Nothing But Blue Skies (5 page)

‘You hear that?' Gordon was saying. ‘That distant pitterpatter, like tap-dancing angels? That's rain, that is. My rain. My fault. You know why it's my fault?'

‘Yes, Gordon.'

‘I'll tell you why it's my fault. It's my fault because I
make the weather
, that's what I do.' He paused to empty his glass and push it across the counter, then continued: ‘Which was news to me, of course. I thought I just said what I thought the weather was going to be. But oh no.'

‘Same again?' the barman asked, pointlessly.

Gordon nodded without interrupting the flow. ‘Oh no,' he repeated. ‘I make the weather, I do. And do you know how I know that? Do you?'

‘Yes, Gordon.'

‘I know that,' Gordon went on, ‘because every week,
twenty thousand people write in and say so
. Which means it must be true.' He grinned and picked up the glass; no need to look and see if there was anything in it. Wonderful things, rituals; a solid place among the shifting sands of real life. ‘Democracy in action, that is,' he said. ‘
Vox populi, vox Dei
,' he bellowed, ‘which, in case you're so ignorant you can't even understand bloody Latin, means “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” You know what they say, in all those letters? Do you?'

‘Yes, Gordon. It means the quick brown vox jumps over the lazy—'

‘They say,' Gordon went on, word-perfect as ever, ‘they say that Gordon bloody Smelt is a bloody rotten weather man, because all he ever makes is filthy rotten bloody weather. Get rid of him, they say. Give the bugger the push, so we can have some decent weather for a change. You know how many death threats I get on an average day? Do you? Fifty-six-point-four-seven. '

The barman nodded. ‘Point four seven of a death threat must be a terrible thing, Gordon,' he said. ‘Ready for another?'

‘Don't mind if I do. The Prime Minister only gets six death threats a day. The bloody President of the United bloody States only gets twenty-nine. I get fifty-six-point-four-seven. And you know why?'

‘Yes, Gordon.'

‘Because,' Gordon said, wiping away a tear before it had a chance to dilute his Scotch, ‘I don't give them the weather they want, that's why. And you know, I try. God knows, I try. Sunshine, I say, it's going to be blue skies, what do I see? Nothin' but blue skies, shinin' on me. And you know what happens when I say that?'

‘Yes, Gordon.'

‘I'll tell you what happens. What always happens. It rains.'

‘Of course it does, Gordon. That'll be twenty-six pounds, forty pence.'

‘Keep the change.' Gordon felt for the bar top with his elbow, but missed. ‘The crazy thing is,' he went on, ‘the stark staring barking mad crazy thing is - we don't just guess, you know. We don't just look up at the sky and say eeny-meenyminy-mo. We're
scientists
,' he thundered, bringing his clenched fist down with tremendous force on the rim of a bowl of dry-roasted peanuts. ‘We have
equipment
. In my department, we have a machine with three hundred and twenty times more computer power than NASA used to put a man on the moon, and that's just for typing up the scripts on. We've got enough hardware bobbing about in orbit to outgun the entire Klingon empire. So,' he went on, carefully picking a peanut out of his eye, ‘when we say it's going to be blue skies, it's not just a guess, it's a scientific sodding
fact
. And you know what happens when we say that?'

‘Yes, Gordon.'

‘I'll tell you what happens.' Gordon sighed. ‘It rains.' With that, the fury seemed to drain out of him, like oil from a classic British motorcycle. ‘And it's all my fault,' he added softly. ‘God says so. Can't fight God, you know. No point trying. I think I'll have another drink now.'

‘Coming up.'

As the barman poured, he nodded discreetly to the customers at the other end of the bar, as if to say
Show's over
, while the jukebox, punctual to the second, launched into ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head'. Gordon Smelt would be quiet now, for exactly fifty-two minutes, after which time he'd make one final noise by falling off his bar stool. Throughout the pub, the atmosphere thinned, muscles unclenched, the buzz of conversation grew louder. It was, as the barman liked to describe it, the quiet after the storm.

