by Tom Holt
At this point, Cassie snatched up a small but chunky brass travelling clock and threw it at the screen. It bounced off.
Vince, meanwhile, was sort of still interested in Christy, which was a bit of a problem since Christy had just been dumped by Lee because he thought she still fancied Zack, whereas in fact she’d just had a brief but torrid fling with Shane, who was on the rebound from Tabby
The toaster had no more effect than the small brass clock; likewise the cast-iron Le Creuset omelette pan her mother had given her the Christmas before last. Screaming at the set didn’t help matters either, which was hardly surprising. Cohere, Cassie ordered herself. Get a grip.
She went back into the kitchen. There, at least, the authentic voice of the Southern Hemisphere was muffled to the extent that she couldn’t hear the words. But she was damned if she was going to spend the rest of her life hiding in the kitchen from her own TV set. Think, she told herself. She thought.
Compared to being stuck in a probability well, it wasn’t too bad after all. She screwed up two little bits of paper towel into plugs and jammed them into her ears; but they itched, so she had to take them out again.
All right, then. When all else fails, try unconditional surrender. She went back into the living room, sat down on the sofa, and paid attention.
‘And another thing,’ Ross was saying (they were on the beach now, carrying surfboards under their arms), ‘I’m really worried about Cassie.’
‘Me, too,’ Holly replied. ‘Her and Colin. Like, when are those two going to get their act together?’
‘It’s always the same with them,’ Ross said. Behind him, a motor boat skimmed a water-skier across the limpid blue backdrop of the bay. ‘Every time they come close to getting it all out there in the open, something goes wrong and they’re back to square one. I think they’re like so afraid to commit.’
(At this point, Cassie had another go with the omelette pan. The handle snapped off.)
‘I mean, it’s obvious they’re crazy about each other,’ Holly whined. ‘It’s like they’re physically incapable of coming to terms with how they feel. Which is so lame,’ she added, as the water-skier wheeled round for another pass. ‘They orta pull themselves together and just go for it. I mean, how long’ve they been an item for?’
‘Practically for ever,’ Ross said. ‘That’s the really dumb part of it. They just keep going round and round and round in circles.’
So much, Cassie decided, for unconditional surrender. After a frustratingly long search, she found Connie Schwartz-Alberich’s home number in the phone-book drawer.
‘Connie?’
‘Cassie.’
‘Help.’
Short pause. ‘Cassie, you aren’t stuck again, are you?’
‘Maybe,’ Cassie replied. ‘I’m not sure. Look, do you think you could possibly come round?’
‘At this time of night?’
‘Please?’
‘And it’s really awkward getting to Chessington from here, you’ve got to’
‘Please.’
Sigh. ‘All right,’ Connie said. ‘But it’ll take me a while to get there. Look, it’s not just a spider in the bath or anything like that, is it? Because’
Cassie explained what was happening.
‘Oh. I’ll be right over.’
Cassie put the phone down and glanced at the TV. The Australians had gone, and a woman with an unfortunate dress sense was doing the weather. Cassie thumbed the remote at her, and the screen went blank.
So she rang Connie.
‘I think the programme just sort of finished,’ Cassie offered by way of explanation, ‘and it switched off perfectly happily after that.’
‘Did it really.’ She could tell that Connie wasn’t easy in her mind about something. ‘Well, don’t touch it again tonight, whatever you do. Also, I’d put a towel or a pillowcase over it for now. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t always mean that it can’t see you.’
Which was about as reassuring as waking up and finding the head of a racehorse on the pillow next to you. Cassie draped the TV with a duvet cover, a sheet and two dressing gowns, made herself a strong cup of tea, then went to bed.
Several hours lying on her back in the dark convinced Cassie that the Sandman had got a better offer somewhere else, so she switched on the light and reached for her book: Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis, an old favourite, warmly recommended to her by a fellow insomniac and hitherto infallible. For once, however, it failed; twelve pages and she was still wide awake. With a primeval-sounding grunt she shoved it back on the bedside table and got up. As she pushed open the bedroom door, she noticed something that shouldn’t have been there: her two dressing gowns, neatly hung up on the hook.
