Muddle and Win (8 page)

S
HADES
:
Miaaoooww?

S
ALLY
: You’ve been fed, Shades.

S
HADES
:
Miaaoooww?

S
ALLY
: You’ve been fed, Shades.

S
HADES
:
Miaaoooww?

S
ALLY
: You’ve been fed, Shades.

S
HADES
:
Miaaoooww?

S
ALLY
: Shut up and let me do my homework!

S
HADES
:
Miaaoooww?

S
ALLY
: What’s the matter with you? There’s still a mountain of stuff in your bowl!

This replays itself hourly in the Jones household, with minor variations but only one ending – the arrival of a fresh helping of cat food, with a layer of nice gleaming fresh jelly, in Shades’s dish. There is no other way it can possibly go. Sally knows Shades is a greedy, selfish, heartless professional beggar. But Shades knows a softie when he sees one.)

Now, if you
are
going to fall off the side of a mountain and into someone’s cat dish, the one thing that might save you from serious harm is a layer of nice fresh jelly. So it was lucky for Muddlespot that he had made his landing in the crucial few seconds between Sally opening the new tin and Shades’s swift arrival for Third Supper.

Another of Shades’s rules – and this too worked in Muddlespot’s favour – was ‘Never Eat Anything You
Think
Might Have Something In It’. It was shocking, what the family tried to hide in his food sometimes: namely vitamins, more vitamins and worming tablets. Shades strongly disliked worming tablets. It was not just that they tasted foul. He thought they made life too easy for his humans.

And this time there
was
something in his bowl. It did not look like a worming tablet, ground up into powder. It did not smell like a worming tablet either. It smelled very largely of cat food, but with lingering traces of other things. Not bad as such (after that near miss with the incense bomb, Muddlespot probably smelled better than he ever had in his life). But Shades had not got where he was by being broad-minded. If it was In His Food, then he was Not Having It. He turned away from the cat dish and stalked off in disgust, leaving a perfectly good third supper untouched as a mark of his affront.

‘Muddlespot!’ came Corozin’s voice again. ‘Why don’t you answer?’

It was coming from inside his sack.

Still groaning, Muddlespot dragged himself and the remnants of his equipment to firmer ground. There he tipped out the contents of the sack and found the
communications
dish. It had somehow already filled itself with powder, and the powder was glowing a lively yellow-green. Within the glow was a pair of eyes that Muddlespot knew well.

‘Muddlespot?’ said Corozin. ‘Why have you not reported success?’

‘Er  . . .’ said Muddlespot. He wondered if there was any good way of saying what he had to say.

There wasn’t.

Heaven and Hell are opposites. There is no meeting place, no middle ground, no possible compromise between them. There is no way that they can be likened to one another, brought together, put in the same box or even encompassed in the same thought. They are black and white, night and day, matter and antimatter or whatever the other stuff is. In the Long War, there is no peace. There simply cannot be.

And yet, both are organizations. Both have people who are bossed and people who do the bossing. And bosses everywhere are a bit the same.
Especially
when they somehow weren’t around when whatever it was that happened happened. And they get to tell you what
would
have happened if only they’d been there to do it themselves  . . .

The agents of Pandemonium, however, do have one advantage. They may let Truth take second place to Self-Preservation. Across the cat dish floated the words, ‘But she
liked
me, Your Serenity.’

Muddlespot heard them but only with difficulty, because his ears were being scorched and blasted by the displeasure of Corozin, and because a long demonic arm (with
perfectly
beautiful fingernails) had magically reached out of the pile of glowing powder, caught him by the neck and was shaking him up and down until his sight darkened and his mind was swimming in the final cloud.

But hear them he did. And gasping, he managed to repeat them. ‘Buff – ee – ike – me – Ur – Fferen-enenenefy!’

The shaking stopped. Muddlespot dangled in the air. The beautifully manicured nails dug deep into his neck.

‘What did you say?’

‘She asked me to call again,’ said the voice softly.

‘Fee afk ee mo ’all a’ain,’ said Muddlespot, whose ability to speak was still compromised by the pressure of a giant (but very beautiful) thumb across most of his face.

‘That’s
better
! Why didn’t you say so?’ The
demonic
arm lowered him gently and set him on his feet.

‘I got a date and a number, boss,’ said the voice.

‘I got  . . .’ began Muddlespot.

‘Thank you, but I heard it the first time. And it’s “
Serenity
”, Muddlespot. Se-
rehn
ity. Not “boss”. I cannot abide “boss”. It is vulgar. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, Your Ser-ee-ee-nity!’ squeaked Muddlespot, and bowed.

One elegant, purple-nailed finger jabbed him on the nose. ‘See here, Muddlespot. I like you. I expect great things of you. You’re like a son to me, etcetera. But Low Command is on my back. They want this kid taken care of. If we disappoint them, I’m for the ovens. And then where will you be?’

‘Yes, Your Serenity,’ said Muddlespot, bobbing and squeaking like a rusty yo-yo.

‘Don’t fail me.’

