In Your Dreams (2 page)

The car radio started talking very fast in German. The girl leaned in and switched it off, something that Paul had never been able to do, though he'd tried very hard.

‘Actually,' he said, ‘it's not my car. Belongs to the company.'

‘Oh, right.' The girl shrugged. ‘Well, it's up to you. We'll fix it for you if you want us to, but . . .'

Naturally, Paul couldn't explain why the car had to be fixed. ‘That'd be great,' he said. ‘Will it, um, take long?'

The way she didn't answer suggested that yes, it would. ‘Hop in the back,' the girl said, pointing towards the pickup. ‘We'll give you a lift as far as the garage.'

Luckily it wasn't far, though such things are relative when you're sharing the back of an open truck with chains, coils of rope and a soggy tarpaulin. All the way, Paul tried to assure himself that once they reached the garage it'd be all right, there'd be grown-ups there who'd do the actual engineering, and possibly even offer a rational explanation. He tried not to think about the fact that his car was apparently sentient, and that the girl hadn't mentioned anything about using anaesthetics while she was performing surgery. He'd never heard a Volkswagen scream, and he was in no hurry to find out what it sounded like.

The garage looked ordinary enough, until the wide galvanised-iron doors opened and revealed three more under-twelves, all dressed in oily overalls. There was a grubby-looking teddy bear on the office desk, and a Barbie calendar on the wall instead of the usual Pirelli. Apart from that, it could've been any small country garage anywhere.

A carrot-topped six-year-old with her hair in bunches unhitched Monika from the truck and pushed her into the workshop. Treading warily round the fact that it was way past her bedtime, Paul asked her if there was any chance of doing the repairs tonight, since he had an important meeting first thing in the morning.

She looked at him; and Paul noticed with alarm a look in her eyes that reminded him of goblins, or rather of one particular goblin, who happened to be the mother of one of the firm's partners and who also, for reasons best known to herself, fancied him rotten. ‘Maybe,' the child said, and grinned, making Paul wish he hadn't asked. ‘I s'pose we could do you the express service,' she went on, and winked broadly. ‘But you'll have to promise not to tell.'

‘Fine,' Paul heard himself say. ‘I'd really appreciate it, because—'

The kid leered at him. ‘Right,' she said. ‘Push off. You can wait outside, I'll call you when we're done.'

Clearly, they didn't want him to see, which was fine by him. Ever since he'd had the use of a car who talked back when he spoke to it, he'd tended to come over faint at the sight of oil. It was cold out on the forecourt, but the rain was only a light drizzle. He found a relatively sheltered spot behind a pile of dead tyres, and huddled. In the distance somewhere, an owl hooted.

‘Hey, you.' The doors slid back, and yellow light engulfed him. He looked up, startled. He didn't know how long he'd been standing there, but he was sure they couldn't have finished already. ‘All done,' the ginger-haired girl said, grinning at him round the edge of the door. ‘You can come in now.'

A kid he hadn't seen before (small, fair-haired, glasses) turned the key and started the engine. Monika purred; no rattle, no smoke. ‘That's great,' Paul said awkwardly. From the expressions on the children's faces he had the idea that some kind of miracle had been achieved while he'd been standing outside. He wished he knew enough about cars to appreciate it properly. ‘Um, how much do I owe you?'

Carrot-top gave him a rather grubby invoice. At least they had handwriting like proper children, and they spelt cylinder with two 1's. Whatever the express service entailed, it came expensive, and Paul didn't relish the thought of what Mr Shumway was going to say about it in the morning.

‘Cash,' Carrot-top added.

‘Oh.' Paul looked down at her, worried. ‘I'm very sorry,' he said, ‘I haven't got that sort of money on me.' He took out his wallet, just in case the Folding Money Fairy had left him a four-figure surprise. She hadn't. ‘I can do plastic,' he said. ‘Or,' he remembered, ‘a company cheque.' Mr Shumway had let him loose with the firm's chequebook, on the strict understanding that any misuse thereof would be punished by unspeakable atrocities. ‘Otherwise, I don't—'

‘Cash,' the child repeated; and then she caught sight of the JWW chequebook, lying inside Paul's open wallet.
BANK OF THE DEAD
, unmissable on the cover. She looked like she had the knack of reading upside down. ‘Or a cheque'll do fine,' she said pleasantly.

