Odds and Gods

by Tom Holt

  Sandra blew on her hands and jumped up and down until the sensation of a cloud wobbling under her feet got too much for her. ‘It’s a sort of square box,’ she replied, ‘with a wheel at each corner and seats inside.’

  ‘It’s a box you go inside?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Ah. You mean a coffin.’

  ‘No. Coffins don’t have wheels.’

  ‘Bet?’

  ‘It’s bigger than a coffin.’

  ‘Bigger than a large coffin?’

  ‘You can judge for yourself.’

  Exactly on time, the bus drew up and stood for a moment, its engine running and doors closed, as if it was catching its breath. ‘Have you,’ Sandra asked, ‘got any money for the fare?’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘Round flat metal discs with someone’s head on one side and—’

  ‘I mean,’ replied Osiris irritably, ‘I didn’t know you had to pay to go on these things. Yes, thank you. Would two gold pieces cover it, do you think?’

  ‘I would imagine so.’

  ‘Hold on, then.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘It’s a bit,’ Osiris grunted, ‘like I imagine putting contact lenses in must be. Come on, you little - oh blast, I’ve dropped one.’

  ‘No,’ Sandra explained patiently, ‘you don’t have to put them on your eyes. The man just takes them from your hand and gives you a ticket.’

  ‘What’s a ticket?’

  ‘Just leave all the talking to me, all right?’

  ‘Ruddy funny way to go about things, if you ask me.’

  Osiris’ bad temper soon evaporated when he found that he was only charged half price, and after a few minutes it was obvious he was enjoying himself immensely. The way he kept yelling ‘Whee!’ and pretending to steer told its own story.

  ‘Will you stop that. People are staring.’

  ‘I’m used to that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sandra whispered back, ‘but we want to be inconspicuous, remember. We’re escaping. Running away. Or had you forgotten?’

  Osiris had the good grace to look embarrassed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Hasn’t really sunk in yet. I’ve been a lot of things in my time, but Most Wanted wasn’t one of them. Usually,’ he added, ‘quite the reverse.’

  ‘Really?’ Sandra searched in her bag for a peppermint. ‘I thought you gods were loved and worshipped.You know, revered and stuff.’

  ‘Revered, yes,’ Osiris replied. ‘Loved, no. All right, people say a lot of nice things to you when you’re a god, but it’s either because they want something or they’re frightened of getting a thunderbolt up the jacksie, not because they think you’re fun to be with. Masses of prayers and sacrifices, but nobody ever remembers your birthday.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Sandra through her peppermint. ‘I didn’t even know gods had birthdays.’

  ‘Proves my point, doesn’t it? Should I be sitting here, do you think? Only it does say, Please give up this seat if an elderly or disabled person needs it.’

  ‘I think you qualify on both counts.’

  ‘Do I? Well I never. It must be very complicated, being a mortal.’

  It was one of those slow buses. From Sunnyvoyde, it meandered at the pace of an elderly glacier with corns past the Islands of the Blessed, across the Elysian fields, round the back of Valhalla - long since sold for development and converted into possibly the most nerve-jangling theme park and paintball game center in the cosmos - along the Nirvana Bypass to the Happy Hunting Grounds Park and Ride, where the bus suddenly filled up with dead Red Indians carrying shopping bags. Shortly after a brief stop at the Jade Emperor’s palace, Osiris fell asleep, and only woke up when Sandra tugged at his sleeve. He looked out of the window.

  ‘Come on,’ Sandra was saying, ‘the next stop is ours. I’ll get your wheelchair out of the rack.’

  ‘Hey,’ said the god. ‘Where is this?’

  ‘Wolverhampton.’

  ‘But it’s so ruddy small.’

  ‘You should have thought of that before. Like on the sixth day, for instance.’

  ‘That wasn’t me,’ replied Osiris, defensively. ‘That was the other bloke. Thing, name begins with a J.’

  ‘Up we get.’

  Although he never dared mention it to his priests for fear of causing immortal offence, Osiris had never been a great one for ceremony and fuss; but there are certain ways of going about things that are bred in the bone, and when a god visits Earth, he expects more of a welcoming party than a small child on a bicycle and a stray cat. Osiris sighed.

