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

by Tom Holt

  ‘Lemon.’

  ‘Lemon,’ Snotty repeated. ‘You know, the mobile-phone network?’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Colin grinned feebly, aware that his prestige had just foundered. No point being the funniest man on earth if you were still living in the nineteenth century. ‘Area manager,’ he repeated. ‘Not bad.’

  Snotty shrugged, a gesture intended to convey modesty; a failure. ‘It’s a great product,’ he said. ‘I just stand back and let it sell itself. Oh, hang on a tick.’ He turned round in his seat and waved to someone. ‘My girlfriend,’ he said. ‘She’s bringing the drinks. Talking of which, what’ll you have?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘Same again, then.’ Snotty stood up and semaphored towards the bar. Apparently two fingers of the left hand uplifted while the right hand pats the top of the head is the international code for a large Scotch. ‘So,’ Snotty went on. ‘Married?’

  Colin shook his head.

  ‘Going steady?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right, still playing the field.’ Snotty grinned, and Colin ached for an apple to stick in his mouth ‘See anything of the old gang?’

  Colin was about to shake his head when he caught sight of someone over Snotty’s shoulder. She was carrying a tray, on which rested a pint of lager, something colourful with fruit in it and (believe it or not) a double whisky. An echo sounded inside Colin’s head; Snotty’s voice, saying my girlfriend.

  ‘Minnie, this is an old mate of mine from school, Colin Hollingshead. Colin, Minnie Williams.’

  The penny dropping; the tinkle as it pitched. Famin. Minnie.

  She said hello. The way she said it, the word had volume, colour and tone. What a nice surprise, it said.

  The other penny dropping, clunk. ‘Of course,’ Snotty exclaimed, ‘Hollingshead and Farren. That’s where you’re working, right?’

  She nodded, but she wasn’t looking at Snotty. She was also smiling.

  There ought to be a dictionary of smiles; somewhere you can look them up and find out what they mean. It’d be a genuine service to humanity, but instead there’re just Jane’s Fighting Ships and the Observer Book of British Birds, useless stuff like that. In the absence of a definitive reference, the only option is a mixture of experience and intuition. Even so. If that smile didn’t mean, Oh good, maybe this evening won’t be such a drag after all, Colin was prepared to comb the local charity shops for a grey fedora and eat it.

  As soon as he’d reached that conclusion, Colin was immediately at a complete loss for words. Luckily, though, Snotty seemed to regard a word driven in edgeways as an affront to his alpha-male status. He talked - about the old days at school, the mobile-phone industry, scandalous examples of bad driving he’d recently witnessed - and seemed not to notice that his audience wasn’t listening. In fact, they were as lost to him as the cities of the Incas, and the fool was too busy with the virtues of the latest Nokia even to notice. There was something faintly unreal about it; Minnie was smiling at Colin and he was smiling back, while the sound of poor old Snotty’s voice hung in the background like the faint whisper of a distant waterfall.

  Abruptly, in mid-sentence, Snotty stood up and said, ‘Same again?’ They nodded; he went away. Colin took a deep breath, but she spoke first.

  ‘Was he that boring at school?’ she said.

  ‘Actually, no,’ Colin replied. ‘As I recall, he was more on the jerk side of things. Mind you, we had some very boring teachers, which must be where he got the inspiration from.’

  She smiled, a bit; and if he wasn’t the funniest man in the world any more, it really didn’t matter. ‘Did he say I’m his girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes.’ Pause. ‘An exaggeration?’

  ‘Too bloody right.’ She frowned. ‘But at the moment it’s go out with him or stay home with the family.’ Shrug. ‘I thought of signing up for Conversational Spanish instead, but classes don’t start till the spring.’

  ‘Ah. Do you like Spain?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘I see. Well, in that case—’

  Colin contemplated writing down Fam’s phone number on a beermat, but there didn’t seem any point. Its digits were burnt into his heart and mind like a brand on a Texan steer. He was as likely to forget it on the way home as Moses would have been to forget the Fifth Commandment on reaching the bottom of Mount Sinai.

  In a way, the evening turned out something like that scenario he’d been toying with earlier: so wrapped up in talking that we lost track of time. It would’ve been closer to the model if all the talking hadn’t been done by Snotty Gillett, but never mind; near enough for country music, as his Uncle Phil insufferably said. Chucking-out time came by; they went three separate ways. ‘See you in the morning,’ she said, and if they’d been in Berkeley Square instead of Mortlake he could’ve paused to listen to the nightingale. Instead, when she’d gone, he lifted his head a little, looked at the sky and said, ‘Thanks,’ just in case anybody was listening; then he recited a string of eleven numbers, which made all the difference.

