A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Fiction

by Terry Pratchett

  A van driver there was, let’s call him me.

  A nine-to-fiver, going home to tea.

  Just outside Bath, observant as they come

  He spied a hippie – travelling by thumb.

  Beside the sunny road the lad stood baking

  His hair was dripping sweat, his feet were aching.

  Not cool was he, so broiling was the day

  The poor man’s grass was turning fast to hay.

  ‘Glastonbury’s where I’m bound.’ ‘Hop in,’

  I said. He gave a weary grin

  ‘Right on,’ he said, ‘this hitching is a drag.’

  And then he rolled himself a sort of fag

  And told me all about how the next day

  Would be specially good vibrations all the way.

  ‘A Festival of Sevens’, and the Tor

  A sort of dustbin full of cosmic lore.

  Some miles further on we stopped again

  To pick up four more lurking in a lane,

  A woeful band, a travel-weary tribe

  Without the breath to raise a single vibe

  Between them. In the back they went

  With two guitars, three rucksacks and a tent.

  One believed in UFOs, one said ley

  Lines were mystic traffic signs and they

  All met at Glastonbury; also she

  Was really deep into astrology.

  ‘You’re Libra.’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Oh, Aries?’ ‘No.’

  ‘I’m never wrong,’ she said. ‘You must be Virgo.’

  ‘No,’ I said; she thought a bit, then – ‘Leo?

  Oh dear, I’m never wrong. Um, Scorpio?

  Pisces? Taurus?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s me.’

  Bells tinkled as the lady laughed with glee,

  And clapped her hands, and said ‘I’m never wrong.’

  And then another pilgrim joined our throng.

  Black-clad she was. ‘I always get a hitch,’

  She said, when climbing in, ‘’cos I’m a witch.’

  ‘Oho,’ said Ley-line Joe, with fancies lewd

  A-thinking of her prancing in the nude.

  But I thought, yes my girl, I’ve met your kind

  At parties, where you always seem to find

  Strange lines on people’s hands and put on airs

  And then go and be sick upon the stairs.

  With seven in the van plus tents, the tension

  Was getting rather tight on the suspension.

  The wheels were giving mystic sort of whines;

  We went round corners hopping in straight lines.

  And then as I must quickly now relate

  The seven of us nearly met our fate.

  ‘You see, inspector, as I drove along

  Listening quite astonished to the throng

  Discussing miracles, I think, and Re-

  Incarnation – it’s all Greek to me,

  Your Worship – I think that when I die

  I’ll come back as a corpse, but this is by

  The way. I’ve got to tell you (honest) now

  How come we very nearly hit a cow.

  The herd came surging out across the road –

  I braked, but trouble was, I had this load:

  The road was hot, the tyres too and so

  We did a mystic skid. And, er, you know

  The van it sort of grit its teeth and lunged …

  The occupants went white with fear and plunged

  Very nearly in my lap, bags, beads and bells,

  Ropes, sandals, Levis and assorted smells;

  On, on we slewed, and how I hoped that seven

  Didn’t mean my number’s up and me in Heaven.

  The witch said “Jesus!” which just goes to show

  It pays to hedge your bets. You never know.

  And then with one heroic braking judder

  We halted seven inches from an udder.’

  I’ve got to say that generally the town

  Of Glastonbury always gets me down:

  A nasty little town of moaning traders.

  But then, there is this problem of invaders …

  I left them near the Tor. I hope they found

  What they are looking for. A holy ground?

  Sacred to what? I really do not know.

  A sort of mystic Glastonbury glow.

  I wondered, as a cheerful atheist,

  Exactly what, besides a cow, I’ve missed.

  THERE’S NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD FOOL FOUND IN AN ENGLISH QUEUE

  BATH AND WEST EVENING CHRONICLE, 14 JANUARY 1978

  This was one of those letting-off-steam things: you underwent what the late Patrick Campbell used to call rigours of life, and instead of taking it out on somebody, you wrote it down in a tea break and forgot about it, until it turned up here.

  Text of the party political broadcast shortly to be given by the Rt Hon Maurice Dancer, the newly appointed Minister for Queues

  Good evening. You will notice how crisply I said that – good evening. I mean I didn’t drag it out, I came right out with it. Good evening.

  Many of you will be wondering why you need a Minister for Queues. Well, it’s obvious. This is, after all [Glances at board behind camera] 1978, the jet age. We must all, ha ha [Grins] get with it, although we must not of course freak up, I mean freak off. Off out. Lose our heads.

  It has come to the notice of your vigilant Government that many people today, in this country of ours, are too slow in queues. We at the Equal Speeds Commission will be doing something about this, make no mistake about it.

  Take Post Offices. When you and I go in all we want is a 10½ pee stamp, for which we are proffering the correct money. Of course we are. But in front of us there is always some nit who wants to send a parcel of live ants to Bolivia, and renew his lawnmower licence, and blow us if he doesn’t start to fill in a great big form there and then!

