Nothing But Blue Skies (6 page)

‘Agh,' said Gordon, and opened his eyes. He was in that uncomfortable transitional stage of being both drunk and hung-over at the same time, and the glare and movement of the screen saver was already doing peculiar things to his eyes. Experience had taught him some time ago that slapping the side of the box with the flat of his hand made the screen saver go away, so he did that, and found himself staring at the words -

- in lurid green letters several inches high against a disturbingly purple background. His first reaction was that it was marginally better than pink elephants and crawling bugs; then he remembered, and narrowed his eyes to read the small print.

If you want get even
, it advised him,
get MAD
.

He lifted his head and blinked once or twice. Maybe crawling bugs would have been preferable after all. He read on.

MAD - Meteorologists Against Dragons - is a direct-action organisation whose aim is to end once and for all the misery, suffering and humiliation caused to thousands of weathermen right across the globe by the recklessly malicious activities of so-called dragons. From our purpose-built headquarters securely hidden in a cavern somewhere beneath the Andean deserts of South America - the only place on Earth where rain has never fallen - we monitor dragon activity worldwide, coordinate anti-dragon initiatives, research potential dragon-prevention technology and support a far-reaching campaign of public education and opinion-reprofiling. If you want to know more about MAD and how it can help you get even, click HERE
.

‘Fuck off,' Gordon sighed, and went to hit ‘Exit'; but the mouse slipped from his hand and landed on its own left-hand button. The screen changed.

Completely potty
, Gordon muttered to himself; still, he could always use a good laugh. He continued reading;

Modern scientists, assessing the ancient Chinese myth of the rain-bringing dragon, have argued an entirely plausible case for regarding the dragon as the prehistoric forerunner of the UFO. All the traditional dragon attributes - fiery objects hurtling across the sky, disturbed weather patterns and the like - almost exactly mirror the sights and sounds reported by present-day UFO spotters. From this they conclude that both phenomena represent the layman's misinterpretation of natural, easily explained occurrences such as meteorite showers and swamp gas. There are, they assure us, no such things as dragons
.

Bullshit
.

We, of course, know different. We know that the world is divided up into four spheres of dragon influence, roughly matching the cardinal points of the compass, each presided over by a dragon king supported by a complex and well-organised hierarchy of adjutants, marshals, signifers, lightning conductors and masters-at-arms. We have a pretty good idea of how dragons go about summoning clouds, precipitating rain at will out of a clear blue sky, and targeting rainfall to cause maximum disruption and embarrassment to the members of our profession. Make no mistake: those scaly bastards are out to get YOU, because you represent a significant threat to the veil of secrecy, superstition and ignorance behind which they've successfully cloaked their activities for countless centuries. By sabotaging our work and discrediting our members, dragons are seeking to undermine public confidence in weather forecasting in general, leading to the cutting of research and operational funding, marginalisation of weather broadcasting slots and the irreversible decline and demise of our trade. With us out of the way, dragons will once again be able to rule the skies without fear of detection and opposition
.

We at MAD feel it's time we stopped these uppity critters from raining on our parade. We believe that it's not just a matter of our jobs and vocation being put on the line by a posse of overgrown iguanas. There are more public health and safety issues at stake here than you can shake a stick at; but so long as the Surgeon General, the military and the Federal Aviation Authority continue to stand by, sit back and do nothing, we get the feeling it's up to us to make sure something gets done, before homo sapiens is forced back into the dark ages of fiddling with seaweed and watching cows lying down
.

To see what MAD action is planned for your region in the short and middle term, click HERE
.

The icon referred to, a colourful thumbnail sketch of a dragon hanging by the neck from a lamp-post, seemed to be urging him personally to continue with the briefing. Shaking his head for as long as he could bear to do so, Gordon clicked, and was presented with a pie chart of the world, neatly divided into four quadrants. Clicking on ‘North-West' brought up something that looked like a family tree, only it wasn't. Instead, it was a schematic diagram of the dragon chain of command for the north-western sector. Regarded purely as a work of art, it was quite something, with its rainbow colour-coding and elegant traceries of connecting lines and dots; if only he'd had a colour printer, he'd have run off a sheaf of copies and wallpapered the toilet with them.

