Unseen Academicals

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘Oh, just a traditional greeting,’ said Nutt. ‘Could you pass me the ball, please?’ He took the football and bounced it on the floor.

  Gloing!

  ‘I suspect you might know the trick of making brimstoned rubber?’

  ‘That was my . . . my grandfather’s name,’ Glang stuttered.

  ‘Ah, a good omen,’ said Trev quickly. He caught the ball and batted it down again.

  Gloing!

  ‘I can cut out and stitch the outer cover if you will work on the bladder,’ said Nutt, ‘and we will pay you fifteen dollars and allow you a licence to make as many more as you wish.’

  ‘You’ll make a fortune,’ said Trev encouragingly.

  Gloing! Gloing! went the ball, and Trev added, ‘That’d be a university licence, too. No one would dare mess with it.’

  ‘How come you know about brimstoned rubber?’ said Glang. He had the look about him of someone who knows that he is outnumbered but will go down fighting.

  ‘Because King Rhys of the dwarfs presented a dress of brimstoned rubber and leather to Lady Margolotta six months ago, and I’m pretty sure I understand the principle.’

  ‘Her? The Dark Lady? She can kill people with a thought!’

  ‘She is my friend,’ said Nutt calmly, ‘and I will help you.’

  Glenda wasn’t quite sure why she tipped the troll tuppence. He was elderly and slow, but his upholstery was well kept and he had twin umbrellas and it was no fun for trolls to come this far, because the kid gangs would have graffitied them to the waist by the time they got out of there.

  She felt hidden eyes on her as she walked up to her door, and it didn’t matter.

  ‘All right,’ she said to Juliet. ‘Have a night off, okay?’

  ‘I’ll go back to work with you,’ said Juliet, to her surprise. ‘We need the money and I can’t tell Dad about the fifty dollars, can I?’

  There was a small collision of expectations in Glenda’s head as Juliet went on: ‘You’re right, it’s a steady job and I want to keep it an’ I’m so fick I’d prob’ly muck up the other one. I mean, it was fun and all that, but then, I thought, well, you always gave me good advice, an’ I remembered that time you kicked Greasy Damien in the goolies so hard when he was messin’ me around, he walked bent double for a week. Besides, if I go away with them it means leaving the street, and Dad and the lads. That’s really scary. An’ you said be careful about fairy stories, and you’re right, half the time it’s goblins. An’ I don’t know how I’d get on without you puttin’ me right. You are solid, you are. I can’t remember you not bein’ around, and when one of the girls sniggered about your old coat I told her you work very hard.’

  Glenda thought, I used to be able to read you like a book – one with big colourful pages and not many words. And now I can’t. What’s happening? You’re agreeing with me and I ought to feel smug about it, but I don’t. I feel bad about it, and I don’t know why, and that hurts.

  ‘Maybe you ought to sleep on it,’ she suggested.

  ‘No, I’d mess it up, I know I would.’

  ‘Do you feel all right?’ Something inside Glenda was shouting at her.

  ‘I’m okay,’ said Juliet. ‘Oh, it was fun and that, but it’s for nobby girls, not me. It’s all glitter, nuffin’ you can hold. But a pie’s a pie, right? Solid! Besides, who’d look after Dad and the lads?’

  No, no, no, screamed Glenda’s voice in her own head, not that! I didn’t want that. Oh, didn’t I? Then what did I think I was doing, passing on all that old toot? She looks to me, and I’ve gone and given her a good example! Why? Because I wanted to protect her. She’s so . . . vulnerable. Oh dear, I’ve taught her to be me, and I’ve even made a bad mess of that chore!

  ‘All right, then, you can head back with me.’

  ‘Will we see the banquet? Our dad has been fretting about the banquet. He reckons Lord Vetinari is going to have everyone murdered.’

  ‘Does he do that a lot?’

  ‘Yes, but it gets hushed up, our dad says.’

  ‘There’s going to be hundreds of people there. That would need a lot of hush.’ And if I don’t like what I hear, there won’t be enough hush in all the world, she thought.

