Short Story Compilation - by Paul Evans.

I can remember what I asked him – practically word for word, as it happens - although it doesn’t really matter much now, anyway.
But I can quote you what his reply was. Exactly.
“It’s come around to the point when we should be getting married. It’s either that, or the parting of the ways. An either or thing,” I’d confessed.
And Ben had thought about it for a moment, and said: “A relationship has to be greater than the sum of its parts.”
That was a good observation: cold, quotable, soundbite-able. Right up there with Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you…”

Ben has always been my best friend.
We’ve both lived through his embarrassing name and come out the other side.
Well, his name isn’t embarrassing for him, perhaps. But it makes me go red-faced when I explain that Ben is my best mate because…well, because people of a certain age reckon that Ben is a dog. My ultimate best friend – man’s best friend. And younger people within earshot believe them, snigger and say I need to get a life.
It has to be said that younger people are always within earshot of older people speaking because:
a) Old people think they know everything and it’s therefore their mission to let everyone know it. And:
b) That’s why they talk in a loud voice, not because they’re deaf (which they may or may not be, of course).
“Your pal should be eating Pal,” one of these old farts even said, once. And just to spite them, Ben did.

Anyway, back to the parts that nearly made up the sum.
Ben said that:

a) Miranda is good fun;
b) Miranda is younger than I am;
c) Miranda has the correct height-weight ratio;
d) She cooks well;
e) She looks great. Really great. Steady Ben, I’d said to that one. And:
f) She’d never cheat on you;
g) She has a law degree and will one day make us very rich - probably from the proceeds of somebody else’s misfortune but I can’t afford to care: I don’t buy fare-trade coffee and free-range eggs. Do you? Oh, and by the way Ben had wanted to get to ‘h’ because, he says, H is his lucky letter. Sad git. So he’d thrown in:
h) Isn’t that enough?

Well, no it wasn’t. Because Ben had gone to the bar for the umpteenth time and forced that unlucky seventh pint down my neck – unlucky, not because I share Man’s Best Friend’s superstitions but because every man(‘s best friend) knows his limits. And mine is that elusive seventh pint from Hell, the one that always results in me having slightly more drink inside me than he has; the one that finally forces our pint-to-piss ratio out of synchronicity (and therefore, because he’s a good bodyguard but only when he’s actually there, can get me beaten up in the gents).
Anyway, on that night, and after that particular seventh pint, I’d finally been made to admit that I didn’t really love Miranda.
I’d voluntarily gone through a list of ‘cons’ that came nowhere near outnumbering the ‘pros’ but that, you see (and I think you do already) was Ben’s point.
If you don’t, then let me tell you that with Miranda our love wasn’t greater than the some of our parts.
And one of her parts, as she was continually reminding me, meant that Miranda could not have a child.
“That’s a little harsh,” he’d said, when I’d listed her lack of a certain part as a con.
“I know,” I’d replied. “But it goes back to the time when Miranda and Ron (her previous lover who is actually still technically her husband) had this huge row over his infertility.”

To his credit, Ron had accepted straight away that they couldn’t have a child because he knew they were having plenty of hot sex.
He also knew that he was ugly and fat and that she was ‘fit’, so how could it possibly be her?  I mean, God only stops people who are less than aesthetically pleasing from procreating, doesn’t He?
Yeah, that was his logic. Who was she to contradict it?
And she didn’t, until, one day she’d had a few gins – seven, legend has it – and finally fronted him out.
And then she’d chucked him out.
Again, to Ron’s credit he still didn’t believe her so she sent him what he believed to be a certificate from the hospital, although she still refused to let him back in the house. Ron opened the letter in tears at his sad gaff in bedsit-land – Lord knows how it ever got there unopened. I mean, you know you’re renting down-market when your home doesn’t have a postcode. The postie knows it as ‘third padlock up from the downstairs bog that nobody uses (but nobody’s cleaned since two years ago when the last person used it very much).
So it was then, and only then, that Ron finally conceded that he’d been chucked out for good.
He’d thrown the wallet that contained Miranda’s photo and front door key into a very huge puddle, a puddle that was so huge, in fact, that it had a name.
“Into the Thames with you, my girl,” he’d said. “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.”

