Falling Sideways (46 page)

It occurred to David that in Philippa's vocabulary,
upbeat
was Newspeak for getting your teeth kicked in. True, if he was only a week or so old and had been born in a tank of green slime—

‘—You'd be bloody miserable too. Exactly. And here's me trying to cheer
you
up. I think it ought to be the other way around, don't you?'

David sighed. ‘Probably,' he said. ‘I just wish—'

Without warning, Philippa smiled. He wasn't sure he'd seen her – this Philippa, at any rate – do a really full-out, fifteen-hundred-amp smile before. It changed a lot of things, somehow. ‘Screw what you wish,' she said. ‘Face it, this is as good as it's likely to get. And this time the day before yesterday you were a penniless, desperate fugitive cowering in a lock-up industrial unit in Watford. Really, there's no pleasing some people.'

David stood up. ‘Oh well,' he said. ‘Suppose I'd better go and kiss a few frogs, then.'

‘Better had,' Philippa agreed. ‘That's the thing about work, it's something you can throw yourself into and not worry any more.'

‘Ah. A bit like a combine harvester, then.'

She appeared not to have heard him. ‘And in case you were wondering,' she said, ‘though if you were, surely you'd have mentioned it just once in all this time—'

‘What?'

‘This.' She leaned forward and kissed him, with a certain degree of enthusiasm. For a moment, a voice in his head tried to make the point that it didn't mean a damn thing, any more than a tape recorder talking to you when you hit the play button means that it likes you. And for a moment, David wondered if the voice in his head was his own or someone else's. And for yet another moment, he thought, That reminds me, I've got to kiss six thousand frogs as soon as we reach Canada. And for yet another moment, he reflected on the fact that, to all intents and purposes, he lived in a cosmos where God's name was Honest John. Then, as each of these moments crumpled and burned up like a sheet of paper in a good fire, he realised that he didn't care: it didn't even matter if the kiss lasted exactly to the nanosecond that John had calculated it would back in the early seventeenth century. All that mattered was the fact that he was participating in the kiss, and that somehow, utterly improbable as it might have seemed only a day or so earlier, he had finally managed to reach the end of the story.