Rimmsey

If Rimmer hadn't been such a dedicated anal retentive, he would have realised the simple truth: he wasn't cut out for Space.

He wasn't cut out for it.

He would have realised he wasn't the slightest bit interested in astronavigation. Or quantum mechanics. Or any of the things he needed to be interested in to pass the exams and become an officer.

Three times he'd failed the entrance exam to the Academy. And so, one night after reading the life story of Horatio Nelson, he'd signed up with a merchant vessel as a lowly Third Technician, with the object of quickly working his way through the ranks and sitting the astronavigation exam independently, and thereby earning his commission: the glimmering gold bar of officerhood.

That had been six years ago Six long years on Red Dwarf, during which he'd leapt from being a lowly Third Technician to being a lowly First Technician. In the meantime, his brothers went for ever onward, up the ziggurat of command. Their success filled him with such bitterness, such bile, that even a Christmas card from one of them - just the reminder that they were alive, and successful - would reduce him to tears of jealousy.

And now he sat there, under the pink glow of his student's table lamp ('Reduces eye-strain! Promotes concentration! Aids retention!' was the lamp manufacturer's proud boast), preparing to sit the astronavigation exam for the thirteenth time.

He found the process of revising so gruellingly unpleasant, so galling, so noxious, that, like most people faced with tasks they find hateful, he devised more and more elaborate ways of not doing it in a 'doing it' kind of way.

In fact, it was now possible for Rimmer to revise solidly for three months and not learn anything at all.

The first week of study, he would always devote to the construction of a revision timetable. At school Rimmer was always at his happiest colouring in geography maps: under his loving hand, the ice-fields of Europa would be shaded a delicate blue, the subterranean silica deposits of Ganymede would be rendered, centimetre by painstaking centimetre, a bright and powerful yellow, and the regions of frozen methane on Pluto slowly became a luscious, inviting green. Up until the age of thirteen, he was constantly head of the class in geography. After this point, it became necessary to know and understand the subject, and Rimmer's marks plunged to the murky depths of ‘F’ for fail.

He brought his love of cartography to the making of revision timetables. Weeks of patient effort would be spent planning, designing and creating a revision schedule which, when finished, were minor works of art.

Every hour of every day was subdivided into different study periods, each labelled in his lovely, tiny copperplate hand; then painted over in watercolours, a different colour for each subject, the colours gradually becoming bolder and more urgent shades as the exam time approached. The effect was as if a myriad tiny rainbows had splintered and sprinkled across the poster-sized sheet of creamwove card.

The only problem was this: because the timetables often took seven or eight weeks, and sometimes more, to complete, by the time Rimmer had finished them the exam was almost on him. He'd then have to cram three months of astronavi- gation revision into a single week. Gripped by an almost deranging panic, he'd then decide to sacrifice the first two days of that final week to the making of another timetable. This time for someone who had to pack three months of revision into five days.

Because five days now had to accommodate three months' work, the first thing that had to go was sleep. To prepare for an unrelenting twenty-four hours a day sleep-free schedule, Rimmer would spend the whole of the first remaining day in bed - to be extra, ultra fresh, so he would be able to squeeze three whole months of revision into four short days.

Within an hour of getting up the next morning, he would feel inexplicably exhausted, and start early on his supply of Go-Double-Plus caffeine tablets. By lunchtime he'd overdose, and have to make the journey down to the ship's medical unit for a sedative to help him calm down. The sedative usually sent him off to sleep, and he'd wake up the following morning with only three days left, and an anxiety that was so crippling he could scarcely move. A month of revision to be crammed into each day.

At this point he would start smoking A lifelong non- smoker, he'd become a forty-a-day man. He'd spend the whole day pacing up and down his room, smoking three or four cigarettes at a time, stopping occasionally to stare at the titles in his bookcase, not knowing which one to read first, and popping twice the recommended dosage of dog- worming tablets, which he erroneously believed to contain amphetamine.

Realising he was getting nowhere, he'd try to get rid of his soul-bending tension by treating himself to an evening in one of Red Dwarfs quieter bars. There he would sit, in the plastic oak-beamed 'Happy Astro' pub, nursing a small beer, grimly trying to be light-hearted and totally relaxed. Two small beers and three hours of stomach-knotting relaxation later, he would go back to his bunk and spend half the night awake, praying to a God he didn't believe in for a miracle that couldn't happen.