Anyway, in the pub that night I’d continued to go on, and on, and on – in the way that you now know I do.
I’d mainly gone on about Miranda admitting she was dyslexic, the reason she’d given to not getting round to actually divorcing Ron. She couldn’t fill in the forms correctly, you see. So that would incur more costs - employing someone who could, I mean. And, no, she didn’t trust me to do it – another bone of contention. Another ‘con’.
So the matter of her officially leaving him had just been left.
After I’d reminded Ben of all Miranda’s bad points, and introduced him gently to those two revelations about her dyslexia and the lack of a divorce, Ben had said: “Let’s go on to a club.”
The bouncer delighted in letting me know I was borderline.
I’d only just made it into The Snooty Vixen because, although I’d been reeling around a bit after the seven pints, Ben had sworn on his mother’s life that he’d arranged to meet some horny blondes there later that night and none of them had a penny between them because they were expecting him to pay. The bouncer knew that this was ‘Girls Go Free’ night and Ben knew the bouncer was on a bar takings percentage and so he’d given me the benefit of the doubt because if either of us was refused admission Ben would simply call the Head Blonde up on her mobile and drag the whole party along to Happy Mondays instead.
Once inside the Vixen, Ben had introduced me to a man who ran another club, only not a nightclub this time.
“It’s called ‘Luck School’, its American principle proudly announced. “And, boy, you sure look like you could use some.”
It must’ve been my lucky night.
The man’s instant recruitment plan for me had consisted of Ben inducing the pissed version of me to run through the good and bad points about Miranda once again, only this time for Mr. Lucky’s benefit. Then, just as Lucky had drawn so much breath that I’d actually accused him of sounding like a car mechanic who was about to impart some expensive news I’d begun to mention something that was a revelation to both Ben and his odd acquaintance.
“Do you know, Mister, er…” I bumbled.
“Call me Ralph.”
“Do you know, Mr Lucky Ralph, that Miranda’s schoolmates were so cruel…”
“About her word-blindness?” said Ben, being mindful of his imagined probability that Americans haven’t yet heard of dyslexia.
“Yeah,” I went on. “Do you know that these kids were so heartless that they accused her parents of christening her ‘Miranda’ because they knew she would be dyslexic – er, word-blind - because they were dyslexic themselves. And they must have believed that she was going to get in trouble with the law…”
“Law breaking isn’t hereditary, you know, even if dyslexia is,” Ralph had wisely said.
“I know,” I snapped. “Anyway, as I was saying, they called her ‘Miranda’ because it’s an anagram of ‘remand her’ – as in custody.”
“No it’s not – not literally,” Ben had joined in.
“It is an anagram if you’re dyslexic,” Ralph contributed patiently. “Ben, it seems you have been very unlucky indeed.”
My mate’s guru had seemed very convincing and so I’d given him my American Express card and he bought me my eighth drink – the one that elevated me dangerously beyond seventh heaven.
Eventually, after I’d signed for fifty dollars, he handed me his business card.
I’ve kept it all crumpled up in my wallet for three years – yes, it still lives just behind the one with a girl’s name in red writing, though it’s not next to my Amex card anymore because I’ve torn that one up.  
What do you mean, Why?
Not because of Mr. Lucky Ralph. No. It’s because that night Ben had dared me to actually phone the prostitute on the card but I’d never taken him up on it because I was secretly afraid that she might be dyslexic, too. You see I feared that every woman I was destined to meet would turn out to be dyslexic. Is that a condition in itself?
In this case Ben conceded I was probably right. I mean, how many girls called Nicola do you know who spell the shortened version of their name with three k’s?
Anyway, three hooker-less, girlfriend-less years later I find myself standing outside the place where Ralph holds his Luck Classes.
Knowing my luck, Ralph himself is probably not even here anymore.      

