My Hero

by Tom Holt

  Before he reached his objective, however, he found his path blocked by a girl, fourteen years old or thereabouts, in school uniform and carrying a satchel. She was staring at him. He stopped and frowned.

  ‘’Scuse me,’ said the girl, ‘but you’re him, aren’t you? The bloke in the film.’

  Am I? Gosh, yes, of course I am. Laurence Olivier, Mel Gibson and a tall Russian bloke with a name that seemed to go on for ever, to name but three. Hamlet smiled, and nodded.

  ‘Can I have your autograph?’ The girl rummaged in her satchel and produced a grubby exercise book and a pen. Hamlet accepted both as graciously as he could manage, signed with a flourish and handed them back.

  ‘Here,’ said the girl. ‘I thought you said you were Frankenstein.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘That’s bloody marvellous, that is. Now you’ve gone and written all over my geography book.’ She scowled at him, stuffed the book back in the satchel and flounced off; which was probably just as well for all concerned. Hamlet had never struck a woman, but only really because the ones he most wanted to thump were able to get out of the way in time.

  He sighed, pushed open the post office door, and joined the queue.

  ‘On air in fifteen seconds,’ said the continuity girl. ‘Fourteen, thirteen . . .’

  Jane gave the camera a worried frown. It was bad enough that she had to do things like this, she reflected, but of all the inopportune moments in history, this one was in a class of its own. She caught sight of herself in the monitor, realised that the horrible, scowling woman was her, and hitched up the corners of her mouth. She had just realised that that made her look like an opium addict when the interviewer took a deep breath and started to speak, leaving her stuck like it, just as her mother had warned her all those years ago.

  ‘Hi,’ said the interviewer, ‘this is Cable South West’s Afternoon Show, I’m Danny Bennet, and we’re lucky to have with us this afternoon none other than Jane, um, Armstrong, author of the bestselling Zarmanico trilogy. Tell me, Jane, where exactly do you get the ideas for your characters from?’

  As she mouthed the usual pleasantries, Jane let her mind wander. Wherever they were now, whatever they were doing, there was nothing she could do to help until she got back home; at which point, she added remorsefully, I’ve also got to do something to find out where Hamlet’s got to. Another stray bloody cat to worry about, another whale to save, another rain-forest to preserve; but there was something more to it than that, something rather more immediate forcing her to get involved, although she couldn’t really say what. Why, she demanded of herself, am I doing all this anyway? I must be out of my . . .

  ‘I expect,’ the interviewer was saying, with the air of a man drowning in tapioca, ‘that sometimes you find your characters almost seem as if they have a life of their own, don’t you find? Almost as if they know what they want to do, and you’re just there to help them do it.’

  Jane laughed; and there was a tiny sliver of hysteria in there somewhere, like the metal strip in a banknote. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ she said. ‘No, I generally find they do what they’re told. If they know what’s good for them, that is. Anyway, my lot are usually so damned idle they wouldn’t get out of bed from Easter to Michaelmas if I didn’t put my boot behind them.’

  Was that it? she wondered. Was it because they were her characters, wholly dependent on her, like a mother and her children? No, probably not. She’d never worried about them before. She could kill any of them without a second thought if the plot required it. Often, she recalled, with great pleasure.

  ‘Now then.’ The interviewer was finding it difficult to keep afloat. ‘Perhaps you can tell us about what you’re working on at the moment.’

  ‘Yes indeed.’ Oh Christ. ‘It’s a bit of a new departure for me, really. It sort of starts off as a western, goes on as a pastiche of a couple of classics of English literature, and I don’t know what happens after that. But,’ she added firmly, ‘it does have a happy ending. I mean, they do all get home safely in the end.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the interviewer, sourly. ‘Well, we have to take a short break now for the news headlines, but we’ll be back with Jane in a moment, when I’ll be asking her more about her fabulous new book. And now it’s coming up to five o’clock, and here’s the latest from the Cable South West newsroom. The main story this afternoon is the armed siege in the Birmingham post office, and I think we now have some pictures for you . . .’

