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"Curious. You handle fountain pens with your right hand."
Sherlock's voice betrayed rather less surprise than his words suggested as he roused himself from the sofa where he had been sprawled and rose to his feet with evident reluctance.
The dreary rain had persisted all day, and I had just returned to our familiar sitting room at Baker Street after waging a small war with the self-service checkout over fresh milk and baked beans. Sherlock, meanwhile, had been immersed in various newspapers and websites since morning, though today's trawl had apparently yielded nothing of interest. Under such circumstances, one might reasonably expect one of his tiresome fits of hysteria—perhaps some peculiar criticism of the phrasing or grammar in my blog—but my discovery of an unfamiliar object on the table seemed to have redirected his attention. He strode over to where I stood frozen, fountain pen in my right hand, and picked up the object in question.
"Your alma mater was remarkably backwards. To think there are still educators who insist on correcting the dominant hand through such unreasonable means."
"Actually, it wasn't my secondary school that tried to correct my left-handedness, it was primary—"
The words died on my lips as the old nightmare surfaced in my mind.
"Sherlock? Hang on, how did you know my handedness was corrected at school?"
"I didn't know. I observed, and reached a conclusion."
"Right. Let me rephrase. What exactly did you observe to reach this conclusion?"
Sherlock looked down at my bewildered face with an expression that clearly said How can you not see this?, tilting his head in that characteristically condescending manner.
"Your reaction upon picking it up. You handled it like unexploded ordnance. Initially, I deduced you'd simply clocked its retail value, but your eyes immediately tracked up and to the right—visual memory retrieval. Touching the pen triggered a specific, deeply ingrained recollection, prompting you to instantly, almost convulsively, transfer it from your dominant left hand to your right. As if holding it naturally was a punishable offence."
I glanced between my right hand and the fountain pen now resting in his. Had I really been so transparent in those few seconds since picking it up? Or was it simply that his powers of observation were so extraordinarily acute? Sherlock continued, paying no heed to my stunned expression.
"You are left-handed. You've been trained to use your right hand for firearms, but for writing and fine motor tasks, you default to your dominant left hand. You typically handle pens with your left. And yet, you transferred this fountain pen to your right. A left-handed person deliberately switching a pen to their right hand. Most peculiar behaviour."
He was quite correct—I am left-handed. And I suspect every left-handed person in the world would heartily agree that daily life presents us with a remarkable number of difficulties. Consider scissors, for instance—try using an ordinary pair with your left hand and you'll quickly discover that the cutting line becomes hidden behind the blade, making it impossible to see where you're actually cutting. Yes, using standard scissors with any proficiency requires considerable practice for a left-hander. But it doesn't end there. Army-issued firearms, automatic ticket barriers at tube stations, digital cameras, telephones, refrigerator doors—the list of situations where left-handed individuals are made to suffer is endless. And perhaps the greatest struggle of all concerns writing. Partly out of spite for having these unpleasant memories dredged up, I decided to enlighten the right-handed Sherlock.
"You probably know this already, being so learned, but writing with your left hand is rather difficult. Especially with a fountain pen. Even with a biro, you have to hold it with the nib pointing towards yourself to write properly. But try that grip with a fountain pen and the paper catches, or the ink won't flow."
Writing systems are designed to move from left to right. Most writing instruments—fountain pens in particular—are constructed to accommodate this motion. This makes fountain pens rather troublesome implements for left-handed use. I was implicitly suggesting that it wasn't at all strange for a left-hander like myself to hold a fountain pen in my right hand, but Sherlock dismissed this with a laugh.
"You're blinking more frequently."
"Sorry?"
"Increased blinking indicates anxiety or nervous tension. Your blink rate rose markedly the moment you picked up that pen."
He twirled the fountain pen between his fingers, one corner of his mouth curling upward in a knowing smirk. The expression of a cat cornering its prey.
"Considering your behaviour before and after, you clearly have some unpleasant memory associated with fountain pens. And that memory involves being forced to hold writing implements in your right hand despite being left-handed. Since you show no such reaction to other writing instruments, this 'enforcement' was brief and specific to fountain pens. This makes it unlikely to have been imposed by your parents. So who fits these criteria? A schoolteacher."
