The Assumptionist
To Assume makes an Ass out of U and ME!
The Assumptionist
Gerald Pemberton prided himself on his extraordinary powers of deduction. Not for him the tedious business of asking questions or checking facts. He could divine the truth of any situation from the merest glance, the slightest inference, the most gossamer-thin thread of circumstantial evidence.
“Mrs Henderson’s having an affair with the postman,” he announced to his wife over breakfast one Tuesday, gesturing with his marmalade-laden toast towards the window.
“How on earth would you know that?” Margaret asked, not looking up from her crossword.
“Obvious. He delivered at 9:47 yesterday instead of the usual 9:53. Clearly dawdling at number twelve. And she was wearing her good cardigan when she answered the door. The burgundy one. Case closed.”
Margaret made a noncommittal sound. After thirty-two years of marriage, she’d learned that Gerald’s deductive pronouncements were best treated like flatulence—acknowledged minimally and allowed to dissipate naturally.
At the parish council meeting that evening, Gerald was in his element. When Councillor Davies mentioned the new traffic bollards on the High Street, Gerald nodded sagely.
“Kickback scheme, obviously. Davies’s brother-in-law owns a bollard company. Follow the money, people.”
“My brother-in-law sells mobility scooters,” Davies protested weakly.
“Diversification,” Gerald replied with the serene confidence of one who has never doubted himself. “Classic misdirection.”
The bollards went in anyway. Gerald marked it down as another victory for corruption over common sense.
The first real crack appeared on a wet Thursday in November.
Gerald had noticed Dr Patel leaving the surgery at odd hours, often carrying what appeared to be sports bags. The conclusion was inescapable: prescription drug theft, probably fentanyl, definitely feeding an addiction or a black-market operation.
He mentioned it to Trevor at the newsagent’s. Then to Sandra at the butcher’s. Then to anyone who’d listen at the Fox and Hounds.
“Someone should do something,” he said gravely, tapping the side of his nose. “But people don’t want to see what’s right in front of them.”
Three weeks later, Dr Patel was treating Gerald for a chest infection when she mentioned, with studied casualness, that she’d heard some peculiar rumours about herself.
“I coach girls’ football on Tuesday and Thursday evenings,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes. “That’s why I carry the kit bags. Though I shouldn’t have to explain myself, should I?”
Gerald felt a momentary flicker of something uncomfortable—doubt, perhaps, or shame—but it was easily squashed. “Excellent cover story,” he thought. “Very convincing.”
But the seed was planted. After he’d gone, Dr Patel sat in her consulting room for twenty minutes, trying not to cry. Her daughter’s school friends had started asking awkward questions. Parents were looking at her strangely at pickup time.
By spring, Gerald’s assumptions had achieved a certain momentum.
The new family at Willow Cottage were clearly benefit frauds (they had nice cars but claimed to be “freelancers”). The vicar was embezzling from the restoration fund (he’d bought new shoes, rather expensive-looking ones). Young Jamie Morrison was dealing drugs (he had a lot of visitors and kept irregular hours—the fact that Jamie was a freelance graphic designer working from home seemed immaterial).
Gerald maintained a notebook. Blue, hardbound, filled with observations and conclusions. He showed it to Margaret one evening with something approaching pride.
“Thirty-seven instances of probable criminal activity or moral turpitude within a half-mile radius of our house,” he said. “Somebody needs to be paying attention.”
Margaret looked at the densely-written pages, at her husband’s neat handwriting cataloguing the minor variations in his neighbours’ routines, the slight deviations from expected behaviour, all transformed through the alchemy of Gerald’s certainty into evidence of conspiracy, crime, and corruption.
“Gerald,” she said carefully, “have you considered that you might be... mistaken about some of these things?”
His face went very still. “Mistaken?”
“Well, you don’t actually know any of this. You’re guessing. Assuming.”
“I observe and deduce,” he said coldly. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there, though?”
He closed the notebook. They didn’t speak for the rest of the evening.
The darkness crept in so gradually that Gerald didn’t notice the transition.
Young Jamie Morrison lost two clients after rumours reached them about his “drug activities.” He had to move back in with his parents.
Mrs Kapoor at number twenty-eight stopped attending the community centre after Gerald had loudly wondered why she received so many parcels. (”Identity fraud,” he’d explained. “Probably ordering things on stolen credit cards.”) She was, in fact, running a small online business selling her sister’s handmade jewellery, but the damage was done. She began to stay inside, curtains drawn.
