by Tom Holt
Subconsciously, in spite of what Polly had told him, he must have been expecting to find that the dry cleaners was exactly where it had been yesterday. It wasn’t. The convenience store, the video library, the mobile-phone shop, but no dry cleaners. That stopped him in his tracks, and he stood quite still for a moment, staring. Then he went into the convenience store. The nice lady told him no, there was no dry cleaners there; she believed there was one in Albion Street, that’s straight down the road, first left, second right, then second left, keep going till you see a (he tuned out). She and her husband had been running their store for seven years, ever since they moved down from Leicester. He bought a Mars bar and a packet of drawing-pins, thanked her and left.
He crossed the road and stood exactly opposite the store, looking closely at the invisible line dividing it from the video library. Invisible being the relevant word; no sign of a crack, join, seam, emergency filling or rendering. His guess was that the same landlord owned all the shops in the group, because the upper storeys were one continuous spread of homogenous brickwork, all painted the same colour, as far as he could judge all at the same time. The roof tiles matched and were equally discoloured. With his phone he took a couple of pictures; next, he walked up the street to the corner and then back again, past the shops, to the next road, counting the number of buildings. Then he went home.
Back at his flat, he logged on to Google Earth and zeroed in on Clevedon Road. The pictures he got were understandably hazy, but he saved them and got to work with a high-powered enhancement program he’d got free with a magazine. They were, of course, aerial photographs, so he couldn’t see the shop frontages; but he counted the number of roofs, and found that it didn’t tally, by one, with the count he’d made earlier. He double-checked. That was when he got the funny feeling in the pit of his stomach.
Next he uploaded the pictures from his phone and used another free program to rotate them through ninety degrees for a bird’s-eye view. All that achieved was a series of straight lines, but it did give him the relative proportions of the frontages. He superimposed them onto the Google pictures and got a confused tangle of overlapping lines.
The Google people don’t tell you when their wonderful images were taken, but he got lucky there. Outside the convenience store was a newspaper sandwich board; zooming in and enhancing, he was just able to make out the headline; the results of the Tonbridge by-election, which meant the photo was something like eighteen months old. At this point he got up, soaked a flannel in cold water, and laid it across his forehead. Didn’t help.
The next two hours were extremely boring; but, thanks to the Net and a surprisingly helpful woman at the council offices, he established that, as far as local government records were concerned, there had never been a dry cleaners in Clevedon Road, and the block in question (built in 1926 by a local speculative builder called Morrison; sold by his daughter in 1969 to a property company, Yule Vasey) consisted of seventeen properties. Could she please confirm that; seventeen? Yes. Not eighteen? No. Thank you so much.
Yule Vasey had been taken over in 1974 by City and Suburban Property Portfolios, who in 1982 succumbed to the blandishments of Higson Trust, who in turn sold out to White Shark Property in 1995. White Shark was a wholly owned subsidiary of Western General Holdings, which had merged in 2002 with the Chen Hua Group. A nice lady at Western General promised to call him back, but didn’t.
At this juncture he paused to gobble ibuprofen and take stock. Local government, his phone camera and his own two eyes all agreed that there were seventeen buildings on Clevedon Road between Chamberlain Street and Spenser Way, and that none of them was now or ever had been a dry cleaners. On the other hand, approximately eighteen months ago, Google’s eye-in-the-sky had plainly seen an eighteenth roof; furthermore, the roof currently situated next door to the convenience store was something in the order of one and a half metres longer than the one Google had seen there when it glanced down from the bar of heaven.
Back to the search engines. He had to pay money for it, but he managed to get a download of the 1934 edition of the Ordnance Survey; the large-scale version used by lawyers and estate agents to draw up plans. Eighteen buildings. Next, he got on to the Land Registry, who were delighted to help on payment of the appropriate scale fee, but could only release information on receipt of the relevant form, a copy of which they sweetly put in the post to him. Something to look forward to. He also ordered a copy of the latest edition of the Ordnance Survey.
