Nothing But Blue Skies (9 page)

‘Certainly not.' The dragon crushed his fingernails into the palms of his soft, flabby human paws. ‘In fact, I'm just starting to like you. Why don't we go and have something to eat?'

‘I'd be delighted. Let's go somewhere crowded, where there's lots and lots of people. I'd really like that.'

A passer-by stopped for a moment and peered at the little weedy man, as if trying to read him upside down. ‘Here,' he said, ‘you're on telly.'

The weedy man smiled graciously. ‘That's right,' he said. ‘Thanks for watching.'

‘You do the weather, don't you? After
News at Eight
.'

‘That's me.'

The passer-by nodded. ‘We used to watch you all the time,' he said. ‘But not any more. We watch the weather on ITV now. There's less rain on ITV.'

‘Ah.' The weedy man nodded gravely. ‘You noticed. It's all to do with the cuts, you see. They've got the money, they can afford more sunshine than we can.'

The passer-by shook his head. ‘It isn't right,' he said. ‘I pay enough for the licence fee, God knows. Weren't you on that
Celebrity Squares
that time?'

‘Which time?'

‘I don't know, do I? I wasn't the one who was on.'

‘Yes.' The weedy man dipped his head graciously. ‘It was me.'

‘There you are, then. Thought it was you.'

As the passer-by passed by, the dragon shook his head and sighed. ‘Are they all like that?'

‘All who like what?'

‘Your public. The people you forecast the weather for.'

The weedy man shook his head. ‘Not at all,' he said. ‘Most of them aren't nearly as perceptive. Judging by the quality of insight displayed by his questions, I'd guess he was either the managing director of a major bank or the Regius Professor of Logic at Oxford. But that's not the point,' he went on, taking a step closer to the dragon, as if about to fit him with a saddle and bridle. ‘They are the People, and they have a Right to Know. And I'm the one who's going to tell them.'

For the first time in his long and complicated life, the dragon felt panic starting to take hold. Mostly it was the incongruity - this pathetic specimen of a puny breed, advancing on him with a contemptuous grin on his ridiculous face, as if he was the one who could call down millimetre-perfect lightning strikes without even lifting a finger; in the face of such assurance, he couldn't help wondering if there wasn't more to all this than met any of his three eyes. He resolved on a controlled strategic withdrawal, with strategic running like buggery held in reserve as a contingency plan. The question was how—

And then he happened to look down and see, right there under his foot, a grating in the gutter. Some iron slats, a short drop, and below that a smart current of water running-off the recent heavy rain; too small for a human, let alone a dragon, but easily one small tail-flick for a goldfish.

He smiled. ‘Goodbye,' he said; then he turned himself into a fish, slid through the bars and went
plop!
into the water—

—Right into the keepnet installed there by the little weedy man an hour before. Before the dragon realised what was happening to him he'd been scooped up out of the water and dumped, wriggling and thrashing, into a jam jar full of water. At once he tried to revert to his proper shape, but he couldn't; in order to make the change he needed clear, empty space around him to grow into during that all-important first three milliseconds of the process. Trapped like this in water, with the walls of the jar hemming him in, he couldn't do anything to free himself.

‘Sucker,' the man said; then he screwed the lid on the jar, and everything was silent.

 

‘Gordon?'

Gordon hesitated, his tray gripped precariously in one hand while the other tried to fish coins out of his pocket past the big bunch of keys, and looked round. ‘Oh,' he said. ‘It's you.'

It was a risk he ran every time he had lunch in the canteen: a disconcerting ambush by a more or less irritating colleague. There was neither time nor an obvious vector for escape, so he accepted his fate as gracefully as he could. ‘How've you been, Neville?' he asked, synthesising interest like Rumpelstiltskin spinning gold out of straw. ‘Haven't seen much of you since you started on the six o'clock slot.'

‘Marvellous,' Neville replied, grinning. ‘Come over here and sit down, I want to talk to you.'