  Still chanting integers softly to the moon, Colin started to walk home. At the corner of the street, someone stepped out of the shadows in front of him, barred his way and said, ‘Finally.’ It was what’s-her-name, Connie Schwartz-Alberich.

  ‘What are you—?’ he started to ask.

  ‘Have you got any idea how long I’ve been standing here waiting for you?’ she said, sounding more than a little like his mother.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Connie sighed ‘Well,’ she said, ‘never mind about that now, and stabbed him in the throat with a pair of nail scissors.

  CHAPTER NINE

  He was the little Aberdeen terrier in a Monopoly set, and he was scampering round the board. It wasn’t the conventional format. Instead of Piccadilly and Edgware Road and Fenchurch Street station, the squares were pictures, which moved. As he skipped over one, he saw a woman in a hospital bed holding a baby; the next one was a toddler wobbling awkwardly across a carpet; two squares further on was a small boy arriving at a school gate; the school buildings were squat and green, and he realised that they looked just like the Monopoly houses that make a square very expensive to land on. He was counting as he ran, two, three, four; somehow he knew that he had six squares still to go. He glanced down, and saw himself standing at a bench next to a big three-phase grinder and polisher. Rang a bell; he was pretty sure he’d just seen his first day at work. Nine, ten - he hopped and, as he was about to land, looked down. Not good. There below him was a deep rectangular hole, into which four men in black were lowering an instantly recognisable box, with a brass name-plate and handles. Oh, he thought; then his paws touched down, and he found that he wasn’t in the hole after all, but standing off to one side on an L-shaped sort of patio thing made up of square stone slabs, painted on which he could see the words:

  JUST VISITING

  So that was all right, presumably. He didn’t need to lean forward and peer at the brass plate to know whose coffin it was. Late for my own funeral, he muttered to himself. Very droll.

  At any rate, he wasn’t an Aberdeen terrier any more. Neither, he realised with a slight start, was he Colin Hollingshead. Nothing handy that he could see his face in, but the hands, arms, feet, stomach he appeared to be wearing weren’t his own; the scar on the back of his right hand, for example, where he’d cut himself on a jagged Coke-can edge when he was six, quite visibly wasn’t there. The fingers were longer, their nails squarer. Who am I? he wondered. Just out of curiosity, he added.

  ‘Finally,’ said Connie Schwartz-Alberich, standing beside him. ‘Have you got any idea how long I’ve been standing here waiting for you?’

  He frowned. ‘You said that just now.’

  ‘That’s right, I did.’

  ‘And then you stabbed me.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She was wiping a pair of nail scissors on a bit of tissue.

  ‘And—’ He cast his mind back. Memory like a tea bag, but he could dimly recall… ‘
And I died,’ he said. ‘I’m dead.’

  She clicked her tongue. ‘No, just visiting,’ she said. ‘Can’t you read?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Something possessed him to reach out, to see if his hand could pass beyond the paved L-shape into the rest of the square. ‘Stop that,’ she ordered sharply, and he drew it back again. Not a good idea, apparently.

  ‘Why did you stab me?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah.’ Connie pulled a face as she dropped the scissors into her bag and closed the clasp with a snap. ‘D’you want the full tcchnobabble or the abbreviated layman’s version?’

  ‘The second one, please.’

  She smiled at him. ‘For your own good,’ she said.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said, and she made a gesture that would’ve been very reassuring in a rather less disturbing context. ‘Just stay on the concrete slabs and you’ll be fine.’ She was looking at her watch. ‘Bloody Shumway,’ she was muttering. ‘No idea of time. Not,’ she added, ‘that time has any meaning here, but it’s the principle. Punctuality is the politeness of princes, and all that.’

  He frowned. ‘Who’s Shumway?’

  ‘Oh, a colleague of mine from work. He’s supposed to meet us here. I suppose he thought he might as well do the banking first and then come straight on here instead of going back to the office. Two birds with one stone.’ She grinned. ‘No pun intended.’

  ‘What?’ Colin asked; and a short man in very thick-lensed glasses materialised beside him. In his left hand was a big, sharp-edged chunk of flint. There was blood on it.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Been here long?’

