Open Sesame (17 page)

Bugger this, he muttered to himself as he let himself in to his bedsit, for a game of soldiers. And when you don’t know, ask someone who does.

Princess Scheherazade sighed, scratched her ear and ate another pickled onion. She was bored.

When she’d met the handsome prince, she’d hoped it would be different this time; not just one more meaningless storybook love affair, another thousand-and-one night stand. Now, however, with only three nights left to go before the inevitable Happy Ending, she could sense the story coming to an end all round her, and it made her feel like a written-off Cortina just before the big crusher reduces it to the size of a suitcase. It was only a vague, unformed suspicion clouding her subconscious mind, but deep down she knew that Happily Ever After sucks. Time, in other words, to move on, except of course that that wasn’t possible.

She was, needless to say, in an unusual position. As well as being in a story, she made up stories. This only made her feel worse; having sent nine hundred and ninety-eight heroes and nine hundred and ninety-eight heroines to their Happy Ends, she no longer had any illusions whatsoever about what the process entailed, just as the man who operates the electric chair can’t really kid himself that Old Sparky is an innovative new alternative to conventional central heating.

The pickle jar was empty. She scowled and snapped her fingers.

‘Wasim,’ she snapped without looking round. ‘More of these round, vinegary things, quick as you can.’ She heard the slave’s obedient murmur and the slap of his bare feet on the marble floor. She yawned again. Dammit, she was bored out of her skull and the story hadn’t even ended yet.

Supposing there was a story that went on for ever…

God only knows where the thought came from. It’s extremely unlikely that it originated in the Princess’s brain, which simply wasn’t geared up with the necessary plant and equipment to turn out notions like that. Storybook characters don’t speculate on the nature of stories, in the same way that calves don’t write books called A Hundred and One New Ways With Veal. On the other hand, it’s equally improbable to think that somebody planted it there. Who?

A story that doesn’t end. A story that goes on, even outliving the storyteller.

But that’s impossible, Scheherazade told herself; get a grip on yourself, girl, it’s the pickles talking. Because every story is made up of three parts, beginning, middle and end, and something lacking one of these parts can’t by definition be a story.

But just suppose…

On the evening before the First Day, God muttered But just suppose to himself in exactly the same way. He too ate rather too many pickled onions before going to bed, and the consequences are plain for everyone to see. But Scheherazade didn’t know that, being female and accordingly, in the Islamic tradition, excused religion. She stopped lounging, sat upright, and began to think.

Soap opera—

Because she was excused religion, Scheherazade wasn’t to know that human life is what God watches in the evenings when He gets home from work, and that He has a choice of two channels, and He was watching her on one of them at that precise moment. She only knew that she had three stories to go before everlasting happiness, and a liberal interpretation of the rules might just be her best, and only, chance.

Okay, she thought. For tonight, she’d decided on the traditional tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves; a simplistic, two-twist narrative with two, maybe three featured characters and a couple of walk-ons for friends of the director’s brotherin-law. But maybe, with a little breadth of vision and an HGV-equivalent poetic licence, the tawdry little thing might stretch…

The further supply of pickled onions arrived. She helped herself, crunched for a moment, and began to rehearse. Once upon a time there was a man called Akram …

… Who sat down on a packing case, unwrapped a bulky parcel of old dusters and produced a brass oil lamp of the traditional Middle Eastern oiling-can-with-a-wick variety. He extended his sleeve as if to rub it, thought better of it, hesitated, closed his eyes and rubbed.

‘Hello,’ said the djinn, ‘how’s you? Hey, it’s dark in here.’

Akram couldn’t let that pass. ‘Darker than where you’ve just come from?’ he queried.

‘Of course,’ the djinn replied, ‘I’ve been in a lamp. Now then, what can I do for you?’

There was something about the horrible creature’s nailson-blackboard cheerfulness that evacuated Akram’s mind like a flawlessly executed fire drill. He stared for a moment, then frowned.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘All I want is a simple answer to a simple question.’

‘Sure.’ The djinn smiled. Dammit, it was only trying to be friendly, but it was like having an itch in your crotch when you’re addressing an emergency session of the United Nations. Akram took a deep breath and went on.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What I—’

‘Don’t say wish,’ the djinn interrupted. ‘If you just ask me the question, you see, I don’t have to count it as one of your wishes. Just a hint. Hope you don’t mind me mentioning it.’.

