Pulse

moments when an object had passed from one set of fingertips to another.
    That was the nearest I got to her that evening, and for weeks to come.
    Have you ever played that game where you sit in a circle and close your eyes, or are blindfolded, and have to guess what an object is just from the feel? And then you pass it on to the next person and they have to guess? Or, you keep your guesses to yourselves until you’ve all made up your minds, and then announce them at the same time?
    Ben claims that once, when he played it, a mozzarella cheese was passed round and three people guessed it was a breast implant. That may just be medical students for you; but there’s something about closing your eyes which makes you more vulnerable, or drives the imagination to the gothic – especially if the object being passed is soft and squishy. In the times I played the game the most successful mystery item, the one guaranteed to freak somebody out, was a peeled lychee.
    There was a production of King Lear I went to some years ago – ten, fifteen? – played against a bare-brick backdrop,with brutalistic staging. I can’t remember who directed it, or who played the title role; though I do remember the blinding of Gloucester. This is usually done with the earl pinioned and bent back over a chair. Cornwall says to his servants, ‘Fellows, hold the chair’, and then to Gloucester, ‘Upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot.’ One eye is put out, and Regan chillingly comments, ‘One side will mock another; the other too.’ Then, a moment later, the famous ‘Out, vile jelly’, and Gloucester is pulled upright, with stage gore dripping down his face.
    In the production I saw, the blinding was done offstage. I seem to remember Gloucester’s legs flailing from one of the brick wings, though perhaps that is a later invention. But I do remember his screams, and finding them the more terrifying for being offstage: perhaps what you can’t see frightens you more than what you can. And then, after the first eye was put out, it was lobbed on to the stage. In my memory – in my mind’s eye – I see it rolling down the rake, faintly glistening. More screams, and another eye was tossed out from the wings.
    They were – you guessed – peeled lychees. And then this happened: Cornwall, lanky and brutish, stamped back onstage, tracked down the rolling lychees, and set his foot on Gloucester’s eyes a second time.
    Another game, from back when I was a hiccuping boy at primary school. In the morning break we used to race model cars in the asphalt playground. They were about four inches long, made from cast metal, and had real rubber tyres which you could roll off the wheels if you felt like simulating a pit stop. They were painted in the bright colours worn by the racing marques of the day: a scarlet Maserati, a green Vanwall, a blue … perhaps something French.
    The game was simple: the car that went the furthest won. You pressed your thumb down on to the middle of the longbonnet, pulling your fingers up into a loose fist, and then, at a signal, transferred the pressure swiftly from a downwards to a forwards direction, sending your car off into the distance. There was a certain technique involved in obtaining maximum propulsion; the danger being that the knuckle of your middle finger, held a fraction of an inch above the playground’s surface, would scrape against the asphalt, tearing skin and costing you the race. The wound would scab up, and you would have to adjust your hand, dropping the knuckle of the third finger into the danger area. But this could never produce the same velocity, so you went back to the usual, middle-finger technique, often ripping off the newly formed scab.
    Your parents never warn you about the right things, do they? Or perhaps they can only warn you about the immediate, local stuff. They bandage the knuckle of your right middle finger and warn against getting it infected. They explain about the dentist, and how the pain will wear off afterwards. They teach you the highway code – or at least, as it applies to junior pedestrians. My brother and I were once about to cross a road when our father put on a firm voice and instructed us to ‘Pause on the kerb.’ We were at that age when a primitive understanding of language is intersected by a kind of giddiness about its possibilities. We looked at one another, shouted, ‘Paws on the kerb’, then squatted down with our hands flat on the edge of the