by Holt, Tom
At some point, she must’ve stopped talking and gone away, because when Paul finally managed to look up, she’d gone. He blinked a couple of times, then looked back at the stone, just to make sure—
—And saw a thin, dark young woman with large eyes. She was picking her nose with the cap of a biro, and behind her head, through a window, Paul could just make out a hillside with big white letters on it.
Funny how, when you’re fairly sure that at least one segment of your horrendously complicated life has finally fallen into place, even though everything else is still screwed up beyond any remote possibility of redemption, something will come along and twist everything through ninety-five degrees—
His own true love, apparently. Sophie.
Chapter Four
‘Not bad,’ said Benny Shumway, holding the little red stone up to the light. ‘And I had this feeling when I first saw you that your arse was probably the deadliest weapon in your armoury. But you should’ve used the SlayMore, like I told you. Keep it simple and you won’t go far wrong.’ He handed back the stone, which Paul dropped into a matchbox and pocketed. ‘Who told you about this, by the way?’
For some reason, Paul had left Mr Tanner’s mum out of his report. ‘I must’ve read about it somewhere,’ he replied unconvincingly. ‘Is it right that you can use them for scrying and stuff? Only I’m supposed to have a knack for that sort of thing, so I thought—’
Benny Shumway nodded. ‘Can do, yes,’ he said. ‘With a lot of patience, self-discipline and training, you can get to the point where they’re almost an acceptable substitute for a laptop and a mobile phone. Personally, I could never be bothered. Better things to do with my free time.’
‘Oh,’ Paul said. ‘Well, anyway. What are we going to do today?’
Benny was silent for a moment. ‘By way of vocational training, you mean? Nothing. Finished,’ he explained. ‘We’ve covered it all. As far as I’m concerned, you now have all the knowledge and resources that you need to be a genuine, practical hero.’ He grinned. ‘Doesn’t that make you feel a whole lot better?’
‘No,’ Paul said.
‘Thought not. Truth is, the theoretical side isn’t really worth spit, you’ve got to pick it up as you go along. Assuming you live long enough.’
‘Fine,’ Paul said, frowning. ‘I thought I was going to be doing this for three months.’
‘Call it parole. Time off for mediocre behaviour. You complaining, or what?’
‘No, absolutely not,’ Paul said. ‘I mean, it’s been, um, interesting, but I don’t really think it’s my cup of tea somehow. I was better at finding bauxite, that’s for sure. So now what?’
Benny laughed. ‘So now, you’ll be delighted to hear, you’re officially released from this department, and you move on to the next one. Since you’ve already done your time with Dennis Tanner, that’ll probably mean either Effective, with Countess Judy, or Practical with Theo van Spee. Don’t envy you either of those,’ he added. ‘But after that you’ll be ending up doing civil engineering with Cas Suslowicz, and that’ll be an absolute doddle in comparison. I always say it’s best to get the nasty stuff out of the way first.’
‘I see,’ Paul said. ‘But what I actually meant was, what do I do now ? Do I go back to my office and wait for someone to send for me, or should I go and find someone and tell them I’ve finished here?’
Benny shrugged. On the wall behind him, Paul noticed a framed print – three white kittens – that hadn’t been there before. Neither, now he thought about it, had the wall; it was where the little door had been, but it had vanished. ‘Depends on how much of a hurry you’re in,’ Benny said. ‘If it was me I’d spend a day or so lurking in one of the empty offices upstairs, where nobody’s likely to come looking for me. Flask of coffee and a good book, you could stay hidden for a week before anybody noticed.’
If Paul could’ve been sure Benny wasn’t joking, he’d have been sorely tempted. ‘How’d it be if I went and asked Julie?’ he said. ‘She generally seems to know what’s going on.’
‘More so than anybody else in the building,’ Benny confirmed. He yawned. ‘Well, thanks for all your help. I won’t pretend you’ve got enough aptitude for pest control to line a small thimble, but it’s been nice having someone to deal with all the crummy paperwork.’
