by Glenn Myers
Every spirit’s guide to keeping humans as pets
‘What happened?’ asked Caroline after Dumbo and I had pulled up on the runway at Edwards. I was still breathing quickly and trying to unclench my fists, which were gripping folds of the elephant’s cartoon skin.
‘Nothing,’ I muttered.
‘What happened to your plane?’ asked Caroline.
‘Smashed.’
‘Did you find an escape route?’
‘There isn’t one.’
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘No. No. I want to go to Lord’s Cricket Ground to rewrite the last Ashes series. All afternoon. On my own.’
Things had looked up when I rowed back to the lighthouse in the evening. The lights were on. I tied the boat at the jetty, climbed over the rocky path, unlatched the wooden door. I was trying to forget the terrors of the morning and was feeling invigorated from the cricket.
I had tweaked things from the strict historic record to include a series-winning batting, bowling, fielding and captaincy performance from that outstanding England player, J. V. Smith, a man who amazingly had been playing for a pub team just a few months earlier, and who led his side to five improbable victories. The breakup of the Australian team and their descent into alcoholism and madness followed soon after.
Caroline put her book down when I opened the door.
‘Hello Jamie,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Good cricket match?’
‘Fantastic,’ I said.
‘I’m cooking suckling pig,’ said Caroline. ‘Possibly against my better judgement.’
‘Oh,’ I said, surprised. ‘Thank you.’
I dated all our relationship problems to the last time Caroline and I had eaten suckling pig. A bunch of us had gone out to a village pub that specialized in it. Afterwards, Caroline and I had driven back to my house. Lizzie, who shared my house, was away at a nightclub. We’d been cuddling on my sofa next to my fire. I was full of the pig and contented, and I’d happened to mention to her, ‘Do you know, Caroline, I’d rather be here with you than anywhere else in the world, or with anyone else in the world.’
It had popped into my head and I’d said it. I didn’t think much of it: I could’ve said the same words to the suckling pig itself an hour earlier.
The effect on Caroline had been alarming.
Two people can be sitting on a sofa and they could be anywhere on the following scale:
1.0 Hardly bear the sight each other
2.0 Be quietly contented with each other’s company
3.0 Be hardly able to keep their hands off each other.
Caroline had flipped from a comfortable 2.3 on this scale to a supercritical 3.9, without any kind of warning. She’d gone all floppy and her eyes were intense. This had not happened before to the amusing, sharp-tongued, offhand Caroline, not in eighteen months. Her previous record was probably a 2.8 during our June walking trip in the Lake District.
I panicked.
I can’t remember what I said but I must have given the impression that I was reversing fast back up the scale past 2 and heading north to 1. I was probably at about 1.3 when I drove her home. By then Caroline had morphed again, this time into the Ice Queen of the North.
Things weren’t the same after that. The next time we’d met, I’d been back at my good old reliable 2.2 or 2.3 but Caroline was somewhere around the arctic regions of 0.7 or worse.
We’d stumbled along for a few more weeks, during which time Caroline had occasionally thawed to 1.5 or so but had also initiated consultations with her mother and a wide-ranging panel of girlfriends.
Finally she’d initiated a disciplinary hearing (‘we need to talk’), issued two sorrowful final warnings, then given me the sack. Trust a librarian to do it by the book.
I still wasn’t sure what I’d done wrong.
Anyhow. Suckling pig was back on the menu. Perhaps the librarian was offering me a renewal.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said. ‘Do I know how to cook suckling pig?’
‘You read a recipe in a Sunday supplement one wet November afternoon.’
‘I didn’t think you liked suckling pig.’
‘Pigs can surprise you,’ she sniffed, ambiguously. ‘Mel said she’d eat some. I’m doing stuffed peppers for Annie and me. We’ve invited Keziah round and she said Stub might turn up too.’
‘I can’t believe I’ve got a memory of a recipe for stuffed peppers.’
‘Dentists’ waiting room,’ she said. ‘East Anglian Country Lifestyle. Your alternatives were Hello magazine or a short film about cosmetic dentistry.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘I’m just going to text Keziah and tell her you’re here.’
We had quite an enjoyable meal, which helped muss over the sad fact that three of those round the table were reconstructed figments of my imagination, one was a neurotic demon therapist and the only other human was Keziah, who has yet to win the Little Miss Sunshine Award for being good company at parties.
The trick with suckling pig, as you may know, is to keep drinking Chinese tea. Like a good tour guide, it slips into your stomach and makes arrangements so that the next half-kilo of pork has somewhere to go.