‘What I want to know is— Look, I’m a villain, right?’

‘Yes. Was that it?’

‘No. Be quiet. I’m a villain. A baddie. Suppose I wanted to change and be a goodie, how’d I go about it?’

The djinn frowned and scratched the tip of its nose. ‘I don’t follow,’ it said.

‘Oh for crying out — Listen. I want to be good. How’s it done? It can’t be difficult, for pity’s sake. If nuns can do it, so can I.’

The djinn grinned. ‘It’s easy for nuns,’ it said. ‘With them it’s just force of habit. Get it? Habit, you know, like those long dressing gown things they wear —’

Instinctively Akram grabbed for the djinn’s throat. His hands passed through it as if he’d tried to pull a projection off a screen. ‘Don’t push me too far,’ he snarled. ‘Now answer the goddam question, before I lose my temper.’

A multiple lifetime of experience in menacing had put a rasp into Akram’s voice you could have shaped mahogany with, but the djinn simply looked down his nose at him. ‘All right, Mister Grumpy,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to get aerated.’

‘I’ll aerate you in a minute. Hey, would that make you a djinn fizz?’

‘Your question,’ said the djinn frostily. ‘Can you, a villain, turn yourself into a good guy?’

‘You got it.’

‘Dunno.’ The djinn pondered for a moment, and the air in the lock-up unit seemed to sparkle with tiny green flecks. ‘It’s a bit of a grey area, that. I mean, you could just try being nice to people and giving up your seat on buses to old ladies with heavy shopping and holding open-air rock concerts to raise money for famine victims and stuff, but there’s no saying that’d actually work.’

‘There isn’t?’

The djinn shook its head. ‘No saying it wouldn’t, either. I’m just guessing, really.’

Akram closed his eyes and started to count to ten. He got as far as four. ‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘If I took your lamp and soldered down the lid and blocked the spout up with weld, would that mean you’d be trapped in there for ever and ever?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Neither do I.’ Akram reached for his toolkit. ‘Soldering iron, soldering iron, I saw the blasted thing only the other day.’

‘Alternatively,’ said the djinn, ‘you might try and do good but all that’d happen would be that you did bad in spite of yourself.’

‘Sorry, my gibberish is a trifle rusty. What are you talking about?’

‘Because you’re a villain,’ said the djinn, ostentatiously patient, ‘everything you do - arguably - will turn out evil, regardless of your intentions. Like in the film.’

‘Film? What film?’

The djinn made a tutting noise. ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue,’ it said. ‘Donoghue. O’Shaughnessy.’

‘What the—?’

‘Cassidy. Butch Cassidy. You know, the bit where they try going straight and get jobs as payroll guards and end up gunning down about a zillion Mexicans.’

‘Bolivians.’

‘Pardon me?”

‘Bolivians,’ Akram repeated. He could feel a headache starting to come together in the foothills of his brain. ‘They were in Bolivia, not Mexico.’

‘You’re quite right,’ the djinn conceded. ‘I always think of it as Mexico because of the big round hats.’

‘Bugger hats.’ It was going to be a special headache. ‘What you’re saying is, I’m stuck with being a villain, there’s nothing I can do about it. But that’s crazy. I mean, this is Reality, for pity’s sake. Surely in Reality I can be whatever I want to be, that’s the whole bloody point.’

The djinn sniggered. ‘Think you’ll find it isn’t quite as simple as that,’ it said. ‘Otherwise everybody’d be film stars and millionaires and lottery winners.’

‘Ah,’ Akram said, ‘but I happen to have a genuine magic djinn with supernatural powers on my side, so I’m laughing, aren’t I?’

The djinn made a sniffing noise. ‘Now you mustn’t go building your hopes up,’ it said, ‘because in actual fact I have to be very careful with the possibility infringement regulations, and—’

‘Got it!’ Akram held up a soldering iron, and grinned. ‘And here’s the solder, look, so all we need now is the flux. Unless this is the sort where the flux is in there already.’

‘Now look,’ protested the djinn, ‘don’t you try threatening me…’

‘I think it’s that sort. Why do they use such small print on these labels?’

‘I’ve been threatened by bigger people than you, you know. If you were to see some of the people I’ve been threatened by, six miles away through a telescope, you’d have to sleep with the light on for a month.’

