Only Human (16 page)

‘And it's got God in it,' the young woman pointed out. ‘That'll do, then. Now, about the flowers.'

‘Just a moment.' The man raised his hand, like a small child wanting to leave the room. ‘I want to know what you meant by
Are you sure?
'

‘Oh.' Artofel rubbed his chin. ‘Look, I wish you'd forget about that. Just me sort of thinking aloud, really.'

‘Then think aloud some more.'

‘Is this going to take long?' the young woman interrupted. ‘Only we got to sort out the flowers.'

Artofel steepled his fingers. He'd often wondered why vicars did that; now he knew. It gave them something to do with their hands other than strangling their parishioners. ‘What I was thinking was, look, obviously you two are very much in love, you're perfectly suited, I know you'll have a very long and happy life together. By saying
Are you sure?
I was just being a sort of—'

‘Well?'

Artofel swallowed. ‘Devil's advocate,' he said. ‘Now please, let's just forget all about it and carry on.'

The man looked at him. ‘You don't think so,' he said.

‘Excuse me?'

‘You think it's a bad idea,Trish and me getting married,' the man said accusingly. ‘Why?'

‘No, no,' Artofel said quickly. ‘Perish the thought, really. Really and truth—'

‘Come on, spit it out.Why don't you think we should get married?'

‘But I do, honestly,' Artofel said vehemently. ‘I mean, in some cases the fact that the man's twenty years older than the girl might well be a problem, but I'm sure it's something you've both thought about and talked through, and you're clearly satisfied in your own minds that it's not going to make difficulties, so—'

‘Hang on,' said the young woman. ‘I hadn't thought of that. Hey, that means when I'm forty, he'll be -' she counted on her fingers ‘- sixty-two. That's old,' she added, frowning.

‘Sixty-
three
,' the man said, with a hint of impatience. ‘Look, is that all, because . . .'

‘Actually,' Artofel said, with a wry little smile, ‘the thought had crossed my mind that, what with Tricia having such a lively, outgoing personality and being a barmaid, and you being a professional pallbearer, perhaps you might not be, how can I put this, temperamentally quite ideally compatible, but hey, that just goes to show how wrong you can be.'

The young woman scowled. ‘Don't you take that tone about me being a barmaid,' she said severely. ‘And anyway, Derek's going to pack in the pallbearing and we're going to have our own pub, so . . .'

‘No I'm not,' the man interrupted. ‘I like pallbearing.'

‘Yes you bloody well are, excuse me, Vicar,' the young woman replied. ‘I'm not marrying some miserable bugger who wears black suits and smells of embalming fluid. No, when we sell your house we'll buy a nice little pub somewhere and . . .'

‘Sell my house? Who said anything about selling my house?'

‘Um,' Artofel muttered. ‘Excuse me, but . . .'

‘If you think I'm living in that nasty dark shed of a house of yours, you need your plugs cleaning,' the young woman retorted. ‘No, we'll sell it and buy a nice . . .'

‘But what about my owls?' the man said. ‘Best collection of stuffed owls in the West Midlands. I'm not having them stuck up in some lounge bar where people can pull their feathers and shove crisp packets between their legs, thank you very much.'

‘Too right you're not, because they're going in the skip,' the young woman snarled. ‘Disgusting bloody things. Morbid, I call it, having dead things all over the place.'

‘Tricia,' said Artofel soothingly. ‘Derek, maybe we should all just, um . . .'

‘They're a damn sight more tasteful than your stupid teddy-bears,' the man replied angrily. ‘You should see them, Vicar. Pink, the lot of them.'

The young woman glowered at him. ‘I made them myself,' she protested.

‘Yes, and can't you tell,' answered the man nastily. ‘The best of 'em looks like it's just gone twelve rounds with Frank Bruno. Kindest thing'd be to have 'em all put to sleep.'

Quietly, Artofel groaned. He had, after all, only been trying to do the right thing. That's what vicars are supposed to do, surely?

