Little People

by Tom Holt

  I grinned. ‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘Here, I’ll show you,’ I added, scattering another swathe of the buggers. ‘See? Didn’t hurt me a bit.’

  Before that lot had picked themselves up off the deck and legged it into the wings, I felled another tranche, and another one after that. Resistance? They were too scared. And to think I’d been missing this much fun all my life!

  ‘Stop it Michael, please!’ There was Melissa, or at least her head, sticking out from under a pile of toppled elves. ‘Stop now, before it’s too late!’

  I ignored her and launched another sweep at the last few still standing. Down they went. But when they picked themselves up, they didn’t run like the others. They just stood there instead. That struck me as off, and prompted me to wonder where the others had run to.

  A quick look round answered that question. They hadn’t run so much as regrouped; in fact, they had me surrounded. Big deal, I thought. Couldn’t matter less to me which direction they came from, there still wasn’t anything they could do.

  ‘Well,’ I sneered, ‘what are you waiting for?’

  They didn’t move. Too scared, I reckoned, to do anything except stand there and cower. More chicken than Colonel Sanders.

  By the time I realised what they were really up to, and that the real reason for their regrouping was to form a circle in the grass around me, it was significantly too late.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The first thing that struck me when I opened my eyes was that I wasn’t in Elfland any more. The second thing was a boot.

  It was a black boot, as I recall, with decorative white stripes stitched up the side, and several rows of studs moulded into the sole. It seemed to take an awful long time getting to me as I lay on my back watching it, and yet by the time it made contact with my jaw I got the impression that it was travelling really rather fast. One of those relativistic paradoxes, I guess.

  About half a second after that, someone blew a whistle.

  I was a bit too preoccupied with the pain in my face to be properly aware of what was going on around me, but there seemed to be a whole bunch of people in shorts and long woolly socks standing around, and I think I heard someone asking someone else where the fuck he – me, presumably – had suddenly appeared from. A wonderful thing, the human brain; even while I was still three-quarters stunned from the kick, a part of my brain was patiently, diligently sorting through the data and analysing various alternative hypotheses. Shorts, for example, might be taken to imply a hot summer on the beach; but the muddy grass and long socks suggested winter, which also happened to be the football season. Add in the whistle and the studded boots, unsheathe Occam’s razor and there you have it. A football match.

  ‘Yes, you,’ said a voice directly over me, ‘I’m talking to you. What do you think you’re playing at? And how did you get on the pitch in the first place?’

  It was at about this stage in the proceedings that I became aware of approximately twenty thousand people watching me. Yes, they were a long way away, behind a load of barriers, but even so it was a bit embarrassing.

  ‘Well?’

  Even if I’d had a plausible explanation all worked out and ready to roll, my jaw wasn’t exactly in prime working condition, which made it pretty well impossible for me to say anything much apart from ‘Aung’. This didn’t seem to have occurred to the owner of the voice, who must accordingly have taken my silence for dumb insolence.

  (That same scrupulously conscientious part of my brain that had figured out the football match solution now chimed in to point out that since everything in Elfland is the same as it is here, apart from the differences, if when I’d left Elfland I’d been surrounded by a huge crowd of people, it was only logical that a similar crowd would be all around me as soon as I reached the human side. Very well-reasoned and helpful, my internal research department; if only I’d known how, I’d have fired the lot of them.)

  ‘On your feet,’ somebody said; a different voice, though, but nevertheless familiar. ‘I said, on your – oh, for crying out loud. You.’

  A face appeared, looming up in front of me. Hardly surprising that I remembered him, since in my timescale it was only a few hours since the last time he’d arrested me. I was impressed, however, that he recognised me so readily. Still, I guess a policeman needs a good memory for faces.

  ‘You know this clown?’ muttered the first voice.

  ‘Too right,’ said the policeman, sideways. ‘I nicked him five years ago for vagrancy.’

  Five years . . . With my jaw still numb, all I could do was groan.

