Little People (42 page)

‘Well?' I said. ‘We haven't got all day.'

Her face was as empty as a blank form. ‘All right,' she said. ‘If that's what you want.'

I knew her so well, I could feel the death of love; there was a specific moment at which she stopped loving me. And as soon as that moment came—

‘Run,' I shouted. ‘Cru, for God's sake just trust me. Get out of here.'

Yes, it can be a real pain at times, but there are occasions when a really forceful and assertive personality can make all the difference. A bewildered now-what-the-hell look flashed across her face, and then she started running. I hit the deck with my hands over my head, asinine as a Civil Defence leaflet, and closed my eyes.

The world didn't end.

No fuses blew, no chasms opened up, the ground stayed stolidly motionless. After five seconds, I lowered my arms, raised my head and looked up.

The sun was coming out.

I let my head sink back onto the ground; it was a big, heavy, cumbersome head and I was sick and tired of supporting its weight. It could be a clever old head when it wanted to be, there were all sorts of smart ideas stuffed away inside it somewhere, along with all the trash. On balance, however, I didn't like it much. In fact, as far as I was concerned, that head was just a pain in the neck.

I realised I was in shadow, and looked up. Melissa was kneeling beside me, her eyes wet with tears. ‘Are you all right?' she asked.

‘Go away,' I said.

She winced as if I'd slapped her. ‘I love you,' she said.

‘So what? Push off.'

I stood up. I'd felt happier. Being unspeakably cruel to Melissa hadn't actually made me feel any better, for some odd reason, so I turned round to apologise, but she wasn't there.
No matter
, I thought,
she'll definitely be better off
. You don't have to be an unmitigated bastard to save the world, but it probably helps. I can't see how any nice, decent, honourable person could ever get the job done.

‘Well?' said a voice behind me.

I didn't recognise it, as such; but it was so completely and utterly unlike another voice I knew very well that I'd guessed the speaker's identity well in advance of spinning round and seeing her. ‘Spike?'

There she was again; another bloody dreamboat. All the female elves were beautiful, of course, in the same vaguely unsatisfactory way as the countless industrial-grade California blondes you see on American daytime soap operas. Golden hair, flawless features, millimetreperfect Barbie-busted figures, swimming-pool-blue eyes – and instantly forgettable. ‘Actually,' she said, ‘my name's Zefirassa, but I was Spike on the other side.'

I shrugged. There wasn't really anything I wanted to say to her.

‘Sorry if I'm being intrusive,' she said, ‘but oughtn't you to go after her?'

‘Mind your own bloody business.'

‘I was watching,' ex-Spike went on, ‘and I figured out what the problem was, and how you solved it. Wonderfully inventive and resourceful.'

Part of me felt like replying that whatever it was I was full of, it surely wasn't resource. Most of me couldn't be bothered, however, so I kept my face shut and shrugged again. The fact that she'd apparently been able to work out from first principles what the problem was, and how to solve it, wasn't lost on me. I just wasn't particularly interested.

‘If you don't mind me saying so, I really do think you ought to go after her,' she went on. ‘She's probably very upset. And you do love her ever such a lot.'

I scowled. ‘You're absolutely right,' I said. ‘But she doesn't love me. Not any more. That's the whole fucking point, isn't it?'

She huddled up a bit, like a leaf held over a candle. ‘Absolutely, yes,' she said. ‘But you've sorted the problem out now – extremely well, of course in fact quite brilliantly. If you were to go to her and explain—'

I shook my head angrily. ‘Listen,' I said. ‘I know her, you don't. Sure, I could run after her, and I could explain the reasoning behind it and how it was the only way to deal with the situation without getting hurt. I could even,' I added, ‘apologise. Wouldn't do any good. If you had the faintest idea of what love's really all about, you'd have known that.'

She looked at me with that simpering-sweet soulful expression I'd come to know and loathe so much. ‘You're an idiot,' she said. ‘Goodbye.'

She walked away, leaving me with my mouth wide open.

