by Tom Holt
‘Nah. Spoil the surprise. Besides, it’s got nothing to do with you. Strictly between me and’ He scowled. ‘Me and Him,’ he said. ‘That’s the thing about business,’ he went on. ‘Sometimes it means you’ve got to get a bit intimate with people you don’t like terribly much. Can’t be helped, you do it for the company.’ He stood up, suddenly restless. ‘I don’t suppose I could ever make you understand. You always were a bit of a disappointment to me, you know. I don’t think you’ve ever really felt what it means, being responsible for the company. It’s like it’s a living thing, you know; you can’t help it, you’ve got to look after it, keep it going, protect it from all the bastards who want to kill it. I’ve fought them, all my life. In the 1980s it was the Yanks, coming over here, buying up good little firms like us, stripping out the good stuff, selling off the rest. Then there were the unions, and the men from the ministry with their gadzillions of bloody forms and regulations, and then it was the Chinese and the East Europeans, dumping their tat over here at way below cost, just to starve us out. I’ve seen them all off, over the years, and you know what? We’re still here, and so help me, we’ll still be here in a hundred years. It’s all I care about, Colin, and I’m buggered if I’m going to let them win. That’d be so much worse than’ He shrugged. ‘I guess eternal damnation is like anything else, in the eye of the beholder. Fire and brimstone’s something I can learn to put up with, it can’t be so bad. Losing’ He shook his head. ‘No, I won’t stand for it. Not while there’s something I can do.’
Colin looked at him. If it had been anybody else, he might just have found it in himself to make the effort, to go on resisting - tear up the contract, scream, shout, plead, whatever. But Dad was the one person in the world who he knew would never, ever listen to him. Wonderful thing, family.
‘What about the others?’ he said feebly. ‘Uncle Phil and Uncle Chris. What’ve they got to say about it?’
‘Haven’t told them. Can’t be bothered. They’re useless, they’ll do as they’re told.’
‘Like me.’
‘Like you. It’s been my bad luck,’ Dad said, ‘to be surrounded all my life by weak, useless people. It’s made it so hard for me, you know? In the end, it’s always had to be me, me against the whole fucking universe. On the other hand,’ he added, with a violent gleam in his eye, ‘I’ve always won, haven’t I? Guess that says something about me.’
Guess it does, Colin thought. I guess it means I’ve lost him; and so what if he’s a vicious, bigoted old bully who’s screwed up my life for me, he’s still my Dad. At the back of his mind, a small voice made a suggestion. What you ought to do, said the small voice, is offer to take his place, sign the contract instead of him. It’d be an absolutely pointless, idiotic thing to do, obviously you’d regret it every second of every day for ever and ever, it’d be completely unjustifiable and just plain stupid, but on the other hand he’s your father, so maybe you should. Because it’s the right thing to do. You know it is.
Colin shut his eyes. There was a moment, maybe a second and a half, when the offer was capable of being made. It passed.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Well, thanks for filling me in. I’ll go back to bed now.’
‘You do that. Sweet dreams.’
So he went. And of course, he had no chance whatsoever of getting to sleep after what he’d heard; nevertheless, he woke up to the shriek of his alarm clock, tumbled out of bed and, just before his feet hit the carpet, he realised what he had to do.
Cassie and Mr Tanner’s mother had disliked each other from the very beginning. Mainly, this was because Mr Tanner’s mother, who amused herself by looking after the reception desk at 70 St Mary Axe, was a goblin, and there’s always been bad blood between goblins and humans. Not that Rosie Tanner was a bigot. She liked humans, or young human males at any rate (hence, among other equally regrettable occurrences, Dennis Tanner), with the result that she took a great deal of trouble over her appearance when she worked on the front desk; and, like a daytime soap star, she never wore the same outfit twice. Today, she’d chosen red hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and a creamy complexion with just a faint sprinkle of freckles.
There was also, of course, something of a clash of personalities. Cassie tried to avoid being judgemental, but nevertheless had reservations about anybody who transformed herself into a different superbimbo every day and chased after anything in trousers like a ferret down a rabbit hole. Rosie Tanner, by contrast, had long maintained that human women had simply lost the knack of having fun and were seriously out of touch with their inner orc.