"And hence your conclusion. Your powers of deduction are remarkable, as always."
"Not particularly. Your reaction when you transferred the pen to your right hand—that level of tension suggested the enforcement was recent. I hadn't expected it to date back to primary school. It must have been etched into your neural pathways as quite the formative trauma."
The sardonic smile faded from his face, and he fixed me with a penetrating gaze, as though attempting to read the very memories stored within my skull. I felt oddly uncomfortable and dropped my eyes, then found myself looking up at the ceiling. Yes—I seemed to recall doing exactly the same thing when she had shrieked at me in that hysterical voice all those years ago.
"Yes, well. It ranks as one of the worst experiences of my life, just behind being shot in Afghanistan. I blame her for a fair portion of why my handwriting is still rubbish. Whatever I tried to do, she'd screech, 'If you want to write properly, you must correct your abnormal left-handedness to normal right-handedness!' She was absolutely determined to make me use my right hand. My writing never improved, and I've nothing but terrible memories of that woman."
"Idiocy." Sherlock's voice was flat, clinical. "Handedness is simply neurology. Imposing right-handedness forcibly rewires the brain's pathways, inducing massive psychological stress. George VI's stammer was a direct result of George V's archaic bullying. Lewis Carroll, Winston Churchill—all victims of the same pedagogical barbarism."
"Churchill?" I raised an eyebrow, my previous irritation momentarily sidelined. "Suppose that gives his V-sign a bit of a double meaning, doesn't it? One for the Germans, and one for his primary school teachers."
Sherlock paused, processing the historical irony. A short, sharp sound escaped him—a genuine bark of laughter. "A dual-purpose gesture of defiance. Elegantly efficient."
The sudden burst of shared amusement hung in the air for a fraction of a second, before I remembered the fountain pen that had started this whole business.
"By the way, whose is that fountain pen you've got there?"
"Why don't you observe and deduce? You may not be able to identify the owner by name, but you should easily be able to determine what sort of person it belongs to."
He tossed me the pen, and I held it up before my eyes, frowning.
"It's new, isn't it?"
"If you're uncertain, test how it writes."
"I told you, I'm still not comfortable with fountain pens. I may have used them at school, but that was years ago."
"You'll be fine. This one is left-handed. The nib angle is reversed from standard pens, making it quite awkward for right-handed use. You'll notice immediately. In other words, the owner of that fountain pen is left-handed."
Sherlock swept the hem of his dressing gown aside and settled back onto the sofa.
"A new, barely used, left-handed fountain pen. Found on the sitting room table. The only people with regular access to this flat are myself, you, and Mrs Hudson. Mrs Hudson and I are both right-handed, so we don't fit the profile. Other visitors might include clients, but if such a person were to forget a fountain pen, it would more likely be near the sofa than on the table. Furthermore, not a single left-handed person has visited this room in the past two months. Therefore, the conclusion is that this belongs to you."
"No, that can't be right, Sherlock. I don't own a fountain pen—"
"Precisely. You don't own a fountain pen. I bought this one for you."
I stared at him, my brain briefly stalling. "You did what?"
"I was unable to return the biro I borrowed from you, so I bought this as a replacement."
"Borrowed? When did I lend you—"
"Three days ago."
To an outside observer, this conversation must have seemed thoroughly bizarre, but Sherlock continued as though discussing the most mundane matters.
"A case I don't believe I mentioned to you. The suspect was claiming self-defence—that she had reflexively stabbed the victim in the neck with a biro that happened to be on the desk. I borrowed your pen to test whether such a thing was actually possible."
"Borrowed? What exactly did you do with my pen?"
The answer to this question was more or less what I'd feared, but hearing it confirmed still made me want to cover my ears.
"Verification. Testing how deeply a ballpoint pen could be driven into the cervical region using human force. The pen used in the crime happened to be the same make as yours. The fact that it was well-used also matched the conditions of the murder weapon—most convenient." He paused, utterly unperturbed. "If you absolutely insist on having that particular pen returned, we can go to the morgue and retrieve it now. I can't guarantee the writing quality, given that the tip will be encrusted with blood, flesh, and adipose tissue."
