Barking

by Tom Holt

  ‘You can share ours,’ Ferris says.

  Duncan is still recovering from the amazing spectacle of Ferris’s throw - could’ve been a fluke, sure, but he really doesn’t think so. ‘What?’

  ‘Our sandwiches. What d’you want, ham or chicken?’

  As soon as he says it, the attendant trolls unzip their school bags and produce flat wedges wrapped in plastic. Sandwiches: slices of toxic plastic bread with scraps of butchered flesh entombed between them like the dead at Pompeii. No, thanks, I don’t eat meat, he doesn’t say. Instead: ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Make your mind up. It’s not astro-bloody-physics.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Duncan repeats. ‘Never had either of them.’

  - Which should, according to his mother and father, have unleashed on him the full fury of their unenlightened wrath (because nasty people who eat animals always make fun of nice people who don’t; but you mustn’t tell lies and pretend, because you must always stand up for what you truly believe in . . . There were times when Duncan wondered if his parents had ever been to school; and, if they had, how they hell they’d survived.). Instead, that Luke Ferris stares at him. Not mockery or bigotry, but compassion.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I never had either of them.’ I’m a vegetarian. ‘My mum and dad are vegetarians.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Ferris shrugs. Duncan watches him. Even he can see that a great deal depends on what happens next.

  ‘You poor bastard,’ says Ferris. ‘Try the ham.’

  He doesn’t signal, but a troll steps forward with a plastic packet, which he unwraps.

  ‘That’s ham, is it?’

  ‘Think so. Pete?’

  The troll nods. ‘Ham,’ he says.

  Duncan hesitates. ‘That’s murdered pig, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mphm.’

  And now he has no choice. He takes the object in his hand, tries not to look at it, bites until his top and bottom teeth meet through the unfamiliar textures; chews before swallowing.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, with his mouth full. ‘Cool.’

  Ferris nods slightly, acknowledging a truth too obvious to need expression. ‘Now try the chicken. That’s murdered hen,’ he adds.

  Yummy murdered hen. Duncan pauses for a moment, trying to catch words that come somewhere near the turmoil of lights and explosions inside his mind. ‘I like the ham best,’ he says, ‘but the chicken rocks too.’

  A troll grins; but not unkindly. ‘There’s murdered cow and murdered sheep too,’ he says. ‘My mum does me murdered cow on Thursdays - you can try some.’

  ‘And murdered turkey,’ adds another troll. ‘And corned murdered cow. You want to try some of that, it’s amazing.’

  The trolls had closed in round him, but not in any threatening way. For some reason, Duncan almost expects them to start sniffing him. ‘My mum’s going to be so pissed off,’ he mutters.

  Ferris grins; a very slight movement, nonetheless showing the teeth. ‘Only if you tell her,’ he says.

  Which Duncan never gets round to doing; which is why, every lunchtime until the day comes when he dumps his tie in the bin on his way out through the school gates for the last time, he ritually discards an unopened tinfoil packet before seeing what his mates have brought him to eat. Over the years, he wavers in his loyalty. Sometimes his favourite is roast murdered cow, sometimes it’s murdered salami. (Nobody would tell him what sort of animal a salami was; at first he assumed it was short for salamander, until he saw a whole one hanging up in a delicatessen shop. For a while he felt guilty about eating cold sliced dachshund, but he came to terms with it in the end.) His greater loyalty, however - to Luke and the gang - never falters even for a split second, in spite of the detentions and suspensions and awkward times down at the police station; not for an instant, until the very end—

  ‘Why?’ Luke repeated.

  ‘Because—’ Duncan hesitated for a split second, then exploded, ‘Bloody hell, Luke, you can’t just spring something like that on someone and expect an instant yes-or-no answer. I’ve got to think about it.’

  His explosion had been more like a damp Catherine wheel: two or three unconvincing twirls and a few farted sparks. Luke was grinning, his teeth still as straight and white as ever. ‘Why not? I mean, what’s there to think about? You hate this shit-hole you’re at now, your whole life’s a complete mess. You need looking after.’

