by Tom Holt
‘Yes.’
That bewildering, walking-into-a-plate-glass-door feeling, when you know you’ve said something wrong, but you don’t know what it was. ‘Times,’ he said quietly. ‘Who’s Loop?’
‘What?’ Luke must’ve been thinking about something else for a moment. ‘Oh, right. Wesley Loop. Came in with us to start with, left after eight months. Should’ve changed the name when he buggered off, only we’d just ordered a big lot of letterhead and it seemed silly to let it go to waste. And by the time we’d used it all up, people had sort of got used to the name. Corporate identity and all that garbage. Can’t be bothered to change it now.’
One of those silences, the sort unique to the reunion of old friends who suddenly realise that they no longer have anything to talk about. He’s lost interest in me, Duncan thought; any moment now he’ll make an effort and ask—
‘So,’ Luke said. ‘Work aside, how’s things?’
Sometimes it’s a pain when you’re proved right. ‘Oh, I just sort of wander along,’ Duncan said. ‘Nothing to say, really. I mean, if this was Mastermind, I wouldn’t choose my personal life as my specialist subject.’ He paused, took a breath, not too deep. ‘Got married; we met at law school, got hitched as soon as we both qualified, didn’t last five minutes. No big deal. In fact, in my list of Bloody Stupid Things I’ve Done Over The Years, it’s somewhere down around number seven hundred and fifty. Since then—’ He shrugged. ‘I could never see the point, really.’
‘Mphm.’ Luke nodded. ‘You lost the only woman you ever loved, and since then life’s been an emotional black hole seething with despair and existential doubt. It’s a right cow when that happens.’
‘No, it wasn’t like that at all,’ Duncan said, only realising as he said it that he wasn’t really telling the truth. Occupational hazard. ‘Blessing in disguise, really. The way I see it, work’s bad enough without relationships as well. Mostly I sit at home in the evenings watching the box and hoping that one day I’ll evolve into plankton. Too tired and emotionally buggered to do anything else, really.’
Luke was frowning. ‘That doesn’t sound much fun,’ he said.
‘No. I think fun’s a bit like Father Christmas. You believe in it passionately when you’re young, but eventually you figure out it never really existed. What about you, then?’ he said, seconds before embarrassment made them both die of hypothermia. ‘Married? Kids?’
A smile; superiority and compassion, mostly. ‘Not in any meaningful sense,’ he said. ‘But you don’t want to hear about that. What happened? You can’t just say didn’t last five minutes and leave it at that.’
None of your damn business, Duncan thought. ‘I don’t really know what happened,’ he said. ‘We got married straight out of law school, like I told you. She got a job with Crosswoods - you know, the family law specialists?’
Luke nodded. ‘Impressive,’ he said.
‘Oh, she was the clever one, not me. Anyhow, as soon as she started there, she seemed to change. Funny little things, to start with. Like, she always used to love eating out at swanky French restaurants; then suddenly, if I ever suggested it she’d get all up-tight and bite my head off. Which is odd, when you come to think about it. I mean, when we were students we couldn’t afford to go to places like that, but we did; then, when she’s working at Crosswoods and money’s not a problem—’ He sighed. ‘Stuff like that, anyway. Cut a long story short, I came home one evening and found a letter on the mantelpiece. Both of us being in the trade, we got the divorce practically at cost.’ Luke was looking at him , as if trying to diagnose where the fault lay. Time, Duncan decided, for a diversionary counter-attack. ‘I’m surprised at you, though. Weren’t you and Hannah Schlager—?’
‘Yes.’ A gentle scowl, such as you’d imagine on God’s face as He contemplated a blatant case of TV licence evasion. ‘But it was a bit like the Roman Empire. Came to an end eventually, and that was that. Since then - well, I’ve had other things on my mind.’
In other words, a big Keep Out sign, backed up with razor wire and searchlights. Duncan could take a hint; besides, he realised, he wasn’t all that interested. Whoever this person was, he wasn’t the Luke Ferris he’d gone to school with. It was like driving past the house you used to live in twenty years ago; and in this case, he really didn’t like what the new people had done to the old place.