Stub, looking quite dapper in a collar and tie, wasn’t eating, just taking occasional sips of water. He’d turned up with Keziah; they had been working on Keziah’s model together for the past hour. Stub seemed even more on edge than usual, his welt-splattered neck chafing against his collar. He kept looking around with sudden paranoid jerks, and he couldn’t keep his fingers still.
I was quiet too. The girls were telling unsavoury stories about me that Keziah seemed to be enjoying. Keziah herself was tackling the meat with surprising relish, as was Mel.
‘So what’s the edge of the habitat made of?’ I asked Stub. ‘All I could see were these blue blocks.’ We were an hour into the meal and, soothed by the pig-meat, I was OK about talking a little bit about my trip to the edge.
‘Pixellated Fear, sir,’ said Stub. ‘It is used as a fencing material.’ He looked around, as if there were someone behind him.
‘How do you mean?’
‘All those blocks of fear, sir, they’re spirits in their own right. They have a schooling instinct. Your habitat’s surrounded by a shoal of them. The nearer you get to them, the more frightened you feel—it’s governed by an inverse square law, sir, like gravitation or light—so they make an ideal material for borders and edgings. You can get them in any colour: Leopold must have picked blue ones to look like sky.’
‘So how do you get through them?’
‘I’m afraid, sir, it’s a question of capacity. A human can stride over a fence that would be an impossible barrier for a rabbit. We spirits drink more deeply of terror than humans do. So, sir, a small layer of Pixellated Fear that would stop the bravest human isn’t a barrier to us at all.’ He took a nervous sip of water.
‘The bravest human?’
‘A shoal of Pixellated Fear that thick would paralyse the heart of even the bravest unaided human, sir,’ confirmed Stub. ‘According to Building Regulations, anyway.’
‘Thought so,’ I said, relieved. I helped myself to yet another piece of pork, feeling much better. ‘Hey girls,’ I said. ‘Stub here said I was brave.’
The figments and Keziah stopped their conversation, looked at me, then went back to their plates and glasses.
‘I just mention it,’ I said. ‘It happened to come up in conversation. I mean it’s nothing really. Another question,’ I said to Stub, deciding to change the subject. ‘I still don’t understand how you get inside my head at night? I have to say I wish you wouldn’t.’
Stub did not appear to be listening. I repeated the question.
‘Sorry, sir. I was a bit distracted. The fact is we don’t get inside your head. Your memories are stored elsewhere in the heavens.’
‘The HELP system told us that.’
‘Indeed. So anyone in the heavens willing to risk the corrosive rain can climb in and root
around and stir things up. That’s what I’ve been doing.’
‘You mean to say that anyone can climb in and riffle through my memories?’
‘Yessir. Few do though. For one thing, they have to brave all the acid pollution. For another, forgive me for saying so, but most people’s minds are rather tedious. It’s like looking through a near-infinite slideshow of someone else’s photos, sir.’
He was tapping his finger on the table again.
‘Or wedding videos,’ I added.
‘Precisely.’
‘I like wedding videos,’ said Mel, who, like the other girls, was now listening in on our conversation. ‘I think they should have a TV programme of them, like they do with car chases.’
Annie looked like she was going to agree, but when Annie opens her mouth all kinds of warnings and fears about making a fool of herself kick in and they did so this time, so her mouth closed again.
‘In the British Museum,’ said Caroline, who had finished her stuffed pepper, ‘they still have boxes of clay tablets that were dug up a century ago. Thousands of years old and no-one’s ever got round to reading them.’
‘An apposite example, miss,’ added Stub. He was rubbing his hands together, as if drying them. They weren’t wet.
‘So if I can’t get past the Pixellated Fear, how come I can recall my memories?’ I asked Stub. ‘Caroline, who is a figment of my imagination, fetched an article from East Anglian Country Lifestyle magazine earlier on and she didn’t leave the habitat.’
‘Your spirit and your memories are entangled together, sir,’ said Stub. ‘Just as your spirit and your body are. It shouldn’t surprise you that they can act on each other at a distance.’
‘I think I follow,’ I said.
‘It’s even more complicated than that,’ said Stub. ‘In “reality” everything is tangled up in an extremely complicated way. The view I am describing—with your body on earth, your spirit here, and your memory storage further out in the heavens—is true in one sense but in another sense is also a convenient oversimplification that helps us find our way around, sir.’
‘But we left our bodies,’ said Keziah.
