by Tom Holt
Bugger me, I thought, I can understand the language of birds; and then I remembered (couldn’t remember having found it out, just remembered the memory) that all elves can understand the language of birds when they’re over this side of the line, but it’s a singularly useless ability, since all birds ever do is recite their times tables, or the dates of the kings of France, or the Periodic Table – all the stuff that must be extremely helpful and important, because we all learn it at school, but which we never ever seem to find ourselves using once we’ve escaped. Being able to understand the language of birds doesn’t mean you can speak it, of course – you can’t ask a passing sparrowhawk the way to the nearest all-night café or anything useful like that. All you can do is listen to them grinding out the Ten Commandments or the prime numbers or French irregular verbs, until eventually you develop a mental spamblock that edits all the gibberish out and replaces it with melodious warbling noises.
Enlightenment, I thought. You can stuff it.
So I walked on a bit further, and eventually I heard a lorry rumbling up the road behind me. I’d never hitchhiked successfully in life before, needless to say (don’t accept lifts from strange men, and all that) but I stuck my thumb out anyway. The lorry thundered past me, then stopped.
I trotted up the lane towards it, and noticed the name stencilled on the side in tall white letters: HigginStyle Footwear – Daddy George’s company. I ordered myself to calm down. Perfectly reasonable to come across one of his lorries in the lane leading to his factory and nowhere else.
‘Bloody hell,’ said the driver, staring down at me. ‘What the fuck are you got up as?’
‘Don’t ask,’ I growled. ‘If you must know, I’m a film extra – we were doing this big kids’ film with elves and brownies and pixies and all that crap. Last night was the wrap party, and when I woke up they’d all gone, left without me. So here’s me, stranded in the middle of nowhere, dressed as an elf. You got a problem with that?’
The driver grinned. ‘Hop in, then,’ he said. ‘I can take you as far as Northampton.’
I’d never ridden in a lorry before, either. Interesting perspective you get from the front passenger seat of one of those things; you’re much higher off the ground than you’d be in an ordinary car, and the feeling of being whisked along over the heads of the traffic, like a Roman senator in a sedan chair, is rather fine.
‘Bloody strange day,’ the driver was saying. ‘Went to pick up a load of shoes at the factory, nobody about. I banged on the gate till I hurt my hand, but it’s all shut up. Then I went round the side, there was this door open, and the whole place is deserted, like the Mary Whatsername. Bloody strange.’
‘Hadn’t you heard?’ I said. ‘They’ve closed down the factory, going to buy in all the stock from Poland from now on. Cheaper, they reckon. We got talking to some of the locals down at the pub while we were filming. They’re very upset about it all, as you can imagine.’
The driver shook his head. ‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘Makes you think. What’s this country coming to? The accountants up at head office, they do their sums and reckon they can shave a few quid off costs, but they don’t stop to think about the little people.’
‘Who does?’ I said. ‘That’s the problem with business today. Same in my line, of course,’ I added, and held forth for several minutes about the trials of being an lowly spear-carrier in today’s motion-picture industry. I was making it all up as I went along, of course, but the driver didn’t seem to notice or mind; in fact, it struck me that I was sounding particularly plausible and convincing, not to mention putting across my message with style and a certain passion. Suddenly it was great fun being my improvised persona, my imaginary friend called me; I could clearly see every facet of his life, every stitch and purl of his character. His name was Steve, originally he was from Romford but he’d been brought up in Sheffield (now there was a dead-end place), and he’d always wanted to be an actor, but of course unless you’re really lucky there’s absolutely no way to break in; so instead he tried this film-extra gig, and once you got your name known and assistant directors knew you could be relied on to show up on time and do as you were told, actually there was a living to be made at it – not a wonderful living, sure, but it was better than plucking chickens, and of course you were constantly rubbing shoulders with the stars, like for instance Robert de Niro; shared a mobile field latrine with him once, just outside Melton Mowbray – well, there was a crowd of us, and there were about seven other extras standing between him and me, but it’s something you can tell you kids when you’re old and grey—
(Listen to yourself, I thought, this is complete garbage. But it passed the time, and this Steve’s life was so much more interesting than mine that I wasn’t really in any great hurry to leave it and go back to my own; and then I realised that it wouldn’t take very long to make it true. So long as I was content to be just an extra, a nobody-much, one of the little people, nobody would ever listen carefully enough to figure out that I was lying through my teeth; and after I’d really been an extra on three or four films, the wind would change and I’d stick like it. And wouldn’t that be absolutely bloody fantastic—)
‘Whereabouts in Melton Mowbray?’ the driver asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘Whereabouts in Melton Mowbray were you doing this film? My wife’s lot come from round there.’