After that, things went downhill like a bobsled. All Luke seemed to want to talk about were the circumstances of the failure of Duncan’s marriage, and as far as Duncan was concerned, even if there had been anything more to say on that subject (and there wasn’t) he really wasn’t inclined to say it. The usual conversational gambits suitable for failed reunions were a wash-out. Luke seemed preoccupied; he sat with his stanchion-like elbows parked on the table, gnawing vigorously at the end of a pencil grasped in both enormous hands. If Duncan started to say ‘Do you remember the time when you and me and Steve—’ Luke simply said ‘Yes,’ closing the conversation like someone squashing a spider between the pages of a heavy book. There didn’t seem to be much point continuing; so, when Luke stood up to buy yet more beer, Duncan did the looking-at-watch-and-tutting thing and said he had to be getting back to the office.
‘Oh.’ Luke frowned. ‘That’s a nuisance. Give me your home number - I’ll ring you.’
Why? Duncan thought; but it was an order, not a request. He noticed, however, that Luke didn’t offer his own number, and he felt no urge to ask for it. He stood up to go; Luke was already on the move, reprising his Moses impression through the Red Sea of lunchtime drinkers. Along the way he nudged against a table, dislodging some female’s powder compact; it fell on the floor, landing on its rim, and began to roll, but before it had travelled ten inches Luke pounced on it, a blurred, smooth motion of almost deadly grace, and put it back without a word. As they walked out into the street Luke glanced at Duncan quickly, nodded and strode away through the crowd, the tallest tree in Birnam Wood.
As a hatter, Duncan thought. But, as he headed back up the street, he decided that was oversimplifying. Whatever it was that was strange about newly rediscovered Luke Ferris, comparisons with hatters, brushes, jay birds and fruit cakes proved unhelpful in isolating it. Quite possibly it would have bothered him, if he’d had any desire whatsoever to see Luke again.
One good thing about the legal profession is the extraordinary range, depth and variety of counter-irritants. No matter how grim or niggling a problem may be, in a matter of minutes you can be sure that something else even more exasperating will come along and flush it out through your ear. Five minutes into a call from the accountants in the da Soto probate, the eccentricities of his old school chum were the last thing on Duncan’s mind.
‘But can’t you see?’ the voice quacked in his ear. ‘If we do a Section 56 election, that’ll mean we trigger an event under Section 8(b) of FA77, which’ll have a knock-on effect on our Schedule D, quite apart from the CGT implications, which in themselves—’
(Yet another joy that goes with the trade. You don’t have to poke about in the backs of dusty old wardrobes to find a way through into a strange, unreal world populated by freaks and monsters. We deliver to your desk.)
Maybe the worst part, Duncan thought, is that if I was actually listening, I’d probably be able to understand what he’s talking about. ‘Point taken,’ he said. ‘So what do you think we ought to do?’
That always shut them up. A silence. ‘Hello?’ Duncan asked, out of wickedness. ‘Are you still there?’
‘On the other hand,’ the voice said, ‘there’s a very real risk from the anti-avoidance provisions in section 106 FA98, which means we’d be treading a very fine line—’
‘I agree,’ Duncan said. ‘So what do you think we should do?’
Very long pause. Amoebae that had been crawling across the bottoms of lightless oceans when it started had evolved into sharks, crayfish and dentists by the time the voice spoke again. ‘I think,’ it said, then hesitated. ‘Let me run through the figur
es one more time, and I’ll get back to you,’ it mumbled; then there was a click and a buzz.
Duncan grinned. Just occasionally he was able to control his environment one teeny-tiny bit, and when it happened, it never failed to please him. He reached for the summit of the mountain of green wallet files on his desk and tried to remember what he was supposed to be doing with it.
Just more death, that was all. Back in the unfairly stigmatised Dark Ages, they knew a thing or two. When you died, they buried all your stuff with you: your spear and your shield, your favourite cup, your string of shiny beads that the Roman trader had promised you were genuine amber. In a way, it was a kind of golden age of mankind. No need for jumble sales, dejunk-your-life TV make-over shows, or probate lawyers: you simply took it with you, on the assumption that, when you reached Valhalla, Odin had infinite cupboard space. Simpler times, simple faith. Of course, it helped that only Iron Age Gettys and Gateses had more than one pair of shoes.