  Trev mooched aimlessly around the shop while Nutt and the dwarf put their heads together over the ball. For some reason there was a faint scrabbling on the roof. It sounded like claws. Just a bird, he told himself. Even Andy wouldn’t come in through the roof. There was another pressing matter. This place would have a privy, wouldn’t it? There was at least a back door and that would inevitably lead to a back alley and, well, what is a back alley for except for sleeping tramps and the call of nature? Possibly in the same place if you were feeling cruel.

  Trev unbuckled his belt, faced a noisome wall and stared upwards nonchalantly, as a man does in these circumstances. However, most men don’t look up into the astonished faces of two birdlike women who were standing, no, perching on the roof. They screeched Awk! Awk! and flew up into the darkness.

  Trev scuttled quickly and damply back into the shop. This city got bloody stranger every day.

  After that, time flew past for Trev, and every second stank of sulphur. He’d seen Nutt dribbling candles, but that was at snail’s pace compared with the speed at which the leather was cut for the ball. But that wasn’t creepy, that was just Nutt. What was creepy was that he didn’t measure anything. Eventually, Trev couldn’t stand it any more, and stopped leaning against the wall, pointed to one of the multi-sided little leather strips and said, ‘How long is that?’

  ‘One and fifteen sixteenths of an inch.’

  ‘How can you tell without measuring?’

  ‘I do measure, with my eyes. It is a skill. It can be learned.’

  ‘An’ that makes you worthy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘An’ who judges?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Here we are, Mister Nutt, still warm,’ said Glang, arriving from the back of the shop holding something that looked like something taken from an animal that was now, you hoped for its own sake, dead.

  ‘Of course, I could do a lot better with more time,’ he continued, ‘but if you blow down this little tube . . .’

  Trev watched in wonder, and it occurred to him that in all his life he’d made a few candles and a lot of mess. How much was he worth?

  Gloing! Gloing!

  Two balls in harmony, thought Trev, but clapped as Nutt and Glang shook hands, then, while they were still admiring their handiwork, he reached behind him and slipped a dagger off the bench and into his pocket.

  He wasn’t a thief. Oh, fruit off stalls, but everyone knew that didn’t count, and picking a toff ’s pocket was just a case of social redistribution, everyone knew that, too, and maybe you found something that looked lost, well, someone would pick it up, so why not you?

  Weapons got you killed, often because you were holding one. But things were going too far. He had heard Andy’s bones creak and Nutt had brought the man to his knees without sweating. And there were two reasons for taking precautions right there. One was that if you put Andy down you’d better put him out, right out, because he would come back, blood around the corner of his mouth. And two, the worst, was that right now Nutt was more worrying than Andy. At least he knew what Andy was . . .

  Carrying a ball each, they hurried back to the university, with Trev keeping a watchful eye on high buildings. ‘It’s amazin’ what’s turnin’ up in this city,’ he said. ‘There were a couple of vampire types back there, did you know?’

  ‘Oh, those? They work for Ladyship. They are there for protection.’

  ‘Whose?’ said Trev.

  ‘Do not worry about them.’

  ‘Hah! And do you know something even stranger has happened this evening?’ said Trev, as the university hove into sight. ‘You offered that dwarf fifteen dollars and he didn’t even haggle. Like, that’s unheard of. Must be the power of gloing!’

  ‘Yes, but I actually gave him twenty dollars,�
� said Nutt.

  ‘Why? He didn’t ask for anythin’ more.’

  ‘No, but he did work very hard and the extra five dollars will more than repay him for the dagger you stole while our backs were turned.’

  ‘I never did!’ said Trev hotly.

  ‘Your automatic, unthinking and spring-loaded reply is noted, Mister Trev. As was the sight of the dagger on the bench, shortly followed by the sight of the empty space where the dagger had been. I am not angry, because I saw you most sensibly toss Mister Shank’s wretched cutlass over a wall and I understand your nervousness, but nevertheless I must point out that this is stealing. And so I ask you, as my friend, to take the dagger back in the morning.’

  ‘But that will leave ’im up by five dollars and his dagger back.’ Trev sighed. ‘But at least we’ve got a few dollars each,’ he said, as they entered the back door of the university.

