Quiz by Author Paul Carter MD
by Author Paul Carter MD
On cup day morning, Gilly, Nel and I sat on the back deck overlooking the creek, under the shade of an umbrella, and had a leisurely breakfast. We had toast and home-made marmalade and Nel had some chicken necks. It was a perfect morning, the temperature was just so, there was not a breath of wind, and the sky was an arc of uninterrupted blue. When she had finished eating, Gilly rocked back in her seat and started the crossword in the morning’s paper. With nothing particularly on my agenda, for once, I just sat there sipping my tea and looking at her. Gilly is a strikingly good-looking woman at any time, but in that morning light she looked especially beautiful, so I reached over and started to stroke her hair.
She finished filling in 19 Down and then looked up and asked me to stop mussing her hair about. ‘Why don’t I find you something to keep you out of mischief,’ she said, and then handed me the quiz from the paper. I have always fancied myself as a well-educated man of the world who knows a thing or two about it all, so I happily accepted the challenge.
‘How did you go?’ Gilly asked a little later as she completed her crossword.
The quiz had been a good deal harder than I had expected, and I was thinking of a suitable answer when Gilly grabbed the paper off me. ‘Twenty-five questions,’ she read. ‘So, did you get them all?’
‘Not quite,’ I replied.
‘A half? A quarter? Less than that?’ she laughed.
‘I wasn’t keeping score,’ I said quietly, but Gilly wanted an exact number, once again, I thought, failing to recognise that sometimes it can be better to just let things go.
‘Three,’ I said quietly, and Gilly nearly swallowed her coffee down the wrong way.
‘Not exactly a high distinction performance,’ Nel piped up.
‘Oi, less of that from you,’ I said to her. ‘It’s better than anything you could do.’
Nel sat up and looked at me. ‘Try me,’ she said.
‘This is ridiculous,’ I mumbled to myself as I scanned down the list of questions in front of me. ‘Okay, what’s the state capitol of Florida.’
‘Tallahassee,’ she replied without hesitation to my complete amazement.
‘How on earth did you know that?’ I asked, but apparently it was her mother’s kennel name and she had always remembered it.
‘That was a fluke,’ I said, looking at the questions again. ‘Right, smarty pants, what is a pendecagon?’
Again the answer came back like an Exocet missile. It seemed that was how many pups there had been in her litter.
I drummed my fingers on the table and went back to my list for the third time. ‘Well, I bet you don’t know what aphantasia is.’
‘That’s the easiest question yet,’ she replied with that silly grin of hers where she gets her lip caught up on her teeth. ‘You’ve seen me running in my dreams. That means I don’t have it.’
‘Got any more questions for her?’ Gilly asked as she cleaned the last of the coffee off her top. I was going to say something really clever to put the pair of them back in their places, but I didn’t bother because they were both cackling so loudly that they wouldn’t have heard a word I said anyway.
