Open Sesame (2 page)

The picture arose in her mind; Aunt Fatty leaning forward in her chair, whispering to the alarm clock: ‘Tell Michelle I want her to have my ring. It’s very valuable, you know. Tell her to take special care of it when I’m gone.’ And the alarm clock, swift and sure as a professional translator at a UN debate, had said tick; in other words, humour her, obviously it means a lot to her. And Michelle had said, ‘Of course I will.’ She’d given the clock to one of the nurses, though of course she only had the towel-rail’s word for it. The ring. Mine, all mine.

Feeling unaccountably guilty, she stuffed the box in her pocket before binning the rest and driving home. When she got in, she put the box in her underwear drawer, washed her hands and played back the answering machine.

When they find out, said the man with the book, they’re going to have my guts for garters. I hope you realise that.

‘Shouldn’t have been so careless, then, should you?’ Akram replied. ‘Next time, check the guest list before you start the show. Now then, get on with it. I don’t think I’ve got much time.’

The man shook his head. Time, he explained, was now quite beside the point; Akram had died nearly half a second ago, as he’d have realised if he’d been paying attention. Besides, time doesn’t happen here, wherever this is. Don’t ask me, he added, I only work here.

‘I said get on with it. I might be dead, but I can still give you a boot up the backside. I think,’ Akram added, and for the first time ever there was a hint of uncertainty in his voice. ‘In any case,’ he added, cheering up, ‘we can have fun finding out. I’m game if you are.’

That won’t be necessary. You’re quite right, the man went on. You have died before. I can’t tell you offhand how many times, but it’s rather a lot. You see, you aren’t real. You’re in a story.

Akram hesitated. There was enough of him left to resent a remark like that, even though he hadn’t a clue what it meant; on the other hand, supposing he succeeded in breaking the man’s neck in six places, all he’d achieve would be to lose his only chance of getting an explanation.

‘Story,’ he said. ‘Right. I’d expand on that a bit if I were you.’

Stories (the man explained) are different.

Oh sure, the people in stories are people, but they live in a different way. More to the point, they do it over and over again. You don’t follow? All right.

People are born, right? They grow up. They live. They die. But if every character in every story had to do all that, the story would be very long and extremely boring, and nobody would want to hear it. So we edit. Perfectly reasonable way to go about things.

People in stories begin with Once-upon-a-time, and end with Happy-ever-after; and the bit in between goes on for ever, over and over again, in a sort of continuous loop. So; each time you reach the end, you die, or you marry the princess and rule half the kingdom, it doesn’t matter which. The story is over, and you go back to the beginning again. Then, when you reach the end, the story repeats itself. You, of course, don’t remember a thing, and that’s probably just as well.

You’re not convinced? I’ll give you an example. Captain Hook. Now, Captain Hook’s called Captain Hook because he’s got a hook instead of his left hand. This is because Peter Pan cut it off and fed it to the crocodile. Think about it. What about before? Like, what about when he was born? Or when he was at school. He still had both hands then. Was he still called Hook? If so, why? Or did he go around calling himself James Temporary-Sign until the time came?

No. You see, by the time the story starts, it’s already happened, and so it’s all okay. It’s the same for all you people who live in fairy-stories. You don’t like that word. Okay, call it legends if you’d rather, but it’s a bit like living in Finchley and calling it Hampstead.

Not that it matters; because, like I said, you forget every time. In two shakes of a camel’s withers you’ll be back at the beginning, which in your case means returning to the magic cave and shouting Open sesame while Ali Baba hides behind a rock. Then the cave opens, and you and the other thirty-nine thieves ride in with all the treasure from your latest raid and the cave door slams shut behind you.

What do you mean, what can you do about it? Nothing. You’re stuck with it. Because that’s who you are.

Don’t be silly. Of course you can’t.

You can’t.

And then the lights came back on, and in front of him Akram saw the familiar outline of the cliff looming over him, silhouetted against the night sky.

‘Open sesame!’ shouted a deep, cruel voice. His, by God! But…

He remembered.

‘Skip.’

He looked round. Behind him were thirty-nine horsemen, motionless as a motorway contraflow. One of them was talking to him.

‘Skip,’ he was saying, ‘can we go in now, please, because I don’t know about you but I’m bloody well freezing.’

‘Aziz?’

‘Here, Skip.’

