Wish You Were Here (15 page)

Wesley shifted his weight off his left leg, which had gone to sleep. ‘Is there any point in you telling me this,' he asked, ‘or is it just to make me feel rotten about being human?'

The buffalo snickered into its beard. ‘This is just the setting,' it replied. ‘The adventure'll be along in a minute.'

‘The adventure? What adventure?'

‘Ah.'

 

‘So you're the little bastard who's been sitting in my chair,' snarled the Daddy bear. ‘Muriel, hold her arms.'

Linda rose to her feet like a firework from a milk bottle. As she did so, she heard the chair go
snap!
under her. ‘Now just a minute,' she said.

‘My chair!' yelped the bear. ‘Look what the bitch's done to my chair! Goddamn thing isn't even paid for yet, and she's gone and bust it.'

Linda looked down, gulped and turned back, trying to fumble her face muscles into a smile. ‘It's OK,' she croaked, ‘really. The paper'll pay for any damage. Look, I'll give you my card, and . . .'

‘Like hell you will. Junior, run and get the big hammer.'

Many years ago, when she was nothing but a cub reporter with a spiral-back notebook and a dream as big as Mongolia, Linda had been sent on a course. The title was
Handling Awkward Confrontations
, and the idea was to train the young newshound how to blarney her way past the fact that she'd been caught taking pictures of the secret military installation, resting her elbows for a one-fifteenth second exposure on the big sign saying
Photography Punishable By Death
while wearing a T-shirt of the local military dictator dressed in horns, cloven hooves and a frock. At the time, Linda had been rather more interested in following up a potential story about corrupt coursework-grading practices at that particular summer school, and she'd missed quite a few useful hints. Short-sighted of her, in retrospect (although in the end it had made a fine story).

There were, however, three magic words that usually worked in these situations. She tried them.

‘I'm a journalist,' she said, and held her breath.

Daddy bear's brow furrowed. ‘A what?'

‘Journalist,' Linda repeated, in that patient voice grown-ups use when teaching backward children to read. ‘I write things for the newspapers.'

‘Newspapers?'

Before Linda could say anything, Mummy bear leaned forward and whispered something in her partner's ear.

‘Oh, right,' he said. ‘That stuff. And you write the words, do you?'

Linda allowed herself to relax ever so slightly. ‘That's right,' she said.

‘Ah. Actually, I've often wondered, maybe you can tell me this. Why do they bother printing words all over the stuff when all you ever use it for is wiping your—?'

‘Hey!' Linda objected.

Hard-bitten, cynical newshound that she was, Linda Lachuk still had a small, battered compartment in her soul labelled
Dreams - Handle With Care
. About the only thing in that compartment that hadn't been reduced to glass dust years ago was the quaint notion that whenever a story of hers got printed in a newspaper, people would actually read it and take it seriously. Although, generally speaking, she wouldn't give you the pickings of a piranha's teeth (you collect) for any matter of principle that wasn't good for two thousand words and a photo spread, all it took was somebody speaking blasphemously about the media to make her as ideologically ferocious as, say—

A she-bear defending her cubs? Well, why not?

The bear stared at her down its long snout. ‘You say something?' it demanded.

‘I said, Hey,' Linda replied. ‘Want to make something of it, fuzzball?'

‘Don't you call my husband a fuzzball.'

‘Go on, Dad, eat her.'

The bear growled. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘I want to make something of it.'

‘Right now?'

‘Right now.'

‘Then perhaps,' Linda said, slowly taking off her jacket and rolling up her sleeves, ‘you'd care to step outside. '

The bear frowned. ‘But you're a girl,' it objected.

Linda nodded. ‘Yeah,' she said. ‘I'm the girl whose gonna shove your dumb face down your dumb neck, you fleabag. Now, you wanna step outside or not?'

The bear opened its mouth. ‘You bet.'

‘Me, too. Oh please, Mum, can I step outside, too? Oh, go on.'

‘Let's all step outside,' snarled the she-bear. ‘Nobody calls my husband a fleabag and gets away with it.'

Linda nodded. In her eyes flickered the light of battle. The three bears looked at each other, and their eyes said,
Right
.

‘Go on, then,' grunted the bear.

‘No, after you,' Linda replied, dipping her head in a disdainful bow. She stood up, crossed to the door and held it open for them.

‘Right,' said the bear.

‘Right.'

‘Right.'

‘Right.'

The three bears stalked outside, breathing heavily through their snouts; whereupon Linda slammed the door behind them, shot the bolts, dragged up a chair and wedged it under the handle and sprinted for the stairs. By the time the Daddy bear had smashed down the door, Linda had one leg over the sill of the bathroom window, and was calculating approximately how hard she'd hit the tin roof of the scullery ten feet below.

The answer was: quite hard, but not nearly as hard as, for example, three angry bears. She rolled down the roof, landed awkwardly on her right hip, swore, picked herself up and ran. Mummy bear reached the open window just as Linda disappeared into the trees, and although she threw several articles of crockery and footwear after her, she missed.

Some considerable time later Linda caught her foot in a low trailing bramble, measured her length on the ground and lay still. When her head came back on line she got up on her hands and knees and listened for sounds of pursuit. Silence, except for soft forest murmurs and the welly-booted tap-dancing of her own heart. Shaken them off. Phew.

‘Damn,' Linda said aloud. OK, it was good to have escaped from the bears, but that didn't alter the fact that she'd been
that
close to getting a full eyewitness statement from that waitress which sounded set fair to link the CIA, the Pope and the Australians to this submarine thing.

If she was half a journalist, she'd go back.

