Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  ‘I had this really weird dream,’ he repeated, ‘where I was this obnoxious snivelling little git, and God or somebody came to me in a vision and asked me if I wanted to be me, or if I wanted to turn back into the git and get off with Sophie Pettingell.’

  At the words get off with, his friend’s hearing came back on line. ‘With who?’

  ‘Sophie Pettingell. You know, that awful bitch at our place, the one who just got made a partner.’

  His friend frowned, as though peering through a cloud of amber-coloured fumes. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ he said.

  ‘Wouldn’t what?’

  ‘Whatsername, that bird you just said. Anyway, I thought you were after that redhead from the Credit Lyonnais.’

  ‘Snores,’ Paul replied succinctly. ‘And anyhow, I didn’t say I wanted to, I said that in this dream I had, God said I could be this wimp loser and get off with her, if I wanted to.’

  His friend seemed to have a problem with that concept. ‘God, you say?’

  ‘I think it was God,’ Paul replied. ‘One of those blokes, anyhow.’

  His friend shrugged. ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d think seriously about my whole religious position. Also, if next time you see Him, He starts on about how there’s all these English people buying up farmhouses in the Dordogne and wouldn’t it be a good idea to raise an army and drive them into the sea, I think you’d probably be wise to change the subject.’

  Paul nodded absently. ‘The thing was,’ he said, ‘it was such a vivid dream. If I close my eyes, I can still see bits of it. And he said, if I chose it’d be for ever, for the rest of my life. Which is really weird, don’t you think?’

  His friend didn’t seem unduly impressed. ‘I had this dream once,’ he said. ‘I dreamt I was a twelve-foot-high bass saxophone, and I was being chased through the corridors of Broadcasting House by a pack of aubergines. And you know what? Since then, I’ve never touched the stuff again, and it seems to have done the trick.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Paul said vaguely. ‘In any case, I think I’ll go home now.’

  ‘Oh,’ said his friend. ‘You’re not stopping for the other half.’

  ‘I had the other half two hours ago.’ Paul swilled the last drop round in the bottom of his glass and swallowed it. ‘Got to be up early,’ he said. ‘Pre-breakfast meeting with Dennis Tanner. Catch you later, Duncan.’

  ‘Neville.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Paul pushed his way through the crowd to the door and walked out into the street. It had turned cold, and the beginnings of rain were feathering down. He’d left his umbrella at the office, but it was too late and too far to go back for it.

  ‘Really weird,’ he muttered to himself, as he stepped off the pavement.

  Later, at the inquest, the taxi driver said the bloke must’ve been drunk or something, because he hadn’t looked, he’d just charged out into the road.

  ‘Celia Johnson,’ said the elderly Chinese gentleman. ‘Leslie Howard.’

  Paul closed his eyes and opened them again, but the Chinese bloke was still there. ‘You what?’ he said.

  ‘Brief Encounter,’ the Chinese bloke said. ‘I can’t remember if either of them actually says, “We can’t go on meeting like this” in the film, but you get the idea.’ He shrugged his blue silk-clad shoulders. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘you’re down for the Scrabble tournament at six-thirty, followed by first steps in basket-weaving at seven-fifteen, followed by gardening club at nine. After that,’ he added, ‘I haven’t bothered, since by then time will have no meaning for you.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Paul said, and he couldn’t help but notice that, apart from the elderly Chinese gentleman and his rather garish silk dressing-gown thing, there was nothing at all in any direction, ‘but I haven’t got the faintest bloody idea where I am or who you are or what the hell is going on or what just happened to me.’

  The Chinese gentleman’s smile was a salad of pity, cruelty, sadness and triumph. ‘Like it matters,’ he said.

  ‘So it’s just as well,’ Mr Laertides said, as Paul’s eyes snapped open, ‘that there’s two of you. Otherwise—’

  For the first few seconds of consciousness, Paul was sure that he was dead. He could remember it so clearly: Mr Dao’s horrible grin, the terrible sensation of gradually drifting away, the sudden realisation that this time there was no escape, the white curtain being drawn slowly across his mind’s eye. ‘Where?’ he mumbled. ‘Am I—?’

  ‘Now,’ Mr Laertides was saying, ‘there’s only one of you, and so that’s been put right too. I do like to have everything neat and tidy and sorted when I’m wrapping up a job.’