  ‘Fine,’ said the first voice. (I decided I didn’t like him very much, whoever he was). ‘Practice makes perfect, arrest him again. Assault. He head-butted my boot.’

  It may just have been my imagination, but the policeman seemed to hesitate for a split second. Then he told me to get up.

  I did try. In fact, I managed to stand sort of Neanderthal-upright before my knees gave out and dumped me in mid-air. Instinctively, I grabbed at the nearest object for support.

  Not a case where instinct knew best, since the nearest object turned out to be the policeman’s leg. He landed on top of me, his nose impacting on the top of my skull. I had a feeling I knew what was going to come next.

  ‘Right,’ said the policeman in a somewhat nasal voice, ‘that does it. Resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer, obstruction. You’re nicked.’

  Blame it on the cuts, I guess; anyhow, they hadn’t redecorated my cell since I was last there. I remembered the little brown damp stain on the ceiling as if it was yesterday. Which, of course, it had been.

  It was a different desk sergeant this time; a shorter, rounder model with a thicker neck. The drill was pretty much the same, though, giving me a distinct feeling of déjà vu. Set me thinking, too; what if all this flitting backwards and forwards across the line had set up some kind of causality loop? Had I contrived to lock myself into a pattern, always ending up in this cell, starting at that brown stain? I rather hoped not.

  While the desk sergeant had been divesting me of my bootlaces, I’d mumbled something or other about wanting to see the duty solicitor. But either he hadn’t heard me or he didn’t hold with lawyers cluttering up his nice orderly station; it’d been five hours now, and no sign of anyone. Probably just as well, I told myself, since there was a slender chance that Cruella would still be working that particular beat. If she’d been annoyed with me the last time, I didn’t really want to contemplate how she’d react to seeing me again.

  While I was running after this train of thought, the door opened and the desk sergeant’s head appeared in the crack. ‘You,’ he said.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You asked to see the duty solicitor. Well, you can’t.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He sighed. ‘I been trying her number, but it’s just the machine. Rang the senior partner of her firm at home – he wasn’t happy about that – and he said she’d mentioned something about going to watch her boyfriend playing in a football match.’ He grinned, as widely and unnervingly as the San Andreas fault opening up just outside Los Angeles. ‘You’ve met him,’ he went on. ‘He’s the centre forward for United.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’

  ‘No.’

  The door swung shut, and I heard the by-now-familiar sound of the lock scraunching home. Well, at least that answered one of my questions, though not the one I’d most have liked out of the way.

  The sensible, logical reaction would have been relief; after all, I’d been the one who’d screwed up ten years of her life, so I should have been glad to hear that it had all turned out right in the end and that she’d found true love with a large, sarcastic man with big, hard feet. Curiously enough, I didn’t see it that way; in fact, my immediate reaction was to think unkind thoughts about her. Silly, really, though I guess you could blame it on the last vestigial traces of my Elfland obnoxious-arsehole personality.

  Irrelevant what I thought about it,
anyway. Her future happiness was none of my business; my own, on the other hand, was an immediate and legitimate concern insofar as there was any chance of my having any, which seemed unlikely. As far as I could judge, I was back where I’d been five human-side years ago – broke, homeless, quite possibly in grave danger of being murdered on the orders of my stepfather – except that I no longer had the option of going back to Elfland, and I was facing a spell of jail time for an impressively chunky list of serious offences that I’d be hard put to it to deny. Put like that, if I’d had the opportunity to change places with a turkey in mid-December, I’d have been a fool not to take it.

  Why me? I thought. What did I do?

  I was just weighing up the potential advantages of lying on my back and sobbing hysterically when the door opened again. This time, my friend the sergeant didn’t even speak; he just jerked his head vaguely leftish and pushed the door a bit wider.