Stupid bitch
, I thought,
really hasn't got a clue
. Apparently she was under the impression that love was something you could switch on and off like electric current. Of course, it's not like that. Oh, it'll survive almost anything if it's contrary and cussed enough, it'll take pruning and parching and flooding and DDT in its stride and carry on growing like convolvulus – the more you try and clear it out, the stronger it gets. But when it dies, it dies; it's as dead as Queen Anne or the Monty Python parrot, and all the king's horses and all the king's men can't do spit about it.

All my own fault, of course. I was trying to be clever. It was a far, far better idea at the time than I had ever had before.

On the other hand, the least I could do for her was give her a ride home, instead of leaving her stranded for ever in the company of elves. Maybe Daddy George had deserved that (though the point was still as moot as a barrelful of ferrets as far as I was concerned) but Cru certainly hadn't. I let my shoulders lump and set off after her at a medium-fast trudge.

Half an hour later I realised that I didn't actually have to do all this tedious walking. Two seconds after that I was somewhere completely different, with a vague memory of a long, difficult search, and there she was, sitting under a flowering cherry tree, with her left shoe in one hand and the heel pertaining thereto in the other.

‘Bloody thing snapped off,' she said, without looking up. ‘Serves me right for buying cheap, flashy footwear.'

‘Cru,' I said.

She didn't throw the shoe at me. That was a bad sign. Instead, she sat there pressing the heel back into the little square of cracked dry glue that marked where it'd been attached to the sole. ‘Ruined,' she said. ‘I could try glueing it back on, but it'll never stick. Oh well, chuck it away and get a new pair. It was a load of rubbish to begin with, anyway.'

I nodded. ‘Did you have them long?' I asked.

‘Oh, years and years and years,' she replied, ‘ever since I was a teenager. And you know what, they never did fit properly, used to rub my heel raw sometimes. I suppose I had this sort of silly sentimental attachment to them, and I simply couldn't bring myself to chuck them. Now they're bust, of course, and I can't remember what I ever saw in them.'

I sat down on the grass, about six feet away from her. ‘Force of habit, maybe,' I said.

‘Maybe. Doesn't matter a whole lot now, of course. I expect I can get another pair just as good. Better, in fact. I can have any pair of shoes I want in the whole world.' She twiddled the heel round in her fingers. ‘Except these, of course.'

‘Would you like to go home now?' I said.

She nodded. ‘I don't like it here,' she replied. ‘The blue sky and happy, caring, beautiful people get right up my nose, and the flowers are hell on my hay fever.'

‘I know what you mean,' I said. ‘Of course, if we go on from here I haven't the faintest idea where we'll end up.'

‘Oh.'

‘Well,' I qualified, ‘if the village green was in fact central Birmingham, my guess is that right now we're somewhere in Handsworth. But I wasn't really paying attention.'

‘Handsworth'll do fine.' she replied. ‘In fact, I couldn't care less if we finish up in Perry Bar as long as we get out of this dump.'

As it turned out, I was right. When we stepped out of the circle we were in Handsworth, and it was tipping down with rain. A bus whipped past, flaying us with flying puddle.

‘Well,' she said, ‘goodbye, then.'

It was, I realised, now or never.

‘Goodbye,' I said.

I guess that's the difference between romance and real life, Elfland and Humanside. I think they probably have tupperware hearts in Elfland, thin and bendy and impossible to break, and thus not worth having. This side, we have the real thing; we have all the real things, good and bad, and it's the fact that they can be lost and bruised and broken that makes them valuable. They have all the looks and the style and the flowering cherry trees, we have grotty streets and lousy weather and love that can't be Araldited back together again if you're cack-handed enough to drop it. They have elves who can edit out the bad and boring bits and live for ever; we've just got little people, living short lives, living every second of them, whether we like it or not.

It's a great place to visit, Elfland, but I'm glad I don't live there.

Just as there's no silver medal for knife-fighting, there's no consolation prize for making the wrong call on a street corner in Handsworth in the rain. I watched her walk away, until she turned a corner and wasn't there any more.