Never been to Melton Mowbray in my life, of course. ‘Don’t ask me,’ I replied. ‘Ours not to reason why, ours but to get on a coach at Pinewood and get out the other end. Some field in the middle of nowhere, with a row of Portaloos and a chuck wagon. One location looks pretty much like another, after a while.’
He nodded. ‘Her mum and dad live in this village called Saxby,’ he said, ‘and her sister – that’s her older sister, not the one who married a Yank – she lives in Stapleford. All sort of flat and open. Very slow driving all round there, specially when there’s caravans.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said, and I wasn’t kidding either; suddenly I could imagine. In my mind’s eye I could see a straight, narrow road, quite possibly a Roman road, like a line drawn with a ruler across the map, and on either side a hazy golden panorama of newly cut wheat stubbles, pigeon-haunted and rook-spotted, broken here and there by brusque square castles of straw-bales; behind me and in front of me as I drove my mighty sixteen-wheel Daf was a pilgrimage of slow cars following a squat white caravan, towed by an elderly Mercedes. Overhead the sky was blue, dusted with small patches of scruffy white cloud, and the sun’s warmth through my greenhouse windscreen made the skin of my forearm glow pleasantly. God, I thought, what an absolutely wonderful life, how idyllic, how perfect: the road, winding slow and sure to a certain, reliable destination, through the very heart of unspoilt England on a glorious late-summer day, Tammy Wynette on the tape deck and the promise of a fat mug of strong tea and the all-day breakfast at some truck-stop or Little Chef just a few miles down the way – how could anything possibly be better than that?
‘I said,’ the driver was repeating, ‘I’m going to stop for breakfast in about five miles, all right?’
I pulled a face. ‘You go ahead,’ I replied. ‘Just wish I could join you, only the bastards took all my stuff with them, and my wallet was in my rucksack.’
‘You haven’t got any money?’
I shook my head. ‘No pockets in these bloody stupid clothes,’ I pointed out. ‘Otherwise you’d have elves with mobile phones and bunches of keys sticking out of the sides of their legs, it’d screw up the whole film.’
‘Yeah,’ the driver said, ‘I can see that. ’S OK, breakfast’s on me. Only,’ he added, ‘I’ll fetch you yours over and you can stay in the cab. I’m not going anywhere people can see me with a bloke wearing green tights.’
His unexpected generosity nearly broke my heart. So this was what real people were like, I told myself: spontaneous, compassionate, filled with the simple fellowship of the road. All my life, and I’d never known anything like it. ‘Thanks,’ I said, managing to
keep my voice steady. ‘I could murder a bacon roll.’
He was as good as his word; he brought me out a bacon roll wrapped in a paper napkin and a styrofoam cup of very hot dark brown tea, looked round furtively to make sure nobody was watching him talk to me, and scuttled off back to the café. For a while after that, I didn’t have any attention to spare for the world around me. I was too busy relishing the amazingly subtle and exotic flavours of bacon, the delicious softness of white bread, the overwhelmingly savoury tang of vintage cooking-oil, lovingly matured in the bottom of a constantly used frying pan. My senses drowned in them, like kittens in a bucket; Oh brave new world, I said to myself, that has such butties in it. I’d finished the last exquisitely crusty crumbs of the roll and was peeling the plastic lid off the cup of tea when I became aware of someone hammering on the cab window with a clenched fist.
I wound down the window and looked out. There were two policemen, looking up at me. The taller of the pair reached up and put his hand on the door handle. I knew him from somewhere.