By then, however, he’d come to the conclusion that he had enough data. More than enough.
Clearly there were two opposing schools of thought here, the eighteens and the seventeens, and it didn’t really matter which side the Land Registry and the OS people chose to adhere to. What mattered was the divergence of opinion. On his desk next to the computer he’d placed the receipt he’d been given when he picked up his trousers and overcoat, only yesterday. He looked at it for a long time, then closed his eyes and tried to think.
He knew there had been a dry cleaners there, because he’d seen it, been inside it; he had the receipt, the polythene wrapping his clothes had come back in (salvaged from the bin, a bit the worse for wear and coffee grounds, but undeniable in its physicality) and, of course, the pencil sharpener. He found that he was humming the old eighties song that includes the words;
I would like a souvenir
Just to show the world was here.
On the other hand (which by now was rapidly turning into the other tightly clenched fist) he’d been there, looked, walked and counted, and he had City Hall to back him up. There were seventeen buildings in that block, and none of them dry-cleaned clothes for money.
Shit, he thought.
He looked at his watch, then Googled a chart of time zone differentials. Unless they were hopeless insomniacs in Hong Kong, the Chen Hua people wouldn’t be answering their phones for another eight hours. He sent them an e-mail, tried Western General again, got through to another nice lady who promised to call him back.
All right, he said to himself. So what am I supposed to do about it? I don’t want to right wrongs, find out the truth that is out there or solve the fundamental mysteries of quantum fluctuations in the space/time multimatrix. I just want to get my sister’s party dress back, so she’ll stop worrying and get off my case. Presumably it’s my civic duty to tell someone in authority, just in case this is the tip of some catastrophic iceberg, but even if I could figure out who I’m supposed to tell, they’d only laugh at me; and if not the authorities, then who? You and Yours? Esther Rantzen?
He spared a brief moment of compassion for all the honest people out there, in Oklahoma and places like that, who come home from being abducted by aliens to find Elvis is gabbling away in their microwaves again; people who’ve seen something and know it’s true, but can’t or daren’t pass on the news to the rest of the species. Their biggest mistake, he’d always thought, was wanting to: the fatal urge to communicate to an outside world that simply doesn’t want to know. Human ignorance, after all, invalidates nothing; the world was just as round before Columbus was born, and gravity would still have worked if Isaac Newton’s father had never planted an apple tree in the garden. By the same token, he appeared to have stumbled across evidence of the existence of a phenomenon that could gobble up a building and partially erase its existence from the timelines. So what. Big deal. If he was prepared to miss out on paragraphs in science textbooks and having his portrait on a 50p stamp, he was under no obligation to share.
But that wouldn’t get Polly her dress back. More to the point, turning a blind eye would mean he’d have to lie to her, and for some reason he didn’t want to do that. Telling her the truth, on the other hand— She’d believe him. That was the awkward part. She’d believe him, and what effect was that likely to have on her already precarious mental state?
Maybe, he thought, I could just buy her another dress.
Nice idea, but it wouldn’t work. For one thing, he knew how incredibly picky she was about s
tuff like that. It had to be exactly the right size, shape, colour, God only knew what else; there were all sorts of technical things he knew nothing about. And even if he was unbelievably lucky and managed to get her something she liked, that’d do him no good at all. Why’ve you bought me a dress, Don, she’d say, when you couldn’t even be bothered to remember my last three birthdays. If you’ve started buying me presents, things must be really, really bad—
No; in order for that to work, it’d have to be an exact replica of the one that appeared to have fallen down the back of Infinity; and the chances of finding something like that were infinitesimally small. Stupid of him even to consider it.
He shifted in his chair, and something jabbed him in the thigh. It turned out to be the corner of the pencil sharpener, which was still in his pocket. He sighed, took it out and put it on the desk. Yesterday, in some weird kind of way, it had been a source of inspiration, but the mess he was facing now was something he couldn’t just sharpen his way out of. He picked it up again; a ridiculous object, fussy and ostentatious—
It was warm.