‘My pleasure,’ Paul replied. ‘When’s Mr Wurmtoter likely to be back, then?’ he added, not that he was particularly interested.
‘Any day now,’ Benny said. ‘Can’t be more specific than that; a job takes as long as it takes, and besides, he’s got this habit of skiving off for a day or so once he’s finished and then pretending he’s been stranded in the desert or held captive in the dungeons of the Dark Lord. Really, of course, he’s been off seeing the sights, lounging by the pool, going on coach trips. But he’s a partner, so you can’t say anything.’
As Paul had predicted, Julie knew exactly what he was supposed to do next. ‘The Countess will see you in her office at 2.15,’ she said. On the opposite wall, the clock showed seven minutes to one. ‘You might as well take an early lunch,’ Julie said, as though conferring on him the freedom of the City.
Actually, Paul was in two minds about that. What he really wanted to do was hang around reception and see if Melze wanted to come out for lunch. If it hadn’t been for the vision he’d seen in the annoying little red stone—
Sort of a subconscious compromise; he hung about in the corridor agonising about whether it’d be the right thing to do until 12:59, then sprinted for the front office before they locked the street door. He got there just in time, and Melze was on her way out.
‘Long time no see,’ she said, smiling at him like a searchlight. ‘I was just heading for that sandwich place round the corner. You coming?’
Easy as that. ‘Yes, all right,’ he replied. Like Benny had just told him: keep it simple and you won’t go far wrong. Indeed.
‘So,’ she said, as they sat opposite each other across an old formica table. ‘What’ve you been up to, then?’
If only, Paul thought. It’d be so easy to get along with Melze. When he’d been with Sophie it was all jagged pauses and unbridgeable silences; you had to be a mountaineer to get from one end of a conversation to another without falling down a crevasse. Before he’d met her, he’d been under the impression that love was everything, that once you’d acquired or attained love you were free and clear, and the world owed you happiness as a reward for valour. But now his own true love was in California, and here he was with someone he could talk to, if only—
‘Finished heroism,’ he replied with his mouth full. There’s no elegant way of eating a brittle-shelled ham roll. ‘Not sure what I’ll be doing next. Either glamour or wisdom, I think.’
Melze laughed. ‘Was it fun? Heroism?’
He shook his head. ‘Filling in forms, mostly,’ he replied. ‘And I sat on a dragon. Small dragon,’ he added. ‘Squashed it, poor little bugger. But apparently they’re a real pain in the financial sector, so I’m not to lose any sleep over it. Also I had to read a lot of stuff about weapons and poison gas and blowing stuff up. Not my scene at all.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘So, what’ve you got to do for glamour? Or don’t you know yet?’
Paul grinned. ‘I’m hoping it’ll just be more filling in forms. It may be boring, but I can handle that. Did I tell you about the time—?’ He hesitated. He’d been about to say the time Sophie and I had to catalogue the strongroom. ‘The time I broke down out in the wilds somewhere, and there was this garage run entirely by kids.’
Melze looked suitably intrigued. ‘How do you mean, kids?’
‘Kids. None of them was older than twelve, I don’t think. But they knew what was wrong with the car and fixed it, just like that. Spanners and screwdrivers and the hydraulic ramp and everything. Of course,’ he added – was he showing off? Apparently. ‘Of course, it’s not exactly a normal car.’
‘How do you mean, not normal?’
So Paul explained t
o her about Monika, and how she bossed him about in German, and how she’d originally been an agent for one of JWW’s deadly rivals and how she’d been caught spying. ‘For all I know,’ he went on, ‘she’s not the only one. I mean, why spend money on office equipment when you can turn your enemies into it for free? You know about the photocopier, don’t you?’ he added.
She didn’t, so he told her; and this gave him the opportunity to explain his part in the overthrow of Humphrey Wells and the rescue of old Mr Wells, the rightful senior partner. Somehow, Sophie didn’t figure much in this version of the story. Nevertheless, Melze seemed to find it all quite fascinating.
‘I can see why you like it here,’ she said.