‘That’s what makes you unusual, miss,’ said Stub. ‘When you and Jamie entered your comas, your spirits did what spirits do when the body dies—they left. That’s actually an irreversible reaction, like being born, or breaking an egg. You’re changed forever.’
‘Does that mean we can’t go back?’ I asked.
‘No it doesn’t, sir,’ said Stub. ‘It just means that if you did go back, it wouldn’t be the same. Your spirit will be able to leave your body at will, sir—after some practice anyway.’
‘Handy for boring meetings,’ I said.
I filled everyone’s glasses with Chinese tea, before offering fifth helpings. So much wonderful cooked flesh.
‘OK,’ I said to Stub, feeling expansive after all this luscious meat. ‘The therapy thing, then. How does that work? Not that I want any, you understand.’
Stub put his glass down, looked round, and tapped his finger on the table rapidly.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘among other things my colleagues and I search in people’s memories trying to find something that will make them less dysfunctional. When we find it, we can send it to their spirit—remind them of that memory.
‘Sometimes, on earth, sir, you might be struck with a thought that offers a fresh perspective. That might be our work. Of course, you might just have summoned the thought yourself.’
‘That’s what you have been trying to do to me, in my dreams.’
‘Yessir.’
‘But because my spirit has left my body, I can see you working on my memory storage.’
‘Some of the time, sir. There is a random element. Your attention wanders. I guess Leopold has visited to dig up memories and you didn’t even notice, possibly because your attention was elsewhere, sir.’
‘Do you do this therapy with everyone? With people on earth?’
‘In principle, sir, yes, but we’re a very small team. We have to make an assessment before each intervention.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve been poking around in my head for years?’
‘No sir,’ said Stub. ‘You would have been one of the thousands we looked at and decided we could do nothing with.’
‘Because I was healthy.’
‘Because you believed you were healthy, sir.’ Stub looked around again. What was he looking for? ‘Of course in your altered situation, we thought we might try again.’
‘You’ve been working on me, haven’t you?’ asked Keziah, putting her fork down.
Stub looked at her carefully, his head in its humble-old-retainer stoop, eyes still fearful.
‘You were on our books Miss Mordant,’ he said.
‘Suicidal thoughts put you up the list?’ she asked, with a little wry smile. ‘Self harm?’
‘No, miss,’ said Stub. ‘Too common. The cry of the brokenhearted: that’s like a fire alarm in the heavens.’
Keziah stared at him for a moment.
‘I knew. But you were only stirring up more muck.’
‘That’s a risk, miss.’
‘I need a glass of wine,’ said Keziah.
‘It doesn’t work up here,’ I reminded her, ‘and you’ve given it up.’
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Just to hold it and gulp will help.’
I provided something and she poured it out greedily and kept the bottle.
‘So how many of you are there, these therapists?’ I asked Stub.
‘Only three for Cambridge City,’ said Stub.
‘Three! What use is that with 18,000 neurotic students?’
‘Plus another 70,000 people in the city itself. My colleagues are extremely able.’
‘Wow, we must be somewhere up the priority list, for you to be spending all this time with us.’
‘You were an emergency, sir.’
‘So you came out to rescue us,’ I said. ‘Braving the rain.’
‘Yessir. I do not know that it was especially brave. It was clearly the correct thing to do. Neither of my colleagues could do this job.’
‘Why not?’
‘Sir, they are human like you. Unlike pure spirits, they are unable to change shape and are thus unsuited for undercover work. They would find it hard to evade the defences set up by the Toad on behalf of Gaston and Leopold.’
‘Human?’ I was temporarily at a loss, not knowing which question to ask out of the many that were suddenly clamouring to be picked. ‘You mean human like us?’
‘Yessir. They have bodies on earth, but they work in the heavens. As therapists.’
‘They commute?’
‘In a manner of speaking, sir, yes.’
‘How does that work then?’
‘Sir, in the case of my colleague Miss Corrie Bright, she is an old lady who lives alone in her small apartment. So long as her carers are not around, she can leave her body whenever she wishes, sir. Nobody notices an old person having a quiet doze.’
‘Good grief.’
‘Our senior colleague is one who’s name you may recognize. His body lies deep in a tomb in Mosul in Iraq—the site of the former Nineveh. As is sometimes noted in saints of the Eastern Church, his body has not yet decayed. While that remains true, he can technically return to it at any time. He has in fact been resident in the heavens for many centuries. His name is Jonah—the prophet Jonah.’
‘As in the whale? That Jonah?’
