The Portable Door (1987) (23 page)

The door closed behind them, and they could hear the keys graunching in the locks. It was just starting to rain.

“Well,” Paul said. Sophie didn’t answer. They walked a few steps, then paused.

“You heard him,” Paul said. “Hurry, or you’ll miss your train.”

She looked at him; rain was running off her forehead and down her nose, like fat tears. “What’re we going to do?” she said.

Paul shook his head. “I haven’t got a clue,” he said. “My dad’s got an old Spanish proverb he’s always quoting: when you’re drowning in beef stew, it’s a hell of a time to decide you’re a vegetarian. I’m not sure whether it applies to this or not, but it’s the best I can manage right now.”

Sophie looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Well,” she said, “see you Monday.”

“Yes, right. Enjoy your pottery thing.”

“Ceramics,” she corrected him, and walked away.

§

Paul took the only course of action open to him at that point in his career. He went to the nearest pub and drank six pints of lemonade shandy, without the lemonade. When he asked for a seventh, the man behind the bar said he reckoned he’d probably had about as much lemonade shandy as was good for him, and maybe he ought to go home. Paul thanked him, left the pub, found another and ordered a pint of ginger-beer shandy, without the ginger beer. When the barman asked him if he wouldn’t rather just have a pint of lager instead, since it amounted to the same thing, Paul shook his head and replied no, he’d rather stick to shandy because he wasn’t used to strong drink. Then he fell over; whereupon kind-hearted bystanders helped him out through the door and into the gutter. There he stayed for a while, considering his options and restructuring his priorities, until a policeman came along and arrested him.

But Paul merely smiled. True, he’d just passed through unutterable horrors and every aspect of his life had turned to cheap cooking shit between his fingers, but at least he didn’t have to take that sort of nonsense from coppers; not now that he was a wizard.

First, though, he tried to explain. “You can’t arrest me,” he said. “I’m a wizard.”

The policeman admitted to a certain degree of scepticism. He advanced an alternative theory of his own, and tried to grab Paul by the lapels.

Paul brushed him aside, none too gently. “You can’t do that,” he said. “Not respectful. I’ll give you one last chance, and then—”

But the policeman didn’t seem to want his last chance; a pity, but there’s no helping some people. With a mild sigh of regret, Paul narrowed his eyes, took a deep breath and clicked his fingers.

It didn’t seem to be working.

Meanwhile, the policeman hadn’t been idle. He’d got Paul up on his feet, and was shoving him rather brusquely against a wall, while unshipping his handcuffs. Paul was disappointed, to put it mildly. This wasn’t what he’d been led to expect. Fat lot of good it was, being a wizard and being able to find bauxite blindfold in the dark wearing boxing gloves, if you couldn’t do a perfectly simple thing, like ordering Porky Pig to eat his truncheon. Then he remembered, and suddenly it all became clear. He’d thought of the bit about the truncheon
after
he’d snapped his fingers.
Well, there you are
, he told himself, and tried again.

For a moment, Paul had the nasty feeling that it still wasn’t going to work. But then, just when he was beginning to get worried, the policeman let go of him, took a step back, and made a very faint mewing noise, like a cat inside a large suitcase. Then, in slow motion like an action replay, he pulled the shiny black riot stick from his belt, lifted it to his mouth and bit it.

There was a faint pinging noise. In retrospect, Paul figured out it was probably a tooth breaking.

“There you go,” Paul said happily, as the policeman bit again. “Though, if I was you, I’d try it spread on toast, or with a couple of bits of bread. Truncheon meat, ha ha.” He grinned, Mr—Tanner-fashion. He’d never had a policeman for a straight man before. “Mind how you go,” he said, and walked away, straight into a deep, oily puddle.

The special providence that looks after cats and drunks got him home. He closed his door, flopped down on the bed and went straight to sleep. He had a strange dream; in this dream, he fought a band of goblins, discovered he had unearthly magical powers, and forced a policeman to commit an undignified and painful act in public. While the dream was playing inside his mind, he found himself thinking that, even by his standards, this dream was as weird as the plumbing on the Tardis. Then he woke up; and, in the split second between the return of consciousness and the hangover spinning its wheels in the poisoned mush of his brain, he realised that it wasn’t a dream, it was a memory.