  Images of a deserted street flashed on to the monitor, and Jane turned her head and cast a jaundiced eye over them. She was just about to look away when the camera zoomed in . . .

  . . . On Hamlet, his face pressed against a window, waving frantically. Behind him stood a tall, dreamy looking man with a portable cassette player in one hand and a revolver in the other. Cut back to the street outside . . .

  Jane sat on the edge of her chair, doing goldfish impressions. She was sure, she knew that it was Hamlet in there, even though he looked completely different. In fact, she realised, she hadn’t got the faintest idea what his face looked like, because she’d never seen him without his paper bag. But even so, she knew; just as a mother always knows her child, perhaps. Unimportant why. What mattered was that her Hamlet, a character of hers by adoption, was in trouble and she had to go to him. Only she couldn’t, because she was on telly.

  She wrenched her mind away and tried to listen to what the interviewer was saying.

  ‘The man holding the hostages,’ he said, ‘has been identified as a Doctor Rossfleisch, a world-famous scientist working in the field of genetic engineering. The siege is apparently the result of a botched kidnapping attempt. Dr Rossfleisch has so far demanded a helicopter to fly him to Tripoli, a plate of jam sandwiches and a tape of 50 All-Time Pianola Greats. A spokesman for the Performing Rights Society has declined to comment.’

  She was wrong, Jane realised. It was because they were hers that she cared. All right, so occasionally, when it was necessary, she killed them or had them paralysed in devastating accidents; but that was for her to do, not anybody else. Because if she did it, it was because it was right and she would know that that was what the character was there to do. If it simply happened, there could be no reason or justification for it; it would be just like Life. And that wasn’t something she’d wish on her worst enemy, let alone a character she had deliberately called into existence.

  Come on, you silly man, let’s get this over with so I can go and protect my baby.

  ‘And there’ll be more from the newsroom at six o’clock. Now then, this is The Afternoon Show, I’m Danny Bennet and I have with me this afternoon the novelist Jane, um, Armitage. Tell me, Jane, do you write in longhand or do you use a word processor?’

  Got to get out of here. Find a pretext. Got it. Right.

  ‘Honestly!’ she snapped, rising to her feet. ‘How dare you! I’ve never been so insulted in all my life.’

  ‘But,’ flummoxed the interviewer, ‘I only asked if you—’

  ‘That does it.’ Livid with synthetic rage, Jane tore off the microphone, threw it on the chair and stalked out of the studio. As soon as the door closed behind her, she picked up her feet and started to run for the car park.

  Down this mean river-bank a man must walk.

  After half an hour’s stroll beside the pleasantly lapping waters, with Skinner peering anxiously into every bush in case it contained narcotics agents or the Mob, and the Scholfield observing from time to time that if he was going to ambush anyone in these parts, here was as good a place as you could hope to find, they reached a small boat-shed.

  ‘Right,’ said Regalian, his hand resting as if by coincidence on the butt of the revolver, ‘this looks like the place.’ He sighed. It was a hot day, he was uncomfortably warm inside the beaver’s skin and he had a headache. The thought of having to do anything heroic seemed positively distasteful. ‘I suppose,’ he went on mournfully, ‘I’d better lead the way.’

  Nobody contradicted him.
He took a deep breath, pushed the door open and waited. After what seemed to him a decent interval, he dropped on to all fours and scuttled through the doorway.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he called out after a moment. ‘Looks like we’ve got the place to ourselves.’

  Titania and Skinner walked through the door, each doing their best to follow the other. It was dark inside, and there was a strong smell of mould, stagnant water and decomposing boat. So far, in fact, so reassuringly normal.

  ‘Well?’ Titania demanded.

  ‘It’s somewhere,’ said a voice from under a low table, ‘over here, if only I can find . . .’

  There was a muffled clinking noise, followed by a bump; and a moment later the beaver reappeared, looking dusty but triumphant, with a small green bottle clutched between its front paws.

