Open Sesame (12 page)

The same, of course, goes for Mr Barbour; more so, in fact, since where he came from his hair wasn’t the colour of light, dry sand and his eyes weren’t pale blue. Both of them spoke in English (Akram with a faint tinge of Manchester around the vowels, Mr Barbour sounding like Bertie Wooster doing his Lord Peter Wimsey impression) and both of them, if asked, would have been prepared to swear blind they’d never set eyes on each other before.

‘Right,’ said Mr Barbour. ‘What seems to be the problem?’

‘Toothache,’ Akram replied. ‘My tooth hurts.’

Mr Barbour nodded. ‘By some miraculous fluke,’ he said, ‘I happen to have some experience in tooth-related disorders. Now then, the chair won’t eat you, it’s on a diet. Ah,’ he added, inclining his mirror, ‘a cavity. The question is, do I fill it or lease it from you to keep my vintage port in?’

Akram frowned. ‘Could you get on with it, please?’ he said.

‘My apologies.’ Mr Barbour wiggled the mirror a little more, probed with the toothpick thing. ‘This is one ghastly mess you’ve got here, by the way. How long’s it been hurting?’

‘Not long.’ Akram tried to think back. ‘Ever since I arrived - I mean, since I, er, got back from holiday. Two weeks, maybe? I forget.’

Mr Barbour raised an eyebrow. ‘That, if you don’t mind me saying so, is pretty well world class forgetting. If I had something like this in my face, I’d remember it easily enough. I’m afraid,’ he concluded, straightening up, ‘she’s got to go.’

Akram thought of the tooth fairy in his bedsit. ‘Come out, you mean?’

Mr Barbour nodded. ‘If we can persuade the little blighter to come, that is,’ he added. ‘Not an awful lot left to get a hold of, and what there is looks like it’ll be as hard to shift as a grand piano in a skyscraper. Sorry about that,’ he added. ‘I could tell you it’s just a tiny bit awkward and we’ll have it out of there in two shakes, but I got given a free sample pack of truth the other day and I’m dying to try it out.’

Akram shifted impatiently. ‘If the tooth’s got to be pulled, pull it. Either that, or tie a bit of string to the door and leave it to me.’

‘On y va,’ replied Mr Barbour, fiddling with sundry instruments. ‘Now, I’m going to have to carve your gums like the Christmas turkey, so it looks like the jolly old gas for you.’ Akram gave him a sharp look. ‘For my sake, not yours. I find the sound of agonised screaming a bit offputting, to tell you the truth. Ready?’

‘Just a minute.’ Deep in Akram’s unconscious mind, an alarm had gone off. This was no big deal; Akram’s mind was full of the things, and usually he paid them as little heed as you would if you heard a car alarm start shrieking three blocks away. On this occasion, however, he decided to take a look, just in case. ‘You mean an anaesthetic? Put me to sleep sort of thing.’

‘That’s right,’ Mr Barbour said, uncoiling a length of rubber pipe. ‘Sorry, is that a problem?’

‘Well…’

‘I could try doing it with a local,’ said Mr Barbour. ‘But when it comes to major slashing and chopping, I find local anaesthetics are a bit like local government; lots of aggro and inconvenience, but they don’t actually achieve anything. Up to you, really.’

For some reason that Akram couldn’t quite fathom, the chair he was sitting in was beginning to remind him of the interior of a palm-oil jar. He could see no reason why this should be, and his tooth was currently giving him jip in jumbo catering-size measures. He reached a decision, shouted to his unconscious mind to switch that bloody thing off, and politely asked Mr Barbour to proceed.

‘Sure?’

‘Sure. Sorry about that. Silly of me.’

Akram lay back and closed his eyes. Somewhere behind him, something was hissing like a snake. There was a funny taste in his mouth. He was feeling drowsy …

And where is it, this Storybook country, this place we’ve all been to and know so well and can never find again?

They say it’s a small enclave, a protectorate of sleep and dreaming, landlocked in the mind, the soul’s Switzerland; inside every one of us a tiny patch of Somewhere Else that’s as foreign and sovereign as an embassy. Major financial institutions have been searching for it for years, on the basis that the fiscal advantages of relocating their registered offices there would be beyond the dreams of avarice, but it refuses to be found. It issues no postage stamps, has no national netball team and never submits an entry to the Eurovision Song Contest. Conventionally, the map-makers show it as lying between the borders of sleep and waking, but that’s just a guess. A profession that’s only just got itself out of the habit of putting Jerusalem in the middle and dragons round the edges isn’t to be relied on, in any event.