In the living room the TV was alive again, burbling away to itself like a drunk on a park bench; the duvet cover, she noted, was lying on the sofa, folded with more precision than she ever managed. She frowned. This wasn’t just weird and inexplicable, it was bullying, and she wasn’t having it. ‘Stop it,’ she said, in a loud, clear voice. It took no notice.
Fine, Cassie thought. Stifling a yawn (probably the unabridged Amis working its way through her bloodstream) she sat down on the sofa, tucked the duvet cover round her, and looked at the screen. Open University, by the look of it; where else were you likely to find two grown men and a sensible-looking woman sitting round a table discussing thematic resonances in Shakespeare at one in the morning? Serendipitous, nonetheless. If these three didn’t fast-track her to Nod Central, nothing would.
Seemed to be working. Her eyelids drooped, her train of thought stopped in a tunnel just outside Birmingham, the edges of the world smudged. It was just comfortably snug under the duvet cover. She relaxed into the languid warmth.
One of the talking-head people was reciting poetry, no doubt to illustrate some point he was making - Ay me! For aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth.
Right, she muttered to herself, tell me about it. Been there, endured that, and they’ll have to build an annexe to the Hayward Gallery to house my T-shirt collection when I die und bequeath it to the nation. Star-crossed lovers; the talking head was banging on about star-crossed lovers. Star-crossed, don’t know they’re bloody born. If they’d had to deal with what I’ve had to put up with all these years, over and over and over again; you think star-crossed is such a big deal, you should try
Cassie sat up. The TV had switched itself off. The brass travelling clock (which had picked itself up off the floor and somehow got back onto the mantelpiece) told her it was a quarter to three.
Go on, then, she asked herself. What should I try?
No answer. Insufficient data; please try again.
Damn, she thought. It would’ve been perfectly simple to dismiss it as having been one of those dreams where you wake up convinced you’ve got the next Xanadu or a sensational new theory that’ll revolutionise particle physics as we know it or the best recipe ever for scrambled egg, knowing all the while that it’s an illusion, an undigested belch of subconscious waste. I had a dream, and suddenly I remembered all my previous lives in one go
Not that kind of dream, though, because she hadn’t been asleep; she had the folded-up duvet cover as proof. No, not any more, because she’d unfolded it, silly cow; but there were two dressing gowns hanging on the back of her bedroom door that she’d last seen draped over the screen. Even Lord Hutton couldn’t turn a blind eye to evidence as compelling as that.
Just to be sure, she got up and checked. They were still there. Next she went to the kitchen. In the bin was her Le Creuset omelette pan (one careless owner, unwanted gift) with the handle snapped off.
The course of true love never did run smooth. Cassie ate a couple of Ritz crackers and a small pink yoghurt. It seemed a great deal of trouble to go to - telekinesis, strong effective magic, quite a lot of difficult technical stuff which she could appreciate, being in the trade herself - just to remind her
of that. A bit like buying the last surviving Concorde and retrofitting it with huge smoke canisters just so you could skywrite A stitch in time saves nine over the Manchester rush hour. Besides, she wasn’t at all sure about true love. Rather, she’d come to the conclusion that it was a bit like God or Santa Claus; something you take on trust when you’re young, until you eventually get to figure out why they want you to believe in something so innately improbable. You had to have something like true love, or else there’d be chaos: the fabric of society in tatters, the apocalypse of the film and music industry, a total lack of anything for the retail sector to hype in February. It was, therefore, a necessary myth, something you subscribe to but know deep down is a fallacy and a sham, like parliamentary democracy. Accordingly, it never runs smooth because it doesn’t actually run at all. Fact.