Akram smiled. People who saw Akram’s special menacing smile invariably remembered it for the rest of their lives, although in many cases this was not, objectively speaking, a terribly long time. ‘And then,’ he said, ‘once I’ve soldered the lid and jammed the spout, just suppose I put the lamp on top of the cooker and turn the heat full on. It’d get very hot in there.’

‘Look.’ The djinn was sweating. ‘I don’t make the rules. If it was up to me, you could be Saint Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa and the Care Bears all rolled into one. As it is…’

‘First,’ Akram said, ‘you plug in your soldering iron. Next, make sure all surfaces are clean and free of dirt and grit. That’s one of the basic rules of all endjineering, that is.’

‘As it is,’ said the djinn, passing a finger round the inside of its collar, ‘there are a few very remote possibilities I could check out, but there’s absolutely no guarantee-‘

‘So what we do is,’ Akram went on, the lamp in one hand, a scrap of emery paper in the other, ‘we just rub down the edges until we’ve got rid of the verdigris and we’re down to the virdjinn metal—’

‘No cast-iron guarantee,’ the djinn muttered rapidly, ‘but on the other hand I think we can be quietly confident. What was it you wanted again?’

‘I want to be good.’

‘No worries.’

‘In fact,’ Akram said, ‘I want to be the hero.’

The djinn swallowed. ‘And that’s a wish, is it?’

‘You bet.’

Cue special effects. Unearthly green lights, clouds of hissing vapour, doors and windows suddenly flying open. It would have taken George Lucas nine months and an eight-figure budget. The djinn was a spinning tower of green flame, and Akram looked like he was wearing a fluorescent green overcoat with Christmas tree lights for buttons.

‘Your wish,’ said the tower of flame, ‘is my command.’

Scheherezade paused, and looked up at her husband, who chuckled, lit his cigar and grinned. Outside, the sun shone on a wide lawn, a long drive, a pair of impressive-looking gates guarded by a huge man in dark glasses and a black suit. Scheherezade’s husband took a long pull on his cigar and poured himself another glass of Strega.

‘One down,’ he said, ‘two to go.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Maybe, in accordance with some extremely complex chain of causalities explicable only in terms of the most highly advanced avant-garde chaos theory, Akram’s transformation into a trainee Hero was the reason he got fired from the kebab house. The ostensible reason, or at least the catalyst, was taking time off to go to the dentist without clearing it with the boss first.

He accepted the decision with uncharacteristic stoicism.

The old Akram would immediately have avenged the insult in blood, leaving his replacement a confusing choice of impaled hunks of knife-slashed meat. The new Akram shrugged meekly, apologized for his thoughtlessness, collected his apron and left without raising the issue of arrears of wages due. If he’d been offered any money, he’d probably have refused to accept it.

He was shuffling homewards from this mortifying interview when he passed the window of a large fast-food joint, an outpost of an internationally respected hamburger federation.

Looking up, he saw a brightly coloured poster that said: HELP WANTED.

Wow, he said to himself, is that an omen or what? You’d have to be brain-dead or carved from solid marble not to recognise such an obvious example of Destiny handing out second chances. With a small nod of the head to indicate respectful thanks, he walked in and asked to see the manager.

In order to be considered for the job, the manager explained, prospective candidates had to be:

(a) hard-working, diligent and honest;

(b) experienced in all main aspects of retail mass catering;

(c) of a presentable appearance and able to communicate effectively with the general public;

(d) desperate enough to apply for the job and demoralised enough to stay.

And, he added quickly, Akram seemed to him to qualify in all four categories. He didn’t actually stand in front of the door until Akram agreed to take the job, but he hovered.

‘Not,’ he added quickly, as he issued Akram with his apron and cardboard hat of office, ‘that we have difficulty keeping staff. Far from it. Some nights at closing time I have to shoo them out with a broom. It’s just that this is - well, a lively neighbourhood, and some of the customers—’

Involuntarily he closed his eyes, but only for a split second. ‘A bit fun-loving, some of them. Very occasionally.’

‘Good-natured banter and high spirits?’

The manager nodded. ‘From time to time. Anyway, welcome on board and the very best of luck. Now, if you’ll just give me the name and address of your next of kin, purely a formality…’