‘Um,' Paul replied. It had just occurred to him that, according to Mr Shumway, the term ‘misuse' specifically included giving JWW cheques to anybody outside The Business. Given who JWW banked with, he could see Mr Shumway's point. ‘Actually,' he said, ‘maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea. If someone could give me a lift to the nearest cashpoint—'

‘A cheque,' the girl repeated firmly, ‘will do just fine. We've got a stamp,' she added, making it sound like a threat.

So Paul wrote her a cheque. The girl waved away the card, then took the cheque in her left hand, produced a cigarette lighter and—

‘And then,' Paul said, ‘you'll never guess what she did.'

Sophie yawned. ‘Set light to it,' she said, pouring water from the kettle into her hot water bottle.

Paul looked at her. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘How did you—?'

Sophie had joined JWW on the same day as Paul; they'd found out the great secret together, at roughly the same time that they'd discovered that they were, somewhat improbably, in love. But whereas there were still mornings when Paul woke up and assumed his recent memories were the shrapnel from a particularly bizarre dream, Sophie seemed to have adapted remarkably well to the ambient weirdness. She tightened the hottie-bottle stopper and yawned again. ‘Bank of The Dead,' she said. ‘You don't know, right?'

Paul nodded.

‘It's a Chinese thing originally,' she said. ‘They believe it's your duty to provide for your ancestors in the next world by sending them money; you buy Bank of The Dead banknotes with real money, and then you burn them, which credits their account.'

Paul frowned. ‘Yes, but surely that's just a—'

‘Tax fiddle, yes,' Sophie said, her hand in front of her mouth. ‘Other companies bank offshore, but JWW has to go one better.' She opened the kitchen door. ‘You think that's strange, you wait till you see what happens when you use a Bank of The Dead cashpoint card in an ordinary machine. Well, I'm going to bed. G'night.'

‘'Night, then,' Paul said. He felt faintly disappointed; not that it was the most grippingly fascinating story ever or anything like that, but . . . Still; on balance, he approved of the way that Sophie could shrug off the bizarre and the disturbing, the way he still couldn't. A sense of perspective, he supposed you'd call it, a vitally important part of being grown-up and all that stuff he'd never quite been able to master. But so long as she had one, he didn't have to. That's partnership for you, the Jack Sprat equilibrium. She had her own special strengths, and he—

Paul still couldn't see what the hell Sophie saw in him.

He caught sight of his reflection in the kitchen window, and found no answers there; tall, thin, unfinished-looking young Englishmen aren't hard to find, the supply tends to exceed demand, whereas beautiful, intelligent, courageous, resourceful, small thin girls with enormous eyes are a scarce commodity, always highly sought after, even if they do have an unfortunate manner which you can get used to very quickly . . .

Yes
, he thought, ordering the kettle to boil,
but
. In the time they'd been together, she'd started to change. It was as though Life was an exam the term after next, and she'd already started revising, and he hadn't. Where he still drifted from day to day, trying to keep out of the way of the more alarming variants of weirdness and counting himself lucky every time he got home in the same shape he'd left in, she— She was getting
serious
about things, in an admirable but not entirely comfortable way. At work, she tried hard; at home, she cared about stuff like spin-dryers and radiators and putting money aside for the electricity bill; and yes, someone had to do all that kind of thing and for sure he wasn't capable of it, but even so. It couldn't be too long, could it, before she got sick to death of the sight of him, and—

Frowning, Paul ordered the boiling water into his teacup, then remembered that he'd forgotten the tea bag. He had, of course, assumed that once he'd won the girl of his dreams, that would be that; the story would be over, and somehow complete. Exam thinking again; once he'd passed, he'd get his little bit of paper with the curly writing and his name and grade, and then he'd have his Maths GCSE for ever and ever. Nobody could take it away from him, and he wouldn't ever have to do it again. But there was rather more to being in love. You had to stick at it, or you could lose everything, just like that.
Not fair
, growled Paul's inner child. Not fair at all.

Somehow, tea seemed to have lost its relevance; he tipped the hot water down the sink, dried the cup and put it away. (He now lived in an environment where cups didn't live on the draining board any more; when had that happened, and how?) The kitchen clock told him it was time to go to bed, since he had to be up bright and early in the morning for the Important Meeting. Oh well.

