Here Comes the Sun

by Tom Holt

  ‘Oh hell, why not?’ said Jane suddenly, aloud, and crossed the road into the shop.

  ‘Two cream doughnuts, please,’ she said to the girl. ‘No, make that three. The fresh cream, not the artificial.’

  Eyes like molybdenum steel augers bored into her soul as she fumbled in her purse for a pound coin, trying her inadequate best to look like someone who is buying cakes for three people, not just one.

  ‘And a penny change,’ said the girl. ‘Thank you.’

  Well, Jane thought, as she walked on down the street, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Eat a doughnut, girl, said the Father of Lies, you won’t know yourself afterwards. Whereas in fact, her better part of reason told her, the only perceptible change will be round the back of her buttocks. Girls who eat three cream doughnuts have only themselves to blame if they end up looking like hovercraft.

  ‘Never mind,’ Jane said firmly. A man in a fawn overcoat gave her a look and quickened his pace slightly. Never mind, she repeated sotto voce, at least it isn’t chocolate. When you start mainlining chocolate in the middle of the day, it’s time to give up and die.

  She found a bench in the park, sat down and looked at the paper bag on her knee. Cream had saturated it in patches, making the paper transparent, and she shuddered slightly. Had a tramp been passing just then, he would most certainly have been the recipient of unexpected charity; but there was nobody, except a couple of gluesniffers under a plane tree on the other side of the Oriental pond, and the distant prospect of a jogger. She was going to have to eat them herself.

  The first one wasn’t too bad, although she was painfully aware that the cream had got out and was roaming around her face like a Dark Age horde. The second one wasn’t too bad until about halfway through; and she abhorred waste, and you look such a fool walking around with one and a half cream doughnuts in a paper bag. So she finished it, sent her tongue snowploughing through the sweet slush on her upper lip, and closed the bag firmly. She felt slightly sick.

  ‘It’s a symptom, you know,’ said a voice beside her.

  She jumped. It was bad enough being addressed by a strange man in a park; the fact that it was the same strange man who frightened her half to death the previous day by reading her mind and then walking away dry-foot through a huge puddle only served to add inches to her take-off.

  ‘Eating,’ the man went on, smiling. ‘Atavism, pure and simple. The hunter-gatherer inside us all reckons that if you’ve got something to eat, then that’s all that matters, and so at the first sign of trouble we reach for food. It’s all stress related, of course; and the things we eat make the stress worse. For a purely instinctive reaction, it’s pretty counter-productive, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Go away,’ Jane replied.

  ‘You’ve got cream on your nose.’

  ‘I’ll call a policeman.’

  The man smiled. ‘For all you know,’ he said, ‘I am a policeman.’

  ‘Then I’ll call another policeman. Go on, get lost.’

  The man crossed his legs and folded his hands round the junction of his knees. ‘Another slice of atavism,’ he said, ‘though marginally more sensible. What a mess humanity is.’

  He vanished.

  In the ensuing cloud of mental static, Jane became aware that she had somehow managed to sit on the third cream doughnut. It’s odd, the way you notice things like that.

  ‘Where have you gone?’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t gone anywhere,’ replied the voice. ‘Did you realise you’re sitting on . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There you go,’ said the voice. ‘Telepathy. We can really get a move on now, don’t you think?’

  Jane stood up to walk away, turned and brushed ineffectually at the adherent doughnut. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she said.

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ replied the voice. ‘Being a spirit, I am not susceptible to mortal desires; and even if I was, I’m not sure removing flattened cream cakes from the back ends of people would be quite my thing. If you sit down again, nobody will see you’ve got a doughnut sticking to your . . .’

  Jane sat down. She didn’t like this one little bit; but of all the things she was, she wasn’t afraid.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  The air hung around her, empty and quite blatantly transparent. She began to wonder whether . . .

  ‘Sorry,’ said the voice, ‘I was forgetting. I’m still here.’

  Jane stared straight in front of her. ‘Are you a ghost?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said the air. ‘The term ghost implies someone who is dead. Never having been alive, I cannot be dead. Next question.’

