Little People

by Tom Holt

  A lot of elves, then; and all of them without exception dead miserable and snotty. To what degree this was due to them being the opposites of the sweet-natured folk they’d have been on their own side of the line, and how much of it was the result of being banged up in a sweatshop and forced to make shoes for a psychotic Nazi, I never did find out. Six of one, I guess. It didn’t take me long – about five seconds, in fact – to realise that they didn’t like me, either.

  The first four of these five seconds were taken up with the foreman telling the congregated workforce that I was the new guy, and as they could see from my ears I was only half an elf and therefore a freak, but even so he’d rather they didn’t kill me outright, since he was accountable to management for staffing levels. The fifth second was a moment of complete and utter silence as they all turned round and stared at me. At the end of that second, I’d pretty well got the message.

  Whether it was because they didn’t want to get the foreman into trouble, or because they were too demoralised and generally pissed off to bother, they didn’t immediately rise up and lynch me or beat me to a pulp. When they’d finished staring – a second and a half was all it took to download all they needed to know about me, apparently – they turned round and got on with what they were doing, namely their mid-morning break, which they spent standing around in small, wretched groups with their hands by their sides, muttering in low, unhappy voices. I soon discovered that this was pretty much the high point of their day.

  The foreman looked at me, shook his head sadly, and wandered off, leaving me standing there on my own on the edge of the mob of sad elves, and I decided that it was now my turn to look at them. There wasn’t really a lot to see, since it was well-nigh impossible to tell them apart. They were all more or less the same height, dressed in extremely similar shabby green boiler suits and clumping engineers’ boots, and they all slumped in more or less the same way (head forward, shoulders drooping, knees very slightly bent, hands dangling on the ends of arms like defeated conkers). It’s hard to imagine a sadder, more disheatened and despondent collection of life forms anywhere in time and space, with the possible exception of the Conservative party after the 1997 general election.

  I suppose I hadn’t been there for more than ten minutes (which, in context, felt like slightly over a million years) when a sadder-than-average-looking elf peeled off from the crowd and trudged towards me, moving with all the snap and vigour of an exhausted man wading through waist-deep semolina. He looked older than most of them; his hair was getting thin and tufty on top, and even the points of his ears looked like they were wilting. ‘You,’ he said.

  There’s not a lot you can say by way of reply to ‘You’, sighed at you by someone who looks like he’s spent the last hundred years down the back of a sofa. I tried to look respectfully alert and attentive. I’m morally certain he didn’t notice.

  ‘You’re with me,’ he said, in a tone of voice that suggested that that was the most depressing and dismal fact he’d ever had to come to terms with. ‘I’m putting you in the stockroom.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. Right.’ I toyed with adding thank you or something like that, but decided not to, in case he took it the wrong way. I’d got the distinct feeling that in the prevailing culture, pretty well any remark over two syllables long would probably be interpreted as a mortal insult requiring settlement in blood.

  ‘Right, then,’ he replied. ‘You’d better follow me, then.’

  He led me across the huge floor towards a Marble Arch-sized doorway in the opposite wall. It was a long walk, but at least it gave me the opportunity to look about me and take in the scenery. Under other circumstances, I might even have been impressed; the sheer size of the place, as seen from my perspective, lent it a certain air of grandeur. Imagine St Mark’s in Venice after a raid by a bunch of really dedicated bailiffs. Other aspects, however, weren’t quite so impressive; the dust was OK, it was almost like walking along a sandy beach, but the cobwebs started my imagination off along distinctly unsettling avenues. When you’re six inches tall, arachnophobia is less of a psychological disorder and more of a survival trait.

  As I followed the sad elf I did make a real effort to get my bearings, or at least try and remember which way we’d come, but it wasn’t long before I gave up. The trouble is that when you’re walking through a succession of spaces so overwhelmingly huge that you have trouble seeing the opposite wall until you’re halfway across the room, it’s quite hard to maintain a sense of direction. Think what it’d be like trying to navigate if you were travelling through intergalactic space from the Milky Way to Andromeda on foot.

