Little People (20 page)

Almost immediately, of course, I realised that there was now a problem with the original plan. The notion that I was the person best suited to rescue the enslaved elves depended on me being on the inside; and now, of course, I wasn't. In fact, I wasn't anything any more; my whole life, such as it was, had been wiped out by a pesky chronological anomaly, and all because of those rotten, interfering, we-know-what's-best-for-you-even-if-youdon't elves (the same ones I'd been dead set on rescuing a few hours ago; well, they could forget that, for a start). Now, for the first time in my life, I had
real
problems. It wasn't just a case of my parents not loving me or not being popular at school or having a face like a prune and the physique of a Lowry portrait of an anorexic; right now, I had nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat, no money and no means of getting any. Those aren't just a few specks of dust in Life's ice cream, those are real problems, as faced by millions of real people every day right across the world.

Fuck
, I thought.
I'm screwed.

Not a pleasant situation to find yourself in, at that. Of course, there was one other option: I could find some grass with a circle in it, and go crawling back to the elves. Somehow I got the feeling that starvation and homelessness and stuff like that didn't happen over there; and even if economic disaster was possible on the other side of the line and they were temporarily hungry or broke, all they had to do was fast-forward until they reached the point where the found gold dust in the bed of a stream or their number came up in the premium bonds draw.
All right for some
, I thought resentfully,
they just don't know they're born.

(And all this anger after I'd been penniless and destitute for about three-quarters of an hour. God only knew what I'd be like after, say, an hour and a half. Storming the Winter Palace single-handedly, probably.)

No
, I told myself,
you're being melodramatic. All right, maybe Daddy George won't be overjoyed at seeing you again, not to mention forfeiting his ten million quid, but he's still family, blood is thicker than water, the prodigal lamb goes most often to the well, and there's no place like home.

Assuming you can get there.

Not so much of a problem as the penniless-and-destitute thing, but still a problem. No train; no money for a ticket even if there had been one, so forget buses too. My sturdy yeomen ancestors (on my mum's side; my father, of course, was a bloody
elf
) would've sneered at me and told me that's what the flat-bottomed things on the end of my legs were for. But it was over a hundred miles from school to home and I didn't even know what direction to start walking in. How the hell was I supposed to find my parents' house if I didn't even know whether to turn left or right at the bottom of the road?

But of course. How stupid of me. All I had to do was hitch a lift.

Oh sure. Well, in this era of wandering serial killers and smiling little old ladies with axes in their shopping bags, do you stop and pick up hitch-hikers any more? Of course you don't. Back in 1985, however, things were different, and I was still thinking in those terms.

After a bit of aimless wandering I found a main road with lots and lots of big lorries and cars swooshing up and down (the cars looked odd, as if they'd been left on a hot radiator and started to melt; I assumed that was because of Progress), and I walked beside it for a couple of hours until it got too dark to see and my thumb hurt from being waggled. By this stage I was painfully aware that my last meal had been a school breakfast in 1985, and the blisters on my heels weren't helping much, either. I sat down on a little patch of grass between the crash barrier and the chain link fence, leaned up against a fence post and closed my eyes for a minute or two.

When I opened them again, someone was pointing an offensively bright torch in my face and telling me to get up. It took me a few seconds to boot up my sorely fragmented memory and figure out who and where I was – I'd been having this wonderful dream where I was back at school, with nothing worse to contend with than an unprepared-for maths test – during which time the voice behind the torch repeated its request, only louder and not quite so graciously.
Policemen
, I realised.
Wonderful
.

Of course, they asked what I thought I was doing, dossing down beside a main road in a designated something-or-other area, but I got the feeling they didn't really want to know, and I quite definitely didn't want to tell them anything remotely resembling the truth. Car design wasn't the only thing that had changed since 1985; these days, it appeared, police fashions tended towards thick belts with loads and loads of scary-looking toys dangling off them, including a few obscure-looking gadgets I felt sure that any self-respecting Imperial Stormtrooper would give his right prosthetic limb for. These weren't the cuddly, helpful bobbies of my youth (they weren't even then, but at least they didn't clank when they walked), and my instincts told me they were probably a bit short on patience and understanding, and not at all minded to be told interesting stuff about elves.

