Little People (37 page)

I turned my back and walked away. For some time, I could still hear the voices of the elves, exacting their unspeakable, unintentional revenge. When I couldn't hear them any more, I began at last to feel as if that unwelcome and unpleasant phase of my life that had begun all those years ago when I had first seen an elf in our garden was finally drawing to a close. But that wasn't a solution. Winning the war was one thing; coming home again afterwards is something else entirely. And what shall it profit a conquering hero to get off the troopship and catch the train back to his home town, only to find that while he's been away the whole street's been flattened by a land mine?

It didn't take years, as I'd feared, to repatriate the slaves. Once I'd got back into the swing of it, and organised the waiting elves into orderly queues, I found I could take back as many as five hundred an hour. The last elf I dropped off happened to be Spike.

‘There you go,' I said, as we stepped out of the circle in Elfland. ‘Home again.'

‘Thank you.' As I may have mentioned earlier, on our side of the line Spike was short, stocky and built like a very small Sumo wrestler. On her side, she turned out to be a tall, willowy blonde with deep grey eyes and the face of an unusually solemn angel. In fact, she looked quite stunningly beautiful standing there in the deserted cathedral, with a shaft of pale evening sunlight glancing down through a high window and bathing her head and shoulders in a pool of liquid gold. But as I looked at her, with the look of calm serenity glowing in her eyes, I realised that this version of Spike would be great if you liked long, soulful silences and shared moments of total intuitive clarity, but she probably couldn't change a light bulb or rewire a plug if her life depended on it; and as for her acid tongue and the extremely grudging way she'd had of saying that for once you'd managed to get something almost sort of right, which made you feel so much better than mere praise could ever have done, because Spike never said anything nice if she could possibly avoid it—

I looked away. Different, and not the same at all. Cute as they come, sure enough, but she just wasn't Spike any more; and Spike had been my friend.

‘Well, so long,' I said, looking at the ground. ‘Thanks for your help. Couldn't have done it without you.'

‘Oh, I didn't do anything, really,' Not-Spike replied, in a low, breathless voice that would've set my heart tap-dancing if it hadn't been for who she now wasn't. ‘You saved us all. We'd never have escaped if it wasn't for your courage, your intelligence, your compassion.'

‘You're welcome,' I mumbled. ‘Don't worry about it. Anyway, it's time I was getting back. You know, things to see to.'

‘You're leaving?'

I nodded.

‘Oh.' She sounded like an angel who's just seen the value of her investment portfolio tumble in a stockmarket panic. ‘I'm sorry, I'd rather got the impression you were going to stay. Are you sure—?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘No offence, but I'd better be getting back. I mean, it's really nice here, but it's not me. Really.'

‘Oh.'

Amazingly versatile word, ‘oh'. With the right inflection, it can mean anything from ‘I'm not listening, shut up and go away' to ‘Jesus fucking Christ, we're all going to die!' to just plain ‘oh', with a million gradations of subtle significations in between. In this case, it was, ‘You're going away and it's all my fault and I've ruined everything and even if I managed to struggle through the rest of my life without slashing my wrists, I'll never smile again.'

‘Cheerio, then,' I said, and stepped back into the circle.

On the other side of the line, the factory was empty, and quiet, and desolate. Sure, it had been a terrible place when it had been full of elves and the hum of busy machinery and the unique stench of tanning fluid and shoebox cardboard; but at least there had been people in it, and some of them had been my friends, even if they were difficult, annoying and dead miserable ninety-nine per cent of the time. Now it just felt empty, as if there was nothing there at all.

All my fault, too. Because of what I'd done, all those people, the elves, my comrades-in-arms and in affliction – and Daddy George himself, of course – they'd all changed so much that by all meaningful criteria they simply didn't exist anymore. They'd gone away for ever, and been replaced by people who were totally unlike them. You could say I'd killed them all, and you wouldn't be far wrong.

I was so lonely, I even missed Daddy George.

The factory: whose was it now, I wondered? It's rightful owner was gone for good, but there was no way of proving that. Time would pass and he wouldn't come back (and my mother, who loved him, would be worried sick; she'd loved me, too, and I'd never come back) and presumably after a while the law would say he was dead, so Mum would own the factory, and the huge multinational business empire, and the nice house and all the money, not to mention the little plaques or statuettes or whatever it is they give you for winning a Nobel prize . . .