Under the diagram was another block of text, headed
What YOU can do. Well,
Gordon said to himself,
indeed
; then he yawned and glanced up at the clock. If he wanted to spend more time asleep than it'd take him to brush his teeth and put his pyjamas on, he needed to go to bed now. Before hitting the kill button, however, he took the time to bookmark the page under the file name KOOKS -

- Because, he decided, he could do worse than come back to this site the next time he was filled with rage and fury against the elements. It demonstrated that he wasn't alone, that there were other weathermen out there, perched on the far shores of cyberspace, who'd been pushed even further than he had, to the point where they'd obviously dropped clean off the edge. Comparing them with himself was the most comforting activity he'd indulged in for years; indeed, just looking at the unmitigated drivel they'd come out with scattered the clouds of his anger (Freudian metaphor; so what?) and replaced the furious glare with a broad grin. As the old saying went: too many kooks spoil the wrath.

After an untroubled night's sleep soothed by dreams of blue skies, Gordon woke up with only a token hangover, which a pot of strong coffee and a pint of orange juice soon dissipated entirely, allowing him to go to work for the first time in as long as he could remember without a goblin chain-gang quarrying the insides of his skull. And, although his postbag was as full as ever and the warm, fine day he'd forecasted was riven at frequent intervals by inexplicable electric storms, somehow none of it seemed to matter quite as much as it usually did; indeed, when he picked up an evening newspaper on his way out of the office and saw the headline ENGLAND SAVED BY RAIN on the sports page, he felt a tiny glow of pride.

Accordingly, he didn't stop off for a drink on his way home, and the regulars at the Cat's Whiskers were forced to set their watches by the TV news instead. It felt distinctly odd going to bed sober, but not entirely unpleasant. All in all, it had been a better than average day, and although he certainly wouldn't have described himself as happy - if only because he was way-wise enough to know that in the
Really Accurate Oxford English Dictionary
, ‘happy' is defined as a divine dialect term meaning asking for trouble, and that admitting happiness even in private is effectively the same as twiddling a catnip mouse directly under Fate's nose - he had to concede in all fairness that he was rather less unhappy than he'd been for some time.

Gordon woke up at two a.m. with a blinding headache and various other symptoms consistent with acute alcohol deficiency. Fortuitously, he had a bottle or two of homoeopathic medicine about the place, and was able to prescribe himself a suitable dose; but he was realistic enough to accept that he wasn't going to be able to squeeze any more sleep out of that night. That meant he needed something to do for the next few hours.

The silly website, he suddenly thought, the one with the dragons; nothing like a little goofball comedy to help pass the time. He turned on the computer, waded through the preliminary garbage, and clicked on a promising-looking link headed
The Phantom Menace
.

The page took a long time to load, as if it wasn't happy about being woken up in the early hours of the morning. When it finally came through, however, Gordon was disappointed. The only thing on the screen was a big picture of a dragon, one of those Chinese New Year efforts, framed by the cross-hairs of an optical sight, and underneath, the words PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE, in eerily flickering blue and gold lettering. This struck Gordon as marginally too obsessive to be funny - up till then he'd still had a vague, lingering suspicion that it was all a very delicate and subtle spoof - and he was about to get rid of it when the picture disintegrated and re-formed as something rather more humanoid: a black-and-white mugshot of someone who looked like a fusion of God (as depicted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel), Big Brother and Colonel Sanders.

Gordon was staring at this striking image and wondering why the words underneath hadn't changed when it too dissolved into a bee-swarm of pixels and came back together again as a large goldfish.

