Muddle and Win

by John Dickinson

  ‘I showed him how to multiply fractions. He didn’t get it. Now he does.’

  ‘Oh, fractions! Is that what you call it? You should show him how to do a bleep test or two!’

  ‘He can’t help his shape,’ said Sally, waving again as the number 86 bus roared past them with Charlie B at the window.

  ‘He could try,’ muttered Billie.

  Sally knew Charlie could try harder than he did. But she also knew he wasn’t going to. He got quite a lot from the other kids about it and he still wasn’t going to, so it wouldn’t make anything better if she got at him as well.

  Besides, bleep tests, which she had once enjoyed, were now on much the same curve as her alarm clock. That was another thing that was changing for Sally.

  The number 86 receded down Darlington Row, bearing with it the face that lunched a thousand chips.

  A schoolgirl?

  Muddlespot fell off his perch.

  He bounced on the floor a couple of times and sat there with his eyes wobbling and little circles of twittering green ghouls floating around his head.

  He had been expecting someone of immense power and holiness. A terrible enemy, who had defeated all of Corozin’s best. A threat to the very fabric of Pandemonium. A saint. A martyr. Maybe even a lama.

  Maybe the schoolgirl was a lama?

  To tell the truth, he was not sure exactly what a lama was and whether you would find one in Darlington Row. The rumours that filtered down as far as Corozin’s palace made him shudder, but were never terribly specific. He had had what you might call a sheltered existence – up to now.

  ‘Pay attention, Agent Muddlespot!’ said one of the guards, plonking him back on the rim of the furnace.

  The other guard had picked up a standard No. 3 red-hot poker and was using it as a pointing stick. ‘Notice the shoes – no scuffs. The tie knotted at the top button, see? And the things you don’t see. She’s vegetarian. Helps injured animals. Visits the old man down the street who can’t get out any more. Alarm bells ringing yet?’

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘Better brush up on that fieldwork, Agent.’

  ‘Ve-ry quickly,’ agreed the other.

  (Neither of them, of course, had done any field-work of their own since the days of buckled shoes and powdered wigs. And they weren’t going to do any more if they could help it. Doing what they did down here was easier and safer. And far more Fun.)

  ‘Just check out her stats,’ said one grimly.

  Another pinch of powder went into the furnace. Huff! Little figures of fire were leaping and dancing across the image of the girl in the flames. Muddlespot knew what they were. They were the schoolgirl’s Lifetime Deed Counter (LDC).

  Everyone Up There had an LDC. And for all of them, a time came when their totals of good and bad deeds could be compared. There then followed a complicated series of adjustments, weightings, appeals, swaps, derivatives, salvations and redemptions which nobody really understood but the basic idea was that if the good deed count was low enough and the bad deed count was high enough then the person in question came Down Here and a Lot of Fun was had in chambers like this one, for a Very Long Time.

  This LDC said:

  Lifetime Good Deeds: 3,971,567

  Lifetime Bad Deeds: NIL

  Muddlespot whistled. It didn’t look as though there was going to be much Fun with Sally Jones. With figures like that, the only source of Fun would be whoever it was who hadn’t been able to make them better.

  ‘Er – is there a fault in the counter?’

  ‘Never ask that question, kid,’ said one guard.

  ‘Low Command gets stressed when you ask about the LDCs . . .’

  ‘We sent old Filharmouzh down there to tell them there had to be a fault. He came back in pieces. I mean, very small pieces. When we undid the packet . . .’ The guard pulled a face. ‘Well, we couldn’t help it.’

  ‘We breathed him in. Bits of him, anyway.’

  ‘He was mostly dust, see.’

  ‘Made me sneeze, he did.’

  ‘Thing is, the LDCs aren’t run by Low Command. It’s more of a Joint Commission kind of thing. With the Other Side. They’re a teeny bit sensitive about that down below. So no, you don’t ask. The LDC tells it like it is. Nil means Nil. Believe it.’

  Billie dashed to get through the front garden gate ahead of Sally. ‘I’m on the computer!’ she said.

  The computer had been imported into the house by Greg, Mum’s partner. It stood on the upstairs landing, which was the only space that Mum would allow it. Once Greg got home he would monopolize it for the rest of the evening. The two-hour window between the girls’ return from school and Greg’s from work was very precious.