"Jesus, Sherlock, keep it. Just... don't bring it back here." I pinched the bridge of my nose, fighting the urge to sigh. I'm not the sort of person to get squeamish over a corpse—I've seen enough of them in Afghanistan—but I draw a firm line at using my personal stationery as a forensic instrument. Quite apart from the sheer disrespect to the deceased, the man's complete disregard for basic clinical hygiene was staggering. I really ought to have a serious discussion with him about cross-contamination at some point.
"Right. In future, if you're borrowing a pen for purposes other than writing, please tell me what you intend to use it for. Finding out that something I've been using every day was employed as a weapon—even experimentally—is rather... no, it's extremely unpleasant."
"Understood. I shall endeavour to bear that in mind."
Personally, I'd prefer 'bear in mind' to become 'rigidly adhere to', but given that this is the man who routinely stops my heart every time I open the refrigerator or microwave, I suppose I should be grateful for any acknowledgement at all.
"This is quite an expensive fountain pen, though."
"Not really. Keep it filled with ink and it'll last decades. Far more economical than constantly buying disposable pens."
"That may be true from a certain perspective, but I really can't accept something this valuable."
Putting the rather disturbing fate of my biro out of my mind for the sake of my own sanity, I looked down at the fountain pen in my hands once more. The gleaming black barrel with its delicate gold accents. If it truly was left-handed, it might not even be a standard retail item.
Sherlock rolled his eyes, emitting a sharp, impatient breath.
"You have a habit of setting down your writing implements wherever you happen to be after taking notes. And then forgetting where you've put them. In fact, you forgot you'd lent me that pen for three entire days. You'd forgotten the pen's very existence. So every time you need to jot something down, you panic. Where's my pen? When did I last use it? Where did I put it? The surgery? The bedroom? Oh, sod it, it wasn't expensive—I'll just buy another. Whether this is your natural character or something instilled by military service, I couldn't say, but you really ought to develop some attachment to your possessions."
As he spoke, he crossed in front of me and reached for a stack of newspapers that had been lying face-down on a section of the table.
"I wonder how many pens you've bought since we began sharing this flat?"
With a theatrical flourish, he swept the newspapers aside. Beneath them lay a graveyard of biros—dozens of them, scattered like fallen soldiers. Every single one looked vaguely familiar, and every single one I had assumed had simply disappeared somewhere along the way.
"Where did these—"
"Scattered about the flat," Sherlock cut in smoothly. "Wedged down the back of the sofa, abandoned next to the kettle, entombed beneath your discarded medical journals. I tolerate a certain level of necessary chaos, John, but I draw the line at converting 221B into a branch of WHSmith."
The state of our sitting room was generally a hazard zone—and largely his fault, given the ongoing experiments involving bodily fluids in the kitchen. But confronted with this undeniable evidence of my own domestic negligence, my righteous indignation withered. I closed my mouth and glared at the pile.
"You are notoriously indifferent to your own comfort, yet stubbornly sentimental regarding others." Sherlock's gaze softened by a fraction, tracking my reaction. "You still use that battered mobile your estranged sister gave you, despite your improved finances. You anchor yourself to gifts. A biro you bought yourself is disposable; a gift is an obligation. Therefore, I calculated you would not allow an expensive, tailored instrument to roll under the sofa." He paused. "I hadn't calculated on your having such unpleasant associations with fountain pens, though."
I looked up at Sherlock, who had fallen into pensive silence, and removed the black cap. I decided to try writing my name on a nearby piece of paper. The alloy nib I pressed tentatively against the paper neither caught nor scratched—it glided across the surface with a smoothness I hadn't expected, the reversed angle guiding my left hand naturally across the page rather than fighting against it. The signature I produced was somewhat awkward due to my unfamiliarity with the instrument itself, but the tactile difference was undeniable.
"Well! This is far easier to write with than I'd expected. If I'd had one of these as a child, my handwriting might have turned out rather better."
"It's not too late to improve."
Sherlock, who had been observing the signature over my shoulder, smiled with evident satisfaction.
"I won't claim the tool is everything, but good tools naturally tend to show in one's work. I shall pray that you at least become able to read your own numbers after the fact."
Given several incidents that sprang immediately to mind, I could only muster a rather unconvincing response to this barbed encouragement.
"I can read my own numbers perfectly well. ...I think."