‘Sorry,' I said.

They helped me into the back of their car by the scruff of my neck, stuck the siren on (whatever happened to DAA-dum, DAA-dum, by the way? If you ask me, this modern cat-in-a-combine-harvester noise they've got these days isn't a patch on the old one) and off we went for a ride.

At first I just sat there, hating Fate and God and the world in general (not to mention bloody elves); and then it occurred to me that at least I wasn't still walking, risking chronic carpal tunnel syndrome by wiggling my thumb like a loon, and that where I was going it'd probably be warm and dry, and they might well give me a cup of tea, and possibly food as well. That felt like a promising avenue of thought, so I followed it up by recalling something about being allowed one phone call (or was that only in America?), not to mention the right to have a lawyer present . . . Not that I wanted a lawyer, of course, but by the time we reached the cop-shop and they'd asked me my name fifteen times and taken my photograph and confiscated by bootlaces it'd probably be cracking on for midnight, and the thought of rooting some fat git of a lawyer away from his fireside and TV and making him trek in from the suburbs and sit around for an hour or so on an uncomfortable chair gave me a distinct glow of sadistic pleasure. Misery should be like Quality Street, something you share with those around you.

More to the point, I could phone home, or if it really was just America where they let you do that, I could get the solicitor to phone home for me. (That'd be better: an experienced orator, he'd be far more likely to know what to say than I would.) Looked at from that perspective, I began to realise that getting nicked was in fact the best possible thing that could have happened to me, and that the grim-faced kydex-fetishist sitting beside me was really my best friend in all the world.

Well, maybe not that; but it could be worse, and there was at least a fair chance that things were going to turn out all right. I smiled (it was dark in the back of the car, so there was no risk of them seeing me. I have an idea it's a serious offence, smiling in a police car without a licence).

About twenty minutes later the car stopped, they extracted me from it with what I'm sure was the minimum of reasonable force, and took me to say hello to the desk sergeant. He turned out to be a pleasant enough fellow if you happen to like Nazis, and even let me keep my socks after he'd snipped them lengthways with a pair of scissors to make sure I didn't have an Uzi hidden in them. I thanked him for his kindness and asked about the phone call thing.

Turns out it
is
only in America; but when I explained that really it was all a mistake and I hadn't been dossing down by the road, it was really a very important and sacred ritual that was essential to my religion, and hadn't there been that case recently where they awarded record damages for wrongful arrest, I guess he decided that if letting me use the phone would induce me to shut up, the quality of mercy wasn't strained and anyway, it wasn't his phone bill.

My main fear was that there'd be nobody home; typical, I thought, for them to be out on the razzle – probably getting smashed out of their minds at some criminally expensive restaurant before driving drunkenly home, wickedly irresponsible and dangerous –

‘Hello?'

Apparently not; at least, there was someone at the end of the line. Wasn't sure I recognised the voice, but it could be a new live-in handyman or other peon. ‘Hello?' I replied.

‘Hello.'

No, not a voice I was familiar with. ‘Is that Norton six seven six five eight?'

‘Yes. Who's this?'

Um
, I thought. ‘Could I speak to George Higgins, please?'

‘Ah, right,' the voice said. ‘I know that name. They're the people who had this house before the people we bought it from.'

My mind spied with its little eye something beginning with S, in which the rest of me was enmired up to the kneecaps. ‘Oh,' I said. ‘Look, I don't suppose you happen to have their new number, do you?'

‘Sorry,' replied the voice. ‘I used to have the Perkins' number – that's who we bought from – but I seem to remember hearing they'd emigrated to Tasmania. 'Course, you could ring their old number, if I can find it, and the people who bought their old house – the old house they had after this one, I mean – they might have their number in Tasmania, if that's any help.'