The arm and the eyes vanished. The glow faded. From nowhere, it seemed, a faint draught blew across the communications dish, lifting the smouldering powder in a fine smoke and dispersing it into the air.

‘Narrow escape there, kid,’ said the voice.

‘Yes,’ gasped Muddlespot, who was trying to stop
his
teeth chattering by clamping his hands one to either side of his jaw. It wasn’t working very well. ‘Who – who are you anyway?’ he added.

‘Thought you’d never ask.’

There he was, leaning nonchalantly against a lump of drying cat food. He was almost the colour of cat food himself.

‘The name’s
Scattletail
,’ he said.

HE WAS THE
smallest, shabbiest, evillest-looking creature Muddlespot had ever seen. His eyes were bright black little horizontal slits. His nose was twice the length of his head, curving and pointed like the beak of some wading bird. He wore a battered broad-brimmed hat the same brown colour as his skin, and a shapeless, rumpled coat that covered him from his lips all the way down to his toes. His mouth was tiny and sloped a little to one side, as if all the talking he ever did was done sideways.

‘You’re one of us?’ asked Muddlespot, knowing it must be true but not quite believing it.

‘Strictly speaking, kid. Strictly speaking.’ The words came out of the side of Scattletail’s mouth, just as Muddlespot had suspected. ‘I’m assigned to Billie there.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

Muddlespot looked up.

And up.

From down here, the huge forms of the humans were like clouds drifting in the sky. Yes, they were there. Yes, they were big. But it was impossible to say how big, how far away, or exactly what meaning they had down here at the level of cat spittle.

There seemed to be three of them now, gathered round the table. They were Sally, her mother and the blonde, dishevelled girl whom Muddlespot vaguely remembered was Sally’s twin. Their voices filtered down to the cat dish like distant thunder.

‘But I can’t do my homework!’ the blonde girl was screaming. ‘She’s got the pencil sharpener!’

‘That’s Sally’s pencil sharpener, dear,’ said Mrs Jones. She sounded as if she felt like screaming herself. ‘So where’s yours?’

‘It’s not hers! She stole it and put her name on it!’

‘I put her name on it, Billie. I named hers and yours after the last time. Remember?’

‘She can have the pencil sharpener,’ said Sally.

‘Thank you, Sally,’ said Mum. ‘Now, Billie—’

‘I need the calculator too!’ said Billie crossly, and snatched at it.

‘But that’s Sally’s  . . .’

‘She can have the calculator,’ said Sally.

‘Right,’ said Billie. ‘And I need quiet too! So you have to stop her from doing violin practice until I’ve finished. I’m already late starting because of her, and I won’t be able to get it all done in time and I’ll have to hand it in late again and I’ll probably get punished and I’ll get a bad report and it’ll be all her fault. AGAIN!’

‘I’ve done my violin practice,’ said Sally.

BANG-rattle! Billie had somehow bumped into the leg of the table, knocking Sally’s glass of water over her carefully written page.

‘That looks like an easy number,’ said Muddlespot enviously.

went the door behind Billie.

‘It is and it isn’t,’ said Scattletail.

STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP!
went Billie’s feet on the stairs.

‘I bet
she
hasn’t got squadrons of Fluffies looking after her.’

SLAM!
went Billie’s bedroom door.

‘You can tell, can you?’ Scattletail lit a cigarette and put it into the corner of his mouth. (What with all his
words
and
the cigarette, which was there most of the time, the left-hand corner of Scattletail’s mouth had a lot to do. The rest of him made up for it by doing as little as possible.)‘Nope. She just has the standard detail. One guardian angel. Name of Ismael. He works hard, I’ll give him that  . . .’ He blew a long puff of sulphurous yellow smoke. ‘But most of the time I run rings around him.’

Obediently, the smoke became a ring of little Scattletails, running busily around the figure of an angel who sat dejectedly in the middle of the circle.

Muddlespot sat dejectedly in the middle of the cat dish. He looked at his toes. His ears drooped. He felt a lump forming in his throat and his eyesight was going misty.

‘Sally’s impossible,’ he said forlornly.

Scattletail eyed him through narrow, dark, slitty eyes. ‘Yeah?’ he said.

‘I tried everything! She wouldn’t listen!’

‘Still in one piece, ain’t you?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Muddlespot, thinking gloomily of the piles beneath Corozin’s windows. ‘For the moment I am.’

‘So what’d she say?’

‘She’s not interested,’ said Muddlespot. His words thudded in his ears like a brass hammer falling. He clamped his mouth shut and put his chin on his hands. He thought he was going to cry.

‘All right,’ said Scattletail after a bit. ‘What’d
you
say?’

‘Everything I could. I promised her the lot: the nations, wealth, fame, beauty  . . .’

‘Everything that Low Command says, right?’

‘Even the apple!’

Scattletail blew another puff of sulphurous smoke. He seemed to think for a moment. Then he sidled up to where Muddlespot sat. ‘You use that book,
How to Tempt
?’ he whispered.