  Jane turned her head and looked slowly around. There wasn’t a tree or a bush for ten yards around, so it wasn’t some silly fool ventriloquising. The voice was quite soft, but distinctly external. She didn’t know what voices inside your head sound like, but this was definitely an outside broadcast. She turned her head back and continued to stare forwards.

  ‘Well?’ she repeated.

  ‘If you continue sitting on that doughnut,’ the voice replied, ‘it’ll ruin your skirt. Compacted fresh dairy cream and gaberdine don’t go, or so they tell me.’

  ‘If you go away,’ she said, ‘I will remove the doughnut. While you stay here, visible or not, I have no intention of indulging your warped sense of humour.’

  There was a long silence, and then the voice spoke again. This time, though, it was definitely inside.

  ‘Happy now?’ it said.

  ‘Certainly not,’ Jane replied. ‘Go away.’

  ‘I just did,’ replied the voice. ‘I went back to the office and I’m making myself a cup of tea. What the hell more do you want?’

  ‘Don’t you dare make a cup of tea inside my head,’ Jane replied. ‘I won’t have it, understand?’

  ‘What’ll you do, then, blow your nose?’

  Jane wriggled violently in her seat, trying to dislodge the doughnut. Inside her head, she could feel laughter.

  ‘Stop that,’ she said, ‘you’ll give me a headache.’ The walls of her skull stopped vibrating. As far as she could tell, the doughnut was still there.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  Her brain hummed, and the message, when it came through, was wordless and vague; repellent, but attractive too. What remained of her defence mechanisms prompted her not to understand it.

  ‘Very well,’ said the voice, audible inside her head once more. ‘Here’s three clues for you. Talk of me and I appear; the proverbial alternative to me is a lot of sea water; and, like your average cream bun, I have a tendency to take the hindmost. Or at least,’ the voice corrected itself, ‘those should help you identify our head of department. Actually, though, we’re more of a team. The cult of personality, though . . .’

  ‘I see,’ said Jane, primly. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you leave.’

  ‘You can’t insist unless you’ve got an or-else,’ replied the voice. ‘What’ll you do to me if you don’t?’

  ‘I shall make the sign of the cross,’ Jane replied awkwardly. ‘So there.’

  The voice smiled - it was that sort of voice. It would have had a radio producer standing on his hands with pure joy.

  ‘Can if you like,’ it replied. ‘Won’t do you the slightest bit of good, and I shall be bitterly offended. We have feelings, you know. All these spiritual stereotypes would be history in a truly enlightened society. But we’re used to it. We make allowances.’

  ‘Can I get rid of you?’

  ‘Not really,’ the voice replied. ‘I suppose you could get one of those portable stereo things with earphones and try and blast me out, but I’m not sure that that wouldn’t be counterproductive. I mean, I’m not vain, but which would you rather have banging about inside your head, me or Def Leppard?’

  Jane considered this. ‘Are you planning on staying long?’ she asked. ‘Because if you are, it might just be worth it. And there’s other things beside heavy metal that you can play loud
, you know. I was on a train the other day with a man who was listening to Götterdämmerung on his Walkman. You could hear it buzzing away from the buffet car.’

  ‘Threats,’ said the voice coldly, ‘are the last resort of the inadequate negotiator. Were you thinking of the Solti recording, by the way, because I prefer it, on balance, to the Karajan.’

  ‘Why can’t I get rid of you?’ Jane demanded. ‘You’ll make me late for work.’

  ‘You let me in,’ the voice replied. ‘You listened to temptation. ’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘What you’re sitting on proves it,’ replied the voice, smugly. ‘Go on, I said, be a devil. I didn’t actually mean it like that, of course, but you seem to have got the message.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Jane replied thoughtfully. ‘As a rule, I don’t even like cream cakes. What are you doing here, anyway? Do you want me to sell you my soul or something? ’

  The voice laughed, making her hair shake slightly. ‘My dear girl,’ said the voice, with genuine amusement, ‘why on earth should I want to do that? I can get souls any time I want, trade. The public,’ it continued, ‘have this peculiar idea that all we care about is souls. Me, I can take them or leave them.’