  ‘And people actually live here?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do they fit in those titchy little houses?’

  ‘We manage.’

  ‘Which way now?’

  ‘Actually,’ Sandra said, opening the gate and pushing the wheelchair through, ‘we’re here.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘Look. If you’re going to be difficult we can turn straight round and go back. Just because you’re a god doesn’t mean you own the place.’

  ‘Well, actually . . .’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Sandra opened the front door, parked Osiris’ wheelchair in the small front parlour, and went through into the kitchen. From behind the kitchen door, Osiris could hear a buzz of voices. The door opened.

  ‘Mum,’ said Sandra, ‘meet Mr Osiris; he’s a god. Mr Osiris, this is my mother.’

  Sandra’s mother was a small, potato-shaped woman, who looked as if she’d been repeatedly washed in bleach but not ironed. She stared at the god suspiciously.

  ‘Is he staying for his tea?’ she asked. ‘Because I was going to do liver.’

  ‘Actually, Mum,’ Sandra replied, ‘Mr Osiris’ll be staying with us for a week or so. You see, he’s escaping from his godson, who wants to take over the world by having him certified.’

  ‘He’ll have to have our Damian’s room, then.’

  ‘That’ll be fine.’

  Sandra’s mother sniffed. ‘He’s not one of those vegetarians, is he? Only I thought we could have steak and kidney tomorrow. There’s vegetable soup if he’d rather, but it’s only packet.’

  ‘Steak and kidney will be fine, Mrs . . .’ Osiris said. ‘I really don’t want you to go to any trouble on my—’

  ‘And what about clean towels,’ Sandra’s mother went on, ‘what with him being in a wheelchair and everything, because it’s Thursday tomorrow and the man’s coming to fix the aerial in the morning.’

  ‘Mum . . .’

  ‘And you haven’t forgotten I have my feet done Mondays now instead of Wednesdays, have you?’ Sandra’s mother sighed. ‘Though I suppose he could have the small chair from the lounge and I’ll move the nest of tables into the kitchen. For now,’ she added. ‘Can he use the, you know, on his own?’

  ‘Mr Osiris is a god, Mum. I’m sure he’ll be no trouble at all. Will you?’

  ‘You’ll hardly know I’m here, Mrs . . .’ Osiris sucked his lower lip. Either he was missing something or else Julian’s doctor friends were well within their rights wanting to have him certified. Two weeks in this place, he added to himself, and I might even give myself up.

  ‘Does he want a scone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right.’

  Sandra sat down and took her shoes off. ‘I’m sure you two’ll get on like a house on fire,’ she said, looking at the ceiling. ‘She likes visitors really.’

  Well quite, Osiris muttered to himself. After a day or two she probably puts vases of flowers on them. ‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said aloud, ‘doing all this for me. You’re sure it’s no trouble?’

  ‘No trouble at all.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘We are not lost.’

  Thor glanced up at the sky. ‘Anyone else saying that,’ he said, ‘would have grounds to be worried about sudden bolts of lightning.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Perjury,’ Thor explained. ‘If it’s any help,
that down there looks very much like Bury St Edmunds.’

  ‘What do you know about Bury St Edmunds?’

  On the chariot flew, whirling like a fast black cloud over the sleeping landscape of (for the record) northern Italy. Where its shadow fell, thin and ghostly in the pale moonlight, dogs whined and sleepers turned in their beds, crossing themselves and dreaming strange dreams.

  ‘A damn sight more than you do, probably,’ Thor replied. ‘Look, there’s the High Street directly below us, and that bright light there must be Sainsbury’s.’

  ‘Sainsbury’s?’

  ‘Since your time,’ Thor replied, not without slight embarrassment. Odin and Frey looked at each other.

  ‘All right,’ Thor snarled, ‘so I’ve got this, um, acquaintance in Bury St Edmunds, and from time to time she sends me the odd postcard . . .’

  ‘She.’

  ‘She’s seventy-five years old, for crying out loud,’ Thor snapped.

  ‘Well, you’re no spring chicken yourself.’

