Oddjobs 5: The Long Bad Friday

by Heide Goody

  “Are we trying to antagonise him?” Chad whispered.

  “Just getting his attention,” Morag replied.

  An elder waved a clawed hand. His fingers were long and webbed, and the hand made a fan-like slicing sound as it cut the air. “Skzza’ ineneo. Aen-su du guhes’ pysh!”

  Strong hands seized the three interlopers – Fluke and Death Roe went from supporting Omar to restraining him. All three were driven towards the edge of the canal.

  “Okay, we’ve got their attention now,” said Morag. “Hey! Easy! I’ve just given birth.”

  “Yo Daganau-Pysh,” called out Omar. “Me’a pen dhorri. We have come on the behalf of others – Kaxeos, Mammon – with proposals for the world that is to come. Gods who have spent silent aeons in their own realms are now coming here to take what you have worked to build for yourself.”

  As if to punctuate this, helpfully or not, a large bamboo gantry high up on the far side fell away, cracking and burning. It crashed into the canal, flying apart in smoking chunks on impact. Samakha responded with wails and angry shouts.

  “Em-shadt car-eh ben durrigan!” said Omar, struggling in the grip of the young samakha. “You have made this world your home! You! You colonised it! Are you going to let nameless things come here and take over? Gods who have not the slightest inkling of how this world works. No concept of … time, of gravity, of … of…”

  “How you can make chocolate chip cookies without melting the chips!” shouted Fluke.

  “How to pop a crisp packet when the crisps are gone,” nodded Death Roe.

  “How to steer a coracle with your knees, to impress the honeys!”

  “Yes! That!” agreed Omar.

  His impassioned plea had set the elders burbling to one another. There was room for discussion. Fluke patted Omar’s chest, eliciting a pained moan from him.

  “Eh? Why you got – ggh! – seashells down your shirt, man?”

  “They’re whelks,” Omar grunted. “Angry whelks.”

  “He’s got whelks down his front,” said Death Roe. “Some kinda whelk smuggler.”

  “Whelk mule!” declared Fluke.

  Mutters of suspicion rippled through the crowd.

  “Ggh! Something fishy going on,” murmured Hragra the translator.

  Morag resisted the urge to shout of course something fishy was going on.

  “Ladies! Gentlemen! Please! Let’s not get distracted!” It was Chad, adopting his smoothest salesman voice. “We’ve come not just to offer something to your—” he waved a hand at the murky shallows “—you know, but to every one of you.”

  He raised his hands high. The fishmen holding him loosened their grip.

  “Canalside living! It’s the best, isn’t it? City centre dwellings with nature and the calming waters outside your window. But you can do so much better than this. This place is – and do forgive me – a right bloody shambles.”

  There was a mixture of angry disagreement and surly acknowledgement from the samakha. Chad’s phone was in his hand, displaying a picture to those nearest to him. “Sherborne Wharf. Gas Street Basin. New apartment complexes.”

  “Mrs Grey promised me a new apartment months ago!” a woman yelled from the crowd.

  “And hundreds of them have just come on the market,” said Chad. Morag guessed that was sort of true if the human occupants of the city were, for the most part, dead and gone.

  An elder made a dismissive gesture, but he was clearly in the minority.

  Samakha and human slaves crowded to look at Chad’s phone. There was no internet, so he must have had that picture stored already. Did he have a stock of random images? Was it where he lived? Was it an aspiration of his? Whichever, as he chatted to individuals, Chad weaved them a homeowners dream of living on a stylish wharf with a café-bar on every corner and nothing but cool fresh water around them.

  “You’ll need a workforce to repair the canal here,” Morag added loudly. “Humans to work alongside samakha. We have a deal with Yoth Mammon—”

  “A deal of sorts,” corrected Omar.

  “We have an understanding that an enclave of humans will be protected in the world to come,” said Morag.

  The elder with the massive webbed hands objected in violent Venislarn. “Map-ehu! Map-ehu! Ouril set-ehu!”

  “Well, you can be pure samakha all by yourself, if you like—” Morag began, but the elder wasn’t listening. He raised his voice in garbled and angry speech.

