Little People

by Tom Holt

  Suddenly I grinned. ‘The Prisoner?’ I asked.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Didn’t, either. It was still love at third sight, even if she hadn’t been quoting from my favourite TV show. ‘Be seeing you,’ I repeated, and I did the little gesture, just in case. She didn’t remark on it, and I went back to the main building, where I was now seriously late for double history.

  And what, you may very well be asking, the hell had that got to do with elves? Well, I guess it depends on how you like your relevance: immediate, tangential or with lemon. I’m taking the line that it’s because of that initial encounter that Cruella Watson and I gradually slid in love – a long-drawn-out process that started with a grudged and wary non-aggression pact and slithered sideways into an unspoken acknowledgement that, when the teams of Life were picked, we’d always be the ones left over at the end, and therefore some kind of alliance was grimly inevitable. She was sullen, razor-tongued and miserable as sin, having a father who lived behind a desk in a solicitors’ office and a mother who despised her because her hair didn’t go with the curtains. I saw elves. Who in God’s name else would want either one of us?

  Ah, you’re saying, how sweet, and probably you’re right. Sweet, though, wasn’t a term you’d ever use to describe Cru, except together with the words she isn’t at all or not the slightest bit. She crunched a path through life like a small, steady ice-breaker. As regards the chicken/egg issue, opinions differ; I take the view that she’d have been pretty much the same if she’d been christened Jane or Fiona, while she maintained that her parents’ act of thoughtless whimsy had wrecked her entire life and therefore she wasn’t to blame and could do what she liked. It was, according to her hypothesis, the defining incident of her life, and there at least I could see where she was coming from. Her Cruella was my elf.

  That being the case, it was only a matter of time; indeed, it was as if I was under some kind of obligation in that regard. She’d told me her name. Honour demanded that I tell her about my elf. So, one wet and wretched Friday afternoon between last lesson and compulsory optional swimming, I did.

  ‘You did what?’ she said.

  ‘I saw an elf,’ I repeated. ‘Years ago, when I was just a kid. It was leaning against a lettuce in our garden, smoking.’

  She was silent for five, maybe six seconds. From my point of view, very long seconds indeed.

  ‘That’s bad,’ she said eventually.

  Didn’t like the sound of that. ‘What’s bad?’ I said. ‘I really did see one, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said. ‘But I thought everybody knew: smoking can damage your elf.’

  Completely deadpan, too, which made it worse. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have told you,’ I grumped. ‘It’s just—’

  ‘Oh, I believe you all right,’ she interrupted. ‘Let’s see: about so high, with pointed ears, sort of yellowygreeny skin, a bit knobbly round the knees and elbows.’

  She was right. I’d forgotten the knobbliness, or rather it had always been there in my mind’s eye but I’d never noticed it. ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘how did you—’

  ‘There was a picture of one,’ she said, ‘in my Little Blue Fairy Book; and even though I was only six, I remember thinking, God, what an ugly little runt, they must be real because nobody would make up something as ugly as that. Did yours have a pointy nose, like someone’d been at it with a pencil-sharpener?’

  I nodded. ‘Come to think of it,’ I said, ‘it did. Are you really telling me you believe—?’

  She shrugged. ‘Depends,’ she replied. ‘In the Peter Pan sense, probably not. In the sense of not actively not believing just because everybody’s always told me not to, quite possibly. Did I ever mention that my mum and dad had the fireplace bricked in when I was seven, just to prove conclusively there was no Father Christmas?’

  I frowned. ‘Proving nothing,’ I replied. ‘He could just as easily get in through a window.’

  ‘Not in our house. Not unless he’s got an oxyacetylene torch and a jackhammer, not to mention Dobermann-proof trousers.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘But that’s why I never needed to believe or not believe, you see. If there really had been fairies at the bottom of our garden, Dad would just have got a court order and had them slung out.’

  ‘I see,’ I replied. ‘What you’re saying is, there may be elves and there may not, you just aren’t particularly interested either way.’

  ‘I suppose so. I mean, it’s no harder believing in little men with sharp ears than it is believing in God, or relativity, or film stars; they’re all weird, and nothing to do with me. If you feel you want to believe in them, go ahead. If they’re ever relevant to anything, be sure and let me know.’

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It had all gone rather better than I’d expected, and now it was out of the way and we’d never have to go there again. A great weight off my mind, let me tell you.