My fault for not dying young while I had the chance
, Gordon muttered to himself. He did as he was told, and started to disembark the contents of his tray onto the formica table. There weren't many places left where you could still find the genuine, original, unspeakably naff 1970s formica in its natural habitat.

‘You got my message, then,' Neville said.

Gordon frowned. ‘Did I?'

‘Sorry for all the melodrama,' Neville replied, opening up his grin to Insufferable Level 2. ‘But if I'd told you normally - you know, chatting like this - you wouldn't have done anything about it. Which is understandable enough; after all, you've always thought of me as an annoying little shit—'

‘No, no.' Gordon frowned. ‘Well, yes. If it's any consolation, I think of lots of people that way.'

‘Me too. Doesn't matter. The point is,' Neville continued, spreading his skinny forearms across the table, ‘you did as you were told and looked at the website. That's good.'

‘Website? Oh, you mean
that
. How did you know I looked at the website?'

The soft gurgling noise Neville made was one of his trademarks. For what it was worth, he was a genuinely brilliant meteorologist, and he could also whistle more or less in tune. It was important to bear in mind that there was always some good in everybody. ‘I don't think you really want to know,' he replied. ‘So,' he went on, ‘what did you think?'

‘About the website?' Gordon pointed a forkful of shepherd's pie at his face, caught sight of it and put it back on his plate. ‘With a certain amount of editing, it could be mere harmless drivel. I'm not saying you haven't still got a long way to go, but it's possible so long as you stick at it.'

‘Drivel.'

‘
Harmless
drivel,' Gordon reminded him. ‘Or at least, there are several places where it aspires to be harmless drivel. Ah, but Man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for?'

Neville wasn't grinning any more. ‘Is this your facetious way of telling me you don't believe what we're telling you?'

‘Yes. Do you want my bread roll, by the way? If you had two of them, you'd be able to bang them together and light a fire.'

‘What is it you don't believe?'

Gordon sighed. ‘Come off it,' he said. ‘A joke's a joke, but it isn't a fence post; hammering it into the ground is not recommended. I'll admit you had me fooled for a minute or two, but . . .

Neville picked up the ketchup bottle, took the lid off, sniffed and put it back where he'd found it. ‘You're saying you think the whole thing's a spoof. A leg-pull.'

‘To more or less the same extent that Ronald Reagan was an actor; but yes, I think that's what you intended it to be.'

‘I see.' Neville was beginning to look genuinely angry. ‘Obviously I've been overestimating your intelligence all these years.'

‘You mean underestimating, surely.'

Neville shook his head. ‘My own silly fault. I honestly thought you had the breadth of mind, the perception, the depth of vision . . . '

‘Sometimes I do,' Gordon said. ‘Quite often, in fact; usually around half ten, eleven at night. Right now, though, I'm sober.'

Neville didn't seem to find that particularly funny. ‘That's a pity. But we can deal with it. After all, seeing is believing.'

‘Sometimes,' Gordon replied cautiously. ‘Other times, it's nature's way of telling you to lay off the vodka chasers. All depends on what it is you start seeing.'

Neville pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘So,' he said. ‘What are you planning on doing now?'

‘Eating my lunch?' Gordon caught another glimpse of the shepherd's pie. ‘No, maybe not. In that case, I may as well go back to the office and do some work.'

Neville moved to block him from getting up. It was like being threatened by a Ray Harryhausen pipe cleaner. ‘You mean,' he said, ‘you're going straight to the fifteenth floor and you're going to tell them to fire me because I've gone crazy. That's right, isn't it?'

Gordon frowned. ‘Do you want me to do that?' he asked.

‘No, of course not.'

‘That's all right, then, because I'd prefer not to. And besides, you only imagine the world is ruled by enormous flying lizards. By BBC standards, that makes you dangerously sane.'

People were, of course, beginning to stare. But Gordon was used to that; it was Neville who seemed disconcerted - odd, really, considering that he made his living being stared at by up to ten million people at a time.

‘You'll see,' he said. ‘I'll show you, and then you'll see. Meanwhile, if you so much as breathe a word about this—'

‘You'll feed me to the dragon?'

