by Tom Holt
In spite of everything, Michelle realised something was wrong. What could it be? Ah yes, she realised, I’ve been forgetting to breathe. She remedied the problem. ‘In that case,’ she demanded, ‘who are you?’
Ali Baba grinned, feebly as a twenty-watt bulb. ‘It’s written up on the window,’ he replied. ‘Just spelt a bit wrong, that’s all.’
Short delay, while Michelle reads the letters on the glass backwards. Another short wait, and then
‘Are you trying to tell me,’ she said, ‘that you’re Ali Ba’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’
‘Quite,’ said Ali Baba. ‘And you, apparently, are my daughter.’
Michelle looked at him. At that moment, even though she wasn’t crouched inside an oil-jar with boiling water cascading down around her ears, her past life flashed in front of her eyes. A curious life it had been, to be sure; comfortable, quiet, under any other circumstances she’d have said ordinary, because that’s what ordinary means; just like it is at home. Ordinary is in the eye of the beholder. Sorcerors’ children run to meet Daddy on his return from work and find nothing unusual in the fact that he’s glowing slightly or comes home a different shape. That, they assume, is what all Daddies do. Hit-men’s children love to be allowed to help Daddy scrub the lead fouling out of the slots in the silencer, or hold the wiring diagram for him when he’s out in the garage making bombs. The children of great prophets learn not to whine, ‘Oh Daddy, not loaves and fishes again,’ when Father comes home from work with a doggy-bag. In her case, she had been brought up to a life in which there were no grown-ups at all. A taxi collected her from the school gate. As soon as she opened the front door, the timer on the oven went ping! to let her know dinner was ready, and the TV switched itself on. Sure, other kids had mummies and daddies; they also had caravans and satellite dishes and boats, but she’d come to understand at an early age that not everybody can have everything. It was cool. It was how things went.
And now, apparently, she had a father. Spiffing. And what, precisely, was she supposed to do with him now she’d got him? Answers on a postcard, please.
‘Hello,’ she said.
CHAPTER TEN
Mlk,’ Akram growled. ‘Nd mk t uh dbl.’ The barman, who was used to him by now and even got fresh milk in for him specially, stuck his thumb through the foil caps of two pint bottles, poured and took the money with a smile.
‘Thnks.’
‘Been to the dentist?’
‘Ys.’
‘Have to have much done?’
‘Ys.’
‘Hard luck.’ The barman grimaced sympathetically. ‘I can get them to rustle you up some soup if you like.’
Akram looked up at the barman, puzzled. ‘T’s nt n th mnu,’ he objected.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ the barman replied. ‘Won’t take ‘em a minute, it only needs heating through. Mushroom do you?’
‘Tht’llbfn. Thnks uh lt.’
So that, Akram mused, is kindness. He’d heard about it, in the same way as people on this side of the Line have heard of unicorns; he knew perfectly well what it was supposed to be like, he could picture it in his mind’s eye, it was just that he’d never actually come across it before, in the same way and for the same reasons that the barman probably hadn’t met too many unicorns.
Strange, he thought; very strange. Just because I’ve been coming in here fairly regularly to buy milk and sit down after my shift at the kebab house, and because I’ve just been to the dentist and the barman can see I’m still a bit under the weather from the anaesthetic, he goes out of his way to obtain soup for me, figuring that soup will be easy for me to eat, even though soup’s not on the menu. He won’t charge me extra. Quite probably he hasn’t given any thought about how this act can ultimately be turned to his advantage. He just does it. Probably it makes him feel good; but so would drinking all the whisky or sleeping with the barmaid, and he doesn’t do either of those, so that can’t really be the reason. He took a long pull at his milk, and the coolness eased the ache in his jaw. He felt strangely
‘Quite warm,’ said the barman, ‘for the time of year.’
‘Ys.’