Well, of course it was. He’d just taken it out of his pocket. He turned it over a couple of times. He could probably get a fiver for it on eBay.
It came to me, my own, my precious. But it wasn’t his birthday, and it was silly to imagine that it had anything to do with him finishing off the jingle so painlessly. He sighed, and let it fall off the palm of his hand onto the desk, which cracked down the middle and split in two.
Oh, he thought.
He knelt down and picked it up from where it had landed on the carpet. Definitely warm. His desk was sagging in the middle where the top had split. I’ve had just about enough of this, he thought, and stood up to lift the computer to safety. With a soft click, the desktop came together again. Mended, good as new. Not even a mark, or a seam.
Reminded him of something. He frowned. It was one of those moments when he wished he did a lot of serious drugs, because then he could blame it all on a flashback. All right, he thought, here goes. He closed his hand round the pencil sharpener, until he could feel its corners digging into the palm of his hand. If you’re so clever, he thought to himself (no, to it), what about a dress for my sister?
There was no movement, no twitch glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. It was just there, lying neatly folded on the desk, where the crack had been, with dry-cleaners’ plastic all around it. Holding the pencil sharpener tight in his right hand, he reached out with his left and drew the dress towards him. At the point where the arms of the hanger were twisted round to form the hook there was a label; green, with a number, the day before yesterday’s date, the name ‘Mayer’ in blue pen, and a printed address in Clevedon Road.
It was as though someone had kicked his knees out from under him. He landed arse-first in the chair rather than sat down, and his eyes didn’t seem to want to focus. So that’s it, he said angrily to himself. Magic.
Angry; he was furious. A lifetime of rational thought. A lifetime dedicated to the twin goals of reasonable, logical explanation and doing as little work as possible, and now he discovered that there was magic in the world. It was insulting. It was how Columbus would have felt if he’d sailed two days beyond the Azores and found himself falling off the edge.
He could just about reach the phone from where he was sitting. He dialled a number.
“Polly Mayer, please.”
“One moment.” Pause. “She’s not answering her phone right now, can I take a message?”
He breathed out heavily. “Yes. Tell her Don called, I’ve got it here but she can damn well come over and pick it up.”
“Got that. Thank you for calling.”
Magic, for crying out loud. The superbloodynatural. One pencil sharpener to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Well, he wasn’t having that. What if (he cringed) his jingle, his masterpiece, his seven-note Brandenberg Concerto turned out to have been composed by magic, by the grossly overspecified graphite-nibbler still snuggling in his right hand, and not by him at all? He wasn’t sure he could handle that. Surely it would invalidate what should have been the crowning glory of his career, and that in turn would undermine everything else he’d ever done or would do in the future. How could he ever bear to work again?
Yes, whispered a little voice in his head, but with magic you’d never need to work again. Ever.
Pause. Backspace. What did you just say?
With magic, the little voice insinuated, you could be rich. Effortlessly rich. Have anything you wanted, just like that. Well? How about it?
Another pause. Then; You did always say you were only in it for the money.
Yes, he conceded, I do tend to say that, don’t I? And if all I had to do was snap my fingers—
He snapped his fingers. Nothing happened.
Ah, he thought, a gadget moment. As in, you’ve brought it home from the shop, you’ve burrowed through the cardboard and the polystyrene and the shrinkwrap, you’ve plugged it in and switched it on, and it doesn’t work, and the instructions are in Arabic, Cantonese and Lithuanian. He knew all about that. All the more reason, therefore, to ignore it. Pretend it hadn’t happened, dump the pencil sharpener in a bin somewhere, go back to a world governed by Newton and Einstein and equations and times-tables, where everything makes sense eventually if you work away at it for long enough—
He looked at the dress. Horizontal stripes. Eew.
