by Tom Holt
‘Oh,’ I said.
She paused, her arm drawn back to launch a black plastic desk tidy. ‘What the bloody hell do you mean, “oh”?’ she snarled tearfully. ‘For pity’s sake, at least make an effort instead of grunting like a sick pig.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I understand, really I do.’
‘Understand what?’
I took a deep breath. Wasn’t easy, because even though it was ten years or forty-eight hours since I’d last set eyes on her, I realised I still felt exactly the same about her (a sort of nervous devotion, like those people in South America who worshipped volcanoes) and having to admit it was all over between us hurt like careless dentistry. ‘That it’s time we got on with our lives,’ I said, ‘recognised that – well, we’ve grown apart, basically. I mean, you’ve got your career, you’ve obviously achieved so much in the last ten years—’
‘As opposed to a measly brace of Nobel prizes?’
I shrugged. ‘That wasn’t me, we both know that. I’d only hold you back. To be honest, I never was good enough for you – shit, that hurt.’
‘Good.’
I’d been wrong about the plastic desk tidy: it flew pretty straight, and turned out to be chunkier than I’d thought. ‘So,’ I went on, skipping down behind the desk, ‘I guess it’d probably be for the best if I just sort of wander off now and let you get on with what you were doing.’
Pause, during which she didn’t throw anything or even sniffle. ‘All right,’ she said.
‘You’re OK with that, then?’
‘Sure. And you can come out now. I’ve put down the file-card box.’
Well, the basis of any lasting relationship is trust; and she had, too. Just as well. One of those things could give you a nasty bump on the head. I straightened up and looked at her. The expression on her face was – well, neutral, really.
‘So,’ she said, ‘what’re you planning to do?’
I scratched my ear, not that it was itchy or anything. ‘Haven’t thought about it,’ I confessed. ‘Really, I don’t think I’ve got that many options to choose from. I’ll have to go back.’
‘Back? Where back?’
‘The other side of the line. Elfland. I mean, there’s nothing for me here any more.’
‘I see.’ Her stare would’ve kept a woolly mammoth oven-ready for a million years. ‘Back to your six-inch friends, huh?’
‘Sorry, didn’t I explain about that? Over there, you see, they’re normal height. In fact, normally they’d be normal here, it’s just that my stepfather electrocutes them as soon as they arrive.’
‘Ah.’ She nodded. ‘That’d account for it. So this lady friend of yours—’
‘She’s not—’ I started to say, then I realised what she was doing. In order to cancel out her own guilt about having found someone else, she needed me to have done the same thing. Brilliant, the way I figured that out; no formal training, sheer intuition. I honestly believe I could’ve had a career in psychology if I’d had the chance. ‘Normal height, that’s right,’ I said.
‘Cute, is she?’
I shrugged. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Blonde, They all are, in fact.’
‘How unspeakably Aryan. Well, there you go. Best of luck.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, looking away. ‘The same to you, too. Thanks again for everything.’
‘Just doing my job, really.’
‘Doing it very well,’ I replied, because it’s always a good idea to help people maintain their self-esteem. ‘Oh, you won’t get in any trouble, will you? With the police, I mean. If I go away again.’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ she replied. ‘So, how do you do this going-back thing? I’ve never seen real magic before.’
‘It’s very simple,’ I told her. ‘All I need is some grass, and a circle. In fact, for all I know the grass isn’t necessary and carpet will do just as well. No special effects or anything.’
‘I see. Well, I’d better let you get on with it, then.’
‘All right. Though,’ I added, ‘I’m not in any particular hurry. Over there, you see, time has no meaning.’
She sighed. ‘Wouldn’t suit me, then. In this office, time costs between two and seven pence a second, depending on whether you’re a partner, an assistant solicitor or a legal executive. I suppose lawyers on your side have a completely different charging structure.’
‘I guess so,’ I replied. ‘Assuming there are any lawyers over there. To be honest with you, I wouldn’t have thought they had any use for them.’
