You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (21 page)

It was just a rectangular pink card, with his name printed in the centre. He frowned and turned it over.

Get out of death free.

Colin had his faults, but gift-horse dentistry wasn’t one of them. He poked the card into his top pocket, and the wind caught him again. Please, no more animals or birds, he thought; then the slam, the wobble, the glance downwards.

Only goes to show how short-sighted he’d been, not paying attention in history. True, he’d salvaged that scrap about the American War of Independence, but that was more or less it. The folly of his neglect came home to him as he stared at the two people in front of him. He knew who one of them was, the man in the funny coat like a dressing gown, but the girl in the enormous dress was a total stranger. She was very odd; in fact, they both were, because neither of them was much older than him, but they were both wearing white wigs. She was holding a fan, though it wasn’t particularly warm. This time they weren’t alone. They were in a huge room along with lots of other people in funny clothes and wigs; music was playing, and everybody was moving about. Colin supposed you could call it dancing, though that was a subject he knew even less about than history. She was smiling at him; he seemed to be having to concentrate on where he was putting his feet. She did a sort of low curtsy; he stumbled, barged into her and trod on her toe. He didn’t hear what she said to him, because the wind got up and tore him away, but he reckoned he could probably guess the gist of it.

The next time Colin landed, he found himself in some sort of hut. No, he was being unfair, it just about counted as a house, because the walls were solid and faced with plaster; there was one window with no glass in it, and the floor was planks covered with dried reeds. There was a cow in the doorway, looking at him and swishing its tail. He saw himself come in from another room; he was limping, and when he dropped into the chair (there was only one) he lifted his knee and started rubbing his toot through the frayed woollen stocking he had on. Only a short stop, that one; next he landed in the middle of a really old-fashioned-looking pub: very dark (no proper lights, just candles stuck in bottles on the tables) and crowded with people dressed like characters in the Dickens serials they used to put on at the weekends when he was a kid. It took him a while to pick himself out of the crowd. He was sitting next to a girl in a big, wide hat with a rather grubby feather sticking out of it. He said something - too far away to make out the words over the background noise - and the girl stood up. He stood up too; she smacked him across the face, and the sound of palm on cheek was so loud that, for a moment, everybody in the pub turned round to stare. He staggered, grabbed at the table - various cheers and general laughter - put his weight on his back foot which crumpled up under him, and collapsed in a heap on the floor. A big, scruffy-looking dog came across and licked his face. All in all, Colin was glad to be blown away from that one.

There were others, nearly all of them involving him and a girl, and in every single one he seemed to have something wrong with his legs or feet. The last one was that day in St Mary Axe, when he’d come in to pick up the file with the contract and everything. It played out more or less as he remembered it, then once again he was a fly swatted against a windscreen, only this time he did lose his balance and fall over.

‘Let me guess,’ said Benny’s voice over his head. ‘Pins and needles?’

‘Yes, actually.’ Colin leaned forward and massaged his foot. ‘How did you—? Oh, right. You’ve been watching.’

Benny’s legs materialised in front of him, and Colin realised he was back on the L-shaped pavement. The funeral was still going on; a vicar was talking, and the mourners - not very many of them, he noticed - were yawning and glancing sideways at their watches.

‘Sort of,’ Benny said, bending forward and offering him a hand to help himself up by. ‘Only got the gist of it, but at least now there’s a pattern emerging.’

‘Is there?’ Colin asked, as Benny hauled him to his feet. The left one sent a fireworks display up the nerves of his legs, and he nearly went down again. Benny caught him before he could topple into his own grave.

‘Well, yes,’ Benny said. ‘Didn’t you notice? Every time you’re about to get somewhere with Cassie - with the girl, I mean - your leg goes to sleep or your foot gets pins and needles, and then it all goes down the toilet. Either she slugs you and flounces off, or she calls you names, or the other way round. If that’s a coincidence, I’m Bill Clinton.’

‘Yes, all right,’ Colin mumbled. ‘But what is all this? Who are all these people I’ve been looking at?’ A small landmine of resentment blew up inside his head, and he yelled, ‘Why does nobody ever explain anything?’

Benny laughed. ‘You don’t get it? Oh well.’ Suddenly Colin felt the dice back in his hand. He tried to drop them before Benny could shake his hand, but he was too late.

