Another Way to Do It by Stephen Silvester

Punch – the professor only used the honorific Mr when trying to seize the butterfly attention of excited children – woke up one morning and decided enough was enough. From his random dangling position it so happened that he was looking at – it could hardly be into – one of the glazed eyes of his unlawfully wedded. He didn’t know whether she was awake or not; he was only ever fairly confident that she was when she was on the other end of the tug of war with the baby and had already assumed the professor’s rather camp baritone. Punch sniffed the air and wondered if being upside down was making his sense of smell more acute.

‘Oi missus,’ he muttered. ‘Where do think he’s left us this time?’

‘I don’t know.’ Judy’s voice was wooden, in resonance and delivery. ‘Wherever we were yesterday, I suppose.’

‘Which was?’

‘Can’t remember. One place is much like another.’

‘To you, maybe. I’ll give you some olfactory clues. Piss, Jeyes, boiled cabbage.’

‘Oh, there.’

‘You will recall that I have remarked on more than one occasion that our little drama is scarcely appropriate for those with a less than robust constitution. Blue rinses for example.’

‘Where have you been? Blue rinses are out. They do strawberry blonde nowadays, in a modern style. Knocks years off.’

Had Punch been capable of a change of expression, Judy might have interpreted it as incredulity. ‘Meaning they look only eighty? I don’t think the modern style has reached here yet. This lot have even given up on the blue rinse. White wisps, sparse tight yellowing curls, baby pink of scalp, but blue, no.’

‘You are horrid. The old dears enjoyed themselves. Their first and second childhoods met happily. Anyway, who are you to mock others for their alopecia?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re bald.’

‘How do you know? You’ve never seen me without my hat.’

‘Take it off, then.’

‘No. Now you’ve put me off my stride. I was talking about him and his lack of respect, wandering off and us stuck here like left luggage, probably had to get to the Dog and Duck or whatever it’s called here for opening time and then stayed until he forgot about us or where he’d left us …’

‘Could have been worse. Remember that time he left us on the beach at Southwold and there was that freak tide and if we hadn’t been wedged between two of the beach huts that didn’t get swept away …’

‘Yesyesyes and we stank of seaweed for weeks afterwards, I know I know, but we’re getting off the point again. It’s got to stop. He can’t treat us like this. We’re his living, the wretched sot.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘I have an idea.’

‘What is it? A strike? Rebellion?’

‘Something like that. You’ll find out soon enough. Where’s the baby?’

‘I don’t know. Around here somewhere. Unless old slobberchops put it in his pocket.’

‘Hard to believe it’s the fruit of our loins, isn’t it?’

‘We haven’t got any loins.’

‘Strange-looking thing. Like a dolly peg in a dish cloth.’

‘That’s your child you’re talking about.’

‘So you say. What sex is it?’

‘I don’t know. Dolly pegs don’t have rude bits.’

Fortunately most of Sunnyside was at lunch when the professor came to retrieve his booth and its inhabitants, but he was nevertheless greeted in the lounge by a small gaggle of ancients who had either already eaten or had somehow been overlooked. He wished they had shown such animation the day before.

‘Are you going to do a show?’

‘I don’t think he should hit her like that. It’s not very nice.’

‘What are you doing in here, young man? Can’t you see it’s ladies only?’

‘I haven’t seen one of those for years.’

‘Does this dolly peg belong to you? That nasty one with the big nose threw it out of the window.’

The professor grinned dementedly, nodded furiously and made reassuring noises while simultaneously dismantling the booth with atypical unhandiness and thinking uncharitable thoughts about his would-be interlocutors. He was much relieved when he was finally able to cram everything into the bag and beat a retreat. He was even more relieved when an innocent-looking sky unleashed a torrent that satisfactorily cancelled his afternoon rendezvous with sandy, sticky infants and their minders, leaving him free to deal with his lingering hangover in his own tried and tested way.

The next day was sunny and the sky truly innocent. The professor could not avoid his next bit of destiny. There was a fair crowd for the 11 o’clock show. It was too early in the day for the smaller children to have become fractious. The spotty youth he had acquired as a bottler – rather, he thought, as the sole of a shoe acquires a glob of spat-out chewing gum – was nowhere in evidence. This was not entirely a bad thing; the professor suspected that his assistant’s rapt appreciation of Punch and Judy was that of a five-year-old and that he might also be a little light-fingered with the contributions; besides, he had more often than not managed perfectly well on his own, and he did so now.

The show started unremarkably; he wasn’t particularly inspired or inventive that morning, but the audience wouldn’t notice. He was surprised, however, by the energy he was putting into his performance. There was something unusually physical about it; he was very aware of his hands, which seemed to be unnecessarily busy, restless, one might even say keyed up. Certainly Judy received a far more fervid drubbing than she was used to. Then Punch rammed his stick between the crocodile’s clacking jaws with such determination that it could only be extracted offstage by a momentarily puppet-free hand. The professor didn’t begin to harbour suspicions until Punch was sent downstairs to fetch the baby and then failed to come up again in a timely manner, despite Judy’s increasingly nervous appeals. It was only after the children’s encouragement had been solicited that he reluctantly reappeared bearing aloft the baby, which he then flung into the audience with a half-hearted cry of ‘That’s the way to do it.’ The professor felt that it really wasn’t, a conviction that was substantiated moments later by a high-pitched hubbub out of which emerged one clear voice which wailed disgustedly: ‘He’s eating the baby!’ The dolly peg had been swapped for a banana.