She looked at me oddly. ‘No use me going there, then,’ she said.
I wasn’t quite sure why we were talking about legal fees, but my intuition told me she was just making conversation to ease over the high residual awkwardness levels. ‘I suppose not,’ I replied. ‘Actually, I don’t think you’d like it much. Things are very different there. People, too.’
‘Oh? In what way?’
Nicer, I didn’t say; neither did I explain that since everybody there was gentle and polite and almost lethally pacifistic, she’d stick out like a lion in a den of Daniels. ‘It’s very quiet,’ I said. ‘Dull, really. You’d be bored stiff in five minutes.’
Which of course wasn’t true, since all the boring bits got edited out; and I had my doubts about whether she’d be all that out of place, bearing in mind the abrupt personality change I’d experienced while I was there. If Elfland made me assertive, loud-mouthed and uppity, surely it’d turn her into a baa-lamb. In fact, I knew exactly what she’d be like there, since I’d already met her.
Eeek, I thought.
If I really was a Nobel-prizewinning maths genius, I’d probably have been able to figure out what’d happen if Cru and Melissa, identical twins apart from the differences, were ever to meet face to face. But I wasn’t, and I really didn’t fancy the possibility that the result would be a very loud and destructive explosion. Besides – cards-on-table time – Cru being all sweet and gentle just wouldn’t be right, I’d been there and seen that and, as far as was concerned, you could keep it. The Cru I wanted, the one I was in love with—
Anyway.
‘You wouldn’t be happy there,’ I said. ‘That’s assuming you’d even be able to get across, which I doubt – there’s all sorts of rules and science stuff that reckons it’s not possible. I can, of course, because I’m half an elf already, but as far as you’re concerned I just don’t know. Anyway, not worth the risk, really.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
I looked at her sideways. Total absence of emotion, like a waxwork Vulcan. The sort of look that makes you think that if you whispered something in her ear, you’d probably end up being deafened by the echo.
‘Well, must fly,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know where the nearest lawn is, do you? I think I’d better stick to grass for the time being.’
‘Down the stairs, out through the main doors – just press the button, they’re electric – then keep bearing left until you come to a flight of steps going down; at the bottom of those take a right, under a sort of portico thing, left there, straight on about twenty-five yards, straight ahead of you, can’t miss it. Sort of cloister arrangement where the typing pool eat their sandwiches in summer.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, trying to remember what came after the electric doors. ‘Oh, and can I borrow a dustbin or something? To make a circle in the grass with.’
‘Help yourself. That one big enough, or do you need the next size up?’
‘No, that’ll do fine. Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Neither of us moved. Part of me, approximately ten per cent by volume, was wishing there was some way to make all this easier on her. The remaining ninety per cent was wishing there was some way to make it all easier on me. No dice on either account, seemed to be the consensus of opinion.
‘You’d better empty it first,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘The dustbin.’
‘Oh, ye
s, right.’ I looked round. ‘Where?’
‘Outside. Where you’re going to turn, turn right, then right again, that’ll bring you to the trash chute. Then to get back, instead of left then left again, which’d just be retracing your steps, go straight on, then left and just follow the alleyway round till you come to a sort of sunken floor arrangement; there’s a left turn directly opposite where you’ll have come in, take that, then the third right, brings you back to where you started from.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘OK, I’ll find it.’
Did I mention that my sense of direction is so amazingly acute I could get lost in a telephone box? Sad but true. I made a mental note to dump the few pieces of screwed-up paper nestling inside the bin into another bin on my way back through the office.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘I guess this is goodbye, then.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘from what you were saying, it doesn’t sound like you’ll be coming back.’
I tried a nonchalant shrug, which turned out like a mudslide off a giant blancmange. ‘No way of telling, really,’ I said. ‘Who knows, I may really hate it. After all, last time I was only there for what, three-quarters of an hour. I may decide I can’t stick it and come back.’
