Wish You Were Here (12 page)

‘Nobody wanted to go to bloody Weymouth 'cept you,' the male bear snapped, ‘so shut your noise.You can see what I've got to put up with,' he added, as Wesley backed away another step and got a low branch in the small of his back for his pains. ‘So if you could just see your way . . .'

Pulling himself together like a zombie jigsaw, Wesley picked up the tomahawk and held it at arm's length. ‘Please,' he said, ‘help yourself. Keep it if you like.'

‘Can I really? Thanks.' The bear lumbered forwards, took the axe gently, as if carrying a captured crane-fly to the window, and waddled back to where a massive wicker basket was lying on the ground, being unpacked by the other bears. One of them, who had been trying in vain to bite through a tin of salmon, grabbed the tomahawk and drew the sharp tip of the top horn of the blade round the lid of the tin. ‘'Scuse paws,' it said, and then levered the severed lid back delicately with one clawtip. ‘Hey, salmon,' it said. ‘Always it's bloody salmon.What's wrong with pilchards?'

‘In the other basket, stupid.'

‘Ruddy marvellous picnic this is turning out to be.'

‘Oh, go climb a tree,' snarled the she-bear. ‘Some people,' she sniffed, turning to Wesley as if expecting agreement, ‘are never satisfied.'

‘Ah, but bear's claws must exceed his paws, or what's a Heaven for?'

‘Your father's off again,' sighed the she-bear. ‘Who rattled his cage, then?'

‘Excuse me,' said Wesley.

‘Yes?'

‘Excuse me,' he repeated, ‘but I thought the picnic was for teddy bears.'

The bears looked at each other. ‘What was that he said?' one of them asked.

‘Teddy bears,' the male bear replied. ‘I think he means that lot that go around on scooters wearing long thin trousers and big jackets.'

‘Not our lot, then.'

‘Actually,' interrupted the bear who was someone's father, ‘I think he means soft, cuddly toys made in the shape of bears.'

‘Don't start, Dad, please.You know it upsets the kids.' Wesley bit his lip, rather harder than he'd intended. ‘In fact,' he said, ‘that's what I did mean. There's a song, you see . . .'

This time, the bears looked at Wesley. ‘Come off it,' said the salmon-hater, ‘that's silly. How could a lot of cuddly toys have a picnic?'

Wesley decided not to reply to that; instead, he watched the bears ripping open tins with the tomahawk. Despite the fact that they didn't have thumbs, which is supposed to make handling things like axes extremely difficult, they were getting through them at an impressive rate. There were also two enormous brown bears, who were digging a hole.

‘Excuse me,' Wesley heard himself say, ‘but what's the hole for?'

‘To bury the litter, of course,' replied the she-bear who'd wanted to go to Weymouth. ‘We're green, we are.'

‘Speak for yourself.'

‘I heard that.'

Sure enough, the two bears stopped scrabbling with their tennis-racquet paws and started shovelling the empty cans into the hole they'd made, swearing occasionally as a ragged tin edge snagged a glove-leather-soft paw-pad. It was at that moment that Wesley forced himself to admit that this was really happening, and it wasn't some bizarre sport of his imagination; because however weird and disturbed he might be, there was no way that he was capable of imagining
this
. Even his odder acquaintances, the ones who regularly chatted to angels or acted as franchisees for Martian Equitable Life, might get embarrassed and remember distant appointments if he started telling them about this.

‘Thanks.'

The first bear, the one he'd lent the tomahawk to, was talking to him. He turned his head and smeared a bewildered smile on the front of it.

‘Sorry?' he said.

‘Thanks,' the bear repeated. ‘For the loan of your axe. Did the job a treat. Would you like a pickled walnut?'

‘I, er - yes, that'd be great. Fine.'

The bear reached out a treelike arm and put something small, black and shrivelled delicately into his hand. It looked like something a nine-year-old head-hunter might have brought home from school. He shuddered and said thank you nicely.

‘Saving it for later?'

‘Yes,' Wesley replied. ‘Much later. I'll, er, appreciate it more then.'