  ‘Fine,’ sighed Sally, and waited while Billie hunted for her house key. She reckoned up the chances of getting five uninterrupted minutes on Wikipedia that evening, and decided there might not be any. Her bag felt that bit heavier, as if the mountain of homework had just added another crag to itself.

  Twenty seconds later, she was still waiting. Billie lost her key at least once a month. It looked like she’d lost it today, too.

  Sally reached for her own key.

  ‘Found it!’ cried Billie. She opened the door and dashed up the stairs to the landing. Sally followed her into the hall.

  There was a smell of smoke in the house, so Mum must be home early and trying to cook. Mum coming home early usually meant . . .

  ‘Hi there,’ said Mum, poking her head round the kitchen door. And yes, she was looking harassed all right. Mum was slim and blonde, and, given a peaceful hour to wash, dress and apply make-up, could look very elegant. But she managed an office at work and a family at home, and between the two of them they didn’t leave many peaceful hours in her week. Most of the time, she lived with bags under her eyes and a faint air of panic. ‘I’m sorry darling, I can’t right now’ was one of the things she said a lot. She had a string of other things that she also said a lot, but they got you into trouble if you used any of them yourself.

  ‘Hi, Mum. Tough day?’

  ‘You’ve no idea,’ said Mum. ‘Stood it till three and then couldn’t take it any more. King-sized headache. A million and one things to do, and of course I’ve promised I’d do cakes for the PTA raffle and the wretched oven’s playing up again . . .’

  ‘Like a hand with that?’ said Sally.

  She said it even though her bag-carrying shoulder complained that her evening was already looking full. She said it at once, because Baking With Mum had always been a special thing, and it didn’t happen so much these days because Mum was always run off her feet.

  ‘That’d be great, sweetheart,’ said Mum, also at once. ‘In fact, could you do it for me?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sally.

  ‘You’ll have to watch them like a hawk. The thermostat’s playing up again. I’ve ruined one lot already.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Sally.

  So the evening’s to-do list now began: 1) Bake cakes for the PTA, assisted by dodgy oven. Followed by, 2) Do mountain of homework, unassisted by Wikipedia. Plus she couldn’t get started on homework at the same time as baking because the oven was dodgy enough for her to have to keep an eye on it throughout. She knew all about the thermostat and its little ways.

  It was like a lot of things at home – things that almost didn’t quite work and had to be jiggled or coaxed or teased very, very carefully until they did. Mum just didn’t have time to get them all mended. Or organized. Or clean.

  1) Bake cakes. OK. Bring it on. (Though it would have been nice to do something with Mum for a change.)

  ‘Thanks,’ said Mum. ‘Thanks so much, sweetheart. I keep telling Greg he’s got to get it fixed . . .’ She paused. Her eyes went a little unfocused, as they do when a busy person is trying to remember what they were going to do next. The air of stress and frazzle lifted, just a little.

  Then it came on again, full force. ‘Billie! How many times have I told you? WIPE YOUR FEET WHEN YOU COME IN!’


  From above, Billie wailed. ‘Oh, what?’

  Sally checked her shoes. She thought she remembered wiping them on the mat, but she couldn’t be sure. There was a small amount of dirt caught in the angle of one heel. So to be on the safe side . . .

  ‘That might have been me, Mum. I’ll clean it up.’

  The jingle of the newly-woken computer sniggered from upstairs.

  ‘Did you see that?’ cried one of the guards. ‘She covered for her sister! I mean – what can you do? What can you do?!’

  ‘Sends shivers up your spine,’ agreed the other, licking his lips. ‘Eh, Muddlespot?’

  Muddlespot was the stuff of Pandemonium. He was Pandemonium to his very last pimple. He knew that the whole point of everything was to get to the people Up There and work the LDCs until you could get them back Down Here and have all sorts of Fun with them. That was the way it was. He thought about it as much as someone in a fishing village thinks about fishing. That is, rather a lot, and in just one way.

