Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  Paul thought for a moment. ‘I don’t feel any different.’

  ‘Well, duh,’ said Mr Laertides kindly. ‘That’s because you’ve completely forgotten what it was like to be the old Paul. Otherwise - well, you get the point, I trust.’

  Put like that, it made sense. ‘All right,’ Paul said. ‘And the rest of it; I mean, all the other crap from the past. Like, I don’t have to go on working for JWW any more if I don’t want to.’

  Mr Laertides nodded. ‘Do you want to?’ He smiled. ‘In case it has any bearing on your decision,’ he added quietly, ‘now that both Ricky and Theo are dead, they’ll be needing two new partners: pest control and applied magic. Probably I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Dennis Tanner’s going to drop by here soon after lunch to ask you if you’ll be the new pest-control partner.’

  Paul blinked. ‘Really?’

  Mr Laertides nodded. ‘Really. Dennis has always thought very highly of you, ever since you joined the firm. He likes your drive, your commitment; let’s face it, your ambition. And there’s no denying the fact, you’ve really taken to the pest-control stuff. Absolute flair for it, particularly the killing aspect. Even Ricky had to admit, you’re the best assistant he ever had.’

  Well, Paul thought, that’s only fair. ‘In that case—’ he said.

  ‘And after he’s done that,’ Mr Laertides went on smoothly, ‘he’s going to find Sophie Pettingell and offer her applied magic.’

  ‘What, that stupid, soppy, fat-arsed—?’ Paul was suddenly livid with rage. Ever since he’d joined JWW, he’d cordially loathed Sophie Pettingell and everything about her: her big cow eyes, her little-girl smile, her giggle . . . All an act, he’d known that since he’d first set eyes on her, and how a normally sensible person like Dennis Tanner couldn’t see through it, he had no idea. Actually, he knew perfectly well: it was absolutely basic, beginner’s-level effective magic, a bog-standard glamour. But when applied by small, pretty blonde girls to middle-aged men, it was one of the strongest forms of magic there was. ‘Bloody hell,’ he sighed. ‘But she’s useless. And annoying.’

  ‘You should hear what she says about you,’ Mr Laertides replied.

  ‘But that’s so unfair,’ Paul protested loudly. ‘I mean, I’ve worked my arse off for this firm, and what’s she ever done, apart from float about wearing tight skirts and lip-gloss? I’ve killed bloody dragons for JWW, I’ve slaughtered demons, duelled with dark wizards, evenings and weekends too, and all she’s done is stuff her face with expense-account lunches and gone to awards ceremonies.’

  ‘It’s not right,’ Mr Laertides murmured.

  ‘You bet it’s not bloody right,’ Paul growled. ‘Well, we’ll see about that. I mean yes, she’s got Dennis Tanner eating out of the palm of her pudgy little hand, but I know for a fact that Cas Suslowicz doesn’t really like her very much, and you’ll back me up, I know, so really it’s just a case of getting Jack Wells on our side—’ He hesitated. ‘Talking of which,’ he said, ‘where is Jack these days? Haven’t seen him around for a while. He’s not off pretending to be something again, is he?’

  Mr Laertides shook his head. ‘He’s been on holiday, remember? Every year he goes to the Isle of Man to watch the TT races. He only got back yesterday.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Paul frowned. ‘Only there’s something in the back of my mind, and I can’t quite - something about a fridge getting killed.’

  ‘That was me, dumbo,’ said Mr Laertides indulgently, ‘and anyway, I wasn’t killed, was I? But fancy you remembering that.’

  ‘Remembering what?’

  ‘You tell me,’ said Mr Laertides.

  Paul thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Whatever it was, it’s gone. Anyhow, if I can’t talk Jack Wells round, I don’t deserve a job sorting Mortensen printouts, let alone a partnership. We’ll beat the bloody cow, just you see.We’ll have her out of here inside a month.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said Mr Laertides pleasantly. ‘No prisoners, right?’

  Paul nodded. ‘Absolutely. No prisoners.’ As he looked round he happened to catch sight of the clock on the opposite wall. ‘Hell’s teeth, is that the time? Only I’m having lunch with that redhead from the Credit Lyonnais, brain the size of a lentil but legs up to her chin.’

