Wish You Were Here (30 page)

She was in an auditorium. High up, on scaffolding towers, there were TV cameras. White lights as bright as the Second Coming blazed at her, and beyond them was a sea of pink and red faces, some of them worryingly familiar.They appeared to be an audience, looking at her. She was on the stage.

She was also, she discovered, wearing a costume, or part of one. It was hard looking down, but she seemed to be wearing a sparkly sort of swimsuit; either that, or the parts of her that had to be at least vestigially covered had been smeared in glue and dusted down with sequins. There was glittery stuff in her hair, and enough paint on her face to do the outside of a block of flats.

And the audience was staring at her.

Sharing the stage with her was a tall, silver-haired type in a glittery white tuxedo and a smile that made the studio lights seem unnecessary, and also a stunningly attractive girl with golden hair and eyes as blue as the mould on decomposing bread. They looked as if they were supposed to be the centre of attention. They weren't. She was.

By now, she knew the signs as instinctively as seaweed knows the weather. The whole goddamn audience was in love with her.

Vaguely remembering something she'd once heard about someone being a lion in a den of Daniels, she looked round for an escape route: but there didn't seem to be one. The MC and the dreamboat stood directly between her and the doorway in the wings. The only other visible way out was down off the stage and through the audience; an option as attractive to her as a short cut through a minefield would be to a thirty-foot-long centipede.

The beautiful girl; didn't she know her from somewhere? The eagle's cave? Something about submarines? She concentrated, and tried to hear what the MC was saying to her.

‘Now then, Lindsey,' she heard, ‘perhaps you'd like to explain your theory about the Vaticangate affair to our studio audience.'

‘Right,' said the lovely girl. ‘First, it's not Lindsey, it's Linda; or, to you, Ms Lachuk. Second, well, it's basically fairly simple. The beef is, they're bringing the stuff in somehow; I'm not sure of the details yet, but it seems to involve midnight airlifts using Mafia-owned Sea King helicopters. Then they encase it in blocks of—Hey!'

‘Hm?' The silver-haired man, who'd been ogling Janice's legs, made an effort and turned back to the lovely girl. ‘Sorry?' he said.

‘The cameras,' she complained, ‘why are they all on her and not me? I'm the one doing the story.'

‘What? Sorry about that. I was miles away.'

‘The cameras,' the angelically gorgeous female repeated angrily. ‘And the mikes, too. I know about these things; they aren't picking up a single word I'm saying.'

‘Huh? What did you say about the cameras?'

‘Oh for crying out—Look, do you want me to give you my world exclusive scoop, implicating the US government and the Pope in illicit undercover arms shipments? Or would you rather all just gawp at the goddamn chubby bitch over there?'

The MC glowered at her. ‘Not chubby,' he said sharply. ‘Voluptuous.'

‘Hey!'

‘Or even,' he continued dreamily, ‘Rubensesque. By God, there's enough meat on that to feed a family of five for Thanksgiving and still have enough for sandwiches clean through to New Year.'

Whereupon the audience burst out into an explosion of cheering, yowling and wolf-whistling that must have been plainly audible in Pennsylvania, and left Janice feeling torn between a desperate longing never to have been born, and a ferocious desire to scalp each and every one of them with a blunt putty knife. In the event, however, she did neither of these: instead, she carried on standing there, sweating through the makeup and looking like a cross between the Statue of Liberty and one of the young ladies who spend their days sitting in shop windows in Amsterdam. Probably the only person in the whole world who was more furious than her was the lovely girl; and that was a laugh, because she had all her clothes on.

‘Hey!' she was howling. ‘If this is your idea of a serious in-depth current affairs programme, you can . . .'

‘Sorry? Oh hell, yes. I'd clean forgotten about you. Right then, Laura, er—' The MC glanced down at the card in his hand. ‘Lachik, right? Laura Lachik, ladies and gentlemen, special current affairs correspondent for the
New York Globe
, who's going to give us the low-down on the latest . . . what was it again?'

‘Oh for God's sake!' The dreamboat was scrabbling at her cleavage for the little concealed microphone. ‘I've had enough of this. Here I am with the most significant news story in history, and all you creeps are interested in is that cow's legs. And they aren't even nice legs, damnit, they look like pink elephants' trunks.'

‘Not just her legs,' replied the MC equably.

‘Oh . . . !'The lovely girl was having difficulty tracing the course of the microphone lead, which had apparently been threaded through her underwear and out through a hole in her left shoe. ‘The hell with you! I'm not standing for this. I'm . . .'

The MC was staring at her with baffled concern. ‘But Ms Lachuk,' he was saying, calmly and quietly, ‘I thought this was what you wanted. Peak air time, ten minutes all to yourself, your own script—'

‘Stuff it!' With a yelp of pain as the flex bit into her hand, she yanked the mike off the end of the wire, pulled it free and stomped off into the wings, while the cameras followed her every step and the studio audience threw empty styrofoam cups. She was just about to slam out of the door when the length of wire she was trailing behind her snaked into the coils of spaghetti hanging out of the sound desk. There was a sudden cracking noise, a puff of smoke and a big fat blue spark, which travelled along the wire and, catastrophically, up her skirt.

‘Hey,' said the MC, pulling out his handkerchief and holding it over his nose. ‘A big hand, people, please for Old . . .'

 

 

N
ot long after his death, Wesley woke up.

He was lying on the grass. A very faint breeze was blowing, just enough to be noticed. Above him, a pine tree rose straight towards the sky, its branches scattering the sunlight. He tried to turn his head, and found he couldn't.

Panic.

