You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps

by Tom Holt

  Connie looked at him oddly and said, ‘I’ll be the judge of that. Now then, what’s all this about a tree?’

  ‘Two trees, actually.’ Colin studied her for a moment, and realised that she was actually taking him seriously. So he told her about it, the whole shebang, starting with his early childhood and putting in all the details he could call to mind. When he’d finished, all she said was, ‘And you’re sure it’s not an ash?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. Not an apple, either?’

  ‘I’ve got books out of the library,’ he said. ‘Alan Titchmarsh and everything. It’s not anything in any of them.’

  ‘That’s very strange,’ Connie said. ‘That’s the bummer with mysteries, of course. One particular detail catches your attention and reminds you of something, and so you don’t pay proper attention to the rest of it, and you wind up completely screwed. I mean, here’s me banging on about species … But this tree definitely goes up through your roof and then disappears?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Connie shook her head. ‘I’ll have to think about that one,’ she said. ‘There’s something lurking at the back of my mind, but I must’ve ticked it off somehow, because it’s sulking and won’t come out to play. Meanwhile, we’ve got to assume that it’s nothing to do with the other stuff. Which is hard to take,’ she added irritably, ‘because two separate lots of weirdness happening to one civilian - no offence - is pretty bloody unlikely if you ask me. Tell me, do you do the Lottery?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Colin admitted.

  ‘No luck so far, obviously.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe you should stick with it,’ Connie said. ‘I mean, it’d solve a lot of problems if you won. Well, of course it would, ignore me. Only, you remind me a bit of the old joke about Cyprus being a place that produces more history than can be consumed locally. You do seem to have an awful lot of luck, far more than your fair share. Pity it’s all bad luck, really.’ She shook herself like a wet dog and went on, ‘The tree thing probably isn’t anything to worry about, but the other business is turning my colleague into a nervous wreck, and I don’t suppose it’s much fun for you, either. And the larks your father’s getting to up to-‘ She pulled a face. ‘I’ll be straight with you, if you promise not to breathe a word of it to anybody at JWW. In our profession, ethics is generally just someone talking with a lisp about southern East Anglia, but most of us do draw a line somewhere, eventually. Trouble is, the firm’s just been taken over, and the new management isn’t too picky about who it does business with. Seems to me,’ she added with a slight edge in her voice, ‘that if you help young Cassie to sort out her bit of bother - and that’ll be doing you some good too, don’t let’s forget - then she might be inclined to be grateful, which might lead her to make a complete balls-up of this routine sale-and-purchase. Completely out of character, that’d be, because she’s pretty good at her work most of the time, but everybody makes mistakes occasionally.’

  Colin nodded. ‘I think she’d be happy to do that,’ he said, only she doesn’t know how. I mean, how to make a mess of it so the - the other lot pull out.’

  Connie smiled beautifully. ‘That’s just youthful inexperience,’ she said. ‘When you’ve been in this trade as long as I have, you learn a thing or two about how perfectly simple, straightforward, do-it-standing-on-your-head-whistling-“Chatanooga-Choo-Choo” jobs can go horribly wrong in the twinkling of an eye. So; have we got a deal?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Colin said, feeling vaguely stunned. ‘Sorry if I sound a bit out of it, but I’m new to all this. A few days ago, I thought magic was sawing girls in half and Paul Daniels.’

  ‘Did you really?’ Connie shook her head. ‘Well, don’t beat yourself up too much about that. Let me tell you a secret about our profession. Basically, it’s all about giving a tiny minority of the population a hugely unfair advantage over everybody else. If everybody could get at it, there’d be no point, because it’d be the proverbial level playing field; and then you’d get cowboy sorcery outfits in every high street, you’d have watchdogs and ombudsmen and EU directives and disgruntled customers ringing up You & Yours, and everything’d grind to a halt. So instead, we confine ourselves to the very, very few people who can afford to pay our extortionate bills. We help them to get even richer still and the rest of the world gets screwed rotten without even knowing it; everything’s normal, everybody’s happy. It’s a noble calling, but it’s all I’ve got. Or it was,’ she added, frowning. ‘But that’s none of your concern. Leave it with me,’ she said, finishing her drink, ‘and I’ll see what I can do.’ She grinned. ‘Think of me as your fairy godmother,’ she said. ‘I’ll wave my magic wand—’

  ‘Have you got one?’ Colin said. ‘A real one?’

