Falling Sideways (16 page)

‘Oh, come now,' said the Chief Inspector, and David could see his raised eyebrow reflected in the rear-view mirror. ‘You'd rather be arrested and sent to prison for a murder you didn't do than sit in this car with us for half an hour? I don't think so.'

‘Half an hour?'

‘That's right. And I promise faithfully that as soon as we get there we'll explain everything.'

‘Everything?'

‘Everything. I swear. On my brother's life.'

Of course, it wasn't as if he had any choice in the matter. From where he sat, most of his forward view consisted of the back of Philippa's neck, her hair-toggle and ponytail. He could reach out, grab her round the throat and threaten to throttle her, but only in the sense that he could also one day be the prime minister of Canada; feasible, in other words, but not very likely.

‘It wasn't a real spaceship, was it?'

‘No.'

David thought for a minute. ‘And you really will explain everything?'

‘Yes.'

‘Fine. And will the explanation be true?'

‘Large parts of it will be, yes.'

It wasn't as if he had anything better to do. ‘All right,' he said.

‘Splendid. Now, on the seat beside you, there's a big silk handkerchief. If you wouldn't mind tying it round your eyes—'

‘Certainly not.'

‘I'm afraid I'll have to insist. Otherwise, I'll stop outside the first police station we come to and hand you over.'

David stared. ‘You're bluffing.'

‘Sorry, but I'm not. For what it's worth, I really am a policeman.'

David breathed in slowly. ‘Is that one of the true parts?'

‘Yes.'

‘Doesn't matter,' he bluffed. ‘In fact, it makes it better, because I'll tell them all about you.'

‘Fine. Would that be before or after you tell them you were abducted by aliens?'

The silk handkerchief was yellow with big green spots and smelled faintly of peppermint. Tying the knot behind his head in a moving car proved to be annoyingly fiddly. Once secured, it tickled his nose and made him feel extremely silly.

‘Here we are,' the Chief Inspector said eventually, after what felt like considerably more than half an hour. (But time behind a yellow silk hankie is flexible and nonrelativistic, as any physicist will tell you if you put enough schnapps in his grapefruit juice.) ‘You can take the blindfold off now if you like.'

David decided that, on balance, he liked. Unfortunately, he'd managed to get the knot immovably wedged. ‘Hold still, I'll do it,' he heard Philippa say; then cool, deft fingers yanked his hair, making him yelp with pain. ‘Don't make such a fuss. And hold still. How on earth did you manage to get it this tangled, anyway?'

Bright light flooded in through his eyes, like coffee spilt on a keyboard. Through the car's windscreen, he could see a hedge with a gate in it; through the gate, he could see a field of oilseed rape, glaringly yellow under a pale blue sky. ‘Where are we?' he asked, not expecting a sensible answer.

‘About three miles west of the M25,' replied the Chief Inspector. ‘The nearest town is Beaconsfield. More or less due south of here are the old Denham film studios. I suggest we go indoors and have a drink.'

The house was a flint-faced red-tiled cottage, with genuine organic roses round the door. Inside was like an interior from an American movie set in England: almost authentic in most respects, but overdone. It was the sort of house you could only live in if your complexion and hair colour didn't clash with the curtains.

‘Sit down, please,' said the Chief Inspector, waving towards a comfortable-looking armchair with perfectly plumped cushions. ‘Drink? Cup of tea? Sandwich?'

There was nothing to be gained by refusing; he could be lied to equally well if he was thirsty, hungry and standing up, but where would be the point? ‘Yes, please,' he said. ‘Actually,' he added, ‘what I'd like most of all is to use your bathroom—'

‘Hm? Oh, of course, right.' Sounded as if the Chief Inspector hadn't immediately understood the euphemism. ‘Up the stairs, first on the left.'

It was a very nice bathroom. Too nice. Immaculate. The soap, for example, was brand new, straight out of the packet; likewise the toilet roll and the towels. No trace of a tidemark in the bath or the handbasin. There was a window, but it was too small to climb out of.

When he came down again, there was a sandwich and a cup of tea waiting for him (again, mighty curious). He sat down in the armchair, which was every bit as comfortable as it looked. The Chief Inspector was sitting in a matching chair facing him. Philippa was curled up on the sofa, her shoes kicked off and lying on the floor. David considered the scene, and realised that the only thing missing was the Dulux dog.

‘This place isn't real either, is it?'

The Chief Inspector smiled. ‘Define real,' he replied. ‘It's what my brother the lawyer would call a grey area. Consider: you just went upstairs without a nasty fall and bruised shins, so the stairs would seem to be real enough. If you care to bang your head hard against any of the walls . . .'

