Euan Ferguson is a Scottish writer and journalist living in London. He is the author of several successful non-fiction books and has held roles including contributing editor at Time Out. After years of sub-editing, editing and copywriting for companies including Mr Porter, Hardie Grant and Soho House, he is now focusing on writing fiction and has completed a modern gothic novel set in Scotland and a collection of darkly comic short stories.
Email: ferguson.euan@gmail.com
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The Wallacestone & Reddingmuirhead Jigsaw League
‘Hurry up and shite Bella, I’ve no got all day.’
The Wallacestone & Reddingmuirhead Jigsaw League was approaching its climax and Liz Paterson was not in the mood. Bella, though, had business more pressing than defecation: she’d happened upon the sauce pot from a box of chicken nuggets and was manoeuvring her long ham-tongue into its crevasses to extract the seams of tangy BBQ within.
‘Leave that ya manky thing!’ Liz half-jogged across the patchy recreation ground to where Bella was at her sneaky feed. Bella, foreseeing a hasty end to an unexpected treat, picked up the pot and danced away, enjoying the element of tomfoolery the episode had acquired.
‘I swear I’m no needing your nonsense!’
Bella gave the pot a final chew and dropped it by a dandelion. Liz grabbed her collar and coupled it to the lead with a yank; the labrador – for canine, of course, was Bella – was reminded of her full bowels and began sniffing around for a splendid place to deposit her surplus. The rain dribbled down, and human and dog hunched their shoulders against it, though their pelages were dampened, both Liz’s Clairol Nice’n Easied medium-blonde and Bella’s God-given dun.
As Liz scraped the beast’s concoction from the turf with bag-sheathed hand, her mind turned to the matter that was causing her to give her charge short shrift this ashy autumn day. It was true, the league had always had a cutthroat element. Friendships several had been dashed against the rocks of sporting rivalry, and more than one contest in the dusty village hall had ended with voices raised and tempers flared. An event broadcasted on Zoom to appeal to the younger generation of puzzlers had ended in angry allegations of gamesmanship, provoking bickering that intensified so severely it attracted a wider online audience, then soon after the dirt-digging pressmen of the Record, who turned the bargying into a scoop and published an account with the headline GIVE PIECE A CHANCE, forcing the chairman to set their Facebook group private.
Antagonism was part of jigsawing. Liz accepted that. This year, however, was different. For the first time, the winner would be awarded a place in the national heats. And Liz was one game away from joining the puzzling elite. On its own, she thought, as she trudged back to her bungalow with Bella aside, this would be excitement aplenty. But there was more. Last year’s league winner, the redoubtable Betty Henderson, had perished in April, her heart pumping its last at the top of her stairs and her breath giving up at the foot. She could finish a board before your average jigsawer had worked out which way up the picture went. The pretender, Frank Barclay, a whelp at seven years her junior, scented victory, and was displaying newfound enthusiasm. Folk said he was even off the drink. But Liz was suspicious. Moreso, she was quite sure, he was communicating with her via the medium of jigsaw.
The bequeathal of finished die-cut puzzles was a tradition in the league. After a dissectologist – as practitioners prone to grandiosity called themselves – had basked for a moment in self congratulation, they would sweep all the pieces into their box and transfer them to an acquaintance. All the pieces, thought Liz bitterly as she towelled Bella’s four feet and doled out the post-walk biscuit.
‘You in?’ she barked into the house, but the recipient of her demand purported not to hear. What was a puzzle without all the pieces? The last five boxes Frank had handed to her over their party fence had been short of a single piece each. And, she had told her husband, it was no mistake: the missing bits had been chosen deliberately to convey sinister messages.
‘Pish,’ he’d muttered, and returned to his reels. He had scant regard for the world of competitive jigsawing. Antique fishing tackle was his thing: his collection was second to none in the county of Stirlingshire, and it filled shelves and boxes in their side room, the one Liz had once imagined could be a sun lounge, perhaps with wicker furnishings and plants in pots, but had soon become instead a repository for Jim’s esoteric assemblage. Fishing itself was a secondary concern, but the equipment – from his 1930 Hardy Marquis with its Bakelite handle to the Victorian salmon Starback – now you’re talking. It was thus with reluctance he agreed to the affixation of the sticker to their Honda, the one bearing the slogan ‘PUZZLERS DO IT ON FLAT SURFACES’, with its rendering of interlocking pieces crudely suggestive of coitus.
So it followed he had scant regard for Liz’s theories of cryptic missives hidden in those secondhand cartons of parts. The brief attention he’d paid to her explanations on the subject led to cynical dismissal. They travelled their own paths in their roughcast dwelling, spending most of their minutes on their respective amusements, converging to sleep on their allotted sectors of the divan. But Jim’s indifference didn’t stop Liz. She expounded on her theses regardless. She talked the ear off him.
‘It started with “Pasta Shapes of Italy”,’ she said, as Jim tickled the felty head of the snoring Bella. ‘Macaroni, tagliatelle, the rest of it. But it was missing one piece. Farfalle. No F. In other words, F off. I don’t need to be told what that means Jim.’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Right enough.’
‘And then it was “Henry VIII and His Six Wives”. Thousand pieces, that was. But what was missing? Catherine Howard’s heid. Daft hat and all.’
‘Aye,’ said Jim.
‘Catherine Howard. Had her heid chopped off.’
‘Definitely,’ said Jim, definitely not listening.
