by Tom Holt
“Thanks, Uncle Gordon. Sorry. Was this a bad time?”
Click. He put the phone back. Uncle had sounded–well, yes, but that was only to be expected. He’d also sounded worried–no, more than that. Worried not so much in the usual how-much-is-this-going-to-cost-me sense, but worried worried. Almost as though he was afraid something bad might happen.
Don’t touch anything, Uncle had said, so he daren’t sit down. From where he was standing, he could just about read the top page of his revision notes. Well, he thought, I suppose I ought to crack on with it, even if it is all untrue. He closed his eyes and mumbled the five salient points about the wave-particle duality of energy and matter under his breath. One—
Yes, but it isn’t. Never mind about that. Think about the exam.
He tried, how he tried, but he just couldn’t. The thought of sitting down and cold-bloodedly writing out a whole bunch of lies revolted him. It would be wrong, on a level so fundamental as to constitute a breach in nature, an abomination, an act so terrible that it couldn’t fail to have disastrous consequences; like shaking antimatter sprinkles over your cappuccino. I can’t do it, he realised miserably. Which means I can’t take the exam. Which means I can’t finish my course. Which means—
He shivered. His fingertips and toes had gone cold. An unseen hand grabbed a fistful of his intestines and squeezed.
Which means I’ll have to leave Uni and get a job.
He whimpered. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Oh no. It was supposed to be: graduate (with first-class honours), then three years’ postgraduate, then another three years as a junior lecturer somewhere, then assistant professor, a fellowship, a nice cosy little corner of research into something so abstruse and obscure that nobody would know enough to tell him he was wrong, and never having to go to work ever. That had been the route map of his life for as long as he could remember, and now it was all slipping away from him like the torn scraps of a dream; like being Prince Florizel. All the cloud-capped mountains and lofty towers had sunk back into the ground with an unearthly shriek, leaving him alone in a desert of suits, ironing shirts, getting up at seven o’clock, buying sandwiches at the station to eat at his desk. Face it, he told himself, your life is over. And all because of the rotten, stinking, inconvenient truth.
How long he stood there he didn’t know. Only Salvador Dalí could have designed a watch capable of monitoring the passage of time between the moment when he put the phone down and the click of Uncle’s key in the door.
“All right, where are you?”
“In here.”
One of our greatest failings as a species is our tendency to judge by appearance and first impressions. On that basis, Uncle Gordon didn’t score very high. It was only—
“You bloody idiot,” Uncle Gordon said. “What’ve you gone and done now?”
—when you’d known him a while, say nineteen years, that you came to understand that behind that forbidding exterior was a generous, warm-hearted, extremely patient man who just happened to shout a lot. “Sorry, Uncle,” he said.
“Of course you’re sorry, you’re always sorry, and you know what? It doesn’t help. Oh for God’s sake, don’t loom like that. Sit down.”
“Sorry, Uncle. You said not to touch anything.”
It was nobody’s fault that Benny Gulbenkian was six foot four, and his uncle was five foot three and twice his weight. For some reason, though, Uncle had always taken the height thing as a personal affront, as though Benny was doing it to be cheeky. It hadn’t helped when one of Uncle’s oldest friends, seeing the two of them standing next to each other with Benny wearing a scarf on a windy day, had said they looked just like a quaver. Or that Uncle hadn’t known what a quaver was until Benny told him.
“Now then,” Uncle said, drawing a deep breath as Benny folded himself into a chair, “tell me what you’ve done.”
“Well.” Benny took a moment to compose his thoughts. “I was revising my notes for the exam, and suddenly I realised, loads of this stuff doesn’t work. I mean, it isn’t right.”
“This stuff being—”
“The laws of physics. So I sat down and did the maths, and it turns out I was right. Look, I can show you if you want.”
Uncle’s eyes were like two tiny portholes onto the abyss. “No, that’s fine. Look, are you sure?”
“Oh yes. I double-checked.”
“Christ Almighty.”
