Wish You Were Here (29 page)

‘Having the courage to confront our inner anxieties,' he read, in a voice that would have made the average Dalek sound like Laurence Olivier hamming it up, ‘is a fundamental stage on the road to personality growth. By making our nightmares come true, we can confront whatever it is they really stand for, and resolve the inner turmoils that cause them.You have ninety seconds. Man, play that thing!'

Very reluctantly, Wesley lifted the violin to his chin, drew back the bow and let it glide across the strings. The result was perhaps the ghastliest noise ever made by catgut in the absence of the rest of the cat.

‘Sixty seconds. And he's going to have to do a bit better than this if he wants to stand a chance of winning tonight's grand star prize!'

‘But I can't—' Wesley started to say; then it occurred to him that anything further might lay him open to a charge of stating the obvious. He gritted his teeth, clamped his eyes so tightly shut that muscles in his cheeks started to ache, and tried again.

And succeeded.

Admittedly, it was only
Baa Baa Black Sheep
, and there was little in it to prompt his colleagues at the day job to buy a big card for everybody to write farewell messages on; but considering that the nearest he'd ever come before to playing the violin was when he used to stretch rubber bands along his six-inch ruler at school and scrape them with a pencil, it wasn't bad at all. For the first time in a long while, Wesley felt -

- Proud? Good about himself? Maybe.

‘Time's up,' read the inspector. ‘And it looks like Wesley's won tonight's grand star prize. Which is—' He turned the card and found his place again. ‘Death by - what's that word? Oh, sorry. Electrocution, so let's have a big hand for . . .' He stopped reading, lowered the card, paused as directed, and raised the card again. ‘Old Sparky!'

Whereupon the door in the wings opened; and someone dressed in a comic electric-chair costume waddled on, big felt smile stuck to the front of his seat, big white padded hands waving adorably, big live blue sparks arcing across his terminals—

Wesley opened his eyes. Time to wake up.

But he didn't wake up, and his eyes were already open.

 

When Calvin rematerialised, he found himself standing beside his car, with the keys in his hand.

Before that, he'd been just about to start a fight with someone, and then he
felt
himself disappearing; a very brief but entirely unmistakable experience, equivalent to watching yourself vanish before your very eyes.

‘Tonight's star prize . . .'

He spun round on his heel, to find he was being watched by a theatre full of people. Which meant he was in a theatre. Which meant that he was indoors. Which meant, though he wasn't quite sure why, that this wasn't his car.

Except that it palpably was. In the same way that a woman can always recognise her own new-born baby's cry in the middle of a wardful of howling infants, a man can always recognise his own car. Probably it's the same basic instinct; the natural and subliminal bonding between two souls formed from the same piece of stock. And if all that mystic stuff wasn't sufficient evidence, there were palpable physical signs; the tiny scratch on the front fender that nobody but he would ever know to look for, the minuscule abrasion on the front offside hubcap, the all but invisible scar in the paintwork under the filler cap where he'd once slipped with the filler cap key. His car; flesh of his flesh, chrome of his chrome, vinyl of his vinyl.

So what the hell was it doing here?

‘A big hand, please . . .'

Who cares? He fumbled on the keyring for the doorkey. If only he could get inside, he'd be safe; he could triple-lock the doors, turn on the alarm, use his phone to call a SWAT team. According to the brochure, the quickest time in which the world's most accomplished automotive thieves had been able to break into this model had been twenty minutes. Give the boys in the flak jackets and baseball hats twenty minutes, and they'd have this whole lot looking like Monte Cassino on a bad day. Except for this car, of course; according to the literature, a direct nuclear strike might bubble off a couple of layers of paint, but that was about it. A serious car for a serious world, the brochure said; the picture its well-chosen phrases conjured up was of an intact, barely scratched car free-floating in the vacuum of space, while the exploded fragments of Planet Earth sailed harmlessly by on the interstellar winds. Once inside this mother, he'd be
safe
.