Oh
, he thought.

Jesus
, he thought,
did I really say
truncheon meat?
Not good. Not good at all
.

He stumbled out of bed, found the kettle and filled it with water. Just for fun, instead of flipping the switch he gave it a stern look, snapped his fingers and said, “Boil!” But nothing happened. Still, he hadn’t expected that anything would. Maybe that was why it hadn’t. Whatever.

Thinking about it rationally and sensibly didn’t really help. He’d got past the stage where he could kid himself that the various weird things he’d seen were hallucinations or unusually vivid dreams. Instead, he had to face the fact that he was living in a world where magic seemed to work, goblins existed and he was stuck in the cold eye of Weirdness Central without the option of running away. In theory, there was a positive side, since apparently he could do at least some bits of magic; he could immobilise policemen (ever since he could remember, he’d been terrified of them) and so, also in theory, he could do pretty much what he liked, without having to worry about being arrested and sent to prison. Fine; but even if this was true, when he came to think about it he couldn’t call to mind a single illegal thing he actually wanted to do. So maybe he could rob banks and have lots of money; a fat lot of good it’d do him, even if he got away with it, when he was obliged to turn up for work every day at 70 St Mary Axe and file printouts or play Spot-the-Bauxite all day, or else risk some imaginatively nasty penalty from the murky depths of Mr Tanner’s imagination. Besides, he rationalised, there was probably a very good and obvious reason why the possessors of magical powers didn’t go around helping themselves to anything they took a fancy to, or else why were the partners in the firm working for a living, instead of swanning about enjoying themselves like a bunch of supernatural Kray Brothers? It was much more likely that the scope of his superpowers was severely limited; he’d be able to stare down one copper, for example, but not two—something like that. On balance, he decided, having magical powers would probably turn out to be rather like satellite TV; sounds cool, turns out to be more hassle than it’s worth.

All that bothered him, for sure; but for most of the weekend, as soon as he allowed his mind to wander, Paul found his thoughts turning to Denmark Hill, and wherever the trail led from there. The more he thought about that, the worse it got. For the last month, he realised, his whole life had been founded on one admittedly unlikely supposition:
if I can woo and win this girl, I shall be happy ever after
. He’d never for one moment believed that he could actually win, but at least he’d been in the race, in contention. Now, at a stroke, he was out of it. She’d found someone else.
No vacancies, the position’s been filled, go away
. Not just that; thanks to Mr Tanner and his horrible associates, he was condemned to go on seeing her every day, spending hours on end in the same room with her, when what he really should be doing was putting as much distance between himself and her as he possibly could. He knew the drill, he’d been turned down often enough. If he could quit his job and get another one, it was a pound to a chocolate Euro that within a matter of days he’d light on some other unsuspecting female who happened to meet his not-too-exacting criteria and fall hopelessly in love with her. No problem; that was his natural defence system, a series of rebounds as quick and complex as the highest level on a pinball table. Unfortunately, that option didn’t seem to be open. The best he could do would be to fall for someone else at JWW; and he didn’t hold out much hope in that direction, for the simple reason that if there’d been anybody suitable on the premises, he’d have done so already. But who was there? The secretaries were either notoriously spoken for or far too glamorous and beautiful to offer him the tiny glimmer of hope that was a prerequisite for crush acquisition. It had always been the same; the ones Paul fell for tended to be boot-faced, bespectacled, a tad too fat or too skinny to slot neatly into the conventional stereotype of womanly beauty. It was, he’d admitted to himself, the difference between hunting for the rainbow’s end and buying a lottery ticket every week. Neither path was ever going to make him a rich man, but doing it his way, at least he had a one-in-fifty-million chance. That was enough.

But.