  The upshot was that after an hour or so I fell into a sort of dazed trance, and when the sad elf suddenly stopped and said, ‘Well, we’re here’, I’d lost track of pretty well everything. I couldn’t actually see what differentiated here from anywhere else; the place we’d stopped in was a double-Wembley-sized concrete-floored desert, and although I could just about make out vague shapes on the horizon, I didn’t have a clue what they were. Could’ve been pyramids or mountains or medium-sized cities, for all I knew.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Um, where is this?’

  ‘Stockroom,’ whispered the sad elf, as if acknowledging a deadly secret he’d managed to keep hidden for the last forty years. ‘It’s where we keep stuff.’

  Oh, I thought, that sort of stockroom. ‘What would you like me to do?’ I asked.

  The look in his eyes answered that question more eloquently than words ever could, and if he’d insisted, the result would have been extremely uncomfortable and ultimately fatal. But what he said was, ‘You can start on loading trolleys. Try not to bugger it up, it’s hard enough as it is.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, making it sound a bit like a major concession during international trade negotiations. ‘Um, can someone show me what to do, or . . . ?’

  His head slumped even further forward, implying he had a triple-jointed neck. ‘Yeah, why not?’ he replied, as if to suggest that everything was so far gone that nothing really mattered any more. ‘Come with me, I’ll show you myself.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, but he managed to rise above it.

  We walked on in silence for a few minutes, to the point where I began to make out recognisable shapes in the distance. On the walls there were shelves, the usual steel angle-iron type bolted together like good old-fashioned Meccano, except that each shelving unit was the size of the Pompidou Centre. Fortunately there were lifts from the ground to each shelf, and running along each shelf a little railway line, beside which gangs of elves, each gang between twenty and fifty strong, were hauling about such things as cardboard boxes, reels of thread and rolls of canvas. Each item was mounted on a sled and tied down to stop it toppling off and flattening the crew, and the gangs were hauling on ropes like students re-enacting the building of Stonehenge. When they reached the railhead there were derricks and cranes to hoist the load off the sled and onto a flatbed truck, which waited in a siding till a locomotive arrived to haul it to the lift shaft. I noticed that all the railway stuff – track and rolling stock and engines - was the same Hornby Dublo I’d had in my train set when I was a kid.

  ‘There you go,’ said the sad elf. ‘Watch what you’re doing, don’t fall off the shelves or get under the loads when they’re shifting. ‘Snot fair to the rest of the lads, having to scrape you off the deck.’

  ‘I can see that,’ I told him. ‘I’ll try and be careful.’

  His shrug suggested that he’d heard that one before. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ll be getting back. If you get any problems,’ he added, and rounded off the statement with a vague hand gesture.

  ‘Thanks again,’ I said.

  He sighed, shook his head and walked away.

  As I set off to plod the remaining distance to the foot of the nearest shelving unit, I tried to imagine what all this lot would look like if I were a story-book giant, five feet six in my bare feet. It’d all be completely different, I realised (though, of course, essenti
ally the same), and all I’d see from my towering, thin-atmosphere height would be a poky little store where they kept a few things. If I needed something off the shelves, I’d just reach over and lift it off. No sweat.

  A bit like being God, really.

  But such speculations were foolish, because (as I recognised, probably for the first time) this was it; I’d never be five-six again, let alone a scrape under six feet, I’d never see things from that kind of Olympian perspective, and I’d quite definitely never get out of this dump alive. I was here for the duration, and I was what I’d become, the lowest grade of slave labourer in a vast, uncaring enterprise run by creatures immeasurably more powerful than I was. Something of a novelty for me, a spoiled kid from a rich and privileged background, and therefore even more of a culture shock. Suddenly, without warning or preparation, and without possibility of reprieve or parole, I’d been cut down to size. I was now, for ever and always, just one of the little people.

