by Tom Holt
Colin knew that bottle. In fact, it was an old family friend, since its remote ancestor had been the source of his first experience of strong liquor ten years ago, practically to the day. He’d since found out that Dad’s office bottle was strictly industrial-grade whisky: crude, functional and cost-effective. Nevertheless, it had put him off the stuff for life. furthermore, he’d never known Dad touch a drop before a quarter to six.
‘These people’ Dad stopped, glugged a fair-sized dose of the whisky, and turned round to face him. ‘J. W. Wells & Co,’ he said. ‘Very good firm, probably the best in the business. You know what they do?’
Colin frowned. ‘Some sort of lawyers, aren’t they?’
Dad grinned, but the expression on his face had nothing whatsoever to do with humour. ‘Sort of. Actually, they’re’ He hesitated again; then he fished about in the file and took out a sheet of paper; thick, heavy cream paper, with an old-fashioned embossed black letterhead. ‘Read that,’ he said.
So Colin read - J. W. Wells & Co. Practical & Effective Magicians, Sorcerers and Supernatural Consultants. 70 St Mary Axe, London EC3
Then he read it again. Unfortunately, he’d been right the first time.
‘What,’ he said, ‘you mean, like, conjurors and kids’ birthday parties and stuff?’
‘No,’ said Dad.
‘Oh.’ Colin read it a third time. Under the address, he saw:
Partners: J. W Wells, MAA (Oxon) LLB FIPES DipN; C. N. Suslowicz, FSEE AIBG; Dennis Tanner, BA (Plymouth) BG
‘Magic,’ Dad said, and there was a weight of sadness in his voice that Colin had never heard before. ‘That’s what we’ve been reduced to, son. It’s enough to make you bloody weep.’
Colin screwed his eyes up and relaxed them again. ‘They’re putting in an order for stuff,’ he hazarded. ‘Those little brass interlocking rings, or whatever it is they hide up their sleeves for holding the spare ace of spades, or’
‘Not,’ Dad said (you could hear the fraying of his patience), ‘that kind of bloody magic. This is’ He stopped, closed his eyes. ‘This is real magic. It’s what they do. It works.’ He breathed out a long sigh. ‘It’s the only thing that can stop H&F going right down the pan. So we haven’t any choice.’
‘Magic?’ The word burst out of Colin’s mouth like water from a cracked pipe. ‘Oh come on, Dad, you’ve got to be’
‘I’m fucking not.’ Dad rounded on him so fiercely that Colin took a step backwards. Then he seemed to deflate a little, and went on in a slightly calmer voice: ‘It was Ben Phillips from Amalgamated Box that put me on to them. They were in the same fuck-awful mess as us three years back; then someone told them about these people, JWW, and look at them now. Amalgamated Box plc, and they’ve just bought a fifteen per cent stake in Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits. So I thought, well, we’ve got fuck all to lose, so why not?’
‘Magic?’ Colin repeated.
‘Keep your bloody voice down!’ Dad roared. ‘You want the girls in the back office to hear? They’ll think we’ve gone round the bend.’ He sat down heavily, as though he’d just run a marathon. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘magic. Turning stuff into other stuff; casting spells; doing curses, reading the future, disappearing things, the works. Ben says they can even raise the dead and fight dragons.’
‘Dragons.’ Colin rubbed his eyes. ‘Dad, have you paid these jokers any money yet, because I’ve got a feeling they’re’
‘It works,’ Dad said firmly. ‘I know it does, because I’ve seen it. That bird who came here’ He leaned forward, unlocked his desk drawer and pulled out a small leather bag about the size of a baby’s sock. ‘See this?’ he said, and opened the top. Colin peered inside. It was stuffed full of gold coins. ‘That’s a genuine authentic bottomless purse,’ he said wretchedly. ‘You keep on taking the gold coins out, and they just keep on coming. Turn it upside down over the floor, and before long you’re ankle-deep in gold, quite literally. That girl showed me, I nearly shat myself. Unfortunately,’ he added with a rather disturbing grin, ‘if you don’t enter your PIN code the gold turns into little wriggly worms in about ten seconds.’