  This time, the flare of anger was hot enough to light the blue touchpaper of self-expression. ‘Absolutely,’ he snarled. ‘My whole life’s a complete mess—’

  ‘Well,’ Luke interrupted reasonably, ‘it is.’

  ‘I know.’ Not quite loud enough to silence the bar and turn heads, but almost. ‘You don’t actually need to remind me, thank you so very fucking much. And it’s been a complete mess ever since—’

  ‘Since she dumped you.’

  In the Middle Ages, they hunted the wild boar with a spear. You dug the butt end in the ground, shoved the pointy end at the approaching boar, and let the stupid creature kebab himself on it. ‘Well, yes,’ Duncan mumbled; but what he’d been about to say, because until Luke spoke it had been what he’d believed to be the truth, was ever since I left your stupid gang. And he’d been about to add that his decision to turn his back on the Ferris gestalt had clearly been proved to be disastrous, and he wasn’t fit to run his own life and obviously needed Luke to run it for him; but, regardless and in spite of all that, fuck off and die.

  He didn’t say any of that. He felt like a physicist who’s spend twenty years working on a theory, spending millions in hard-won research grants and devoting his life to the cause, and who finally achieves final and irrefutable proof that his basic hypothesis is a load of old socks.

  ‘The bitch,’ Luke said sympathetically. ‘But what the hell, it’s still no reason why you should carry on having a horrid time when you could be having a slightly less horrid one. Well?’

  But he couldn’t just roll over on his back and admit it. ‘Like I said,’ he muttered, ‘I need time to think about—’

  ‘Chicken.’ Very slight pause. ‘That’s murdered hen, to you.’

  You can’t really be offended and want to laugh at the same time, not unless you’re Duncan Hughes. He opened his face to say something, but closed it again, as it occurred to him to consider the significance of the fact that his ex-wife had also been a vegetarian.

  Then Luke said, ‘So, what was she like?’

  There’s a drug that supposed to make you tell the truth, whether you want to or not: the CIA buy it by the tankerload, presumably. Luke could’ve spiked Duncan’s beer with it, except Duncan hadn’t drunk any.

  ‘Tallish,’ he said. ‘A bit on the chunky side, though she lost a lot of weight. Straight dark hair; she was a lot into the Goth sort of look when I first met her, black clothes and spiky silver jewellery. A bit on the quiet side to begin with. She changed a lot after we left law school and started work.’

  ‘It happens.’ Luke nodded. ‘I gather it’s called growing up,’ he said. ‘I don’t reckon it much, and neither did Peter Pan.’

  ‘It wasn’t just that.’ Duncan frowned. For some reason, things long obscure were beginning to clarify in his mind. ‘She was always - well, quiet.’

  Luke nodded. ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Didn’t say a lot.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You sure she was female?’

  Girls had always liked Luke, of course, and Duncan had assumed that his air of arrogant disdain for them was just catnip; it certainly seemed to have that effect. But now there was an edge to his voice. Not bitterness, an echo of Duncan’s own attitude. More the unconcerned dismissal of the man who’s never been to a particular place and never wanted to. He bookmarked the insight for later.

  ‘Serious,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean no sense of humour, just - well, quiet.’

  ‘Boring.’

  ‘No, not boring. Just—’

  Luke shrugged. ‘Quiet, right. Nice-looking?’
/>
  Duncan pulled a face. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see. Nice-looking and didn’t talk all the time. You wouldn’t happen to have her phone number?’

  Duncan sighed; Luke frowned. ‘Go on,’ Luke said.

  ‘That’s about it, really. We met, we fell in love - well, I know I did, and she said she did too.’

  ‘Quietly?’

  ‘And when we both finished law school and qualified,’ Duncan continued sourly, ‘we got married. She’d got this job at Crosswoods lined up, I’d already got a place at Craven Ettins. We bought a flat in Battersea - it was just before it got too expensive - and everything seemed more or less OK. And then, one day out of the blue—’ He snapped his fingers. ‘And that’s all there is to it,’ he added sadly. ‘My life down the toilet, basically.’

