Paint Your Dragon (16 page)

‘But that was murder,' Chardonay replied uncomfortably: ‘Wasn't it?'

‘Pesticide. Where the hell's that bloody vicar got to with the drinkies?'

‘You're a saint and you
killed
him. Without provocation.

He wasn't setting fire to anything or eating maidens, he was just sitting there.'

‘Yeah,' George snarled, his feet up on the coffee table; size twelve Doc Martens resting on disused
Catholic Heralds.
‘Eating me in effigy. Charming. Anyway, bugger that. We're on the same side, remember.'

Chardonay shook his head. ‘I still don't really buy that,' he said. ‘That's like saying good and evil are basically the same thing.'

George, who had never been near a university common room bar in his life but could nevertheless sense the onset of one of those ghastly serious-conversations-about-the-meaning-of-Everything, got up and opened the drinks cabinet with his foot. ‘Bollocks,' he said, knocking the top off a Guinness bottle against the mantelpiece. ‘That's like saying Accounts is the same as the Packing Department. They're different, yes, but part of the same firm.'

‘Oh. I thought we were, you know, at war, sort of thing. Evil versus Good. In competition for the soul of man.'

‘Listen, pillock. If Evil won, it'd become Good, like the opposition becomes the government.' He glugged at the bottle until it was empty and dropped it in the fireplace. ‘Thought you were meant to be a management trainee, son. Don't they teach you boys anything?'

Father Kelly peered nervously round the door and whispered that he'd got a bottle of champagne, if that's what they wanted. He looked nervous and semi-martyred; Terry Waite in his own home. Which suited him fine, because although he'd always reckoned he'd have made a cracking hostage he spoke no foreign languages and air travel gave him migraines. ‘And,' he added, ‘there's a devil in the washing machine.'

‘That'll be that Holdall,' George grunted. ‘I told him to search the place, see where you're hiding the good stuff.'

‘Um.' Father Kelly wasn't sure what good meant any more, but from the context he guessed alcohol. ‘Actually,' he said, ‘I haven't got any more. I can send out Mrs McNamara if you—'

George made a scornful noise. ‘You don't fool me that easily,' he said. ‘In my day, first thing your priest did when he saw a gang of saints on the horizon, he put all the grog in a bucket and lowered it down the well. Always used to confess, though, specially when we told him we'd chuck him down after it. That,' he added stonily, ‘is a hint.'

‘Actually, I haven't got a well.'

‘I can improvise.'

Father Kelly gulped and bolted. George listened after his retreating footsteps and winked.

‘He'll be back in ten minutes with a couple of crates, you mark my words.' he said. ‘Where was I?'

‘Good and Evil.'

‘Yeah. Them.' George yawned, stretched and kicked his shoes off. ‘All a bit academic, really. I mean, what it all boils down to is, you see a dragon, say, wandering about on your patch, you scrag it, job done. What more d'you need to know, for Chrissakes? I mean, it's not exactly brain-bending stuff. Not like your angels dancing on the head of a pin - to which, in case you ever wondered, the answer is six, unless they're doing the valeta, in which case eight. I don't see what you're making all this fuss about.'

Chardonay shrugged helplessly. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘Maybe I'm not right for this line of work after all. When I joined, I thought there'd be something, you know, non-controversial I could do, like keeping the books, doing budget forecasts, working out cost-efficiency ratios and calculating depreciation of fixed assets on a straight-line basis. Killing people ...'

George treated him to a look of contemptuous pity.

‘Wouldn't do if we were all the same, son. I mean, if we were then the likes of me couldn't kick shit out of the likes of you, for starters. Here,' he added irritably, ‘this isn't proper champagne, it's that naff Italian stuff. When that dozy parson gets back, I've a good mind to pour the rest of it down his trousers. One thing I can't stand, it's blasphemy.'

 

‘What?'

‘Grapes,' said Mike, smiling. ‘Flowers. Womens' magazines. I know you hate them all like the plague, so I'm building up an environment you'll be desperate to leave. That way, you'll get well faster.'