He located the key in the lock, pushing away the spring-loaded lock cover. He pushed.

The key wouldn't go.

‘. . . For our second contestant, Calvin Dieb!'

The theatre exploded into pandemonium; howling, whistling, rebel yells and so on.Two large men in tuxedos materialised behind Calvin's shoulders. And still the key wouldn't go.

‘Excuse me, sir,' muttered one of the men. ‘Auto club.'

Whereupon he took the keys from Calvin's hand and put them in his pocket. As Calvin straightened up to punch him (although, without a stepladder, he'd have been hard put to it to do any significant damage), two huge hands pushed down on his shoulders, sitting him efficiently and with minimum dignity on the floor.

‘Hey,' he whined, ‘gimme my keys, will you?'

A giant hand reached down, gathered a fistful of lapels and lifted Calvin up by them. He found himself looking into the unfriendliest pair of eyes he'd seen in a long time; ever since, in fact, he'd been cross-examining a rape victim in the witness box and caught sight of his own reflection in a window.

‘No keys,' said the proprietor of the unfriendly eyes. ‘First you gotta play the game.'

The hand let go of his lapels and he slid back downwards, until he came to rest against the passenger door of the car. It was then that he noticed another man, this time wearing a spangly white tuxedo and reading aloud from a card.

‘Your chosen subject,' the man said, ‘is Law. You have two minutes in which to answer one question - just one - correctly. If you do, then tonight's wonderful grand star prize, a complete set of keys specially custom-crafted to fit
your
car, will be yours to take home. If you don't, then you get to sit in . . .' The man lowered the card and counted under his breath before speaking again; when he did, his words were drowned out by the unison chant from the audience.

‘Old SPARKY!'

Old Sparky? The electric chair? Calvin looked round quickly, to see if he had a chance of rolling under the car before the two tuxedoed monsters could stop him. Then he thought, Just a minute, one correct answer in two minutes? On Law? And they give me my keys?

He didn't exactly relax, in the same way as the polar ice never actually melts; but a different kind of tension thrilled down to his nerve-endings. If there was one thing he knew, it was Law. This was a gamble he'd be prepared to take.

‘Your two minutes,' the man said, ‘starting . . .'

And then he recognised him.

Strange, how quickly the mind can work when there's absolutely nothing that can be done in time to avert disaster. IBM never built anything with a better response time than the mind of a man who notices through the windscreen of his speeding car that the tall object five yards dead ahead is a tree. All that long interim, between the moment of initial recognition and waking up to find your arm full of plastic tubes, is filled with an almost infinite number of thoughts, suggestions and referrals from the self-preservation sub-committee and strong recommendations from the theology department; all marvellously good stuff, but there's no time to act on the advice.

The man smiled, and said, ‘Now.'

‘Hi, Dad.'

‘In
State of Colorado v Stein
,' the man read out, ‘was the third party's collateral warranty held to bind the defendant regardless of the terms of the original agreement? '

Dieb swallowed hard. ‘Look,' he said, ‘I really did mean to come to the hospital, it was just a bad day for me—'

‘Incorrect. In actions for defamation, is slander actionable per se or must the plaintiff prove special damage?'

‘I was all set,' Dieb went on, ‘and then just as I was about to leave the phone rang, and it was this really important client—'

‘Incorrect. In
Sharps v Rowan
, was the defendant's inability to fulfil the contract owing to intervening factors beyond his control sufficient to relieve him of his obligations to the plaintiff?'

‘And about the funeral, I really did mean to go, but my dumb secretary'd booked me lunch with the board of Freemans', and you just don't call up old man Freeman and say, Sorry, can you do Tuesday instead? So . . .'

‘Incorrect. Thirty seconds remaining. Briefly explain the maxim
res ipsa loquitur
.'

‘Anyhow,' said Calvin desperately, ‘I hope you liked the flowers. Sorry about the mix-up, I told my secretary you always liked carnations, but she must have gotten carnations and chrysanthemums mixed up. Besides, you wouldn't actually have seen them, would you? Not from where you . . .'