  ‘Ah well.’ Luke shrugged again. ‘Spilled milk, plenty more fish, all that crap. I don’t really see, though, what any of that’s got to do with you quitting your job and coming in with us.’

  ‘You raised the subject,’ Duncan snapped back.

  ‘Yes,’ Luke said. ‘And obviously it’s relevant. It’s left you with a raw, bleeding hole where your self-esteem used to be, and that explains why you can’t be bothered to try doing something about your wretched, pointless existence. Fair enough; I can see exactly where you’re coming from. What I’m having trouble with is your reluctance to leave the barren desert island and let yourself get rescued by the passing ship. Can’t see the problem myself. Perhaps you’d care to explain.’

  It had never been what Luke Ferris said; always the way he said it. How else could anyone explain why instructions like you take this bowl of cold custard and balance it on top of the Head’s office door while I nip back and set off the fire alarm had, at the time, seemed not only wise and sensible but the only possible course of action in the circumstances? Later on, in the still calm of triple detention, it was possible to unpick the strands of his logic and trace the fatal flaws. But when Luke was giving you your orders, it was as though the Oxford University Press had recalled all the earlier editions of the Dictionary and replaced them with one containing only the single word Yes.

  ‘I need time to think about it,’ Duncan repeated.

  And Luke shrugged again. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You’d be an idiot to take a big decision like this without weighing up all the pros and cons, considering the implications, really thinking hard about what you want to do with your life.’ He smiled. ‘You can have as long as it takes me to get in another round. Then you can toddle back to Craven Ettins and clear your desk.’

  In spite of his mental turmoil, Duncan couldn’t let that pass. ‘Does alcohol have any effect on you at all?’ he asked.

  Luke smiled. ‘Long story. Be back soon.’

  There was, Duncan decided, only one thing he could sensibly do. He waited until Luke reached the bar and turned his back on him; then he jumped up and scuttled out of the pub as fast as he could go.

  Reception glared at him as he loped through the front office, looking nervously over his shoulder. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘You’ve had ever so many calls in the last ten minutes. Ferris and Loop—’

  He leaned on the desk, both hands planted, fingers spread, so that Reception leaned back nervously. ‘If Mr Ferris rings,’ he said loudly and clearly, ‘tell him I died. Got run over by a bus at the corner of Barditch Alley. Private funeral, no flowers. You got that?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Bus. Brakes squealing. Squelch. Flat as a pool table. Come on, picture it in your mind, it’ll help you sound convincing.’

  Duncan couldn’t stop himself sprinting up the stairs, hardly stopping to draw breath until he was back in his office with the door shut. He was tempted to drag the filing cabinet over to block the doorway with, but he guessed the partners might not approve. To hell with Luke Ferris and his rotten gang, he said to himself. I’ve been there once, I’m not going back. Ever.

  All that afternoon he felt as though his chair was stuffed with six-inch nails, and every time the phone rang he cringed. But apparently he’d shaken them off, at least for now. As four o’clock dragged by (it was one of those days when the Chariot of the Sun gets a flat tyre, and its fiery Charioteer has to get out and push it all the way to the portals of the sunset) he felt brave enough to suggest to himself that maybe, over the last fifteen years, Luke Ferris had learned how to take a hint. Curiously, in spite of the painfully slow movement of the clock hands, it turned out to be a reasonably good afternoon. No accountants rang in to point out his mistakes; no clients turned up unexpectedly to see him; no partners sent for him. He sat with his feet propped up on the opened bottom drawer of his desk, slowly enunciating a draft Deed of Trust into his dictating machine. Today, for a change, he was Richard Burton, with occasional intervals of Alec Guinness when the context called for it; and when he’d finished that he did Ian McKellen for the first sixteen clauses of a nil rate band discretionary will trust. Of course, when he hit the rewind and played any of it back, it sounded just like a duck quacking in an echo chamber.