Later, it occurred to Benny that Uncle hadn’t doubted for one moment that his calculations had been right. Odd, that. In so many other aspects of his life, Uncle assumed as an article of faith that his nephew was an idiot; not unreasonably, it had to be said (and Uncle had said it, eloquently and at length) This time, though, there was no don’t be stupid, you’ve got it all wrong, as usual. He’d accepted the statement at face value and moved straight on.
“Have you told anyone about this?”
“Yes.”
“Oh God.”
“You,” Benny clarified. “But that’s all. Really.”
Uncle blinked twice at him and counted to ten under his breath. He did that a lot. “Just me. Nobody else.”
“No. I promise.”
“That’s all right, then.” The words came gushing out, like air from a suddenly depressurised cabin. “No harm done. We’ll just forget all about it and I can get back to my meeting and you can get on with your revision, and—”
“Um.”
Uncle Gordon had that way of freezing, as if he’d just walked into an invisible wall. “Um?”
“I don’t think there’s any point me revising any more, Uncle. I don’t think I can take the exam.”
And now the still, small voice. “Why not?”
“Because I can’t answer the questions if I know they’re wrong. Can I?”
And now the very sad voice. “Why not?”
“Well, it’d be wrong. It’d be lying.”
“Benny.” There were times, usually just before he threw things at the wall, when you could hear the love under all the anger and contempt. “I don’t know who you’ve been listening to lately, but lying isn’t actually all that bad. People do it all the time. Lying is the lubricant without which the machinery of society would seize up and crash. It’s no big deal, really.”
“Yes, but—”
A long sigh, mostly of resignation. “Oh, come on,” Uncle said. “You’ve worked really hard these last three years, Benny, you’ve really knuckled down and got on with it, and for the first time in your otherwise unsatisfactory life you’re on the verge of achieving something. And now you’re going to throw it all away just because of some technicality. Now, take me.”
“Uncle—”
“I never got the chance to go to university. I had to leave school when I was sixteen because my dad needed me in the shop, dicing the kidneys, cleaning out the sheep’s heads. When I think what I could’ve been if I’d had the advantages you’ve had—”
Benny pursed his lips. Once, when Uncle had made this speech, he’d pointed out that if Uncle had gone to college and got a degree, he’d probably have got a proper job and ended up in the Civil Service or something, instead of starting his own business and making his first million before he was thirty. For some reason it hadn’t gone down well, so he decided not to say it now. Instead, he sat perfectly still and let the speech flow over him. The interval gave him time to think–he knew he’d be safe until I-promised-your-poor-mother–and it occurred to him to wonder, not for the first time, what it was that Uncle Gordon actually did. Business, yes, he’d sort of grasped that over the years. But when he’d asked the straight question, the reaction was always a barrage of covering fire, masking an orderly retreat to prepared positions. Now, however, it might well be kind of relevant, because fairly soon they’d be getting on to what-are-you-going-to-do-with your life, and—
“Well,” Benny interrupted, “I thought, maybe I could come and work for you.”
Benny was, above all, a peaceful sort of person. Violence alar
med him. He winced at the sound of fireworks, and The A-Team gave him nightmares. On this one occasion, however, only military imagery would do. Imagine a tank, barging its way through walls and squashing cars flat under its tracks. That’d be Uncle, in full swing. Now imagine that tank driving over a mine.
“Say what?”
“Come and work for you,” Benny repeated. “By the way, what exactly is it—?”
“You wouldn’t like it,” Uncle said quickly.
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it depends what it is.”
“Accountancy.”
“Oh, maths. I like maths.”
“Not the mathsy sort of accountancy,” Uncle Gordon said, and his voice had got slightly higher. “More like management consultancy. Very dry and boring. Lots of meetings. You’d have to wear a suit.”
Benny hesitated, just long enough to make Uncle think he’d won. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”
“And a tie.”
“Ties are all right.”
“Early starts most days. Lots of breakfast meetings.”
Benny did his eager-beaver smile. “I’m sure I could get used to that. And it sounds really interesting.”
