Muddle and Win (17 page)

‘Three!’

‘ . . . With thy duly merited reward. Look up, Muddlespot!’

Muddlespot looked up. Over him hovered a huge brass hammer. It filled the sky.

They held it poised over his head.

‘Good night, Muddlespot!’

Grinning  . . .

The hammer coming down  . . .

It seemed to move so slowly. So slowly. And Muddlespot could not move at all. He could not think.

He shut his eyes.

He opened his eyes.

The hammer was lying before him. Flat on its side, it came about up to his waist. Not that he had a waist, but he had an upper part of his body which got bigger as it went down, and then a lower part of his body that got smaller as it went down, and then he had his legs. What’s more, all of it was still attached to him.

Smattered and scattered in a wide circle around the hammer were the remains of the two guards. They had been torn to pieces: shot full of holes. The holes were shaped like little musical notes.

‘Thanks, Ismael,’ said Scattletail, who was lounging by the lamp stand. Beside him, clutching a smoking violin, was an angel. ‘Nice shooting. We owe you one.’

‘OK,’ said the angel. ‘So: Billie does the washing up – without being asked?’

Scattletail seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then he said, ‘Sure. Go ahead. Me an’ the kid here’re gonna have a chat.’

‘Take your time,’ said the angel. ‘Don’t hurry back.’ He jumped off the table and disappeared.

‘But  . . . but  . . .’ said Muddlespot dazedly.

‘Take it easy.’

‘You’re with
them
? The Other Side?’

‘Nope.’

Muddlespot stared at the remains of the fallen guards. ‘They were going to smash me,’ he said.

‘Yep.’

‘But I was doing what I was
supposed
to!’

‘Yep.’

‘And you got that  . . .’

‘Fluffy?’

‘He  . . .’

‘He did me a favour. We’ve known each other a while, kid. It gets like that. C’mon. Let’s walk.’

He led the way to the edge of the table and slid down the lamp flex. Muddlespot followed. He caught up with Scattletail on the carpet.

‘But – the
War
!’ he said desperately.

‘No compromise, huh? No meeting place?’

‘It’s  . . . not allowed,’ said Muddlespot. He felt quite weak.

Scattletail ambled on ahead of him, hands in his pockets. The spaces of Sally’s room were huge around
him
. ‘Ever look at a human war, kid? No? Very instructive.
Ve
-ry instructive. You get two sides going at each other. Just like us. It’s ’bout places, mostly. Most human wars’re ’bout places. And both sides’re told it’s a fight to the finish. No meeting place, etcetera. That’s what they say  . . .

‘But what they
do’s
a bit different.
OK
, they think.
You want that place real bad. We won’t fight you for it. Not yet. You keep that place, right. We’ll keep this one. Let’s not make too much trouble. Too many of us might get hurt
. Most of the time it’s like that. Sometimes they even kick a football around. Sometimes a boss on one side says to a boss on the other, “Hey, pal. I sent some guys over to your side some days back. What happened? They’re all dead? Sure. Only I got to tell the families, see  . . .” It happens, kid. Most of the time they’re only fighting just enough to keep the fight going. Mostly they’re leaving each other alone. Trying to keep the holes in their pants down to four.’

Dazed, Muddlespot struggled to understand. Wars. Places. Humans. Holes. Pants  . . .

Pants with
four
holes.

One for each leg, he thought. One for the waist, three  . . .

Oh, most of them would be male. Right.

So that made four. Got that. So  . . .

‘But
then
,’ grunted Scattletail. ‘Then what happens is someone – usually some boss – thinks,
OK
, you
want that place real bad. So
we’ll
take it. We’ll take it to show you we can. We’ll take it to show you we’re winning. That’ll be good, won’t it? Then
you see two sides kicking the stuff out of each other. Bleeding real bad. For what? For a place. A hill. Something that once was a town. Nothing that’ll be worth what it’s costing them by the time they’ve finished. Just a place. Or in our case, it might be a kid.’

They passed under Sally’s door. The landing was in half-light. Voices rose up the stairs. Greg was watching television. Billie and her mum were in the kitchen, humming as they worked together.

‘Darlington Row,’ said Scattletail. ‘As normal as it comes. We ship some out, they ship some out. Fair enough. But as long as they had Sally, and we were getting nowhere near her, they could reckon they were ahead. Low Command didn’t like that. That’s why someone in Low Command’s said “Take that kid”. Who did they say it to? Corozin.’

‘But I was getting her!’ wailed Muddlespot. ‘Or at least,’ he added, with the ingrained honesty of a cleaner
who
every day has to admit to himself that he hasn’t
quite
removed that stain yet, ‘I’d made a start.’