‘You’re nicked,’ he said.
CHAPTER NINTEEN
‘I don’t quite follow,’ I said.
I was lying, of course. I lie very badly, certainly not well enough to deceive policemen, and quite definitely not well enough to convince this particular flatfoot, who’d last seen me being hauled out of an interview room by an armed man in a balaclava. Truth was, I followed like a cat chasing a piece of string. Still, one has to go through the motions.
‘You,’ said the policeman. ‘Out of the cab. Slowly. You have the right to remain silent—’
I’d have liked to say goodbye to the lorry driver, but there didn’t seem to be time. I’d also have liked to drink my tea, but when I asked if it’d be OK if I brought it with me, they put me in handcuffs. At least I’d finished my bacon roll. Small mercies, and all that.
It’d been a while – several months, at least – since I’d ridden in the back of a police car, and I’d hoped they might have upgraded a bit, invested in a model with a bit more knee-room. But they hadn’t; a pity, really, because when Daddy George unshrank me I think he must have overdone it a touch. My legs were unquestionably longer than they’d been the last time I took a trip in a government taxi, and I spent most of the ride with my knees up around my chin.
In difficult situations, it helps if you know the drill, and by that point I could’ve booked myself in without any prompting from the desk sergeant. They put me in a different cell this time though. I can say that with total confidence, since there were a thousand and twenty-four bricks in the wall opposite the bed, compared with a thousand and seventy-eight in my previous studio apartment.
Ask Marco Polo or Cervantes or Sir Walter Raleigh or Oscar Wilde – they’ll all tell you the same thing. Being in jug provides you with a first-class opportunity for taking stock of your life, thinking things over, honing and fine-tuning your world-view. In fact, it’s about all there is to do once you’ve run out of bricks to count, and personally I’d be inclined to count it in as part of the punishment schedule, under the sub-heading ‘cruel and unusual’. Of course, it’d be different if your life was happy and successful and nothing but blue skies; but if that was the case, you wouldn’t have ended up in nick in the first place.
So I did the customary stocktake, and the results weren’t encouraging. True, I’d contrived to get myself sprung from the shoe factory. On the other hand, compared with a small whitewashed cell, the shoe factory hadn’t been all that bad. At least there’d been something to do and people to talk to, even if mostly they’d either not answered or told me to bugger off. True, I’d freed the slaves and settled the score with Daddy George, but that hadn’t actually got me anywhere, and nobody on this side of the line would ever know about it or believe it if the story ever did get out. On the negative side, I had no home, no money, no job, no identity, no recent past, no friends and no Cru, and quite soon I was going to be asked to explain what had happened the last time I was in police custody, something I wasn’t going to be able to do. Pretty bleak, really.
I had one option. I could figure out a way of marking a circle on the floor, and go back to Elfland. Technically, of course, I was still banned for life, but it seemed pretty likely that the ban no longer applied, particularly with the rescued slaves putting in a good word for me, not to mention the fact that I’d changed a certain amount while I’d been in the shoe business. So, yes, I could go back there, stay there for good where the police and the DSS and the social services and God only knew who else couldn’t find me. I could do that just by wanting to, it’d be no big deal; and once I was back in the place where there really was no hunger, homelessness or poverty (what you might call the elfare state) I’d be more likely than not to settle down there and get on with it. Fine; except that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I’d be there, but it wouldn’t be me. I’d be exactly the same, but different.
No, thanks.
Fine. That helped put everything else into a vague sort of perspective. No matter what kind of unholy pig’s ear my life might turn into from this point on, at least it’d be my life, not the edited highlights of an existence being lived by someone else on the other side of the looking-glass. Besides, even if it was worse than the shoe factory, it couldn’t be all that much worse. I’d just made it through an unknown number of months, years for all I knew, surviving extremes of hunger, deprivation, solitude, fatigue and boredom, and here I still was. So long as they didn’t cut off any major limbs or line me up against a wall and shoot me, I figured I could handle it.
In which case, there really wasn’t all that much to worry about. I leaned back – it felt odd to be resting in the middle of the day like this, but it was growing on me – closed my eyes and went peacefully to sleep.