‘Ah. So what’s the’
Dad smiled. ‘You don’t get the PIN till you’ve bought the purse. This is just, like, for demonstration purposes.’ He emptied out a palmfull of softly chinking coins, looked at them wistfully and put them back; all except one, which he allowed to full on the floor. Then he started to count, slowly. As he reached ten, the coin stopped being solid and became a very tightly wound spiral, which gradually straightened itself out into a straight line and squirmed away under the desk. ‘No kidding,’ he said. ‘They’re the genuine bloody article. They’re also,’ he went on, ‘bloody extortionately expensive. No, we aren’t keeping the bottomless purse, because we couldn’t ever afford it in a billion years. Real pity, that.’
Colin thought for a moment. Then, in a very quiet voice, he asked: ‘Dad, has this got anything to do with the damn great big tree growing right up through?’
‘All we can afford,’ Dad went on, as though Colin hadn’t spoken, ‘is to hire them to broker a deal for us, a deal with one of their other clients.’ He frowned, then continued: ‘You know what our biggest headache is?’
Colin nodded; easy peasy. ‘Cheap imports,’ he said.
‘That’s right. And you know why we can’t compete with those’ (Here Dad said something highly reprehensible about the Chinese.)
‘Labour costs,’ Colin replied promptly. ‘You told me all this.’
Dad nodded slowly. ‘These clients of JWW,’ he said slowly, ‘are going to solve all that. What we’re going to do is, we make all the workforce redundant, effective immediately, and these friends of JWW are going to supply us with replacement workers. No minimum wage, no pension contributions, no sick pay, maternity leave, equal opportunities, investing in people, health and safety, nothing like that. We’ve got their cast-iron guarantee that their workers’ll work an eighteen-hour shift, no tea breaks, no unions, per capita productivity like you wouldn’t fucking believe and - this is the really good bit - they don’t want paying. And’ the grin on Dad’s face extended from ear to ear, like a professionally cut throat ‘- the joy of it is, it’s all absolutely hundred-per-cent legal.’
‘Legal?’
‘Couldn’t be more legal if it tried.’ Dad slumped forward and covered his face with his hands. ‘And we can afford it,’ he went on, sitting up again. ‘All we got to pay is JWW’s bill - which is going to be bloody enormous, but compared to the sort of money we’ll be making from now on, it’s a short pee in the ocean. In eighteen months we’ll have driven those [inexcusable racial epithet] out of business, and the Yanks and the Poles too, most like. It’s absolutely sure-fire. We can’t lose.’
‘Oh,’ said Colin. ‘That’s’
‘Yes.’ Dad sat up sharply. ‘It is, isn’t it? And that’s what that thin cow from JWW’s coming here to sort out; and since you’re -well, you’re part of the business, so you’re involved too, so I thought I’d better tell you now, before you get the wrong end of the stick or anything.’
Colin thought for a while. ‘It sounds really, really good,’ he said cautiously, ‘and I know we’re in a really bad position right now. But sacking everybody - some of them have been with us for years and years, Dad, it’s not’
Dad lifted his head and gave Colin a scowl that brought back some very bad memories. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But if we carry on like we are at the moment, the firm’ll go bust, they’ll be out on their ear anyhow, so what’s the difference? And this way, they’ll get their full redundancy, all legal and by the book, so they’ll be all right. And besides,’ he added, his scowl blossoming, ‘to be absolutely bloody honest with you, I don’t give a toss. All I care about is this business, which I’ve worked fucking hard for all my life, and I’m damned if some slanty’
‘All right,’ Colin said. ‘I take the point.’ He hesitated, considering various aspects of the matter. He was, he re
alised rather to his surprise, a man of principle who felt nothing but disgust at the kind of measures that his father seemed so blasé about; but he was also a coward. ‘And if like you say, it’s all completely legal’
‘No doubt about it,’ Dad said. ‘All checked out with the lawyers, they even got counsel’s opinion from a top barrister. Five thousand quid for six sides of A4,’ he added with a shudder. ‘But no matter. Got to do these things properly. And yes, it’s completely legitimate and they can’t have us for it.’ He scowled violently at a blank space on the wall then shrugged. ‘It’s not like there’s any other way out,’ he said. ‘And I’m buggered if I’m going to stand by and watch the company go down the toilet. It means everything to me, son. You got problems with that, keep ‘em to yourself.’