But just suppose they’re right; or, to be exact, not conclusively wrong. Suppose, when you fall asleep and your soul takes leave of your body for a while, you turn left out of your skull instead of right and find yourself on the other side of the looking-glass, or inside the picture on the wall. Just suppose; or, put it another way, make believe.

‘Oh,’ said Akram. He was fast asleep, dead to the world. Put a hot iron on his stomach and he wouldn’t even flinch.

He was also sitting up rubbing his eyes, and realising that the man in the white coat leaning over his physical body with a small, sharp knife in his hand was Ali Baba, the palm-oil merchant. He shut his eyes, cringed and muttered Fuck, fuck, fuck! under his breath. It was one of those moments.

Maybe, whispered the eternal optimist within him, the bastard hasn’t seen me, and if I’m really quiet I can just sneak back and hide inside this tall, bearded geezer who would appear in some respects to be me. Gently does it…

Akram’s astral body knocked over the glass of nice pink water. There was a musical tinkle, like the first laugh of a baby that brings a new fairy into the world, and Akram froze.

‘Oh for pity’s sake,’ said Ali Baba. ‘It’s you.’

There was no obvious reply to that; and for ten seconds, Neverland Mean Time, they just stared at each other, while the nice pink water seeped into the carpet.

‘Damn,’ said Akram.

Ali Baba’s fingers were holding the scalpel rather tightly. ‘Of all the chairs,’ he said slowly, ‘in all the dentist’s surgeries in all the world, why did he have to come into mine? This is …’

‘Quite,’ Akram replied. ‘Though I don’t really know what you’ve got to complain about, since you’re not the one whose sworn enemy’s standing over him with a sharp instrument.’

‘Sharp instr—’ The clatter of dropping pennies was almost audible. ‘So I am,’ said Ali Baba slowly. ‘Do you know, if you hadn’t pointed it out, I might never have thought of it. Now then, this may hurt quite a lot.’

With great precision he laid the sharp edge of the scalpel against Akram’s jugular vein, took a deep breath and let it go again.

‘Well go on, then,’ Akram snapped. ‘Sooner you do it, the sooner I get back to my nice warm oil-jar. I suppose. In any case, stop pratting about and get on with it.’

Ali Baba frowned. His hand was as still as Akram’s body. ‘I’m not sure about this,’ he said. ‘Slitting a defenceless man’s throat while he’s asleep. More in your line of country, I’d have thought.’

‘Want to change places? I’m game.’

‘No.’ Ali Baba shook his head. ‘Thanks all the same, but that wouldn’t be right either. Mind you,’ he added, scratching his ear with his left hand, ‘I don’t know why I’ve come over all indecisive and Hamlety all of a sudden. After all, last time I saw you I was dead set on scalding you to death in a whacking great pot. Without anaesthetic,’ he added, shuddering slightly. ‘Maybe the tooth business has turned me soft in my old age.’

‘That’ll be right,’ Akram sneered. ‘Strikes me you’re ideally suited to a career in which you spend all day inflicting pain on helpless people cowering before you. You bastard,’ he went on, with considerable feeling, ‘what the hell harm did I ever do you? I mean you personally? Sure, I did a lot of antisocial things, a throat cut here, an entire household massacred there, but not to you.’

‘Not for want of trying,’ interrupted Ali Baba gently.

‘Only after you’d ripped me off,’ Akram snapped. ‘Broken into my place, swiped my pension fund, nicked my life’s savings, made me look a complete and utter prawn in front of the whole profession. You’ve got to admit, a man might be expected to get a trifle vexed. And then, when I try and even the score up a bit, you dowse me down with boiling water as if I was an ants’ nest or something. So please, we’ll have a little bit less of it from you, if you don’t mind.’

‘Ah,’ said Ali Baba, without moving. ‘But you’re the villain.’

‘Bigot.’

‘Not up to me, is it?’ Ali Baba shook his head. ‘It’s just the way it is. Me goody, you baddy. And now,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘presumably you’ve come after me all this way just to get your revenge, and what happens? Old Mister Fate plonks you down helpless and immobilised in my dentist’s chair while I stand over you with a knife. I think that may well constitute a strong hint.’

“Snot fair,’ Akram growled. ‘I never had the advantages you had.’

‘Advantages?’

‘Too bloody right, advantages. Took me twenty years hard graft to get that hoard together. You come along, just happen to overhear the password, and bingo! You’re incredibly rich. And then, whenever it comes to a fight, there’s the Story creeping up behind me with half a brick in a sock, waiting to bash my skull in as soon as my back’s turned. I don’t mind people being born with a silver spoon in their mouths, but I do resent it when it’s my ruddy spoon.’

‘Which you stole from its rightful owner.’