(Hers by right of inheritance; they'd belonged to her dead son . . .)

I couldn't stay in the factory. There wasn't anything to eat, and I was starving hungry; it was over forty-eight hours, I realised, since I'd had any food, and even then it had been a meal precisely calculated to provide the minimum nourishment necessary for a person six inches tall. What I wanted most of all, I discovered, was a hamburger the size of the Sydney opera house, and enough chips to pave the Champs d'Elysée.

I didn't have any money, of course. Come to think of it, all I had was the clothes I stood up in, namely a leaf-green jerkin, a pair of thick green woollen tights, and brown shoes with a silver buckle; my demob outfit, the equivalent of a Marks & Spencer navy pinstripe suit in Elfland, but a tad conspicuous on this side of the line. I really didn't want to go out into the world and get arrested
again
. If it was the same policeman as last time, I'd die of embarrassment.

Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, if I could just fast-forward . . .? To where? To the moment after I'd just had my next square meal; to when I'd sorted out all my many, many problems and complications, and my life was back to normal; to when I was finally happy; come to that, to the end of the tape. (Be considerate; please rewind this life for the benefit of the next person living it.) What I really wanted to do, of course, was wind
back
, but there didn't seem to be a facility for doing that, even in Elfland. No back, only forwards. Sorry, but that's how it is, and please direct any complaints to the ghost of Albert Einstein.

So I walked out of the factory gates – strange experience, that – and found myself in a narrow country lane, with grass growing up the middle and untended hedges that met across the top, sculpted into a flat-roofed arch by the tops of heavy lorries. It was just getting light (I'd forgotten about day and night after
x
months in the factory) and somewhere offstage a wood pigeon was cooing. I wondered what it was saying—

‘ . . . Sevens are forty-nine, eight sevens are fifty-six, nine sevens are sixty-three, ten sevens are seventy. Eleven sevens . . .'

Bugger me
, I thought,
I can understand the language of birds
; and then I remembered (couldn't remember having found it out, just remembered the memory) that all elves can understand the language of birds when they're over this side of the line, but it's a singularly useless ability, since all birds ever do is recite their times tables, or the dates of the kings of France, or the Periodic Table – all the stuff that must be extremely helpful and important, because we all learn it at school, but which we never ever seem to find ourselves using once we've escaped. Being able to understand the language of birds doesn't mean you can speak it, of course – you can't ask a passing sparrowhawk the way to the nearest all-night café or anything useful like that. All you can do is listen to them grinding out the Ten Commandments or the prime numbers or French irregular verbs, until eventually you develop a mental spamblock that edits all the gibberish out and replaces it with melodious warbling noises.

Enlightenment
, I thought. Y
ou can stuff it.

So I walked on a bit further, and eventually I heard a lorry rumbling up the road behind me. I'd never hitchhiked successfully in life before, needless to say (don't accept lifts from strange men, and all that) but I stuck my thumb out anyway. The lorry thundered past me, then stopped.

I trotted up the lane towards it, and noticed the name stencilled on the side in tall white letters:
HigginStyle Footwear
– Daddy George's company. I ordered myself to calm down. Perfectly reasonable to come across one of his lorries in the lane leading to his factory and nowhere else.

‘Bloody hell,' said the driver, staring down at me. ‘What the fuck are you got up as?'

‘Don't ask,' I growled. ‘If you must know, I'm a film extra – we were doing this big kids' film with elves and brownies and pixies and all that crap. Last night was the wrap party, and when I woke up they'd all gone, left without me. So here's me, stranded in the middle of nowhere, dressed as an elf. You got a problem with that?'

The driver grinned. ‘Hop in, then,' he said. ‘I can take you as far as Northampton.'

I'd never ridden in a lorry before, either. Interesting perspective you get from the front passenger seat of one of those things; you're much higher off the ground than you'd be in an ordinary car, and the feeling of being whisked along over the heads of the traffic, like a Roman senator in a sedan chair, is rather fine.