‘No, really, that’s fine,’ Colin said awkwardly. There are few things on earth as embarrassing as a display of raw emotion by a parent. ‘I was just wondering. If this scheme or whatever you call it - if it’s so foolproof and easy and legal, then why doesn’t everybody do it?’
Dad chuckled. It was, for some reason, a rather disturbing sound. ‘Because they don’t know about it, of course,’ he said. ‘It’s what you might call a well-kept secret.’
‘But for crying out loud,’ Colin broke in. ‘Magic. I thought that was just Harry Potter and stuff.’
‘Ah, well.’ Dad looked past him, as though he wasn’t there. ‘There’s all sorts of rules, apparently. Like, they aren’t allowed to advertise or anything like that; and they’re so bloody extortionately expensive, it’s kind of self-regulating. I don’t know,’ he said, with unexpected vehemence, ‘maybe half the blue-chip companies in the FT use magic, wouldn’t surprise me in the least, it’d explain a lot of things. Who gives a damn? All I know is, it works and we’ve got this chance to use it, and it’ll save us from ending up on the shit-heap along with the rest of the manufacturing sector. Look, if you’re drowning in the North Atlantic and someone chucks you a lifebelt, you don’t turn round and say, no thanks, I’m not using that, it’s not made out of eco-friendly recycled plastic’ He frowned. ‘Well, you might, because you’re an idiot, but a sensible person wouldn’t. All right?’
Colin nodded. Only a small part of him was engaged in the debate. The rest of him was analysing the extraordinary fact that she was coming here, out of all the billions of places in the universe where she could be instead, and that he was going to see her again, in a matter of minutes. Compared to that incredible miracle, stuff like magic seemed practically mundane.
Dad led the way to the small back office they used for meetings. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a pen and something to write on? Fine. I want you to take notes. That’s all. If anything occurs to you, any point you think needs clarifying or whatever, keep it to yourself.’
The phone rang. Dad picked it up, listened, grunted, put it back. ‘She’s here,’ he said. ‘Remember. Seen and not heard, got it?’
He left the room, closing the door behind him. Colin listened to his father’s footsteps (clump, clump, clump, like a heffalump in rigger boots). He thought: I don’t really care about the company. The thought of it not being there any more scares me, but really it’s just force of habit. And all that bullshit about magic being real; of course I believed it while Dad was talking, because I’ve been trained to believe him ever since I was a kid. But he lied to me about Father Christmas, so
Pause. In the light of what he’d just been told, maybe Father Christmas hadn’t been a lie after all. Think about it, he urged himself. Which is more likely: a thousand-year-old perfect stranger capable of defying all the fundamental laws of physics coming all the way from the North Pole to climb down our blocked-up chimney and leave me presents, or Dad buying me stuff with his own money? Put like that, maybe Santa wasn’t so implausible, after all.
Not that he cared terribly much. If charmed quarks and electric eels exist, then why shouldn’t magic? Probably it’s all just science that we haven’t found out about yet. Besides, it could all be shunted neatly into the big black plastic sack marked Not My Problem, along with global warming and earthquakes in South-East Asia. Far more immediate and personal was the fact that she was, by now, probably no more than forty yards away and closing, and he still hadn’t figured out why that fact should be so all-consumingly important
The door opened. Dad (perfect gentleman of the old school/patronising sexist git) was holding it open for her. Colin stood up as she walked across the threshold.
She looked at him.
‘This is my son Colin,’ Dad was saying, in that too-late-to-do-anything-about-it-now tone of voice that he’d honed to silky-sharp perfection over the years. ‘Thought he might as well sit in, if that’s all right with you.’
She was still looking at Colin and his right foot was suddenly a pincushion. Agony. I can’t move, he realised. I can’t even sit down, I’m going to have to stay standing up like this till it gets better.
‘Hi’ she said.
‘Hi,’ he echoed.
‘Please take a seat,’ Dad was saying - not to Colin, as witness the P-word. She folded herself elegantly into the plain, straight-backed chair. She was still looking at him. He knew that look on her face.
‘Right,’ Dad was saying, ‘I want to start off by looking at some of the terms in this Colin,’ he snapped, ‘sit down.’
Twenty-five years of training had made Colin physically incapable of disobeying a direct order spoken in that tone of voice. He shifted the agonised foot; the whole leg sort of buckled under him, and he only just managed to control the resulting collapse. He landed heavily in the chair, which creaked painfully but held together.