  New chairs in the interview room: that rather bendy plastic instead of wood. Same table, though, and probably the same lino on the floor, though I’ve got to admit that one expanse of scuffed lino looks pretty much like any other to me. Not a cheerful place, all in all; maybe Lawrence and Carol and Andy could make something of it, but even they’d need a whole week and probably a bulldozer.

  She was already there when I arrived.

  ‘Sorry I’m a bit late,’ she said crisply, opening her briefcase. ‘I was having a furious row with my ex-boyfriend, and it took rather longer than I expected.’

  One syllable in particular caught my attention. ‘Ex?’

  She nodded. ‘As of two hours ago, yes. You’ll be delighted to hear that you were the cause. Of course. Where the hell did you suddenly materialise from, by the way? As if I didn’t know.’

  Only one word seemed suitable and she’d forbidden me to use it; still, rules are made to be broken. ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said with more than a trace of weariness. ‘Did me a favour, actually. Miserable, self-centred jerk. You can guess what we had in common.’

  She looked exactly the same, apart from the differences. Somehow, the last fifteen years had managed to chamfer off the sharp angles in her face, the carrot-on-asnowman pointedness of her nose, the vicious cutting profile of her chin; she didn’t slump quite so much either. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘We both like football,’ she replied. ‘Or at least, that’s what I kept telling myself. Over and over again.’

  ‘I don’t remember you liking football when we were at school.’

  ‘Neither do I. But then, I’m just a stupid woman, what do I know? That’s beside the point,’ she said, snapping back into formal mode. ‘Is this just a flying visit, or are you planning on sticking around long enough for a kettle to boil?’

  I smiled. ‘I’m here for good,’ I replied. ‘I got thrown out.’

  ‘What? Oh, you mean out of Elfland.’ She frowned. ‘How on earth did you manage that? It sounds such a quiet place.’

  ‘It is,’ I told her, ‘when I’m not there.’

  She twitched her nostrils. ‘Is that what they turfed you out for, then? Being noisy? Must be a very strange place. Do they make the ants wear carpet slippers, too?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t suppose I explained it properly last time I was here,’ I said. ‘Basically, when I’m over there I’m a different person entirely.’

  ‘Different? How different?’

  ‘Rude,’ I said. ‘Loud-mouthed. Insulting. Insufferable. A bit like—’

  She leaned forwards a little. ‘Do go on,’ she said. ‘Like who?’

  ‘Doctor Jekyll,’ I answered smoothly, though she clearly wasn’t fooled. ‘And Mr Hyde. You know, the same body but two completely different people living in it.’

  ‘Really. Well, I never. And they threw you out.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sounds like an interesting place – I’d like to go there sometime. Would I be different there too, do you think?’

  ‘Oh definitely,’ I told her. ‘In fact, I know just what you’d be like.’ I left it at that; I may be an idiot, but I’m not stupid.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ she said. ‘So, this is interesting. You’re telling me that when you’re over there, you’re a seething mass of attitude and geese huddle in corners for fear you’ll jump out and say Boo! to them?’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I said.

  ‘Well, if it’s true I suppose it’d explain the strange fascination the place seems to have for you. After all, you’ve spent longer over there than you have here.’

  Forty-eight hours, give or take twenty minutes. More than half my life. Short-changed at Time’s checkout, and no realistic chance of ever getting to see the manager and complaining. And that was, at least in the short-to-medium term, the least of my problems.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘The last time I was here, just before—’

  ‘Just before you buggered off for half a decade. Sorry, please do go on.’