  “The time of purification is at hand,” translated the crab-handling Hragra. “No more the mixing of – ggh! – blood with the dog species.”

  “Who’s ’e calling a dog, eh?” shouted a woman.

  “The unclean samakha will be driven into the waters to become food for our lord and god. None shall—” Hragra was cut off by sudden violence beneath the canopy. An elder with a massive dorsal fin had leapt up and shoved the one who’d been speaking hard, out from under the canopy and off the side of the towpath.

  Shouts went up. Morag couldn’t see what was happening. She looked to Chad, but he was deep in discussion about stamp duty for first time buyers with a young fish couple. She looked to Omar.

  The professor had a thoughtful look on his face. “It would appear that Reyah-Sku – the shover there – felt that Muyori’n Fee – the shovee – was far from being a pure blood samakha.”

  The big-handed Muyori’n Fee surfaced in the canal, gargling invectives and beckoning.

  “And now Muyori’n Fee is inviting Reyah-Sku to come in the water and settle the matter, mano a mano.”

  “Or fish-o a fish-o,” said Morag.

  “Oh, that’s a common misconception,” said the professor. “‘Mano’ does not mean ‘man’ but refers to—”

  He was interrupted by further shoving and shouting beneath the elders’ canopy. Elders had risen from their frog-like squats, pushed aside their attendants, flung away watering pots and set to full-blown skirmishing.

  Omar watched with interest. “So, Rilk Hasp, who is Muyori’n Fee’s brother, is keen to point out that Reyah-Sku has no claim to racial purity since his grandmother was a … a Rhode Island whore, I think he’s saying. Ah, but now Sho’loffa is interjecting and sharing the ‘well-known’ belief that the Krel-asan clan, including Rilk Hasp and Muyori’n Fee, are all half-bloods and have so much Scandinavian blood in them they might as well … ah, vest ghading plas’iah penti-o. It doesn’t translate well and is quite racist, to samakha and Scandinavians alike. And now Vand’ab-oby is weighing in with some moral philosophy about purity being spiritual in nature and— Oh well, that’s him in the drink.”

  Shoving, stabbing and slicing had resulted in various samakha elders being pitched into the canal. And now, Daganau-Pysh, Lord of the Deep Places, was lazily picking them up one by one in his slick coils and dragging them down to be consumed. Perhaps he agreed those who had been ditched were less than worthy. Perhaps he really didn’t care. Perhaps he was pissed off that his home was draining away to nothing and was simply comfort eating.

  In a few short minutes the canopy had been reduced to shreds, and the number of self-important, racially pure elders had been reduced to a sorry trio who stayed out of the fight.

  The waters of the canal slurped and sucked. There was one last cry from an entangled fishman, then silence – but for the crackle and roar of the fire on the opposite bank.

  One of the elders spoke, barely a whisper.

  Hragra the translator held out his hand (the one not holding a crab). “Those apartments. Could we have a look?”

  05:35am

  In the end, Prudence ate Yang’s biscuit too. Yang didn’t trust the biscuit because it didn’t come in a wrapper.

  “I’m sure it’s fresh,” said Prudence.

  “Yes, but what is it?” said Yang.

  “It’s a biscuit.”

  “What brand?”

  Prudence looked at Yang’s biscuit, since she’d already eaten her own. She shrugged. “No brand. It’s just a biscuit.”

/>   “How can it be just a biscuit? You can’t have a product without a brand. The brand is the message. If I eat it, am a fun-loving party girl? Am I a much-cherished grandma? Am I a dedicated office-worker taking a break from my labours?”

  Prudence tried to be helpful. “It tastes buttery.”

  Yang huffed, unimpressed, so Prudence ate Yang’s biscuit.

  There was movement on the stage.

  “Something’s happening,” said Yang

  “We should leave,” said Prudence.

  “We are not safe here,” Yang agreed.

  Soldiers were meeting on the stage, chatting in a manner which Prudence could tell was formal, even without hearing what they were saying. Malcolm, the soldier who had brought them here, had a map spread out on a table. With Kathy Kaur at his side, he was discussing matters with those around him.