Yawn, stretch. The soldier’s definition of war is an infinity of boredom punctuated by moments of unspeakable horror. The working day ground on, one begrudged tick at a time. As he read, cross-referenced and dictated, Duncan allowed his mind to wander a little. He considered, among other things, the curious return of Luke Ferris. It had been an odd, faintly surreal business, rather like a dream, and he found it hard to shift the mental image of the huge white-haired man who’d once been his best mate at school gnawing the end of a pencil, looking for all the world as if he was about to crack it with his teeth and suck out the graphite. Memory and the passage of time don’t just revise the past, of course. They cover it up, like a government burying bad news. The fact was, he’d never liked Ferris much; the confusing thing was, he hadn’t actually realised it at the time. What had confused the issue (he could see it clearly now) was that Ferris had apparently liked him; and, being a commanding sort of personality and a born leader, it hadn’t ever occurred to him that anybody he liked wouldn’t automatically like him back. Now he came to think of it, there’d always been that undertone in their relationship: like me or I’ll break your arm. Teenage boys are, of course, the crudest form of pack animal, their obedience to the alpha instant and unthinking, at least until the alpha is deposed and replaced. Duncan smiled at that. Just as well he’d made the decision on the day he left school to forget all about his old friends. By the look of it, the rest of them - Micky, Clive, Kevin, even Pete - hadn’t moved on at all. The Ferris Gang still defined them, as it had all those years ago. There but for the grace of God, Duncan thought—
(Except that the Ferris Gang had an office in Mortmain Street and were presumably swimming in money; and if they were still being ordered around by their boyhood Il Duce, how could that be worse than having to listen to inspirational speeches from Jenny Sidmouth? Fine. It’d be easier to count himself well out of it if he hadn’t contrived to get himself bogged down in something worse. Which raised the question, of course—)
The door opened and Tricia came in, with the wire basket of freshly printed letters for him to sign. At one time he’d rather enjoyed this particular ritual. There was something rather medieval and grand about having your chamberlain waiting on you while you affixed your royal seal to a consignment of writs and charters - le roy li volt, and all that. And signing his name, over and over again, like a film star conceding autographs on his way to an awards ceremony; it’s not for me, you understand, it’s for the Maidenhead branch of the Midshires Building Society. He’d taken a perverse pleasure in gradually eroding his signature into a wild, Dadaesque squiggle, something to be executed with panache and plenty of wrist. But the sad reality is that even kings and earls and margraves reach the point when they groan and say, ‘Not more bloody charters’, and Duncan’s signature had long since degraded into a squirly mess. He groped around his desk for a pen.
‘Under your elbow,’ Tricia said.
‘What?’
‘Pen. You’re leaning on it.’
Of course, he had two different squiggles: Duncan Hughes for the yours-sincerelys, Craven, Ettin and Trowell for the yours-faithfullys. Over the last few months they’d gradually begun to merge into one another. Occasionally he still tried to make believe he was the Booker Prize-winner signing copies at the front of a queue that was paralysing traffic as far back as Holborn, but each time he tried it the illusion frayed a little bit more. ‘That the lot?’ he asked.
A nod, and Tricia was gone. Once the door had shut behind her, Duncan realised that she’d changed her hair yet again; now it was black, straight, vaguely Goth. Was there a reason for it, a little bit of human interest, or had she just woken up that morning with the fanciful notion that it’d make her look nicer? He shrugged, and picked up another green folder. The trouble is, in order to do human interest, you have to be interested in humans.
