Little People (12 page)

‘Who the bloody hell are you calling obnoxious, you tall . . . ?'

I let her rant on for a moment or so while I considered what I'd just said. I suppose I hadn't really noticed the remarkable similarity between the elf's way of talking to me and Cru's, presumably because I was so used to being insulted by girls that it just seemed normal. Now I'd made myself aware of it, however, I couldn't see past it: there were differences, sure, but the resemblance was too close to ignore. ‘All right,' I broke in, interrupting her in mid-tirade, ‘let's deal with this human thing. Who the hell are you, and what do you know about me that I don't?'

She sighed, a long, rather musical sigh that seemed to start somewhere down around her ankles. ‘We-ell,' she said, ‘if you really don't know, I suppose it's only fair to tell you, before you make life really difficult for yourself. Not to mention for us,' she added, in a distinctly odd tone of voice. ‘Only problem is trying to get the idea across to you in human terms. It'd be like trying to explain quantum theory to a water vole.'

I frowned. ‘Try me,' I said.

She thought for a moment. ‘No,' she said eventually, ‘it'll be far easier to show you. I'm not supposed to,' she added, ‘but we won't worry about that now. Besides, I'm going that way anyway. And,' she said, looking away awkwardly, ‘I need your help to get there.'

‘
You
need
my
help?'

‘All right, don't make a six-part miniseries out of it,' she snapped. ‘You'll be amazed to hear that I'm not actually all that thrilled about having to go begging and pleading with a tall – with a compactness-challenged person about anything, let alone something as important – oh, the hell with it. Are you going to help me or not?'

I shrugged. ‘Depends,' I said. ‘Is it dangerous? Will it hurt? And how long's it going to take, because if I'm not careful, I'm going to be late for—' I paused. She was laughing. ‘Sorry, what's so unbearably amusing about that?'

‘Nothing,' she said around a mouthful of giggles. ‘Nothing at all. Elf stuff. Don't you worry about it. As far as you're concerned—' Big snigger. ‘Far as you're concerned, it'll take no time at all.'

Well, that didn't sound so bad. ‘And it won't hurt?'

‘You won't feel a thing. Promise.'

‘All right. And then you'll explain.'

‘It'll all become as clear as crystal, just you wait and see. Well, don't just stand there like a lovesick prune. This way.'

I had my doubts, of course. Unfortunately, the Pavlovian urge to obey overrode the soft whinnying of my vestigial self-preservation instinct. ‘Okay,' I said. ‘Where are we going? There's nothing out this way but sheds and dustbins.'

‘That's what you think,' she replied without looking round, as she strode out of the door like a cross between Tinkerbell and Xena. ‘That's because you're pathetically unobservant, as I think I may have mentioned already. Ah, here we go. I was sure I'd seen it on the way over, and here it is.'

I looked down, and saw a circular bald patch in the scruffy grass where, by the looks of it, a dustbin had stood until very recently. ‘That's it?'

‘I just told you, yes.' She stood on the edge of the ring, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. ‘It's going to be a hell of a squeeze getting you in there with those ridiculous great big feet of yours, but we'll just have to manage somehow. That's it,' she continued, as I went and stood where she was pointing. ‘Now, make sure that your whole foot's inside the ring.'

She was right, it was a tight fit. Believe me, it's a bizarre feeling having a very attractive six-inch-tall woman nestling in a hostile manner close against the calf of one's leg.

‘Is that all right?' I asked.

‘Absolutely not, you've got the big toe of your left foot three-eighths of an inch over the line.'

‘Have I really? Does it matter?'

Force six scowl. ‘Up to you,' she said. ‘Just remember, while you're making your mind up, anything you don't take with you gets left behind. This includes clothes, footwear and, most of all, toes. Now, then: on three. One, two—'

I twitched my foot back just as she said the T word, and on balance I'm glad that I did, even though it meant that I inadvertently kicked my small companion in the stomach and knocked her over. Now, this wouldn't have mattered particularly (to me, at least, except on ethical and social grounds) if she'd stayed six inches tall; there would have been a small, irate girl yelling at me down at ankle level, but I've put up with far worse than that in my time. Where it all started to go wrong was the point where she started to grow.