Bianca tried to rub her eyes, but found she couldn‘t, because her arm was cocooned in plaster and hanging by a wire from a frame above her head. ‘I'm in hospital, right?' she said.

‘Huh.' Mike scowled. ‘Someone must have told you.'

‘How did I get here?'

‘You got blown up,' Mike replied through a mouthful of grape-pulp. ‘Along, I'm very sorry to have to tell you, with your statue. Note the singular, by the way. There's bits of marble dragon scattered about as far as Henley-in-Arden, but no Saint George. They're saying it's the animal rights lot.'

Suddenly there was something solid and awkward in Bianca's throat; possibly a bit of dragon shrapnel. ‘The statue's - gone, then?'

Mike nodded. ‘All the king's horses are reported to have packed it in as a lost cause,' he replied. ‘All the king's men are still at it, but only because they're paid hourly. If it's any consolation, you're in all the papers and there's a guy from
Celebrity Squares
in the waiting room right now.'

What with the plaster and the wires, Bianca couldn't sink back into the pillows with a hollow groan, so she did the next best thing and swore eloquently. Mike agreed that it was a pity.

‘A
pity?
They murdered the - my statue, and you say it's a pity?'

‘These things happen. Is there anything else you're particularly allergic to that I can bring in? I seem to remember you can't stand chrysanthemums, but they'd sold out at the kiosk, so I got daffs instead.'

‘Mike.'

‘Yes?'

‘Go away.'

‘I thought you'd say that,' Mike said, and left.

 

The dragon looked down, then back over his shoulder. Cautiously, he spread his wings and folded them again. Finally, he breathed out the tiniest, finest plume of flame he could manage, so as not to incinerate the extremely plush office he was apparently sitting in.

‘All present and correct,' Chubby said. ‘Actually, in all the panic we knocked off a toe, but we put it back on with Araldite as soon as we got here and it seems to have taken okay. Grateful?'

The dragon nodded. ‘Extremely,' he said. ‘I had the distinct impression I was dying. I was in this restaurant, and then I was in the square again, inside the statue. I thought—'

‘They tried to blow you up,' Chubby replied. ‘I got there just as a fat bloke with a moustache tripped over his feet and fell on the plunger. A sixth of a second later and all you'd have been fit for would have been lining the bottom of goldfish bowls.'

The dragon narrowed his eyes. ‘So what happened?' he said. ‘What did you do?'

Chubby shrugged modestly and folded his hands in his lap. ‘A sixth of a second can be a very long time,' he said, ‘especially if you boost another twelve hours into it using a state-of-the-art Kawaguchiya Heavy Industries Temporal Jack.' He grinned. ‘At $3,000,000 per hour plus hire of plant and equipment, you owe me plenty, but we'll sort that out later. Anyway, during that time we winched your statue up off the deck and into the cargo bay of the big Sikorsky, substituted a big chunk of solid marble, and legged it. That way, when the fireworks started, there were plenty of bits of flying rock to make them think they'd succeeded. To them, of course, the sixth of a second lasted a sixth of a second, thanks to the KHI jack and a quick whip round with the soldering iron. Neat, yes?'

‘Rather. I'm impressed. It was very good thinking.'

‘Yes,' said Chubby, ‘well. Some of us don't go all to pieces at the first sign of trouble. And now, here you are, safe and sound. And, I sincerely hope, desperately anxious to try and repay the colossal debt of gratitude, ditto money, you now owe me. Correct?'

The dragon nodded. ‘You said something about a job.'

‘Ah yes. Two jobs, really. Both of them right up your alley. Can I get you a drink, by the way? I've got four-star, diesel, aviation fuel or ethanol, and I think there's a drop of turps left over from the Christmas party.'

The dragon asked for a large ethanol, straight, no cherry. ‘Two jobs,' he repeated. ‘Connected?'

‘Sort of,' Chubby replied. ‘One, I want you to fry me some devils. Two, I -
Don't touch that!'