  ‘Don’t let me keep you, then,’ Mr Laertides said softly. ‘Only, Paul,’ he said.

  ‘Yes? What?’

  ‘Is this what you really want?’

  Paul stopped. ‘What a strange question,’ he said. ‘If you mean the partnership, well, yes, of course it is. To be the youngest-ever partner in JWW; it’s what I’ve always wanted, all my life. It’s what I was born to do.’

  ‘Fine,’ Mr Laertides said. ‘Just checking.’

  ‘And if that sad bitch Pettingell thinks she can spoil it for me—’

  Mr Laertides tapped the glass of his watch. ‘Your lunch date,’ he said. ‘Can’t keep true love waiting, can we?’

  Paul laughed. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said, and left the office.

  That night, Paul had a strange dream, as he lay on his back with the leggy redhead from the Credit Lyonnais snoring open-mouthed beside him.

  He dreamed that he was someone else, and it wasn’t much fun at all. This someone else he was being in his dream was the most appalling loser ever: a junior clerk in the scrying department, staring gormlessly at bauxite photos and filing Mortensens and occasionally running errands for the grown-ups. That was a pretty bad dream, the sort you’d expect if you’d stuffed your face with lobster and pickled cucumber followed by half a Stilton cheese ten minutes before getting into bed. But there was worse. In this dream - and he wondered what dank, fog-wreathed swamp in the black recesses of his psyche this bit had oozed out of - he was in love. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he was in love with, wait for it, Sophie Pettingell.

  And then it got even worse; because in his dream, the Pettingell bitch wasn’t even a bit pretty. In fact, she wasn’t even blonde. In his dream, she was small and thin and dark and bony, like some kind of female brunette Gollum; she cleaned out her fingernails with a biro cap and wiped her nose on her cuff, and whined on about her feelings and relationships and commitment and all sorts of other New Age feminist women-are-from Venus crap. And his dream wanted him to believe that he - Paul Carpenter, for crying out loud - he was in love with this object.

  Even while Paul was dreaming the dream, he was seriously considering the practicalities of suing his own subconscious for slander. It was obscene, there was no other word for it. Oh, there was more besides: in his dream, he hated working for JWW, he hated Dennis Tanner (he had a soft spot for Mr Tanner’s mum, which could have been a step in the right direction; but no, it was as Platonic as a wet weekend in North Wales and he only liked her when she was being a goblin, and that was just sick) and anything at all to do with the firm’s business, with magic itself, gave him the creeps right down to his toes. Under normal circumstances, that on its own would’ve had him sitting up in bed screaming so loud that the neighbours would’ve called the police; but since it shared the dream with the degrading and perverted Sophie Pettingell fantasy, he hardly noticed it.

  Time is funny in dreams; it stretches and flollops about like fondue. In Paul’s dream, it started as a day at work, and there he was in the unspeakably grotty clerks’ office, the one on the ground floor with no windows, and he was working his way slowly through a huge stack of those stupid aerial photographs of slices of Kalahari desert. And then it was lunchtime, and he was happy, because he had a lunch date; but the date was with the bloody awful Pettingell cow, and apparently his idea of a really wild time was nibbling a stale ham roll in that crummy Italian sandwich bar round the corner from the office—

  (At this point in his dream, Paul was aware of the leggy redhead from the Credit Lyonnais squirming in her sleep and dragging the duvet off his shoulders; and normally he’d have dragged it back off her and given her an elbow in the ribs to remind her whose duvet it was, dammit.
But he was too weak and too numbed with horror to move.)

  - And while he nibbled at his stale ham roll, the Pettingell monstrosity was bleating at him in her quiet, annoying voice, which was the sort of voice you’d expect to hear a lot up on the Yorkshire moors if sheep could talk, and she was giving him all sorts of dumb-assed half-baked reasons why it’d be a really bad idea at this stage in their (yuck, that word) relationship for her to move back in with him—

  For the first time that Paul could remember, he felt himself agreeing with Sophie Pettingell; in fact, as he lay there, the corner of his mind in which he was awake and watching this ghastly nightmare unfold was shouting, ‘Yeah, absofuckinglutely, you go, girl.’ But he - Paul, this hideous parody of himself - was sitting there getting sadder and sadder and gloomier and gloomier, and instead of rounding on her and telling her just precisely how wrong and full of shit she was, which of course was what the real Paul would’ve done, except of course that the real Paul wouldn’t go anywhere near Pettingell with rubber gloves and a ten-foot pole - instead of pointing out to her how utterly stupid her arguments and reasoning were, he was just crouching there and taking it, like some kind of emasculated silver-trailing slug.