Two days to go, and ravaged by the combination of anxiety, nicotine, caffeine tablets, alcohol he wasn't used to, dog-worming pills, and overall exhaustion, he would sleep in till mid-afternoon.

After a long scream, he would rationalize that the day was a total write-off, and the rest of the afternoon would be spent shopping for the three best alarm clocks money could buy. This would often take five or six hours, and he would arrive back at his sleeping quarters exhausted, but knowing he was fully prepared for the final day's revision before his exam.

Waking at four-thirty in the morning, after exercising, showering and breakfasting, he would sit down to prepare a final, final revision timetable, which would condense three months of revision into twelve short hours. This done, he would give up and go back to bed. Maybe he didn't know a single thing about astronavigation, but at least he'd be fresh for the exam the next day.

Which is why Rimmer failed exams.

Which is why he'd received nine ‘F's for fail and two 'X's for unclassified. 

The first 'X' he'd achieved when he'd actually managed to get hold of some real amphetamines, gone into spasm and collapsed two minutes into the exam; and the second when anxiety got so much the better of him his subconscious forced him to deny his own existence, and he had written 'I am a fish' five hundred times on every single answer sheet. He'd even gone out for extra paper. What was more shocking than anything was that he'd thought he'd done quite well.

Well, this time it was going to be different, he thought, as he sat carefully colouring all the quantum mechanics revision periods in diagonal lines of Prussian blue on a yellow ochre background, while Lister stared out of the viewport window.

'I'm going into stasis,' said Lister, picking up his vacuum trunk, 'and that's that. You don't seriously expect me to spend the rest of my life alone here with you.'

'Why not?'

'Fifty-odd years? Alone with you?'

'What's wrong with that?'

Lister stopped and put down his trunk. 'I think we should get something straight. I think there's something you don't understand.'

'What?' said Rimmer.

'The thing is,' said Lister as kindly as he could: 'I don't actually like you.'

Rimmer stared, unblinking. This really was news to him. He didn't like Lister, but he always thought Lister liked him. Why on Io shouldn't he like him? What was there not to like?

'Since when?' he said, with a slight crack in his voice.

'Since the second we first met. Since a certain taxi ride on Mimas.'

'That wasn't me! That guy in the false moustache who went to an android brothel?

That wasn't me!'

Rimmer was outraged at Lister's accusation. Even though it was true, he felt it was so out of kilter with his own image of himself, he was able to summon up genuine indignation. As if he, Arnold J. Rimmer, would pay money to a, lump of metal and plastic to have sexual intercourse with him! It just wasn't like him.

True, he did it, but it wasn't like him!

'I've never been to an android brothel in my life. And if you so much as mention it again, I'll ...' Rimmer faltered. He suddenly realised there wasn't very much he could do to Lister.

'I don't get it. What point are you trying to make?'

'The point I'm trying to make, you dirty son of a fetid whoremonger's bitch, is that we're friends!' Rimmer smiled as warmly as he could to help disguise the massive incongruity he'd walked straight into.

'Sniff your coffee and wake up, Rimmer; we are not friends.'

'I know what you're referring to,' Rimmer nodded his head vigorously. 'It's because I gave you a hard time since you came aboard, isn't it? But don't you see? I had to do that, to build up your character. To change the boy into a man.'

'Oh, do smeg off.'

'I always thought you saw me as a sort of big brother character. Heck - we don't always get on. But then, what brothers do? Cain didn't always get on with Abel. . .'

'He killed him.'

'Absolutely. But underneath all that they were still brothers, with brotherly affection. Heaven knows, I didn't always get on with my brothers - in fact once, when I was fourteen, I needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after all three of them held my head down a toilet for rather too long but we laughed about it afterwards, when I'd started breathing again 

'You're not going to persuade me not to go into stasis. I am not spending the rest of my life with a man who keeps his underpants on coat hangers.'

Rimmer held up his outspread palms in a gesture of innocence. 'I'm not trying to persuade you.'

'Then what's all this about?'

'I don't know. I'm not sure what anything's about any more.

Here comes the emotional blackmail, thought Lister.

'It's not easy, you know, being dead.'

'Uhn,' Lister grunted.

'It's so hard to come to terms with I mean death. Your own death. I mean, you have plans ... so many things you wanted to do, and now...'