That, he’d learned, was called Making Conversation. He’d been watching the barman out of idle curiosity for some weeks, and as far as he could gather, the barman often said something conventional and meaningless but essentially friendly to men who came in on their own and sat down at the bar. At first he’d assumed that he was passing on coded messages, or trying to scrape acquaintance with young adventurers who were alone in the world and wouldn’t be missed, in order to mug them into entering the secret cave to retrieve the magic lamp from its man-eating guardian. Back home, that would have been the logical explanation. Not so on this side, though; the barman seemed to regard being friendly to strangers and doing the little he could to cheer them up as part of his duty as a human being. The payoff, Akram assumed, was that they’d do as much for him one day, if it ever came to that; but it seemed an unrealistically long shot to expect that one day they’d be barmen and he’d be a solitary drinker in need of companionship. The fact of the matter was, Akram was forced to conclude, that he did it all on spec, or possibly just because that’s what people do.
‘Hr,’ he said to the barman. ‘Hv n yrslf.’ The barman’s eyes twinkled. ‘Cheers,’ he replied, ‘don’t mind if I do.’
The essence of it was, Akram reflected, that on this side, there was so much that was random, purposeless, meaningless. On his side of the Line, everything meant something; every word, every act was relevant to the plot, part of the story. If you were out fishing and you threw a little tiddler back into the water, you knew for certain that it’d turn out to be the son of the Dragon King and you could start making lists of Wishes on the back of an envelope. Do the same here, and you’d be out of pocket one small fish; and where was the percentage in that, for God’s sake? And yet the poor suckers did it, unthanked, unrewarded, kept on doing it until the day they died. And virtually none of them ever got to marry princesses, and those few that did never seemed to live happily ever after. It was weird, the whole arrangement, like a place where water flew upward from a spilt glass. And yet, somehow it was all very…
‘Your very good health,’ the barman said.
‘Ndthsmty.’
All of which, Akram couldn’t help feeling, was just a tiny bit relevant; because today, in his encounter with the accursed, thieving, treacherous Ali Baba, he had been soundly and completely defeated. His quest had failed utterly, there was now no way he could ever achieve the vengeance that was his sole purpose for existing, and his life was therefore effectively over. To all intents and purposes, he was a dead man, and the story had no further use for him.
Which meant
Which meant he was free. He couldn’t go back home. Suddenly it occurred to him that when the prison authorities drag you from your cell, stuff money in your pockets, frogmarch you through the gates, slam them behind you and shout, ‘And stay out!’, you don’t necessarily head for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau to ask about an action for unlawful eviction. Maybe you just had to be big enough to swallow the insult, turn the other cheek, buy a spade and go dig up the swag. Not where he came from, maybe; but he wasn’t there any more, was he?
He had an idea they called it Free Will. ‘Your soup’s ready,’ said the barman. ‘No, put your money away and have it on me.’
Back home, the phrase Free Will was always followed by the words ‘With every lawsuit, special offer, hurry while stocks last’. Back home, he added, dipping his spoon in the soup, there is no free lunch, either.
‘Yr vry knd,’ he said. ‘Thnks vry mch.’
And then the thunderbolt hit him. The force of its impact was so great that he almost dropped the spoon. Suddenly, it was as if the world was flooded with pink light.
The barman isn’t a hero, yet he can do hero-type things. He can be whatever he wants.
If I stay here, so can I. I don’t have to b
e a villain any more.
If I want to, I can be a bloody hero.
‘You should have killed him,’ Michelle replied, ‘while you had the chance.’
Ali Baba nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Silly old me. Of course, then I’d have been left with a dead body on my hands, and the dustmen are getting so fussy about what they’ll actually take.’
Michelle frowned. ‘Even so’
‘Have the last slice of pizza,’ Ali Baba interrupted. ‘I can’t, I’m full up.’
Like many naturally slender young women, Michelle had an appetite like a blast furnace, and there was a slight pause while she took advantage of the offer. ‘Even so,’ she said, ‘surely it’d have been worth it. You’ve been running away from him all your life, haven’t you? Your life in this, what’s the word’
‘Dimension?’ Ali Baba shrugged. ‘It’s not the right word, but if you don’t tell the lexicographers, neither will I. And yes, I have. And now I don’t have to any more. Have some more champagne.’