‘Incorrect.' Calvin Dieb senior gave his son a big, friendly smile. ‘Time's up, and gee, son, you've blown it! Which means—'

‘Old SPARKY!'

As the cuddly, padded, smiling electric chair waddled in from the wings, and the two gorillas dragged Calvin towards it, his father waved to him, not unaffectionately. ‘Son,' he said, ‘you should have listened to Mom and me. Didn't we say if you threw in your job with the circus and ran away to law school, one day you'd be sorry? So long, son.'

‘So long, Dad.'

Calvin Dieb senior turned to the audience and smiled. ‘A big hand for Calvin Dieb junior, folks. Serves the little bugger right.'

He turned. Flashing blue light was reflected in his silver hair as he left the stage, a handkerchief pressed to his nose because of the smell.

In the chair, Calvin was just getting to the interesting bit when he vanished.

 

The Proprietor was dreaming.

It was a curious dream. It seemed to involve four blind mice, scampering round the shores of His lake, pursued by the farmer's wife, Sabatier XL stainless carver in her hand and a great big silly grin on her face. There were other ingredients to the dream - Indians and Vikings and goblins and talking bears and a thing like a walking armchair that fizzed blue, and a few others He couldn't yet see clearly. Everyone except the mice seemed to be enjoying themselves enormously; but this was wrong, because the dream was supposed to be for the mice's benefit.

It then occurred to the Proprietor that things which are good for you - medicines and cabbage and cold baths and quitting smoking and good healthy exercise and going to bed early - do seem, as often as not, to be horrible at the time. It's only afterwards that you appreciate their virtue; usually when you've grown up and have children of your own on whom you can inflict the torments of your youth.

The Proprietor wondered about that. He wondered why bad things taste nice, and good things taste nasty. He wondered why it was good to waste the golden sunlit afternoons of childhood doing piano practice so that, when you turn forty, you'd be able to play the piano indifferent-badly if only you had the time. He wondered why Youth must learn how to do long division so that Middle Age can tap a few buttons on a calculator. He tried to remember the things He'd been at pains to learn when He was young, but couldn't.

And He resolved; learning is to punish the ignorant for offences they would have committed if they hadn't known better. Having sorted out the point, definitely for ever, He slid back into full sleep.

The mice were still running; they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles and they ran through the thickets where the rabbits wouldn't go, and still the farmer's wife followed them, and the sun flashed off the broad blade of her knife, in which were reflected many tall trees and mountains. This implied that He had missed the point, something He never liked to do.

So He wondered about the blind mice. He had already Resolved that learning is punishment; and when He came to look at them He could see that all four mice did indeed deserve to be chased, and that their tails had been forfeit for most of their adult lives. They needed to be taught a lesson. Well.

But they hadn't come to learn; they'd come to dream. One of them had capital-D Dreams like the New York sewers have alligators; one dreamed greed and selfishness and a callous disregard for everything beautiful and good that stood between him and a dollar; one lived in a dream so complete and so unreal that it wouldn't have mattered, except that she wanted to make other people believe it too; and one dreamed of being an unmitigated pest, which was antisocial behaviour by anybody's standards. Very well, then; let them have their dreams, and learn that their dreams are nightmares.

He tried to Resolve accordingly, but found that He couldn't.

 

Janice felt herself reappearing.

It wasn't anything like she'd imagined. As far as she'd always been concerned, you reappeared in a shower of tinselly glitter, to the accompaniment of a melodious electronic twang, and the first thing you saw was the face of Mr Scott, peering at you over the top of his instrument panel. Then, if you were lucky, deferential security guards escorted you to the recreation room, where you could have a refreshing pink milk shake and a recycled currant bun.

The reality was rather different; a bit like the feeling you get when your leg, having gone to sleep, wakes up again. One of the things you don't readily do is move.

So, rooted to the spot, she looked round to find out where she was. She didn't like what she saw.