“Does it?” Uncle’s eyes widened into perfectly round black holes, reminding Benny awkwardly of something he’d seen once, in a doughnut somewhere. “Dear God. You know, I had no idea you thought this way.”
“Joining the family business? You bet. I’m up for that. I mean, you and me working together—”
Little beads of sweat were forming on Uncle’s forehead. “You’d have to start at the bottom, of course.”
“Naturally.”
“But I promised your mother—” Uncle stopped dead, as if he’d suddenly been unplugged. He’s scared, Benny suddenly realised; then, does not compute, because Uncle Gordon wasn’t afraid of anything. Then Uncle took a deep breath, and it was as though that strange, aberrant moment had never happened. “Believe me,” he said, “you’d hate it, you really would. Besides, I haven’t spent a small fortune in tuition fees so you can flush it all down the toilet in a fit of wild integrity.”
Even so; he couldn’t forget that moment of raw terror. “You think I should take the exam.”
“Yes. And you can keep your fingers crossed under the desk while you’re writing, if it’ll make you feel any better.”
“It might,” Benny said, and then realised it was meant as a joke. “But I don’t know, Uncle Gordon. I’ve got this funny feeling that if I pretend like that, it’ll make things very bad. Very bad indeed.”
“Listen.” It was the serious face. “I only want what’s best for you, got that? And I know, if you pack in Uni now and wind up in some dead-end boring job, like accountancy or management consulting, you’ll be unhappy and miserable, and I’ll have let you down. But if you pull yourself together, get stuck in and get a good degree, you can carry on and do what you want to do, and everything will be just fine. And when you’re a professor somewhere, and people will actually listen to what you’ve got to say, then you can go blowing up the foundations of modern science and they’ll probably give you the Nobel Prize for it. You go shooting your mouth off now, they’ll think you’re just some wacko kid and you’ll be finished, you hear me? So, you do the exam, you finish your course, you don’t drop out, you don’t go disproving anything until I tell you it’s the right time. Got that? Well?”
For a split second, Benny wondered if he ought to tell Uncle Gordon about the YouSpace thing. Because maybe there are such things as coincidences, but if so, this was a pretty monumentally, visible-from-orbit huge one, so it could well have a bearing on the situation, so Uncle ought to know about it so he could factor it into his advice. But the thought of what Uncle would say if Benny confessed he’d been skipping in and out of alternate realities when he should’ve been revising simply didn’t bear thinking about. “Yes, Uncle,” he said.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Good boy.” Quite unexpectedly, Uncle Gordon smiled. It wasn’t something that happened very often, roughly on a par with a total solar eclipse; unlike an eclipse, it made the world a very bright place. “I don’t know, you’re a bright kid, Benny, really, really bright, but there are times when you can be really, really stupid.”
Benny grinned back. “I know,” he said. “Sorry.”
Uncle Gordon sighed deeply and glanced at his watch. “Hellfire,” he said. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got sixteen South Korean venture capitalists sitting round a table drumming their fingers waiting for me. I told them I was just nipping out for a piss. See you later, all right?”
Uncle departed in a flurry of clomping feet and mislaid car keys, leaving the usual empty silence behind him; when he left a room, it tended to be far emptier than it had been before he arrived, as if his exit had drained all the energy from it. But stillness, peace and quiet are what you need when you’re revising, and Benny was (he noticed with a degree of mild surprise) doing just that. At least, he was reading the notes and uploading data into his medium-term memory; but it was coming in hermetically sealed and labelled WARNING–UNRELIABLE, with one of those toxic-waste symbols stencilled on each package. He really wasn’t sure he wanted stuff like that in his head, in case it leaked out and got into something important. So he sealed off the bit of his brain he thought with from the warehouse space, and occupied it with thoughts like—
Well, he was very good about it, really.
Yes, except—
What?
I’m still not entirely sure what he was being very good about.
Excuse me?
I mean, it’s not like I’d done anything wrong—
Whoa there, cowboy. You disproved the laws of thermodynamics, for crying out loud.