Melissa put on five and a half feet in about a quarter of a second.

This complicated matters. Where, not so long before, there'd been something weighing maybe a pound and a half pressing against my ankle, there was now a mass roughly equivalent to that of a medium-sized farrier's anvil. Curiously enough, I heard the snap before I felt the pain.

More agonisingly late than never, though, if you see what I mean; when the pain eventually came on line a whole microsecond later (we apologise for the late running of this service &c &c) there was enough of it to fill up my senses like a well-presented pint of Guinness. I'm only mentioning this, not out of some rather pathetic attempt to gain sympathy, but to explain why I wasn't really paying much mind to the extraordinary miracle going on all around me.

Pity, really. And typical of my luck, needless to say. At the precise moment when everything changed out of all recognition (while staying exactly the same in virtually every respect), I was squirming on the deck in agony, yelling, ‘Get off me, get off me!' to a six-foot-tall female sprawling across my right thigh. Like I just said, typical; dammit, the sprawling alone should've been the most fun I'd ever had in my life, and of course I missed out on that, too.

I guess she must've removed herself, because the pain grew slightly less unbearably awful. Reconstructing the order of events with the benefit of hindsight, my guess is that she rolled sideways and scrambled up before she started yelling at me. At any rate, I tuned out the yelling (years of experience) and concentrated on the suffering and self-pity aspects, where at least I was doing something I was good at.

Then, quite suddenly, there was another click; except that this one was, for want of a better word, an unclick, the same sound as before only reversed. The pain stopped – of course, pain doesn't do that, it fades out like the end of a track on a record, but this time it was immediate, as though nasty Mr Pain had driven into a brick wall. And serve him right.

‘Uh?' I said.

‘Idiot,' she replied. ‘Anyway, we're here.'

I wasn't expecting a comment like that, since I hadn't been aware of travelling any distance, unless you counted a short, fast journey in the Y axis. ‘My leg,' I said. ‘It's better.'

‘I fixed it,' she said, with the air of someone getting an irrelevant detail out of the way. ‘Double green-stick fracture of the left shin. That's perfectly all right, don't mention it, you're very welcome.'

‘Thank you,' I said. ‘What the bloody hell do you mean, you fixed it? and how do you know what sort of a—'

‘Shut
up
, for pity's sake,' she said. ‘We're here.' Her voice was suddenly different. ‘I'm here. Home.'

‘But you can't just fix a broken leg just like—' Then I noticed something out of the corner of my eye and sat up to look about me; after which I stopped worrying about my leg, or how come it was suddenly unbroken. Priorities, you see. Legs are all very well in their place, but there's other things in life.

I knew where I was, of course; I could've drawn a map blindfold, and marked the place where I was sitting with an X. There was the shed we'd just come from; behind that were the other outbuildings, and fifty yards or so in the other direction were the tennis courts and the football pavilion, all exactly where they should be.

Except that they weren't.

Let me try and hook my fingernails over the edge of coherence here, and try to explain. In the places where there should have been buildings, there were buildings, and the buildings were more or less the size and shape they should have been. But where there ought to have been rather crummy creosoted timber and galvanised steel sheet (that's our school for you: all Victorian Gothic out front, and scruffy as Albert Steptoe's junk-yard round the back), there was mellow golden stone and new thatch the colour of Dutch salted butter. Likewise, the grass should've been thin, patchy and scrawny, covering the mud like the residual traces of hair on Daddy George's bald patch. Instead, it was thick, even, and I think the word I'm looking for is verdant: Hollywood grass, costing more per square metre than best-quality Axminster carpet. Even the sky - the sky, dammit, was this amazingly
blue
shade of blue, like a very unconvincing background matte on a film. In England, in January? Get real, will you?

‘What?' I asked.

Melissa was looking at me. She hadn't changed at all, except that now she was much, much taller, and somehow, during the thirty seconds or so since she'd said the word ‘three', her hair had formed itself into a ferociously complicated-looking plait. There was another change, too, now I come to think of it, even more drastic and improbable than the instant hairdo. She looked happy.