For his part, Gordon was just about to climb into his sixteenth drink, the one that would carry him sweetly away to oblivion, when he became aware of somebody sitting next to him. This was unusual, as in unheard of. There are cocky peasants in Sicily who build houses on the lips of active volcanoes; but nobody ever sat next to Gordon Smelt in the pub.

‘You Smelt?' the man asked.

Still humming along to the music, Gordon nodded.

‘Thought so.' The man sat still for a second or two, then suddenly reached across, grabbed Gordon by the shoulder and turned him through ninety degrees, nearly spilling him onto the floor. ‘All right,' he said, so softly that Gordon could scarcely hear him. ‘Would you like to know why?'

‘I'm never gonna stop the rain by—Why what?'

‘Why,' the man repeated.

Gordon looked at him for a moment. ‘You're drunk,' he said. ‘Go away.'

The man refused to let go. There was something very disconcerting about his eyes - apart, that was, from the fact that he appeared to have six of them. Gordon squinted, adjusting the parallax, until there were only two. ‘I said—'

‘Shut up,' the man said, ‘and listen. If you want to know why it rains, even when all the data says it's going to be ninety in the shade, I can tell you. Assuming you're interested, that is.'

Slowly and accusingly, Gordon stared into his glass. Then he put it down on the bartop, untasted. ‘What are you drivelling on about?' he said. ‘I know why.'

The man smiled. ‘Really?'

‘Course. It's because I make it rain. Because God tells me to. I thought I just explained all that; or weren't you listening just now?'

‘Bullshit,' the man replied pleasantly. ‘There's a perfectly simple, rational explanation. And if you want me to tell it to you, all you've got to do is ask.'

Gordon's face coagulated into a frown. ‘Let me guess,' he said. ‘Three guesses. Then I'll ask. Okay?'

The man shrugged. ‘If you insist,' he said.

‘All right, here goes.' Gordon thought for a moment.

‘Global warming,' he said.

‘No.'

‘The greenhouse effect.'

The man pursed his lips. ‘Isn't that the same thing?'

‘Don't ask me, I'm just a bloody weatherman.'

‘Let's assume it's the same thing. Two guesses left.'

‘All-righty. El Niño.'

‘Nope.'

‘Not El Niño? Oh well. I know,' Gordon said, smiling unexpectedly. ‘Obvious one. Secret nuclear testing.'

The man shook his head. ‘Is that the best you can do?' he said. ‘Secret nuclear testing. Well, well. I suppose I'd better tell you the truth, hadn't I?'

Gordon nodded. ‘Fire away,' he said.

‘Dragons.'

Gordon exhaled a lungful of air through his nose before replying. ‘Dragons,' he repeated.

‘Dragons. To be specific, the dragon king of the north-west. Or rather, his adjutant general.'

Gordon crowded his eyebrows together. ‘Do you mind?' he said. ‘If you hadn't noticed,
I
'm the pub loony around here. This is my turf, and if there's any gibbering to be done, I'm the one who does it. You want to gibber, find another bar.'

The man looked hurt. ‘Sceptical bastard, aren't you?' he said.

‘Yes. Just because I'm a paranoid drunk with a persecution complex doesn't necessarily mean I'm stupid. Which is it; practical joker or undercover tabloid journalist?' Gordon smiled hazily. ‘Think carefully before you answer. Practical jokers get kicked across the bar and jumped on. I don't
like
tabloid journalists.'

The man stood up. ‘Please yourself,' he said. ‘I've told you what you need to know, what you do with the information is up to you. Meanwhile—' He picked up a beer mat and scribbled on it. ‘Here's where you can find us, if you want to. If not - well, enjoy the rest of your life.'

‘Are you crazy? I'm a
weatherman
.'

‘Aren't we all,' the man replied, walking away, ‘in a sense.'

The beer mat lay on the bar top, just an inch or so from Gordon's hand, right next to the full whisky glass. No more effort needed to pick up one rather than the other.

Dragons.

Well, quite.

Nevertheless, it wouldn't do any harm to look. Gordon flipped the beer mat over and saw, scrawled in green (for some reason) ink, the words:

 

www.stormtroopers.co.uk

 

- which even he recognised as being an Internet website address. He drummed his fingers in a pool of spilt beer, thinking.