‘Suit yourself,' said the bear equably. ‘Well, we'd better be getting along. See you around.'

‘Will you? I mean, yes, right. Cheers for now, then.'

The bears waved their paws, turned and wandered off into the forest, until their lumbering backs merged into the dappled shadows. When Wesley was sure they'd gone, he opened his hand, looked at the strange black fossilised thing clutched in it, and threw it away. A squirrel ran down the side of the tree over his head, pounced on the reject walnut and ate it quickly.

‘Waste not, want not,' it said with its mouth full. ‘Sure you don't want some?'

‘Very sure indeed.'

‘Your loss.' The squirrel twitched its nose and spat something out. ‘Well, maybe not,' it added. ‘Anyway, how are you liking it?'

Wesley made a peculiar noise. ‘
Liking
it,' he repeated. ‘Oh for God's—'

‘You mean you aren't? That's a pity. Particularly since you saved up and everything. Hell, for that money you could have gone to Disneyland. I would've,' the squirrel added wistfully. ‘Of course,
I
haven't had a holiday in, oh, twenty thousand years.'

‘This is a holiday?'

‘Supposed to be, yes.'

‘A holiday!' Wesley burst out. ‘So far I've nearly drowned, I've witnessed a shipwreck and I've been set upon by seven enormous bears. If that's meant to be a holiday, what the hell do you think I do the rest of the year?'

‘I wouldn't call it being set upon, exactly,' the squirrel pointed out. ‘As I recall, they gave you a walnut.'

‘Set upon,' Wesley affirmed. ‘By seven enormous bears. Look, is there a point to all this, because if so I'd like it if we could get to it now, please, so I can go home.'

‘We're getting there,' the squirrel replied. ‘I mean, we're past stage one, the suspension of disbelief.'

‘Oh, I've suspended my disbelief all right. Lynched it, in fact. Now can I please—?'

‘Not yet,' said the squirrel firmly. ‘Boy, you ain't seen nothing yet.'

 

Funny bugger, Old Mister Instinct. At school, Janice DeWeese had been a keen swimmer. (See that rubber-capped, goggle-faced egg shape chugging up and down the school swimming bath, lacking a salt-caked smoke-stack but otherwise a dead ringer for the ship in the poem? That's her.) The human otter, they'd called her, to her face. And yet, when she got her head up out of the water and realised what was going on, she found she was doing the doggy-paddle; not very well, either. The thing that had somehow got into her mouth was either a newt or a small fish. The backpack wasn't helping, either.

In her defence, she could have argued that this wasn't the sort of water she was used to. Swimming-pool water, like tap-water, sea-water and pretty well any kind of water apart from the stuff you find in Lake Chicopee, flows. Push it aside, and it goes away. In other words, it's liquid. This stuff was more like runny aspic. You'd be hard put to drown in it, in the same way that it's hard to drown on a stone floor; but it wasn't much good for swimming in. It wasn't particularly - what was the word she was groping for? - wet.

‘Gnurrgh!' she said.

‘It's an acquired taste,' said a voice by her ear.

‘Gnargh?'

‘Not,' the voice added, ‘that I'd go out of my way to acquire it, if I were you. There's things living in it that aren't house-trained.' The otter shrugged. ‘Texture's not all that hot, either. You wouldn't want to irrigate your tender young seedlings with it, for fear of squashing them flat.'

‘You're an otter!'

‘Yes.' The otter twitched its nose. ‘So?'

‘But . . .'

‘Look, if you've got a problem with that, I'm terribly sorry. But it's turning out to be a long day and I've got a lot on my plate right now, so if you could just accept the fact that you're talking to an otter, it'll save a whole lot of time.'

‘But . . .'

‘Ah, don't be like that. The others were all right about it, so why should you be any different?'

‘Others?'

‘Whoops, me and my big mouth. You can see I'm tired, can't you? Look, any minute now you're going to see this Viking longship, okay?'

‘What?'