This time the giant unseen hand dropped him on a pink square. Which was how he rationalised it later. At the time he guessed that he must be on Mars, because in every direction as far as the eye could see there was nothing but red dusty plateau under a red sky. It was a bit like the sets in the original Star Trek, but without the foam rocks.

No pins and needles this time, which was a relief. To make sure, Colin glanced down at his feet and saw he was standing on a black letter C. There were other letters, but the wind had blown pink dust over them, partly covering them so he couldn’t make them out.

‘Fine,’ he said aloud. ‘Is it my go again yet?’

A gust of breeze fluttered a small piece of card past his nose. He grabbed at it reflexively, like a cat, and caught it. It said:

GO BACK TO WHERE YOU BELONG

Charming, he thought; I’ve only been here two seconds and already I’m getting hate mail from the Martian National Party. He opened his fingers and let the card flutter away; at which point — No rush of wind or invisible fingers squeezing his head like a spot this time. Instead, it was as though he’d been there all along, and everything else - Funkhausen’s Loop, the past few weeks, his life in Mortlake, Hollingshead & Farren - was just a dream or a funny five minutes. He was sitting down, which was nice, but he didn’t recognise the setting, even though it was so very familiar—

Desk. Colin leaned forward in his posh merchant-prince super-duper office chair and pulled open the top drawer. He’d had a funny feeling he’d know what was inside it, and it turned nut he was right. Not that any of the stuff in the drawer was exciting or out of the way: no office bottle, pearl-handled .45, diamond necklace. Instead there was a selection of capless biros, some broken pencils, a melange of paper clips, rubbers, treasury tags, blocks of staples, AAA batteries, rubber bands and tapes for a pocket dictating machine. He slid the drawer closed and looked at the desktop. Couldn’t have been any desk he’d ever had responsibility for, since it was neat, tidy and not inches deep in letters that should’ve been answered weeks ago. Instead, there were two telephones (one red, one green), a keyboard and VDU (blank) and a clipboard with a questionnaire of some kind clipped to it. He frowned and looked at the first question.

1. What do you feel has been your most significant achievement over the past 6 months?

Um, he thought. He’d have explored the theme further, only the red phone rang.

‘He’s here,’ said a female voice. ‘Shall I send him in?’

Colin heard himself say ‘Yes,’ and the office vanished.

It turned into a tea shop, of all things. He was sitting at a table with a neat white tablecloth, and directly in front of him was a blue and white teacup, a brown teapot, a plate of toasted teacakes and a sugar bowl. On the other side of that lot was a girl. She was looking at him.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ he heard his voice reply; and for once in this bizarre experience, he couldn’t have put it better himself.

‘Really.’ He got the impression he’d just given the wrong answer. ‘So that’s it, then, is it?’

A small part of Colin felt a pang of utterly sincere sympathy for Dr Sam Beckett. The rest of him said, ‘I don’t know. I suppose it’s up to you, isn’t it?’

That made matters worse, apparently. The girl (who wasn’t anybody he knew: heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, pale blue eyes, thin mouth, mousy hair) sighed and looked away. ‘You always do this,’ she said, ‘it’s just not fair. I don’t think I can go through it all again, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not me, it’s you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know, maybe it really would be all for the best.’

‘Fine.’ She was about to stand up, but then she stopped. Froze, more like. It was as though someone had pressed the pause button; and there on the tablecloth, between the sugar bowl and the teacake plate, was a very small man, apparently dressed as a garden gnome.

Colin looked again, just to make sure. Yes. Tall floppy red hat, oversize baggy trousers held up by braces, big black boots, even the long white beard. He wasn’t, however, holding a fishing rod or a spade. Instead, he had a dear little clipboard, with a sheet of paper clipped to it, and a sweet little ballpoint pen.

‘Well?’ said the little man.

‘You’re a gnome,’ Colin said.

He hadn’t meant to. Even he wasn’t in the habit of being quite so—

‘Yup,’ the little man replied.

‘I didn’t mean to say that.’

Grin, just visible through groves of white beard. ‘Nope. But this is me, remember? To whom all desires are known, and from whom no secrets are hid.’ He chuckled. ‘That’s the Bible or something,’ he said. ‘You remember it from morning prayers at assembly.’ He shook his head, and the cute little red hat tilted a little over one eye. ‘You’re making a right pig’s ear of this, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Colin said. ‘But maybe it’s for the best. I mean—’

‘You’re still crazy about her.’