Well why not?
First, however, there'd be no harm in drinking this glass of fine single malt whisky.

He tilted the glass, absorbed its contents, closed his eyes and, just as he'd done every night for as long as anybody could remember after his sixteenth drink, slid gradually and with the poise of a trained judo expert to the floor. Twenty minutes later, the barman and one of the regulars scooped him up, dusted him off and laid him gently to rest in his usual eyrie in the broom cupboard.

‘Seven minutes late tonight,' the regular observed.

The barman thought for a moment. ‘Must be British Summer Time again,' he replied. ‘Just as well you noticed, or I'd have forgotten to do the clocks.'

Snuggled upright among the mops and brushes, Gordon slept the sleep of the totally zonked. Atypically, however, he dreamed; and in his dream a great green dragon with fiery red eyes, perfumed breath, wings like a DC10 and a belly plated with twenty thousand letters addressed to
Points of View
in place of the conventional scales hovered over him, fanning him with its slow, measured wingbeats and widdling in his ear. When he tried to shoo it away by flapping an umbrella in its face, it did a double back somersault, opened its jaws to full gape and turned seamlessly into the Director General of the BBC, thereby causing the graveyard shift in Gordon's subconscious mind to file a memo recommending that in future he should avoid eating pickled eggs when going on a binge.

At midnight they woke him up and threw him out, and he wandered home in a thoughtful mood that severely impeded his ability to avoid lamp-posts. It was as he was picking himself up off the deck after a particularly close encounter that he remembered the beer mat, which he'd folded and tucked in his top pocket before sinking the last whisky.

Dragons
, he thought.
Yeah, right
, he thought.

But as Gordon continued on his way (typically he walked twenty-five per cent further on the way home than on the way out; the difference between a boring old straight line and a sequence of aesthetically pleasing jags and swerves) he found himself considering, with the brand of logic that only kicks in when the brain is sufficiently lubricated, whether he shouldn't at least give the theory a fair trial. Now would be the time to do it, of course, while he was revoltingly drunk; sober, he wouldn't even contemplate doing something so utterly stupid, and so might just miss out on the discovery of a lifetime. After all, some great truths can only be fully appreciated when one's consciousness has been suitably enhanced, and if this happened to be one of them, he was ideally placed to handle it right now, being, by anybody's definition, as consciousness-enhanced as a newt.

After a mildly frustrating fifteen minutes spent trying all the keys on his keyring to see which of them opened his front door, he made it safely through to the hallway and stood still for a moment, trying to remember if he was still married. The issue was entirely relevant to the matter in hand. Jennifer would have his scalp if he started turning on lights and playing with computers at one in the morning, but he was morally certain that Jennifer had left him after the sea lion-in-the-bath incident. What he couldn't recall offhand was whether Jennifer had come before or after Trudy, and whether one or the other of them still lived here. There was only one certain way to find out and that was to turn on the light, an experiment that quickly gave him the answer he'd been looking for. Various subtle clues about the way the room looked - the trousers draped over the back of the sofa, the half-empty vindaloo cartons on the floor, the craggy yellow growth in the necks of several milk bottles - strongly suggested to the trained eye that he was once again a single man and perfectly within his rights to start up the computer any time he felt like it.

A little archaeology duly revealed the computer plug and matching wall socket, and soon the system was humming merrily - surely the whirring of a Pentium fan ranks with the soft gurgle of a brook and the distant click of bat on ball across a village green among the most soothing sounds available to a distempered mind - and the screen was urging him to buy more Microsoft products now, while stocks lasted. Somehow managing to resist the allure of these offers, he carefully unfolded the beer mat, typed in the address, hit ‘Send' and went to sleep.

The common or garden office chair, as sold for computer workstation use, is a masterpiece of design, arrived at after hours of painstaking research and input from the CBI, Department of Industry and a number of consultants recruited from former members of the Haitian secret police. One of its most valuable features is the way it wakes you up, with extreme prejudice as regards the back of the neck, if you're slothful enough to fall asleep in it. The deterrent effect of this design has so far saved British industry enough man-hours to staff the next industrial revolution; but it was easy to overlook these positive aspects if you woke up in one after a night on the razzle.