by Tom Holt
Three, four - ‘Duncan?’
‘Hi, Luke.’ Just enough of a pause to swallow some breath, then: ‘I’ve been sacked.’
‘Sorry, what did you—?’
‘They fired me. Craven Ettin. This morning.’
‘Bloody hell. Why? What’d you done?’
Duncan laughed, for some reason. ‘No idea.’
‘Any warning?’
‘Clear blue sky.’
‘What an absolute bugger. So, what can we do to help? You want us to sue them for unfair dismissal?’
Duncan closed his eyes. One small step for a lemming. ‘Actually, Luke,’ he heard himself say, and he sounded very far off and strange, ‘I was wondering if—’
‘Did they give you the proper written warnings; you know, the section one stuff? Because if they didn’t—’
‘No. Look—’
‘What about dispute-resolution procedures? Are there any in your employment contract? The tribunals come down like a ton of bricks—’
‘Actually,’ Duncan repeated, ‘I was wondering if I could have that job.’
Silence. You could have skated on it, or smashed it up to go in whisky. Floating chunks of it could’ve sunk liners.
‘I thought you’d decided you didn’t want to come in with us,’ Luke said.
‘Yes. Sort of.’ A mammoth trapped in the pause that followed would keep fresh for a million years. ‘But I’ve been thinking about that, and—’
‘Yes?’
He gave in. ‘The bastards say they won’t give me a reference,’ Duncan said.
‘That’s nasty,’ Luke replied. ‘You sure you don’t know what it was you did? You must’ve got up their noses so far you were practically coming out of their ears.’
Duncan counted to three. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘is the offer still open, or what?’
‘The partnership, you mean? Joining us?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, sure.’ Completely offhand, as though Duncan had just asked him for a light. ‘No problem there. Only, I got the impression you’d rather starve in the gutter and be eaten by rats.’
‘No, not really.’
‘Well, then.’ Luke sounded happy, for crying out loud. ‘Sorted. Tell you what. Drop in some time tomorrow morning, give us a chance to clear all the crap out of the upstairs front office. Do you prefer tea or coffee mid-morning?’
‘What? Oh, tea.’
‘Fine. No rush. I generally drift in around ten-ish, unless I’ve got to be in court. Give me half an hour to get the morning clutter out of the way, any time after that that suits you.’
‘Um,’ Duncan said.
‘That’s really good news,’ Luke said. ‘The others’ll be chuffed to buggery when I tell them.’
How could he be so sure of that? ‘Listen, are you absolutely sure—?’
‘See you tomorrow. Bye.’
‘Bye,’ Duncan replied into the dialling tone. He put the phone back, then wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge. One can of beer, a packet of plastic ham slices and a carrot. He ripped open the beer and drank it, but it bloated rather than anaesthetised him. He went back to his chair, sat down and closed his eyes.
Whether it was nervous exhaustion or the beer, he fell into a doze, which in turn slipped gradually into a dream. He was still in his chair, but in front of it was an office desk: a big, impressive thing made of shiny golden oak, with a green leather top. There was another desk next to his, and another in front of him; in fact, the room was full of the things, like a classroom. He looked up, and found that he was being glowered at by the teacher.
‘Duncan,’ the teacher said. ‘Perhaps you’d like to share the joke with the rest of the class.’
‘What, sir?’ he heard himself say.
There was something in his hand. He clenched his fist around it, but too late; the teacher had seen it, and advanced on him like a siege-tower. He knew that if he opened his hand and let the teacher see it, whatever it was, he’d be in all sorts of trouble.
‘All right,’ the teacher said. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’
He knew what it was: the ripped-off lapel of a jacket. To be precise, the lapel from the teacher’s suit. ‘I haven’t got anything, sir, honest,’ he said. ‘You can trust me, sir, I’m a lawyer.’
He raised his hand, opened it and showed that it was empty. The teacher nodded, then vanished in a shower of green sparks, as the rest of the class cheered.
The architecture of the office in Mortmain Street was early Mordor with strong Dalek influence: a gleaming rectangular tower of black glass, with fountains and palm trees in the entrance lobby, and doormen who looked as though they’d turn to stone in an instant if they happened to be exposed to direct sunlight. Ferris and Loop were on the twenty-first floor. The lift moved so fast, Duncan had an unsettling feeling that he arrived before he’d left.
