Wish You Were Here (41 page)

‘Hey!' Janice looked again, and realised that she was shouting at an empty landscape. She noticed something else, too.

‘Neat,' she said.

It was a rainbow; a huge, scintillating, warm, humming rainbow, and one end of it was coming out of the sports bag. The other end, needless to say, was in the middle of the lake, and its reflection looked just like a big, friendly grin. It vanished as abruptly as it had appeared, and then it began to rain.

Janice looked down at the sports bag as she pulled her collar round her ears. All that gold, all those diamonds; she checked, and they were still there. With that much money, you could buy one hell of a lot of cosmetic surgery. Alternatively, with that much money you wouldn't need to, because with that much money you'd automatically become irresistibly attractive no matter what the hell you looked like; and the beauty that comes with obscene wealth never fades or tarnishes, and you can eat whatever you like, and there's no need to sit around for hours with grey slime on your face and slices of cucumber over your eyes. From now on for the rest of her life, Janice realised, she need never be alone or unadored again.

Nice thought . . .

Fairly nice thought . . .

Something to think about . . .

 

 

‘S
o,' demanded Talks To Squirrels, ‘who's it going to be?'

Lake Chicopee; the round blue centre of the round blue Earth. From the hilltop with the trees it looked like a small Earth, blue and green, white and brown patches where the trees and clouds and mountains were reflected in it. From higher still, on the other side of the sky, the big Earth looks very much the same; another world, a place to go away from and come back to, but made separate by an elemental barrier that only the mind can cross.

‘I've decided,' Okeewana said, looking closely at her shoes.

‘Yeah, right,' said the Chief Goblin impatiently. ‘So share. Who is it?'

An otter waddled down the slope and slid into the water, leaving behind it a trail of bubbles, like a submarine. Like submarines and (to a certain extent) ducks, otters can make themselves at home on either side of the water, at least for a while, just as squirrels divide their time between the ground and the treetops. Whether they're different submarines, otters, ducks and squirrels when they're on the other side, nobody really knows. Only Man, the measure of all things, knows when he's truly in his element.

‘I just want you to know,' the girl continued, ‘I've given this a lot of thought. And my decision's final, so there's no point making a fuss.'

‘OK, OK,' sighed a Viking. ‘Understanding you all we are. The person name, so kind if you will be.'

The girl stooped, picked up a stone and threw it as far as she could. It hit the water with a tremendous splash.

‘Me,' she said.

Everybody spoke at once; it was, in fact, what the writers of communiqués call a free and frank exchange of views, to the point of almost total unintelligibility. The gist of it, however, wasn't hard to grasp.

‘You want to know why?' the girl said quietly.

Immediately, the babbling stopped.

‘No,' said Mummy Bear.

‘Tough,' the girl replied, ‘because I'm gonna tell you anyway. I'm sick to the teeth of this place, is why. And I'm sick to the teeth of this lousy job, and I've had it up to here with you. I want to travel. I want to see the world. I want to
live
a little.'

‘I tried that once,' said the doctor. ‘Overrated. A bit like Japanese food.'

The girl shrugged. ‘Anyhow,' she said, ‘that's it, and it's final. I've got a job to go to, all lined up, even a body to do it in, so . . .'

‘A body?' demanded the Goblin, his tongue involuntarily flicking round his lips, like the mortuary cat when they're scrubbing up for an autopsy. ‘Lucky you.'

‘Where'd you get that from?' asked Talks to Squirrels. ‘You mean that crazy journalist bitch?'

The girl smiled. ‘Not her,' she said. ‘The Inspector. Captain Hat stole him for me, and now I'm going to be him. My replacement starts tomorrow, so I suggest you do a stocktake and get the place tidied up.'

‘Replacement,' the doctor echoed. ‘Hey, just a . . .'

