The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

“In a very deep ocean?”

No.

“Hmm. Up someone’s bottom?”

Possibly.

14. Are you on the edge of your seats now? If we had a sound track to this book (of which more later) that kind of ending to a chapter would come with a three-note theme along the lines of “Dun-dun- dah!”

About that edge-of-the-seat business: in a sense, we are always on the edge of our seats because of electromagnetic repulsion, which means that the atoms that make up matter never actually touch one another. The closer atoms get, the more repulsion there is between the electrical charges of each atom. It’s a bit like trying to make the same poles of a pair of magnets touch: it just doesn’t work. So you may at this moment think that you’re sitting in a chair reading this footnote, but you’re actually hovering ever so slightly above it, suspended by a force of electromagnetic repulsion a billion billion billion billion times stronger than the force of gravity. You are officially a hoverperson.

V

In Which We Go on a Date—Well, Not “We” as in You and I, Because That Would Just Be Awkward, but We Go on a Date with Other People. No, Hang on, That’s Still Not Right. Oh, Never Mind. Just Read the Chapter.

THERE MAY COME A time in your life—I hope that it does not come, for your sake, but it might—when you realize that you may be with the wrong person. By this I don’t mean being in Russia with Napoleon just as the weather starts to turn chilly, or on a raised platform while a chap with a hood over his face raises a big ax and looks for a way to make you roughly a head shorter, although neither of those things would be good.¹⁵

No, what I mean is that you may ask someone out on a date, and during the course of the date you may discover that you have made a terrible mistake. You may even get a clear signal that a terrible mistake has been made. The person sitting across the table from you, or next to you in the cinema, may announce that she wasn’t sure that she was going to make the date because she was certain the jury was going to find her guilty, even though she hadn’t really murdered anyone because her last boyfriend had simply tripped and fallen on the knife she just happened to be holding at the time, ha-ha-ha, what a silly boy he was, and DON’T EVER MAKE ME MAD! Other subtle signs that you may have erred in asking someone out for an evening include: shooting the waiter for spilling the soup; laughing very loudly any time anyone dies in a film, especially if they die horribly, and everyone else in the cinema is weeping; or telling you that they’ve never gone out with anyone quite like you before, and when you ask them what that means you get the reply, “You know, a real person. One that I didn’t imagine, or build from LEGO.”¹⁶

Samuel Johnson was having one of those moments. In fact, he’d been having them for quite some time, but had hoped that things might get better. After all, he’d had a crush on Lucy Highmore for so long that he couldn’t actually remember a time when he didn’t have a crush on her. Occasionally in life we will wish for something that may not be very good for us simply because we think it will make us feel better about ourselves, or make us seem more important in the eyes of the world. This is why people buy expensive cars that they don’t need, or wear gold watches bigger than their heads. It is also why people will often date someone simply because he or she is wealthy, or famous, or beautiful. In case you didn’t already know—and if you’re clever enough to be reading a book, and have managed to get this far without stumbling over any words longer than five letters, then you probably do know—let me explain a truth to you: it doesn’t work. You’re trying to fix a flaw in yourself by shoving the problem onto someone, or something, else. It’s like having a cut on your finger and bandaging your toe instead. It’s like feeling hungry, and hoping that you’ll feel less hungry by buying yourself a hat.

A wise man once said that you should be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. Samuel wanted to meet that wise man and ask him why he hadn’t been there to advise Samuel when he’d started wishing that Lucy Highmore would go out with him. That was the trouble with wise men: they were never around when you needed them, and by the time you became a wise man yourself it was too late to use any of your wisdom on yourself, and nobody else wanted to listen to you.

Lucy Highmore didn’t particularly like Samuel’s friends. She didn’t like where he lived, and she didn’t like how he dressed. She didn’t like the sunlight because it damaged her skin, and she didn’t like the cold because, well, it made her feel cold. She didn’t like going out, and she didn’t like staying in. (When Samuel suggested that they could just stand at her front door with one foot inside and one foot outside, she had looked at him in a troubled way.) She didn’t like Samuel’s dog, Boswell, because he smelled funny. Boswell, who understood people better than people understood him, found this very unfair, as he wasn’t one of those dogs inclined to roll in stuff that smelled bad. He had yet to find a dead animal or a pile of deer poo that made him think, Wow, now why don’t I have a bit of a spin in that because I bet everyone will want to hug me after, and there’s no way they’ll make me take a bath that I don’t want. Furthermore, Lucy Highmore smelled funny to Boswell, too, but there wasn’t much that he could do about it. She smelled of peculiar perfumes with French names that sounded like Mwah-mwoh, or Zejung, names that were only impressive when spoken by an invisible man with a deep voice. She also smelled slightly of vegetables because that was all she seemed to eat. She could live for a week on a stick of celery and half a carrot, and there were camels that consumed more liquid.

On their first date, Samuel had taken Lucy to Pete’s Pies. Everyone loved Pete’s Pies. It was a small pie shop run—and you’re ahead of me here—by a man named Pete. Pete’s pies were perfect pastry constructions filled with meat and vegetables, or just vegetables if you were that way inclined, and just meat if you really, really liked meat. The pastry was as golden as the most perfect dawn, the filling never too hot and never too cold. Pete also made what he called his “dessert pies,” triangles of apple, or rhubarb, or pear that made grown men weep for their sheer loveliness, and grown women weep with them. There was nobody—I mean, nobody—who didn’t like Pete’s pies. No one. You’d have to be mad not to like them. You’d have to be impossible to please. You’d have to be—

Lucy Highmore.

On that first date, Lucy had politely declined to share a pie, and had simply sipped delicately at a glass of water—so delicately, in fact, that natural evaporation caused the level in the glass to drop more than Lucy’s sips.

Now, months later, she and Samuel were still together, but both of them were starting to think that they shouldn’t be, although neither could quite find the words to say it. They were also back in Pete’s Pies. Since Lucy never seemed to eat much, it didn’t really matter where they went. She could choose not to eat in Pete’s Pies just as easily as she could choose not to eat anywhere else. They were the only people in the pie shop apart from old Mr. Probble, who now spent his days reading the Oxford English Dictionary in order to improve his word power. He’d started at A, and was reading a page a day. This meant that conversations with Mr. Probble tended to involve exchanges like the following:

“Hello, Mr. Probble. Nice day, isn’t it?”

To which Mr. Probble might reply, “Aardvarks amble awkwardly.”¹⁷

Samuel stared into Lucy’s eyes, and Lucy stared into his.

“You know,” she said, “you ought to get new glasses.”

“Really?” said Samuel.

“Yes, those ones make your face look a funny shape. They also make you seem like you have trouble seeing properly.”

“But I do have trouble seeing properly,” said Samuel.

“But you don’t want everyone to know, do you?” said Lucy. “It’s like ugly people and hats.”

“Is it?” said Samuel, not sure where ugly people came into it, exactly, or hats.

“Of course, silly.”

Lucy patted Samuel’s arm. To be honest, “patted” might have been an understatement. There were wrestling champions who would have screamed “Ouch!” after being patted by Lucy Highmore. She had quite a