3
Moving onto the first of his desserts, David started to move his fork around, waving it in the air in front of them both. Sometimes the fork was over the plate of food. Often it wasn’t. It was as if he was rehearsing what he was going to say. Helen knew him well enough to know that David was, in-fact, so keen to embark on his subject that his hand gestures were incapable of waiting for his mouth to empty and today’s sticky toffee pudding was especially tasty and, clearly, exceptionally sticky.
Helen knew she was smiling and she did her best to make hers an expression of anticipation. To laugh now would possibly result in them both laughing out loud and sitting opposite David when he laughed out loud was potentially hazardous. To do so while he still had sticky toffee pudding un-swallowed was much too great a risk to even contemplate.
“Look around.” The instruction came before David had even finished his mouthful. “Look around.” he said again – swallowing. His fork exemplified what he was instructing Helen to do. Fortunately, today’s sticky toffee pudding was extra sticky and what was stuck to his fork remained firmly in place.
Helen obliged. “There!” David exploded “See? You looked around but you failed to look up or down. Look around again.” Thinking that perhaps the ceiling had been painted or the floor tiles changed, Helen did indeed look around. She looked into the corners of the dining area. She looked up at the roof tiles and down at the floor tiles she studied the walls and tables. She even managed to look, fleetingly, at some of the other diners. Not an easy task given that, by now, most of the other diners were looking at her.
She noted nothing worth the attention, and said so. “The point is,” David said, “that you can look all around. You can look up, down, left, right, behind and in front. You can look in any of the directions you choose.” Completely un-impressed with David’s excitement, thus far, Helen merely replied with a hesitant “yes?” which sounded much more like “so what!” than she intended.
“Okay, now I’m going to hold this straw in front of your eye and you have to look through it. What can you see?” Helen could see hair sticking out of David’s right ear but she was pretty sure that was not the answer he was looking for. “Just the side of your head,” she said. “What else?” Helen started to worry that perhaps he DID mean for her to examine the hair sticking out of his ear. “Nothing.” she said. “Exactly, all you can see is straight ahead of you and if you were at this end of the straw you would only be able to look back along the same length, forward and backward. No right, no left, no up, no down. Even if I point the straw somewhere else, be it the floor or the ceiling even one of the walls, the same rule would apply. You would only be able to see along the straw. If you were inside the straw you would only be able to see along the straw and nothing through the sides of the straw.”
Helen thought David seemed inordinately pleased with himself given that he had done nothing extraordinary, yet. This looked as though it was going to be one of David’s more progressive subjects after all there were two more straws, two menus and a pile of paper towels on his tray yet.
David reached for his second dessert.
The second dessert had cooled significantly and the stickiness had increased considerably. “Nnnng.” he said. Frustrated at his inability to articulate even the word ‘now’, David’s fork went into overdrive. Helen slid her chair back a little from the table and gave a warning look to a passing diner who changed direction and passed them by a good table length away instead of squeezing through the gap adjacent to theirs.
David attempted an early swallow and Helen was sure she could see the dessert’s entire journey from David’s mouth to his stomach. “Now,” he said. “Without moving you head, or eyes, up or down look around the room again and tell me what you can’t see.”
Despite the improbable nature of the question, Helen complied. Remembering her earlier acquaintance with the room, Helen was able to report that she could see nothing of the floor or ceiling inside a relatively short distance. David was already reaching for the two menus, which he arranged, again in front of Helens face. One was held flat just below her eye line the other just above and parallel to the first. Helen dutifully reported that both the floor and the ceiling had now been removed from her sight.
“So,” David fed back, “with the two menus obstructing your vision above and below you can only see along the flat surface. Your vision is in a sort of sandwich, which means you can look sideways, and along the plane of the menus but not at an angle through the menus. If I tilt the menus so that they remain parallel but are pointed so that your visual plane is up, or down, or left or right of where we started, you see different things but the same rule still applies; you can only see along the plane of the menus or from side to side within the plane of the menus. Yes?”
As Helen answered, David was already moving on from the menus and reaching for his can of coke. Wondering what was happing next Helen could only marvel as David summarised the fact that through the straw you could only see forward and back; between the menus only along, or side to side and yet, when David had told Helen to look around the room she had the option to see in any direction she chose. As David concluded his summary, the coke can returned to the table and in one smooth flourish David had popped the ring pull. Helen almost escaped the exploding liquid as the thoroughly shaken can expressed its contents all over the table, the floor, David and Helen. “I knew I’d need these,” said David reaching for the paper towels.
It was somebody’s phone making an insistent repetitive racket that had been substituted for a ring tone that caused them both to look at their watches.
David swept his brown saturated paper towels into a soggy ball, which landed, on his tray. Standing he brushed crumbs from his bread roll from his lap and departed.
Helen resealed her now empty salad container with plastic fork inside. Placed what was left of her bottled water in her bag placed the contents of her tray onto David’s tray. Stacked the trays and slid both the trays into the self-service used tray slot near the exit.
Smiling after him, Helen followed in the direction David had taken knowing that today’s subject was going to be one of David’s ‘multi lunchtime’ specials.