At
long last the mystery of the Princess and the Pea has been solved but the case
of the Cowardly Custard Apple is still baffling to anyone who has heard about
it, including myself.
When
I was first told about the princess who could feel a pea through dozens of
mattresses piled on top of each other I grew suspicious immediately and decided
that the official explanation was wrong. The true answer has nothing to do with
her abnormal sensitivity to physical irritants but can be found in the nature
of the pea itself.
For
that pea was not a pea, a good honest simple legume, but a fragment of a
neutron star, which as we all know is a dead or dying sun, or rather the relic
of a collapsed star that has packed its own matter so tightly together that
only neutrons—
No,
I might as well admit I don’t really understand anything about the physics of
outer space; but I am aware that a piece of neutron star the size of a pea will
weigh an absurd number of tons and that denser objects have stronger
gravitational fields than less dense ones, and so that fake pea was able to
raise high tides and make walking away from it very difficult.
The
princess felt it pulling at the nerves clustered in the small of her back and
she interpreted this sensation as a poke in the spine, which is wasn’t really,
but the mistake was understandable.
A
tug can feel like a push, in the same way that a very cold piece of metal burns
the skin when touched.
As
for the Princess and the Pea: the story of what happened to her reached the
ears of a king who ruled a land far to the south. He was delighted to finally
learn a method of testing the authority of princesses and he decided to try it
out on himself.
“You’re
not a princess, sire!” his advisors objected.
“True,
but I belong to the same species. I’m a ‘royal’ and so the basic principle must
still apply. Fetch me a pea!”
He
had no idea that the original pea had actually been a pinch of neutron star and
his advisors were ignorant of this fact too, as are most people, including
myself before I commenced writing this tale. His advisors shuffled their feet
and then timidly replied:
“There
are no peas to be found in your kingdom, sire. Peas aren’t a native crop down
this way. We would have to import one and that might take rather a long time.
Several months.”
“I
can’t wait that long to test myself. Procure an alternative!”
“But
why, may we ask, do you wish to
‘test’ yourself in the first place? You know you are a king; we know this; the
people know it; and also, most importantly, do the foreign rulers.”
“Yes,
yes, but am I a real king, a true king, a king that has a natural right to call
himself a king? I mean, am I descended from a pure unbroken line of kings
stretching right back through the dim mists of antiquity and even thicker fogs
of prehistory to the very first men
who called themselves kings? Or was one of my not-too-distant ancestors merely
a commoner who was fortunate or cunning or aggressive enough to win a throne
artificially? That sometimes happens, you know. The pea test will determine the
truth of the matter.”
“Still
we have no peas for you, sire...”
“An
alternative then! I told you that already: go out into the palace gardens and
orchards and find a substitute. Meanwhile I will arrange for thirty thick
mattresses to be conveyed to my bedchamber in readiness for the conducting of
the test.”
And
the advisors had no choice but to obey the whim of their king, so they went
outside and wandered through the gardens and orchards for an hour before
returning to the throne room, where the king was using his sceptre to fence
with a flapping tapestry.
“What
have you got for me?” asked the king impatiently.
“A
cherimoya, sire,” they answered.
“Ah,
the most delicious of all fruits and also known as a custard apple! But how
ripe is it?” he demanded.
“Perfectly
ripe, sire. The only problem is that—”
“Problem?”
The king arched a regal eyebrow and paused with his sceptre thrust out at full
arm’s length. “If it’s ripe then it will be too squashy for the pea test; but
we’ll use it anyway. That’s the sort of monarch I am! I don’t care about such
details.”
“There’s
another problem, sire,” the advisors said.
“Really?
And what might that be?”
The
advisors grimaced at each other. Finally one of them found enough courage to
speak. “It’s a cowardly custard apple, sire, that’s the plain truth of it. It’s
scared and won’t stop trembling. It’s not a brave cherimoya, oh no!”
“You
informed it of what I plan to do with it?”
“Yes
we did, we certainly did.”
“And
it is frightened of being compressed to bursting by the combined weight of the
mattresses and my recumbent form?”
“That
prospect makes it more than nervous, yes, sire.”
“Then
fetch a less cowardly custard apple!”