But before he could say anything else, the girl jumped up, shook herself and leaped into the air. Her wings opened, and with a joyful quack she shot up above the trees, circled the lake three times and planed down, at full speed, right into the middle of the water, like a torpedo. Ripples welled out of the gash she made in the reflected sky, and faded away.

‘It's a ruddy fix,' growled Prince Charming, his aristocratic drawl slipping. ‘They ain't 'eard the last of this, not by a long way. I got a good mind to tell the giant.'

‘Cut it out, will you?' sighed Talks To Squirrels. ‘I reckon it's only fair, at that. I mean, she's been here ever since the lake was a boggy patch on a flat plain. If she's had enough, she's had enough. Let's go eat.'

He stood up, bent his bow, shot one arrow into the water at the point where Okeewana had dived in, three more into Daddy Bear and another two into Prince Charming's ear, and trudged away down the hill.

The rest of the redcoats watched him go in silence. Something he'd said had woken an old, submerged memory in all of them. They looked at each other.

‘Eat?' said the Prince.

‘That's food,' explained Baby Bear. ‘We have food in our act, only it's not real, only pretend. Wax fruit and plaster bread and stuff.'

‘Real food,' murmured one of the Russians.

‘Smorgasbord,' whispered a Viking.

‘Honey sandwiches,' breathed Daddy Bear.

‘Children,' sighed the Chief Goblin. ‘With sage and parsley and just a soupçon of turmeric.'

‘I'd be quite happy with ham and eggs,' said the doctor, staring wistfully at the lake. ‘And a couple of waffles with maple syrup, naturally.'

‘And coffee,' the Prince interrupted. ‘Dear God, real coffee. Made with genuine atoms and molecules, not like that 'orrible imaginary stuff you get in the canteen.'

The goblin nodded. ‘What I wouldn't give,' he said, ‘for a cup of real Blue Mountain coffee, with cream and lots of brown sugar; you know, the crunchy stuff that looks like bits of ground-up whisky bottle.'

‘Quite,' agreed the Prince, looking at him sideways. ‘My dearest wish, you could say.'

The doctor lifted his head, like a warhorse at the sound of the trumpet. ‘Your heart's desire, even?'

‘You're way ahead of me, Doc, I can see that.' The Prince grinned. ‘Well, why not? In fact, we should get a staff discount or something.'

‘Let's do it.'

‘Yeah.'

The rest of the company looked at them. ‘What are you two gibbering about?' Mummy Bear demanded. ‘How do you mean, staff rates?'

‘He means,' Daddy Bear said, his face split by a grin like a scale model of the Grand Canyon, ‘staff rates. Wait up, you guys, I'm coming too.'

As the three of them began to run down the hill, straight towards the lake, there was a general tumbling of pennies from a great height. ‘Oh, I
see
,' muttered Murdoch the footman. ‘Heart's desire, right.' He shrugged. ‘It might work, at that.'

‘What might—?' Mummy Bear began to ask; then she understood too, and a moment later she was running after them, folding her pinny as she ran. By the time she reached the water's edge, the doctor and the Prince had already jumped in. She wasn't all that far behind; and, with a loud rebel yell and a cry of: ‘Madeira cake!' she closed her eyes, crossed her claws and jumped.

 

Wesley climbed out of the water and looked around.

‘Oh,' he said.

Life can be very cruel, but it's scarcely if ever unusual; which is why it's legal as a form of punishment in the USA.The term ‘life sentence', seen in that light, becomes rather frightening.

‘Oh well,' Wesley said, and he waded ashore. Might have known, he muttered to himself. Must have been soft in the head, coming all this way and jumping in a lake, and really and truly expecting that the wish would come true. If he'd whispered, ‘Double pneumonia,' under his breath as he jumped, he might just conceivably not have been disappointed. But he hadn't; so he was.

He looked round again, and then up at the sun, though he didn't actually know how to use it as an aid to navigating his way back to Brierley Hill. All this way, and for nothing. At times, life can be very, very usual.