  ‘Shut up and navigate.’

  There had been a time - not so long ago in divine chronology, but for the gods all things are different - when the passing of Thor’s chariot made the skies boil and the earth shake; but no longer. There were many reasons - the decay of faith, the decomposition of the ionosphere, the fact that when Odin put the main crankcase assembly back together he somehow managed to connect up the swinging arm direct to the connecting rod without linking it up to the reciprocating toggle - and all probably just as well. Mankind cannot bear too much unreality, and there are rather too many military airfields and guided missile bases on the north-east Italian border to make overflying in an environmentally disruptive UFO a sensible course of action.

  ‘What’s she called, then?’ asked Frey.

  ‘What’s who called?’

  ‘Your bit of stuff in Bury St—’

  ‘She is not,’ Thor growled, ‘my bit of stuff, okay? Mrs O’Malley is a highly respectable—’

  ‘Carrying on with married women now, are we?’

  ‘. . . widow who happens to have a sincere and scholarly interest in Scandinavian folklore, and who happens to have consulted me on a few points of reference concerning the—’

  ‘What’s her first name, then?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Ethel. I bet you it’s Ethel.’

  ‘Look, can we please talk about something else, because I find this whole conversation extremely childish and pretty damn offensive.’

  ‘So it is Ethel.’

  ‘No it’s not.’

  Beneath them, a flash of silver, a few silhouettes against the sky, the glitter of the moon on a broad expanse of still water. The early fishermen of the Venetian lagoon looked up from their nets and wondered what they had just seen; a black cloud flitting across the moon, a cold, sharp breeze ruffling the lagoon into a myriad feathery waves, a distant sound as of far, unearthly voices bickering.

  ‘And that,’ said Odin triumphantly, ‘must be Scar-borough. ’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mrs Henderson frowned.

  It hadn’t been a good day, so far. She’d completely lost one resident, another was out loose somewhere on the transparent pretext of buying socks, she’d had intruders on the premises claiming to be doctors (which unsettled some of the more ethnic gods, to whom doctors were people in leopard skins with short tempers and impaling sticks) and now one of the nurses had called in sick. Her intuition told her that Chaos was back in town looking for a rematch.

  About three quarters of the residents of Sunnyvoyde would have you believe that they had been solely responsible for putting Chaos in her place and giving Order the confidence to come out of her shell and form meaningful relationships; but Mrs Henderson knew better. Chaos, as far as she was concerned, was a Greek word for what happened when you let people try and run their own lives, and it wasn’t something that she permitted in her establishment, thank you very much. Had Mrs Henderson been in charge of the Garden of Eden, stewed apple would have been on the menu every second Wednesday, and anyone who didn’t eat it all up would have had it put in front of them at every meal until they did.

  ‘Melanie,’ she said into the intercom, ‘just come in here for a moment, will you?’

  It was time, she decided, to stop getting in a fluster and start sorting things out. The doctors had gone, and any further reference to them would be firmly discouraged. Mr Lug would be back eventually, and she would have a few well-chosen words with him when he did, and that would be all right. Sandra, the nurse who had had the misfortune to contract some unspecified illness, would be given the opportunity to select a career more conducive to her obviously delicate health. Mr Osiris, though, was a different matter entirely. Although the precise situation wasn’t totally clear, Mr Osiris would appear to have booked out for good; his toothbrush was gone, as were his gold watch (presented to him by the people of Egypt in recognition of four thousand years of loyal service; he was ever so proud of that) and the little jar he kept all his leftover organs in. And Mr Osiris owned the place. She wasn’t quite sure what to do about him.

  By way of explanation: an unresolved uncertainty in Mrs Henderson’s life would be a bit like a Tyrannosaurus in Central Park; out of place, extremely rare and, after a fairly short interval, extinct.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Melanie, I want you to put a call through for me. It’s a Los Angeles number. Fairly urgent, if you don’t mind.’

  She wrote the number, and a name, on a yellow sticky and handed it to her secretary, who glanced at it, looked up sharply, caught her employer’s eye and left the room quickly.

  There, said Mrs Henderson to herself, problem solved.