  Hah. As if. But there, I’m getting ahead of myself, like a derailing train. At the moment I’m talking about, everything for once seemed to be working out. I’d told her about It, the great big enormous issue in my life that made me screwed-up and defective, and she didn’t seem to mind. I was sorely tempted to ask her to marry me, but fortunately I did no such thing; even someone with a name like Cruella can only stand so much weirdness in the course of one day.

  After that momentous dialogue, however, things did seem to move a bit more easily, as the WD40 of openness and trust seeped its way into the rusted-up threads of insecurity and self-loathing. To put it another way: I stopped creeping round like I had some unspeakable secret disease, which probably made me slightly more fun to be with. Given that Cruella’s choice of people to hang out with was limited to those who were prepared to put up with her moods and snippy fits – all one of me – the burgeoning of our relationship was probably not nearly as remarkable as I thought it was at the time.

  Excuse me if I’m getting philosophical; it’s a fault of mine, I know. Basically, I’ve always tended towards the view that life is just a bowl of cherries told by an idiot, as the sparks fly upwards; I accept the hand life has dealt me with passive, sullen resentment and get on with it. Back then, of course, it wasn’t all unalloyed hatefulness. People were mostly a pain, but things were pretty cool; whatever else Daddy George may have been, he wasn’t tight with his money, and when you’re a kid you tend to look no further than the next cool thing, whether it’s a skateboard or a Walkman or a better skateboard or a computer or an even better skateboard with carbon-fibre dampeners. As far as things were concerned, it was always pretty much a case of ask and ye shall receive the cash equivalent, plus the bus fare so ye can go and buy it yourself – Mummy and Daddy George believed very firmly in the time-is-money equation, and invariably opted to let me have the money and keep the time for themselves.

  Wonderful, as far as your average kid is concerned; except that, when you’re that age, at least half the fun of having some really cool thing is being able to wave it under the noses of your friends and bask in their jealousy and resentment. In my case, nobody ever seemed to care. If I had the latest model BMX bike straight from the factory gate or a pair of trainers so overwhelming in their coolness that I lost at least one toe to frostbite every time I put them on, nobody ever seemed to give a damn; I could even leave them lying about and nobody would deign to steal them. Accordingly, round about the time I first cut myself shaving, I stopped caring terribly much about mere artefacts and the kind of stuff I could have if I wanted it. Unfortunately this left a hole in my life about the same height, width and depth as me, and I was pretty well at a loss to know what to plug it with. True, that was about the time Cru came along; but I didn’t make the mistake of turning her into my new hobby. Like I said, I may be stupid, but I’m not thick.

  Even so . . . thanks largely to Cru and the opportunity she’d afforded me for the first full confession I’d ever made of my elf-seeing tendency, I was gradually working my way back out
of the pit I’d managed to tumble into eight years previously. It was as though I’d finally found the courage to go and see a doctor and find out that the symptoms I’d been fretting about for so long were just a slight cold, and not terminal cancer after all. If it didn’t matter about elves, I could start again; and gradually, day by day, that inner elf of mine started to fade. He was still there, but I didn’t have to go there any more. Instead, I tried to find something to like; and since Cru had made up her mind, on evidence as slender as the finest surgical suture, that she was naturally artistic and destined to create wonderful things out of bits of old junk, I reckoned I might as well be artistic too. This was, of course, a load of what mushrooms grow in, but fairly harmless as misapprehensions go, and if I’d carried it through and made it my life’s calling, I’d probably have turned out no worse than the average screw-up. As it was, I never got the chance.

  Enter the second elf.

  That particular end of term was hard for me. As if going home wasn’t bad enough in itself, being parted from Cru for the whole of rotten Christmas and wretched New Year was going to be torture (and if it wasn’t, every agonising, angst-crammed second of it, I’d want to know the reason why).

  Our parting was such sweet sorrow –

  (‘Well,’ I said, as my train pulled in to the platform, ‘bye, then. See you next term.’

  ‘Yup,’ she replied.)

  – but not so sweet or so ostentatiously sorrowful as all that. To look at us, you’d think our relationship was something quite other – pedestrian and lollipop lady, for example, or stockbroker and not particularly affluent client. Then, at the very last moment, for the very first time, she grabbed at where my hand would’ve been if I hadn’t moved it to scratch my nose. I reciprocated by putting my arms around her neck and carrying out a manoeuvre that would probably have ended with her head popping off her shoulders like a champagne cork if she hadn’t snapped, ‘Stop it, you’re pulling my hair,’ in a tone of voice you could’ve shaved with. Personally, even after all these years, I don’t think you could get more romantic than that without a general anaesthetic.