‘You're
horrible
,' the young woman yowled. ‘And you're ignorant. And you snore.'

‘No I don't.'

‘Yes you do.'

‘No I don't. Ask your sister.'

A small ring, thrown with considerable force, missed the man by the thickness of the skin on a cup of tea and hit a china paperweight on the mantelpiece, reducing it to shrapnel. A door slammed.

‘If you go after her . . .' Artofel suggested.

‘I might just get my head kicked in,' the man replied. ‘This is all your fault.'

‘But . . .'

‘I got a good mind to smash your face, only you're a vicar.' The man sneered. ‘You'll be hearing from my solicitor,' he said. He retrieved the ring, which had embedded itself in the plaster, made a derogatory remark about the clergy in general, and left.

As Artofel tidied away the wreckage, he reflected that if they'd got married, they'd probably have been utterly wretched for as long as it takes to get a divorce, provided they both lived that long. He'd done good. He'd done them both a favour.

They didn't seem terribly pleased about it.

When their tempers cooled, and they'd had a chance to think it over . . . The teddy bears. The owls. Her sister. By the time they each got home, they'd probably be thanking their lucky stars he'd saved them from themselves.

He put it out of his mind and set about making himself a light supper. He was just taking the steak and kidney pie out of the microwave when there was a sound of breaking glass and a heavy thump. He ran back into the front room to find a brick lying in the middle of the floor. Wrapped round it was a sheet of paper, on which was written:
which suggested that one of them had indeed thought it over and come to a rather different conclusion. He shrugged his shoulders, hoping vehemently that at least the other one would realise the truth of the matter, and started buttering bread. He'd done two slices when he heard the letterbox snap shut, and smelt something burning.

Fortunately, his host had one of those small kitchen-fire extinguishers they sell for dealing with self-igniting chip pans, and the petrol-soaked carpet in the hall hadn't really got going properly by the time he arrived on the scene. Nevertheless, it was a rather depressing reaction to his first genuine good deed. It was enough to put you off righteousness for life.

However, he reflected as he ate his supper, even if they didn't appreciate what he'd done for them, at least he'd done it. The potential disaster had been averted. Who needs gratitude when you can have a sense of achievement?

The meal was all right, if you happened to like dead cow in scrunched-up grass seeds with more scrunched-up grass seeds coated in cow fat, but he couldn't help wishing he was back in the staff canteen in Flipside. Oh, those mixed grills! Oh, those barbecued spare ribs! He washed it down with a can of ancient lager, which tasted of three parts dissolved aluminium and one part yeast, and went to bed.

It was while he was lying on his back, wide awake in the darkness, that an unpleasant thought struck him. The reason he wasn't sleeping, apart from the dead cow and scrunched-up grass seeds, was that he was quite understandably worried about how, when and where the witness elimination program was going to get around to him; but what if he'd got it all wrong? After all, why were they biding their time? Not like Flipside to let the embers cool under their feet. Perhaps it wasn't as straightforward as he'd first thought.

Perhaps someone was doing this on purpose.

Not just an ordinary cock-up, the sort of thing that happens every day here in Entropy's backyard. Maybe it was part of some deep-laid scheme, with himself as one of the cogs in the infernal machine?

Paranoia, he told himself as he bashed the pillow. Comes with the monkey suit. On the other hand, it would explain a whole lot of things, answer a whole lot of questions that he admittedly hadn't thought of yet but which were undoubtedly out there somewhere, prowling around in the dark and ripping open dustbin bags. A conspiracy . . .

But why? How would it help anybody to have a Duke of Hell catapulted into the body of a minister of the Church? Not for sabotage or inside information; we're all on the same side, remember. Unless, of course, it's being done in what you might term an unofficial capacity; and that would suggest that someone had managed to get inside Mainframe and play about with it, and that was of course unthinkable.

Well. He'd done it, of course, but that was different. He'd only gone in to snoop about, not fiddle with the cosmic order. If any fool could play musical bodies just by hacking into the Web, it'd have been a piece of cake for him to get himself out of here and back home where he belonged. No, you needed really high-level codes to do things like body-swapping.