Accordingly, she leered menacingly at Cassie when Cassie arrived late, and wrote something down on a piece of paper. In fact, the something was nothing more malicious than the answer to seven across, but Rosie dwelt with relish on the thought of That Thin Cow fretting herself all morning in case she’d been reported to the boss for deficient timekeeping. She was still smiling to herself over it when a young man - tall, solid, a bit gormless but who wants an intellectual? - turned up at the front desk asking if Ms Clay could spare him ten minutes.
Carelessly, Rosie Tanner left the smile in place and loaded as she turned to answer his enquiry. To her annoyance, it didn’t have the usual effect. Either the young man was smileproof (and she hadn’t met one yet) or he had something pretty substantial on his mind.
‘I’ll ring through and see,’ she said. ‘What name, please?’
She recognised him and of course the name was familiar, since the Hollingshead clan had been clients for yonks; now that she looked, he reminded her quite a bit of his great-grandfather, except that the relentless march of evolution had dispensed with the cute nose. Pity.
‘You’re in luck,’ she said, putting the phone down. ‘She can see you straight away. If you’d care to go through into the waiting room.’
He went. Rosie Tanner sighed, and fished a small mirror out of her desk drawer. What she saw in it gave her no pleasure - to her, one monkey-suit was much like another - but her proper sense of craftsmanlike pride was offended by the lack of reaction she’d had to what she knew was a perfectly well designed and executed flame-haired bombshell. Frowning, she made a few adjustments: the eyes a trifle bigger, a hint more fullness to the bottom lip, a few experiments with nose length and eyelash density. No, she’d got it more or less exactly right the first time. Maybe young Mr Hollingshead simply didn’t like girls. In which case, she reflected, Cassie Clay was welcome to him.
Talk of the Devil (must stop using that expression now They’re clients of ours); here was Ms Clay in person. Rosie jerked her head toward the waiting room, and went back to her crossword.
‘You can’t let him do it,’ Colin said.
Cassie closed the door and sat down. ‘Oh,’ she said.
He was standing by the window (extensive views of the back alley and the dustbins; because of the rather unconventional geography of 70 St Mary Axe, the back alley was only there on Tuesdays when there was an R in the month, which made emptying the bins even more hit-and-miss than is usual in Central London)
‘You can’t,’ he repeated. ‘It’s so stupid. It’s only a poxy little company. We’d all be better off stacking shelves in Tesco’s anyway.’
Cassie opened her mouth to say something, but hesitated. There were lots of things she could say at this point; client confidentiality, only obeying orders, was he sure he hadn’t got entirely the wrong end of the stick. She’d said all those, and several other variants on these themes, to other clients’ families on other occasions. It was part of getting the job done. Long ago she’d come to terms with the fact that magic isn’t all flower remedies and the ends of rainbows.
Instead, she said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry}’ He spun round and looked at her. ‘My Dad is going to go to Hell, and you’re bloody sorry.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s not up to me. I’m just the’
‘Look.’ Cassie noticed how awkward Colin was in the fairly straightforward business of
displaying anger; a greenhorn, a newbie. Probably this was the first time in his life he’d allowed himself to lose his temper with a virtual stranger. ‘I don’t want to her about it. It’s not going to happen, all right?’
‘Sit down,’ she said. He sat down.
‘Sorry.’ He didn’t mean that. What he meant was, I can’t risk pissing you off by shouting at you. ‘Listen, can’t you see what this means? He’s my Dad.’
She looked at him. ‘So talk to him,’ she said. ‘Persuade him.’
‘He won’t listen to me.’
Cassie thought about that. No, quite probably he wouldn’t. She imagined herself having a conversation along those lines with her own father. ‘Don’t fuss, kitten,’ he’d say; his mind made up, her objections dismissed unheard, because of course she was still a little girl who wouldn’t eat up her nice casserole. And she’d never had any trouble talking to her parents. It helped that they’d been in the trade, of course, but that only covered superficialities. No, she could see his point.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘So, what do you want me to do about it?’
‘Easy. Tell him the deal’s off.’
She sighed. ‘I could do that,’ she agreed. ‘And then your father would ring up my boss and say, what the hell - what on earth’s going on? And my boss would apologise and make up some excuse, he’d pass the file on to one of my colleagues, the deal would go through just the same and I’d get the sack. Do you think that’d help?’