He was too late. The dragon, a born fidget, had let his claws drift across the keyboard of the obsolete old PCW The screen started to glow.

‘Sorry,' the dragon said. ‘Oh look, it's gone all green.'

The dragon blinked. ‘Nosher?'

‘Likewise.' The dragon grinned, and only just managed to restrain a sigh of pleasure that would have melted the side off the building. ‘It's been a long time, Nosher. What, three thousand years?'

‘Well,' the dragon replied, ‘most of the time I've been dead, though I'm better now. And yourself?'

Chubby, his eyes round as tennis balls, could contain himself no longer. ‘Nosher?' he demanded. ‘Your name is
Nosher
?'

Zagranosz. And this is my old friend Fredegundar. We go way back
.

‘I trust,' said Chubby bitterly, ‘that none of this great-to-see-you-heard-from-Betsy-lately stuff's going on my account. I mean, I don't mind soul-destroying
work,
but college reunions—'

The dragon nodded. ‘Weird sort of a bloke,' he agreed, ‘although he did just save me from getting blown up. And now he wants me to go torching demons.'

The dragon blinked. ‘You know about this?'

Confused, and feeling as left out as an empty milk bottle, Chubby finished off the dragon's ethanol and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘You guys,' he said. ‘It's no good, I've got to know. Where do you two know each other from?'

The dragon turned his head and smiled.

‘Sunday school,' he said.

 

Drop a pebble in the sea off Brighton and the ripples will eventually reach California. Likewise, blow up a statue in Birmingham and you risk starting a revolution.

A lot depends, of course, on the quality of the statue, because only the very best statues have the potential to be squatted in by unquiet spirits. The word
unquiet,
by the way, has been chosen with great care.

The sound waves travelled fastest, of course; followed by the shock of air suddenly and violently displaced, in turn hotly pursued by microscopic fragments of dust and debris. The sound and the air dissipated themselves soon enough, but the dust floated on, carried on the winds far over the English Channel, south-east across France and down into Italy. Most of it fell by the wayside, to be whisked away by conscientious housewives or ploughed under; but one stray particle happened to drift into the great and glorious Academy Gallery in the city of Florence, where they keep possibly the most famous statue in the world - Michaelangelo's
David.

Imagine that there's a wee video camera mounted on the back of this dust particle - impossible, of course; even the latest twelfth-generation salt-grain-sized Kawaguchiya Optical Industries P7640 would be far too big and heavy - and you're watching the city come into focus as the particle begins its unhurried descent. Now we're directly over the Piazzale Michelangiolo, where the coaches park for a good gawp and an ice lolly; we can see the khaki majesty of the river Arno, the Ponte Vecchio with its bareback shops, the grim tower of the Bargello, the egg-headed Duomo. Here is the square horseshoe of the Academy. Here is an open window, saving us 4,000 lire entrance fee. And here is the statue.

It stands at the end of a gallery, in an alcove shaped like half an Easter egg. No miniature, this; twelve feet from curly hair to imperious toe, leaning slightly backwards, weight on his right foot, one hand by his side and the other holding what looks uncommonly like a sock over his left shoulder. There are those who'll tell you his head and hands are too big, out of proportion to the rest of him; that his hair looks like an old woolly mop head, fallen on the unsuspecting youth from a great height. Be that as it may, the consensus of civilised opinion holds that you are in the presence of transcendent genius, so be told.

The grain of dust flittered casually down and settled on David's nose.

He sneezed.

‘Nngr,' he mumbled, the way you do after a real corker of a sneeze. Absent-mindedly, he moved to wipe his nose with the thing that looks like a sock and found he couldn't. Shit, he thought, my arm's stuck.

Also, he observed, horrified, there's a whole gaggle of people over there staring at me
and I haven't got any clothes on.

Not a happy state of affairs for a well-brought-up twelve-footer who can't move. My God, he asked himself, how long have I been here like this? I can't remember. In fact, I can't remember
anything.
I must have been in a terrible accident, which left me completely paralysed and amnesiac. Oh
God!