The twenty-first floor, seen through the lift doors as they opened, wasn’t what he’d been expecting at all. There was a great deal of oak panelling, dark and glowing as though beeswaxed by generations of housemaids. The carpet on the floor was deep and expensive but softened with long use; old and very well cared for. The front desk was apparently genuine antique, beautifully figured and carved walnut but with heavily scratched legs. On the walls hung ancient, slightly faded tapestries, in what Duncan guessed was supposed to be Elizabethan style: hunting scenes and so forth. In one corner stood something that looked like a sawn-off church font: a large granite bowl on a marble plinth.
Reception was a small, elderly bald man with a pointed nose and very large ears. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, when Duncan told him his name. ‘Mr Ferris is expecting you,’ he added, making it sound as if Duncan was either the Messiah or Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent. ‘If you’d care to take a seat.’
Duncan looked round. One thing there wasn’t, in all this genteel splendour, was a chair. The old man was muttering into a phone, like an elderly clergyman intoning responses at evensong. On his desk, a VDU the size of the screens they show football on in pubs flickered and dissolved into a screen saver of prancing antelopes.
‘Do please sit down,’ the elderly man said. ‘Mr Ferris will be with you directly.’
Duncan glanced round again, but saw no chair. He turned away and pretended to be fascinated by the nearest tapestry - a bunch of big, nasty-looking dogs bothering an anatomically improbable unicorn, wearing what looked like a gold Christmas-cracker party hat.
‘Duncan. You’re here at last. Come on through.’
There was Luke. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, and his shirt-tails hung out over his trousers, as they had all those years ago. There was an enormous grin on his face as he lunged forward. For a moment Duncan thought he was about to offer to shake hands; instead, he walloped Duncan between the shoulder-blades like a cyclops performing the Heimlich manoeuvre, then grabbed him by the arm and dragged him towards a panelled oak fire door.
‘Guided tour,’ Luke thundered in his ear, as the door swung shut behind them. ‘The others’ll be down to see you in a tick, but I thought you might like to see the old dump first.’
Dump, oddly enough, wasn’t too inappropriate a term. A great deal of money had been spent at some point on decorating and furnishing; there was enough solid hardwood around the place to account for decades’ worth of despoiled rainforest. But every single desk, chair, table and door he saw as Luke whisked him along was chipped, scratched or gnawed up to a height of about four feet off the ground. The filing cabinets were more than usually battered, and the flex spaghetti that hung out of the back of the technology like disembowelled entrails was heavily patched with black insulating tape. The fabric of all the chair seats was frayed, and covered in grey and white hairs. All in all, it was a bewildering mix of industrial extravagance and lived-in scruff. There was also a curious smell, which Duncan couldn’t quite place.
‘Library,’ Luke said, as they swept through a huge room, floor-to-ceiling with the usual black, blue and fawn-spined volumes -
law reports, forms and precedents, the loose-leaf planning encyclopedias, Kemp and Kemp on mutilations, a whole wall full of tax statutes. On the floor, next to a battered grey waste-bin, something had apparently savaged an elderly and obsolete edition of Megarry and Wade’s Law of Real Property; it lay open on its broken spine, and several pages had been torn out, screwed up and shredded. In the opposite corner, a bank of computer screens showed the same running-antelope screen saver he’d seen in the front office.
Duncan frowned. ‘Does someone around here have a dog?’ he asked.
‘What? No,’ Luke snapped. ‘Why? You’re not allergic to dogs, or anything like that?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I’m not exactly what you’d call a dog person, but they don’t make me come out in spots or anything like that.’
‘Cashier,’ Luke said, pushing open a door like the DEA pulling a dawn raid. A little white-haired man with enormous glasses looked up at him from behind a huge desk, then went on with his work. None of those cloying how-utterly-wonderful-to-get-to-know-you introductions in this office. Back out into the corridor again; another swift forced march.
‘This is where we’ve parked you for the time being,’ Luke said, opening another door. ‘If you absolutely hate it, we’ll have to sort something out, but I hope it’ll do for now.’