‘Week after it was “MC Escher, House of Stairs”. A bugger. Now I know for a fact Moira Heaney gave him that one. She swore it was all there. But not now. Four hundred and ninety-nine pieces. And how did Betty die? Fell down the stairs. Try and tell me that’s a coincidence.’
Jim’s tufted ear pricked up. For while he was uninterested in puzzling, he was very interested in Moira Heaney. It wasn’t that her appearance was enticing. Far from it. The source of his preoccupation lay well hidden among the angling antiquities in the side room. Specifically, it lay in the issue of Readers Wives he’d encased in plastic all those years ago because he’d been sure – sure – that woman on page forty-eight, the one in the Berti Vogts-era Scotland shirt and hee-haw else, turning just so to the camera while exposing to all her lunar hindmost, was in fact Moira Heaney, her from over the road. Yes, there was a black rectangle eclipsing her eyes, but he was confident in his suspicions.
Because on every occasion that he and Liz had been invited into Moira’s house, he’d spent longer than was civilised eyeing up her fireplace, assessing whether it was the same one in the photograph of the willing wife in the magazine, taking note of its shade and detail, so as to confirm his identification at the next opportunity: opportunities that he often found, waiting till his own wife was otherwise engaged, and slipping the journal from its hidey-hole before coaxing out his shameful yield while the redacted provocatrix from over the road presented herself in the aged pages.
‘Let’s see what the sneaky so-and-so comes up with next,’ Liz said. ‘I’m on to him. If he thinks he’s beating me this year he’s got another think coming.’’
On his familiar plinth, a coffee table and a half from Liz’s armchair, Jim twisted his leg to release silently the gases that filled his gut so pressingly. The velveteen folds of the previous Paterson couch had absorbed all but the most surprising of exclamations, but this new one his wife had chosen, with its pleathery surfaces, acted as an amplifier to his many gusts, especially when he was so clad in chino. He committed a silent oath and shuffled his fat arse uncomfortably.
Liz considered herself a fastidious jigsawer. Just as she ran the most disciplined filing system on the second floor of the Forth Valley office of the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal Service, so her puzzling technique was without discrepancy. She was an edger – seeking and placing the perimeter first – and a colour sorter, and like most of her stripe she had private names for each variety of shape. It was thus she’d developed from a spare-time dabbler, thumbing in pieces with one eye on Strictly, to laser-focused master of the board. Ask her why she enjoyed jigsawing so, though, and she’d struggle for an answer. Perhaps it was because the concentration it required provided no space for thinking about such existential questions.
Limited time there was in Liz’s head, and that which should have been spent in preparation for her decider with Frank had instead been given to stewing over her neighbour’s absent fragments. She visited the library to research intently the jigsaws’ subjects, and what information she couldn’t acquire among the echoing aisles she just googled. She pontificated while she was peeling tatties and thought about it through the night, awakening after nightmares where Frank presented her with jigsaws of her own face, one piece always missing.
And in her waking hours, the investigations continued apace. Liz bounced her wild ideas off her husband, and bounce they did.
‘Two more to decipher,’ she said.
‘Eh?’
‘“Warwick Castle – The Most Famous View in England” – and “Monarch of the Glen.” Each missing a piece. The top of Clarence Tower – lot of grey there – and the deer’s nose. What does that mean?’
‘No idea hen.’
‘Me neither. But I’ll work it out.’
After a month more of this Sherlock act so convinced was she that Frank was attempting a devious intimidation that she spoke of little else, even interrupting Jim’s most private moments with outlandish speculations. ‘The tower one’s obvious, Jim,’ she shouted through the bathroom door. ‘It was started by King Richard but he never finished it. That’s what I read. Frank’s telling me to give up.’
‘You need to give this up, hen!’ an exasperated Jim shouted from his locked refuge, a place he’d found himself retreating to often in this trying time. ‘He’s got in your heid!’
‘Never. He’d love that, the bastard. Never!’
But while it was clear to Frank and Bella that Liz was not her usual personable self, how could they have known the extent to which her mind was unravelling, or that she could barely look at an unmade jigsaw without seeing only a hateful pile of chopped-up cardboard?
The day before the pair’s deciding bout, a wrung-out Liz was making the morning journey from house to car when Frank appeared. His face, as always, was shaved flitch-pink, and his fingers like butcher’s-window bangers, so that his signet ring was swamped by the pudge of the fourth on the left. In the ten of them he clutched a box, which bore a sentimental rendering of a glowing toyshop window, into which a trio of Dickensian urchins gazed longingly at a spread of wooden novelties they’d never get their paws on.
‘Awright Liz?’ Frank said. ‘You off to work aye? Glad I caught you. Just finished this. Tougher than it looks. Thousander. Thought I’d give you it. How you getting on with those other ones?’
‘Aye… fine,’ was all she could manage.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Aw, listen. I found a few pieces of them lying about. Sorry about that. I’ll pass them over to you.’ And then he winked, with a confidence that showed he was a regular winker, and the gesture brought his lip to arch and revealed a glint of gold on his incisor. ‘Hope you’ve no been up all night worrying about them.’
Frank started home, because it was baltic out there, but Liz stood motionless in her driveway, holding the cardboard box like an offering, with the devilishness of Frank’s scheme becoming so horribly clear, and her hopes and dreams disintegrating away, into nine hundred and ninety nine oddly shaped pieces.