‘All right.’ Akram scowled. ‘So it might not be mine. Sure as hell wasn’t yours. But even that I wouldn’t mind so much if on top of all that, you weren’t the bastarding hero. As far as I’m concerned, that really is the limit.’

Ali Baba sighed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What would you do if you were me? Come on, if you’re so clever.’

The words crumpled on Akram’s lips and he was silent for a comparatively long time. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied at last. ‘That’s a trick question, that is, because I’m a villain.’

‘You’re a trained throat-cutter.’

‘City and Guilds,’ Akram confirmed. ‘And I assume you also have some piece of paper with a seal on it that authorises you to cut bits off people. What’s that got to do with anything?’

Suddenly Ali Baba smiled. When expatriates meet in a strange land, there’s always a bond between them, no matter how incompatible they are in all other respects. ‘Looks like we’re stuck,’ he said, slowly and deliberately placing the scalpel into the steriliser.

‘Stuck?’

Ali Baba nodded. ‘Something somewhere’s gone wrong,’ he said.

Just then the intercom buzzed. For a moment, Ali Baba hadn’t the faintest idea what the noise could be; he whirled round, and his hand groped instinctively for the scalpel he’d just put down.

‘I think your receptionist wants a word with you,’ said Akram scornfully.

‘You’re quite right. Hello? I’m still engaged with Mr …’ He turned back and whispered, ‘Remind me. What’s your name supposed to be?’

‘Smith.’

‘Smith!’

Akram grimaced. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘she took me by surprise.’

‘Sorry to bother you,’ quacked the receptionist’s voice. ‘Just to let you know Miss Partridge is here, and can you fit her in? The filling’s worked loose and there’s some discomfort.’

Ali Baba nodded. ‘Tell her that’s fine. Anybody waiting?’

‘No, your twelve o’clock rang in to cancel, so you’re clear through to half past.’

‘Much obliged.’ He flipped the switch, then turned back to the paralysed body and the floating soul in his chair. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.

‘Not at all,’ Akram replied petulantly. ‘Good of you to fit in slitting my throat for me at such short notice. Next time you kill me - I have this terrible, inevitable feeling that there will be a next time - I’ll try and remember to make an appointment.’

‘Look.’ Ali Baba was speaking in a we’re-both-reasonablepeople-we-can-talk-this-through voice that, in context, Akram found downright insulting. ‘Let’s see if we can’t get this mess sorted out. Just you and me, and the hell with the story. You on?’

‘Gosh,’ Akram replied, staring pointedly at the scalpel still in Ali Baba’s hand, ‘I’m so bewilderingly spoilt for choice, how can I possibly decide? Go on, then, let’s hear it.’

Ali Baba perched on the radiator, put the scalpel down within easy reach and folded his arms. ‘The way I see it,’ he said, ‘is like this. I’m a hero, right?’

‘If the word can encompass people who rob other people blind, try and kill them and then run away, then yes, no question. So?’

‘And you’re a villain.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Well, then.’ Ali Baba spread his hands in a bewildered gesture. ‘Someone has blundered. Because here I am, supposed to be cutting your jolly old throat, when throat-cutting is your job. And there’s you, at my mercy, trying to use your wits to talk me out of killing you, which is hero stuff. It’s all back to front. If I kill you and you die, we’ll both be hopelessly out of character.’

‘That,’ remarked Akram, ‘will probably be the least of my problems.’

‘Now then,’ Ali Baba resumed. ‘What about this? I let you go -‘

‘Hey! Why didn’t I think of that?’

‘— In return for your word of honour that you’ll pack in trying to kill me and toddle off back to where you belong. Problem solved. What d’you reckon?’ Akram felt his throat become dry. ‘When you say word of honour…’

‘As in honour among thieves,’ Ali Baba went on, smiling brightly. ‘Because everybody knows that the word of Akram the Terrible is his bond. Akram the Terrible could no more welch on his word of honour than fly in the air. When did Akram ever break his word? Never. Everybody knows that, it’s all to do with respect and stuff. So you see, that way I’d be far safer than if I actually did cut your throat.’

‘Now just a minute …’

‘The more I think about it,’ Ali Baba said, sliding off the radiator and walking excitedly around the room, ‘the better it gets. We’d both still be in character, you see. I’d be being magnanimous and merciful, which is ever so Hero, much more so than just silly old winning. Any old fool can win—’

‘Except me, apparently.’ ‘But it takes a hero to win properly. Okay, that’s fine. And you’ll still be in character, because your really high-class bespoke villains always keep their word; you know, the old twisted nobility thing. Then I don’t have to spend all weekend scrubbing blood out of my carpet, you get to give up this pestilential vendetta thing - I’m sure it must be costing you a fortune, all the time spent chasing after me when you could be out thieving - and go quietly home, where you—’