She frowned at me, clearly debating whether it was worth the hassle and weirdness involved in getting me to explain how I’d disappeared ten years ago but only been away for forty-five minutes. An untroubled mind and a quiet life must’ve won out, because she sniffed and started fidgeting with a plastic cup full of paper clips. ‘Don’t suppose you will,’ she said. ‘Oh well. Have a nice life, wherever you finally end up.’
‘You too,’ I replied, and picked up the dustbin. I guess it must’ve stood there a fair old time, to judge by the way it’d marked the carpet. I was ready to go now, but I couldn’t resist one last cheap parting shot. ‘Whoever he is,’ I said (head averted, in fact straight into the dustbin, which imparted a wonderful booming resonance to my words. Cross between God and a railway station announcement), ‘tell him from me, he’s a lucky man.’
She gazed at me with an expression of bewilderment, understanding, contempt and joy, all mixed together and steeped in relief. Then she called me a rude name and threw the paper clips at me.
As a half-elf and a serial Nobel prizewinner, I can probably explain just why a plastic cup full of paper clips makes such a rotten missile. The ballistics of it are actually quite interesting; it’s all to do with the weight-to-surface-area ratio of the cup and the way in which the shifting contents alter the centre of gravity while the arc of the trajectory is still developing. But we’ll leave that on one side for now, maybe come back to it later once we’ve got the next chunk of narrative out of the way. The net result, which is what we’re concerned with here, was that I ducked to get out of the way but, because the cup’s flight path described an outswinging curve, I contrived to put my head where the cup finally decided to go.
On a scale of one to ten, where ten is a right cross to the chin from Mike Tyson and two is a greenfly landing on your nose, I guess the impact of the cup registered a solid 0.000000000000000000000001. In other words, it wasn’t the cup that knocked me off balance at all. If anything, it was my trying to get out of the revised line of fire at the very last minute that made me wobble on the ball of my left foot, overbalance and go plunging forward like a badly felled tree. Cru, it turned out, had far better reflexes than me. She cleared out of the way with a very impressive standing jump, which left her with both feet in the dustbin. Unfortunately, the confinement of her movements caused by the sides of said dustbin meant that she couldn’t move her feet to adjust her balance. So, after a moment of perfect equilibrium during which she stood perfectly upright, like a ball on top of the stick perched on the trained sea lion’s nose, she toppled sideways like a felled bowling pin.
I’d like to claim that it was a combination of true love and instinctive chivalry that made me reach out and grab her before she cracked the side of her head on the edge of the desk. The rather less attractive truth is that I was trying to fend her off me, and missed. Besides, I wasn’t giving the falling-about aspect of things my full attention. I was too preoccupied with the implications of that look, and the ensuing bombardment. Could it possibly be the case, I was wondering, that I’d completely misinterpreted everything she’d said and seemed to imply, and that there wasn’t a somebody else after all, and that maybe, just possibly, she was still in love with me? If so, It changed everything, because . . .
And while I was figuring out exactly what it changed. while tottering backwards into the incuse ring pressed into the carpet by the waste-paper basket with my arms full of Cru, everything suddenly stopped for a brief but perceptible moment; and when it had stopped being stopped, if you follow me, I was lying on my back in lush, dew-moistened grass with a beautiful girl in my arms.
Everything exactly the same, in other words, apart from the differences.
‘Cru?’ I said.
The girl looked at me. She was looking overpoweringly lovely, with her straight golden hair hanging forward over her shoulders, her lips slightly parted, her eyes wide open and deep as unfathomable pools of pure cobalt blue. In other words, the wrong bloody chick.
‘Melissa,’ I said.
‘Michael!’
Typical. The sort of poetic justice you’d expect to get if Judge Dredd wrote sonnets. I noted in passing that I appeared to have broken my leg; but that was just the free plastic toy at the bottom of the cornflake packet of my afflictions.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I closed my eyes. ‘Fuck,’ I said.