‘Well,' she said, ‘here we are. Welcome to Elfland.'

CHAPTER SIX

‘
D
on't be silly,' I said. ‘this is round the back of the main buildings. We're in the Home Counties. England. Earth.'

Melissa laughed; and although she was laughing at me, there wasn't any cruelty in it. ‘You're absolutely right,' she said. ‘That's precisely where we are. Isn't it
wonderful
.'

I didn't say anything for a moment. All right, yes, she'd obviously gone barking mad at some point in the last couple of minutes, but there was an argument for saying that this was no bad thing, since it seemed to have done wonders for her attitude. On the other hand, anybody who could use the word ‘wonderful' to describe the wasteland round the back of the school sheds was quite possible a danger to herself and others and oughtn't to have been out loose.

‘Sorry,' I said mildly, just in case her mental condition involved sudden extreme mood-swings, ‘but I'd rather got the impression that you said we'd gone somewhere. And didn't you just . . .?'

She nodded, beaming like an angel (or, depending on your point of view, an imbecile). ‘That's right, she said, yes. This is Elfland, where I come from. Do you like it? Isn't it fantastic?'

Well, the weather was an improvement and the architecture wasn't bad; likewise the grass, if grass is something that really matters to you. But it was still round the back of the sheds, or so she'd have me believe. ‘Please tell me what's going on,' I pleaded. ‘This is beginning to worry me.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said –

Just in case you're as amazed as I was, I'll just repeat that.

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I'm being thoughtless. It's just – well, being back here after such a long time . . . And I'm just starting to feel like I'm
me
again. You've no idea how utterly wonderful that is.' She frowned, with a side salad of guilt. ‘Do I sound different?' she asked.

I paused. ‘Do you want me to answer that?' I asked.

She nodded. ‘It's very important that you're completely honest,' she said.

‘Ah, right. Fine. In that case, yes, you do sound different. Nicer. Less of a horrible sarcastic bitch, if you follow me.'

She nodded gravely. ‘That's how I see it too,' she said. ‘You know, that's awful. It must mean that all the time I was there I was this really nasty unpleasant person—' She stopped, and a tiny teardrop welled up in the corner of her eye, like a small leak in a sink trap joint. ‘I can remember,' she said unhappily. ‘I'm remembering some of the horrid things I've said to you.' Pause. Sniff. ‘Oh Michael, I'm so very sorry—'

Just a minute
, I thought,
what's going on?
‘That's very nice of you,' I said, ‘but I only met you about an hour ago, so I don't suppose it's done me any lasting psychological damage. Besides, compared with what I'm used to—'

‘An hour ago?' She looked utterly bewildered. ‘Oh, of course, you don't know yet. Oh dear.' Then, just to complicate things, she started crying.

People who cry when they're sad – well, they're a pain in the bum most of the time, but at least you can see where they're coming from. People who cry when they're
happy
, on the other hand, are an unmitigated nuisance and it's high time something was done about it. Now. I don't know; the government spends millions of pounds of your tax money on guided missiles and clogging up perfectly good roads with speed bumps, but can you persuade them to part with a bent nickel to deal with the growing menace of happy cryers? Can you hell as like.

Difficult to know what to do for the best. Quite possibly it was one of those situations that calls for the arm round the shoulders and the reassuring hug; but maybe it wasn't, in which case well-intentioned physical intervention might earn me a busted jaw followed by a long holiday in a mailbag factory. My theory is that until you know the locals' habits, customs and culture to Ph.D. level or preferably beyond, you're best off not pawing them about if there's any doubt in your mind whatsoever concerning how such contact's going to be interpreted.

On the other hand, standing there like a short, defective telegraph pole while the poor girl sobbed her eyes out was as clear a case of boorish male insensitivity as you're ever likely to see, and if there's one thing women can't be doing with (trust me on this one) it's boorish male insensitivity. Which would be worse – a boot in the nuts followed by a jail sentence, or long-term ongoing aggravation on the missed-birthday level - has got to be a matter of personal taste rather than objective judgement.