  Of course, everyone in the queue behind us nips off smartly to the three other vacant counters, and then the selfish clod pulls out a purse and starts to pay for it all in pennies! Meanwhile looking very self-satisfied! [Realizes he is standing up, coughs, adjusts tie, sits down, smooths hair back into place.]

  Sorry about that, got a bit carried away there. Now, banks. You go to the Quick-Service Counter to cash as it might be a cheque for £10 and the lady in front of you, it turns out, wants to arrange a complicated transaction that needs phone calls and the taking down of large official books.

  And then when you rush to the next counter the man queuing there suddenly opens his briefcase and takes out dozens of little bags of coins, which all have to be weighed and counted!

  How many times have you got to the railway station in reasonable time for the train only to find some complacent person at the ticket counter opening negotiations for a return ticket to Vladivostok? And of course the clerk, instead of motioning him to the back of the queue, abets him, because it’s a change from the usual cheap day returns to London.

  Ho yes! I’ve got my eye on the likes of him! He’s the sort who whips into a garage forecourt a bumper ahead of me and then fills his car up very slowly from the one available pump. I mean, you know how you can make those self-service pumps shoot the petrol up at a gallon every ten seconds but not this chap, oh no, he fidgets with the trigger just in case it runs away with him, and then when you’re waiting to pay he takes out a cheque book, verrrry slowly, asks the man what the date is, and then says ‘By the way, sorry to be a nuisance, have you got a fanbelt for a 1954 Austin Trundler?’

  And then he has the brass-bound nerve to smile in a self-satisfied way. Oh yes, he’s thinking, I’m first in the queue I am, oh yes, I can take all day if I like, oh yes, any more tooth-grinding out of you matey and I’ll buy five pints of oil, an anorak, one of these ghastly little air fresheners and a motoring map of Angola.

  Ironmonger’s shops! This vermin breeds there like flies! You’re waiting there with your little packet of quite simple nails and he says to the man,
‘Sorry to be a nuisance, I want a lock.’ When they’ve shown him all the locks in the shop he decides that he’d better go home again and measure the door, but meanwhile could they show him some hinges?

  In the past, if you were to seize a length of, as it might be, 22-millimetre copper piping from the counter and batter him with it, our antiquated legal system would have dealt severely with you. Not any more! From now on, unless they are a registered old age pensioner, you will be able to give these people what they richly deserve and they’d better not go and moan to anyone! That’ll teach them!

  What’s the good of being in power unless you use it, that’s what I say. God, I hate these people, the hours I’ve spent standing behind women who open their shopping bags to open another bag to open their handbag to find their purse to find the money to pay— [Voice off: ‘Are you going to be all night? I’ve got a simple news bulletin here and you’ve been going on for twenty minutes!’]

  Thank you, good evening.

  COO, THEY’VE GIVEN ME THE BIRD

  BATH AND WEST EVENING CHRONICLE, 8 APRIL 1978

  My word, how this brings back memories. When I worked for the Bath Evening Chronicle, in the dear old days of long ago, my place of work was a shed – your actual fairly cheap garden shed – which was placed on a flat roof opposite, if I recall correctly, the room that was the workplace for the Tele Ad girls, who I must say did not work in a shed, and especially not my shed, which was so ramshackle that if I moved a useful piece of wood in one corner, I had a direct view of young pigeons in a nest. Sometimes I used to feed them. That was the time when I was doing features and other hack work. Oddly enough, it was a good life if you didn’t mind being constantly surrounded by pigeons. And while I can’t remember much more about it, I must assume that my near neighbours were the inspiration of this little piece.

  According to the Radio Times (so it must be right), the Russians have experimented with using pigeons to do simple production-line jobs in factories …

  DEAR COMRADE CHAIRMAN,

  I would just like to say right at the start that I have been employed here at the Dugvilasgivichski Tool and Die Collective for 12 years and there have never been any complaints. I have never applied for a visa for Israel, I am not now and never have been an intellectual, and I have always kept my production line spotless, you could eat your dinner off it. There is not another man in the place what could say the same or, if I may put it bluntly, there is not in actual point of fact another man1 in the place.

  Of course I realize that as a humble Factory Hygiene Operative Grade III it is not my job to criticize decisions made higher up the Party machine, not if I don’t want to end up on the wrong side of the Dugvilasgivichski Mental Health Institute anyway, but I cannot help recalling the old days when there were 1,300 other comrade workers here, I mean human beings, I mean I don’t wish this to be interpreted as a criticism of the quality of the work of my current feathered comrades per se.