‘It was a fish,’ said Keziah. ‘Not a whale.’
‘He’s based in Cambridge?’
‘Hardly surprising, sir, when you think about it.’
‘Oh completely obvious. I’m surprised you mentioned it.’
‘He has something of a track record for changing the destiny of the whole world by working in a strategic city, sir.’
‘After this fish sicked him up,’ pointed out Keziah, helpfully, ‘he went to Nineveh, which was the centre of the greatest empire on ea
rth.’
‘In every essence correct, miss,’ said Stub.
‘However much you try to forget Sunday School, it still comes out.’ Keziah finished another glass of wine.
‘You should visit the British Museum,’ added Caroline, to me. ‘They’ve got a large Assyrian section. They dug Nineveh up and put it there.’
‘So what’s he doing in Cambridge?’ I resumed. ‘Changing the world?’
‘Some think, far too much,’ said Stub.
‘Hang on a second.’ I was thinking. ‘We used to play this in the pub. Cambridge: where Isaac Newton wrote Principia Mathematica, which has been called the single greatest achievement of the human mind. Cambridge: where the electron was discovered, most fundamental of all fundamental particles. Closely followed by the neutron. Cambridge: where DNA was figured out. Later, just down the road, the human genome. The neutron star was discovered here. Cambridge: where the jet engine was invented, transforming the world. Cambridge: where, even today, the chips for every mobile gadget on the planet are designed, transforming the world again. Cambridge: where dwarf wheat was developed, transforming agriculture. Cambridge: no city on earth has more Nobel Prizes per square mile. The hospital I do a contract for—the hospital right now where my body is lying—houses a research centre that claims a stake in thirteen Nobel Prizes. Near my bike park. That’s only science. Cambridge: breeding ground for world leaders and politicians. Cambridge: possibly the only city where an Italian language student can meet an Indian university student in a restaurant and forty years later be offered the job of Prime Minister of India (which Sonia Gandhi then turned down).
‘Modern culture? Cambridge: home of Pink Floyd and Monty Python. Cambridge: where the first game of soccer according to modern rules was played, shortly before—you’ve guessed it—it transformed the world. Stub you might have a point.’
‘You have ignored the religious dimension sir, Cambridge: one of the intellectual homes of the English Reformation.’
‘Is that a good thing?’
‘It is, sir.’
‘I’ll believe you. We used to think it was because Cambridge is a kind of funnel into which you siphon all the brightest and best at the most creative time of their lives.’
‘No sir,’ said Stub. ‘I’m afraid that’s just a recipe for a more energetic and imaginative class of dissolution.’
‘So Jonah—’
‘And Miss Bright, and in a very small way myself. Unearth creative thinking. Jolly things along. Yessir.’
‘What, you drag bits of memory into people’s consciousness—’
‘Help them make connections. Yessir.’
‘It’s not just advancing human thought and civilisation, diverting though that no doubt is, but it’s also helping people overcome their problems and live their lives?’
‘It’s all of a piece, sir. Mending souls changes the world eventually, and that is our main focus,’ said Stub. ‘Transforming the sum of human knowledge is more of a rewarding sideline, sir. Part of the total job, but the kind of thing you do on Friday afternoons.’
‘Gee, I hope you being here hasn’t dammed up too much of the creative flow of Cambridge intellectual life.’
‘It’s true we are rather short-staffed,’ said Stub. ‘I’m sure my colleagues will have it in hand, sir.’
‘So who do you all work for?’ I asked.
‘Who do we work for?’ repeated Stub. ‘Who do we work for?’ His face suddenly contorted, as if he’d been shot. ‘Who do you think we work for? Well I think that could be said to be a sore point. I am in something of a dispute with my employer.’
‘Oh really?’
‘And it is impossible,’ he whispered, not to me, to himself, going rigid, eyes staring at something I couldn’t see, face working. ‘It is impossible. I am doing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, but I am doomed to fail. And still it is demanded. Because the one we work for demands it.’ Alarmingly, he started swaying in his seat. ‘He demands it,’ he whispered. Then he wrapped his long arms around his head and fell off his chair. The chair also toppled over.
A long noise came from him, like a death wail. Curling himself into a ball, he screamed. It wasn’t high pitched, like a girl’s scream: it was the full-blooded honk of male anguish, a sound you almost never hear.
‘I have tried!’ he wailed. ‘Like waves breaking against a rock. Broken! Broken! Broken! I cannot die!’