  ‘Yes, and then again no, Mister Trev. You will take the remaining five dollars and this rather grubby although genuine receipt for twenty dollars to Mister Stibbons, who thinks you are no good, thus making him doubt his original assumption that you are a thief and a scallywag and assisting your progress in this university.’

  ‘I’m not a—’ Trev began and stopped, honest enough to acknowledge the knife in his coat. ‘Honestly, Nutt, you’re one of a kind, you are.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nutt. ‘I am coming to that conclusion.’

  WOTCHER!

  The word, in huge type, shouted out from the front page of the Times, next to a big picture of Juliet glittering in micromail and smiling right at the reader. Glenda, frozen for the last fifteen seconds in the act of raising a piece of toast to her mouth, finally bit.

  Now she blinked and dropped the toast to read:

  Mystery model ‘Jewels’ was the toast of an astounding fashion show at Shatta yesterday when she was the very incarnation of micromail, the remarkable metal ‘cloth’ about which there has been so much speculation in recent months and which, she confirms, Does Not Chafe. She chatted happily and with fetching straightforward earthiness to dignitaries to whom, this writer is certain, no one has ever said ‘Wotcher’ before. They appeared to find the experience refreshing and entirely without chafe . . .

  Glenda stopped reading at this point because the question ‘How much trouble are we going to get into about this?’ was attempting to fill her whole head. And there was no trouble, was there? And there would not be. There couldn’t be. First, who would think that the beauty in the silver beard, like some goddess of the forge, was a cook’s assistant? And, second, there was no trouble to be had, unless someone tried to make it, in which case they would have to go through Glenda and Glenda would go through them, in very short order. Because Jools was wonderful. She had to admit it. The girl brought radiant sunshine to the page, and suddenly it was plain: it would be a crime to hide all that grace and beauty in a cellar. So what if she had a vocabulary of fewer than seven hundred words? There were more than enough people who were stuffed tight as an egg with words, and who would want to see any of them on the front page?

  Anyway, she thought, as she pulled her coat on, it would be a nine-minute wonder in any case and besides, she added to herself, it wasn’t as if anyone would spot it was Juliet. After all, she was wearing a beard and that was amazing, because there was no way that a woman in a beard should look attractive, but it worked. Imagine that catching on! You’d have to spend twice as long at the hairdresser’s. Someone’s going to think about that, she thought.

  There was no sound from the Stollops’ house. She wasn’t surprised. Juliet did not have much grasp of the idea of punctuality. Glenda popped next door to see how the widow Crowdy was and then headed, in the drizzling rain, back to her safe haven of the Night Kitchen. Halfway there an all but forgotten pressure in her bodice reminded her of her duty and she dared go into the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork.

  Trembling with fear and defiance, she walked up to a clerk at his desk, slapped fifty warm dollars in front of him and said, ‘I want to start a bank account, all right?’ She left five minutes later with a shiny account book and the delightful recollection that a posh-looking man at a posh-looking desk in a posh-looking building had called her madam, and enjoyed the sensation until it ran into the reality that madam had better roll up her sleeves and get to work.

  There was a lot to do. She made pies at least a day ahead so that they could mature, and Mister Nutt’s appetite last night had put quite a large dent in her pantry. But at least there wouldn’t be much demand for pies tomorrow night. Even the wizards didn’t call for a pie after a banquet.

  Ah, yes, the banquet, she thought, as the rain started to soak into her coat. The banquet. She would have to see about the banquet. Sometimes if you wanted to go to the ball you had to be your own fairy godmother.

  There were several obstacles requiring the touch of a magic wand: Mrs Whitlow did indeed operate a certain kind of apartheid between the Night and Day Kitchens, as if one flight of stairs actually changed who you were. The next difficulty was that Glenda did not have, according to the traditions of the university, the right kind of figure to serve at table, at least when there were visitors, and, lastly, Glenda did not have the temperament for serving at table. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to smile; she was quite capable of smiling, if you gave her enough warning, but she positively hated having to smile at people who actually merited, instead, a flick around the earhole with a napkin. She hated taking away plates of unfinished food. She always had to suppress a tendency to say things like ‘Why did you put it on your plate if you didn’t intend to finish it?’ and ‘Look, you’ve left more than half of it and it cost a dollar a pound,’ and ‘Of course it’s cold, but that’s because you’ve been playing footsie with the young lady opposite and haven’t been concentrating on your dinner,’ and when all else failed ‘There’s little children in Klatch you know . . .’ – it was a phrase of her mother’s, but she’d obviously missed some significant part of it.