  I mean, on the production lines all you hear is thousands of little beaks pecking away, that and the rustle of feathers, some days it drives me up the pole. Also take the case of works outings, they used to be very enjoyable, we’d all go out to Nodynoverograd-super-Mare with a few crates of wodka stuck in the back of the coach, only now it’s hard to enjoy yourself when you’re the only chap in 13 coaches and all the rest of your fellow comrade workers are in big wicker hampers. When we get there I have to let them out and then they all fly back home, leaving Joe Joevarich Muggins here with his funny hat and a bag of whelks and a long journey back home on his tod.

  I wouldn’t mind that so much, but when I complained to the Chief Hygiene Operative he just flew away.

  Things aren’t the same in the canteen any more, either. Well, they’re not going to produce 1,300 lunches of mixed corn and just one of caviar-and-chips, are they? No, it’s either sandwiches or up there on the feeding perch with all the rest of them and no moaning or we’ll peck your fingers.

  I will pass over the failing fortunes of the works darts team, the humiliating defeat in the billiards league, the unpleasant encounter with the KGB All-Stars on the football field, and the nasty mess at the international chess championships – and I told the fraternal Chinese delegate not to take his hat off, but of course no one listened.

  I appreciate what it said in Pravda about not being capitalist about our fellow creatures, and all that about joining together in the greater unity of all warm-blooded creatures as per true Marxist thinking, also where it said that every pigeon in a factory means another man free to build submarines, but what it boils down to is that I’m only employed here because none of my new fellow comrade workers is big enough to push a broom.

  I would also like to make a protest that the parrot they’ve got operating the switchboard won’t let me make personal calls, and as for the flamingo on the tea trolley, well, how would you like your tea stirred?

  I hope this message reaches you, on account of me attaching it to the leg of one of my fellow comrade workers who’s going to see his relatives, he says they’ve got a little nest just outside your office window.

  Thanking you in anticipation, I remain,

  Yours fraternally,

  TERRY TERRYANOVICH PRATCHETT

  PS: Sorry this letter is a bit nibbled at the top, only the works manager has been out for a fly-around and you know what these budgies are like – little scamps.

  1 Author’s note: Should have said comrade, shouldn’t I?

  AND MIND THE MONOLITHS

  BATH AND WEST EVENING CHRONICLE, 1 APRIL 1978

  Around the time this was written an Iron Age village was being reconstructed somewhere near Farnham in Dorset; I had contacts in the area, which wasn’t too far away from where I lived. People had been brought in to this new prehistoric settlement and were filmed going through the working day of Iron Age man, but rumours began that locals nearby were going in during the hours of darkness to flog fags and (if I remember correctly) soft lavatory paper to the ancient and rather desperate inmates. In no way can I vouch for the truth of this, but there seemed to be a vogue for this sort of thing and so, for a jobbing journalist, looking outwards through the pigeons, that was enough of a spark to start a fire. Wind yourself up to a sort of English music hall humour and away, boys and girls, you go.

  You can’t miss us, down here at the HTV Paleolithic Village. Well, you can, if you’re not careful. What you do is, you come up past the Yorkshire Television reconstructed hill-fort, turn left at the LWT Bronze Age encampment, go straight on past Southern TV’s Beaker Folk village, and we’re next door to the field where some poor bleeders are being paid by Granada to try to build Stonehenge.

  It’s not a bad life, all things considered. There’s only me and Sid here now, ever since Ron and Amanda were lured off to Border Television’s Dark Age Settlement by the promise of not having to sleep in the same hut as the goats. Also old Tom Bowler left us last week: he said he didn’t mind being Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, except that when the original Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, wanted to get his head down after a hard day’s flintknapping he, Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, didn’t have a ruddy great 250 horsepower diesel generator roaring away outside his sodding sod hut hut. Or a bank of arclights in his bedroom.

  I can’t say I mind that. What keeps me awake are the thuds and abruptly cut-off screams from next door every time a monolith falls over.

  Still it’s not too bad. I can put a pretty good edge on a flint, even if I say it myself, and next week it’s our turn to go hunting. There’s been a bit of a stink over this hunting business ever since the Granada lot came back with a side of best beef and three chickens with their giblets in a plastic bag. I thought that was a bit odd, and I said as much to Sid.

  Mind you, Sid’s an old hand at this business. He did a year on the Sussex University Ancient Farm, then he wangled a place on the Radio Three Celtic Living Experiment, and then he did nine months being paid to reconstruct Silbury Hill. He can knock out a copper b
racelet quick as a wink, can Sid, and when it comes to hunting, he just nips over to the nearest farm and pinches a cow.

  The TV types have never rumbled him; we hardly see them now, what with there being no bathrooms in the Paleolithic and the midden right outside the hut and everything – they just stay on the main road and use a long lens.

  Where I disagree with Sid, though, is over this flogging of fags to the other villages. I looked at his straw mattress the other day and it’s stuffed with Benson and Hedges, toothpaste, shampoos, and rolls of soft toilet paper. I don’t think it’s in the spirit of the thing, but Sid said trading was very important in the olden days, and anyway, he can get a quid for a roll of Andrex down at the Bronze Lake Village.