The rest of the performance bumbled along without conviction or major incident until they were approaching the denouement and Jack Ketch was demonstrating to Punch how to put his head in the noose. Each time the initiate seemed to have mastered this complex procedure the hangman would pull on the other end of the rope, and each time the gibbet would wobble wildly and then collapse. The professor detected more than a whiff of sabotage and decided to drop the Devil and wrap the thing up with Punch squeaking a forcedly jolly song.

Once the disgruntled adults – including some who hadn’t paid – had dragged the mostly unimpressed children off in search of less slipshod diversions, the professor said: ‘I want a word with you.’

‘Snap,’ said Punch.

‘What’s your game? First you start beating Judy like she’s some old carpet. My hand was in there, you little bastard. Then that over-the-top crocodile business …’

‘Self-defence.’

‘You nearly dislocated my thumb. Then your self-important display – look at me, I’m the star, I can keep everybody waiting – and that stupid banana trick. And to cap it all, that thing with Jack Ketch. I suppose you think that was funny.’

‘I thought you’d like a bit of gallows humour.’

‘What is it you want? You obviously want something.’

‘Respect. A bit of appreciation. Not being taken for granted. A new contract.’

‘But there is no contract. You’re a puppet. I’m in charge.’

‘That’s what you think. Who’s been calling the shots this morning?’

‘I don’t need to do this, you know.’

‘Yes, you do. You don’t know anything else.’

The professor absorbed the words and saw the chasm. ‘Are you threatening me?’ he asked numbly.

‘Of course not,’ Punch replied, all sweetness and light. ‘I just want to make a few gentle suggestions for peaceful coexistence.’

‘Go on.’

‘First of all, no more abandoning us in strange places. It makes us feel unwanted. Secondly, don’t leave us dangling. How would you like to be hung upside down all night? Put us away properly in our box. I’m on a roll now.’ His fixed grin seemed to the professor to have widened. ‘And that bloody dog has to go. It’s got no business being here. It’s not one of your lot, nor one of ours. What do we need a third species for? I can’t imagine whose idea it was to introduce the damn thing. Someone who liked ratty little yappy crappy pissy doggy things, I suppose.’

‘My father was very fond of the previous Tobys, the present one’s mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.’

‘But I am not at all fond of the present – soon to be past – Toby, which is of the leg-lifting gender. For some reason it favours my side of the playboard. It has to go.’

‘Anything else?’ the professor asked sarcastically.

‘No, that’s about it. For now. Oh no, while we’re at it, I’ve just thought of an addendum to the storage arrangements. I want to be next to Pretty Polly. On top, side by side, underneath, upside down, I’m not fussed. I want once again to feel a stirring in my non-existent loins.’

‘You are a dirty little puppet. And what if I don’t give in to your demands?’

‘Suggestions. Well, you may have to learn – quickly – how to improvise. Anyway, how could they be demands? We’re only puppets, as you so delicately pointed out.’

‘And so you are.’

‘And you’re a wobbly soak. You’ll burst something one day, and then where will we be? End up in a junk shop or a chichi museum somewhere. Or if we’re lucky, bought for some obnoxious brat who’ll rip us to pieces when he’s throwing a tantrum – a quick end, at least – or if we’re less lucky for a child who loves us and understands us but then is forced to put away childish things and we are left to moulder in a suitcase in loft. A sad end.’

‘So for the moment it looks like we’re stuck with one another, for better or for worse.’

‘I don’t think worse is really an option, do you? How many swazzles have you swallowed, gutbucket?’

‘More than my share, I think. And there’s no call for name-calling, you woodenheaded psychopath.’

‘Let’s hope you don’t choke next time.’

The new arrangement got off to an unspectacular start, with some trepidation on the professor’s part. Punch’s view of its progress is unknown because he kept his own counsel. Of course there was some backsliding on both sides, on the professor’s simply through self-administered amnesia rather than animus or bad faith. Punch now and then allowed his adversaries to gain the upper hand: when the policeman asked him to come quietly, he did so, and he even allowed his magnificent schnozzle to become the crocodile’s plaything, much to that wooden reptile’s dimwitted astonishment. It was as if he had doubts about his role, but the professor was rudely disabused of this notion when –- after a particularly triumphant ‘That’s the way to do it’ – a scratchy, swazzle-free voice said ‘No it isn’t.’ There was, however, one close call when he let Jack Ketch hang him, nearly successfully. It was Judy who brought him round. His first words to her were: ‘But you’re supposed to be dead.’

‘Needs must,’ she retorted. ‘The show must go on.’ And so it did, until … But that’s another story.

Stephen Silvester

Image: Punch and Judy puppets from Wikicommons public domain. This applies worldwide.