Keziah glared at me and pushed her way over to him, knocking over chair and wine-bottle. Stub rolled around the floor, cursing and bellowing. He was foaming at the mouth.
At first it was simple angst, like that Norwegian painter, you know the man. The Scream. Could have been Stub just then.
Soon it developed into a stream-of-consciousness thing. Graphic. I heard swearwords I hadn’t heard in years. All the time Keziah knelt next to him, trying to take hold of him.
Then his cursing started at me, on the theme of ‘stubborn, thick-skinned, stupid.’ He rolled onto his back, still curled up. Fresh wounds seemed to be erupting in his skin. I could smell smoke. Then with one of those little tricks they do, he shrank away and transformed into the light green snake again (this too was bloodied and smouldering), turned his head to us with pure malice, opened his mouth, hissed, flicked his tongue, and slid under the lighthouse door.
Keziah’s wine was dripping onto the floor, so I got up and turned the glass the right way up.
‘What was all that?’ I asked Keziah. She stood up.
‘If he was human,’ said Keziah, ‘I would say he had a personality disorder, bordering on madness. He just flipped.’
‘Really,’ I said drily. ‘That’s perceptive.’
‘It’s a clinical diagnosis,’ she said testily. ‘Some of my clients have it. Something snaps and they’re gone. It’s an illness.’
‘So the self-appointed therapist is a deluded nutter,’ I said. ‘How very surprising.’
‘Jamie,’ said Keziah, wearily, looking at me. ‘Oh never mind.’ She walked out.
I looked round at Caroline, Mel and Annie, who were looking at me the way girls do when they think you have done a very wrong thing. Quiet and severe.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What?’
I went to bed, slept and drifted to the Dome.
What Stub had said (before he cracked up) made sense. Outside the Dome was where I kept all the bad memories; inside it were all the good ones. That’s how it was going to stay.
Tearing my gaze away from the beach volleyball game, which was replaying, I felt I ought to make an inspection of the Dome walls.
I carefully walked round the perimeter checking for leaks and glancing up at the rubbish. Outside, Zlotcwicvic Enngerrgrunden Transportowicz, Krakow was revving its engine and driving up and down the piles of rubbish, perhaps looking for a way to ram the Dome. But my concrete was strong. I kept walking and scanning the rubbish dump outside, hard though it was to see in the yellow-tinged greyness of the rain.
It wasn’t long before I saw a familiar, light-green snake slithering over the top of a hill of rubbish. There was a jerky, frantic air to his movements, like a movie being played slightly too fast. Fixing his eyes on the Dome, he wrapped himself around a large lump of steel, a piece of derelict car engine.
With a flick like the lash of a whip, he hurled the piece of metal at the Dome.
It hit with a crack and left a white mark on the transparent skin of the Dome. Head darting to the left and right, the snake burrowed into the rubbish pile. He emerged near another piece of metal, a section of railing. Again he threw, and again a crack echoed through the Dome.
Right, I thought. I was pretty sure my Dome was strong enough to resist even this onslaught. But I could do better.
I casually whistled up my old friend the B-2 bomber. It glided silently into view over the Dome. The air-to-ground missile hit Stub just as he was lining up for a third shot. I’m sorry, I thought, no hard feelings, but I have to defend my own.
Ba
ck to the beach volleyball. I could settle down and enjoy myself for however long the dream lasted… Bikini-clad girls walked past. Glasses clinked. I let the dream run. Good to know that even after your spirit has broken free of your body, you’re still allowed to dream. It was a happy, lazy afternoon in my dream-time.
A long time later, Lizzie waded across to me, with a serious expression on her face.
‘Jamie,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if you can hear me.’
‘Lizzie?’ I said. ‘Lizzie?’
‘Jamie. I hope you’re listening.’ Now the dream was slipping away.
‘Jamie,’ Lizzie continued, a voice in the dark now. ‘I wanted to say that they’re a little tiny bit worried about you. I don’t think it’s anything really, but there’s this little thing called a haema-something.
‘They’ve decided to operate on the haema-thingy and drain the fluid from your head. They had been hoping that they wouldn’t need to do it. They think that’ll help you get better.’
With a feeling like an electric shock I felt her fingers entwine with mine in the dark. Actual fingers. Then she kissed my hand, which was as limp and lifeless as if it were lying on the meat counter in a cannibal supermarket.
‘You’ve got to be strong Jamie. You’ve got to really fight. I mean really, really fight.’ Her voice was breaking up.
I am fighting, I thought. Lizzie I’m fighting as hard as I can.