Neville scowled at him. ‘Don't be ridiculous,' he said. ‘Dragons don't eat people. That's just a myth.'

‘It is?' In spite of himself, Gordon smiled. ‘You're sure?'

Neville made an uncouth noise with his mouth and walked away, leaving Gordon with his plate of congealed shepherd's pie and a few things to think about. Most of them were variations on the theme of There-but-for-the-grace-of-God; it was just as well that he'd taken to the bottle as a way of dealing with the nightmares of his profession rather than retreating inside his own head, as Neville had done.

Staring at the shepherd's pie wasn't going to make it edible. Gordon got up, spread a paper napkin over his plate as a mark of respect to the dead, and went back to his office. Even in spite of everything he'd had to suffer for its sake, he still had a spark of lingering affection for his work. Ever since he could remember, he'd had the romantic, idiotic notion of the weather being the planet's way of showing her feelings - the sun her smile, the rain her tears, mist and fog her stark, bleak moods, snow her mischievous winter grin - and according to the satellite, tomorrow ought to be a genuinely sad day, with legitimate heavy rain instead of the usual crocodile tears that he found so hard to explain or forgive. He could therefore forecast wet weather with a clear conscience; just this once, it had his permission to rain.

Once again, he passed the door of the Cat's Whiskers and kept on going. He had no illusions about being cured or having found a better way. One of the lesser reasons why he drank so much was the fact that he quite enjoyed it. He liked the taste of the stuff, the ambience of a properly dark, respectably scruffy lounge bar, the gentle relaxation of feeling his thoughts gradually getting slower and fuzzier. It certainly beat sitting at home alone in front of the telly. (Although the same could, of course, also be said of malaria or, indeed, death.) But the pub would still be there tomorrow; quite possibly the day after tomorrow, too. He'd appreciate it all the more after a couple of days away. In the same way, it made a refreshing change to wake up in the morning without a hangover.

Gordon was thinking about that last factor and reflecting on how much easier the world was to cope with when you didn't have a four-alarmer headache as he opened his front door and reached for the light switch; ironic, really, since before he was able to touch fingernail to plastic, someone stepped out of the darkness behind him and bashed him over the head with eight inches of lead-filled hosepipe.

 

The first thing Gordon saw when he woke up was a goldfish bowl.

Considering some of the things he'd seen a second or so after waking up (scary monsters with big eyes and horns; scuttling, crawly beetles; his first wife) it was odd that the sight of a small orange fish swimming round and round in a small glass container should have shaken him as much as it did. But this was no ordinary goldfish. This was identical to the one he'd seen on Neville's website, the one that belonged to no known species.

‘Neville?' he said, as loudly as his reverberating head would allow.

‘You've woken up, then,' said Neville's voice behind him.

He tried to twist round and face him, but found he could-n't. This turned out to have something to do with the blue nylon rope that surrounded him in coils like a mummy's thermal underwear and held him firmly in the armchair he was sitting on. Quite a lot to do with it, in fact.

‘All right, Neville,' he said, looking round the best he could. ‘I know about the ropes and stuff, thanks to the second Mrs Smelt. What's the goldfish for?'

‘There is no goldfish.'

Gordon dipped his head towards the glass bowl. ‘So what's that, then? One of those lava lamps they advertise in the colour supplements?'

‘That's a dragon.'

‘No kidding.'

The dragon was looking at them, opening and closing its mouth as it finned water. Definitely not a species he'd ever seen in a book or a pet shop. If it was a hybrid of some kind, he couldn't figure out what it was a hybrid of. It held still for a moment, flexed its gills wide and went back to opening and closing its mouth.

‘Turn the sound back on,' Gordon said wearily. ‘I can't make out a word it's saying.'

‘You want to hear what it's saying?'

‘What? Oh yes. Sure.'

‘All right.' Neville took a step forward and slid back a concealed panel in the arm of a chair, revealing some kind of keyboard. ‘Won't be a moment.'