  ‘So what do you want?’ Jane demanded.

  ‘I want,’ said the voice, ‘to offer you a job.’

  Jane caught her breath in amazement. Unfortunately, in doing so she inhaled the last of the cream, huffed for about a tenth of a second, and then sneezed mightily. When she’d recovered from the shock, the voice had gone.

  Staff looked at his watch.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  There was a squelching noise, and Ganger materialised on the other side of the desk. Staff was amused and pleased that, for once, Ganger wasn’t looking like a designer-shirt advertisement. He was wet and shaking slightly, and his stiffed-up haircut had been blasted down over his forehead.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ Ganger said. ‘I got sneezed.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Staff replied equably. ‘How did you get on?’

  ‘I’d say,’ Ganger replied, mopping himself with a handkerchief, ‘that she’s thinking about it. Either that, or she’s booking in at one of those places where they don’t mind if you think you’re a tree just so long as you don’t drop leaves on the stairs.’

  Staff tapped his teeth with his pencil. ‘But she didn’t give you a decision?’

  ‘Lord, no,’ Ganger replied. ‘Wouldn’t have expected her to. In fact,’ he admitted, ‘I’d only just introduced the subject when I had to split. It’s typical of the problems I have with women,’ he added. ‘I just get right up their noses, you know?’

  Fine, said Staff to himself, I’d always wondered who writes the script for Spitting Image, and now I know. ‘But you did tell her about the job?’ he said. ‘I mean . . .’

  ‘Well, I mentioned it.’ Ganger shrugged. ‘You can’t rush these things. It’s one of the lessons we’ve learned in our own mortal recruitment programme. Anyone who wants the job really isn’t going to be suitable.’

  Staff nodded. ‘So?’ he said.

  ‘So,’ Ganger replied, reaching in his pocket for a comb.

  ‘The next stage is, we scare the poor kid absolutely shit-less. You can leave that bit to me if you like.’

  Staff pursed his lips. ‘Is that going to be, you know, absolutely essential?’ he asked. ‘I know you lot are allowed a certain latitude in the way you do things, but over here we’ve got to watch ourselves.’

  Ganger nodded briskly. ‘Absolutely essential,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to do that to induce the right ambience of mild paranoia. Like they say, nobody in their right mind would do this job anyway.’

  ‘Well.’ Staff opened the top left-hand drawer of his desk and found a peppermint. ‘Let me know how you get on.’

  ‘Will do.’ The chair emptied itself. Staff sat for maybe thirty seconds, looking at it. Then, with one smooth easy movement, he reached into the open drawer, grabbed an inhaler and sniffed ferociously. There was a sort of peculiar popping noise, and Ganger was lying on his face on the floor beside him. Staff put the inhaler back in the drawer and closed it.

  ‘Serves you right,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d made it quite clear that I didn’t want any of this mind-hacking stuff, but I suppose you didn’t listen. In one ear and out the other, that sort of thing.’

  Ganger grinned ruefully and rubbed his knee. ‘Force of habit,’ he said. ‘Won’t happen again.’ He got to his feet, dusted himself off and walked to the door.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, as he turned the handle and half-inserted himself into the gap. ‘While I was in there, I couldn’t help noticing. That stuff with the blue stockings and the polar bear. Very original.’

  He closed the door just before the stapler hit it.

  In the Blue Mountains, high above the encircling plain, a woodcutter paused from his work and leaned on his axe. The sun, chugging along on two cylinders and with a pair of tights doing service for a fan belt, glinted on his curly red hair and fearless blue eyes. Far away, a bird sang.

  ‘Greetings, Cousin Bjorn,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Yet another really beautiful day, is it not? Pleasantly mild, yet neither too hot for work nor too cold for a moment merely standing and listening to the voice of the stream as it laughs its way down the hillside to our tranquil village.’

  ‘Drop dead, Olaf,’ Bjorn replied.

  Olaf shrugged. ‘It is a pity that one so young and so blessed by Nature should be as sour at heart as a green apple,’ he observed tolerantly. ‘Nevertheless, I am sure that sooner or later you will overcome your internal anguish and find true peace. In the meantime, there is wood to be cut.’ He shouldered his axe and walked away down the hill, whistling a folk-tune.