  Quarter past five, and it occurred to him that maybe Luke and the gang might be waiting for him outside the building, ready to pounce as soon as he set shoe-sole to pavement. He fretted over that one for five minutes or so until the answer came to him: work late. After all, he had nothing special lined up for the evening (nothing special? Nothing at all: frozen pizza, TV, bed) and in the top drawer of his filing cabinet lurked the Allshapes estate accounts, which he’d been putting off revisiting for weeks. Two birds, one stone; he’d get that particular albatross off his neck, and by the time he’d finished, Ferris and the lads would’ve long since given up and gone away.

  Fine, he thought. Win/win scenario.

  The Allshapes file. Duncan took it out and looked at it for three minutes before opening it. All solicitors know that certain files have curses on them: it’s a simple fact, something they teach you on day two at law school. Sometimes the curse is relatively trivial: you buy the wrong house or, halfway through the case, you suddenly realise you’re supposed to be acting for the defendant, not the plaintiff. Other files bear the weight of darker spells: inconvenient misprints (remarkable, the effect of leaving out a little word like ‘not’ in a contract or a lease); title deeds that only show up once every hundred years, like the enchanted village in Brigadoon; as often as not, the real curse is the client himself. In the case of Bowden Allshapes, deceased, the curse seemed trivial at first sight but, after nine months of trying to deal with the bugger, it had grown so huge that it blotted out the light.

  Quite simply, there was something squiffy with the maths. Every now and again, when he felt brave or reckless or so demoralised he didn’t care, he’d get an up-to-date printout of the client account ledger, stick a new battery in his calculator and try and get the bastard thing to balance. Take a sheet of A3, draw a freehand line down the middle. On the left hand side, list all money paid into the account. On the right, payments made and cash in hand. The proverbial piece of cake; except that, each time he spread the printout in front of him on the desk, it was—

  And that’s where the Allshapes file got a bit spooky; because it was demonstrably the same as the previous edition: you could put them side by side, tick off the new entries and match the remainder with the earlier version. Except that it was also, in some way he simply couldn’t put his finger on, different. Something happened to all the numbers while Duncan’s back was turned; maybe they sneakily converted themselves from base ten to base eight (though he’d tried compensating for that and it made no difference). The visible symptom of this silent alchemy was that, no matter how many times you added up the numbers - the same fucking numbers, every time - they always came to a different total. One day the difference could be thousands; another, it’d only be out by 46p (but then you added it up again, and the discrepancy would swell to twice his yearly salary). Not that he’d have cared a damn if only he could have got the two sides of his A3 sheet to balance. But they would
n’t; not ever.

  Perhaps the weirdest thing about the Allshapes file was that the deceased’s heirs (two nieces and a nephew in South Africa) didn’t really seem to care that their uncle’s estate had taken six years to wind up and wasn’t settled yet. The revolting thing was worth two and a half million, give or take a few thousand, and they’d never had so much as a penny piece or a paper clip out of it. Instead, Duncan sent them interim bills, which they blithely approved by return of post; and Sarah, the younger niece, had taken to sending him cards at Christmas and, for some reason as yet obscure, the Chinese New Year. It was the saintly, unclientlike behaviour of people who should by rights have been his principal natural predators that made the file rather more than he could cope with.

  He opened the file and checked the date on the latest printout; recent enough that nothing on it should have changed, apart from the deposit interest. With a newly sharpened pencil he went down the page, drawing a little sun next to all the receipts and a tiny crescent moon beside each payment out. The familiar crawling feeling at the nape of his neck; but he washed it out of his mind with the image of Ferris and the gang standing out in the street shivering in the cold. This time, he said to himself (and his lips curved in an unconscious smile), let’s do this as slowly as possible.

  Outside in the world, he knew, it was cold and dark by now; and say what you like about Messrs Craven Ettin, they weren’t cheapskates when it came to light and heat. He had a radiator of his very own, and above his head the fluorescent tube burned brightly. His fingers on the calculator keys were as light and swift as a concert pianist’s, and he was nearly at the bottom of the first column of figures when the door opened and his concentration shattered like a glass dropped on a stone floor.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jenny Sidmouth, staring at him round the door frame.

  He was so pleased that it wasn’t Luke Ferris that he almost smiled to see her. ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘You’re still here.’