‘Well,’ Melissa replied, ‘all right. But first, shouldn’t we—?’
I sighed. ‘No,’ I said, ‘not like that, I meant - oh, forget it. And would you mind getting off me? My leg hurts.’
‘Oh.’
‘In fact,’ I went on, ‘I think it’s probably broken. Ouch,’ I added, just to drive the point home.
‘Sorry,’ Melissa said.
‘No use saying you’re sorry, is it?’ I snapped. ‘Get off me, for crying out loud.’
She seemed to shoot upwards, like a Harrier off the deck of a ship. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Your leg, I mean. It’ll fix itself.’
‘Will it? Well, that’s something, I suppose—’ A nasty thought struck me. ‘How long will it take?’
‘Oh, no more than a month, if it’s a clean break. And—’
‘And you’ll fast-forward me through it, so I won’t have to endure all that lying around in traction eating grapes? No, thank you very much. From now on, my time’s my own. You got that?’
She frowned. ‘You want to spend a month in hospital? Actually live through it, I mean? But it’s so boring—’
‘Yes!’ I shouted. ‘And no, I don’t enjoy being bored. In fact, I have an abnormally low boredom threshold, I can’t even sit still during the weather forecast. But I will not have you pointy-eared freaks snipping out great big chunks of my life. It’s not right, and I won’t stand for it. Understood?’
She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. ‘I hate to have to say this, but you won’t be in any fit state to stand for anything until your leg’s healed. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather edit it out? I mean, it’s not as if there’s anything useful you can do, lying on your back with one leg in the air.’
Unfortunately, she was right. I hate it when people are right at me like that; it’s like having a cat that insists on fetching in dead mice and laying them at your feet, like loyal subjects bringing tribute to the Sultan. ‘Oh, all right then,’ I said. ‘But this is the last time, understood? I’ve got to get back there as quickly as possible, before she changes her mind.’
‘She?’
(And I could remember the whole thing; days and weeks of staring at the ceiling, nothing to do but see how many times out of ten I could hit the lampshade with a precision-spat grape pip. If I’d had to go through all that – with the irascible, short-temper, pai
n-in-thebum personality I appeared to be stuck with on this side of the line – I’d have gone stir-crazy in a week. Somehow, though, acknowledging that Melissa had been absolutely right didn’t make me feel any better-disposed to her at all.)
‘She,’ I repeated. ‘Cruella. The girl I’m in love with. The wonderful girl who waited for me for ten years, even though everybody told her I was dead. The angel in human shape who now thinks I’ve pissed off over here for good, thanks to you and your ridiculous magic circles. Right,’ I added, ‘I’m off. Let’s hope this is the very last time I ever see you or this loathsome place.’ I looked about me for something circular to tread in. Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any cows in Elfland.
‘Oh,’ she said.
It was the way she said it, of course. Now if I’d been me, instead of the miserable-self-centred-jerk me, that particular expression would’ve made macramé out of my heartstrings. As it was, I just felt mildly uncomfortable without really knowing why.
‘Trust me,’ I said, ‘you’ll be better off. I mean, be honest. Just listen to me, would you? I’d be the sort of husband who’d come home drunk from the pub and yell the place down because his dinner wasn’t on the table.’
‘It would be,’ Melissa replied quickly. ‘I’d make sure of that. I’m a good cook,’ she added. ‘Why don’t you let me fry you up some bacon and eggs? You like bacon and eggs.’
Well, yes, I do; and let’s not forget, it’d been well over a day, going on ten years, since I’d had anything to eat. ‘With fried bread?’
‘And black pudding and baked beans and hash browns and sausages and fried tomatoes—’
‘No, I can’t stand fried tomatoes. And why aren’t there any mushrooms?’
‘I was just coming to them,’ she said. ‘Followed by toast and marmalade, with plenty of fresh coffee—’
‘Proper coffee,’ I pointed out, ‘not that decaff rubbish.’