Falling Sideways (6 page)

‘I understand,' David said, in a tiny voice.

John laughed. ‘That shocked you, didn't it?'

‘Um, no. Not really.'

‘Liar. Anyhow, bottom line is, this time tomorrow it should be talking, most of the green should be gone – chest, stomach and groin stay green longest. Like I said, if you want you can speed it up by parking it outdoors or shoving it under one of those sunray lamps. Or a greenhouse.'

David felt both nauseated and fascinated, as if he'd just eaten a spellbinding earthworm. ‘And will it –
she
– will
she
know who she is?'

John nodded. ‘In a day or so. Only up to the moment the hair got cut off, of course. Everything after that, you're going to have to tell her.'

Marvellous, David thought. On top of all the other tricky explanations, he was going to have to find a tactful way of letting her know she'd been burned as a witch four hundred years earlier. (‘Oh, and by the way . . .') ‘But she'll be able to talk? And understand what I say?'

‘Sure. Well,' John added, ‘sort of. They talked different in her day. Like Shakespeare and stuff. I saw that
Henry the Fifth
on the telly once. With, you know, Kenneth Wassname. That kind of thing. Like, a cross between the Bible and Monty Python.'

Oh boy (David thought), it gets better and better. As befits a computer scientist, he'd spent English periods at school drawing circuit diagrams and little spaceships on the cover of his exercise book, and looking out of the window. Still, he had an idea she'd find a way to communicate, sooner or later; for example, sticking her head out of a window and screaming ‘Help! Summon thou the watch!' as soon as she'd figured out what had been done to her. He had little doubt that his neighbours would get the gist of it easily enough.

(Whereupon, as the police battered down his door and pinned him to the floor, all he'd have to do was explain that it was all right, she was only a rather precocious form of pondweed, and of course they'd apologise and let him go. Absolutely. No worries on that score.)

‘'scuse me asking,' John said suddenly, ‘but why her? Why not – oh, I dunno, Michelle Pfeiffer? Or that big blonde on EastEnders? You could get a bit of hair easy enough, just go round the bins.'

David looked out of the window. ‘It's hard to explain,' he said. ‘You see, when I was twelve, my mum took me to see this painting of her, in a gallery in London. And ever since—'

‘Whatever.' John shrugged. ‘None of my business. You don't ask questions in this game.'

And that was odd too, since patently he did, because he just had. For some reason, David had the impression that he'd just been checked out, positively vetted; immensely subtly, of course, by a highly skilled and experienced judge of human nature. (Honest John? Are you
sure
about that?)

‘It's all right,' he said quickly. ‘It was just—'

‘Yeah.'

‘Yes.'

‘Left here?'

‘That's fine. Or right, you can go either way. But left's quicker. A bit.'

Honest John turned left; and fairly soon they were in David's road, and the awful moment when he'd be alone with her, it, that
thing
in the back, couldn't be put off any longer. ‘Just pull in here,' David said. ‘Actually, it's three doors further down, but this is the nearest space.'

John grunted and parked the van. ‘You better go and unlock the door first,' he said.

‘Yes, right.'

Outside again, in the night air. Nobody on the street. (But anybody could be watching from a darkened window or behind a curtain. What if somebody knew? What if the police had been tapping his phone, and they were coiled like snakes waiting to spring out at him from behind Number Thirty-four's privet hedge?) He tried walking normally from the kerb to his front door, and succeeded in looking like Norman Wisdom doing Olivier's Richard III with a stone in his left shoe. His keys tried to hide inside his handkerchief, which had wrapped itself round his loose change in his pocket. He couldn't find the keyhole for quite some time.

Once he'd finally managed to cajole the door open, he went back (
Now is the winter of our discontent
, shuffle-shuffle, hur-hur) to the van, where Honest John had just lit a cigar.

‘There you are,' John said. ‘Wondered where you'd got to.'

The cloud of smoke caught and diffracted the orange light of the street lamp, so that it glowed like a nebula. ‘I was just opening the door,' David replied.