'Look - I'm sorry you're dead, OK? It was cruddy luck. But you've got to put it behind you. You're completely obsessed by it.'

'Obsessed??'

'It's all you ever talk about.'

'Well, pardon me for dying.'

'Frankly, Rimmer, it's very boring. You're like one of those people who are always talking about their illnesses.'

'Well!' said Rimmer, his eyes wide in astonishment.

'It's just boring. Change the disc. Flip the channel. Death isn't the handicap it once was. For smeg's sake, cheer up'

'Well!' said Rimmer. And he couldn't think of anything else to say. So he said 'Well!' again.

'And quite honestly, the prospect of hanging around and having to listen to you whining and moaning, and bleating and whingeing for the next three quarters of a century, because you happen to have snuffed it, does not exactly knock me out.'

'Well!' said Rimmer.

'Fifty years alone with you? I'd rather drink a pint of my own diarrhoea.'

'Well!'

'Or a pint of somebody else's, come to that. Every hour, on the hour, for the next seventy years.'

'I can't believe' - Rimmer was shaking - 'you've just said that.'

Lister spun the cap off the bottle of Glen Fujiyama, Japan's finest malt whisky, and poured a generous measure into a pint mug. Rimmer lay on his bunk, whistling pleasantly, his hologramatic eyes a-twinkle. Every opportunity he got, he tried to catch Lister's eye and wink at him cheerily.

Lister took a gulp of whisky. 'You're loving this, aren't you?'

'Oh, you're not still going on about your impending death, are you? For heaven's sake,' Fake Scouse accent: 'change der record. Flip der channel. Death isn't der handicap it once was. For smeg's sake, cheer up.'

'You are, aren't you? You're loving it.'

'Holly - I'd like to send an internal memo. Black border. Begins: "To Dave Lister. Condolences on your imminent death."' Rimmer half closed his eyes.

'What's that poem? Ah, yes ...

Now, weary traveller,Rest your head,For just like me,You'll soon be dead.'

'You're really sick, you know that?'

'Come o-o-o-on, -' Rimmer made the 'on' last three full seconds - 'it's all you ever talk about. Frankly' Lister' it's very booooring.'

'You are, you're loving it.'

'You're obsessed.'

'You realise when I die' you're going to be on your own.'

'Can't wait.'

'I thought you didn't wantthat. I thought that's what you were bleating on about before.'

'No, what got me down before wasn't being on my own. It was the idea that you were doing so much better than me. Staying young, and being alive; it was all too much to take. Now, me old buckeroo, the calliper's on the other foot.'

Lister gave up trying to argue. It was just adding to Rimmer's pleasure.

Rimmer had been avoiding himself since the argument. He didn't know how to begin a reconciliation conversation.

Things had been said which ... well, things had been said. Hurtful things.

Bitter, unforgivable things which could never be forgotten. Equally, he couldn't just carry on as if nothing had happened. So he spent the day in the reference library, keeping out of everyone's way.

It was 4.30 p.m. when he finally swallowed the bile and slumped reluctantly into his sleeping quarters, looking curiously unkempt. His hair was uncombed and unwashed. A two-day hologramatic growth swathed his normally marble smooth chin.

His uniform was creased and ruffled. He flopped untidily into the metal armchair.

***

His double sat on the bunk, looking moodily out of the viewport window. As Rimmer entered he'd looked round over his shoulder, then turned back without acknowledging him.

They sat there in silence. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. Bitter, accusing silence. They were both masters at using silence, and right now they were using it in a bitter, accusing way. After twenty minutes of stonewalling, Rimmer could take no more.

'Look ...' he began, 'I want to apologise for ...' Rimmer faltered, uncertain as to precisely what he was supposed to apologise for. 'I want to apologise for everything.'

'Ohhhhh, shut up,' his double said dismissively.

Rimmer's eyes shrank, weasel-small. 'You don't like me, do you? Even though I'm you, you don't actually like me. Even though we're the same person, you actively dislike me.'

His double turned from the window. 'We're not the same person.

'But we are. You're a copy of me.'

The double shook his head. 'I'm a recording of what you were, what you used to be. The man you used to be before the accident. You've changed. Lister's changed you.'

Lister? Changed him? Preposterous.

'I haven't changed. In what way have I changed?'

'Well, for a start, you've just apologised.'

What was it his father used to say? 'Never apologise never explain.'