Akram looked round. He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that behind that rock lurked his great and perpetual enemy, the accursed thief, his eventual slayer, Ali Baba. One blow of his sword would be all it would take. His brain ordered his heels to spur on his horse. Nothing.

‘Skip?’

Now then, Akram told himself, no need to panic, or at least not yet. ‘Aziz,’ he said, ‘I think there’s someone lurking behind that rock.’

‘Surely not, Skip.’

‘I think there is.’

‘Imagination playing tricks on you, Skip. Look, no offence, but I really am bursting for a pee, so if you wouldn’t mind just—’

Akram drew in a deep breath. ‘Aziz,’ he said, ‘just go and have a look, there’s a good chap. Won’t take you a moment.’

‘Skip—’

‘Aziz!’

A moment later, Aziz came back. While he’d been gone, Akram had distinctly seen a movement behind the door, heard the sound of rapid, terrified breathing. He was there, dammit.

‘Nothing, Skip. Not a dicky bird. Now, can we please go in?’

Feebly, Akram waved him on; and then his horse started to move, and when he ordered his hand to pull on the reins, it flatly refused. Thirty seconds or so later, the door slammed shut behind them.

Bugger, said Akram to himself.

And, sure enough, when they returned to the cave next evening, after a hard day’s killing and stealing up and down the main Baghdad-Samarkand road, they found the treasure-chests empty, all the gold and silver and precious stones lost and gone for ever. No poll-tax bailiff ever did such a thorough job.

‘Bloody hell, Skip,’ wailed the thirty-nine thieves, ‘we’ve been done over! Now who on earth could have found out the password?’

Ali Baba, you fools; Ali Baba the palm-oil merchant, who lives in the house beside the East Gate. Ali Ba …

‘No idea,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Search me.’

And then Fazad had picked up a slipper, and they’d all crowded round to have a look, and someone had said, Presumably this slipper belongs to the thieving little snotrag what done this, and he’d heard himself say, Yes, presumably it does, now all we’ve got to do is find who it belongs to, and what he really wanted to do was bite his own tongue out for saying it and not saying A** B***, and if he had to go through with this he’d go stark staring mad; except of course he wouldn’t, because it wasn’t in the story. Inside, though, he’d go mad, and then in all likelihood his brain would die, and he’d be stuck here doing this ridiculous thing for ever and ever and ever.

Late that night, in his sleep, he hit on the solution. He’d outwit the bastard. He’d change. He’d go straight.

It was, after all, completely logical. He knew, better than any man ever born, that crime didn’t pay. From the first day you step out of line and swipe a bag of dates off the counter while the stallholder isn’t looking or tell your mum there wasn’t any change, it’s only a matter of time before the lid comes off the palm-oil jar and the hot water comes sploshing down. But he was wise to that now. He’d change. He’d be good.

Better than that. He’d change the whole story.

Instead of being the baddy, he’d be the goody.

Somehow.

CHAPTER TWO

Michelle woke up. If she’d been on the jury when Macbeth was brought to trial for murdering sleep, she’d have argued for an acquittal on the grounds of justifiable homicide. Loathsome stuff, sleep; it fogs your brain and leaves the inside of your mouth tasting like a badly furred kettle.

‘Wakey wakey,’ trilled the alarm clock. ‘Rise and shine.’

‘Oh shut up,’ Michelle grunted. She’d been in the middle of a very nice dream, and now she couldn’t remember a thing about it. She nuzzled her head into the pillow, trying to find the spot where she’d left the dream, but it had gone, leaving no forwarding address.

‘Jussa minute,’ she said. ‘Did you just say something?’

Tick, replied the clock.

‘Shut up,’ Michelle replied, ‘and make the tea.’

It was a radio alarm clock teamaker, a free gift from an insurance company - free in the sense that all she’d had to do in order to receive it was promise to pay them huge sums of money every month for the rest of her natural life. She’d managed to disconnect the radio, but the teamaking aspect still functioned, albeit in a somewhat heavy-handed manner. First, there was a rumbling; until you were used to it, you assumed something nasty was happening deep in the earth’s crust, and expected to see molten lava streaming off the bedside table and onto the carpet. After the rumbling came the whistling, which generally put Michelle in mind of a swarm of locusts being slowly microwaved. The whistling was followed by the gurgling, the snorting and the Very Vulgar Noise; and then you could have your tea. You were also, of course, wide awake. If God has one of these machines, then He’ll be able to use it to wake the dead come Judgment Day. And have a nice cup of tea ready and waiting for them, of course.

