Only Human (17 page)

There was a piece of wood, two by four and a foot long, which could have been specially made for the purpose; after half an hour of the most painful effort of his life, he'd managed to move it a quarter of an inch at one end, just far enough to get it jammed against a stone.

There was a bicycle spoke, which he found he was able to drag, about a sixteenth of an inch at a time between twenty-minute intervals, and ram into the gap between door and frame.That done, he scuttled wearily to the other end, put his weight against it and shoved.

The spoke bent. Then it sprang back. Fraud was catapulted eighteen inches through the air and landed in a puddle. Back to the drawing board.

The hell with this, he muttered to himself, as he crawled out and shook the mud out of his fur. It can't be all that difficult, surely. After all, if we can dig a tunnel under the channel and put a lemming on the Moon, then we ought to be able to . . .

But we didn't put a lemming on the Moon. Did we?

Fraud cringed. The voice inside his head telling him to jump had been bad enough; if he was really beginning to believe he was a lemming, he might as well curl up and die now, and save his party the trauma of a mid-term by-election.

I AM NOT A LEMMING, he reminded himself. I AM A HUMAN BEING.

So. Bugger leverage. Damn silly idea in the first place. The trouble with levers, he realised, was that he was being over-ambitious. What he needed was a little-and-often approach; little drops of water, little grains of sand.

Wedges.

Drive enough wedges into the crack, and eventually you'll open it up enough to crawl through. Much better idea; not so flamboyant, but far more realistic. Practical. Pragmatic. British.

Which only left the trivial problem of what he could use for wedges. Unfortunately, as he found out after a couple of hours of frustrated searching, wedge shapes don't occur all that often in nature, or at least not on a scale that would be of any use to him. In the end he tried driving small bits of gravel into the crack with a larger bit of gravel used as a hammer. After he'd bashed himself in the ribs for the seventh time, he gave it up.

All right, he conceded, point taken. I'm failing because I'm thinking in human terms. If I was a lemming wanting to get into this phone box, what'd I do?

Easy. I'd tunnel my way in. Great burrowers, lemmings. Somewhere in the species memory there were some fascinating statistics about lemming earth-moving capacity which, if he was translating them correctly, suggested that the average lemming digs the equivalent of the Bakerloo Line once every nine months. Or something of the sort. Anyway, he could dig.

He dug.

To his surprise, the technique came remarkably easily. It was like doing the breast-stroke through nearly set concrete while running up an extremely powerful down escalator; but the mighty lemming forepaws were up to the task, and even in his rather dilapidated, unfed and unrested state, he realised he had reserves of stamina that a human being could only dream of. Under the onslaught of his keenly scrabbling paws, the heavy clay soil seemed to melt away like snow. Half an hour or so more at this rate of progress, and . . .

He diagnosed the cause of the horrible jarring pain in both forearms as the after-effect of trying to burrow into solid concrete, the sort they used to put down on the floors of old-fashioned red telephone boxes. So disconcerted was he by this unforeseen setback that he was still standing there cursing and hugging his injured paws to his chest when the unshored sides of the tunnel slowly began to cave in . . .

Marvellous excavator, your lemming. Thanks to his superbly adapted paws and impressive inherent stamina, it only took him two hours to dig himself out again.

If at first you don't succeed, take the hint. Fraud sank gasping on to the top of his newly dug mound of earth, stared up at the Everest-high phone-box door and whimpered a little. All that effort, all that ingenuity and application, and here he still was, slumped on the wrong side of a poxy door. He'd tried everything he could think of and—

Except, apparently, trotting round to the other side of the box and crawling in through the broken square of glass an inch or so above the ground; the one he'd been too busy to notice earlier. Easy enough mistake to make. Particularly if you happen to be a pillock.

Because he'd been working so hard for so long, it took him ninety-five per cent of his remaining strength just to crawl through the conveniently placed lemming-sized hole and collapse in a heap on the other side. With the five per cent change, he rolled on to his back and gazed upwards at the telephone, as high and unattainable as the furthest star.

Bloody but unbowed and never say die are, perhaps, just a more upbeat way of saying too thick to learn from experience; but being so near to a telephone, so close to it that he could almost feel its hard smoothness pressed against his ear, sent the adrenaline gushing into his bloodstream. One last enormous convulsive effort would be all it would take, and he would be free. More; he would be human again.

His back ached. His four legs felt as if the bones within them had turned to tagliatelli. Every muscle in his body was pulled, strained or wrenched. Even his whiskers hurt. Never mind. The sooner you make a start, the sooner you'll be there.

How long it took him before he finally managed to scramble up on to the lower doorhinge, he had no way of knowing, either at the time or in retrospect. It seemed a very long time, and every time he failed and fell back to the concrete floor with a bone-jarring thump, a little bit more determination crystallised into obsession inside his brain. Standing on his hind legs on the doorhinge he was just able to reach the ledge above him, where a Perspex pane had been fitted to replace a shattered glass one. Somehow he hauled himself up. Somehow, in defiance of gravity and everything it stood for, he managed to balance, turn round and stretch up as far as the next ledge. Twice his back legs slipped away from under him, leaving him dangling from a ledge by his front paws. Both times he contrived to scrape and scrabble his way up, find a footing where no footing ought to be and address the next stage. For each two stages up, he scrambled one stage sideways, edging his way round the box towards the corner. When he got there, of course, he realised there was no way he could cross the corner and land on the ledge opposite. It was, quite simply, impossible. Which meant he would either have to work his way down again - only that was impossible too - or just let go and fall to the ground (which was very possible indeed) or else make an enormous leap, halfway across the box from the corner he was crouched in to the top of the plastic-covered table on top of the directories shelf.