  She looked at him. ‘I’ll pretend you didn’t say that. Anyway, I’ll be in touch. Now we’ve got some idea of what the problem actually is, solving it ought to be relatively simple. Probably a great big anticlimax; it usually is. We just like to dress it up in funky long words so we can pad the bill out a bit. Still, I don’t suppose you’re the first person in galactic history that this has happened to.’

  Colin looked at her. ‘A moment ago you said I was. You said—*

  Connie made a dismissive gesture. ‘I say all sorts of things,’ she replied, ‘it’s a side effect of charging by the hour. The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to the view that it’s probably just a little bit of fluff on the points of the space-time continuum. Really screws things up for you, but a wipe with an oily rag and a squirt of WD-40 and you’ll be back on the rails in no time.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘In the trade before you were born,’ she said, getting up. ‘I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got anything concrete, as the developer said to the mafioso. Nice to have met you.’

  Colin watched her leave. Very strange; she’d appeared to change her mind in mid-flow, and now it was all a storm in a teacup, no big deal. In which case, why had she come halfway across Greater London in her own time to talk to him about it?

  He got himself another drink and had a nice quiet brood, with a panic chaser. Forget his Dad making a pact with the Evil One; forget the tree, and now the other fucking tree. Focus instead on the notion that he might be the victim of - he wasn’t quite sure how to categorise it, now that he came to think about it. It was either a crossed line in Destiny’s switchboard, or a rare and supernatural variation on an arranged marriage. Either way—

  That at least was something that Colin could be definite about. Either way, it sucked and he wanted no part of it. All the time he’d been telling the nice lady about it, and listening to her explanation, his subconscious had been chewing doggedly over the available data on Ms Cassie Clay, and to his surprise he realised he’d somehow stumbled into a little pothole of clarity.

  He didn’t love her. He didn’t even like her very much. She wasn’t nice-looking, she didn’t make him laugh, he couldn’t imagine sitting over empty plates with her in a restaurant, with the staff tapping their feet because it was past closing time but these two young lovebirds were still nattering away, oblivious of time … Now Famine— Sod it, he couldn’t possibly think of her as that. Fam. If you rewound those criteria and replayed them with Fam instead of Ms blasted Clay, it all played very smoothly indeed. Which was probably, he was prepared to concede, why he was falling in love with her.

  Because it was boring and of no conceivable relevance to the widget-founding industry, Colin hadn’t taken much notice of the history they’d tried to squash into the space between his ears at school. But he did vaguely remember the American Declaration of Independence; which was when a bunch of ordinary people got pissed off with being shoved around by bullies and put a stop to it. No, they’d said, you can take all that, and you can stuff it. Right, then. Here and now, a declaration of not-taking-any-more-of-that-from-anybody. Not from supernature, which had no right to come splurging into his life without any warning. Not from his own pathetic excuse f
or a personality, which couldn’t even make up its mind who it was in love with until the nice lady had explained it all. Not from all the Hollingsheads dead and gone, with their traditions and expectations and demands; and abso-bloody-lutely not from Dad.

  Screw what anybody thought of him, shame and guilt and all that. Just as soon as this mess was sorted out, and Ms Clay was out of his life for good, and Dad had come to his senses and told the Bad Person to get lost, there would be a new dawn for Colin Hollingshead. On that glorious day, there’d be an empty bed and loads of free shelf-space back at the family home; there’d be a vacancy for a junior gofer and blame-receptacle at Hollingshead & Farren Ltd; there’d be a tree poking up the stairwell with nobody to worry to death. He’d be off, out of it, gone. A flat of his own, a proper job, and with any luck a nice-looking, cheerful girlfriend he could go to the pictures and annoy clock-watching waiters with. One small drift for a wimp, a massive break-up of tectonic plates for Colinkind. Yes, he decided, as he drained his second pint and wiped froth on his cuff. Why not?