‘All right.’ Colin scowled in thought. ‘How about this: you get in touch with’ He hesitated. ‘Whatever you call them,’ he said. ‘You get on to Them and say, my Dad’s changed his mind, terribly sorry. They go away. Then you tell Dad that They’ve cried off. He accepts it, so there’s no call for him to go to your boss. Would that be all right?’
Cassie shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work like that. Technical reasons which I can’t go into. I’m very sorry,’ she said. ‘You could burn down this office, or blow it up with dynamite, and it’d still go through. They’re pretty persistent, I’m afraid, once they’ve got their hooks into someone. Imagine a combination of AOL and the National Trust - it might give you some idea.’
‘So there’s nothing you can do,’ he said.
It was his tone of voice. She’d heard it before, but when? It was the voice in which he’d once said, I’m asking you to do this one thing for me, to show that you really Almost she could hear him saying it, if she closed her eyes and ignored his face.
‘I don’t’ she said, and stopped. Maybe there was something she could do after all, but it was still tentative and vague in her mind: an approach, not a strategy. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Has he actually signed anything yet?’
Colin thought, visualised the last page of the contract in his mind. Dotted lines, pencil crosses to show where the signature had to go, but nothing in actual ink. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Actually, that’s odd. I guess there’s still some details he wants to iron out. He’s like that, picky.’
Cassie smiled. She knew that already. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Look, I can’t promise anything’
(And by saying that, of course, she’d just given him a solemn undertaking.)
‘I might be able to think of something, but’
Again she hesitated, and thought about what she was getting herself into. She was, after all, a professional. Her work wasn’t her entire life or anything like that, but it was what she’d chosen to do (Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you leave school, kitten? You’re going to go into the trade, aren’t you? Yes, Daddy, of course) and it mattered to her to do it reasonably well, because she wanted to get on. The fact that doing her job occasionally involved arranging for strangers to go to Hell was one of those things. Of course, she could pack it all in and do something else - computers, aromatherapy, a job in a call centre somewhere - but there’d have to be a damn good reason. True love, for instance; assuming that such a thing existed. She’d never had any trouble believing in magic, because she’d grown up with it, but true love was, well, a bit far-fetched. She looked at Colin again, and took a deep breath.
‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ she said.
He was leaning forward, massaging his leg below the knee, the way you do when you’ve got pins and needles. ‘I don’t - I’m not sure,’ he said quietly.
‘Oh,’ she said.
Colin looked up at her. ‘I’ve been assuming it’s that thing,’ he said in a rush. ‘Deja vu. You know, where you’re convinced something’s terribly familiar, but it can’t possibly be. I heard something about it on the radio. Apparently it’s all just brain chemistry or something.’
Cassie held her breath for a moment, then let it out slowly. ‘That’s what I’ve been telling myself, too,’ she said. ‘But we can’t both’
The light bulb blew. It didn’t matter terribly much, since there was plenty of daylight to see by, but the soft plinking noise made them both jump. ‘That’s beside the point,’ he said firmly. ‘Do you really think you can stop this stupid deal happening? You’ve got to. You must see that.’
‘I don’t know.’ She was only playing for time, though, keeping him talking. ‘It’s like -I don’t know. It’s like I’m a fox and you’re a chicken, and you’re trying to talk me into turning vegetarian.’ She scowled. That hadn’t come out right. It wasn’t even anything like what she’d actually wanted to say.
‘Is that how you see yourself?’ Colin asked her.
‘No, of course not. Look, all I do is draw up paperwork. If my boss knew I was even having this conversation’
‘I’m sorry.’ She wished he wouldn’t say that. ‘But I’ve got to try.’
‘Yes.’ Cassie looked away. This - she really wished she knew how she knew it - this wasn’t the conversation they were supposed to be having. It was as though they’d both drifted so far away from the script that they were hopelessly lost, and hadn’t got a clue how to wind up the scene or escape off the stage. ‘Leave it with me, all right?’ she said. ‘After all, we get paid whatever happens, so I don’t suppose it’ll be the end of the world.’