The family at Willow Cottage—the Okonkwos, though Gerald had never bothered to learn their name—received a visit from the Department for Work and Pensions following an anonymous tip. The investigation found nothing because there was nothing to find. Mr Okonkwo was a software consultant, Mrs Okonkwo a patent attorney, and they paid more in taxes each year than Gerald had in his entire working life. But the humiliation lingered. Their children were asked pointed questions at school.
Gerald noticed none of this. He was too busy documenting fresh anomalies, new patterns, further evidence of the moral decay he alone seemed willing to confront.
The crisis came in August.
The Hendersons’ teenage son, Ryan, had been visiting their house more frequently. Gerald observed him through the window, noting the times, the duration of visits, the furtive way he glanced around before knocking.
The conclusion was obvious: drugs. Ryan was either dealing or using, possibly both, and Margaret—sweet, naive Margaret—was somehow involved. Perhaps she’d been groomed, manipulated. It happened to vulnerable women all the time.
He confronted her one evening, his voice shaking with righteous anger and something that might have been fear.
“I know what’s going on with that Henderson boy. The visits. The secrecy. I won’t have drugs in this house, Margaret. I won’t have it!”
She stared at him. “Ryan’s been helping me with the laptop. He’s teaching me how to use email properly and set up video calls so I can talk to our daughter in Australia. I’ve been paying him pocket money.”
Gerald felt the familiar flicker again, stronger this time. But he’d gone too far to back down now. “Convenient explanation. Very well-rehearsed. Did he tell you what to say?”
Margaret’s face did something Gerald had never seen before. Something closed down, something hardened, something broke.
“Get out,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“Get. Out. Of this house. Now. Tonight.”
Gerald spent that night in a Premier Inn off the A30, his blue notebook open before him, trying to make sense of where things had gone wrong. The problem, he decided, was that people didn’t want to face the truth. They preferred comforting lies to uncomfortable realities.
By morning, he’d convinced himself that Margaret had been manipulated even more deeply than he’d feared. He’d save her. He’d save them all, whether they wanted saving or not.
He returned home to find the locks changed and a letter from a solicitor.
Over the following weeks, Gerald discovered what it meant to be assumed about. To be pre-judged. To have conclusions drawn about you without evidence, without question, without mercy.
He was the man who’d driven his wife away with paranoid accusations. The neighbourhood busybody who’d ruined Dr Patel’s reputation, cost young Jamie his livelihood, harassed the Okonkwos. A nuisance. A menace. Possibly unhinged.
None of these assumptions were entirely wrong, which made them harder to bear than if they’d been complete fabrications.
Gerald sits now in a small flat above a charity shop, three miles from the village where he lived for forty years. His blue notebook is in a drawer, unopened for months. Sometimes he takes it out, meaning to throw it away, but he never quite manages it.
He sees Dr Patel occasionally, in Tesco or walking through town. She doesn’t acknowledge him. Young Jamie Morrison he never sees at all—he’s heard the boy moved to Bristol, started fresh somewhere his name wasn’t already spoiled.
Margaret has filed for divorce. She visits their daughter in Perth every six months now, stays for weeks at a time. Ryan Henderson taught her to use Skype before he left for university. She’s never asked Gerald to join her on the calls.
The terrible thing, the thing that keeps Gerald awake on the worst nights, is that he still doesn’t quite believe he was wrong. Not entirely. Not about everything. The assumptions still feel true, somewhere deep in the place where certainty lives, untouched by evidence or consequence.
But he knows now what assumptions do. How they calcify into fact in the absence of question. How they spread like damp through the walls of a community. How they corrode everything they touch, including—especially—the person doing the assuming.
There’s a young couple who’ve just moved into the flat below his. Gerald sees them sometimes, coming and going at odd hours, carrying peculiar packages, speaking in low voices.
He watches them through his window, feels the old familiar itch to observe, to deduce, to know.
Then he closes the curtains, makes himself a cup of tea, and sits in the dark, fighting the urge to open his notebook and write down what he’s seen.
Most days, he manages it.
Most days.
The moral, should you need it spoken plain: An assumption is a conclusion drawn without the burden of verification—convenient for the one who makes it, catastrophic for the one it’s made about. We are not detectives in our neighbours’ lives, and certainty without evidence is not wisdom but weaponised laziness. The question unasked, the fact unchecked, the alternative unconsidered—these are not merely gaps in knowledge but grenades lobbed blindly into the complicated truth of other people’s existence. Ask, verify, doubt yourself. Or sit alone in the dark, fighting the urge to poison another life with your convenient fictions, knowing that the assumptions others now make about you are the only justice you’ll ever receive.
Alan /|\
Excellent and very relevant! The support base for a certain political party....