“You
don’t understand, your majesty. This cherimoya wants to take part in your modified pea test. When we passed the
shrub on which it grew, the largest and most noble of the custard apple trees
in your orchards, it begged to be picked by us. It was the ripest and largest
fruit on that tree, so we can safely say that it is the finest cherimoya in the
realm. And yet it is still very scared about its own destiny.”
The
king scratched the end of his nose with the tip of the sceptre. “Show me the
fruit in question. This is most curious.”
And
the bravest advisor passed him the cowardly custard apple. The king took it and
saw how it quivered and whimpered. “Twelve centimetres in diameter with a
slightly tuberculated skin. Even with the peel still on I can smell that
delicious combination of banana, pineapple, papaya, strawberry, peach and
bubblegum that is so ravishing to the taste buds and which rightly earns the
cherimoya the epithet of ‘king of the fruits’. Truly, this is an excellent
example, the best I have ever encountered.”
“But
lacking backbone,” the bravest advisor ventured.
“Wait,”
the king replied, then he frowned and lifted the cherimoya to his ear, listened
carefully and nodded. “I thought so. The definition of courage is to be scared
of an ordeal but to endure it anyway. This fruit is apprehensive in the extreme
but insists on being used in the pea test. That isn’t cowardice at all, not
really. And it doesn’t fear being squashed but something else, I don’t know
what. The situation is remarkable.”
The
advisors said nothing: they had nothing to say.
The
king tossed the cherimoya high like a juggling ball, caught it neatly as it
descended, turned on his heel and strode away. “To the bedchamber! I wish to
test myself without delay.”
And
down the corridors they went, to a circular room with a large glass skylight in
the middle of a domed roof. There were mattresses leaning against the walls.
The king lowered the cherimoya to the floor, positioning it at the exact centre
of the bedchamber, beneath the skylight and the wispy clouds in the intense
blue sky. “To work!”
And
he piled the mattresses on top of the fruit. He did this task on his own,
without asking for help, and it was strenuous physical labour. Then he called
for a ladder to be leaned against the stack and he climbed it to the top and
lay flat on the highest mattress.
A
full minute passed, He shifted his position.
The
advisors below held their collective breath. The king rolled onto his side,
rolled over again onto his front. “I can’t feel anything,” he muttered as he
turned once more onto his back.
“Sire?”
The advisors stepped forward in alarm.
“I
can’t feel anything!”
“Nothing
at all, sire? Not even the smallest—”
“Nothing!
Nothing!” he screamed.
They
took two steps back. Then the king sat up in bed, grasped the top rung of the
ladder and his teeth chattered in despair. With a convulsive movement he rose
and climbed back down and stumbled out of the bedchamber, his sobs filling the
corridor.
“I
always suspected it deep down; and now I know for sure. I’m not a natural king
but one of those artificial types. Piling up all the mattresses with my own
hands should have been a clue. One of my ancestors was a builder or a porter or
something equally menial. I’ve failed the pea test! I’ll never be able to face
a custard apple again. This is dreadful and I am distraught and I feel like a
fraud.”
One
of the less intelligent advisors ran after him. “You feel like a fraud, sire?
Shall I fetch you a fraud?”
The
others remained in the bedchamber without speaking.
They
stayed like that for a long time; then a muffled sound began to distract them,
an extremely faint but insistent noise that seemed to be coming from the bottom
of the tower of mattresses. They moved closer and listened. It was no
acoustical trick but real laughter, weak and inhuman. They began to heave aside
the mattresses, flinging them away.
What
they finally revealed was a squashed fruit, a custard apple no longer cowardly
but panting away its final moments in mirth. The white and creamy flesh
festooned with seeds oozed and palpitated and the sickly sweet smell of
botanical death filled their flaring nostrils.
Words
were barely audible between the chuckles.
“I’ve
passed the test! I was so worried about it. The prospect of failing terrified
me. But I felt him. Even through all those mattresses, all that thick padding,
I felt him! When he shifted position I was aware of his elbows and knees. I’ve
passed the test! I always knew I was king of the fruits but now I can say that
my kingship is authentic. I have a
natural right to call myself the finest cherimoya that ever lived. And that’s
what matters!”
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