I knock on the door – hard. It hurts my knuckle because there is no knocker, which makes me think there are bouncers instead.
I realise I’m right when a burly man in a suit unhooks the castle-like door.
His attire kind of blends in with the oak. It looks like there’s just a head hanging there.
“Yeah?”
“Come to see Ralph,” I say, mimicking his abbreviated style.
“This way.”
At this point, I notice another, slightly shorter version of the doorman standing at the bottom of the stairs.
Up till now this man has blended in completely with the darkness.
His sudden ‘appearance’ makes me flinch.
“Uhh, oh. No you don’t,” implies the second man by restraining me gently, threateningly, professionally.
He’s holding out his hand. It’s almost invisible on account of his dark, leather glove.
“He’s asking you for five quid,” the first man says, helpfully.
I pull a tenner out of my wallet and, who knows, drop another tenner on the stair.
I feel the second man’s glove. For all I know he might have given me a receipt but I don’t stop to check because the first man is already holding me by the collar and pushing me up the stairs.
On the umpteenth floor we eventually reach the second set of oak-beamed doors. The second man lifts the huge latch and the first one bundles me in.
“This is Ralf,” says Man 2, revealing his inadequate, high-timbre voice.
Ralf appears in front of me like the Godfather.
I interpret his body language as a pledge to remain silent on account of my low ranking in the food chain of this particular club and, yes, I am afraid he’s going to eat me (or something rather worse).
I stare at Ralf for what seems like an eternity, swallowing regularly and nervously.
Finally, I muster up the courage to spit it out:
“We’ve never met before.”
“Correct.”
I don’t know it at the time, but this is the only word that this terrifying man will ever say to me.
I stare at the luminous banner across the stage that I only realise exists when my eyes become sufficiently accustomed to tell me.
I read the words out loud: School for 5th Century Warriors, it says.
And underneath, in slightly smaller print, Today’s Guru: Ralf the Terrible, leader of the Oodoo Sect. All of which goes someway towards an explanation. The other Ralph, of course, spells his name with a P and an H.
Like I say, I’ve still got his card.  
“Where’s the, er, Luck School?” I manage, throwing out my words in the vague direction of the ‘guru’.
Man A and Man B laugh uncontrollably.
The contrasting pitch of their voices only adds to the cruelty.
As they bundle me out, I console myself with the likely fact that I’m not the first to make this mistake and I won’t be the last.
Then the two bouncers hurl me through yet another set of oak doors and I finally fall to my feet – not because they hurt me, because they don’t. Not because the floor’s slippery, even though it is.
I fall because, well, compared to that last bunch of bastards, I’ve seen the light.
And it’s a very, very bright light indeed that adorns this room.
I’ve made my lucky escape from the other room and I’m completely unaccustomed to it but I’m very happy.
And whadda-ya-know: there, under the spotlight, stands the other Ralph – Mister Lucky.
“You were very fortunate to find this place,” he says, offering me his hand.
I hardly notice the rest of the class as Ralph skilfully extracts my reasons for being here without making it at all clear whether he remembers our meeting at the Snooty Vixen three years ago.
“After the ordeal I’ve just been through,” I say, “I would submit that anything happening to me from now on constitutes some degree of fortune.” I show a satisfied smirk as I await the considered response that my eloquent statement deserves.
I have found my voice at last. The pitch of my voice may lie somewhere between Man A and Man B but its owner is lucky to be free from their clutches.
“You are indeed fortunate to be freed from those monkeys,” Ralph pronounces, finally revealing his worst kept secret. “Everything is relative,” he assures.
It has now dawned on me that all the goings-on in the other room were a staged first stage of Ralph’s game.