  ‘Long enough,’ Connie sighed. ‘I was starting to think you hadn’t got my text.’

  ‘I did the banking on the way.’

  ‘Ah. Thought that must be it. Anyhow, you’re here now. Colin Hollingshead, Benny Shumway.’

  The short man gave Colin a perfunctory nod and said ‘Pleased to meet you.’ Colin had an idea that he was probably exaggerating. ‘She’ll be along any minute,’ he added. ‘She’s the racing car.’

  A second or two of that particularly awkward silence you get when you’re with a couple of strangers waiting for someone or something; then there was a screech of brakes, and a fine example of a late-1930’s Bugatti sports car pulled up a couple of inches short of Colin’s feet. It revved its engine, switched off and turned into Cassie Clay.

  She wasn’t looking her best. For one thing, her hair was soaked with blood, and bright red wasn’t her colour. She looked round, saw the open grave, noticed Mr Shumway and turned on him ferociously.

  ‘You hit me,’ she said. ‘With a rock.’

  Mr Shumway grinned sheepishly. ‘I was just explaining,’ he said. ‘Two birds with one — never mind,’ he added. ‘It’s no good if you’ve got to explain it.’

  A thought crossed Cassie’s mind; if her expression was anything to go by, not a happy one. ‘You killed me,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve just been through all that,’ Connie Schwartz-Alberich said wearily. ‘Look at the ground, dear.’

  Cassie looked down. ‘Oh,’ she said; and then: ‘Connie? What’re you doing here? And why are those men over there burying me?’

  ‘Cassie, dear—’

  ‘And what’s happened to me?’ Cassie went on, her voice sharp with panic. ‘This isn’t my body. What’ve you—?’

  ‘Funkhausen’s Loop,’ muttered Benny Shumway.

  ‘Oh.’ Whatever Funkhausen’s Loop was, she’d heard of it and it calmed her down a bit. ‘You might’ve warned me,’ she said.

  But Connie shook her head. ‘You know better than that,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t work if you’re expecting it.’ She turned to face Colin. ‘I’m forgetting my manners,’ she said. ‘Funkhausen’s Loop is magic,’ she went on. ‘I won’t give you the technical stuff because you won’t understand it, but basically it’s a procedure whereby you can get outside your life for a few minutes and take a look at it.’

  Colin scowled at her. ‘Oh please,’ he said. ‘Now you’re talking like Oprah.’

  ‘Who?’ Connie shrugged. ‘Never mind. The point is, this is a tricky enough procedure at the best of times. Having you along - no disrespect, but you not being, well, one of us, makes it harder still. So, if it’s all the same to you, let’s get on with it.’

  ‘Fine,’ Colin muttered. ‘Just tell me I get to come back to life again when all this is over.’

  ‘Well.’ Connie gave him a thin smile. ‘Fingers crossed. Anyhow, it works like this. The Loop shows you a selection of significant moments from your various lives. In order to get a good look at the particular one you’re interested in—’

  ‘Hang on,’ Colin interrupted. ‘Did you say lives?’

  ‘Yes. In order to get the one you want, you have to keep throwing dice and moving round and round the board till you land on the—’

  ‘Lives plural?’

  ‘Yes. Look, if you keep interrupting, I’ll lose the thread and then we’ll all be in the smelly. Right: round and round the board you go, and when you’ve found the right square, there you are. That’s about it, really; other than that, normal game rules apply. Passing Go is good, Chance cards are usually not your friend, and if you wind up back on this square, do try and keep to the paving stones, otherwise it could be a bit awkward. All right? Who’s got the dice? Benny?’

  ‘Just a second,’ Cassie interrupted. ‘Why exactly are we doing this?’

  Connie clicked her tongue. ‘To find out what’s been playing games with the two of you, of course,’ she said. ‘And while I think of it, a few words of thanks wouldn’t be entirely out of place, don’t you think? After all, Benny and I’ve been to a lot of trouble setting this up.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Cassie snapped. ‘All right, so what’re we supposed to be looking out for?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? They’re your lives.’

  ‘But—’ Cassie protested as Benny Shumway pressed two dice into her hand, folded her fingers round them and waggled her wrist up and down until she dropped the dice on the ground.

  ‘Jammy,’ Connie said, ‘double six. Means you get two goes.’