Duncan’s office at Craven Ettins had, once upon a time, been a boiler room. It was small, windowless, cold in winter and murderously hot in summer; three people turned it into a Bakerloo Line carriage in the rush hour, and the door didn’t close properly. This office wasn’t like it at all. You could’ve staged the Olympics in it and still had room for a modest international airport.
‘You don’t like it,’ Luke said.
‘No, I mean yes.’ Duncan scrabbled frantically for words. ‘It’s big.’
‘What? Oh, I see. Well, it’s all right, I suppose. A bit cluttered for my taste, but you can chuck out anything you don’t want, obviously.’
Define clutter. There was a desk you could’ve landed Sea Kings on (but the legs were grooved with scratches) and the sort of chair that emperors used to sit on; a huge leather-covered sofa out in the western prairies; the wall opposite the door was one huge window, with a view of all the kingdoms of the earth; against the north wall, enough raw computing power to send a manned probe to Andromeda. If you lived in a room like this, sooner or later you’d be overwhelmed by the urge to be discovered sitting in your chair stroking a big fluffy Persian cat and drawling, ‘We meet at last, Mr Bond.’
Duncan found he was clinging on to the door frame. ‘It’s nice,’ he said.
Luke shrugged. ‘It’s an office,’ he said. ‘And at least you can sneeze without the walls getting wet. Seen enough?’
‘Luke.’ Duncan took a deep breath. ‘I think I ought to tell you something.’
‘What?’
‘All this—’ He made a vague gesture. ‘Must cost a fortune.’
Luke frowned. ‘Well?’
‘Which means you must be pretty bloody good at the job in order to pay for it.’
‘We manage.’
‘The thing is,’ Duncan said, slowly, in a very small voice, ‘I’m not a particularly wonderful lawyer. Like, on a really good day, I’m sort of middling to average. What I mean is, if I had a place like this, I wouldn’t hire me to wash down the bogs and frank the letters.’
Luke grinned at him. ‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘You were always fairly bright at school. Except maths, of course.’
‘Yes, but—’ Sort of a surreal feeling about this. ‘School’s different, isn’t it? Just because you can do French irregular verbs—’
‘You can do French irregular verbs?’
‘Well, yes. At least, I used to be able to. I’ve probably forgotten, of course.’
‘I’m impressed,’ Luke said. ‘I sort of tuned out at nous sommes, vous êtes.’
‘But that’s not important, is it? What I’m trying to say—’
‘The only maths I can do is adding up and a bit of subtracting,’ Luke said. ‘And I learned that from playing darts in pubs. No,’ he went on, shaking his head, ‘you don’t want to worry about not being bright enough, God knows. Lawyering isn’t exactly rocket science, after all. If I can do it, so can any bloody fool. The important thing is getting on well with your mates and having a reasonably good time while you’re at it. At least,’ he added, ‘that’s how we do things, and it seems to work all right for us.’
‘Oh.’ Definitely surreal; a job interview conducted by René Magritte and Salvador Dali, wearing silly hats. ‘Well, I suppose that’s all right, then.’
‘Excellent.’ Luke sounded like he’d just fixed up peace in the Middle East. ‘Well, you’ve seen pretty much everything. Come and meet the lads. They’re dying to see you again.’
The moment, in fact, that Duncan had been dreading. Luke on his own, he mused as he followed his soon-to-be partner down a long corridor, was one thing. Meeting the whole Ferris Gang again, on the other hand, was going to be—
Luke shoved open a door and called out, ‘He’s here’. He took a step back. Duncan couldn’t see past Luke’s substantial bulk, but on the other side of it a chorus of voices was baying his name. Then Luke grabbed his shoulder and bundled him into the room.
They crowded round him, their faces bobbing up and down in front of him, their hands hammering his back and pounding his shoulders, until all he wanted to do was sink to the floor and curl up into a ball. He heard himself mumbling names - hi, Micky; hi, Kevin; hi, Clive; hi, Pete - as though reciting the names of Santa’s reindeer or the Seven Dwarves. As for the faces, they were both strange and familiar. They’d aged, all of them. They all seemed to share the same greying hair, worn unflatteringly long. They also looked battered, like boxers who’d retired a couple of fights too late. Kevin’s nose had been broken at some point, and Pete had a long white scar on his left cheek, only partly overgrown by a bushy white-and-ginger beard. Most surprising of all, however, was the almost inhuman pleasure they seemed to get from seeing him again. He was looking great, really fit, he’d grown, they’d never seen him looking better; and as they laughed and barked and chuckled round him, they kept on pummelling and slapping at him until he felt like a slice of flash-fry steak. But when Luke cleared his throat, they all stopped their onslaught and stood still and quiet.