‘But—’ Paul was about to object that he didn’t, not in the least; that he only stayed out of mortal fear of Dennis Tanner’s malevolent sense of humour. ‘Well,’ he heard himself say, ‘it does have its moments.’
She sighed. ‘I wonder,’ she said. ‘Do you think there’s any chance they’d take me on as a clerk? I mean, there’s a vacancy, isn’t there? At least, until the other clerk comes back from the States. I don’t know if I could do the magic and stuff, but I could do the filing and sorting and paperwork and things.’ Like you, her eyes said. With you. It’d be fun.
‘I don’t know,’ he said awkwardly. ‘You could ask, I suppose.’
She frowned. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘They probably wouldn’t agree, because I can’t do the magic.’
‘Maybe you can,’ he said. ‘Have you tried?’
She shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t know how to,’ she said.
‘Neither did I.’
Melze was looking at him. ‘How did you find out you could do it?’ she said. ‘Did they teach you, or did it just suddenly come, or what?’
Paul didn’t answer straight away. The truth was, he’d got drunk out of wretchedness, been thrown out of a pub, and found himself forcing a policeman who was trying to arrest him to eat his own truncheon. ‘It’s hard to say,’ he said. ‘I suppose it was like suddenly remembering something you’ve forgotten for a long time. It didn’t suddenly come so much as suddenly come back, if that makes any sense at all.’
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘But now, presumably, you can do magic any time you want.’
‘Well—’ Well, he thought, I suppose I can, yes. But I never seem to want to unless I’ve got to. Why is that, anyhow? ‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘But I’m still a beginner. That’s why I’m doing the time in each of the departments. Except there wasn’t much magic in pest control; mostly it seems to be basic chemistry and use of power tools.’
There was a look in Melze’s eyes. ‘Do some magic now,’ she said. ‘Go on.’
Bad idea, a voice in his head pointed out. Very bad idea. ‘Well—’
‘Doesn’t have to be anything spectacular,’ she was saying. ‘Just a little bit, so I can see what it looks like. Please?’
He stalled. ‘I can’t think of anything,’ he said.
She looked round. ‘Can you turn that empty cup into a mouse or something?’
‘No.’ Paul had an idea. ‘But I can make it wash itself up, that’s easy. Look.’ He considered the cup, identified the fact that it was dirty and ought to be clean; and then it was. ‘See?’
‘Cool.’ Her eyes were actually shining. ‘That’s so amazing. Do it again.’
‘I can’t. Someone’ll see.’
‘Please?’
It was, just as his mother had always told him, the magic word. ‘Oh, all right then,’ he said magnanimously, and cleaned another cup.
‘That’s amazing,’ she said again.
‘Well.’ Paul shrugged. ‘Fairly amazing. But you can do it just as well with a J-cloth and Fairy Liquid.’
Melze didn’t seem to have heard him. ‘Can you teach me to do that?’ she said eagerly.
He shook his head. ‘Truth is,’ he said, ‘I haven’t got a clue how it’s done. I just look at the cup and realise that in an ideal world it wouldn’t have brown rings round the inside and an eighth of an inch of cold coffee in the bottom.’
‘Oh.’ She leaned across to the next table, said, ‘Excuse me’ to its rather startled occupant, and took his empty cup. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’m looking at it. Yes, I can see what’s wrong. This cup is very dirty, it’s an absolute disgrace.’ Behind her, Paul could see the waitress turn her head.
‘No,’ Melze announced sadly. ‘No luck. Look, still dirty.’
Paul smiled weakly. ‘I think it’s one of those things,’ he said. ‘Actually, I’ve thought about it a lot, and my theory is, it’s – well, this sounds really silly, but it’s all to do with how you look at things, things that’ve gone wrong. I mean, if you look at them and you say to yourself, Oh well, that’s life, I guess, only to be expected, and there’s nothing I can do about it, then I don’t suppose you can do magic. It’s what I said just now about in an ideal world. I suppose that deep down you’ve got to believe that there’s an ideal world out there somewhere, and you believe in it strongly enough that you can sort of swap: one little bit of our rotten old real world for one little bit of the ideal one.’ He tailed off and looked at her hopefully. ‘What do you reckon?’ he asked.