'I'm sorry,' Rimmer apologised again; 'it's just - I want us to get on.'

'Oh, don't be pathetic.'

Rimmer closed his eyes and leaned back on his chair. Was it just him? Was it some dreadful flaw in his personality that prevented him from having a successful relationship even with his own self? Or would it be the same for most people? Would most people find their own selves irritating and tiresomely predictable? When he saw his face in the mirror in the morning, that was the face he carried around in his head: he never saw his profile; he never saw the back of his own head; he didn't see what other people saw. It was the same with his personality. He carried around an idealised picture of himself; he was the smart, sensitive person who did this good thing, or that good thing. He buried the bad bits. He covered up and ignored the flaws. All his faults were forgiven and forgotten.

But now he was faced with them; all his shortcomings, personified in his other self.

Rimmer had never been aware how awesomely petty he was. How alarmingly immature.

How selfish. How he could, on occasion, be incomprehensibly stupid. How sad he was; how screwed-up and lonely.

And he was seeing this for the first time. It was like the first time he'd heard his own voice on an answering machine. He expected to hear dulcet tones, clear, articulate and accentless, and was embarrassed and nauseated to discover only incoherent mumblings in some broad Ionian accent. In his head he sounded like a newsreader; in reality, he sounded nasal and dull and constantly depressed. And meeting himself was the same, only worse, raised to the power 1000.

And there were other things. He was at least thirty per cent worse-looking than he thought. He stooped. His right leg constantly jiggled, as if he wanted to be somewhere else. He snored! Not the loud buzz-saw hunnnk-hnnnunk of Lister; his own snore was, if anything, more irritating - a high pitched whiny trill, like a large parrot being strangled in a bucket of soapy water. It was a terrible thing to admit, but he was reaching the devastating, inescapable conclusion that he, as a companion, was the very last person he wanted to spend any time with.

Was this the same for everybody? Or was it just him? He didn't know.

So lost was he in this train of thought that he was only vaguely aware of Lister coming into the room and announcing that Nova 5 could only sustain one hologram, and so one of the Rimmers would have to be switched off. Who was it going to be? he was asking.

'Who what?' asked Rimmer.

'Who's going to come on Nova 5, and who's going to be turned off?'

'Well, obviously I'm coming,' said Rimmer.

'Why "obviously"?' said his double.

'Because I'm the original. I was here first.'

'So what? We should toss for it.'

'Nooo,' said Rimmer through a disparaging laugh. 'Why should I want to toss for it? I might lose.'

Lister took out a coin. 'Heads or tails?'

'What?' said Rimmer.

'Fair's fair. You call.'

'You expect me to call heads or tails as to whether or not I get erased?'

Rimmer's features fled to the perimeter of his face. 'No way. I stay.'

'You're the same person. It's only fair. Call.' Lister flipped the coin, caught it, and covered it with his hand.

'I'm not calling.'

'I'll call,' said the double.

'I'll call,' Rimmer said firmly. 'Heads ... no, tails. Tails, I mean. NO, wait, heads, heads.'

'It's tails,' said Lister. 'You get erased.'

'I haven't finished deciding yet. I think I was going to choose tails. Yes, I was. "Tails," in fact.'

'Too late,' said the double. 'Erase him.'

'But I was here first,' protested Rimmer. 'In a way, I created you.'

'What difference does it make? You're identical,' Lister said; 'you're the same person.'

'But we're not,' Rimmer whined balefully. 'Not any more, we're not.'

THIRTY-TWO

It was four in the morning and Rimmer sat on the bunk, his long arms wrapped around his spindly knees, his brain fighting off sleep. It was ironic, he thought, that he'd just about come to terms with having died, and now here he was, about to be erased forever.

On the toss of a coin.

But that was life, he thought. Life was the toss of a coin. You're born rich; you're born poor. You're born smart; you're born stupid. You're born handsome; you're born with a face like a post office clerk.

Heads you are, tails you aren't.

Rimmer felt that most of his life had come up 'tails'. Relationships with women: tails. Career success: tails. Friendships: tails. His life, best out of three: tails, tails and tails.

He'd never been in love, and now he never would be. He'd never been an officer, and now he never would be. He'd never be anything, because he was about to be erased.

All right, there still would be an Arnold Rimmer, but it wasn't him, it was his so-called double. But he wasn't a double - they were different.

