A superstitious Devon woman who lived and died in the residential home run by my parents, used to reckon that, if her first glimpse of a new moon was through a window or in a mirror, she was in for a month of rotten luck. If she first saw the new moon when she was out of doors, however, she was pleased, because that meant she was in for a month of good luck. If she glimpsed the new moon first over her right shoulder, she said, that would be very lucky indeed. It had happened to her mother once in her lifetime, but never to her.
She’d lived all of her life in an isolated village. If she saw me sit on a table, she’d say, ‘Sit on a table, meet a stranger!’ If I dropped a spoon, she’d say, ‘Dropped spoon — stranger at the door!’ And once, when she saw me scratching my elbow, she exclaimed, ‘Itchy elbow, end up in a stranger’s bed!’ She was a maiden lady so the thought of ending up in a stranger’s bed was to her an extraordinary one. Violet Joint was her name. She had no teeth, but her gums were so hard she could bite an apple with them.
I thought of her again a fortnight ago when I glimpsed this present moon as a ghostly sliver in a purple sky over my left shoulder as I was getting out of the car at dusk. Left shoulder, note, not right. So I’d seen it out of doors — good — but over the wrong shoulder. Would that cancel out any benefits? All bets were off in any case, probably, because the day before the new moon I’d found a robin in the house. It was in the sitting room, perched on the TV. A robin in the house is a harbinger of death, Miss Joint used to say: tragic, sudden and possibly violent death usually. She could give examples of death by robin from the social history of her village. According to her, after seeing a robin in the house you might as well call it a day.
The day after the new moon, I had some minor surgery. ‘Who is coming to collect you, Mr Clarke?’ said one of the nurses afterwards. ‘Nobody,’ I said. ‘My car’s in the car park.’ She reminded me that I’d had a letter from the hospital telling me I must arrange to be picked up. Technically, she said, she shouldn’t let me go. But I was the last customer of the day, and she couldn’t forcibly stop me driving off, so that was that.
On the way home, I stopped at a café to pick up a coffee to drink as I drove along. I asked the woman behind the counter to make it a large one. ‘Be careful. It’s very hot,’ she said, as she cautiously handed me the cardboard cup with the plastic lid on. It was, too. I placed the cup in the circular, cup-sized niche in the dashboard and let the coffee cool for a bit.
At traffic lights a few miles down the road, I calculated that I had just enough time to remove the lid and take a sip before the lights turned green and our queue began to move forward. She’d filled the cup right to the brim. The cardboard sides of the cup were flimsy and almost too hot to hold. And with the lid off, the cup lost what little rigidity it had, and some hot coffee slopped into my lap. Instinctively, I gripped the cup more tightly to steady it. The cardboard sides caved in, ejecting about half a pint of coffee over the front of my shirt, and down the neck of my shirt, and over the post-operative wounds on my upper chest. I immediately let go of the cup, which fell into my lap, spilling the rest of the contents over my groin area and my upper thighs.
I jumped out of the car and danced a hornpipe in the road, putting further exquisite strain on the wound stitches, while ripping off my shirt and Marks & Spencer vest. Then I went quickly and rummaged in the boot for a towel or cloth. There wasn’t one. I slammed the boot closed, which set off the central-locking system, which has a fault, and the car locked itself with the keys still inside. The traffic light changed to green. I looked around for the moon, so that I could shake my fist at it, and roundly curse it but, if it was there, it was obscured by rain-clouds massing for yet another torrential downpour. So instead I smiled weakly and apologetically at the drivers of the cars massing behind me with their indicators going.
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