‘Sure. But what did that look like to Corozin? Remember how Corozin got his place? By looking smarter than his boss. So his boss was hauled down to Low Command and went under the hammer, and Corozin got the palace. Now Corozin’s using up agents like coal on a fire and still getting nowhere with Sally, and Low Command’s getting sick about it. Who’re they getting sick with? Corozin. What happens if Low Command thinks there’s an agent up here – one who’s finally started to get somewhere with their precious kid – who might be smarter than Corozin  . . .? But if Corozin can make it look like
he’s
done what’s needed, maybe he’ll be moving into a bigger palace, lower down the hill. See?’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘He’s a devil, ain’t he?’

‘Well yes  . . .’

‘I know the type.’

From down below came the splosh of water. It sounded like water in a bucket. Billie was still humming.

‘I wonder,’ sighed Muddlespot, peering through the banisters of the Joneses’ stairwell. ‘If there’s a vacancy
for
a cleaner anywhere round here. Nice long hours, low pay – or none at all  . . .’

‘You can’t run from Corozin, kid. As long as you’re around, he’s not going to feel safe. It’s you or him.’

‘Me?’

Against Corozin?

A thought popped into Muddlespot’s head. Or maybe it exploded.

It was:

‘Help,’ he said feebly.

Voices rose from below.

‘Billie, what  . . . are you mopping the floor?’

‘Thought it needed it,’ said Billie brightly.

‘Yes  . . . yes  . . .’ For a moment Mum seemed to be lost for words. ‘Thank you, sweetheart. That’s
really
good of you  . . .’

‘I’d spilled a bit,’ Billie confessed.

‘I give Ismael an inch,’ sighed Scattletail, ‘an’ he takes a freakin’ mile.’

‘Help,’ murmured Muddlespot. In his mind, the mop had become a brass brush and pan and was busy sweeping up fragments of Muddlespot.

‘I left the muffins in the fridge. We can bake them in the morning and have them fresh for breakfast.’

‘If there’s time  . . .’

‘And I’ve tidied up the spice cupboard, Mum  . . .’

‘Right,’ said Scattletail. ‘That does it – I’ve got to get back. Things are getting
way
out of hand down there.’

‘Help me!’ said Muddlespot.

Scattletail looked at him. ‘I already did, didn’t I?’

‘But I can’t take Corozin on my own!’

‘Nor can I, kid. Did you think I could?’

‘But  . . .’

‘Look, kid, I’m glad to do what I can. I don’t want
him
up here near me any more than you do. But I got to look after myself. Anyway, what goes on in there  . . .’ He jerked his thumb back at Sally. ‘I can’t be getting into that. Not my territory. That’s got to be between you and him. And her. See?’

‘Yes,’ said Muddlespot heavily. ‘I see.’

Deep within the hard, cold eyes of Scattletail there was a gleam of regret. ‘Good luck, kid,’ he said. ‘And think – holes in pants.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Muddlespot sighed. ‘Keep them to five.’

SALLY WASN’T USED
to talking about herself. It wasn’t something she did much. Mostly she listened to her friends talking about
them
selves, and she would say the things they needed to hear. The important thing was to be interested.

Until now, she’d had most of the stuff about herself already sorted. So what would have been the point of talking about it?

But that wasn’t true any more.

And now that she had stuff she wanted to say – things that if they
didn’t
get out through her mouth would swell up and make her chest burst – she didn’t know how to say them. She stumbled. She put her hand to her head and said, ‘No, that’s not right. What
I
meant
was  . . .’ She shook her fists and paced up and down like a starlet in a TV soap, or like Cassie complaining about the latest man she had ditched. She knew it was acting. She knew that half of it wasn’t real. She just didn’t know how else to do it.

Anyway, he seemed interested.

‘All this “Being Good” – it’s been a con,’ she said. ‘A great big
con
. And I fell for it.’

He put his head on one side. He didn’t question what she meant by ‘
all this Being Good
’. And she was glad, because she would have found that difficult to answer without saying something really tacky like ‘Everything’ or ‘My Life’, etcetera.

He asked: ‘Who’s been conning you?’

Sally faced him. ‘I have,’ she said.

She thought about how deep his eyes were. They seemed to know a lot more than he said. Sometimes she wondered if he knew what she was going to say before she did.

‘And  . . .?’

She shrugged. ‘And everybody else has got used to it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it suits them.’

‘It does, doesn’t it?’

Help, thought Muddlespot.

He was cowering in the shelter of the banisters, wondering if there was anywhere better to hide. Anywhere Corozin wouldn’t find him.

The huge figure of Mum was climbing up the stairs before his eyes. She was calling over her shoulder, ‘Billie, bedtime!’