He allowed himself an ironic snicker. He couldn't even succeed at being Arnold Rimmer - there were two of them and he'd come second. Unbelievable.

Unbe-smegging-lievable.

What had he learned from his life? What? Except 'keep your face out of the way of atomic explosions'? Nothing.

He'd learned nothing. What had he achieved? Again, nothing. His life was a goalless draw.

In his entire life, thirty-one years alive and one year dead, he'd made love with a real live woman once. One time only. Uno. Ein. Une. Once. One raised to the power of one. What Plarick's Constant can never be more than. Pi divided by itself.

We are talking one here, me old buckeroo, he thought. Once.

Yvonne McGruder. A single, brief liaison with the ship's female boxing champion. 16th March, 19.31 hours to 19.43 hours.

Twelve minutes.

And that included the time it took to eat the pizza.

In his whole life he'd spent more time vomiting than he ever spent making love.

Was that right? Was that fair? That a man should spend more time with his head down a lavatory than buried in the buttocks of the woman he loved?

He'd always deluded himself that the problem was he hadn't met the right girl yet. Now, given that the human race probably no longer existed, coupled with the fact that he had passed on, even he had to admit there was more than a possibility he was leaving it a little bit on the late side.

He'd never had a break. Never. And so much of life was luck.

Luck.

If Napoleon had been born Welsh, would his destiny have been the same? If he'd been raised in Colwyn Bay, would he have been a great general? Of course he wouldn't. He'd have married a sheep and worked in the local fish and chips shop.

But no - he'd had the luck to be born in Corsica, just at the right moment in history when the French were looking for a short, brilliant Fascist dictator.

Luck.

Van Gogh. Wasn't it sheer good fortune that Van Gogh was born raving mad? Wasn't that why his cornfields looked like they did? Wasn't that why he did several hundred paintings of his old boots? Wasn't that why his paintings were so innovative? Because he had the happy chance to be born with a leak in the think tank?

Luck!

And what about John Merrick? The jammy bastard - born looking like an elephant.

How can you fail? You just stand around while people goggle at you, and you rake it in.

He was too normal, that was his problem. Too ordinary, and normal, and healthy and bland. A bit of madness, a spot of deafness, the looks of an elephant, a birthplace like Corsica, and he could have been somebody. He could have been the deaf, mad, elephant Frenchman for a start.

He stood up and paced around the room. His body wanted to sleep, but his mind wanted to rant. This was torture. It was Death Row. It was Hell. If it was going to happen, he wanted to get it over with. He couldn't tolerate the agony of a day knowing everything he did he would be doing for the last time.

Forget tomorrow, he wanted to be erased now.

'Forget tomorrow,' he said, 'I want to be erased now.'

'It's half past four in the morning,' croaked Lister, scraping the fuzz off his tongue with his top teeth.

Rimmer's duplicate sprang, out of his bunk. 'Great! Let's get it over with.'

'What d'you think you're doing?' Lister asked.

'I'm coming to watch.'

Lister shook his head. 'It's not a freak show.'

The double forced air through his teeth disappointedly. 'There's precious little entertainment on this ship. If you can't attend the odd execution, what've you got left?'

Lister started to get dressed. 'I'll see you in the disc library in ten minutes.'

Rimmer nodded and left.

***

When Rimmer arrived Lister was already there, sitting in front of the generating console clutching a mug of steaming black coffee and a jam doughnut brushed with sugar.

Great, thought Rimmer. Come to my execution. Light refreshments available.

'Fancy a drink?' said Lister, sipping at his rum-laced coffee.

Rimmer grunted in the negative. He was wearing his best blue First Technician boiler suit, with a row of worn-looking medals dangling over the spanner pocket.

'I didn't know you had any medals. What are they?'

Rimmer pointed to the first medal with his forefinger: 'Three years' long service.' He tapped the second: 'Six years' long service.' He touched the third: 'Nine years' long service, and ...' he hesitated, his finger over the final medal, as if remembering, 'and ... uh ... twelve years' long service.'

Lister didn't smile.

'Come on - one drink.'

Rimmer capitulated. 'I'll have a whisky.'

Holly simulated a large shot of Glen Fujiyama, and Rimmer took it in one belt.

'Another?'

Rimmer nodded, unable to speak, feeling as if the lining of his larynx had been stripped like wallpaper.