‘Really? Oh well.' John balanced his cigar on the van roof. ‘Catch hold of the ankles, I'll go round the other side and push.'

‘All right,' David replied unhappily. ‘Here, are you sure she's not going to wake up?'

‘Pretty sure. Gave her a shot that'd cripple an elephant.'

Heigh-ho, David thought, and reached for a green ankle, as if putting his hand in a jar full of carnivorous earwigs. One small grab for a man . . . he pulled gently, but he felt no movement other than a slight stretching of the ankle joint. He wondered if he'd dislocated anything, maybe crippled the poor creature for life.

‘Well, pull, then,' John muttered from inside the van. ‘Haven't got all bleeding night.'

‘But— All right,' David said, tightening his grip. ‘I'm pulling.'

‘Then pull harder.'

So he pulled harder. For the first two seconds, nothing carried on happening. Then he got movement. A lot of it. ‘Ouch!' he yelped, as one of the feet shot out and connected forcefully with his nose.

‘Bugger,' John's voice, slightly distorted by the acoustics inside the van. ‘Now look what you've—'

The heel of the other foot jabbed him in the mouth. Contrary to what you might have been led to expect, human heel doesn't taste in the least like chicken.

‘Stop fooling about, for God's sake,' John's voice boomed at him. ‘Come on, get a bloody grip.'

Something told David that this might not be the best advice going, but he was too put out to think for himself, so he did as he was told. It was at that point that the clone started screaming.

Absolutely nothing wrong with the lungs. First-class workmanship.

‘Hold on,' John bellowed, just audible over the screams. ‘Don't let it get away, whatever you do. There,' he added a few very long seconds later (just after the kicking and screaming suddenly stopped, as if a plug had just been pulled out). ‘I doubled the dose, that'll keep it under for hours. Now then, let's get it inside before some nosy sod calls the law.'

Too late for that, surely. By now, they'd already have dug the SWAT teams out of bed and scrambled the black helicopters. Considering the volume and intensity of the screams, if the police
hadn't
been called then it was a sad comment on public apathy. He grabbed the ankles as if they were wheelbarrow handles and tugged as hard as he could. The clone shot backwards, sending him staggering into the gutter, and flumped down on the base of her spine.

‘You're not very good at this sort of thing,' John said.

‘No practice,' David explained.

John scooped the clone up, hands under her armpits, dragged her round through 180 degrees and trotted backwards, lugging her behind him. As soon as he was through the front door, he let go. ‘Now you're on your own,' he grunted, pressing his hands to his back as he straightened up. ‘Bloody good luck to you, and all.'

‘Yes, but—' David said to the door, as it closed firmly in his face.

A few moments later, he heard the van start and drive away. He looked back at the clone, slopped at the foot of the stairs like a pile of unironed laundry. Pygmalion and Galatea, he thought. Yeah, right.

This is the moment I've been waiting for all my life.

CHAPTER THREE

T
wo options. Either David could try and drag the clone up the stairs, or he could leave her there till she woke up and see if he could persuade her to walk up of her own accord.

Well, option one was definitely possible. He thought of the great engineering feats of prehistory – Stonehenge, the pyramids, the seamless walls of Macchu Picchu. He was as human as the men who'd built them. By nearly every criterion he was way ahead of them, in knowledge, nutrition, easy access to equipment and materials. For example: he could nip up to his flat, get on the Net, do a search and download the schematics for an A-frame and a block and tackle. Four thousand years of technology and ingenuity were right behind him, only a mouse-click away. Highly unlikely that this was the first time in four millennia that a man had been faced with the problem of how to shift a sleeping girl from the bottom of a staircase to the top; and as someone once said, anything that'd been done once could be done again. Think of Archimedes, he told himself. Think of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

He kneeled down beside her and prodded her tentatively on the point of the shoulder. ‘Excuse me,' he said. ‘Excuse me, but would you mind very much waking up?'