  “I’m going to have a look before we go,” said Prudence.

  “Why?” said Yang.

  “They’ve got a map. It can tell us where we are. My mum is at the Library of Birmingham.”

  “They’ll shoot you as a spy if they see you,” said Yang. “I would.”

  “So, would I,” whispered Steve in agreement.

  Prudence was certain that Yang was far too cynical, and Steve’s wisdom wasn’t to be trusted. She stood, tucked Steve in the blanket beside Yang and moved to the edge of their concrete step to get to the stairway.

  “Where you going, love?” asked one of the women, the one who had given them the blankets.

  “I need to stretch my legs,” said Prudence. It was a phrase she had never used before, but she automatically felt it was the right kind of thing to say.

  “Do not get in anyone’s way.”

  “I won’t.”

  It was easy to move through the abandoned cinema’s auditorium without being noticed. The place was crowded and, although people were gathered in groups, there was very little organisation. Here, a bunch of people slept under green blankets, some of them on low metal beds. There, a family sat around a glowing screen, watching some animated film. A person in uniform sorted through a bunch of heavy rucksacks all stacked together. A soldier brushed past Prudence to get something from one of them before returning to the stage. At a table, another soldier handed out ammunition magazines to a short queue.

  Prudence tiptoed past all of these. She didn’t actually tiptoe. Tiptoeing would have looked suspicious. Prudence decided the best way to move was sort of like a breeze, wafting through, causing no fuss, acting like she was not worth noticing.

  Kathy had joined in with Malcolm’s briefing. “I will carry the pack and move forward with alpha team. It will be connected to a fail-deadly dead man’s switch which will be activated once we enter the Cube. I will also be carrying a Yandi voors amulet and enacting certain charms to keep any Venislarn at bay.”

  “And that will keep you safe?” asked a soldier.

  “No, Jackson,” said Malcolm. “You will keep her safe as you approach from the forming-up point and into the building.”

  There was mild joking and some side chatter. Prudence used the distraction to step up onto the stage area. The space was crowded, but she kept herself behind the back of the gathered men and women, and worked her way round. The closer she got to the table and the map, the more obvious her movements would be. She began to edge towards a gap between two men next to the table.

  “Captain McKenna!” called a voice across the auditorium.

  Captain Malcolm and many soldiers looked over. It would have been an ideal opportunity for Prudence to slip in and look at the map, but she glanced over too, just for an instant. Three soldiers were standing with Yang between them.

  “What is it?” Malcolm asked.

  One of the men approached. When he was halfway, Yang shoved one of the other soldiers and tried to run off. The soldier grabbed her by the arm, nearly toppled by her momentum. They spun around together, stumbled and fell, the soldier pinning the mammonite girl to the floor. There was a screeching from Yang and shouts of pain and effort from the soldier. Many people were now on their feet, the volume in the room rising. As soldiers moved to intercept, to see past one another, Prudence lost sight of Yang.

  She could have looked at the map. She could have pushed through to get to Yang. Fear and uncertainty gripped her, and she did neither. She stood, immobile, until the soldiers cleared a space. Yang was being marched forward, held firmly between two soldiers. One had a bleeding nose and long scratches on his cheeks. Somewhere else, a thin voice moaned, “Broke my arm. The tiny bitch broke my arm.”

  “What’s going on?” demanded Kathy Kaur.

  Yang’s mouth was pursed in lip-whitening tightness. Her eyes bulged with silent fury.

  “Peters saw her badge,” said one of the soldiers.

  “Badge?” said Kathy.

  The soldier carefully let go with one hand and lifted the torn badge on her blazer.

  “Thatcher Academy,” said Kathy.

  “The mammonites?” said Malcolm.

  Kathy reached out and pulled Yang’s fringe away from her face. Yang flinched. Kathy picked up a dark blue stone which was holding down one corner of the map. In a simple innocent-looking movement she pressed it against Yang’s cheek. There was a sizzle, a hint of burning vapours, and Yang screamed as though stabbed.

  “No!” shouted Prudence and eyes were suddenly on her. Hands grabbed her too. Captain Malcolm stared in shock at Prudence, then Yang.