  That’s life for you. When I was at liberty and the world was a counter overflowing with free samples of wonderful new experiences for me to try out, I lost fifteen years as quickly and easily as you lose a screw or fiddly little spring out of some dismantled household appliance. In Daddy George’s shoe factory, by contrast, each second of each minute of each hour of each day had to be got through, like those dinners I sat in front of when I was eight and really not in the mood for eating, but the plate had to be cleared before I could go upstairs and play, and no matter how furiously I munched and chewed, the measureless carrot mountains and Alpine mounds of mashed potato never seemed to get smaller.

  I guess it was even worse for the elves, who were used to being able to fast-forward through Life’s adverts and trailers; like South Sea islanders who’d never been exposed to flu, they had no inherent immunity to boredom. Now I’d been bored for a significant proportion of my time on this earth, what with school and family Christmases and Sunday visits to relatives; I could shrug off the regular kind of boredom, the sort that starts around ankle level and slowly works its way up your spine to your head, and the frantic if-I-don’t-get-out-of-here-soon-I’ll-explode fidgety boredom, and even the molybdenum-steel-acroprops-won’t-keep-my-eyelids-apart narcoleptic boredom, or Brookside Syndrome. The boredom in the factory, however, was new to me, it was a deadly blend of extreme tedium and bowel-loosening terror, whereby quite often you’re scared witless and bored silly at the same time. Unless you’re a collector or compiling a Ph.D. Thesis I really wouldn’t recommend that variety.

  And yet; although every second of every minute was endlessly prolonged, to the point where I reckoned I could trace the path of every sluggardly photon, because every hour of every day was like every other hour of every other day, the whole experience soon melded seamlessly into one interminable continuum, and before I knew it, it was a whole lot later. I guess that losing track of time isn’t so far removed from the Elfland fast-forwarding trick, at that.

  So what did I do all day? Well, at five-thirty a.m. every morning the screamer went off, and we all rolled off our thin pile of threadbare blankets, yawned and trooped off to breakfast – one-fiftieth of a stale Ritz cracker and a Barbie-shoeful of brackish water. Ten minutes to grind the masonry-tough biscuit into swallowable paste, then the long march from the dormitory to the stockroom, a trailing grey-green crocodile, no talking, keeping step. Once there, we shuffled off into our respective groups – no need to tell us what to do, it took a whole thirty seconds to learn the trade to grand master level. Take a firm hold of your assigned eighteen inches of rope, and when the worried-looking elf with the clipboard shouts, ‘Pull,’ you pull. When he says, ‘Stop pulling,’ you stop pulling. So simple you could train Arts graduates to do it, given time.

  Even within this rather sparse framework there was scope for a certain amount of variety. Some days we worked in gangs of a hundred, pulling rolls of canvas or vinyl. Other days, we worked in gangs of fifty, hauling reels of sewing thread. Occasionally we were assigned to intimate little crews of fifteen or twenty, shifting cardboard boxes full of eyelets and laces and tissue paper and other evocatively labelled commodities straight out of a Masefield poem – at least, the boxes were marked ‘eyelets’ or ‘laces’ or ‘tissue paper’. We never actually got to see any of these fabulous artefacts, but it was just nice to believe they were in there, soft and shiny and smooth. Talking, singing, whistling and other forms of unproductive gaiety were strictly forbidden, needless to say – it wasn’t clear who was enforcing the forbidding, because nobody ever broke the rules and I never got to find out; my guess is no one could be bothered to try.

  At some unspecified hour the screamer went and we had our mid-morning break. I’ve already described that, and I won’t enlarge on it, for fear of getting snotty letters from Dante’s lawyers wanting to know what I think I’m playing at, plagiarising bits of the Inferno; suffice it to say that all my fellow-workers had long since abandoned Hope with the decisive speed you’d usually reserve for used styrofoam hamburger boxes. Please dispose of Hope tidily.