  Paul filled his lungs with air, just to see if he still could. ‘Did I just die?’

  Mr Laertides’s face stretched into a long, annoying grin. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said, ‘I’ve never tried it myself. You, on the other hand, seem to spend more time down there than up here. Not so much a grave, more a pied-à-terre.’ He drew his fingertips down the sides of his nose, and yawned. ‘That said,’ he went on, ‘I’d sort of throttle back on the snuffing-it side of things from now on, if I were you. Might not be so easy to get away, the next time.’

  ‘I died,’ Paul repeated. ‘Really died. I was fading away, evaporating—’ He stopped; he felt sick, and he was shaking. ‘Are you listening to what I’m telling you? I didn’t manage to get away at the last minute this time. It happened. I—’

  ‘You woke up,’ said Mr Laertides. ‘You were having a bad dream. People have them every day.’

  ‘Not like this,’ Paul objected hysterically. ‘It was so real. It was real—’ He could feel muscles contracting in his stomach. ‘All those other times, somehow I knew it wasn’t actually the end, because, well, it wouldn’t have been right. But this time—’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.’

  ‘The hell with that,’ Paul said. ‘It was horrible. It was so absolutely horrible.’

  Mr Laertides smiled awkwardly. ‘I’m not saying it wasn’t,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying that you shouldn’t worry about it, because it doesn’t do any good. I mean, it’s like spending the whole summer holidays feeling miserable because school starts again in September. You can waste your whole life thinking like that.’

  ‘But I thought—’ Paul tried to pull himself together; it was a bit like trying to catch whitebait with a cod-fishing net. ‘Mr Dao told me himself. He said that over me death has no jurisdiction.’

  ‘Had,’ said Mr Laertides gently, almost kindly. ‘There was an anomaly. It’s been ironed out. That’s what I do. Congratulations,’ he added, with a slightly forced grin. ‘You’re now a hundred per cent normal again, at least where mortality’s concerned.’

  ‘Oh.’ Paul curled up in a ball on the floor, hugging his knees to his chest. ‘So some day—’

  ‘Some day,’ Mr Laertides repeated. ‘But not yet. Anyway,’ he added briskly, ‘that about wraps things up as far as my side of it goes. I can shove off, go back to sleep until some other dangerous bastard starts mucking about with the foundations of the universe. Thanks for all your help.’ His voice was different somehow, Paul noticed. ‘You know what?’ he went on. ‘I’ll miss you. Sort of got used to being around people these last thirty years, and watching you grow up and everything. It’d be pushing it a bit to say I’m proud of how you turned out, but you could’ve been a lot worse.’

  Paul opened his eyes and looked up at him. ‘Uncle Ken,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Laertides; then he flickered one last time into a cloud of pixels, which reshaped themselves into his errant godfather. ‘Now you see what I meant when I said I’ve always been here for you. Looking after your moral and spiritual welfare, that was the job description. I did OK, though I say so myself. So long, son.’

  ‘You’re going,’ Paul said.

  ‘Well, yes.’ He smiled, this time with a hint of genuine warmth, though perhaps that was just an illusion resulting from the change of face. �
��Couldn’t hang around here even if I wanted to. I’m not so much an actual person, see, more what you’d call a phenomenon; and when my gig’s over, I move on to the next one. Bit like Dr Sam Beckett, but without the crinkly blue lights.’

  ‘But you’re my godfather,’ Paul said. ‘I mean, you’re real.’

  ‘For a while,’ Uncle Ken replied. ‘Same as everybody else, same as you, even. But all good things come to an end.’ He walked to the kitchen door and opened it, and Paul suddenly realised he’d never see him again. ‘Thanks for the biscuits and stuff, by the way.’

  ‘Biscuits?’

  ‘The ones I helped myself to, last time I was here. I also nicked the magic sword from under the sofa, while you were in the other room, but that wasn’t actually stealing, because I knew I’d be giving it back, at Rosie Tanner’s do, when you’d be needing it. Just a minor detail I wanted to set straight,’ he added. ‘Force of habit. Talking of which: when I was your godfather - well, it wasn’t one word so much as two separated by a comma. Or even an ampersand. Be seeing you, our Paul.’