The desk sergeant was scowling and tapping the dial of his watch; somehow, I got the feeling he wouldn't be enthusiastic about playing hunt-the-Higginses across two hemispheres. ‘No, that's OK,' I said. ‘Thanks, anyway.'

Thanks, anyway, unhelpful bastard
was what I really wanted to say, but I didn't, not with a police officer watching. Instead I put down the phone and looked glum, something that came naturally to me.

‘Well?' said the desk sergeant.

‘They've moved,' I replied.

‘Really.' His expression communicated more clearly than words ever could his belief that if I'd been out of circulation for so long that my next of kin had moved away without bothering to tell me, I must've been in prison, probably for a crime so heinous that even my own mother wanted to make sure I'd never be able to find her. ‘Right, this way.'

‘Can I see a lawyer, please?'

A dab hand at non-verbal communication, this one; his look of weary distaste was quite remarkably eloquent. ‘Yeah, all right,' he said. ‘I'll ring the duty solicitor when I've got a minute.'

Since I appeared to be the night's only customer, and there didn't seem to be anybody else in the place except him and me, I wasn't sure what there was to keep him from ringing through right away. Still, I wasn't going to say that to his face. ‘That'd be really kind and helpful,' I said. ‘Thank you.'

Flattery got me somewhere in this instance; a small whitewashed apartment with a bed and a sink, and an extremely burglar proof front door. The view wasn't up to much, but you can't have everything. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?' I called out, just before he left me to it. The what-did-your-last-butler-die-of way in which he slammed the door on me put his previous efforts to shame.

There's a certain light-headed relief that comes with being locked up in a police cell; the feeling that it can't possibly get any worse than this, so whatever happens next is bound to be an improvement. I guess that's a warped echo of the eternal optimist in all of us, the man falling out of a plane at 50,000 feet and muttering ‘So far, so good,' every second of his descent. Deceptive, of course; if there's one unalterable truth in the universe, it's that something, at least one aspect of your current situation, can always get worse, no matter how lousy everything may already seem. Nevertheless, I'll admit that as I lay down on the bed I still had a few little snippets of hope left, wrapped up, as it were, in the table-napkin of innocence. All right, so Mum and Daddy George had vanished into the unchartable wastes of the telephone directory and it'd probably take Philip Marlowe five years, working full time, to find them. Could be worse; the silver lining was that now I wasn't going to have to be beholden to them ever again. I was, in a sense, free.

Odd choice of place to be free in, the nick; but that was a purely temporary thing, I felt sure, because after all I hadn't actually done anything wrong, and this was England, a free country, cradle of parliamentary democracy and birthplace of trial by jury, habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence. Ten minutes after my solicitor arrived, I'd have my bootlaces back and be at liberty to go about my lawful occasions. No sweat.

I guess the soothing nature of these reflections must've lulled me to sleep, because the next thing I remember was being woken up by the scraunch of the lock. The door swung open – you may find this distressing, but in police stations room service doesn't knock before entering – and my friend the desk sergeant shuffled in.

‘You,' he said. ‘This way.'

After a short walk down a dreary-looking corridor (it seemed longer because of the pins and needles I'd woken up with) I ended up in a small room with a table and three chairs. As far as the aesthetics were concerned, I preferred the cell. The desk sergeant dumped me in one of the chairs, and a moment later we were joined by a young woman who was introduced to me as the duty solicitor.

No introduction, however, was necessary. We'd already met.

CHAPTER TEN

‘
Y
ou bastard,' she said.

I smiled; or at least I twisted my face into something more or less smile-shaped. ‘Hello, Cru,' I said. ‘Fancy meeting you like—'

‘You
bastard
!' she repeated. ‘You horrible, thoughtless, worthless scumbag. What the hell are you doing here?'