Fat chance of getting to sleep with all that churning round inside her head. She looked round for something to do. Well, there was the ironing; but the ironing is always with us, and Cassie held to the view that doing it only encourages it. Or there was the Hollingshead & Farren file, which she’d thrown aside earlier as too easy-peasy for words. Nevertheless, she still had to draft a couple of covering letters, forms for registering the transfer at St Peter’s House, routine guff like that. If she did it now, she wouldn’t have to do it later, at the office; she could go and chat to Connie, or stare out of the window. What fun.
True love, indeed. Whatever next? The tooth fairy?
Cassie duly fell asleep at 5.25 a.m. in the middle of filling in Form G37. She woke up at 7.35 with a cricked neck, in plenty of time to burn her tongue on her morning coffee, miss her usual train and arrive at the office twenty minutes late - with Mr Tanner’s mum on reception.
CHAPTER SIX
Dimly glowing, Colin’s watch dial told him that it was a quarter past one in the morning. Without switching on the light, he levered himself out of bed, padded to the door and opened it a sliver. All dark, all quiet. He took a deep breath and started to climb the stairs. He reached out to guide and steady himself, and his fingertips brushed the bark of the tree. He’d know its texture anywhere: familiar without being the slightest bit reassuring, like everything in this house.
He’d realised, long before he got back to the office after his strange, serendipitous meeting with her in the tea-shop place, that asking Dad straight out what was going on would be at best counterproductive, and most likely traumatic. That left him a stark choice: accept passively and wait, or go snooping in the wee small hours. Normally, he’d have gone for the first option like a terrier after a rat. But normality seemed to be distinctly out of fashion these days, so here he was.
Colin had never done anything like this before, of course, so he didn’t actually know whether Dad kept his study door locked during the night. Wouldn’t put it past the old bugger; but on balance he decided that it’d be worth the risk of frustration. If the door was locked, he’d turn straight round and go back to bed. On balance, he hoped very much that he’d find it locked.
It wasn’t. The door handle had a singularly powerful spring - he had to use both hands to turn it. Once inside, he closed the door carefully before flipping the light switch.
The file was there on the desk, its flap open, a big, thick typewritten document lying flat with its first few sheets folded back. Apparently, snooping was as easy as the made-for-TV movies made it look. Colin lowered himself into the chair - he’d never sat in Dad’s study chair before, and he felt like a royal footman trying out the throne when nobody’s looking - and pulled the document towards him. He’d filed away a mental picture of where it had been before he touched it, and the page it was open at.
This agreement
First time lucky. He started to read.
This agreement made the day of 2005 between (1) Hollingshead of 17 Mere View Drive Mortlake Surrey (hereinafter ‘the vendor’) and (2) the Prince, governors, directors, supreme council and diabolical parliament of the Powers of Darkness (a statutory corporation; hereinafter ‘the purchasers’) witnesses as follows: (1). By a letter of agreement dated the 19th March 2005, the vendor agreed to sell his soul (hereinafter ‘the soul’) to the purchasers in consideration of the sum of money, facilities, services and other matters detailed in the first schedule hereto (hereinafter ‘the purchase price’)
Fuck, Colin thought, and that was putting it mildly. He looked up and read it again. The Powers of Darkness; well. Not much scope for ambiguity there. Likewise the bit about souls. This couldn’t be happening. That’s it, he lied hopelessly to himself, I’m sleepwalking, and
He read on. Maybe he was hoping he’d get to a clause that said, Fooled you, really it’s only a second mortgage on the house but we like to make these things as scary as possible. If so he was disappointed. As a piece of draughtsmanship it was laudably clear. No melodrama here. It was a plain, functional businesslike instrument for getting a job done, rather like a bullet or a hangman’s noose. A chunk of legal bumf for selling your soul to the Devil.
Oh boy. Much, much scarier than melodrama. Pentangles and goats’ blood and circles chalked on the floor he could’ve handled, because everybody knows that’s just Hollywood, and if the special effects look so convincing that you can’t begin to imagine how they’re done, it doesn’t matter. Deep down, you still know they’re just Mr Lucas’s brilliantly crafted illusions. A piece of paper calling itself This agreement and ending up with dotted lines for signing on is in a completely different league.