  He closed the door after him; tricksy things, doors, as Paul had learned to his cost over the last nine months or so. Paul sat still for a while, musing on his godfather’s parting words, which appeared on first hearing to be mere gibberish.

  Two words separated by a comma. Or even an ampersand -

  Oh.

  Oh well, Paul thought. That’d explain various things, too: like why Mum had always liked Uncle Ken a lot, but Dad had never seemed to care for him much; indeed, why Dad hadn’t liked Paul much, either, or bothered to show up at his funeral. And other stuff, to do with the first of the two words; intriguing but on balance rather less important.

  Paul stood up and went to the fridge, but when he opened the door the light didn’t come on, and there was nothing in it, not even furry cheese or deliquescent tomatoes. Paul sighed; it wasn’t every day that you lost not only your immunity from death and your god and your newly discovered long-lost father but your fridge as well.

  ‘Now what do I do?’ he said aloud; whereupon the doorbell rang.

  It was a goblin. No, it wasn’t, but not far off the mark - it was Dennis Tanner. He came in without being asked, looked around at the furnishings and decor with a vague, mute blend of disgust and contempt, and sat down on the edge of the better chair.

  ‘You didn’t come into the office today,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t I?’ Paul tried to think what day it actually was. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’ve sort of lost track of time lately.’

  ‘Well, that’s not good enough,’ Mr Tanner said. ‘You’re fired.’

  A very brief spurt of instinctive anger, followed by a slow, glorious sunrise of joy. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Tanner said, and he had the grace to sound a bit uncomfortable about it. ‘You’ll get a week’s pay in lieu of notice, and we’ll clear your desk for you in the morning. Don’t bother coming in, I’ll send it on.’

  ‘That’s—’ Paul tried to find some words, but they were all out to lunch. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  Mr Tanner sighed. ‘Don’t thank me,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t exactly an ordinary management decision. More,’ he added, muttering, ‘an act of God. Anyhow, that’s it as far as you and the firm are concerned. If you were hoping for a gold watch or a card signed by all of us, forget it.’

  ‘I—’ Paul shrugged. ‘That’s all right,’ he said.

  Mr Tanner got up. ‘You may also be interested to know,’ he said, ‘that I’ve had to sack Ms Pettingell as well. Pity, we had high hopes of her at one stage, but—’

  ‘Another act of God?’

  ‘More acts than bloody Chipperfield’s,’ Mr Tanner said bitterly. ‘But there you go. She’s out of it, and so are you. In fact, it’s going to play merry hell with my agoraphobia, what with Theo Van Spee and Ricky Wurmtoter suddenly vanishing off the face of the Earth. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?’

  ‘Me?’ Paul said. ‘Sorry, no.’

  ‘Ah.’ Mr Tanner shrugged. ‘So it’ll just be me, Cas Suslowicz and Jack Wells holding the fort. Still, we’ll manage. Probably take on a few zombie trainees from MIT come the autumn. They’re smart and hard-working, have excellent qualifications and they don’t want paying. I’ll see myself out.’

  The door closed behind him, too. It was being a hungry door today, gobbling people up and not even spitting out the bones or the boots. On the other hand—

  On the other hand, Paul was free, and that was going to take quite some time to sink in. He dreaded to think what kind of threats Mr Laertides - even now he couldn’t manage to think of him as Uncle Ken; let alone Dad - must’ve used to force JWW to let him go, after they’d paid a six-figure sum for him and seen hardly any return on their investment. Under other circumstances (fairly bizarre ones, admittedly) he could have felt sorry for them; but the screeching brakes of the sweet chariot swinging low drowned out any such thoughts. He was free; it was the same sort of relief he’d felt on parting company with Mr Dao—

  No, he was under strict orders not to worry about that, so he shoved the thought of Mr Dao out of his mind and slid a chair-back under his mind’s door knob. Instead, he thought: So they’ve let Sophie go, as well. I wonder—