  ‘You’d better get on your train,’ she said. ‘You’ll look bloody silly if it goes without you.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Bye, then.’

  ‘Bye.’

  The train pulled away. I leaned out of the window and waved for as long as I could. She didn’t exactly wave back, but she didn’t exactly not wave either. I guess you had to have been there.

  By the time the train reached my home station it was as dark as a bag and just coming on to rain, which suited my mood so perfectly that I decided I’d walk the mile and a half back to our house rather than take a taxi. After all, I wanted to arrive feeling weary, footsore, bedraggled and desolate, as a way of striking a theme note for the coming holiday. I put down my case, which was suitably heavy and cumbersome, wrapped my handkerchief around the handle, and set off at a deliberate slow trudge.

  Half a mile into the mile and a half, I was beginning to feel that maybe gestures weren’t everything. A fold in my sock had rubbed a patch on my right heel that was as raw as Parma ham, and in spite of the improvised padding the handle of the case was cutting into my hand like a cheese-wire. My trudge wasn’t quite so deliberate any more, and it was also quite a bit slower. In addition, I was also going to be late for dinner, which would lead to a certain amount of ritual umbrage-taking and Force Two melodrama. Sod, I thought, and tried to pick up the pace a little.

  Well, at least there’s no better cure for a broken heart than a blistered heel and the prospect of a family row. I hadn’t thought about Cru even once since the folded sock started to make its presence felt, and that was surely a good thing, considered objectively. All I was thinking about at that precise moment was how much more of this ill-advised and rotten hike remained, and how very much nicer and more sensible it would have been to get a taxi.

  The very, very last thing on my mind right then was elves.

  It happened suddenly to say the least. One moment I was slouching along, thinking unhappy thoughts; the next I was nose down in a muddy puddle, feeling a sharp pain in my right knee and the palm of my left hand.

  ‘Aaaaaa,’ said a voice.

  It was a curious sound – loud, but small, if you know what I mean, like the frantic buzzing of a wet bumblebee – and it seemed to be coming from my navel. At first I assumed I’d fallen on my Walkman and somehow simultaneously ejected the tape and switched it on, the Aaaaaa sound being the resultant white noise. I revised that opinion when something wriggled under me and jabbed me hard in the solar plexus.

  Two theories; either I was pregnant and the baby was kicking, or I was lying on something small.

  Call me unscientific, but I rejected the first hypothesis out of hand without even reviewing the evidence. The obvious thing to do was to get up and stop squashing whatever it was into the mud-coated tarmac, but that proved to be easier thought than done. For one thing, the mud I’d landed in was extra slithery plus, now with 20 per cent added slither. For another, my right leg seemed to be out of order.

  ‘AasaaaaaaAAAA!’ said the voice, pointedly.

  As it so happened, I was pretty well used to that tone of voice, since it was one of Cru’s favourites, and I had a fairly shrewd idea of what it meant. ‘Hold on,’ I snapped back. (Silly, of course, to talk to a rabbit or a duck or a baby deer or whatever it was, but that was just instinct, you know?)

  ‘Aaaaaaoffme!’ shrieked the voice; and it was like when you’re twiddling with a radio dial and the signal suddenly becomes clear enough to understand. Who/whatever it was, it was talking to me in English. With a slight Welsh accent.

  ‘Eek,’ I replied, and rolled over onto my back. From my point of view, this wasn’t a good idea, since it meant I was now soaked to the skin and covered in runny mud the consistency of thin Bisto both front and back. But it shut up the little shrieking voice, so it was worth it.

  And that was the moment when I thought, Elves. Or, to be precise, Elves, shit, not again.

  ‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Arsehole.’ The same voice again, this time with the gain turned up or the tweeter tweeted or whatever you call it when the signal’s cleaned up and made easier to understand. ‘You fell on me, you bastard.’

  Swift and fleeting as a half-glimpsed Perseid, the thought crossed my mind that this probably wasn’t the same elf that was featured in Cru’s Blue Fairy Book. Well, maybe in the director’s cut, but not the version that made it out on general release. ‘Hello?’ I repeated.