Stop, and think. To jump that distance sideways was so completely impractical that even a raw adrenaline surge couldn't help him make it. From above, though , he might just make it. Or not, as the case may be. Only one way to find out.

He scuttled up two more levels and got ready to jump.

For a moment, he wobbled so much he nearly fell off the ledge. That urge again; that delightful, seductive whispering in his mind, half cooing and half taunting. He looked down, the way you're supposed not to. He could see why you're supposed not to.

But, he reasoned, as he threw himself into the air, I'm not a lemming. I'm a member of Her Majesty's Government trying to make an important telephone call, and if Gravity had any respect, it'd look the other way.

The impact knocked all the breath out of him so thoroughly that his lungs seemed to have stalled, and it took an anxious few moments to get them started again. Something - he wasn't well enough versed in lemming anatomy to know what - hurt like hell. He'd made it. Oh good.

Now all he had to do was spring athletically on to the telephone cable, swarm up that like an extra in a Horn-blower novel climbing the rigging, jar the receiver off the hook, cling on to it as it fell, hop off the receiver back on to the black plastic shelf and hop from the shelf on to the part of the phone machine where the dialling buttons were. So he did that; and though he bashed, bruised, winded and squatted himself pretty comprehensively at every turn, at least there were no more siren lemming-voices in his brain. So that was all right.

And here he was, on the pad with the numbers; but who, exactly was he going to call up? Hadn't thought that far ahead. Hadn't wanted to tempt providence. Had somehow assumed that if only he could get to a phone, everything'd be all right. Well, here he was, and it wasn't.

Try the operator.
Hello, can I make a reverse-charge call to the Prime Minister, please?
Maybe not. It was just conceivable that the operator might mutter something under her breath and put the phone down.

There must be someone he could call; otherwise what was the point of all this effort, this incredible success in the face of all the odds? It'd be like climbing in through the skylight of Heaven just to discover that God was out.

Just then, a number floated into his mind. It was the Home Secretary's private line; the direct one that bypassed all the minders and bogies and put you directly in touch with the man himself. That'd do the trick, surely; a few words of explanation, and the cavalry could be here within minutes. Except—

Except he didn't have any coins to make the call with, and he had an idea that the Home Secretary might also be sceptical about taking reverse-charge calls from someone who
claimed
to be the Prime Minister. He slumped, letting all four paws slide across the plastic, until he came to rest against something hard.

It was a pound coin.

Against all the odds . . . someone had left a pound coin lying on the shelf, just handy. Maybe there really is a God, and maybe He loves hard-working politicians. Admittedly, he was faced with the task of lifting it up, balancing it on its edge and somehow lugging it sideways and up the substantial slope that separated him from the coin slot. In the mood he was in, however, that needn't be an insuperable difficulty, or anything like one. Just take a bit of common sense and some honest sweat. No problem.

After he'd thought it through and got the coin upright, he put his forepaws on the edge and rolled it until he reached the edge of the shelf. Then, gripping the coin between his back legs and scrabbling with his front set, he slithered and bucked and scrambled and somehow manoeuvred his way across, backed the coin into the slot, and let it rest there. Dial the number. Wait for the pips. When the pips go, sit on the coin, forcing it in. The coin drops. A very long half-second; and a voice said, ‘Hello?'

Success! Goddammit, I never really believed I could do this, but I have! With a frantic effort, he hurled himself at the flex, abseiled down it to the dangling receiver, back-somersaulted over the edge of the mouthpiece and hung on with his hind paws, leaving his snout level with the bit you talk into.

‘Squeak!' he shouted. ‘Squeak squeak squeak squeak!'

‘Hello? Who is this?'

‘Squeak squeak! Squeak squeak squeak?'

‘Hello?'

‘Squeak! Squeak squeak! Squeak squeak squeak squeak
squeak!
'

‘Oh for God's sake,' said the voice irritably, and rang off.

‘A
h,' Kevin replied.

‘Excuse me?'

‘It's rather a long story,' Kevin said sheepishly. ‘And I'm not sure you'd believe it. In fact, if you're able to believe it you're in the wrong business. With that much faith you could start your own mountain delivery service. In fact, you could play hockey with the blessed things.'

‘Try me.'

Kevin sighed. ‘All right,' he said, ‘but only if you promise not to put the phone down. Remember, I did tell you the right code.'

‘I promise.'

‘And don't say I didn't warn you. Look, you know God?'

‘Not personally, no.'

‘No, I mean, you know
of
Him.You know who He is.'

‘I went to Sunday school for three weeks once,' Karen replied. ‘After that I got thrown out for fighting.'

‘Be that as it may, you know who I'm talking about when I say God. I'm His son.'

‘Jesus!'

‘No, the other one.'

‘I meant
Jesus!
as in . . . What d'you mean, the
other
one? There is only one. Only begotten son and so forth. I remember that bit, because the teacher got all shy when I asked him what “begotten” meant.'

Kevin sighed deeply. ‘Right now,' he said, ‘I'm beginning to wish that was true, but it isn't. There are two chips off the old block, and I'm the other one. I knew you wouldn't believe me.'

There was a pause. ‘I didn't say I didn't believe you,' Karen said cautiously. ‘Like I said, I only did three weeks of Sunday school. Perhaps we didn't get around to you before I left.'