Yes, but
Yes, but what? Either it wasn’t true, in which case everything would be fine, or it was true, and everything was going to be as bad as it could possibly get. No compromise, no negotiated settlement, odds-playing, damage limitation. Straight heads-or-tails call, no big deal, or the end of the universe.
Bloody hell
No pun intended. Colin rummaged in the file, and found what he’d hoped to find: the covering letter she’d written to explain the fine print. No wonder Dad had wanted to go through the contract in detail, clause by clause and line by line. Just this once, it was possible to justify Dad’s habitual pickiness.
He read the letter. Basically, it said the same thing, but without the Latin salad. If the letter and the contract were to be believed, Dad was proposing to deliver his immortal soul to eternal damnation to save the company from going bust.
‘That’s the spirit,’ said a voice behind him.
Colin jumped like a teal rocketing off a pond. There was Dad in the doorway, in that old-fashioned tartan wool dressing gown that Mum had been threatening to chuck out for years. He wasn’t shouting. He wasn’t even doing the glare that flayed you alive. He just looked unhappy.
‘What?’ Colin said.
‘I said, that’s the spirit,’ Dad repeated. ‘Getting some work done instead of lounging in bed like a pig in shit. And there’s me been thinking you’re nothing but a waste of space.’
‘Dad,’ Colin said.
‘So.’ Dad perched on the edge of the desk, leaned over his shoulder to see how far he’d got. ‘What do you make of it, then?’
‘It’s a joke, right?’
Dad frowned slightly. ‘If that’s your idea of funny, you want to see someone about it.’
‘It’s for real, then.’
‘Yes, son, it’s for real.’
Not the answer he’d been wanting to hear. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘are you completely off your head? You can’t do this. It’s’ But they didn’t make words big enough to describe what it was, or if they did, they didn’t leave them lying around where losers like him could pick them up and play with them. ‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
Dad laughed. ‘Don’t talk daft,’ he said. “Course I can; I checked it out with that thin bird. Perfectly straightforward transaction; and, like I told you, totally hundred-per-cent legal.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Colin whispered.
But Dad simply shook his head. ‘Don’t vex your pretty little head about it,’ he
said. ‘It’s the original win-win scenario. As in: if it’s all make-believe and bullshit, I’m no worse off. If not -well, you know what sort of a life I’ve led, the way I’ve had to treat a few people who’ve got under my feet. It’s not like I was ever likely to wind up in the other place.’ He grinned. ‘Don’t suppose I’d have liked it there, anyway,’ he went on, ‘sat around on a cloud all day long with a load of wimps and goody-goodies being nice to each other. And I don’t imagine it’ll be all that bad where I’m going. Compared to running a small manufacturing business under a Labour government, it’ll probably be as good as a holiday.’ He turned his head and stared into Colin’s eyes; Colin tried to look away, but couldn’t. ‘You weren’t worried about me, were you, son? I’m touched.’
‘Of course I’ Colin shut up. No point in trying to talk to him. That had always been a mug’s game, ever since his first lisped ‘Dada’, a quarter of a century ago. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You go ahead.’
‘I mean to,’ Dad replied. ‘Else I wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble. I never start something unless I plan on seeing it through.’
And that was true, God knew. ‘So all that stuff,’ Colin said, ‘about your grand restructuring plan, sacking the workers and taking on trainees’
Dad laughed. A different timbre this time; genuine amusement. ‘You what?’
‘Isn’t that what you told me you were going to do?’
‘Trainees.’ Dad pursed his lips. ‘I guess you could call them that.’
‘I thought’ Colin frowned. ‘I thought you’d signed up to one of these schemes where you take on a load of school-leavers for work experience, and the government pays their wages. It’s not that, though, is it?’
Dad shook his head. ‘Better than that,’ he said. ‘Much better. You wait and see.’
‘So you’re not going to tell me, then?’