Yes, reasoned the better part of her valour, and if you do go back, fairly soon you
will
be half a journalist; the bottom half, probably, all chewed and covered in scratch marks. And to die without having filed the story - what a terrible, terrible waste that would be. Once she'd filed the story - well, once they'd printed the story and she'd won a hatful of awards and done her acceptance speeches - then all the bears in the Universe could come and eat her with English mustard and hack sauce for all she cared. Until then, she was the guardian of a Sacred Trust.

To cover the story . . .

Bring 'em back alive . . .

And me too, please
, added discretion's better part, which had been kibbutzing on this train of thought.
If that's all right with the rest of me, that is
.

The hell with it. There would be other witnesses. All she had to do was find them.

Pulling her shirt collar up round her ears - it was turning cold, and she'd left her jacket behind - she set off to do just that.

 

 

‘I
should've
taken
that job,' muttered Four Calling Birds, the second in command of the war band. ‘Maybe then I'd have had a cigar store of my own by now.' He flopped down on a tree-stump, hauled off his left moccasin and evicted a small stone.

Talks To Squirrels, who was just as weary and footsore as his first officer but felt the need to set an example, scowled at him. ‘Selling tobacco,' he sneered. ‘Fine trade for a brave.'

‘Look,' Four Calling Birds replied, ‘if I had, I'd have killed a hell of a lot more palefaces by now than you have, and that's no lie. Why do we bother, Talks? It's a waste of—'

‘Shut up!' Talks To Squirrels dropped to his haunches and hauled his comrade down out of sight, signalling to the rest of the band with his other hand to do likewise. ‘Something's coming.'

‘So what? Worse case scenario is, we'll fail to kill it or it'll fail to kill us. We're ghosts, for crying out loud.'

It
turned out to be a large shaggy bear, lumbering on all fours. ‘Only me,' it said, in a feminine voice. ‘It's been one of those days, so I thought I'd take a break and see how things were going.'

‘Same as usual,'Talks replied, getting up and brushing leaf-mould from his knees. ‘Scragging the Vikings was fun, but apart from that it's been dismal.'

The bear shrugged. ‘You're welcome,' she said. ‘And in any case, next time it's their turn to massacre you.Your unique cultural heritage snuffed out by brutish foreign adventurers, all that jazz. Oh come on, Talks, don't make faces. You know it's only fair.'

‘Takes me all my time not to burst out giggling,' Four Calling Birds said. ‘Those Vikings couldn't massacre their way out of a paper bag.'

‘True,' admitted the bear. ‘But the punters don't know that.'

Talks To Squirrels shook his head. ‘It's dishonourable,' he muttered, ‘having to hold still while a load of amateurs massacre you. My mother didn't raise me to be cut down by incompetents.'

‘She didn't? What a very narrow-minded woman she must have been.' The bear sniffed, and licked its paws. ‘You know the rules, Talks. If you don't want to play you shouldn't have joined.'

Talks With Squirrels made a get-lost gesture with his hand and changed the subject. ‘Awful busy all of a sudden,' he observed. ‘How many of them are there?'

‘Four,' the bear sighed. ‘Simultaneously. Takes it out of a person, I'm here to tell you. Still, they've all done the Vikings, and three of 'em have done the bears. I always reckon that once you've got the bears out of the way, the rest's pretty well plain sailing. Still, if it keeps up like this I'm going to have to think seriously about taking someone on.'

‘Really?' Three French Hens, the band's master-at-arms, looked up sharply. ‘You mean, like an apprentice or something?'

The bear nodded. ‘Just someone to answer the phone, make the coffee, do the ottering, nothing too taxing. Why? Interested?'

‘Sure,' said Three French Hens. ‘Beats this dead-end job,' he replied, ignoring the look on his CO's face. ‘
My
mother didn't raise
me
to hang around for centuries after my death haunting no duckpond. Come to think of it,' he added, ‘my mother didn't raise me, period, I was found in a basket and brought up by wolves. But you know what I mean.'

‘Fine.' Talks To Squirrels threw his hands up in the air melodramatically. ‘Get lost, the whole lot of you, leave it all to me to do. Don't reckon anybody'd notice if you did, at that.'

The bear extended a footstool-sized paw and patted him gently on the shoulder. ‘Don't be like that, Talks,' it said. ‘You're doing a fine job, really. And who knows, this time round or maybe the next, you might just strike it lucky and get sent Home. Well,' it added, as Talks expressed his cynicism by way of a vulgar noise, ‘you never know. One of these days we'll complete the Cycle and you'll get exorcised. See if you don't.'

Talks shook his head. ‘Going round and round and round and getting nowhere,' he grunted. ‘Sounds just right for an Exorcise Cycle to me.'

The bear removed its paw. ‘Save it for the customers, Talks,' it sighed. ‘And cling on like grim death to the day job. By seeing you, guys.'

The braves waved as the bear lumbered away. The band relaxed. Some of them lit a fire. Two Turtledoves and Five Gold Rings started to fix dinner. In the distance, the mountains stirred in their sleep.

‘It's all very well her saying that,' Talks growled. ‘But we've been through this - hell, I don't know how many times, and we're still here, damnit. All I can figure is, we must be doing something wrong.'

‘Just worked that out, have you?' Four Calling Birds replied. ‘With a response time that quick, maybe you should go work for IBM. Hey, anybody seen my tomahawk? I thought I left it under this tree.'

‘Can't leave anything for a second round here,' Talks sighed. ‘I'm telling you, if ever I get my hands on those no-good smugglers—'

‘They'd go right through them,' Two Turtledoves interrupted. ‘Forget it. We aren't scheduled to do the bears for a while anyhow.'