Somehow, that only made it worse. Suppose there was a conspiracy - a coup in Heaven or just someone trying to rip off a large sum of money - and it involved the sort of people who had access to that sort of code. Didn't bear thinking about; because the only people that could be were the Family itself.

Eeek.

No. Forget it.Too much dead cow and milk residues late at night.

Unless . . .

So. Maybe he was right; what exactly did he propose doing about it? Inform the proper authorities? And besides, if the Big Boss really was omniscient like they all said, then He'd know about it already.

Unless . . .

Maybe he
did.
Now that really was a scary thought.

He was still thinking that one over at half past ten that morning; at which time, Tricia and Derek phoned him from the local register office to tell him, among many other things, that they'd just got married and so he could (to paraphrase slightly) go jump in the lake. Nothing, they informed him, could stand in the way of true love.

Well. Quite.

 

Oh for a muse of fire (and a pair of asbestos gloves), to be able to do justice to the strange and wonderful adventures, the desperate dangers, the razor's-edge escapes, the fabulous encounters that Dermot Fraud had to endure before he reached the telephone box. Or rather, oh for a thirty-million-dollar budget, a cast of thousands, Harrison Ford in a lemming outfit and a team of accountants working round the clock to help decide what to do with the profits.

No offers? The film rights are, inexplicably, still available. Very well, then. Be like that.

Having reached the telephone box, Dermot Fraud sighed, closed his eyes and collapsed into a small furry ball in the shelter of a discarded crisp packet. He was exhausted, starving, emotionally drained and bleeding from a small cut over his left eye, the result of not ducking quite fast enough when he felt the shadow of a cat on the back of his neck. But he was here; only a few feet away from a telephone, at the other end of which was safety.

Only a few feet; straight up. With a sudden hollow feeling inside that had nothing to do with the fact that he hadn't eaten for two days, he lifted his head. Through the glass door of the phone booth he could see the receiver, perched in its cradle. Even if he managed to get the door open - a feat comparable to raising Stonehenge single-handed, for a lemming - how was he going to climb up to the receiver, lift it, dial a number and put a coin he hadn't got into the slot?

How indeed?

He allowed himself a ten-minute interval for utter despair, and then forced himself to think positive. From the depths of his memory he dragged out examples from history of desperate obstacles overcome, astounding feats achieved in the face of overwhelming odds. Hannibal and the Alps; Bruce and the spider; Cortes and the conquest of Mexico; Rorke's Drift; the rescue of the
Apollo 13
astronauts; Neil Kinnock managing to lose the 1992 general election. All right, he said to himself, if they could do it, so can I.

Except . . .

Well, yes. They were human, and I'm a . . .

No I'm
not
; I'm
not
a lemming. This is just a phase I'm going through, that's all. Rodenthood is only skin deep. Inside every lemming there's a human being struggling to get out.

First, there was the question of the door. It was one of the last few surviving red telephone boxes, with the heavy glass and metal doors - when I'm out of this nightmare and safely back in Number Ten, Fraud vowed, there will be a great purge of all red telephone boxes the length and breadth of this great country of ours - which meant that in lemming terms it weighed roughly the equivalent of Nelson's column. In order to get in, he'd have to open it at least two inches. On his own. With nothing but his four bare paws.

All right. Let's think about this.

Archimedes. Give me a firm place and a long enough lever and I could move the Earth. What was the technical term? Mechanical advantage? Something along those lines. Me for some of that.

A lever; and something for it to pivot round, a fulcrum. Oughtn't to be too difficult.

The fulcrum wasn't. It took him only a few minutes to locate a flat stone roughly the size of his head, which would do admirably. Having first looked under it for reporters (old habits die hard) he managed, by dint of extreme effort, to shove and lemmingpaw it up against the foot of the door. Short exhaustion break; then he began the search for a lever.