‘I think you’re right,’ she said.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I think you were spot on, about it sounding really silly. Because,’ Melze continued, as a stray flicker of annoyance crossed Paul’s face, ‘that’d mean that in order to do magic you’d have to be, what’s the word? You’d have to be an idealist. And, well, I’ve met the partners, and presumably they’re all very good indeed at magic, and they don’t look like a bunch of starry-eyed dreamers to me. No way. If you met them in the street, you’d think they were probably lawyers.’
She had a point there. ‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘But—’
‘And then there’s you,’ she said. ‘No disrespect, in fact quite the opposite, because I wouldn’t put you down as a bleeding-heart pacifist whale-saver. You’re too—’
‘Selfish?’
Melze shook her head. ‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘I imagine that if you ever found yourself in a situation where you could save a whale, you would, provided there weren’t loads of people standing around watching. But that’s not the issue; you’re more the sort of person who’s convinced that he could never save a whale, because it’s probably too difficult, and you’re not brave or clever enough. You’d say, no point me trying to end acid rain or Third World debt when I haven’t even got a girlfriend. Right?’
Paul didn’t say anything; whereupon Melze came over all remorseful, as though she’d just trodden on a kitten’s tail. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to get at you particularly, all I meant was, I think you’ve got to have an ego the size of Mount Rushmore if you’re going to be an idealist, because you’re saying to yourself, here’s this problem and I’m just the person to do something about it. And that’s not you, is it?’
Paul shrugged. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘I’m a coward and selfish. No point pretending otherwise.’
That seemed to make Melze angry. ‘No, you aren’t,’ she said. ‘I know you aren’t, because you rescued that Mr Wells who got turned into a stapler; and that was very dangerous and you didn’t have to get involved, but you did it anyway. But I think you did it because you thought, it must be really horrible being a stapler for a hundred years, not because you were on some sort of idealistic crusade to stamp out illegal shape-shifting. Do you see what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ he said, mostly because he wanted to change the subject. ‘I guess so. Anyhow,’ he went on, ‘that’s all I can tell you about how to do magic. Not much help, I guess.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she replied, smiling brightly. ‘Presumably I just haven’t got the knack. No big deal. And I won’t persecute you about doing magic any more. And I do think it’s really clever of you, and so cool.’
In retrospect, Paul decided later, that was probably the moment that Cupid decided
to stop mucking about with bows and arrows and went in with the old cold steel. In the past, people had occasionally told him that he was kind of sweet, but that was about as far as it went. Even Sophie hadn’t said nice things about him. Praise and flattery came his way about as often as claret and foie gras did to someone in prison. Probably he mumbled something by way of reply, some sort of denial or half-hearted rebuttal, he couldn’t remember. Love he’d just about learned to handle. Admiration, on the other hand, was as new, strange and intimidating to him as photography to a Trobriand Islander, and deep down he was afraid that it just might steal his soul.
Paul could remember pointing out that it was getting late and they’d better get back to the office; and Melze had looked slightly sad, because their time together was almost over. To someone whose relatives had been known to put their clocks forward an hour to hasten his departure, that was dangerously rich, too. All in all, when he knocked on Countess Judy’s door at a quarter past two for their scheduled meeting, he felt as though he’d just drunk a pint of champagne far too quickly: light-headed and blown up like a balloon.
‘I expect you’ve been wondering,’ Countess Judy was saying, ‘about how magic works.’
Paul gulped so sharply that he almost gave himself hiccups. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s crossed my mind occasionally, yes.’
She nodded, just a little, like a nodding dog in the back window of a Cortina abandoned in the desert. ‘It didn’t occur to you to ask, of course. Instead, you preferred to try and figure it out from first principles. Maybe a rather strange way of demonstrating your commitment to your chosen career.’
Suddenly he was in trouble again; but he was used to that. Having spent so much of his life in the wrong that it counted as his domicile for tax purposes, he could slip as effortlessly into guilty mode as a cat through a cat flap. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