Yes? So? I mean, if they’re wrong, they’re wrong.
Sure. That’s like saying, Stoke-on-Trent is a pretty horrible place, so let’s burn it to the ground. You can’t do that. People live there. At the very least, you’ve got to give them time to get their things and move out. Same with trashing the foundations of accepted knowledge. You can’t just light the fuse and run away. Well, can you?
Actually, I quite like Stoke-on-Trent.
Bull. You’ve never even been there.
I so have. On a train.
Passing through. Looking out the window. That doesn’t count.
All right, fine. But he wasn’t just being nice about that, he was being nice about me wanting to drop out of Uni.
Didn’t let you, though.
No, because it wasn’t the right thing for me to do. He explained that.
You agreed with him.
Well, yes. He was right.
I put it to you, he only wants you to stay on and do your exams so you won’t make him give you a job at his work. Because he doesn’t want you there.
He said, it wasn’t the sort of thing I’d enjoy doing.
Because he doesn’t like you.
No, I can’t accept that. Just look at everything he’s done for me.
Yes, because he promised your mum.
You’re just trying to make trouble. He likes me. I’m his nephew. When he’s gone, all this will be mine. He said so. And I live here. If he couldn’t stand the sight of me—
He’d have packed you off to boarding school when you were twelve. Oh, wait, yes, he did. And then straight to college. You hardly had time to unpack.
I’m here now.
Now look. One, none of that is true. Two, it’s beside the point. All I was saying was, he could’ve been really upset and angry, shouting, throwing stuff. And he wasn’t. All right?
Yes, and isn’t that just a teeny bit suspicious?
Oh come on. You can’t have it both ways.
No, you come on. You saw how he reacted when you asked him what he actually does for a living.
And he answered the question, didn’t he? Accountancy. Management consulting.
Mphm.
All right, what?
No, it’s fine. You se
em perfectly satisfied with that answer. Far be it from me to go stirring up trouble.
Look—
It just occurs to me and my nasty, suspicious mind, if that’s really want he does, why did the question stop him dead in his tracks—
Ah yes. The crass militaristic tank metaphor.
Actually, I thought it was rather good.
You would.
Anyway. Sorry, where was I? Oh yes. So, two things for you to think about. One. All right, I’ll concede, he’s fond of you, to some extent. But he goes to a lot of trouble and expense to get you out of the house and a long way away. Two. Questions about how he makes his money stop him dead like a bear trap. Now, then. Exercise that fine analytical brain of yours. Don’t you think there may be something just a little bit—?
He’d had enough. Damned if he was going to sit still and listen to himself saying horrid things about Uncle Gordon, when he’d been so nice. He needed to get away, go somewhere he could clear his head; somewhere the insidious little voice couldn’t follow.
The garage. Or, to be precise, somewhere over the garage, way up high, to wish upon a doughnut. He wasn’t quite sure how, but he knew that the voice couldn’t get at him there. Maybe–his memory was oddly unclear on the point–that was why he’d gone there the last time.
Tin box. Doughnut. Here goes nothing—
And into nothing he went; and stepped out into bright sunshine under a clear blue sky. No change there, then. Amazing they ever managed to grow anything in a place with so little rainfall. He reached for a pocket to stow the doughnut in, but the stupid tunic thing he was wearing didn’t have one. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was; inside the palace grounds, but that’s like saying you’re not lost because you know you’re somewhere in Europe. He looked round, but for once the place wasn’t seething with courtiers and guards and gardeners with wheelbarrows. And that was another thing. Where did the money come from to pay all those people? Taxes? Excise duties? A 4 per cent levy on traditional narrative tropes? He made a note to ask the Chancellor, first chance he got—
Something swooped down at him out of the sun. He barely had time to drop into an instinctive terrified cringe when a hawk shot past him, its wingtips brushing his face, snatched the doughnut from his hand, and swung away, two feet or so above the lavender bushes, and vanished from sight.