  Really, it was so revolting it was fascinating, and he tuned in to what she was saying, purely out of morbid curiosity; and she was saying that the problem was that although she could talk to him, she couldn’t really talk to him, because although he listened to her, sometimes she felt he wasn’t really listening, because she felt that when he listened, he wasn’t really hearing what she was saying, only what he thought she was saying, and also the other way round too, because apparently he also had a tendency to say what he thought she wanted to hear rather than what he actually felt, which meant she couldn’t say what she really wanted to say, she had to say what she thought he wanted her to say so that he’d think she was saying what she was actually trying to say, and couldn’t he see that that was really hopeless and it was impossible for them to really communicate—

  Helpless in the prison of his own dream-struck mind, Paul howled at Sophie Pettingell to shut the fuck up, but she couldn’t hear him; and he was pretty sure that if he had to listen to one more second of this poisonous drivel his sleeping brain would explode through his ears and spray itself on the bedroom walls like aerosol paint. And then he somehow became aware that he wasn’t alone inside his head; that there was an alien presence in there with him, not just a submerged part of his own subconscious mind but a genuine outsider, who was talking to him.

  ‘Well,’ said the outsider, and he recognised the voice; it was that of Frank Laertides, of all people. ‘So what do you think of your choice now?’

  ‘My what?’ Paul replied.

  ‘Your choice,’ Mr Laertides repeated. ‘Your decision to be someone else.’

  Weirder and weirder. ‘I don’t get you,’ Paul said.

  ‘Really? Good Lord.’ He could hear a grin in Mr Laertides’s voice. ‘That’s significant in itself, I suppose. So, how’d it be if I were to tell you that what you’re watching here—’

  ‘This is down to you, is it?’ Paul objected angrily. ‘Look, would you please get this shit out of my head, before it gives me a bloody aneurism?’

  ‘What you’re watching here,’ Mr Laertides went on, ignoring him, ‘is the real you, and only a few hours ago, this was your life; or at least, this is how you’d have hoped your life would turn out, because although it doesn’t sound all that hopeful to a casual earwigger, actually you and Sophie have just had a major breakthrough in the peace process and actually resumed a meaningful dialogue in the search for a road map towards a negotiated settlement—’

  (‘What?’ mumbled the leggy redhead from the Credit Lyonnais.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You just sat bolt upright and screamed,’ she mumbled sleepily. ‘What the hell is the matter with you?’

  ‘Bad dream,’ Paul replied. ‘Go back to sleep.’)

  Back in the crummy little sandwich bar, Paul and Sophie both looked round, to see what the loud crashing noise had been; then Sophie resumed her monologue where she’d left off, and Mr Laertides started chuckling annoyingly.

  ‘You’re back, then,’ he was saying. ‘And I guess that sort of answers my question for me. No regrets, in other words.’

  ‘You’re saying,’ Paul muttered in a hollow, broken voice, ‘that there’s some kind of ghastly alternate universe where that disgusting, snot-nosed, cowering thing over there is actually me?’

  Mr Laertides snickered. ‘That,’ he said, ‘would be telling.’

  ‘No way,’ Paul objected. ‘Absolutely no frigging way. I’d rather be dead. Seriously.’

  ‘Funny you should say that,’ Mr Laertides replied. ‘So what you’re telling me is, all in all and taking the rough with the smooth, on balance you wouldn’t be tempted to change places with that Paul Carpenter sitting over there. Yes? All right,’ Mr Laertides added, ‘I get the message, please don’t scream like that, the acoustics in here - Thanks. So, you’re perfectly happy and satisfied with your life, is that it?’