Just as he'd made up his mind to try north, he heard a splashing noise coming from behind him and looked round, in time to see -

- A man in bedraggled ermine robes, eating a hamburger -

- A man in a white hospital coat with a stethoscope round his neck, eating a club sandwich -

- Three bears, eating muffins -

- Sundry Cherokee braves, in warpaint and clutching feathered spears, on which were impaled appetising-looking bits of chicken tikka -

- Sundry Vikings, in armour and winged helmets, gnawing on whole chickens -

- Sundry Goblins, gnawing on something that looked sort of vaguely familiar -

- and some others he couldn't even begin to identify, all walking up out of the lake, grinning, laughing and talking with their mouths full. As soon as they saw Wesley they stopped dead in their tracks and saluted. One of them, apparently a Viking warrior with a chicken leg poking out through his beard, giggled.

‘Er, hello,'Wesley said, out of a combination of nerves, embarrassment and force of habit. ‘Can you tell me the way to Oskaloosa, please?'

None of the strange-looking people spoke. A goblin shook his head. A man in what Wesley guessed was a butler's outfit started peeling a banana.

‘Oskaloosa,' Wesley repeated, wishing very much that he'd kept his mouth shut and kept on going. ‘Do I go back up to the main road and bear east, or . . . ?'

‘You can't,' mumbled a bear through a mouthful of honey. ‘Not allowed. Thought you'd have known that, Chief.'

Wesley began to get
that
feeling: the unmistakable one that starts in your throat and dribbles down like splodged-on gloss paint until it fills you right up. Rabbits and hedgehogs get it when they look up from the patch of hard, black, grassless ground they've just shuffled on to and see two very bright white lights coming straight at them.

‘'Scuse me?' he croaked.

‘Are you going to do roll-call, then?' asked the man in the white coat. ‘Because I've got a workshop full of Vikings with their heads in pieces, and once you lose one of those little eyelid return springs, you've got to tear the place apart to find it.'

‘Roll-call,' Wesley parrotted. ‘Sorry, I don't quite—'

The man in the wet ermine tutted. ‘Sorry, Chief, we forgot. The routine is, roll-call followed by kit inspection followed by the day's assignments and 'anding out the luncheon vouchers, followed by sick parade and ten minutes when we can see you if there's anything we want to talk about, but we never do. You 'ave got the register, 'aven't you?'

‘Register.' Wesley's mind filled with images of school (he always stood at the back and could never see a thing over the heads of the boys in front; he only knew what the Headmaster looked like because he'd seen a picture of him in a giveaway newspaper, and even then it was only a hazy mental image, because the vinegar had made the paper all transparent). ‘Look, I'm not a hundred per cent sure I know what you mean. Are you sure it's me you—?'

‘Wesley Higgins,' said a goblin, chewing a fingernail, not his own. ‘You're the new manager, right?'

‘Uh?'

The goblin glanced back at the rest of the crowd. ‘She didn't tell him,' it hissed. ‘Goddamn sneaky daughter-ofabitch didn't tell him. That's
bad
.'

‘Tell me
what
?'

‘Typical,' sniffed Skellidge the footman. ‘Suppose she didn't want to give him the chance to refuse.'

‘You can see her point,' whispered a bear. ‘I mean, I'd have refused. Wouldn't you?'

‘Refused what?'

‘That the point is not. The point is after being to have told him common courtesy. Administrative smoothly the likewise.'

‘'Scuse me,' Wesley said; and he said it in a voice that faintly surprised him. ‘Please tell me if I've got this wrong, but am I meant to be, you know, in charge?'

The strange-looking people nodded in unison, like a Hollywood script conference. ‘You're the new manager,' the ermined bloke said. ‘Congratulations and all that. Now, while I'm talking to you, do you possibly think I could put in for a new robe? Only water does tend to play 'avoc with me trimmings, I'll never get it quite right ever again.'