A second malt arrived in a hologramatic glass. He tipped it into his mouth.

Rimmer was totally unused to drink. His face glowed brightly. His hair seemed to uncoil and hang onto his face. He swept it back with both his hands, and sighed a long, world-weary sigh. A sigh that had been inside him, trying to get out, for thirty-one years.

'Gaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.'

He unfurled himself into a spare monitor seat andjiggled his right leg impatiently. 'Come on - let's go! Let's do it! Come on - turn me off. Let's do it! Erase me. Wipe me clean. Let's go.'

Lister finished his doughnut and dusted the sugar off his hands. 'So what's this big thing about gazpacho soup?' he said, casually taking a throatful of coffee.

'How do you know about gazpacho soup?'

'I heard the end of the argument. And you've been yelling about it in your sleep ever since I joined up. I just wondered what it was.'

'Aahh! Wouldn't you like to know?'

'Yeah. I would like to know.'

'I bet you would, Listy. I bet you would.'

'Are you going to tell me?'

Rimmer wagged his finger. 'Secret.'

'Go on - tell me.'

'I can't. It's too terrible.' Rimmer clasped his hands and rested them between his splayed knees, his back hunched, his eyes fixed on the rubber-matting floor.

He shook his head.

'I can't tell you. I'd like to tell you but I can't.'

'Why?'

Rimmer's eyebrows plaited. 'You're right. What's the difference? What does it matter now? Now I'm going to be erased? You want to know about gazpacho soup?

I'll tell you.' He flung his head back and closed his eyes, and started to tell Lister about the greatest night of his life.

'It was the greatest night of my life,' he began. 'Every Friday evening the Captain held a formal dinner in her private dining room, in her quarters. just a few of the top officers and their partners, and one, maybe two, of the boys and girls to watch. The young Turks. The up-and-comers. The people who were happening. I'd only been with the company five months and the invitation hit the mat. I knew what it was before I opened it.

`The Captain requests the pleasure of the company of Mr A. J. Rimmer and guest. 8.30 for 9.00. Black tie, evening dress. RSVP.”

'We were in orbit round Ganymede; it was a long-term dock for repairs. I didn't know what to do - I didn't have a partner, and I didn't know any women well enough to ask them. So, on the Friday morning, I caught the shuttle, found the best escort agency on Ganymede, and hired...'Rimmer's eyes milked over 'She was gorgeous. Nothing I can say now can begin to indicate how truly dynamite this girl was. She made Marilyn Monroe look like a hippo. She was at the university, doing a Ph.D. in stellar engineering, and did the escort thing for extra money. She had four degrees. One of the degrees was in something I couldn't even pronounce, that's how smart she was. I paid the agency fee, which was a lot. I mean, a lot lot. And then I tipped her double to pretend we were dating on a regular basis, and to act as if she was crazy about me. Only in public,' Rimmer waved his hand, as if to ward off evil thoughts, 'there was no funny business.

Oh, how I longed for the funny business! But that wasn't the deal. It was all above board.

'We went shopping, and I bought her a dress. Not just a dress.

'A drrrrrrrrrrresssssssssssssss.

'It probably cost about, the same as the entire NASA budget for the twenty-first century. I had to write extra small to fit all of the numbers into the box on my chequebook. Then,' he made a trilling sound with his tongue, 'then we went out and picked a tuxedo for me.

'She went home to get changed, and we arranged to meet at the shuttle port at six.

'Seven o'clock, she still hasn't shown up. I phone the escort agency, which in the meantime has turned into a Chinese restaurant. I try the university. What do you know? There is no university on Ganymede. I've been had. I've been taken. I've blown three months' salary and I haven't even got a date. I can't believe it. I catch the seven-thirty shuttle back to Red Dwarf. I ask all five air hostesses, but they say they're all on duty and can't come. So there's nothing for it: I have to go on my own. I'm humiliated before I walk in the door.

'So, I turn up at the Captain's quarters completely by myself. Everyone else has got partners. The table is all set with place cards. I have to spend the whole evening sitting opposite an empty chair. They ask me where my date is, and I panic and tell them she was killed in a road accident earlier in the evening, but I'm over it now.