‘Bloody strange day,' the driver was saying. ‘Went to pick up a load of shoes at the factory, nobody about. I banged on the gate till I hurt my hand, but it's all shut up. Then I went round the side, there was this door open, and the whole place is deserted, like the Mary Whatsername. Bloody strange.'

‘Hadn't you heard?' I said. ‘They've closed down the factory, going to buy in all the stock from Poland from now on. Cheaper, they reckon. We got talking to some of the locals down at the pub while we were filming. They're very upset about it all, as you can imagine.'

The driver shook his head. ‘Marvellous,' he said. ‘Makes you think. What's this country coming to? The accountants up at head office, they do their sums and reckon they can shave a few quid off costs, but they don't stop to think about the little people.'

‘Who does?' I said. ‘That's the problem with business today. Same in my line, of course,' I added, and held forth for several minutes about the trials of being an lowly spear-carrier in today's motion-picture industry. I was making it all up as I went along, of course, but the driver didn't seem to notice or mind; in fact, it struck me that I was sounding particularly plausible and convincing, not to mention putting across my message with style and a certain passion. Suddenly it was great fun being my improvised persona, my imaginary friend called me; I could clearly see every facet of his life, every stitch and purl of his character. His name was Steve, originally he was from Romford but he'd been brought up in Sheffield (now
there
was a dead-end place), and he'd always wanted to be an actor, but of course unless you're really lucky there's absolutely no way to break in; so instead he tried this film-extra gig, and once you got your name known and assistant directors knew you could be relied on to show up on time and do as you were told, actually there was a living to be made at it – not a wonderful living, sure, but it was better than plucking chickens, and of course you were constantly rubbing shoulders with the stars, like for instance Robert de Niro; shared a mobile field latrine with him once, just outside Melton Mowbray – well, there was a crowd of us, and there were about seven other extras standing between him and me, but it's something you can tell you kids when you're old and grey—

(
Listen to yourself
, I thought,
this is complete garbage
. But it passed the time, and this Steve's life was so much more interesting than mine that I wasn't really in any great hurry to leave it and go back to my own; and then I realised that it wouldn't take very long to make it true. So long as I was content to be just an extra, a nobody-much, one of the little people, nobody would ever listen carefully enough to figure out that I was lying through my teeth; and after I'd really been an extra on three or four films, the wind would change and I'd stick like it. And wouldn't that be absolutely bloody
fantastic
—)

‘Whereabouts in Melton Mowbray?' the driver asked.

‘Sorry?'

‘Whereabouts in Melton Mowbray were you doing this film? My wife's lot come from round there.'

Never been to Melton Mowbray in my life, of course. ‘Don't ask me,' I replied. ‘Ours not to reason why, ours but to get on a coach at Pinewood and get out the other end. Some field in the middle of nowhere, with a row of Portaloos and a chuck wagon. One location looks pretty much like another, after a while.'

He nodded. ‘Her mum and dad live in this village called Saxby,' he said, ‘and her sister – that's her older sister, not the one who married a Yank – she lives in Stapleford. All sort of flat and open. Very slow driving all round there, specially when there's caravans.'

‘I can imagine,' I said, and I wasn't kidding either; suddenly I
could
imagine. In my mind's eye I could see a straight, narrow road, quite possibly a Roman road, like a line drawn with a ruler across the map, and on either side a hazy golden panorama of newly cut wheat stubbles, pigeon-haunted and rook-spotted, broken here and there by brusque square castles of straw-bales; behind me and in front of me as I drove my mighty sixteen-wheel Daf was a pilgrimage of slow cars following a squat white caravan, towed by an elderly Mercedes. Overhead the sky was blue, dusted with small patches of scruffy white cloud, and the sun's warmth through my greenhouse windscreen made the skin of my forearm glow pleasantly.
God
, I thought,
what an absolutely wonderful life, how idyllic, how perfect
: the road, winding slow and sure to a certain, reliable destination, through the very heart of unspoilt England on a glorious late-summer day, Tammy Wynette on the tape deck and the promise of a fat mug of strong tea and the all-day breakfast at some truck-stop or Little Chef just a few miles down the way – how could anything possibly be better than that?