  Time and the hour runs through the dreariest tea break, however, and the rest of the morning was spent pulling on topes, or not pulling on ropes, as directed by those with a broader perspective. Lunch (a fiftieth of a Ritz and the other Barbie-shoe of water) came and went and you just had to grit your biscuit-abused teeth and bear it before shuffling back to your assigned gang and your rope and whatever hoarded sliver of a dream you still had left. For a long time (don’t ask me how long, something like a year, or two weeks; let’s say the time it’d take for a glacier to slide three times round the world, and leave it at that) I kept going by thinking about Cru, remembering shy fragments of smiles, the sunlight glinting on her hair, the shape of her fingertips, selected insults, put-downs and cutting remarks. But memory wears out under heavy use quicker than a cheap cross-ply tyre, and it wasn’t long before the image of her face got polished away into a silhouette, like the portrait on an old copper penny. As soon as I became aware of this effect I made a conscious decision to ration my as yet uneroded Cru memories and save them up for later. Instead, I tried remembering the happy, carefree days of my childhood (both of them), and after I’d worn through the chrome of them, I just remembered stuff – Pythagoras’s theorem, camels’ humps, the Tottenham Court Road in winter, the colour scheme of WD-40 tins, the tunes of soap-powder jingles, the arrangement of aisles in supermarkets I’d known over the years, the birthdays of aunts, bit-players in Coronation Street through the ages, the height of telegraph poles, the midnight murmurs of domestic plumbing. They all helped, a little; but the longer I was there, the more the very act of remembering became like chewing a piece of gum long after you’ve ground out the last vestiges of the flavour, and your jaws are just kneading putty. After all, where was the point? As far as I was concerned, none of that stuff existed any more. The whole of reality was confined to the dormitory, the stockroom and my personal eighteen inches of blue nylon rope.

  Pain, they say, has the merit of reminding you that you’re still alive; the time to start worrying is when it doesn’t hurt any more. Now I’m prepared to go along with that view up to a point, preferably a very sharp point which I’m pressing against the neck of whatever wiseacre thought up such a stupid maxim. My personal take on pain is that it’s very painful, and I’ll do pretty much whatever it takes to make it stop. As far as I could tell, there were only two ways of achieving this highly desirable goal. I could drop down dead (tempting, but probably not very good for you) or I could escape.

  Having decided to escape, the first issue to be addressed was why all the other inmates in this house of fun hadn’t already done so. Double Nobel laureate or not, I doubted that I was the only poor sap in the place who’d thought how nice it’d be to get out of there, so there had to be a fairly good reason why none of them seemed particularly eager to give it a go. As far as I could see, the security arrangements weren’t enough to merit even half a searchlight in the Colditz Guide; no human guard, no bars on
the windows, there didn’t even seem to be locks on the two or three doors I’d had occasion to see during my stay. There weren’t morning and evening roll-calls, or dormitory inspections, or warders prising up floorboards looking for escape tunnels. Nobody, it seemed to me, gave a damn.

  You, of course, being an insufferable cleverclogs, have already worked it out for yourself; if you’re six inches tall and invisible, where the hell do you go that isn’t likely to be worse than a weathertight building with regular meals? Outside in the world, everything was scaled up for the convenience of the indigenous race of giants. Supposing you got away without being trodden on or run over by a lorry (it’d take days to cross a dual carriageway), the undergrowth was positively teeming with furry predators who hunted more by smell than sight. If the term of these perils was finite, if it was just a matter of evading death or capture long enough to nip across the Swiss border and find the nearest town hall, it might be worth taking the risk. But there was, quite literally, nowhere to go to, this side of the line, unless you got really lucky and found your way to Legoland or somewhere with a good old-fashioned doll’s house.

  True; but you’re forgetting something. All the other elves were stuck here, true enough, because they could never get back across the line. Not so in my case. Admittedly I’d been slung out of Elfland on my non-pointy ear. But if only I could get out of the factory, I’d be able to find a patch of grass and something to make a circle with. Then I could get to Elfland, and if they threw me out again, at least there was a sporting chance I’d re-enter the human side my proper height and visible, which was all I could possibly ask of Providence at that stage in my career.