  He looked up at the clock; half past eight. Options review. Well, he could go home, get moaned at for missing dinner, sit in front of the telly, go to bed. Alternatively, the world was at his feet, ready to thrill, chill and cloy him with an infinity of new experiences.

  Qualify that: a rather circumscribed range of experiences that could be sampled without spending money, since he now had a total of twenty-seven pence. The number of things that you can experience in London in the twenty-first century for 27p is still pretty impressive, but offhand Colin couldn’t think of many that he fancied. On the short list he was left with were things like a nice walk, a nice sit on a low wall, a nice lean in a doorway, stuff like that. Still, Washington and Jefferson and Ben Franklin had probably had to make their own amusements, and it hadn’t broken their resolve. Of course, he reflected as he left the pub, it’d all be different if I had, say for the sake of argument, Fam here with me. Slot her into the equation, and a nice walk, lean or sit on a low wall would have a lot going for it. Now, if only he had her phone number, maybe he could do something about it.

  A quiet doorway, the mobile, directory enquiries. Name, please? E. Williams, Mortlake. Could he possibly be more specific, please, since at the last count there were over a hundred and ten E. Williamses in the designated search area. Envy, he clarified, Envy Williams. N. V. Williams, not E. Williams? There’s six N. V. Williamses in the designated search area, can you be more specific? Thanks, Colin said, and forget it.

  Not to worry; Fam would be at the office tomorrow and he could ask her in person. It’d constitute a significant step, of course, a diplomatic incident signalling a potential outbreak of amicabilities, but a man who’s just evicted family tradition, predestined true love and the Devil from his life isn’t put off by stuff like that. If she narrowed her eyes and asked him, ‘What do you want it for?’ he’d simply smile and say, ‘So I can ring you up, stupid,’ and that’d be that sorted and out of the way. True, he’d known a Colin Hollingshead once who’d have gone all droopy and wimpish at the thought of such a positive course of action. He could almost see him, far away below as he sailed through the clouds of newly accessible possibilities. Screw him, in any case. He belonged in a strange, unreal world of unexplained trees and days spent stuffing envelopes, and Colin was beginning In find it hard to imagine that he’d ever believed in him.

  Someone jostled his arm. He opened his mouth for the instinctive automated apology, and stuck like it, face open like a door.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the offending passer-by. ‘Oh, it’s you. We meet again.’

  With his jaw still at half-mast, Colin could only nod his head.

  He wanted to look away, but his eyes had jammed and wouldn’t move.

  ‘You’re young Colin,’ the passer-by said. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. My name’s Oscar.’

  ‘M.’

  ‘We didn’t have a chance to talk the other night,’ said Oscar. ‘Since we’ll be seeing quite a bit of each other in the future, we ought to establish the foundations of a working relationship. Get to know each other. Bond. Do you agree?’

  Colin had once heard on the radio how much the average human head weighs. He couldn’t remember the exact figure quoted, but whatever it had been, it was way off. Right now, as he tried to nod his up and down a second time, it definitely weighed at least a ton.

  ‘Excellent. We should have—’ Pause, while the nightmare vision calling itself Oscar appeared to be trying to remember something. ‘We should drink a large number of alcoholic beverages, play darts, discuss team sports, motor vehicles and women, buy fried fish and sliced potatoes, and possibly urinate together in a shop doorway. That’s the correct procedure, isn’t it?’

  ‘Love to,’ Colin croaked. ‘Only—’

  Oscar did something with its face that could possibly be interpreted as a frown. ‘You have other commitments at this time. I understand. We should reschedule. I can make eighteen-forty-five hours on Thursday the seventh.’

  ‘Eighteen forty-five?’