I felt something warm and wet drip onto my hand. Tears? Mascara? Possibly snot. An upset Lizzie tended to be a bit of a cocktail.
But she was crying for me, and I think she was sober.
‘Just get through this,’ she whispered. ‘Jamie you’ve got to get through this.’
More fluid dripping on the hand. She’s crying for me. Oh dear God.
When I woke up again in my lighthouse, I lay there for a little bit, watching the fire play against the walls while the daylight returned outside. I listened as the sea heaved itself around the place like a fat person and the gulls shrieked.
All my hopes for not being dead presumably now rested in a couple of surgeons on earth. Probably, they had only just scraped through their finals. Surgeons become surgeons because they reject as too boring jobs as test pilots, bullfighters, professional gamblers, parachute testers or cavalry officers in the Light Brigade. They probably juggle with their scalpels before an operation and lay bets as to whether my blood will hit the ceiling or not. I expect when I’m anesthetized they do ventriloquist’s dummy things with my mouth, one handed, while operating with the other hand. They probably make brain-surgery jokes: ‘I know, let’s turn his brain around in his head and see if he walks out backwards.’
It was quiet again over breakfast. (I decided to have the all-you-can-eat hotel breakfast again, eggs cooked by a Selection of Female Jazz Artistes from the Modern Era.) No sign of Caroline or the other figments spontaneously popping in for a friendly chat.
Suitably fortified, I wandered to the woodland in the centre of the habitat and started building a god.
Once you get into it, making your own god is a lot of fun. I started thinking up symbols of things that I really loved.
I love my house, which is within cycling distance of everything: railway station, city centre, Botanical Gardens and some funky restaurants. It’s shaded by a giant tree. My bike is tied up in the tiny front yard. So I added a bike to the pile, and my door-knocker and some horse-chestnut leaves.
I am very fond of girls: as with cricket, devoted but lacking basic talent. The Internet. Private space travel. Gadgets and solar power. Algebra’s in there somewhere, as are cryptic crosswords, with their elegance-without-redundancy. Fresh bread. Apple computers. Sunshine through mist in cold forests. The Lake District in North-West England, host to our walking holidays. I added symbol after symbol to my pile.
How to make a god of all of these? I looked at them, symbols piled around me.
I picked them up and held them in my hands. Hair straighteners, my symbol of all things feminine. My door knocker. An Apple laptop. My bike. My seasonal pass to the Botanical Gardens. An apple from the apple tree in the Botanical Gardens that is a descendant of the tree that Isaac Newton was watching when he thought up gravity, thus becoming the first one after God to entertain this ruse. A model punt, memory of lazy flirtatious summer days on the Cam. Some Afghan murtabak bread and curry sauce. They were beautiful things; my jewels. I stared at them.
Gaston and Leopold are not having them, I suddenly thought. I refuse to be honest about the things I really love. Like a child who hides treasures in the back of a drawer, I didn’t want to broadcast intimate things to two spirits whom (I knew really) weren’t gods at all. Just bullies and exploiters, part of a great web of exploiters and deceivers, all trying to carve a living from me.
On the other hand, these evil spirits were bigger than me and had me in their power.
Time to lie then.
Now what would Gaston and Leopold think I loved? What would make them think they were really getting somewhere?
After a couple of hours my patchwork god was coming on beautifully and I was taking a breather. Leopold walked in through the woodland, and announced himself with a little cough. He was wearing a very short kilt, white socks, a white shirt with a ruffle, and a jacket. The kilt had a slit in it to reveal still more brown wrinkled leg. I swallowed, mostly to keep down the vomit.
‘Leopold!’ I said. ‘I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.’
‘Thanks to the Almighty Toad,’ said Leopold, ‘our negotiations finished early and satisfactorily.’
‘Where’s the Overlord Gaston?’ I asked.
‘He’s gone to bring Keziah,’ said Leopold. ‘Well,’ Leopold was almost shy. ‘We have some news! I can’t give you the details but we’ve been in negotiations—the Almighty Toad has been helping—and it seems that the way we are looking after you has made the leading powers of the Omniverse look up!
‘Think of it, Jamie! Here’s Gaston and I, caring for you in our little way, roughly throwing in a few ideas, just acting in what we saw as the best interests of our dear little human spirit-pets. Suddenly, we might be celebrities. People might use what we do as a model! Right across the Omniverse! The Toad seems to think we’re practically writing the manual—Every Spirit’s Guide to Keeping Humans as Pets.