  ‘Now then,’ Regalian said. ‘Let the dog see the . . . Ah yes, right. Here goes.’

  He uncorked the bottle, which was inscribed DRINK ME, took a mouthful and wiped his muzzle on the back of his front left paw. Then he passed the bottle to Titania, who accepted it with the same degree of enthusiasm she would have exhibited had she been given a large, hairy spider.

  ‘’Sorlright,’ Regalian mumbled. ‘A bit nutty, perhaps, with maybe a slightly over-long aftertaste, but—’

  He vanished. Titania and Skinner exchanged glances.

  ‘And I thought things were a bit over the top where I come from,’ Titania commented. ‘Well, if he thinks I’m going to drink this stuff after what—’

  She stopped and looked down, to see a very small man jumping up and down on her foot and pointing excitedly to what she had assumed on a previous cursory inspection to be a mousehole.

  ‘I think,’ said Skinner, ‘he wants us to go through there. It’s a proper doorway, with a doorbell and a handle and everything.’

  ‘Just because it’s a door doesn’t mean we’ve got to go through it,’ Titania replied, backing away a step or two. ‘There’s millions of doors I’ve never been through, and they were all the right size, too.’

  Skinner shrugged. ‘He’s the hero,’ he said. ‘You gotta trust the hero, or where are you?’

  ‘Where aren’t you, more to the point,’ Titania replied. ‘And high up on the list, I’ve put crawling about down mouseholes.’

  ‘I’m game if you are.’

  Titania winced. ‘An odd expression, that,’ she commented. ‘As far as I’m concerned, game is dead furry things hanging up in butchers’ windows. Mind you, in this particular instance, I can see where the expression might acquire a certain relevance . . .’

  ‘Time I was going,’ Skinner said, taking a long swig. ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I can stay here and wait till we come out in paperback. No thanks.’ She took the bottle, finished it off and then held it up to read the label.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘this stuff ’s got riboflavin and permitted food colouring in it. I heard that stuff makes you go—’

  Skinner vanished; and a moment later, so did Titania. Another moment later they were all three standing at the entrance of the mousehole, which had turned out not to be a mousehole after all.

  ‘It looks bigger like this,’ Titania conceded.

  ‘I thought this sort of thing was all in a day’s work for your lot,’ Skinner said, impatiently. ‘Or else how come you’re called things like the Little People and the Wee Folk?’

  ‘All right,’ Titania admitted, giving the door a tentative prod, ‘on our own turf we have a certain flexibility in these matters. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, though. I always feel distinctly jumpy whenever I’m in a situation where I have to look up to a cat.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Titania, remembering that she was, after all, the Erl-King’s daughter and, par excellence, a thing that goes bump in the night, and therefore presumably afraid of nothing, ‘here goes. Last one through the door’s a cissy.’

  ‘After you, then.’

  ‘Shut up quibbling and get through that door.’

  ‘Fine love interest you turned out to be.’

  Regalian, having screwed up what remained of his courage, opened the door with a flying kick and went through the doorway in a low gunfighter’s roll, as recommended by the Israeli secret service.

  The advantage of this manoeuvre is that you come out the other side with your weight nicely balanced on both feet, shoulders square, gun at the ready in a textbook Weaver stance in position to engage targets within a forty-five degree arc of fire. It’s about as good as you can get, but it still doesn’t provide for all eventualities.

  Like, for example, there being a table in the way. When Regalian regained control of his movements, therefore, he found himself sitting in the middle of a white tablecloth, surrounded by smashed crockery and spilt tea, pointing his gun right up the nose of a strange-looking individual in a top hat.

  For a brief moment, he was at a loss, then the correct explanation registered, and he looked round for confirmation. He found it.

  ‘Terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘You must be the Hatter, and you’re the March Hare.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the Hatter. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at?’

  ‘Just passing through.’ Regalian started to inch his way off the table, trying his best to cause as little further damage as possible. There was a sharp crunch as he knelt on a plate of cucumber sandwiches.

