THE BAROMETER LADY

One should always make sue one hears the whole story....

Mrs Bingley had warts.

She'd worked hard all her life to get them, and she was proud of them. They were great almost spiky brown growths on her face, four of them, two on her chin and one on each cheek. Many another person would have been distressed to be decorated by such loathsome growths and maybe even had them removed, but Mrs Bingley wasn't.

She didn't get out much. The Mrs Bingleys of this world don't. She had no need of other people and so she avoided them. Instead, she sat at home and gazed with love and awe at her collection of aneroid barometers.

They needed tending, did those barometers. Every day she had to tap them, one of the time, and nod her head as the needle moved either to the right or to the left and indicated its pronouncement regarding the weather. And as she had quite a collection of barometers it all took her quite some time to do. Tap-tap, twist the adjuster, tap-tap, nod the head, tap-tap, smile...

Occasionally one of them would disagree with the others, and when that happened she needed to further adjust it by inserting a small screwdriver into the hole at the back of it and turning it left or right until it agreed with the rest of her collection. It was important that they all agreed with each other. One thing she couldn't stand was dissent amongst her instruments.

So there's the picture. Mrs Bingley with four warts on her face, great disfiguring monstrosities they were, too, and her aneroid barometers, and a small screwdriver in her hand just in case.

And she smiled at the barometers. Smiling made her warts seem to dance and anyway wasn't such a good idea because it tended to reveal that she had but the one tooth remaining in her head. One tooth out of so many! All the rest had fallen out over the years, mostly going through a stage of decay before finally giving up the ghost. She didn't believe in dentists because dentists were people and she chose to avoid people. She'd never got on with people.

Then she went to her radio and switched it on. It was time for the weather forecast. She needed to listen to that weather forecast because it might offer clues as to what her barometers might tell her tomorrow. She had a map in her head, a weather map, and she mentally traced the movement of pressure systems so that she always knew what was happening where, and the daily weather forecast fine-tuned that mental map.

The voice on the radio told her the atmospheric pressure. KT might have been in the middle of a sentence (she'd switched onmoments too late, for once) but it did tell her the atmospheric pressure.

1014, it said.

The air-pressure is 1014.

She looked at her barometers. They all agreed with each other, she knew that, she'd already checked them twice that day and it was only nine in the morning.

998, they said. All of them. Every last one of those finely tuned instruments said the atmospheric pressure was 998 and here was her radio daring to suggest it was 1014.

She started weeping. She didn't know why, just that something was wrong, and tears were called for.

Her barometers, each and every one of them (and she had fourteen) were all telling the same lie. The radio must be right because it was the BBC, so her whole collection must have all together decided to go wrong.

That must be it. They'd joined together in a campaign to attack her at her most vulnerable. She'd heard that machines could do that. The man next door had a computer and every so often he threw it out of the window and shouted at it because it had gone wrong.

And more: the bus driver had a ticket machine and only last week when she'd gone on the bus into town to collect her pension that ticket machine had gone wrong, and his roll of paper had disgorged itself from the printing bit in one long serpentine thread of unprinted paper. That ticket machine had most certainly gone wrong and the bus driver had been forced to scratch his head.

Now her barometers had gone wrong. Not one, but all of them. She was appalled. She was outraged. She was madder than she'd ever been, and the more she thought about it the angrier she became.

She became so angry that a red mist formed inside her head, and spread all over her, filling her eyes with its crimson brilliance, and carrying the most appalling pain with it. The warts she was so proud of even felt as if they were going to burst, though they didn't. After all, warts don't burst, not ever.

She sat down, and that dreadful red mist touched her heart, and stilled it. Just at the the same moment as the voice on the radio said and now for the air pressure at home. It's a lot lower than the Dolomites where it's 1014. Here, at home, it's a lowly 998...

But she didn't hear. She couldn't hear. The dead, it seems, are deaf.

But if mechanical devices were equipped with anything like human senses her aneroid barometers might have heard, and chuckled that the voice on the radio, as ever, agreed with them.