‘Those things we’ve been teaching you about happiness and about following the spirits’ advice, and about building your patchwork god, the Almighty Toad—praise be to him—thinks it could be a whole pattern for how we spirits interact with humans. We’re the next big thing!
‘He’s been really selling our case and it seems that in three days, we’re going to put on a reception. Hundreds of other spirits are going to see a presentation about you two.’
So they’d got a booking in the Biennale. I tried to act surprised. What I was really thinking was, only three days! I need longer than that for my body to heal.
‘That’s amazing,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about these things. It seems very sudden. I wouldn’t have thought we were quite ready.’
A cloud seemed to pass across Leopold’s tanned face.
‘I know, I know,’ said Leopold. ‘It was the Almighty Toad (p.b.t.h.) who was hurrying all this along. I said I didn’t think we’d be ready. He said, “Every confidence in you.” You’ve got to back his judgement. The Toad, praise be to him, seems to think I have a special gift with creating environments and worldviews for humans… He also said he really liked my fashion sense, by the way.’
‘I’ve always thought it was unique,’ I replied. ‘Takes courage to wear what you wear.’
‘So did taking you two on. It was a gamble, you know. Still is.’
‘I still think a better time for a demonstration might be when both Keziah and I had built our patchwork gods and were worshipping, and had got Paradise a little more sorted. Maybe even done some of the breeding you wanted. You know, quite a lot later.’
‘Yes, well I don�
�t think the timing’s ideal,’ he said. ‘Gaston and the Almighty Toad, praise be to him, both seem to think we can pull it off.’
I scratched my head.
‘What exactly,’ I said tactfully, ‘will you do about Keziah?’
‘Do you think I hadn’t thought of that?’ Leopold snapped. ‘I mean do you really think I hadn’t thought of that?’
‘I expect you’ve got a plan,’ I said soothingly.
‘The Overlord Gaston and His Brightness the Almighty Toad, praise be to him, seem to have confidence that my work with Ms Mordant will swiftly move on from this incipient phase.’
‘Incipient phase,’ I said. ‘Leopold, she will stand fearless against the host of heaven and completely refuse to bend. She won’t give an inch. In metric, she won’t give a millimetre.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that!’ he hissed, in such agitation that he dropped onto all fours and momentarily seemed to be mutating into a Komodo dragon. With an effort of will he fought his body back into humanoid form and staggered to his feet. ‘Do you think I’m not worrying about that day and night?’
We heard a crashing noise, and we looked round. Gaston was pulling Keziah through the forest, one knobbly hand gripping a thick bunch of her black hair. She came calmly enough. In his other hand he held Stub. I noticed Stub had a particularly large scorch-mark halfway down his body.
‘O Leopold,’ he said slowly. ‘O Leopold look what I have found!’
He shoved Keziah in front of him, very near to where Leopold and I were standing. He kept a grip on Stub’s throat. Given the dust and cuts on Gaston’s face, I wondered if there’d been a fight.
‘You stay there!’ he snapped at Keziah. ‘I’m going to deal with the worm first.’
Keziah tossed her head to straighten her hair and stood next to me, eyes blazing. She was breathing quickly.
‘Hello Jamie,’ she said, without exchanging a glance.
‘Hey,’ I said.
‘Gaston,’ said Leopold, ‘What’s happening? What are you doing?’
‘Leopold,’ he said, still breathing heavily. ‘Look at this. We have an intruder.’ He shook Stub violently, and then, overcome with rage, took hold of Stub with both hands, held him horizontally in front of his mouth, and bit into him, right into the burnt skin. Stub squealed and hissed and tried to get free. ‘You, snake,’ he said. ‘What’s your name and who do you work for and what are you doing?’
‘My name is Stub,’ said the snake, wearily. ‘Like you, I’m going to the Lake of Fire. Who cares what happens between now and then.’
‘Did you work for the Toad?’
‘No.’
Leopold murmured ‘Praise be to his name’ under his breath.
‘Don’t lie to me.’ Gaston sank his teeth into Stub again. ‘You can’t get past the Toad’s guards unless the Toad lets you in. You must work for the Toad.’
‘I don’t work for the Toad,’ said Stub. ‘I have been trying to undermine the work of the Toad and of you and of Leopold.’
‘If I can say something…’ said Keziah.
Gaston looked at her as if he were about to metamorphose into a pterodactyl and rip her head off.
‘What?’ he spat.
‘He’s got a personality disorder, and he’s flipped. If he was helping me, he isn’t going to any more. You can let him go.’