‘Drink it while it’s hot.’

Michelle blinked. If this was still the dream, it had taken a turn for the worse and frankly, she didn’t like its tone. She raised her head and gave the clock a long, bleary stare.

‘What did you just say?’ she asked.

Needless to say, the clock didn’t answer. Clocks don’t; apart, of course, from the Speaking Clock, and there the problem is to get a word in edgeways. Not that it ever listens to a word you say. Michelle shook her head in an effort to dislodge the low cloud that seemed to have got into it during the night, and swung her feet over the edge of the bed.

It was half past eight. ‘Oh hell!’ she shrieked. ‘You stupid machine, why didn’t you tell me?’

Scattering bedclothes, she lunged for the bathroom and started to turn on taps. So loud was the roar of running water that she didn’t hear a little voice replying, somewhat resentfully, that she hadn’t asked.

When the other thirty-nine thieves had gone to sleep, Akram stood up, waited for a moment or so, and then walked quietly over to the big bronze door of the Treasury.

‘It’s me,’ he hissed. ‘Now shut up and open.’

The door was, sure enough, magical; but it wasn’t so magical that it could cope with two apparently contradictory orders at half past three in the morning. “Scuse me?’ it said.

Akram winced. ‘Quiet’ he hissed. ‘Now open the blasted door, before I give you a buckled hinge.’

‘Sorry, I’m sure,’ the door whispered back, and opened. ‘Satisfied?’

‘Shut - I mean, be silent. And stay open till I tell you.’

Once inside, he lit a small brass lamp, having first gingerly removed the lid and shaken it to make sure it was empty; you don’t go around carelessly lighting small brass lamps in Arabian Nights territory, unless of course you fancy explaining to a twenty-foot-high genie precisely why his beard has just disappeared in a puff of green smoke. The flickering light was just enough to enable him to make out the massive gold casket that lay against the end wall. He concentrated.

Big smile. Flamboyant gesture. ‘Crackerjack!’ he exclaimed.

The big gold casket had once been the property of Soapy Shamir; Baghdad bazaar’s top-rated game show host, until his sudden and unexpected demise. It too was magical. If you knew the words, it opened, no trouble at all. But if you got them wrong and it failed to recognise you, the only way to get it open was to answer twenty general knowledge questions, Name That Tune in Four, guess the identity of the mystery guest celebrity and slide down a chute into a large vat of rancid yoghurt. Fortunately, Akram hit just the right note of synthetic cheerfulness, and the lid yawned slowly back.

Inside the casket, the Forty stored their most valuable treasures; items so far beyond price that sharing them out among the company was out of the question. They were, in fact, completely useless; far too readily identifiable to sell, and worth too much to apportion. In consequence they just sat there from stocktake to stocktake, their mindblowing notional value being written up in the accounts in line with the retail price index to the point where Faisal the Accountant had to have a special 3-D abacus built just to do the maths.

There were jewelled eyes of little green gods, enough firebird feathers to stuff a large cushion, bottomless purses, magic weapons, diamonds the size of cauliflowers, all the usual junk that eventually clutters up a long-established hoard. Akram swore and scrabbled. The object he was looking for was small and dowdy: a plain silver band, with what looked like a little chip of coloured glass stuck in it. Just as he was starting to get worried, Akram found it. Ah!

The legendary—

The priceless—

The genuine—

The one and only—

King Solomon’s Ring.

Yes, Dirty Ahmed’s mother had said when they first brought it back, with its previous one careful owner’s finger still wedged inside, but what’s it actually for? Ah, they’d replied, it’s magical. Really, said Mrs Ahmed, with a long sigh, another one of them, how nice. Still, you could give it somebody as a present. Somebody you don’t like all that much, probably. No, they’d said, listen, it’s really really magical. You can use it to talk to birds and animals.

Long, unimpressed silence from Mrs Ahmed. Right, she’d said eventually. Like, Who’s a pretty boy, then? and Here, Tiddles and Gihtahtavit, yer useless bag o’ fleas. Gosh, how useful. No, not like that, Mrs Ahmed, like really talk to them, you know? Talk to them so’s they’ll understand you. And then they talk back to you.