‘How do you know that?’ Michelle demanded, holding out her glass. ‘You’ve only got his word for it. He’s a thief and a murderer, for pity’s sake.’
Ali Baba smiled. ‘That’s how I know his word’s good,’ he replied. ‘If you can’t trust a villain, who can you trust?’
‘Explain,’ said Michelle with her mouth full.
‘Easy. With nice, honest people it doesn’t matter if they lie to you; nothing too ghastly’s going to happen, because they’re basically nice and unlikely ever to cut your throat. For villains, it’s different. After all, they’ve still got to apply for mortgages and have their hair cut and buy toothpaste and take their cats to be wormed, same as the rest of us. If all the world said “Go away, I can’t trust you, you’re a villain,” they’d be in a terrible state. So the convention is, when they promise something, their word is their bond. Then they can walk into a shop and say “I promise to pay for the goods and not murder you” and the shopkeeper knows it’s safe. Of course, sometimes they have to lie on business, like when they promise to share the treasure equally when you know all the time they mean to double-cross you; but that’s all allowed for in the rules and they have to make it perfectly clear they’re lying, just so there won’t be any misunderstanding. They cross their fingers, usually, and look away and cackle harshly. You’d have to be blind, deaf and as dim as a lodging-house lightbulb not to pick up on that.’
Michelle shrugged. ‘You know about these things,’ she said, ‘and I don’t. If it’d been me I’d have knifed the bastard.’
Ali Baba looked at her. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you probably would. It only goes to show how right I was to insist you were brought up this side of the Line.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure.’ Ali Baba’s face became uncharacteristically serious; tonight the part of Bertie Wooster will be taken by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. ‘Much better that way. It means you’ve grown up tough and hard. If you’d stayed on the other side, you’d be no good for anything except gathering flowers and talking to the wee birdies.’
‘Oh.’ Michelle frowned. ‘I’m not sure I want to be tough and hard,’ she said. ‘You make me sound like a duff avocado.’
‘Which reminds me.’ Ali Baba laid his knife and fork down on his plate, blade-tip and fork-tines at precisely twelve o’clock, steepled his hands and smiled pleasantly. ‘Terribly rude of me not to have asked before,’ he said. ‘How’s your life been so far?’
Michelle considered. ‘Fine,’ she said.
‘No major tragedies, deep-seated emotional traumas? Not,’ he added quickly, ‘that I want to pry or anything, but I was reading this book on the modern approach to fatherhood’
Michelle looked at him. ‘You were?’
‘Just because I didn’t know who you were or where you’d ended up didn’t mean I wasn’t interested,’ Ali Baba replied. ‘There was always the offchance we’d bump into each other, so I thought, a little general background reading …’
‘I see. And what did this book say?’
‘Difficult to tell,’ Ali Baba confessed. ‘The chap who wrote it used such fearfully long words, and my dictionary was published in eighteen sixty-something and a lot of the words aren’t in it. But the general idea seems to be that once you’re past the nappies and putting-food-on-the-table stage, all I’m really fit for is listening and saying, “Gosh, how terrible” when Destiny whacks you one with a broken bottle. I know I’ve come on the scene a bit late, but…’
‘Hum.’ Michelle rubbed her cheeks with thumb and forefinger, drawing her lips together. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but there hasn’t really been anything much like that. The nature study stick insects at school died rather suddenly, but that was nineteen years ago and besides, I never really liked them anyway. I had a rather expensive blouse from Printemps, and it got prawn biryani on one of the sleeves. The first time I took my driving test, I failed on the emergency stop. Other than that, no complaints, really. Until recently, that is, but I’m not really counting all that, because I’m still not convinced it’s not all a horrible dream.’
‘I see.’ Ali Baba nodded. ‘Any area where you feel in need of fatherly advice and guidance? Apart from dental hygiene, of course, because fortuitously we’ve already covered that in some detail.’