‘Thank you for that helpful advice which I will choose not to take,’ said Gaston. ‘Leopold, we’ve got to think.’
He looked at Stub again. ‘If you don’t work for the Toad, how did you get past the Toad’s defences?’
Stub gave him a look of undiluted hate. ‘All we spirits can metamorphose, am I right? We can’t adopt every shape, but we can choose from a set of shapes that all reflect who we really are. Mostly, we spend our days either being reptiles or trying to stop turning into reptiles.’
‘Thank you for the lesson in Angelology 101,’ said Gaston. ‘Do you want me to bite you again?’
‘Of course we can add extra limbs or special tools, or similarly we can divest ourselves of almost everything until we are just stripped down to our essence.’
‘I think I will bite you again,’ said Gaston, and did.
It was a little while before Stub spoke again, but when he did, it was with a mulish air of I’ve-started-so-I’ll-finish.
‘The Toad’s guards are trained to look for those things that we always possess, whatever shape we are. Our essence. Which given the variety of shapes we can adopt comes down just to one thing.’
‘Pride,’ said Leopold, mostly to me. ‘We all have our pride. Differing in glory, but we all have it. It’s our badge. The mark of the Free. That’s who we are.’
‘Not me,’ said Stub. ‘I have an unmeasurably low self-esteem. I have no pride.’
Gaston and Leopold looked at him with a new level of disgust, almost of horror. Even Gaston seemed short of words.
‘O you filth. O you filthy filth,’ he finally said. He was squeezing Stub so tightly now that I thought something was going to squirt out of Stub one end or the other. ‘You filthy, treacherous slågönomic €mnigrrvient! Ng! Ng!
‘Leopold,’ said Gaston, making strenuous efforts to calm down. ‘He’s been working to undermine us all.’
‘What’s unusual about that? Every spirit does that.’
‘You don’t understand. He wants to go back. He wants to betray us all, everything we’ve fought for. He wants to go back into bondage.’ He looked at Stub again. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know any more,’ said Stub.
‘But you’ve failed, haven’t you? God won’t take you back. I could’ve told you that. God won’t take you back. He won’t take any of us back. You work for him but he doesn’t pay.’
‘Shut up,’ said Stub.
‘You’ve worked and worked and you have succeeded sometimes but often you’ve failed and you know God won’t take you back. You’re not good enough. You thought you could work on these two but it hasn’t happened, has it? Jamie wouldn’t listen to you. We have Jamie. So you concentrate on her, the woman, the weak one.’
Keziah? I thought weakly. Keziah the weak one? Gaston, you need to go on a course or something. ‘So it’s you who have been behind the stubbornness of our scrawny friend here.’
‘I told you,’ insisted Keziah. ‘I would be stubborn anyway.’
‘She has a point,’ I added, but Gaston shot me a look of such murder I thought I’d maintain a tactful silence from now on.
‘This evil creature,’ continued Gaston, shaking Stub violently, ‘has been at the root of the Mordant girl’s stubbornness.’
‘You mean Keziah,’ said Leopold. ‘We’re on first-name terms with our subjects, remember. It’s part of the training regime.’
‘Leopold. This is important.’
Leopold looked angry. Meanwhile from the expression on Stub’s face—eyes bulging, forked tongue lolling—I thought his head was about to squirt off into the forest like a lemon pip.
‘Oh charming! Oh charming! I work for you night and day! Who does the mucking out?’ snapped Leopold.
‘Leopold! Not now!’
‘Who goes out in the yellow rain and gets the welts sorting through their memories to build that habitat?’
‘Leopold! Not now!’
‘Oh,’ sneered Leopold, ‘it’s always “not now!” It’s never “now” is it? It’s always, some other time, Leopold. It’s always, Leopold I’ll trample all over your thoughts and wisdom—’
‘Leopold—’
‘I don’t think you realize how much I’m adding to this partnership! It’s supposed to be a partnership Gaston! You’re not my employer. We’re in this together.’
‘Leopold! Shut! It!’
Leopold looked mutinous but shutted it.
‘What we have here,’ said Gaston, fighting to control his breathing, ‘is the reason Mordant is so stubborn. Do you know what else? The Toad doesn’t know. Leopold, the Toad doesn’t know.’
/>
‘I expect you’ll tell him,’ said Leopold sulkily. ‘Since you take the rest of his advice.’
‘No,’ said Gaston slowly. ‘This is a weapon in our hands. Against the Toad. If only I knew how.’