  Before Cassie could say another word, she was picked up off her feet, as if by a sudden sharp gust of wind, and carried away down the flickering avenue of pictures. Just when Colin was sure that she’d be blown off the board into the shapeless darkness beyond she stopped dead, windmilled her arms frantically for a moment, and looked down at her feet.

  ‘Can you see—’ Connie asked nervously.

  ‘From this distance?’ Benny Shumway replied. ‘No chance.’

  The gust of wind caught Cassie again, and again she stopped as though she’d collided with a plate glass window and looked down. Then she was lifted off her feet and swept back.

  ‘Go back three squares,’ Benny explained. ‘Very literal-minded man, Funkhausen.’

  Colin opened his mouth to say something, but Benny had squeezed the dice into his hand. He felt his wrist twitch and his fingers open. ‘A four and a two,’ Connie told him. ‘Try and ride with the—’

  It was as though an invisible giant had pinched his head between finger and thumb and lifted him off the ground. He landed, managed to stagger back without falling, and looked down.

  He saw himself. How he knew that, he had no idea, because he looked quite different. For one thing, he was taller, slim, athletic, with thick curly blonde hair; also he was in fancy dress, something sort of medieval involving tight tights and a bright red tunic. Furthermore he was on a horse (never been on a horse in his life) and there was a bird sitting on the side of his right hand. Yuck, he thought, because he wasn’t fond of animals and birds made him nervous. He didn’t like the way they flapped their wings in your face, and he was afraid of the sharp bits, like beaks and claws. This bird was particularly scary; it was some kind of hawk, and it had small, round, mad-looking yellow eyes with a black dot for a pupil. But Fancy-Dress Him didn’t seem to be worried at all; his attention was oc
cupied elsewhere. Colin followed his line of sight and saw a female of some description, also on a horse, though unencumbered by large birds. She was swathed from head to foot in what looked like curtain material with a tall dunce’s-cap sort of hat on her head. He could just make out her face in among all the cloth and net curtain. Nice-looking woman, smiling at him. He was saying something to her, but for some reason he was talking in a strange foreign language—

  ‘French,’ said Benny Shumway.

  ‘How did you get here?’ Colin demanded, looking round. There was nobody there.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Benny’s voice explained. ‘Let’s just say I’m with you in spirit. Want me to translate?’

  ‘What? Oh, right. Yes.’

  He expected to hear Benny doing a not-quite-simultaneous translation, like the people with headphones at the United Nations. Instead, he heard the woman’s voice but now she was talking ordinary English, with a sort of Kenneth-Branagh-directs-Shakespeare accent.

  ‘Is she heavy to carry?’ she said.

  ‘Not really,’ Fancy-Dress Colin replied, and Colin was pretty sure he was lying. ‘I’ll fly her in a moment, if you like.’

  ‘Yes, please. I’ve never seen a real gyrfalcon working.’

  ‘You’ll have to bear with me a second. She’s gripping so tight, I think my arm’s gone to sleep.’

  - Whereupon the wind caught him again and threw him up into the air. Five and a three, whispered Benny’s voice in his ear. Colin’s feet hit the ground, sending a stab of jarring pain up his shins into his knees.

  He looked down. CHANCE, said the marble slabs under his feet. He felt something in his hand that hadn’t been there a split second earlier.

  It was just a rectangular pink card, with his name printed in the centre. He frowned and turned it over.

  Get out of death free.

  Colin had his faults, but gift-horse dentistry wasn’t one of them. He poked the card into his top pocket, and the wind caught him again. Please, no more animals or birds, he thought; then the slam, the wobble, the glance downwards.

  Only goes to show how short-sighted he’d been, not paying attention in history. True, he’d salvaged that scrap about the American War of Independence, but that was more or less it. The folly of his neglect came home to him as he stared at the two people in front of him. He knew who one of them was, the man in the funny coat like a dressing gown, but the girl in the enormous dress was a total stranger. She was very odd; in fact, they both were, because neither of them was much older than him, but they were both wearing white wigs. She was holding a fan, though it wasn’t particularly warm. This time they weren’t alone. They were in a huge room along with lots of other people in funny clothes and wigs; music was playing, and everybody was moving about. Colin supposed you could call it dancing, though that was a subject he knew even less about than history. She was smiling at him; he seemed to be having to concentrate on where he was putting his feet. She did a sort of low curtsy; he stumbled, barged into her and trod on her toe. He didn’t hear what she said to him, because the wind got up and tore him away, but he reckoned he could probably guess the gist of it.