  ‘Hello to you too,’ the voice snapped back. It was much louder now, and perfectly in tune. ‘Now fuck off and die, and leave me alone.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Am I all right?’ the voice repeated. ‘Oh sure, couldn’t be better. Apart from the broken leg and the broken arm and the three broken ribs, that is. Oh, and I think you’ve trodden on my hat, too.’

  I sat up and looked round, trying to figure out where in all that wet dark the voice was coming from. ‘Are you serious,’ I said, ‘about the broken bones and stuff? Where are you?’

  ‘Serious?’ jeered the voice. ‘Me? Nah. That’s not our way, being serious. Smashed bones? Ho, ho, ho. Of course I’m serious, you tall git.’

  Something in the way he said it suggested that tall was the worst possible epithet in his vocabulary. ‘If you’re hurt, we’ve got to get you to hospital, quick – Why are you laughing?’

  More than that, though of course I didn’t mention it; every time he laughed, I could distinctly hear air whistling, like a plastic bag with a tiny hole in it. Not just broken ribs but a punctured lung as well. ‘Where are you?’ I yelled.

  ‘Where you can’t find me, traitor.’ The sudden bitterness in the voice made me shrink back as if I’d just been slapped across the face. ‘So this is as far as I get, after all that work; it’s still out. Death is freedom too, tall bastard.’

  ‘What the hell are
you going on about?’ I shouted.

  ‘And will you bloody well stop playing about and tell me where you are? Please?’

  More laughter, getting steadily more ragged and frightening. ‘You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Wanted, dead or alive – isn’t that what you people say?’ I’d found a bit of old stick and I was poking about at random, trying to locate the owner of the voice by touch. Well, you do some pretty dumb things when you’re all rattled to hell. ‘You won’t find me, tall person. Oh, don’t worry, I know who you are, I know you’re able to see me; but I’m outside the limits, remember, I’m actually me again, even if it’s only for as long as it takes to—’

  Funny, I thought, why’s he stopped talking in mid-sentence like that? Then I felt something soft and sort of padded under the point of my stick, and looked down. Odd that I hadn’t seen it before, when I’d been looking at that exact spot just a second ago, or so I’d thought.

  An elf. A palpable elf. Dead, but palpable.

  Now that was a moment of great weirdness, let me tell you. I’d never seen a dead person before, but I’d seen plenty of roadkill, muddy corpses of foxes and rabbits and badgers. But what it – he – reminded me of most strongly was a doll or a teddy bear, pitched out in the mud and trodden on; more upsetting, in a way, than any dead life form.

  Zippy, I thought, absolutely bloody fantastic. Seen two; killed one. And what in God’s name was I supposed to do with a dead elf?

  (Hey, said a nasty little voice inside me, wouldn’t that make a great one of those little Christmas joke books, a hundred and one uses for—)

  Real-life instinct cut in, and I spun round, staring into the gloom in case anybody’d seen me. As far as I could tell, I was on my own, unobserved. The sensible course of action, needless to say, was to run away as fast as possible.

  One of these days, I may actually do the sensible thing, though most likely only by accident and coincidence. One of these days.

  As I stood there, like a life-size statue of an idiot, several distinct trains of thought were chuffing chaotically through my fuzzed-up little brain. Elves aren’t human, one of them whispered seductively, so therefore killing one can’t be murder, because surely it’s only murder when you kill people. Nothing to be afraid of, proclaimed another, because after all, it was an accident, you didn’t do anything wrong, you’re innocent; and if you’re innocent, well, what have you got to be scared about? A third one was saying, Don’t listen to them, you’ve got to hide the body right now before anybody comes past, sees you and calls out all the coppers in Surrey. Furthermore (continued the third tempter) it’s such a wee tiddly little body, surely it’s not going to take all that much cleverness and ingenuity to find an equally wee and tiddly little coffin-shaped hole to stuff it into? The fourth voice, which was just plain dead miserable, was warning me in a dull mumble against getting so much as a single elf hair or flake of elven dandruff on myself, because all modern forensic science needed to nail my bum to the floor was just a quarter of a molecule of misplaced DNA. There were fifth, sixth and seventh voices too, but even I wasn’t gullible enough to take any stock of what they said; my guess was that in their spare time they wrote the leader columns for the newspapers with the small pages, they were that implausible.