'We sit down, and dinner begins. I'm feeling like I've got off to a really bad start, so I'm trying desperately to be charming as smeg, but no one's warming to me. Then I remember the joke. Ledbetter had told me this joke about a bear trapper in Alaska. It was funny, it was clean; it was perfect for the dinner party. Originally I was going to save it for the mints and coffee, but by this time I'm feeling I might not even make it to the mints and coffee; the empty chair's staring back at me, and the rest of the guests are convinced my girlfriend's lying in some morgue somewhere while I go out to a dinner party. So I decide now is the time to tell the joke. And I'm telling the joke, and it's a long joke, and I'm suddenly aware no one's talking and everybody's watching me telling the joke, and I'm very self-conscious all of a sudden, and I can feel my ears - I'm suddenly really aware of my ears - and the back of my neck's starting to prickle. Suddenly, for no reason at all, I forget the end. I forget the punch line. I forget how it finishes. I just stop talking, and everyone's still looking at me. I have to say: "I'm very sorry, but that's as much as I remember." There's this pause. Horrible pause. Horrible. Horrible. And I can see the Captain's boyfriend looking at me with pity in his eyes, because he thinks Im half-crazy with grief. And everyone starts talking. But not to me. Then the stewards wheel in the first course.

'It's soup.

'Gazpacho soup.

'While they're serving, I'm studying the cutlery. I'd bought this etiquette book, and I know two things. One: never wear diamonds before lunch, and two: with cutlery, start from the outside and work your way in. I start from the outside.

I start so far from the outside, I inadvertently take the spoon of the woman sitting next to me. Eventually we sort it out, and start to eat.

'My soup is cold. I mean, stone cold. I look up. Everyone else's appears to be fine. Here's my chance to make a mark. I call over the steward and very discreetly tell him my soup is cold. He looks at me like I'm something he's just scraped off his shoe. He takes the soup away and brings it back hot. Everyone starts laughing. I start laughing too. And the more I laugh, the more they laugh.'

He stopped, and turned his closed eyes to the ceiling. He smiled through clenched teeth and then, as if every word were punctuated by the pulling of a dagger from his heart, inch by agonizing inch, he said: 'I ... didn't ... know ... gazpacho ... soup ... was meant ... to ... be ... served ... cold.'

His head slumped forward again, and he carried on.

'And by now they're hysterical, uncontrollable. I still think they're laughing at the steward, when all the time they're laughing at me as I eat my piping-hot gaipacho soup.' The memory washed over him like a wave in an acid sea. He bathed in its flesh-stripping agony. He cleared his throat. 'That was the last time I ate at the Captain's table.' Rimmer opened his eyes. They'd been closed throughout - the entire story. 'That evening was pretty much the end of my career.'

There was a silence.

'Is that it?' Lister said eventually. 'Is that what you've been torturing yourself with for the last seven years? One dumb mistake that anybody could have made?'

'If only they'd mentioned it in basic training. Instead of climbing up ropes and crawling through tunnels on your elbows. If just once they'd said "Gazpacho soup is served cold", I could have been an admiral by now. I could. I really could.'

'Come on - everybody has memories that make them wince. And ninety-nine per cent of the time the only person who remembers the incident is you.'

'Oh, what does it matter now? Come on. Let's get it over with. Erase me.'

'And those things nearly always happen with people you don't know very well, and don't see very often, so who gives a smeg anyway?'

'Just turn me off. Get on with it.'

Lister swigged at his now cold coffee. 'I've already done it. I wiped the other one.'

Emotions wrestled for space on Rimmer's brow. 'You wiped ... the duplicate?

When?'

'Before you walked in.'

'And you let me stand here ... and ... spill my guts?'

'Yeah.' A big, broad grin.

'Why?'

'I wanted to find out about gazpacho soup, and I knew you'd never tell me.'

'Of course I wouldn't tell you - because you'd make my life hell with gazpacho soup jokes for the rest of eternity.'

Rimmer - I swear I will never mention this conversation again.'

Rimmer regarded him dubiously.

'I don't break my word. I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a liar.'

Rimmer looked at him through one eye. 'All right, then. I believe you. You're a disgusting rancid slob, but you keep your word.'

'Thank you.'

Rimmer got up from the chair. 'So I'm going back to Earth, then?'

Lister nodded. 'We're all going back to Earth, then.'

Rimmer motioned drunkenly towards, the hatchway. 'Come on. Let's go down the Copacabana, have a real drink.'

Lister got up to follow him.

'Souper,' he said.