‘Longship. They're called that because . . .' The otter shrugged again. ‘Because they aren't short, I guess. That's beside the point. There'll be this ship, OK? Oh
bugger
, here it comes now. The thing I want you to remember is, don't worry if they drown, all right? I dunno, goddamn lousy tight schedules . . .'

The otter dived, leaving a string of bubbles like three dots at the end of a sentence. Janice realised that she'd stopped swimming, panicked and thrashed out with all available limbs. This at least did have some effect on the water around her; it made her go downwards. She was just about to have a go at underwater screaming when she heard something so unusual that she forgot all about drowning and bobbed back up to the surface again.

It was a wolf-whistle.

‘Grrnyahgh!' she said, finally getting rid of the fish, newt or water beetle. At the periphery of her vision she could see something that looked vaguely like a ship. She craned her neck and looked round; and as she did so, she heard voices.

‘Thorgrim! I am telling you how many times that not to be doing! Disrespectful it and sexist is!'

‘Splut?' Janice murmured, puzzled.

‘Apology,' said another voice. ‘Ernly, away carried I was. It a long time been has. And loveliness such!'

‘Ah!' agreed the first voice. ‘Agreement. But the whistling not, to be so kind.'

Jan kicked feebly against the jellied water. She couldn't remember having banged her head, but maybe the bang on the head was affecting her memory. ‘Hey!' she shouted.

‘Hello, gorgeous one,' replied the second voice. ‘Often here are you coming? In this damp water all alone a nice girl doing what is?'

‘That, Thorgrim, not much better is. A line that is so old whiskers on it there are . . .'

‘Help!' Janice yelled. ‘Somebody get me outa here!'

‘To be saving you a privilege, entrancing one. If a little patience—'

‘You, Skaldulf, too presumptuous are,' interrupted a third voice. ‘You saving her who was it said it should be? On this ship others beside yourself—'

‘First I was seeing her, of a lady dog offensive offspring! '

‘My bones breaking sticks and stones may be, of a crow the excrement! And out of the way to be getting—'

‘My dead body over, of a dog the breath! And your feet putting—'

Janice trod water, wondering what in all hell was going on. She could see the ship clearly now; a big wooden row-boat, with painted lids on the sides. The decks were lined with men, who were
looking
at her.

‘Straws we could I suppose be drawing,' someone was saying. ‘Straws here I happen to have, by some chance . . .'

‘With your straws perhaps aware you are what you might do, Bjarni Oddleifsen. Now, my way out of.'

‘The contrary, serpent—'

‘
The ship, where it is heading!
'

There was a crash, as of stone on timber. There was a gurgling, like the water draining out of God's bath. There were complicated refined curses, and glugging noises. And then there was silence, except for the slight lapping of the water as the ripples were ironed away.

‘Ah, shit!' Janice said.

 

 

‘H
iya,Calvin,' said Hernan Piranha.

Usually, Calvin Dieb could recover his composure so quickly that you'd never notice that he'd lost it. If a Greek god were to descend from the heavens and prove to him that without knowing it he'd murdered his father and married his mother, by the time the god had finished speaking, Calvin would have adjusted to the fact and be ready to explain precisely why killing your dad and marrying your mom was probably the brightest thing you could do if you really wanted to cut your tax bills. On this occasion, however, he stood with his mouth open, looking very much like a two-legged, expensively suited goldfish.

‘Hi, Hernan,' he eventually replied.

There was, of course, a lot of subtext going on here. Inevitably, their spectacularly successful partnership was built on a solid foundation of implicit mutual mistrust. If, at the start of the office day, Calvin said, ‘Good morning,' Hernan would spend the next hour and a half trying to work out exactly what Cal had meant by good. If Hernan said to Calvin, ‘No, you drive,' Calvin would make damn sure he wiped any fingerprints off the steering wheel before getting out of the car. They were both, after all, Americans and lawyers. On finding Hernan under a flat stone in the middle of all this utter weirdness, therefore, he didn't ask himself,
What's Hernan doing under that stone?
but
What's Hernan up to under that stone?
And although paranoia was thrusting daggers of panic into his heart, it sure was comforting to see him, in a life-threatening sort of a way.