Finally, when he'd found that none of him would move, and despair had taken possession of his mind and was measuring the insides of his eyes for new curtains, he stared down his nose and saw why.

Mostly, it was the ivy. For example, it was so hopelessly intertwined with the enormously long, straggly white beard he appeared to have grown at some stage that it anchored his head as effectively as a nail driven through his forehead. Other parts of the same ivy had overgrown his arms and legs, so that he lay under a sort of woven harness of the stuff like Daddy on the beach, buried in sand by his offspring while he slept. Some enterprising bird or animal had used his hair as nest-lining material without first severing it from his head, with the result that there was a substantial build-up of twigs and leaves round his ears. Although he couldn't see them, he was prepared to bet he had fingernails and toenails like the quintessential wicked witch, all long and curled and brittle. There was a beetle strolling up and down his nose, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Hair, beard and nails grow after death, they say; a curious fact which explains why the hairdressers of the great kings and pharaohs of the heroic age were buried side by side with their masters.Wesley ran a quick mental status check: unable to move, plus substantial hair growth, ditto nails suspected. But he was too well preserved in other respects to be dead; and besides, he was still breathing. There was also something else—

Ah yes, the noise. By his ear, something was buzzing with quiet persistence. It was a nondescript sound, but vaguely familiar. He concentrated on it, and had just worked out a hypothesis when the noise changed, proving his theory correct.

It wasn't going bzzzzzzzz any more; it was going
gloop-gloop-gloop-aargh
. It was a Teasmaid.

‘Hello,' said the beetle on his nose. ‘Sleep well?'

Wesley managed to bump-start the muscles he needed to talk with. ‘Huh?' he said.

‘Sleep well? Actually, that's a pretty dumb question. Still, you'll feel a bit more lively after you've had a nice hot cup of tea. That's one of your nice English customs, a cup of tea first thing after you wake up.'

‘Asleep?' Wesley grunted. ‘How long?'

‘A hundred and sixteen years,' the beetle replied. ‘I'm afraid you missed the whole of the twenty-first century. Still, it was very popular, so I expect they'll repeat it again soon. I'm assuming you've got cable?'

‘A hundred and sixteen . . . ?'

The beetle waggled its mandibles, presumably by way of confirmation. ‘Rather longer than originally scheduled, ' it said. ‘You see, the idea is that by the time you wake up, everybody you could possibly have known will be long dead. Thanks to the wonders of twenty-first-century medicine, though, everybody lived much longer than ever before, so you've had to have a bit of a lie-in.'

‘Just a minute,' Wesley croaked. His vocal cords, unlubricated for over a century, were scarcely functional, so that he sounded like Lee Marvin singing ‘Wandering Star' with a sore throat. ‘
Every
body dead?'

‘As nail in door,' the beetle replied cheerfully. ‘But that's not going to worry you, is it? I mean, you always reckoned you never liked any of them anyway.'

Wesley's mind was moving sluggishly, but even so the big triangular warning sign that read
Rip Van Winkle
was rushing up towards him at one hell of a rate. ‘What's happening?' he rasped, ‘Who—?'

‘At any rate,' continued the beetle, ‘you missed the war; and anyway, it wasn't too bad here. Far enough away from a major city for there not to be much fall-out. Actually, the war was something of an anticlimax. Twenty-five per cent survival rate, as it turned out. Well, not here in America, of course, more like fifteen. But in Australia they got away with twenty-nine per cent, and Iceland scarcely copped it at all. I expect you'd like to try moving about now.' The beetle peered about, lifting its two front legs into the air. ‘What we really need is a goat, they'll eat
anything
. A nice patch of brambles like that'd be like smoked salmon and caviare to a goat these days.'

‘The war? What war?'

‘What
war
?' The beetle scrabbled furiously with its front legs, then dropped down again. ‘Of course, you don't know, do you?
The
war. The
big
war. World War - now let me see,' it added, counting. ‘You know, it's at times like these you realise how useful it is having six feet. World War Five.'

‘Five?'Wesley's jaw dropped as far as its beard-and-ivy cradle would allow. ‘What about Three and Four, then?'

‘Huh? Oh, right. Three and Four. Well, Three was something and nothing, really, except of course that your place, funny L-shaped island with a frilly top, it's on the tip of my - Britain, that's it. Doubleyou-doubleyou-three was more or less the end of the road as far as Britain went. And that other place. Um . . .'

‘Ireland?'

‘Europe. Still, no great loss, it was all worn out anyway. Doubleyou-doubleyou-four was when Japan and China and all those places got broken; and really, that was what ushered in the Forty GoldenYears of Prosperity for the US of A, because with no Europe and no Far East to get under our feet and keep asking us for favours, we could really get on with our lives, you know? All told, it was a pity it had to end. I suppose—'

‘Yes?'

‘I suppose,' said the beetle, thoughtfully, ‘if we can't find a goat, a sheep would do. One of the new sheep. That's if you're feeling brave.'

In spite of the heavy traffic through the still heavily coned highways of his mind,Wesley was still able to spare a few million brain cells to pick up on that one. ‘Why would I have to be feeling brave about sheep?' he said. ‘Goats, yes, up to a point. But sheep—?'

‘Ah,' said the beetle smugly, ‘these are different sheep. You see, they inherited the earth.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Well, it was promised them. I'm not saying they wanted it; I expect they'd have been happier with some furniture or a few pictures or a clock or something. But it said in the book of words, the meek shall inherit the earth. And they did.'

‘Ah.'

‘But I've got to admit, it didn't make them nicer people, I mean animals.'The beetle opened its wing-case and closed it again. ‘Isn't that always the way, when people inherit things? Never makes them happy. No, they changed.'