No reply. Of course, he was used to girls ignoring him, it was one of the main default settings in his life, but just for once it would've been nice to have been pleasantly surprised. He sat down on the floor and looked at his watch. Almost midnight; and today was Tuesday. That meant Terry and Joanne, from the flat above his, would be back any minute from wherever it was they went on Tuesday nights. He reconsidered his options and found a third one he'd somehow overlooked. Flight.

Nothing simpler: go upstairs, double-lock the door and leave all the lights off. Stay like that for a couple of days, so people would assume he'd gone away for a while. One thing he was fairly sure of, nobody who knew him would think of his name in the context of abandoned nude girls. It was the obvious, sensible thing to do. Someone would call the police or the social services or whoever dealt with cases like this; they'd come and collect her, take her to a hospital or something of the sort, she'd get the finest medical treatment the Health Service could provide, followed by expert psychiatric care—

Well, quite. She'd wake up and start demanding explanations in perfect Elizabethan English. She'd tell them she was Philippa Levens, Marchioness of Ipswich. When they didn't believe her, she'd probably lose her rag and threaten to turn them into frogs. It didn't take much in the way of imagination to figure out where she'd end up after that. But that wasn't his problem, or at least it didn't have to be, because, unlike her, he had the option to run away. Dammit, it wasn't even his last chance; he still had several dozen hairs left from the lock, there was nothing to stop him doing it all over again, having given a little more thought to basic logistics and having made suitable preparations.

Indeed.

‘
Please
wake up,' David hissed, prodding her shoulder quite hard this time. Still nothing. Might as well prod a sofa cushion (except that sofa cushions didn't bruise).

He stood up and straightened his back. The truth was that he only had one option.

First things first. He grabbed her ankles – throughout, it should be borne in mind, he was at all times painfully aware that she wasn't wearing anything apart from a few smears of green slime – and wheeled her round so that her head and shoulders were resting on the bottom stair. That was hard enough work in itself for someone who wasn't used to lifting anything heavier than a computer monitor. Then, trying to remember the angles and handholds he'd seen Honest John using, he hopped up a few stairs, turned round, crouched down and very tentatively slipped his hands under her armpits. The feel of her skin against his was very strange and disconcerting; partly because of the slime, partly because of other factors he really didn't want to stop and think about at that particular time.

In fact, she wasn't quite as heavy as he'd anticipated: he could just about manage, one stair at a time. He'd never had any use for his physical strength before, what there was of it. He was, after all, a creature of intellect rather than brute muscle, a thinker, a dreamer, proud to be weedy. There had always been men in overalls to deal with this sort of thing, and his part in the order of things was to provide employment for the poor, unreasoning creatures. He could've used a couple of them right now (except, of course, that he couldn't have) but there weren't any around when he really needed them, so he had no choice but to find a way of managing. Amazingly, he managed.

Piece of cake, really.

His back foot slipped, and suddenly he was heading downstairs again on his bum, covering distance considerably faster than he'd been able to the last time he passed that way. He let go with one hand and grabbed for a banister rail. The tug on his shoulder nearly dislocated his arm, but at least they'd stopped going bump-bump-bump like Winnie the Pooh. That was, however, the best that could be said of their situation. Single-handed, he couldn't haul her back up even one step. If he let go of the banister, he'd be headed for the bottom of the stairs at warp speed. To summarise, (always a great talent of his, getting straight to the heart of the problem) it was one minute to midnight on his birthday and he was stuck.

Having no better way to pass the time, David traced the slender thread of causality that connected him to the relatively carefree young idiot who'd woken up that morning and decided to screw up his entire life beyond all possible hope of recovery. At every stage, he realised, he'd peeled off and discarded whole handfuls of options, second chances, possible means of salvation, until he'd arrived here, halfway up his own stairs, with a banister rail in one hand and a naked clone in the other. One minute to midnight, on the first day of a new year in his life. Having no choice in the matter, he stayed as still as he could and waited for it to become Wednesday. ‘Happy birthday to me', he sang quietly under his breath; but in his heart he knew it was fairly unlikely.

‘Hello,' said a voice behind him. ‘Mind if I squeeze past?'