Gordon blinked three times. In an earlier, less jaded phase of his life (Marilyn, who to the best of his recollection had been after Louisa but before Trudy) he'd owned a fish tank that from time to time had contained fish. True, they'd tended to have the life expectancy of a second lieutenant in the trenches in 1914, but in between ice-cream-tub funerals he'd learned to tell the difference between, say, a bog-standard fairground-issue goldfish and a pedigree Japanese Koi - the latter had particularly stuck in his mind because of their rigid adherence to the samurai code, which led them to expire melodramatically whenever their honour was impugned by, say, a dirty water filter or economy-grade ants' eggs - and the thing on the screen, while undoubtedly a goldfish, wasn't like any other make, brand or marque of goldfish he'd ever come across.

And still the caption at the bottom of the screen stayed the same:

- which was in itself a contradiction in terms; the most any one of the three images could be was Public Enemy Number l (a), (b) or (c). Likewise he found it hard to imagine how a goldfish, even a bizarre mutant Ninja Koi, could be a public enemy of any description. It could die petulantly at you or it could swim backwards away from you while opening and shutting its mouth; that aside, it was as powerless and ineffectual as an MEP.

While he was trying to puzzle it out, the picture changed back into the New Year dragon, followed by a repeat of the humanoid version, with the fish bringing up the rear. Rather than sit through the show another time, Gordon clicked the kill button and turned the computer off. For some reason, though, the images stayed behind in his mind, like the forgotten guests who suddenly appear from behind the sofa on the morning after a really serious party. The human in particular; something familiar about that face - he was sure he'd seen it, or something very like it, not so long ago.

It wasn't long before the face was chasing him down a long, dark tunnel whose walls and floor were lined with viewscreens on which a goldfish in SS uniform threatened the world with storms, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes, followed by a warm front coming in from the south-west and the possibility of black ice in Hell. Fortunately, all this turned out to be a dream, from which Gordon woke with a stiff neck and a jackhammer headache five minutes after he should have left the house if he didn't want to be horrendously late for work.

 

All that witters isn't guilt; but a nagging conscience could be an uncomfortable companion, especially when you hadn't got much else to occupy your mind. After a day spent in making tiny, meaningless jobs for herself to do while keeping out of Paul's and Susan's way as best she could in a small, open-plan office, Karen was getting to the point where she couldn't hear herself think over the incessant muttering of the small, sharp voice inside her head -

 

. . . don't know how you could've been so thoughtless, going off like that without a word to anybody, they'll be worried sick, your poor father, he must be frantic, not knowing where you are, if someone did that to you you wouldn't like it, not one bit, the least you could have done was leave a note or something but oh no, you just took it into your head to go swanning off without a care in the world, typical of you, no consideration for other people, for all we knew you could have been lying bleeding to death in a ditch somewhere, most of the time you just don't think . . .

 

 

- which in turn had set off the other little guilt goblins, the ones who went -

 

. . . look at the state of this place, that carpet hasn't seen a Hoover in six months, dirty laundry just left lying about, it wouldn't kill you to wash up the cups and plates after you've used them, now would it, is this really what you want to do with your life, it's just as well your poor mother isn't around to see how you're frittering your time away like this. it'd break her heart. and will you just look at the dust on these shelves . . .

 

 

- in a continuous unholy counterpoint, until she'd have gone out and had her head amputated if the NHS waiting lists hadn't meant that death from extreme old age was a rather more probable outcome.

Since surgery wasn't an option, there was only one thing she could do to get rid of the nuisance. She'd have to call home and talk to her father. This would be both traumatic and extremely risky, since her father was nobody's fool and wouldn't have much difficulty in having the call traced; and before she knew what day of the week it was, she'd be scooped up by a couple of extremely polite, utterly ruthless dragons in grey suits and dark glasses, and find herself on the wrong side of the desk in her father's study being asked to explain herself; something which, for various reasons, she didn't want to do.