  There was no reply to Melanie’s call, except for the inevitable answering machine.

  Thank you for calling Kurt Lundqvist Associates. There’s no-one in right now to take your call, but if you leave your name, your number and details of the supernatural entity you want killed after the tone, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Bleep.

  On the credit side, Osiris was blissfully unaware of the second front that was just opening up against him. On the debit side, he was sitting in front of a big plateful of Sandra’s mother’s rhubarb crumble.

  ‘Gosh,’ he croaked. ‘How delicious. And is all that for me?’

  It was a prospect, he felt sure, that would have intimidated anyone. To someone whose stomach currently lay sideways alongside his left lung, the result of a fairly basic misunderstanding on the part of Lady Isis of pages 34 to 56 inclusive of the instruction manual, it was enough to cool the blood.

  ‘Tell him,’ said Sandra’s mother, ‘he needn’t finish it if he doesn’t want it all.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘Mind you, there’s starving children in the Third World who’d be really glad of a nice bit of rhubarb crumble.’

  It’d certainly make them count their blessings, Osiris reckoned. He picked up his spoon and picked tentatively at the southerly aspect. Care was needed in making the first breach in that impressive structure; one false move and the whole lot might come crashing down on him.

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ From behind the cover of the big vase of plastic flowers, Sandra winked at him, setting off an alarming sequence of memories which he thought he’d cauterised years ago. Dear God, yes, the first time he ever went to tea with Isis’s parents. Isis’s father was the Word and her mother was the Great Void; and they weeded out their daughter’s ineligible suitors by means of the diabolical practice of Trial By Massed Vegetables.

  With a start, Osiris realised that all these goings-on were causing him to revisit his lost youth; which was a nuisance, to say the least. He hadn’t enjoyed his youth one little bit. In fact, far from losing it, he’d left it behind, so to speak, by means of an open window and a rope of knotted sheets.

  ‘Tell him,’ said Sandra’s mother, ‘there’s some nice hot custard if he wants it.’

  ‘Oooh yes,’ Sandra replied. ‘Mr Osiris
loves hot custard, don’t you, Mr Osiris?’

  Gods don’t make particularly good liars; they don’t get the practice, because they don’t feel the need. Nobody asks a god why he’s late for work this morning, or was it him who broke the window, for fear of getting a response along the lines of, Yes, and you want to make something of it? Several thousand years of married life had, nevertheless, left Osiris with a reasonable grasp of the basics of the craft.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How delightful.’

  While Sandra’s mother was out of the room, doing whatever it is you do to bring about hot custard, Osiris leaned across the table and grabbed Sandra by the wrist.

  ‘No offence,’ he hissed, ‘but you’ve got to get me out of here. Much more of this Does he like cold custard? stuff, and somebody not a million miles from here is going to go to bed a different shape.’

  ‘Don’t be horrid. That’s my mum you’re talking about.’

  Osiris sighed, letting go of Sandra’s wrist. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and I’m being very ungrateful. Old god’s privilege, that is. But she treats me like I don’t exist. You shouldn’t do that to a god, you know. We’re insecure enough as it is without people not believing in us all over the place.’

  Sandra bit her lip. ‘I don’t think she can see you very well,’ she said.

  ‘Ah.’ Osiris nodded. ‘I might be able to help you there. What is it, cataracts? Glaucoma?’

  Sandra shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘her eyes are fine. I think it’s her, um, imagination that’s a bit wanting in places. I don’t think her disbelief suspends very well. After all, this is Wolverhampton. There haven’t been any gods in these parts for, oh, I don’t know how long. There’s certainly never been any gods on the Orchard Mead Housing Estate.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ Osiris said, shaken. ‘I mean to say, surely everybody is capable of believing in gods. We built you that way, for pity’s sake.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re a bit out of touch, Mr Osiris.’

  ‘Strewth.’ Osiris leaned back in his chair and thought about it. It wasn’t a concept he found easy to get hold of. People could dislike gods, sure enough. Despise them, certainly; hate them, even. But not believe in them at all - that was like people not believing in rain just because they didn’t like getting wet.