No-one could have seen the man and not been moved by his distress, not felt compelled to help in some way, to try to haul him from his pit of woe.
I stopped a yard from where he sat. He made no sign of having noticed me.
"Hello," I said.
Nothing.
"Hello."
Something within him stirred, something barely noticeable, like a mouse waking in a heap of leaves.
"Can I help?"
He groaned, if that’s the verb to describe the noise of rusted doors opening slowly.
"What is it? What’s wrong?"
Slowly, slowly, as if drawing on his very last reserves of power, he raised his gaze to meet mine. That gaunt and ravined face. Those eyes reddened by weeping. The jowls that sagged with misery.
I knew them all. Here was my friend Lasto Theliterates, the wily old Greek, and notorious linguistic stickler.
"Why Lasto," I cried, "what’s up, my man? What brings you to this bench and this despair?"
He shook his head, stretched out a wizened hand. I took it in mine. He whispered.
"What did you say, old man?" I said, squeezing his hand.
"God give me strength," he said. "Or I will not go on."
He paused as if drinking in my vital forces through his hand. I waited. He gulped a little.
"It’s the redundancy," he said at last, his voice a husk.
"The needless redundancy."
"I’m not with you, old man, have you lost your job?" I said.
He groaned again with urgency.
"I speak of language," he said.
"In the newspaper. The redundancy, the pleonasm, the tautology, the use of words that repeat what has already been said."
"Isn’t that itself an example of redundancy?"
"I was making a point for emphasis," Lasto shot back, momentarily regaining some of his usual ferocity.
"Look," and he brandished the back page.
"Since when have you been interested in sports?"
"I detest sports. I read for language. Look. ‘The Crusaders defence was equally as good’.
"Forget the missing apostrophe. Look at the as. What’s it doing there? Why on earth can’t the reporter write ‘equally good’? What’s stopping them? The ‘as’ is a witless redundancy, a needless filler."
"Indeed," I said, "but it’s hardly something to ..."
But Lasto was already quoting from the newspaper again: "the reason why the Black Ferns won ... Ye gods, can the fool not see that the word why is implicit in the word reason? Why can’t they say, ‘the reason that the Black Ferns won’ or just ‘the reason the Black Ferns won’? Can they not hear their own error? Or am I wasting my breath?"
"Yes, Lasto," I said, "you are wasting your breath. You are right, of course, but these redundant illiteracies are as old as the language and I fear for your blood pressure.
"You are no longer a young man. You could do yourself damage getting so worked up."
"Damage! Damage! What do I care for damage? Do I even want to inhabit a world where this sort of thing can be printed. Look," he exclaimed jabbing a bony finger at another line.
"Sending the ball back from whence it came.
"I ask you. What do they think whence means, if not ‘from where’. Oh, oh oh, it is all too much for an old man. I fall upon the thorns of life. I bleed."
And so saying he slumped to one side on the bench and seemed to pass out. I reached for my hip flask, soaked a handkerchief and dabbed his lips with Laphroaig.
His eyelids fluttered. He sighed. I dabbed again, and even as I did so I felt a bony hand clenching around the flask, easing it from my grasp with surprising strength and sliding it into his inside pocket.
"Leave me," he said weakly. "I need to be alone with my grief."
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