All right, then, Mr Wise Guy: why
do
fools fall in love? There had to be a reason. About the only thing Paul still remembered from school science lessons, aside from various interesting things that happen when you mix iodine and ammonia, was Darwin’s theory. Evolution; it was something he couldn’t help taking personally. Gradually, over ten thousand dark millennia, everything necessary had been designed and installed, everything useful had been adopted, everything harmful or unhelpful had been pared away. Sometimes he fancied he could almost hear the thoughts of those successive generations of prototypes, trudging wearily up the steep path of progress with nothing to keep them going except the instinctive knowledge that their effort and unselfish sacrifice would some day lead to the ultimate, the final version that couldn’t be improved on: himself, Paul Carpenter. It would be an unforgivable insult to their memory to assert that any design feature comprised in his physical or mental make-up wasn’t there for the very best of reasons. The same sequence of processes that had brought about such miracles of engineering as bones, muscles, blood and brain had also shaped his instincts and emotions; inevitably, therefore, the software had to be as perfect, in its way, as the hardware. Accordingly, there
had
to be a reason for the apparently loopy way he carried on around girls—it had to be some kind of survival skill or behavioural trait optimised for the greater glory of the species. Nature had included it in the package for a purpose; but he was buggered if he could see what on earth it might be.

And, by the same token, there had to be an equally good and pressing reason why, this time, when he’d somehow managed to get so much further than ever before, to the point where the bloody woman was prepared to talk to him, listen to him, buy him ham rolls; where she regarded him as a close enough friend to confide her wonderful news to him—there had to be some reason why an anarcho-socialist mud-fondler should suddenly appear out of thin air and whisk the object of his devotion away to Denmark Hill and the darkness that lay beyond, suddenly and conclusively drowning all his hopes like kittens in a bucket. Very well. He had faith, he believed that it was all for the best, that a million generations of single-cell life forms had given their lives to make it that way. But it’d be nice if someone—not necessarily Mr Darwin in person but someone from his department, a junior assistant secretary or something—would take the time to drop by at some point and explain it all to him, in terms he could understand. It wasn’t much to ask. Simple courtesy.

Instead…instead he got goblins, and Mr Tanner, and bauxite, and the Institute of Practical and Effective Sorcerers. Nobody, not Darwin’s best friend, not even God’s mother could tell him that this was any way to run a universe. The only conclusion Paul could possibly draw was that the whole operation had gone to cock, and a billion years of mutating plankton would be entirely justified in asking for their money back.

And, on top of that, the milk had gone off.

At any other time, he’d have shrugged and gone to the shop for a more recent version. Not this time; because now he knew that the same agency that had microengineered the intricate hydraulics of his heart had hand-reared the bacteria that were currently making whoopee in his hardly touched pint of semi-skimmed and, once again, he couldn’t help but take it personally. He’d been chosen by Darwin and Destiny to scry bauxite, to fall in love with girls who preferred performance potters, to take part in this bizarre rat-in-a-maze experiment; the least he could expect was milk without great big chunks of cheese floating in it.
Not good enough
, he decided, and he wasn’t standing for it.

He gave the milk a ferocious scowl, and snapped his fingers.

The kettle boiled.

He stared at it for a moment; then he thought,
Well, I suppose you’ve got to get the hang of it first, practice makes perfect and all that
. He tried again; but this time, he concentrated on the milk.
Come on, milk
, he thought,
you know better than that. You want to end up getting tipped down the bog, fine; but wouldn’t you rather do your job, fulfil your purpose, be the best carton of milk you possibly can? I can always get another pint of semi-skimmed, but as far as you’re concerned this is it. Now or never. Do you really want to go gurgling away into the dark sewers without even having
tried?

He snapped his fingers. Nothing happened.

Fine
, he thought; and he studied the milk for a moment, imagining what it’d be like to swim about inside it, if he was no bigger than a milk molecule. He closed his eyes tight and visualised the curdled, knotted particles, set upon by bacteria like Mexican peasants harassed by evil bandits. Then (he could see it, in his mind’s eye, on his mind’s screen) quite suddenly a little milky peasant stands up and defies the bacteria, and almost at once there’s a terrific battle, the peons rushing their persecutors like a tidal wave, dragging them down from their horses, beating them to death with farm tools and pitching their battered corpses on the village midden. Eyes shut, he could see the clots and zits in the milk break up, the ghastly yellow fade into pure milk-white. There was a smile on his face as he opened his eyes and looked down.