  “We found them in Acocks Green,” said Malcolm.

  Yang was panting and groaning in restrained agony. There was a blistered pink circle on her upper cheek, wet and raw.

  “And you brought them here?” hissed Kathy.

  “But look…” he said, gesturing at Prudence’s face. Kathy Kaur put the blue stone ball to Prudence’s face. Prudence gasped and began to shriek – but the stone was cool against her skin.

  “Mammonite and human children. Together?” said Kathy.

  Prudence was filled with heart-thumping energy and emotion. “I’m Prudence Murray and I’m the kaatbari and you have to let us go or I will … I will burn you all with my laser eyes!”

  The wide-eyed stares of the adults grew wider, but no one made a move to let them go.

  “Impossible,” Kathy whispered. “I was there. I saw you.” She glanced at a device on the table and then touched Prudence’s curly ginger hair with her fingertips. “Not even six hours old … Morag’s baby girl.”

  “My mummy will be very angry if she finds out you’ve taken us,” said Prudence, with as much menace as she could muster.

  This didn’t have the desire effect at all. Kathy smiled, a little lip twist at first and then a big grin. “This is excellent beyond words.” She looked at the cylindrical cage full of Venislarn-killing rocks, then at Prudence. “Carrot and stick. Now we’ve got two bargaining chips for when we go see Morgantus.”

  “No, you have to let us go—!” said Prudence, but it sounded rubbish even to her own ears as she said it.

  Kathy pointed at Prudence, then Yang. “Restrain her and get ready for departure right now. Dispose of the mammonite, outside.”

  Yang struggled as the soldiers holding her pulled her away. There was a last silent glance at Prudence, an unreadable stare, neither pleading nor condemning.

  “No!” Prudence yelled. “You can’t! You can’t! Bring her back! You can’t!” She fought against the hands holding her. “I’ll tell my mum!” she cried.

  Kathy crouched and looked at Prudence, Yang already forgotten. Kathy Kaur was a big woman. She had broad shoulders and a tall face. Her eyes were large, made larger by the makeup that accentuated her eyes and eyebrows.

  She tried to give Prudence a kindly look, but didn’t make it look convincing. She put her hand against Prudence’s shoulder. “We’re going to go see your dad. We’ll tell him together.”

  There was noise at the back of the auditorium, the thump of doors and a muffled shout. Prudence tried to see, but the soldiers were in
the way. She looked back at Kathy’s face. The fake kindly look was still there.

  05:39am

  The two soldiers pinning Yang between them pushed through a pair of double doors and into an above-ground courtyard. Brick walls from three different buildings hemmed the area in. A downpipe emptied into a leaf-clogged drain in one corner. The rest of the ground was littered with rusting drink cans, old food wrappers and unidentifiable crud.

  Yang Mammon-Mammonson, heir to the Mammon-Mammonson fortune, grand-daughter of the goddess Yoth Mammon the corruptor, the defiler of souls, the dredger in the lake of desires, would not have pictured this death for herself. She had perhaps never been able to encompass the concept of her own death. She was Yang and only saw herself with a destiny of limitless avarice and wealth. To die in this grimy courtyard at the hands of humans was unthinkable.

  And yet Yang found herself approving of this execution spot. This would be an ideal place to bring someone to kill. The cul-de-sac with high, unscalable walls was ideal. The squalor of the space added to the degradation that Yang would want to inflict on a victim. It was brutal and unpleasant. She approved. She just wished she wasn’t on the receiving end.

  “Is it going to be you or me?” said one soldier.

  The other shrugged. “Both. It’s not human.”

  One loosened his grip and the other gave Yang a forceful shove she was simply too small to resist. She was propelled into the corner of the courtyard. She could hear the minute clicks and knocks of rifles being raised to fire.

  Yang braced herself against the wall and turned. She was too far from them to attack before they fired.

  Steve the Destroyer ran out of the doorway with a miniscule war cry and stabbed one of the soldiers in the ankle with his pencil. The weapon barely put a crease in the soldier’s trousers.

  “What the hell?” said the unhurt stab victim.