  She hated waste, she thought to herself as she walked along the stone corridor towards the Night Kitchen. There never needed to be any if you knew your way around a kitchen and if your diners had the decency to take your food seriously. She was rambling to herself. She knew that. Occasionally she would pull the front page of the Times out of her bag and take a look at it again. It had all really happened and there was the proof. But, it was a funny thing: every day something happened that was important enough to be on the front page of the newspaper. She’d never bought it and seen a little sign that said ‘Not much happened yesterday, sorry about that’. And tomorrow, wonderful though that picture was, it would be wrapping up fish and chips and everyone would have forgotten about it. That would be a load off her mind.

  There was a polite cough. She recognized it as belonging to Nutt, who had the politest cough there could possibly be. ‘Yes, Mister Nutt?’

  ‘Mister Trev has sent me with this letter for Miss Juliet, Miss Glenda,’ said Nutt, who had apparently been waiting by the steps. He held it out as if it were some double-edged sword.

  ‘She’s not come in yet, I’m afraid,’ said Glenda as Nutt followed her up the steps, ‘but I’ll put it on the shelf over here where she’ll be bound to see it.’ She looked at Nutt and saw his eyes firmly fixed on the pie racks. ‘Oh, and I do seem to have made one apple pie more than called for. I wonder if you could assist me by removing it from the premises?’

  He gave her a grateful smile, took the pie and hurried away.

  Alone again, Glenda looked at the envelope. It was the cheapest sort, the kind that looked as if it had been made from recycled lavatory paper. And somehow, it seemed to have got a bit bigger.

  Inexplicably, she found herself recalling that the gum on those envelopes was so bad that when it came to sealing them it was probably better to just have a very bad cold. Anyone could simply open it up, see what it said, dig out a bit of earwax and no one would be any the wiser.

  But that would have been a very bad
thing to do.

  Glenda thought that same thought fifteen times before Juliet walked into the Night Kitchen, hung up her coat on the hook and put on her apron. ‘There was a man on the bus readin’ the paper and it had a picture of me on the front,’ she said excitedly.

  Glenda nodded and handed over her own paper.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s me,’ said Juliet, with her head on one side. ‘What shall we do now?’

  ‘Open the damn letter!’ shouted Glenda.

  ‘What?’ said Juliet.

  ‘Er, oh, Trev sent you a letter,’ said Glenda. She snatched it from the shelf and held it out. ‘Why don’t you read it right now ?’

  ‘He’s probably just mucking about.’

  ‘No! Why don’t you just read it right now ? I haven’t tried to open it!’

  Juliet took the envelope. It opened more or less to a touch. Glenda’s evil side thought, hardly any gum at all! I could have just flicked it open!

  ‘I can’t read with you standin’ so close,’ said Juliet. After some time moving her lips she went on, ‘I don’t get it. It’s all kinda long words. Lovely curly writing, though. There’s a bit here saying that I look like a summer’s day. What’s that all about, then?’ She pressed it into Glenda’s hand. ‘Can you read it for me, Glendy? You know I’m not good at complicated words.’

  ‘Well, I’m a bit busy,’ said Glenda, ‘but since you ask.’

  ‘First time I’ve ever had a letter that’s not all in capitals,’ said Juliet.

  Glenda sat down and started to read. A lifetime of what even she would call bad romantic novels suddenly bore fruit. It read as though someone had turned on the poetry tap and then absent-mindedly gone on holiday. But they were wonderful words, nevertheless. There was the word swain, for example, which was a definite marker, and quite a lot about flowers and quite a lot of what looked like pleading, wrapped up in fancy letters, and after a while she took out her handkerchief and fanned the air around her face.