Perched on the edge of his side of the bed (asleep, Sophie displayed territorial ambitions unparalleled since the collapse of the Mongol empire) Paul fell into troubled sleep, the sort in which the dreams are all the more alarming because you're pretty sure you're still awake. He dreamed that he was in something like a hospital ward, except that there were no nurses or drips or legs in plaster; a dormitory of some kind, except that all the people lying asleep in the beds – hundreds of them, maybe even thousands – were grown-ups. Sophie was there, lying on her side, dead to the world. He knew that something was wrong, but there was nobody to ask; and then countess Judy di Castel'Bianco, the Entertainment Sector partner at JWW, was standing next to him, with a clipboard in one hand, smiling.

‘It's all right,' she told him kindly. (In real life, he hadn't spoken to her since his interview.) ‘They can't feel anything, it doesn't hurt. And it's necessary,' she added, with possibly a hint of remorse. ‘And be realistic; it wouldn't have lasted anyway, you're far too immature. This way, you're spared the pain. It's for the best, you'll see that in the end.'

That made sense, apparently; so did the fact that the ward (it was definitely a hospital now) was suddenly full of children, like the ones at the garage, and, wearing white coats, they were walking up and down between the beds. Some of them wheeled trolleys laden with food and drink: cheese omelettes, strong-smelling coffee. Others were inspecting the sleepers – thumbing back eyelids, forcing lips apart with little wooden spatulas, checking pulses and drawing samples of blood. From time to time they found one who wasn't working any more; they took them away on trolleys and brought replacements.

When they came for Sophie (‘Over here,' Judy di Castel'Bianco called out. ‘Hurry, she's been dead for hours'), he woke up.

The notice hanging from Ricky Wurmtoter's doorhandle was, as usual, both alarming and profoundly unhelpful. It read
BEWARE OF THE PREDATORS
.

Paul had regarded Ricky Wurmtoter, the partner specialising in pest control, with suspicious caution ever since he'd taken Paul out to lunch on the day he'd joined the firm. Probably Mr Wurmtoter was just being nice; he was the youngest and most affable of the partners, looked and dressed like a movie star trying to be inconspicuous, spoke with a faint German accent and owned (among other things) a flying white horse that could get from London to north of Manchester in the time it took to boil an egg. His work mostly consisted of slaying dragons (who, being attracted to stored accumulations of wealth, tended to be a serious nuisance to museums, art galleries and banks), vampires, werewolves, manticores and other monstrous creatures that Paul had, until recently, fondly believed didn't exist; accordingly he was out of the office a lot of the time, and Paul hadn't had much to do with him since that initial lunch.

Paul hadn't been inside Mr Wurmtoter's office before, and he was pleasantly surprised at how normal it was, at least by JWW standards. Apart from a couple of stuffed and mounted heads on the wall that would lead to a mass pulping and rewriting of textbooks if they ever fell into the hands of the scientific community, and a huge walk-in safe in one corner, there were just a plain desk, three chairs and an almost empty bookshelf.

‘Paul,' Mr Wurmtoter said, turning round and smiling pleasantly. ‘Thanks for joining us. You know Benny Shumway, I'm sure.'

Paul knew Benny Shumway, no doubt about it. Instead of snarling at him, however, the cashier raised his left hand and waggled his fingers. Paul sat down next to him and tried to look keen and eager.

‘As I'm sure you know,' Mr Wurmtoter said, ‘it's JWW policy for trainees like yourself to spend a month or so in each department, so we can see where your strengths lie and you can make up your mind which area you'd like to specialise in. Now, as I understand it, you've done your time with Dennis Tanner scrying for mineral deposits – he's really pleased with your work for him, by the way, though I expect you're sick to the teeth of staring at photos of bits of desert all day – and you made a start on sorcery and magic with Humph Wells, before—' Mr Wurmtoter hesitated. It was Paul and Sophie who'd uncovered Humphrey Wells's treachery towards his uncle, the firm's senior partner; Humphrey Wells now served the firm in the capacity of Xerox machine, on the grounds that the copier is the most hated item of equipment in every office in the world. ‘And since then,' he went on, ‘you've been doing odd jobs for all of us while we've been restructuring in the light of – well, you know.' He paused, fiddled with the large claw he wore on a chain round his neck, and went on: ‘So really, it's time you both got back on track with your vocational training, and I'd like it if you'd consider coming and working in my department for a while.'