This lunchtime May is showcasing her Gemini origins and contradictions. Bright sunlight and a bitter breeze have arrived like twins in our room.
The first voice belongs to a man who speaks with a kind of false confidence that can only be heard when someone is offloading an admission from his guilt wagon:
“My name’s Mike and I’m a pessimist,” he declares to the rest of the class.
He waits for a reply but Ralph holds our suspense with one of his trademark pauses.
It underlines my coldness and I freeze as another delegate beats me to it. “Let’s shut those French doors, Mister Lucky,” the spotty teenager proposes.
“As many of you already know, nothing is everything it seems,” Ralph begins, enigmatically. “Mike here has joined us because…well, you tell the class, Michael dear…”
“No matter where I am, or what time of day it is – which season, even,” Mike says almost proudly, “I have to have the doors open.”
“And that’s because, Michael?”
“Because luck never happens when the door’s shut, Coach. And so I have to let it in. Or escape.”
“Bullshit,” shouts a brave voice from the back.  
I look round and see the ‘bouncer’ whom I’d met earlier – the one who’d catapulted me into the ‘wrong’ room. As I observe his bogus contribution, his wooden acting, his multi-skilling, I decide that his face is more familiar than I’d been allowed to notice during that dark encounter.
Here, in the middle of Mike’s Daylight City, I am recognising his face as belonging to the man who’d only just sanctioned my entry into the Vixen some three years earlier. “BullSHIT!” he announces again: a little more conviction but just as wooden, I evaluate.
“We all know that Michael is hiding behind something, don’t we Class?” Ralph goes on. “Don’t we Peter?”
I crane my neck to see a tall, mid-twenty-something man standing up.
I assess that he has probably paid his dues with the tedious life-long round of cloud jokes that have almost certainly come his way; you know, What’s-the-weather-like-up-there type efforts. Oh, and even worse: Deeply unattractive women in supermarkets capitalising on his height to overcome forbidden access to top shelf merchandise (and perhaps the man himself).    
“Michael’s just being a luvvy,” Peter accuses. “He has to have the French doors open because he’s a failed actor who thinks he’s on a stage. Well, I’ve got news for you…” Peter is addressing Michael directly now, though I catch him glancing briefly sideways, trying to seek Ralph’s approval. “You’re just an old Queen,” he lets out now. “Those doors are your bloody stage curtain – go on, admit it: you won’t be happy until another dwarf dives into a sandpit and accidentally buries his equity card.”
“It’s you that’s the freak, Lampost Legs,” Michael says cattily.
Peter, to his credit, only registers a slight ‘tut’ and sits down again.
“Who’s next?” Our guru is rubbing his hands together as he says this. He looks as if he knows he shouldn’t be enjoying himself but he clearly is and no one seems to care.
Then a middle-aged man in a sharp grey suit stands up. “My name is Robert and…”
“He’s unlucky!” choruses the class.
“Tell us your story, young man,” Ralph instructs enthusiastically.
Robert offers some false charm to our host, muttering something about it being a long time since anyone’s called him young and then proceeds to tell his story.
“Since moving to the countryside from the big smoke,” he confides, “all my opportunities have gone down the drain.”
“Why do you think that is?” says our guru as sincerely as he can.     
“Can’t meet the right girl. And now I never will,” Robert sighs.
“And why do you think that is?”
“Why don’t you ask the rest of them?” he says, sweeping his hand across the crowd.  “It’s because all the people down here are in-bred,” he submits, “present company accepted,” he adds weakly.
The class members look at each other accusingly, as if to prove him right.
“Should see ‘em on a Monday,” Robert goes on. “You walk into the Post Office and there they are, crawling out of the hills. Or in some cases the sea. Those bloody overcoats cover a multitude of sins – sheep, cross-bred with pond life…”
Ralph temporarily halts the rant - but only, as it disappointingly turns out, to scold the man for his mixed metaphor, not to challenge his outrageous theory.
“Pond life can never survive in the English Channel,” he admonishes.
“Whatever. They’re neither man nor woman round here. Just bloody hermaphrodites, that’s all. Their gender provides the ultimate in cross-breeding, if you think about it. Self-reproduction: perfect, digital copies.”
“They reckon there are mermaids in the Post Office on a Monday,” chirps up a woman who appears older than her likely years. She looks like a librarian from the Nineteen-fifties and offers: “I keep meaning to collect my mother’s pension on a Tuesday from now on.”
I calculate that the class isn’t laughing at her comments so much as her inaccurate geography. Although the woman’s accent suggests she’s never left town, her gloved hand is indicating that the Post Office is situated on an island all by itself, somewhere in the sea.
Finally, a man called Jack in his forties makes an offering: “Addicted to competitions, me. But you know the only thing I’ve ever won is this TOG’s jacket…”
“Terry’s Old Geezers?” Ralph tries to confirm.
“Yes. Won it on Mr. Wogan’s breakfast show. On Radio 2.”
“What lives in the place that should be occupied by a white handkerchief?” the guru asks the rest of the class. When no answer is forthcoming he provides the answer. “Cheese. That’s what it is! Jack is carrying a three-week-old lump of cheddar around in his top pocket. Don’t you think that might just contribute to the likelihood of your perpetual misfortune, Mister Old-before-your-Time?”
The class is collectively cheering now in response to the great skill of Ralph’s cleverly-engineered guru-punch line. They slow hand-clap but the encore never comes. They’re blissfully unaware that Ralph is a leading exponent of the maxim ‘Leave ‘em wanting more’.