  Freshly canned worms; please dispose of can tidily. Sophie, and yet another ghastly dilemma. Mr Tanner could let her go, release her from her contract and let her get on with her life; all very well for him, all he had to do was tear up a piece of paper. But it didn’t end there. If Paul had got the right end of the stick, Sophie was in love with him; she had to be, because she had no choice in the matter, she’d been bred that way, like a variety of geranium. If she was ever to be genuinely free and have some sort of a life without nasty bits of magic embedded in it like impossible-to-operate-on shrapnel, he’d have to find some way of letting her go too. Assuming, of course, that he could bring himself to do that—

  He’d tried once already; or at least one of him had, and died in the attempt. Not a good precedent. How do you make people stop loving you, Paul wondered; is there a magic spell or a philtre you can buy that’ll do the trick? The impression he’d got back in the office was that there wasn’t; in which case, what’d be so bad about leaving well alone, letting the happy ending slouch towards Bethlehem to be born? If Sophie loved him and he loved her; wasn’t that what Life’s supposed to be all about, according to Hollywood and the music industry and received opinion generally?

  But it wouldn’t be right. It hadn’t been right when she’d offered to drink the philtre for him, and it wasn’t right now. Paul flopped onto the sofa and put a cushion over his face, but he knew perfectly well that the world was still out there, even though he couldn’t see it. He wondered where she was, what she was doing, what she was thinking; had Mr Tanner told her the good news yet, and if so—

  The phone rang. He dragged himself across the room to answer it.

  ‘Paul. Guess what that bastard’s gone and done, he’s sacked me. I don’t believe it, it’s so unfair. He said it was because I was ten minutes late getting in on Tuesday the week before last, and I’m too slow sorting the Mortensen printouts, but that’s just so not true, it was eight minutes not ten, and nobody’s ever said to me when the bloody printouts’ve got to be done by, they just say here they are, do them. I’m definitely going to take them to the industrial tribunal, they can’t get away with stuff like that, this isn’t the bloody Middle Ages—’

  ‘Sophie,’ Paul said. ‘Think about it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, think about it. They’ve let you go. You’re free of them. For ever.’

  Pause. He could hear her thinking, down the other end of the telephone line. Then: ‘Paul, what are you still doing at home? Why aren’t you at work?’

  ‘I’ve been sacked too,’ Paul replied. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

  ‘Stay there,’ Sophie said. ‘I’ll be right over.’

  Click, said the phone in his ear, and he put
the reciever down. So she was coming over to see him. That was probably good, except—

  Except he was living in a world where true love wasn’t possible but magic worked just fine, where death wasn’t always fatal, where his dad wasn’t his dad, but God was; and he had no job and a broken fridge. He slumped in a chair, his face in his hands. He lived in a world where he was doomed always to do the right thing, even when it was palpably wrong. Also, though it was some way down his prioritised list of things to get in a state over, it wasn’t all that long ago that he’d stabbed Ricky Wurmtoter to death with a sword. And that had been the right thing to do; and living happily ever after with Sophie would be the wrong thing to do. The whole business was as crazy as a blenderful of blind ferrets.

  It took Sophie an hour and a half to get there; during which time Paul could have grown a dozen stalagmites. When he opened the door, she walked straight past him and dropped down in the good chair like a discarded bag of shopping.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘We need to have a serious talk about all this.’

  Oh joy, he muttered to himself, a serious talk. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose so. Would you like a cup of coffee before we start?’

  She looked at him with vague annoyance. ‘We need to talk about us, for one thing,’ she said.

  ‘I see. Coffee’s out of the question, then.’

  Sophie had this way of frowning at him that made him wonder if English really was his first language. ‘What?’

  ‘Forget it.’ Paul sat down in the bad chair and braced himself for a serious talk. ‘You start, then.’

  ‘Well,’ she began; and then she hesitated. This was unusual. During the short time they’d lived together, they’d had rather a lot of serious talks, and the format had always been the same. She’d start with a speech-cum-lecture-cum-list-of-charges and he’d sit still and be quiet, trying not to let his attention wander; then there’d be an awkward silence, and then she’d start talking again, usually saying the same things but in a slightly different order. The cycle would repeat itself (rarely more than five times), and at the end either she’d burst into tears and stomp out of the room, lose her temper and stomp out of the room or sit on his lap and start nibbling his ear. Starting the procedure off with an awkward silence was an entirely new approach, and Paul wasn’t sure that it was an improvement. ‘Well,’ she said eventually. ‘Say something, for crying out loud.’