‘Of course. But she’s so bloody—’

‘Complicated.’ The gnome sighed, and the exhalation set the fine down of his moustache dancing. ‘They all are, kiddo. It’s the free curse hidden at the bottom of the packet of human existence. Why, nobody knows. Pursuit, date, dinner, chat, bed, the nine repeated often enough, you move in or she moves in, and suddenly clang, watch out for the falling portcullis.’ He ticked a box on his form. ‘I’ve always found it highly significant that commit is also the word they use for sending someone to a mental institution because, like it says on the fridge magnets, you don’t have to be mad to be here, but—’

‘No,’ Colin protested, surprising himself with his own vehemence. ‘That’s not me at all. I really do—’

‘Love her, all grown-up and shipshape, and everything should be fine because she feels the same way about you, so where’s the problem? You just don’t understand what the matter is.’

‘That’s right,’ Colin said. ‘But she seems to—’

‘Think you understand perfectly well, and you’re just pretending not to because you’re an insensitive git. Now, don’t you wish you’d paid more attention in telepathy when you were at school?’

Colin sighed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re still missing the point. I do understand, and I’ve done everything she wanted, and still—’

‘Exactly.’ The little man shrugged, and the left shoulder-strap of his braces slipped a little further down his bicep. ‘And you’ve reached the point where you’re thinking, is it really worth it? Really? I mean, we started off all right, the sex was brilliant, she likes action-adventure movies and she can cook, and then suddenly it started to fall apart and melt like a Dali watch; and surely there comes a time when you’ve got to cut your losses and move on.’

‘No.’ Colin looked round quickly to see if people were staring, because he hadn’t meant to shout quite so loudly. But the rest of the tea shop was still frame-frozen. ‘Look, it’s not like that. I’m not like that. Damn it, this really is the genuine article, far as I’m concerned. I believe - more than that, I bloody well know—’

‘That you’re soulmates,’ the little man said, with a slight nod. ‘That one-in-a-million thing, your actual true love, where it gets to the point where you can’t tell any more where you end and she begins, and what’s more you don’t care about knowing, you don’t want to know. Ah.’ He sighed, fished in his button-down pocket, took out a darling little clay pipe, caught sight of the No Smoking notice, frowned and put it away again. ‘You know what Plato says, of course.’

‘No,’ Colin said. ‘Fuck Plato. And just shut up a moment while I explain. You keep on—’

‘Putting words in your mouth.’

‘Yes.’

‘I know.’

‘Then stop doing it.’ Colin waited, but the little man didn’t say anything. ‘Thank you. Oh, screw it, now I’ve—’

‘Forgotten what you were going to say.’

‘No. Listen.’ Colin took a deep breath. ‘It was all going perfectly,’ he said. ‘We met, right. At first we took it a bit slow, not wanting to rush in for fear we’d spoil it, but before long everything just sort of fell into place, and there we were. It was so perfect. It was glorious. It - was fun.’ Colin scowled; dimly, right at the back of his mind among the old shoes, boxed-up Christmas decorations and broken trouser presses, he could remember how glorious it had been. ‘It made sense,’ he said, ‘and we never had those stupid rows or those tense sulks or any of that stuff. It was like we could see all the problems coming a mile off, when everybody else couldn’t see them and walked straight into them; but we’d just look at each other and say let’s not do that,” and we didn’t, and that was fine. It was—’

‘Perfect.’

‘I won’t warn you again,’ Colin growled. ‘But yes, it was perfect. Until a month ago. And then, quite suddenly—-‘

He stopped. The little man looked at him, and nodded. ‘It’s all right,’ Colin muttered, ‘you can say it.’

‘No need.’ The little man smirked at him. ‘I know.’

‘It’s like—’ Colin thought for a moment. ‘It’s like the fairy story about the boy who flew too near the sun, and the wax holding his wings together melted, and down he came.’

The little man nodded. ‘Great story, that,’ he said. ‘Seminal.’

‘And now look at us,’ Colin went on, and he looked across the table at the girl, frozen solid in the act of beginning to stand up. ‘It’s all falling apart, and I simply don’t know why.’