On the way out, our guru shakes my right hand while pointing to the in-house collection bowl with the other. I see no evidence of delegates making spontaneous donations, yet I notice no currency smaller than a tenner lurking in the receptacle.
This could well be another trick, I whisper to myself as I head towards the still-darkened hallway with an emptier feeling (and a much lighter wallet) than when I went in.

But the most important question remains unanswered:
Can you create luck, even with the help of a guru? Or are these people just losers?   
I’m still pondering on this question as I walk out into the bright but biting Spring afternoon and then it happens:
The familiar-looking woman with dark glasses growls at me in a deep voice.
I notice she’s too young to wear a headscarf, but it’s not her disguise that fails to give her away.
“Is this where they hold that luck school?”
“I think you’ve just missed it,” I say, looking at the notice board, playing for time.
I’m already aware that there are three repeat sessions this afternoon, but I’m waiting for her to say something back.
“What time does it finish?” the woman persists. “Got to pick my little one up from nursery school at half-two.”
I grow suspicious of her identity so I risk accusations of assault by tearing off her scarf.
When I see Miranda, I give her the sort of look that people who aren’t Chess players rarely see.
“Okay,” Miranda says, holding both her glove-clad hands up in the air. “But it’s not what you think. I haven’t come here to try and get fertile – I’m not that much of a disciple of Luck. Anyway, I can have children. Could all along. It was Ron, after all, that was infertile. But I pretended it was me. It was a convenient excuse to leave him.”
“Where were you when you were supposed to be having the op?”
“In Barbados.”
“So you let yourself fail him?”
“Got it in one. And then I let you leave me too because, deep down, every man wants kids, don’t they? But I couldn’t just let us get on with it. It would be like a miracle, don’t you see? And besides, it would hurt Ron even more if…”
I position the scarf over her mouth. It stops her going on about this insane mess for a moment, until some passers-by appear to be phoning the Police and I have no choice but to let her carry on.
I stand there in silence, letting Miranda dig her own trench. Whether or not the hole becomes a grave is up to her, now. 
“Go on, admit it – it was easier for you to leave because you believed that I wasn’t able to get pregnant,” she says. I nod. “It made it clearer in your mind, didn’t it? Provided you with the ultimate excuse, though you never said the reason why…”
“You’re damn right, Miranda. I never said why. I never said that the reason I left you was that Ben convinced me that I didn’t love you.”
“And that’s because he did.”
“Eh?”
“Ben has always carried a torch for me. It was your best mate that broke us up!”
“So what are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to see whether Ralph can help me bring about the right circumstances for Ron to love me enough…”
“You’re still not divorced, are you?”
“No. Look, this is important. Let me finish. Please! I’ve come to see whether Ron might forgive me for leading him on, for letting him believe that he was impotent when all the time I was on the pill. And if he can, I can exorcise that particular ghost. And move on.”
“And the child?”
“What child?”
“The one you’re picking up from nursery school in an hour’s time.”
“He’s your son.”

Miranda and I have now begun what I can only describe as a ‘forgiving’ relationship.
Our three-and-a-half-year-old son will be starting school pretty soon but it’s sheer coincidence, not luck, that his middle name happens to be Ralph.
Then again, Miranda might have been lying about that…maybe I’ll just check that birth certificate before I put my best diplomatic skills to the test.
I mean, how does an absent father, albeit an accidental one, go about convincing his prodigal son that Ben, as a first name, is only suitable for a dog?