‘Guys,’ Luke said, ‘the man from Del Monte says yes.’
Kevin hugged him. Pete let out a rebel yell. Clive hammered him between the shoulder blades, while Micky punched him savagely in the solar plexus. For a moment, everything went black and wobbly; then he could just about make out Luke saying, ‘I’ve got the paperwork here on the desk, let’s all sign up before he changes his mind. Sod it, witness - Pete, get Bruce in here, he’ll do.’
Pete bounded away, as though chasing a rubber ball; the other three frogmarched Duncan over to a desk, on top of which were six shallow stacks of typed-on A4. ‘We’re all supposed to be lawyers,’ Luke was saying, ‘so I suppose you’d better read the thing first.’ Duncan found some papers in his hand, and looked down at them. This Deed of Partnership made the Day of Between and then a lot of names; legal mumbo-jumbo, wodges of it.
‘Finished?’ Luke said.
Duncan nodded. ‘Seems all right to me,’ he said. (But he was thinking: everything ready and waiting for me as soon as I arrive; a bit premature, surely.) ‘Bruce, over here,’ Luke was shouting, and the bald, pointy-nosed man from Reception squeezed through the slim gap between Clive’s and Kevin’s shoulders. Then Duncan felt a pen in his hand, and saw Luke’s fence-post-sized finger pointing to a dotted line.
He signed: six copies. The others were signing too, using each others’ backs to rest on, while the little bald man from reception sat behind the desk and witnessed each signature. He looked tiny in the shadow of the Ferris Gang - not one of them, Duncan noticed, under six foot - and he seemed to be curled in on himself, a hedgehog without the prickles. He’d barely finished writing when Pete bar
ked, ‘Right, fetch the champagne,’ and the little man jumped up and scuttled away, head bowed, legs pumping. He was, Duncan thought, either terrified or very well trained.
‘Everybody signed everything? Hang on, what’s today’s date?’ Luke was sitting on the edge of the desk, riffling stacks of paper like a Vegas blackjack dealer. ‘Pete, you missed one; here, look. Right, that’s it, we’re legal.’
A cheer that made the floor shake. This is very strange, Duncan thought, as the little bald man scampered back carrying the biggest champagne bottle he’d ever seen in his life.
‘Great stuff,’ Luke said; and the others stepped away, like veteran soldiers not volunteering. Duncan realised they were all standing behind him, as Luke slid his leg off the desk and came towards him. ‘Just one last thing,’ Luke went on, ‘and then we’re done. Duncan Hughes,’ he continued, as his hands reached out and pinned Duncan’s arms to his sides, ‘welcome to the partnership.’
And everybody cheered again as Luke leaned forward, bared his teeth and bit deep into the side of Duncan’s neck.
CHAPTER FOUR
The world had changed.
It was like fiddling with a TV’s tracking or vertical hold: one moment everything’s blurred and fuzzy, and then quite suddenly the picture’s crystal clear, the sound’s loud, distinct and in perfect synch, the colour’s right and you know that everything’s how it should be.
Little short of miraculous; because, a second or so ago, Duncan would have sworn blind that the fuzzy, blurry, foggy, mumbling reality he’d lived in for the last thirty-three years was about as good as it was likely to get, in terms of clarity and definition. All completely wrong, of course. For the first time in his life he could actually see, and hear. And smell. God almighty, he could smell. He had no idea how he’d contrived not to notice them before, but the world was crammed with an unbelievable wealth of scents, smells, odours and stenches; seven different flavours of incredibly rich and complex sweat, for one thing, not to mention the almost stifling perfume of the furniture wax, the dry, mellow background of dust, the bewildering medley of shoe polish and toothpaste and peppermints and stale beer and blood and bath salts; far more vividly perceptible than mere sight could ever be, and phase-shifted backwards through time, so that he felt he was taking in a whole week’s worth of perceptions simultaneously in a fraction of a second.