  Paul hesitated. It was his own dream, so there wasn’t much point in lying. ‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t actually go that far.’

  ‘But I thought—’

  ‘Compared to that,’ Paul said quickly, ‘yes, my life’s an absolute bed of bloody roses. But perfectly happy and satisfied would nevertheless be overstating it.’

  ‘I see.’ Mr Laertides’s voice raised a virtual eyebrow. ‘And what would you say is wrong with your life, right now?’

  ‘That bloody woman,’ Paul answered without a hint of hesitation. ‘Just when I finally get what I truly deserve, what I’ve slogged my bum off for, the partnership, what do you and that git Tanner and the rest of you go and do? You make her a partner too. I mean, where’s the sense in that? It’s stupid.’

  ‘That’s it?’ Mr Laertides said. ‘That’s all, really? The only thing wrong with your life is Sophie Pettingell?’

  Paul thought about that for a full third of a second. ‘Yes,’ he said decisively.

  ‘Fine. And what would you say is your problem with her?’

  That took a little bit more thought, a whole half-second. ‘I hate her,’ Paul said.

  ‘Ah.’ Mr Laertides sounded satisfied, as though he’d just reached a conclusion. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you can wake up now.’

  So Paul woke up.

  But he wasn’t snuggled in a nice warm bed under expensive Laura Ashley sheets next to a leggy flame-haired banker’s moll. It wasn’t even morning. He was at home, in his flat, but it was late afternoon and outside the kitchen window rain was drizzling like a selfish child’s tears.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘I just thought,’ Mr Laertides said, ‘that before you committed yourself to your new life, I’d better check and make sure you actually liked it. I mean, in a sense it’s supposed to be your reward, for repairing the space-time continuum and so forth.’

  ‘Reward,’ Paul repeated.

  ‘Yes, up to a point,’ Mr Laertides replied. ‘Or it’s an attempt, in my usual flat-footed, cack-handed style, to set things right. Like, maybe that’s how you would have turned out if I hadn’t interfered and you’d been left to your own devices.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Well, quite. So I said to myself,’ Mr Laertides went on, ‘it’d probably be wise if I did just check, to make absolutely sure. To make absolutely sure,’ he repeated slowly, ‘that that’s how you’d like to be, irrevocably, for the rest of your life.’

  Paul didn’t say anything. He owed it to himself to make a considered decision for once in his life, rather than just going with instinct and gut reaction. From his mind he plucked the image, only slightly wilted, of himself waking up in bed: himself but not himself, this other person, this stranger—

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said.

  Possibly it wasn’t the reaction Mr Laertides had been expecting. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Am I sure
?’ Paul exploded. ‘For crying out loud. Weren’t you bloody well watching? He’s like rich and cool and successful and he gets on with people and he was in bed with this girl with no clothes on . . .’ Paul paused a moment to catch his breath. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If that could be me, I’m all for it. Absolutely no question whatsoever.’

  Mr Laertides frowned. ‘But Sophie,’ he said. ‘What about Sophie?’

  ‘Well—’ Paul hesitated. ‘If I’ve got this the right way round, the deal is that if I choose, reality will be like it was in that dream, OK? I’ll be normal and successful and I’ll have a career and girl-friends and everything; and so will she. I mean, she’ll have all the stuff she had in the dream; she’ll be a partner too, and—’

  ‘But you’ll hate her. And she’ll hate you too, probably.’

  Paul grinned weakly. ‘Omelettes and eggs?’ he said.

  For a moment Mr Laertides flickered, as if someone was playing about with his vertical hold. ‘That’s what you really want, is it?’

  ‘Yes. Oh yes.’

  ‘Oh. Right,’ Mr Laertides said, sounding somewhat bewildered. ‘Fine. You do realise that unless you say otherwise really soon, like in the next five seconds, you’ll be stuck like it for ever, for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Smashing,’ Paul said. ‘All right, have I got to do anything, or does it just happen?’

  ‘I had this really weird dream,’ Paul said.

  His friend wasn’t listening. Four pints of Flammenwerfer tends to have that effect. Nevertheless, Paul felt he wanted to tell someone about his dream, and his friend hadn’t actually begged him to shut up.