Mail call meant it must be around half-past four; in which case, in just under an hour he’d have Mr Martinez to deal with, complete with his self-propelled miasma of doom and invisible albatross necklace. Did they do post this way over in Mortmain Street? Hard to imagine the Ferris Gang having proper grown-up office routines. All right, so presumably they’d found a way to suppress the urge to roam the corridors writing rude words on the walls and beating up the typists; even so, it was a set-up he found practically impossible to visualise - because, in his mind’s eye, Pete’s tie knot would still be buried under the wing of his open collar, and his shirt-tails defiantly free-range; if Kevin was still at his desk at five forty-five, it could only be because he was in detention yet again, not because he was finishing up a few things he needed for an important meeting next day. Suddenly, and without serious provocation, Duncan felt old. And what in God’s name had happened to Luke’s hair? Now he realised what was so badly wrong with the picture that haunted his mind’s eye. Somehow, his best mate at school had mutated into the headmaster.
Mr Martinez, he ordered himself sharply.
Four big fat green files, not to mention two stocky pink files, for the court case. In a way, they were as eloquent a testimony to human suffering as any war memorial. He looked at them and did some quick and dirty calculations. A sheet of paper: let’s assume an average thickness of one five-hundredth of an inch. The correspondence clip of the first file was easily two and a quarter inches thick: call that twelve hundred and fifty sheets of paper; each sheet was either a letter in, at a fiver each, or a letter out, twelve quid. Average that: eight-fifty. Twelve hundred and fifty times eight-point-five—
Mr Martinez came, unloaded his sorrows like a contractor tipping topsoil, stayed for an hour and went away again, leaving Duncan with a headache and a powerful thirst. He thought of home (the frozen pizza, the microwave, the TV and early to bed) and, as he dragged the sleeve of his coat over the sleeve of his jacket, a vision flooded his mind of a crowded bar, deafening noise, stale air and, the not-so-still centre of the hurricane, Luke Ferris and the Ferris Gang letting off steam after a long but boisterous day in the office. It was inevitable, surely: the pack that plays together stays together, and there they apparently still were, as inseparable now as they’d been in the corridors and behind the bike sheds at Lycus Grove.
Duncan expected to feel a great reassuring surge of superiority welling up inside him, purging him of his earlier self-pity like a pressure washer; the righteous contempt of the cat that walks by himself for mere dogs. He waited, but it didn’t come. Instead, he caught himself thinking that it’d be rather nice to have friends again; not his sort of friends, the kind you see every now and again, who never just pop in uninvited, who’d probably frown and say ‘Oh dear’ when they heard you’d died. Proper friends, the sort who shared their lives with you, the sort who were actually pleased to see you—
He buttoned his coat. He’d turned his back on the Ferris Gang because they had swamped him; told him what he could do and what he couldn’t; unsettled him, belittled him, cramped his growth, tried to turn him into someone he didn’t really want to be. In the event, he’d managed to do most
of those things quite well on his own without any help from them. It hadn’t taken much; he’d mumbled ‘I do’ in a registry office, and the rest had been so much downhill freewheeling.
He thought, as he left his office and turned out the light: I’ve reached a point in my life where I can try to do something about all the crappy stuff, or else I can go home, defrost a pizza and watch Celebrity Love Island. As he headed through the maze of corridors and landings toward the main stairwell, he caught a glimpse, in his mind’s eye, of the great crossroads in Life’s dark and shadowy forest, where the arms of signposts point away from each other at right angles: this way Work, that way Fun. Never mind, he thought, it may still be there tomorrow. He stumbled down the stairs into reception, barged through the fire doors and let himself out into the street.
Sardined in a Tube train, Duncan tried to think about something else; anything. Good heavens, he thought, any day now I should be due for an electricity bill. There’s another crucial moment in a man’s life: should I stay with my present supplier, or should I compare tariffs and look for a more competitive source of supply? And then there’s the larger issue: in my use of electricity, am I doing everything I can to reduce my reliance on fossil fuels, curb emissions and stave off the next Ice Age and the twilight of the human race?
Somehow, he couldn’t quite bring himself to focus on the issues with the laser-like concentration that they required. Instead, through the perished gaskets of his mind seeped the thought of company, the tantalising notion that if you can be with other people, you no longer have to be yourself.
No man is an island; define island. There are some pretty big islands, after all. Being an island is no big deal if you can be Australia. Things only get depressing if the most you can aspire to being is Rockall.
No messages on his answering machine. Duncan poured himself a nice tall glass of water, and shoved his pizza into the microwave.
CHAPTER TWO