In perhaps the funniest and most tear-inducing scene in Cuckoo’s Calling, Strike gets the news from Robin that Charlotte Campbell has called the office to say she is engaged to marry Jago Ross. It’s been three weeks since Strike broke it off with his fiancee and he’s still in a fragile state. He leaves the office, heads for his favorite pub, and proceeds to drown his grief and anger in Doom Bar Lager.

He is twelve pints in — a guess of how much he could drink in a determined hour — when Robin finds him. She’d searched every pub close to the office and The Tottenham was her last stop before giving up and heading home to her fiancee, Matt Cunliffe. She helps the pathetic bear of a broken man out of the bar — he’s about to be asked to leave because he starts to light a cigarette — and they wind up in a kebob shop.

Robin learns the Charlotte Campbell back-story: the lost baby, the dates that didn’t work, and the kairos moment in the Army hospital. Strike also shares with the temporary secretary that she is a nice person. He tells her this five times in fact and apologizes twice for saying “fuckin” which he does indeed say, a total of six times. But who’s counting? Their farewell brings us to the point of this post because it includes two Brit terms Americans do not know or use:

‘Let me just make sure you get upstairs OK.’

‘No. No. ‘M fine now. An’ I might chunder. ‘M legless. An’,’ said Strike, ‘you don’ get that tired old fuckin’ joke. Or do you? Know most of it now. Did I tell you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ (p 305 in the US edition, 328 in the UK).

“Chunder” was easy to find in an online slang dictionary:

Chunder means to be sick, it originates from old seafareing days when sailers would get seasick and stick their head out of the porthole in their cabin. As they did this they would shout “Watch Under” to warn people in lower cabins of the forthcoming puke. Over the years this has evolved into ‘Chunder.

And the “old fuckin’ joke”? Nick is almost certainly right that it turns on Strike’s only having one leg, being drunk, and the word “legless” in the UK being a euphemism for being so drunk that you cannot walk. Strike asks Robin if she gets the joke, explains that he’s already told her “most of it,” meaning I suppose the ‘punchline,’ and then asks her if he’s told her the joke before. Robin responds to that stream with a blanket, “I don’t know what you mean.”

So to what “old fuckin’ joke” is Strike referring, assuming it isn’t about sex with a one-legged man?

I went online in search of a joke along the lines of, “How did the one-legged pirate become legless? He drank too much!” It turns out there are websites dedicated to one-legged man jokes (who knew?) and even to double amputee humor of the zero-pedal variety. You have to scroll down that latter page pretty far to find “legless” jokes that play on the British meaning of the term (they’re all tasteless, of course — and you can find three of them after the jump if you’re interested). There aren’t any on the one-legged comedy page.

If you know the joke Strike is thinking of here, please share it in the comment boxes below.

Why devote a whole post to this subject? Easy.

Believe it or don’t, the meeting in The Tottenham and a kebob shop in which one-legged legless Cormoran shares his Charlotte history with the “very nice” Robin who has searched for her distraught boss to make sure he is all right is the Strike-Ellacott kairos moment or a foreshadowing of it. We revisit the scene in Career of Evil‘s mirrored reflection the night Robin gets plastered after discovering her fiancee had been unfaithful. We see it once again in the Troubled Blood pub in which Strike the Boxer flattens Robin in the American Bar (“Robin, didjer know I wuzza boxer?” Cuckoo, 303) and then they both go back to the office to do their serious drinking. Except for Barclay entering ex machina, the partners were each thinking about, if not becoming legless per se, at least putting both feet off the floor.

Charlotte’s kairos moment with Strike was finding him helpless in a hospital, short a leg, and her kissing him without saying a word, reigniting their failed relationship on her terms. Robin’s kairos moment with Strike in parallel and strong contrast is her finding Strike ‘legless,’ perhaps even more vulnerable than he had been in the hospital, and her being sympathetic, a good listener, and an even better friend. She is determined not to take advantage of his condition or prompt inappropriate intimacies. The temp, as he observes repeatedly, really is a nice person — a much better person than the vicious ex-fiancee.

Though Robin says to herself, when Strike asks her if she knows what a kairos moment is, “Oh please, please don’t tell me we’re having one,” italics in original for emphasis, that is exactly what was happening, something the twosome will almost certainly revisit and discuss in Strike 7, as they have in Strike 1, 3, and 5 thus far.

This makes finding the joke that Strike wants to tell as they part important enough to merit a post. Rowling-Galbraith may just be saving it up for the finale Bar Scene in which Robin and Cormoran at last go legless together.

 Thanks in advance for sharing your best guess about Strike’s “legless” joke below!

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