She was opening a green folder, fishing out wodges of stapled-together paper. Dad was talking; something about whether time was of the essence in Clause Two, subsection four (b). Colin fixed his stare on the blank sheet in front of him; he uncapped his pen and wrote the date in the top left-hand corner. His foot had stopped hurting, but only because it had gone completely numb.
‘Well?’ Dad said.
‘What? Oh, sorry.’ Her voice. ‘Could you just repeat what you just said?’
I asked you,’ Dad said, ‘if this stuff in Clause Seven, subsection five, subclause roman two means that if they do anything that counts as a substantial breach, all we’re entitled to is damages rather than being able to cancel the contract. Because if it does’
‘I’ She sounded - Colin realised that she sounded like he felt. ‘To be absolutely honest,’ she said, ‘I’m not entirely sure. It’s a bit of a grey area, really. I’ll have to check up on it and let you know.’
Colin was suddenly aware that he was meant to be taking notes. Grey area, he wrote, then underlined it twice. Dad, meanwhile, wasn’t happy.
‘That’s all very well,’ he was saying, ‘but you can see, can’t you, it’s a pretty bloody important point. And what about this here, Clause Twelve, subsection three? “Insofar as is reasonable in all the circumstances of the case.” What’s that supposed to mean when it’s at home?’
‘Ah,’ she said. Colin remembered sounding just like that, many years ago, when called on to explain why he hadn’t handed in his homework. ‘That’s just a standard clause, it isn’t really …’
In fact, Colin decided, she’s doing this pretty much the way I’d be doing it if I was in her shoes; but that’s wrong, because you can tell just by looking at her that she’s smart, clever, much more clever than me. It’s like she can’t concentrate worth a damn, for some reason.
Because she wasn’t his only begotten son, with whom he was never well pleased, he was struggling to stay civil; but the effort was making him talk louder and faster, and he was scowling a lot. She - she was fighting too, wrestling with her concentration like someone trying to catch whitebait with their bare hands, and Colin could see clearly that this was a disturbingly unfamiliar experience for her. She was used to being in charge of meetings, to knowing the answers and trotting them out pat and sing-song like
the Speaking Clock. And she kept looking at Colin whenever he wasn’t looking at her. He knew she was doing it, because he could feel the pressure of her eyes on the side of his face as he jotted down scraps of gibberish on his piece of paper. He felt a powerful urge to make an excuse and leave the room, but his foot was as dead as the last sabre-toothed tiger; if he tried to stand up now, he’d fall flat on his face.
‘Look,’ Dad was saying. ‘All due respect, but it strikes me we aren’t getting anywhere, and if you expect me to pay you a hundred and fifty quid an hour for sitting there saying that’s a good question and you don’t actually know the answer’
‘You’re right.’ She lifted her head and looked at him. It was the sort of look that could punch a hole through a wall. ‘It’s my fault, I’m sorry. Let’s just forget about it for today; no charge, we’ll just pretend this meeting never happened. Give me a couple of days, then’ She frowned. ‘Maybe you could call in at the office and we can go through it there. All right?’
Colin was expecting something in the nature of an explosion, but instead his father nodded and mumbled ‘Fair enough.’
She stood up. ‘Sorry to have wasted your time,’ she said.
A moment or so later, Colin was alone in the room. His foot was much better, and he’d stopped worrying about magic being real. In fact, he’d clean forgotten about it. Completely beside the point. Instead, his mind was full to bursting with the most important piece of information in the history of the universe; namely, that her car was parked round the back, under the lamppost. He had no idea how he knew that, but he knew it. He jumped up and tore out of the room, heading for the fire escape.
The fire escape led out into the back yard, and he knew from his childhood that if you jumped up on the roof of the old coal bunker you could scramble over the back wall, landing on the pavement about five yards south of the lamppost. If he ran, he might just get there before she had a chance to unlock her car door and drive away.
Colin hadn’t done much running in the twenty-first century, but he found it came back to him. He vaulted onto the coal-bunker roof like a pentathlete, scrambled over the wall and dropped down the other side. No sign of her, but presumably her car was the soft-topped Golf. He caught his breath, and was leaning against the lamppost when she turned the corner.