Michelle smiled, quite unexpectedly. ‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘Or rather, odd. Or something. I guess that you’re probably the only person who actually has been there all my life. I never seemed to get ill, so I never saw a doctor often enough to remember his name, and schools and teachers seemed to come and go a bit; but I never missed a six-monthly check-up.’
‘Highly commendable,’ Ali Baba replied. ‘Which means we’ve met a minimum of fifty-four times. And I could draw a chart of the inside of your mouth blindfold from memory; now how many of your so-called conventional fathers could say that?’
As he waffled on, Michelle studied him, her head slightly on one side. Suddenly getting a father after twenty-seven years without one is rather like waking up one morning to be told by God that owing to an admin snarl-up, the third arm you should have been issued with at birth has only just come through from the depot, and there it is, look, sprouting out of the small of your back. You don’t immediately think, ‘Hooray, now I can pick up things behind me without turning round.’ You wonder, rather, how you’re going to explain it to your friends and whether any of your jackets can be salvaged, or whether you’re going to have to have a whole new wardrobe tailor-made at Freaks-R-Us. It’s hard, in other words, to be entirely positive about it all. Your first thought is of the immediate, of comparatively trivial, complications and disadvantages which you now face and definitely don’t need in an already complicated life.
‘Excuse me,’ Michelle said.
Ali Baba, who had been saying something or other, stopped and waited expectantly for Michelle to go on. Probably, she thought sourly, there’s a diagram in his book somewhere.
‘This is all extremely important,’ she said, ‘and naturally I’m thrilled to bits by it all, but can we just be practical for a moment? I mean, what do we do now? Because, and I’m really sorry if this sounds unfeeling or anything, but if you’re thinking I’m going to come and live with you and cook breakfasts and iron socks’
‘Do people iron socks?’ Ali Baba interrupted, clearly intrigued. ‘And if so, why?’
‘What I’m getting at’ Michelle wished she’d never started this topic; but now she was, as it were, in custard stepped in so far, and she might as well blunder on a little bit longer until she drowned or was rescued. ‘The point is,’ she said, ‘does it have to change anything, or do we just carry on as before and have lunch together from time to time? I mean, it’s not as if’
‘Quite.’ Ali Baba nodded. ‘I was thinking along the same lines, I must admit. Do I have to stand on the sidelines at netball games? What about pocket money and staying out late at night? I have to admit, I haven’t got a clue. If there’s no hard and fast rules,
then perhaps we ought just to leave well alone and let it grow on us, if you see what I mean. Okay?’
Michelle shrugged. ‘Suits me,’ she said.
‘Just one thing, though.’ Ali Baba frowned. ‘As far as I can see, suddenly being a daughter after twenty-seven years of just being a person oughtn’t to be a problem. The other stuff’
‘What, you mean being half-fictional? And the talking fridge and so on?’
Ali Baba nodded. ‘You’re new to all this, obviously. I’m not. So let me offer you a word of advice.’
Michelle nodded. She needed advice on this particular point, in roughly the same way a house needs the ground underneath it.
‘Forget about it,’ Ali Baba said, and there was a perceptible hardening of tone that might, in someone else, have been mistaken for seriousness. ‘Put it completely out of your mind. Put the ring somewhere safe, and never ever put it on.’
‘Oh. I thought’
‘Never.’
‘Right. Any reason?’
Ali Baba nodded. ‘It’s all very well,’ he said, ‘being given a beautiful silk umbrella with a fetching design of black and white concentric circles. It’s another thing entirely to sit down under it at the far end of a rifle range. You don’t need to use the ring. It’s not meant to be used on this side of the Line. Sling it behind your hankies in the back of a drawer, and leave it there.’
‘Then why not get rid of it?’ Michelle asked.
‘Worst thing you could do,’ Ali Baba replied. ‘Suppose you chucked it in a river. That’s virtually sitting up and begging for it to be swallowed by a fish that gets netted by a poor but honest fisherman who takes the prize fish he’s just caught as a present for the Grand Vizier, and I trust I don’t have to draw pictures of what always happens after that.’