Colin looked at her one more time, then nodded and got to his feet. He staggered and grabbed hold of the desk to steady himself. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘That’s all right. I’ll show you out.’
Mr Tanner’s mum gave Cassie an extra-special glower as she passed through reception, but it hardly registered with her. Part of her was protesting I’m going to get into so much trouble for this, but most of her didn’t care about that; it was desperately trying to figure out what it should be caring about.
She sat at her desk the rest of the morning, going through the motions of drafting a building contract for Mr Suslowicz. It was by no means straightforward, and should have engaged her full attention. A major international leisure consortium had engaged JWW to design a castle in the air (Cas Suslowicz was widely recognised as the best flying-freehold architect in the business); it was going to be their flagship shopping-mall-cum-casino, floating serenely above all terrestrial jurisdictions, tantalisingly out of reach of mortal laws and taxes, hanging in the sky like a free-enterprise heaven. Cas was pulling out all the stops, because the client was on a strict schedule, and it was vital that the paperwork should be sorted out as soon as possible. Normally, Cassie would be chuffed to nuts to be involved in such a high-profile job, so much more prestigious and exciting than a routine little sale-and-purchase for the clients we prefer not to think too much about. Instead, she turned the pages of the precedents book, trying to find a form of words that she could adapt for the snagging clause, and her mind was jumping and snapping like a performing seal trying to get at the just-out-of-reach gobbet of fish.
Colin had a thoroughly rotten afternoon. Dad wasn’t talking to him; there was no work for him to do but he didn’t dare skive off, so he sat in the post room stuffing more of the stupid brochures into their stupid envelopes. At five-thirty he went home. Mum was out at her yoga class. She’
d left a meat pie in the oven, but he wasn’t hungry. He went up to his room and shut the door.
When this is over, he thought; when all this is over, I’m definitely leaving. I’ll move out, get a flat or a bedsit, find a job, don’t care what. Once I’ve cleared out, Dad can do what he bloody well likes. This is the last and only time.
He lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Years ago there had been plastic Spitfires and Messerschmitts up there on bits of fishing line, wheeling endlessly above his slumbers like guardian angels, ready to shoot down the bad dreams, the disturbing thoughts. It was well over ten years since they’d gone: outgrown, discarded, squashed in the jaws of the council dustcart. Now, when he needed them most, he missed them. Bad thoughts were zooming down in squadrons. (In his mind he pictured the Ops room, where WAAFs in neat uniforms pushed little wooden blocks with flags sticking in them around on a tabletop map of his life, as the radio burbled about more bandits crossing the channel). It occurred to Colin that he was only able to keep going because he had so many different bad thoughts circling over him that he couldn’t choose between them. As soon as he made that choice, it’d get very bad for him. Implications would start raining down on him like enemy paratroops - the implications of magic being real, of there being a Hell where you went if you sold your soul, of that crazy deja-vu thing, of the realisation that he’d probably already screwed his life up beyond any possibility of repair or redemption. Compared with all of that, the prospect of living in a fleapit and spending his days flipping burgers was as enticing as the New World to the crew of the Mayflower.
So: I’ll do this one thing, and then I’m out of here.
He wriggled round to face the wall, and tried to think of something else. Counting sheep. His all-time greats fantasy World Cup final teams. Rivers in South America beginning with various letters of the alphabet. No joy; and then he found himself suddenly and unexpectedly engrossed by a thought that had never occurred to him before.
So there’s this tree, Colin thought, growing up through the middle of our house. It starts off in the lounge, right, and then it goes up through the ceiling into the first-floor landing and up the stairwell to the second floor He struggled to figure out the layout of the rooms. For one thing, how could the first-floor stairs be directly above the middle of the lounge? And the place where the tree vanished into the loft; surely that was well over to one side, facing the back-garden fence. He reached for a bit of paper and a pencil and tried to draw it out, side views and seen-from-above, like an architect’s drawings he’d looked at once. The more he thought about it, the less sense it made (unless he’d got the whole topography skew-whiff, which wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility). In the end, he managed to wrestle the problem down to two possible alternatives. Either the tree didn’t fit the house, or the house didn’t fit the tree. Neither of them was satisfactory, and neither of them addressed the question that was bugging him; namely, what in God’s name was it doing there in the first place?