  Bjorn could take a hint. He lifted the axe, whirled it round his head, and brought it down on the base of the tree. The head flew off and landed in the crystal waters of the stream.

  ‘How unfortunate,’ observed a white-haired, rosy-cheeked woodcutter, who had been tying his shoe behind a venerable elm.

  ‘Yes,’ Bjorn agreed. ‘Another eighteen inches to the left and it’d have taken your leg off.’

  The elder, whose name was Karl, sighed, seated himself on a tree trunk, and motioned the young man to join him.

  ‘Hostility,’ he said, offering Bjorn an apple, ‘is like a rough-handled axe. It wounds those you use it against, and it blisters the hands of the user. Try and be a little more peaceful within yourself, Cousin Bjorn. Life is a wonderful thing.’

  ‘Apples give me gut ache,’ Bjorn replied. ‘Specially bloody Cox’s.’ He threw the apple away over his shoulder. ‘Now would you mind shifting yourself, because if you don’t you’re going to be right under this tree when I chop the bugger down.’

  Karl shook his head and smiled. ‘You’ll have to find your axe head first, Cousin. Always remember that,’ he added, as he got up and walked away. ‘Always find your axe head before you start to cut down your tree.’

  Bjorn made a rude noise and stumped across to the stream. It took him quite some time to find the axe head, during which his shoes got absolutely soaked.

  ‘Good-morning, Uncle Bjorn,’ said a voice above his head. He looked up to see a little girl, about ten years old, in a pretty blue dress. ‘Mother thought you might be hungry, so she sent you some food. If you would like a refreshing draught of beer, I can run back to the house and get some for you.’

  Bjorn lifted the napkin and made a face. ‘Leave it over there,’ he said. ‘And tell the dozy cow I can’t stand waffles, right? Waffles give me wind.’

  The girl nodded. ‘Uncle Bjorn,’ she said, ‘I was running blithely through the woods just now and I saw a beautiful flower, as blue as the heavens themselves. Look, I picked it to show you. It’s such a lovely flower, I’m sure there must be a wonderful story about it and how it got its name.’

  ‘It’s called dungwort,’ Bjorn replied. ‘Use your imagination. ’

  ‘Oh.’ The
girl curtseyed prettily. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d better be getting back to the house, before Mother wonders where I’ve got to. Do be careful with that great sharp axe.’

  ‘Scram.’

  The girl curtseyed again and danced off down the hill, leaving Bjorn alone at last with the trees, the birds, the squirrels and his ingrowing toenail. For a while he stood and looked aimlessly about him, until his eye lit on one tree that he recognised. It was a tall, ancient oak and he remembered it well; he had climbed it as a boy, and his grandfather had often lifted him up into its branches, pointing out to him all the marvellous things he could see. How wonderful it is, his grandfather used to say, to sit in a high tree and look out over all the kingdoms of the world, as if one were God’s own eyes!

  Bjorn braced his feet, grinned, and set about cutting it down.

  FOUR

  It’s a strange feeling, knowing that someone else has been inside your head; halfway between having a beetle down the back of your neck and being burgled.

  Jane’s first instinct, on getting home after an afternoon at work when she had got precisely nothing done, was to wash her hair; but it didn’t really do the trick, somehow. She still felt that sensation - irritating more than anything else - of being bunged up with something, the way you feel after you’ve been underwater and got water trapped inside your ear. Holding her nose and trying to blow through it didn’t really achieve anything either, however.

  Silence made it worse, and so she switched on the television. At first the mixture of irritation and fascination inspired in her by the discovery of a brand new Australian soap opera distracted her, and she spent at least six minutes sitting in front of the screen trying to work out whether Terry was Gloria’s sister or Tracy’s boyfriend’s son; and then she started to get the unpleasant feeling that all the voices were inside her head, and several generations of brown-skinned, bright-eyed Aussies were conducting their tangled personal relationships right between her ears. Hurriedly she flipped channels and watched three minutes of a cookery programme before switching off and trying the stereo instead.