  ‘Last time I was here,’ I repeated grimly, ‘you said something which seemed to imply—’ The words were drying superglue-fast on my tongue; I felt like I was in the dentist’s chair, trying to explain quantum theory in a foreign language with half my face anaesthetised . . . ‘That seemed to imply that possibly you felt something for me rather stronger than ordinary friendship; and I was wondering—’

  ‘You can forget friendship,’ Cru said steadily. ‘A friend is someone who lends you a spare hairdryer when yours packs up, and splits the price of a twelve-inch pizza with you after you’ve been to the movies. Or so I’ve heard,’ she added. ‘Somehow I’ve never seemed to have any for long enough to observe their habits, so I’m mostly going on hearsay and the TV soaps. Don’t think we could ever be friends.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘Enemies, on the other hand,’ she went on, ‘we could easily be enemies. The way I heard it, an enemy is someone who smashed into your life, screws up everything in sight, causes you endless grief and inconvenience and then buggers off before you can so much as bash his head in, leaving muddy footprints all across your future. Remind you of anyone?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Or,’ she continued, ‘we could be in love. Actually, I get a bit confused here, because the specifications for “in love” are so bloody close to those for enemy that I’m not sure how you’re supposed to tell them apart. You wouldn’t happen to know, would you? My guess is that it’s something you have to get right up close to see, like a hallmark or a serial number. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything about it in the instruction manual.’

  I frowned. ‘What instruction manual?’

  ‘The one you aren’t issued with when you’re born,’ she replied. ‘Which is a really stupid thing, if you ask me. Buy a CD player and it comes with a chunky thing like the director’s cut of War and Peace in nine languages at once, but when it comes to Life you’re supposed to be able to figure it out from first principles. If I was a proper lawyer, I’d sue someone about it.’

  Odd; I wasn’t used to Cru gabbling. Talking a lot, yes, very much her default setting, but not in this aimless vein. ‘I take it you mean no,’ I said.

  ‘No what? Oh, you mean did I love you back in nineteen ninety-whatever-it-was? Yes, I did. I loved you so much that when you vanished off the face of the earth – this is the first time I’m talking about, not the second – I lost interest in my life more or less completely, just drifted along taking law exams and being horrible to people until they went away, because there had once been a moment when I was sure I’d found the one person I wanted to be with, and after that there really didn’t seem any point in fooling about with substitutes. So, yes, I did. Ever so much. And look where it got me.’

  I took a deep breath; it felt like inhaling lumpy custard. ‘What about now?’ I said.

  Cru turned her head away, so far that I heard the tendons in her neck crinkling softly. ‘You should be aware,’ she said, ‘that my time is being paid for o
ut of public money, via the Legal Aid fund. Unfortunately, with the government being such a bunch of old skinflints, you can’t actually get Legal Aid for problems of the heart silly, really, because they’ll happily pay for a slap-up divorce, but they won’t fork out a measly few bob for a happy-ever-after. But that’s the way the system works, and—’

  ‘Cruella,’ I said.

  ‘And,’ she carried on, pushing past my rather fatuous attempt to call the meeting to order, ‘I should point out that if I’m caught misusing the Duty Solicitor scheme for selfish personal ends, it could mean our firm losing its Legal Aid franchise, and you wouldn’t want that, would you? So – what on earth possessed you to go biting my ex-fiancé’s toes. Even I never did that.’

  ‘Cru,’ I said, ‘shut up and answer the fucking question.’

  She shook her head. ‘Sorry, but like I said, I’m not authorised to deal with that matter. Ask me again when I’m off duty. Getting back to the charges—’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘And when’ll that be?’

  ‘When we’re outside the police station,’ she said, ‘and I’m no longer acting for you in connection with this case. Assuming,’ she added, ‘that I’m still talking to you, when I’m not getting paid for it. That’s quite a big assumption. Anyway; when you hit the arresting officer the third time—’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘It won’t take you a second.’

  She sighed. ‘Well, all right,’ she said. ‘But not on the Legal Aid Board’s time; I’ll have to treat you as a fee-paying client and charge you separately. Usually, of course, we as a firm don’t accept private client work without an up-front payment, in advance, of £250 plus VAT, but—’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’m a millionaire’s son, remember?’

  ‘Cash is better,’ she replied, ‘but I guess that’ll have to do. Now, then. Yes.’

  Some opportunist bastard had nipped in while my mouth was hanging open and stolen all the air out of my lungs. ‘Yes, what?’ I croaked.