  ‘Eighteen forty-five precisely. The Devil is in the detail.’

  ‘Right.’ Colin tried to shut his mouth but it wouldn’t stay closed. ‘I mean, I think that’s OK, but I’d need to check. I’ll call you.’

  ‘Excellent.’ A nod, carried out with Prussian precision. ‘You can pass a message on to me through your father. If I haven’t heard from you by noon tomorrow, I shall contact you. Is that acceptable?’

  ‘M.’

  ‘This was a fortuitous encounter. Be seeing you, kid. Adieu.’

  A few footsteps, and the darkness swallowed it. Colin breathed out and flumped hard against the nearest wall.

  So much, then, for Paul Revere, Boston Harbour and Yankee Doodle Dandy. Maybe it wasn’t going to be that easy after all. Or maybe he’d been more than usually stupid, imagining that he could simply walk out on such a comprehensive assortment of really bad things—

  What the hell was that?

  Since we’ll be seeing quite a bit of each other in the future. If Stephen King could put together a half-sentence anything like as scary as that, the talking-book rights alone would be enough to buy him Illinois. As the trembles and the shudders began, Colin tried to remember what it had actually looked like, but nothing came to mind except two eyes. Perfectly ordinary, they’d been, apart from the feeling they gave of being able to see everything.

  Colin thought of his father. Then he thought about trying to get clever with the likes of that. Pulling the proverbial wool over those eyes suddenly didn’t seem such a piece of cake any more. (And presumably, that was just the messenger, the gofer: probably, in the diabolical hierarchy, someone of equivalent standing to himself. Somehow, that made the whole thing a lot worse.)

  Anyhow, it had cleared up the small matter of where he was going to go next. Back into the pub for a drink stiff as any icicle. No, belay that; he only had twenty-seven pence. He paused on the threshold, and felt something crinkle in his shirt pocket. A twenty-pound note, which he was almost positive hadn’t been there before. For some reason, this stroke of unexpected luck made him shudder. For a moment he was locked in a ferocious mental debate. On the one hand, his mother had warned him about accepting money from strange men, and he was pretty sure Oscar could safely be included in that category. On the other hand, twenty quid employed judiciously on licensed premises could make him feel a lot better, if only for a little while. The demon drink, he thought. Humour.

  It helped, a little. It didn’t make the horror go away, but it took the razor edge off it. Colin followed it up with a repeat prescription, which had no appreciable effect. He thought about that, and reached the conclusion that after a jolt as sobering as that, he’d probably be able to drink for a week before he slurred so much as a preposition.

  ‘Colin?’

  Voices calling him again. No wonder Joan of Arc ended up so stroppy. He raised his head and saw a face he sort of recognised. Not that he cared a damn, since he reall
y wasn’t in the mood, but at a guess he’d say it belonged to—

  ‘It’s me,’ said the face. ‘Steve Gillett. You remember? St George’s Secondary?’

  ‘Steve,’ said Colin.

  What the face was saying was, of course, true; up to a point, anyhow. Yes, he’d been at school with the face’s owner, whose second name (now he came to think of it) was indeed Gillett. But his first name had been Snotty, and Colin was pretty sure that he’d always disliked him intensely, unless of course he was getting him muddled up with someone else.

  ‘Fancy seeing you again,’ said Snotty Gillett, sitting down opposite. ‘What’s it been, nine years?’

  ‘Eight,’ Colin said, and added, with the absolute minimum of enthusiasm, ‘So, how’ve you been keeping?’

  ‘Not so bad, thanks. You?’

  ‘Still breathing.’

  Snotty seemed to find that painfully funny. He still snorted like a donkey when he laughed. ‘You went into your Dad’s company, didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Colin replied.

  ‘Still there?’

  ‘Just about.’

  If anything, that was even funnier. It was so funny that if the game-show comperes ever got to hear of it, they’d send scouts out on camels to find Colin, bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh.

  ‘So,’ Colin said, ‘what about you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m with Lemon. Joined them eighteen months ago - now I’m area manager.’