue eluded me.
    The stranger Spilkin, a person whose name I did not even know, finished tearing, crumpled the scrap into a ball and tossed it into the ashtray, where it immediately began to unfold, blossoming like a desert bloom in a time-phase film. He smoothed the page flat, propped it on his knee in the beam of the searchlight and took a pen from his pocket. It was a beautiful pen, a fountain pen with a marbled barrel, a Waterman I would have said (and I would have been right). The sort of pen advertising copywriters liked to call a ‘writing instrument’. This pen, reclining elegantly on the soft cushion of his forefinger, with its nib as sleek as a ballet slipper, made me proof him more thoroughly, from the open-neck shirt down to the white slip-ons. His clothes were pastel and sporty, casual but expensive; they would have been perfectly at home on the greens, under a blue sky, but looked flashy in this dim brown interior.
    He began to fill out the clues with remarkable facility.
    How long would it take him? Half an hour was considered ‘good’. I consulted my records: that day’s puzzle had taken me twenty-three minutes to solve. Now that my notebook lay open on the table, on the inlaid chequerboard I’d always fondly wished might be transformed one day into a crossword grid, I suddenly resolved to take up the matter of the inconvenient new format of the clues with the editor of the Star .I had been putting it off for months, but watching Spilkin’s contortions had made me aware that the problem was not just my own. A whole community of people were being inconvenienced by some lowly editorial whim. I took up the cudgels on their behalf.
    The letter was a good one.
18 July 1987
    Dear Sir,
    Until recently, the cryptic and the straight clues to your two-speed crossword puzzle appeared above and below the grid respectively, and appropriately so. This enabled the proponents of the higher method to obscure the evidence of the lower by the simple expedient of folding the page in half.
    Since the two sets of clues now appear alongside the grid, this procedure is no longer possible. Your puzzles editor can verify this in an instant.
    Some of your readers may be accustomed to a diet of chalk and cheese, but my constitution will not bear it.