But it was there, on his broken-and-mended desk. Magic had put them both right; admittedly, magic had caused the problems in the first place. Maybe that was all it could do, clear up its own messes. But then he thought about the seventh note. Had that been magic, too? If so, how dare it. Intrusive, interfering, bossy, always having to know best, as bad as his mother (almost as bad). He could have got that note perfectly well on his own, given time, given a lot of time, maybe.
It was as though he’d won first prize in a competition he hadn’t entered; something big and flash and horrendously expensive which he didn’t actually want, but he’d won it, so there was an obligation… The thing about shrinkwrap was, of course, that once you’ve opened it, you can’t take the product back to the shop for a refund, and you’re bound by the terms and conditions, even if you never wanted it in the first place and you don’t know how to make it work.
He snapped his fingers again. Zilch.
Not exactly a fair test, since he hadn’t actually been wishing for anything at the time. He made a decision: stop sulking, concentrate, try and get this thing up and running.
He sat down at his desk and closed his eyes. His mind went blank. He sighed. What he needed to do was to run a controlled experiment. Quantifiable results, definitive success/failure parameters, and preferably something that wouldn’t blow up the planet or bend the fabric of reality if he got it wrong. Science. Scientific method applied to the quantification of bloody magic. Crazy.
“I would like,” he said out loud, “a ten-pound note.”
He waited. Nothing happened.
Try saying the magic word. “Please?” Still nothing. No humming noises, tingling sensations, gusts of wind, flashes of blue light. He searched the desk, in case it had got lodged under something. Nothing there. He tried to remember exactly what he’d done when he conjured up Polly’s dress. The trouble was, he couldn’t remember doing anything. He could feel a tight knot of tension in his chest, the one he tended to think of as the reinstalling-AOL sensation. Then a thought occurred to him. He took out his wallet, opened it, and found a ten-pound note where there hadn’t been one before.
Well, of course. Magic, it appeared, was logical. Ask for money, it delivers it to where money is kept. Where else?
That put a slightly different complexion on it. Ten quid, for doing nothing. He held the note up to the light, made sure the Queen was looking in the right direction, ran a finger over it to see if the ink smudged. Ten quid. Hmm.
Another thought struck him. He logged in to his online banking program and called up his cu
rrent account. Withdrawals: £10, today’s date.
Disappointing; but at least it provided useful data. He’d wished for a dress for Polly, and what he’d been given was Polly’s dress – not a brand new one materialised out of the ether, but her actual dress from the dry cleaners. The significance had escaped him at the time, because that precise dress was the one he’d wanted. Could it be that magic couldn’t create anything? Thanks to a childhood’s worth of story-book misinformation, he’d assumed that magic could pull stuff out of the air, like a Star Trek replicator. Maybe it couldn’t do that; indeed, no reason to assume that it could. Maybe it could only affect stuff that already existed. He wanted a dress for Polly to go to her darts match in; he got the missing horizontally striped monstrosity. He wanted ten quid; they sent him ten quid that already existed, in his bank account.
No, he was missing the point. There were loads of ten-pound notes in the world; real, physical ones, pieces of printed paper. Only a tiny proportion of them was he entitled to treat as his own. Magic had selected one of that tiny subset to fulfil his order. Did this imply an ethical dimension? If magic could only handle things that already existed, then it followed that it could only affect property, stuff that belonged to somebody or other. Maybe magic couldn’t bring him a dress or a banknote that belonged to somebody else, because that would in effect be stealing. Interesting hypothesis; how did it apply to the seventh note? It could be argued that it did apply, since he’d have found the note for himself sooner or later, and therefore (in a sense) it was his note in the eyes of transcendental metaphysical law. All magic had done was let him have it earlier than usual.
On one level, he quite liked that theory. It meant that the cheating aspect wasn’t quite so bad. Also, it suggested that the scope of magic was severely limited, which suited his preferred view of the world. The broken desk, now; well, that fitted, too. Magic broke his desk, magic had fixed it. If he went to the flat next door and smashed a window, would magic fix that for him? He considered trying the experiment, but decided on balance not to.