I think I was dreaming about chicken, marinaded in spices and yogurt, cooked to perfection in a hot clay oven and served on a bed of saffron-scented rice with chickpeas, spinach and okra. Strange thing to be dreaming about, since I’d only ever had one Indian meal, back when I was about thirteen, and I hadn’t liked it much. Anyway, at some point towards the end of the main course, someone grabbed my shoulder and started shaking me, making me spill my beer. When I turned my head, I found I couldn’t quite see how it was, probably because my eyes were shut. I opened them and saw a policeman.
‘Your lawyer’s here,’ he said.
Odd thing to serve for dessert, I thought, could I skip that and just have a coffee? ‘Huh?’ I said.
‘Your lawyer. Waiting to see you.’
‘Oh. Yes. Right. You mean the duty solicitor?’
He nodded. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘this way.’
As I walked down the corridor, I thought about that, as far as I could think about anything with a mind still clogged up with tandoori chicken, soft grey fluff and sleep. All these lawyers know each other, I said to myself, so maybe this one’ll know what’s become of Cru, assuming she hasn’t packed in the legal profession already and gone straight. Maybe he’d turn out to be from the same firm, and could pass on a message. One thing that didn’t occur to me was that I’d find Cru sitting behind the table in the interview room. Too unlikely, even by my rather rarefied standards.
She was reading a magazine – Practical something-orother, boat-building or bee-keeping or some other activity starting with B – and I noticed she was wearing reading glasses: they suited her, somehow made her look a bit less likely to bite you in the leg if you annoyed her. Other than that, she looked exactly the same.
‘Bastard,’ she said.
The copper grinned and went out, leaving us alone together.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Bastard,’ she repeated, putting the magazine down. Out of curiosity I squinted at the title.
‘You’re looking well,’ I said. ‘Since when have you been interested in bee-keeping?’
‘I’m not,’ she replied. ‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’
‘Well—’
She rolled the magazine
up and twisted it, like she was trying to strangle it. ‘Don’t tell me, I know perfectly well where you’ve been, and what you’ve been up to. So what happened? She throw you out or something? Can’t say I blame her.’
‘Actually,’ I said.
‘There I was,’ she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, ‘enjoying my day off, nice warm fire, cup of tea, cream slice, footstool, magazine, Classic FM, and the phone goes, which I was expecting because it always bloody goes when I’ve just got completely comfortable, so I crawl out of the house and drag down here, expecting it to be just some harmless arsonist or serial killer, and guess what, it’s you. Should’ve guessed. You know why I should’ve guessed? Because every time I get comfy the phone rings, and every time I manage to get the shattered wreckage of my life rigged up into some sort of improvised shelter, you turn up. So am I surprised to see you? No, of course I’m not. Hence the magazine.’
‘Practical Bee-Keeping?’
She threw it at me. Good shot. Ouch. ‘Heaviest one I could find in Smith’s on my way here,’ she replied. ‘You and Your Pentium 4 was thicker, but they print it on that flimsy paper. Also it was a pound dearer. I ought to bash your lying, treacherous head in.’
‘It’s nice to see you again,’ I said. ‘I’ve missed you.’
She made a strange noise at the back of her throat. ‘Glad I didn’t miss you,’ she said, ‘else that’d been £2.75 down the drain. Hold still while I get it and I’ll not-miss you again.’
But she didn’t get up to fetch the magazine. Instead she just sat there, staring at me, as if she was trying to wring my neck by telekinesis.
‘So,’ I said, ‘what’ve you been up to since I’ve been away? Any interesting cases?’
She looked at me as if I’d just announced that I couldn’t stay long, the mother-ship was about to leave orbit. ‘You bet,’ she said. ‘There’s this lunatic I used to act for, convinced he’s a garden gnome or something of the sort, and he keeps vanishing for years at a time. And when he turns up again, he’s always managed to get himself arrested for something or other. Nothing major, of course; just mounting commando raids on police stations, trivial stuff like that. You can’t begin to imagine the things they say about me down at the Legal Aid board when I send in my bill.’