  ‘This really isn’t on, though,’ complained the Hare. ‘I mean, yes, we are supposed to be off-the-wall, kooky characters from the back lots of the human subconscious. We’re quite prepared to hold our paws up to that one, sure. Still doesn’t give you the right to come bursting in here trashing our crockery.’ It sighed, and pointed at what was left of the teapot. ‘I mean, how the hell are we supposed to get the Dormouse in that?’

  ‘Can’t stop,’ Regalian muttered. ‘Send me the bill for the damage, okay?’ He rolled off the table, holstered the gun and stopped. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Just one thing. Am I human or a beaver?’

  The Hare and the Hatter looked at each other. ‘Is this one of those wordplay gags,’ asked the Hare wearily, ‘like the treacle-well and the best butter and so on, because if so, we really aren’t in the mood.’

  ‘Nope. Just a simple request for information.’

  ‘Fine. You’re not a beaver. Whether you’re human or not is a matter between you and your author, in which I have no wish to get involved. Now piss off.’

  ‘Obliged to you. Goodbye.’

  After he had gone, the Hatter and the Hare exchanged long, significant looks.

  ‘And we’re supposed to be the goofy ones,’ said the Hatter.

  ‘That’s the trouble with this business,’ the Hare agreed. ‘Too much amateur bloody competition. Come on, let’s get this lot cleared away.’

  They lifted off the tablecloth, shook it free of Wedgwood shrapnel, replaced the cups, saucers and plates, and made a fresh pot of tea. In doing so the Hatter got tea-stains on his shirt-cuffs and the Hare cut his paw.The Dormouse stayed fast asleep.

  ‘Okay,’ said the Hare, ‘that’s all right, then. Now, where were—?’

  There was a crash.

  ‘Oh for crying out loud,’ said the Hatter.

  ‘Enough,’ agreed the Hare, dodging a fast-spreading tea-slick, ‘is enough. From now on it’s paper plates and a disposable tablecloth.’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Alternatively,’ suggested the Hatter, ‘we could try moving the table.’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  The Hatter scowled. ‘What do you want?’

  Titania stood up, brushing bits of broken china off herself. ‘Sorry about this,’ she said. ‘We didn’t realise you were here.’

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘Did you,’ Titania persevered, ‘see a man come this way a few minutes ago? Big chap, tall, probably holding a gun?’

  The Hare gave her a long look. ‘We did just happe
n to notice him, yes. Friend of yours?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Figures.’

  ‘Which way did he go?’

  The Hare rubbed its chin. ‘Let me see,’ it said. ‘If memory serves me correctly, he came in where you did, landed on the teapot, crawled all over the sandwiches, stood on the sugar bowl, kicked over the cakestand and went off that way.’ It pointed vaguely at a house behind them. ‘What is it you people are going to, anyway? Some sort of Hell’s Angels convention?’

  Titania turned to Skinner, white-faced. ‘Are you going to let him talk to me like that?’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes. Look,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t my idea to have a love interest. Nobody asked me.’

  ‘Nor me,’ Titania snapped. ‘Believe me, I was much happier with the damn donkey.’

  Skinner nodded. ‘More your type,’ he said.

  The Hare banged on the table with a spoon. ‘Look,’ it said, ‘would you two clowns mind having your argument somewhere else? We’re five pages behind schedule as it is.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Titania crunched her way to the edge of the table and dropped to the ground. ‘We’ll pay for the damage, of course. Just send the bill to—’

  ‘Get out of here, both of you, before I call the flamingoes. ’

  ‘We’re just going.’

  This time, the Hatter and the Hare waited ten minutes before clearing away the breakages and re-laying the table. They also moved the whole shooting match ten feet to the right. Then they sat in brooding silence, not eating or drinking, just in case. There were bits of broken china in the sugar, and the Victoria Sponge would never be the same again.

  After a while, the Hare looked at its watch.

  ‘I think,’ it said, ‘we’re probably safe now. Right, you pour the tea and I’ll see what can be done with this blasted cake.’