  But even in Pandemonium, what you do is somehow what you are. Muddlespot did cleaning. He was a cleaner. He didn’t really get to share in the Fun, any more than he got to share in the Disappointments. He just got to clean up after both. His world existed in the bit between the screams and the gleams. So far as he was concerned, the only real difference between Fun and Disappointment was who it was you scraped up afterwards.

  And no one down here would ever say that this or that stain was their fault, not his. And they would never offer to clean it up for him.

  That. Just. Wouldn’t. Happen.

  It had never occurred to him that it ever possibly could.

  Those words, ‘That might have been me, Mum . . .’ were still spiralling around inside his head like a scent from a garden he had never known existed. He felt a bit dazed.

  ‘Er, yes,’ he mumbled. And then he added, ‘Scary!’

  It was definitely scary. The LDC now read:

  Lifetime Good Deeds: 3,971,570

  Lifetime Bad Deeds: NILnilNILnilNILnilNILnil

  ‘She’s affecting the whole sector,’ sniffed a guard. ‘Look . . .’

  The scene changed. In a room, somewhere else in Darlington Row, Sally was playing a violin. She played it smoothly, easily. The notes had a richness, like polish laid down in many layers of practice. She might never be a maestro, but she was on her way to a sure-fire Distinction at Grade Five, and maybe more than that if she could find the time.

  Across the room a small, middle-aged woman was listening. There was a peaceful, almost dreamy look in her eyes. Her thoughts were plain for Muddlespot to see. She had troubles but they were suddenly looking smaller. The fights with people in offices about money, with parents who wanted stardom for their children, with children who could take or leave stardom but didn’t see that it had anything to do with playing the A-major scale ten times a week . . . The awful, weary greyness of getting up each morning to another day of it was forgotten. Strength was coming back again. It could be handled. Something good could be made of it all.

  Sally, whispered the flames. Sally makes it worthwhile.

  And the LDC read:

  Lifetime Bad Deeds: NILcomeonguyswhereareyou?

  ‘She’s Big Trouble, Muddlespot. The Enemy have got her. And they’ve got plans.’

  ‘She’s closely guarded, under Sleepless Watch. I tell you, Low Command is worried. They want something done.’

  ‘And if it isn’t . . .’

  There was a short silence in the briefing room. It was the sort of silence that felt horribly like the descent of a huge brass hammer.

  ‘Your mission, Agent Muddlespot. Infiltrate. Contact. Arrange defection. We’ll handle everything else.’

  Muddlespot squinted at the flames. He wondered how many agents had been sent on Mission Alpha before him. And what had happened to them. And how many of them had finished up in his dustpan.

  He had an uncomfortable feeling that it had been rather a lot.

  Infiltrate. Well, that should be easy enough.

  ‘We go through the trap door?’ he asked.

  ‘Normally we would, but . . .’

  ‘ . . . It’s, uh, blocked.’

  ‘Blocked?’ squeaked Muddlespot.

  You couldn’t block the trap door. You could lock it, weigh it down, sit over it armed with fiery swords and that, but there had to be a way of getting through. That was the point.

  ‘We’ve tried it. The whole upper shaft is blocked. To a depth of about fifty fathoms.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘We think it’s pure diamond. No way through it. To get into her head, we have to do it the hard way – to Earth first, and then in through an eye or ear, without the subject realizing it’s us.’

  ‘Insinuation, we call it,’ said the other guard.

  ‘And the – er – Sleepless Watch?’ Muddlespot ventured timidly. He had heard that bit and hadn’t liked it at all. He knew what it meant. It meant the Enemy. It meant angels.

  Angels were not called ‘angels’ in Pandemonium. The messages that came up from Low Command gave them names such as ‘The Unenlightened’, ‘The Accursed’, ‘The Braindead’ or ‘The People Who Have Really Got It Coming’. But the rank and file – the guys who had to go up there and meet them face to face – just called them ‘The Fluffies’ and shot on sight.

  Muddlespot had never met an angel and he didn’t want to. He saw them occasionally in the carvings on the palace walls and that was already quite enough. They were stern-eyed figures with wings, carrying lances of lightning and swords of fire that looked every bit as dangerous as Corozin’s brass hammer. (Some of their harps and trumpets looked pretty dangerous too.)

  The palace carvings, of course, always showed the angels getting the worst of things. In fact, some of the most humorous scenes featured large numbers of angels very much on the receiving end. Muddlespot was not fooled. He thought about those trumpets and wondered how he could possibly duck a hail of B flats.

  He probably wouldn’t even hear them coming.

  ‘You’ll, er, take care of them for me?’ he pleaded.

  ‘Death to the Fluffies,’ intoned one guard.

  The other held out a claw. A small pile of little black spherical objects appeared in his talons. ‘Your tar bombs, Agent Muddlespot. Guaranteed to stick a Fluffy’s feathers when used at close range.’

  ‘Your pitchfork,’ said the first guard, producing one. ‘To operate, grip firmly and thrust. In the right hands it will pierce the heavenliest of heavenly armour.’

  Muddlespot looked at his hands.

  ‘Your communications set: dish, powder, matches . . . Use to report success only.’

  ‘Pentagram, five-point, summoning for the use of—’

  ‘Runes, mystic, casting for the use of—’

  ‘Furnace, No. 19 portable—’

  ‘Standard Disguise Set: Handsome Stranger, Fellow Traveller, Suave Gentleman—’

  ‘Enhanced Disguise Set: Headmaster, Web Pal, Stand-Up Comedian—’

  ‘Don’t use the Headmaster – his cover’s been blown—’

  ‘And your Battle Manual, edition MCCCLXXVIII, latest issue from Low Command.’ Both guards saluted.

  The Battle Manual was a huge book, bound in black marble with brass fittings and pages of silky-smooth leather, or possibly human skin. It was four times the size of Muddlespot himself and creaked evilly when the guards rested it against the pile of other equipment that had suddenly accumulated in that little room. In the black marble burned letters of fire. They read: How to Tempt.

  ‘Um . . .’ said Agent Muddlespot, eyeing the teetering pile of equipment.

  All right. He probably could carry it all. Carrying was just a matter of quantity, and quantity isn’t the same in Pandemonium. But how was he going to keep it all sorted? How would he remember, in an emergency, what did what? He could just see himself reaching for a tar bomb and pulling out the furnace instead. A well-aimed furnace might pack more punch than an angelic piccolo, but
there was no way it was going to beat one on the draw. He’d have been happier if they had just handed him a nice brass dustpan and brush.

  ‘Synchronize watches,’ intoned one guard, adjusting a large timepiece that had just appeared attached to his wrist.

  ‘Mars is in Sagittarius . . .’ replied the other, doing the same.

  ‘Er – should I have a watch too?’ asked Muddlespot.

  He had a sudden sinking feeling that time was running out.

  He was right.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘Then let’s GO! Let’s GO!’

  AT THE END of the corridor was a narrow flight of stairs. Up these stairs Muddlespot ran, with the guards urging him on from before and behind. His kit was in his sack and the sack was on his shoulder, and his tongue was hanging out with the effort of moving it all so far and so fast. Things scuttled in the shadows and whipped out of sight as he passed. Carved faces screamed at him silently. Up he ran, six flights, from the very bottom of the palace to the roof that looked out over the spires of Pandemonium.

  Here on the flat terrace was a flying machine, built of batskin stretched over a frame that might have been mere wood but was probably bone. It was a twisted, lopsided, slithery thing, like a huge insect that had fallen in someone’s bath and then been hit with the soap. By the time Muddlespot hauled himself out onto the roof, the leading guard had already put on some goggles and a flying scarf and was swinging the propeller. The machine buzzed sickeningly into life.

  ‘Chocks away!’ roared the guards, as they bundled into the cockpit.

  Of course it was Muddlespot who had to pull the little horn-shaped chocks away from the wheels, and then run after the machine, which had started to canter across the roof terrace, and pile both himself and his kit sack into the back seat – where, it turned out, there was no seat, let alone a seatbelt or life jacket or nice smiling person telling him how to fasten one and blow the whistle on the other. (Corozin was, in fact, a fairly minor figure in Pandemonium, and his private airline was as basic as they came.)

  The nose lifted. The rooftop dropped away beneath them. They soared out over the gulf of Pandemonium. All the brass spires pointed up towards them like the trunks of slender conifers on a mountainside ablaze. Before them was darkness, and into the darkness they steered, on and on.