‘All right,' David persisted, ‘but they aren't
real
. Like the spaceship wasn't.'

‘Actually,' the Chief Inspector said, with a smile, ‘the spaceship was real enough. It was an actual, functional spaceship, and for a while there, you'd genuinely gone where no one has gone before. But then the cops showed up, so we brought you back.' He reached for his drink. ‘It'd be much easier if I started at the beginning,' he said.

David shrugged. ‘Go ahead,' he said.

‘Thank you.' The Chief Inspector sipped his drink and swirled the glass round, making the ice tinkle. ‘Now then,' he said.

Now then (said the Chief Inspector), long story, so will be as brief as possible.

Once upon a time, and we're going back a few years here, girl met boy, and usual business ensued. She was – well, let's not confuse the issue with culture-specific detail that may have misleading connotations. She came from what you'd call a privileged background. He was . . . Well, he wasn't the out-and-out no-good dirtball her father made him out to be, but he wasn't anything special. Certainly not good enough for daddy's best girl. Query, in this context, whether anybody ever is. I mean, if she were to bring home an incredibly wealthy saint who also happened to be war hero, genius sculptor and Nobel-winning physicist, Mummy and Daddy would still be peering nervously at him over the tea-cups to see if he'd got six fingers or webbed feet. Human nature.

But anyway. Daddy didn't like boy. Girl picked up on this, decided she liked boy even more, precisely because. Became a matter of principle, God help us all. Fingers were wagged, tears shed, words spoken, twenty years of happy family life went down toilet like asteroid down gravity well.

So far, you'll agree, there's nothing much to this story. Happens all the time. All parties probably equally to blame: father obvious villain of the piece, but colour in girl – an Olympic-class emotional blackmailer since she was nine weeks old, will of chrome-molybdenum steel – not to mention boy – healthy twenty-year-old, primary agenda not the most inscrutable thing in Universe – and you begin to get a familiar picture. Faults on all sides. Humans behaving badly.

By this point, everybody heavily into gestures. For girl, mostly limited to slamming doors and unbecoming hairstyles. Daddy – mostly shouting, melodramatic body language. Boy, on other hand, not directly engaged in face-to-face conflict, more scope for grandeur and downright silliness: joins army, goes away. Gets killed. Marvellous.

At this point, I need to fill you in on some background. Bit hesitant about doing this, since it'll require a little suspension of disbelief. In fact, you're going to have to hoist Mr Disbelief higher than a cattle-rustler in old Alabama. Still, we've taken certain steps to loosen up your previously rather rigid views of what is and what isn't possible – it's not all that long ago, for instance, that you were prepared to accept that you were
en route
to a distant solar system to be vivisected by alien frogs. If you could believe that, this ought to be a slice of Victoria sponge.

Daddy, you see— This is embarrassing. I think we can also drop the pretences; you know, like going to the doctor and saying, ‘My friend has this really nasty rash right here'. Let's start again.

I did try and make it easier for you; I could've made it a little bit more obvious, but only by recording it on a cybernetic implant and wiring it directly into your brain. Nevertheless, it seems you managed not to get it, which I consider to be quite an achievement. Remind me to get a medal struck, when I've got five minutes.

My name is not important. You can call me Mr Levens if you like. This here – smile for the nice gentleman – is my eldest daughter, Philippa. And maybe I should add that by the time we'd got used to answering to these names, we'd both been around for a good long while. Put it another way: any day now, some coal miner is going to open up a very deep seam somewhere in Silesia, and in that seam, frozen into the coal like the letters in a stick of rock, he'll find a chunk of millionsof-years-old tree with an arrow-pierced heart carved on it. In other words, this mess has been going on for quite some time.

I think it's well enough established that the course of true love couldn't run less smoothly if it was operated by Richard Branson. Even in its most basic form, it tends to snag threads and get wrapped round trees. Add immortality and a few supernatural powers into the mix, and you get a succession of foul-ups that makes the M25 look like something out of Plato.

Think I mentioned a moment ago that my dear daughter here is a strong-willed individual, used to getting her own way. Trivial details tend not to stand in her path if they know what's good for them; and as far as she's concerned, death is a trivial detail. On the cosmic-hassle scale, she rates it somewhere between a broken fingernail and a parking ticket. Accordingly, when her one true love contrived to get himself snuffed in the wars – it's so long ago, can't remember what wars, or who was fighting who, or back then, more properly speaking, what was fighting what; she and I are both old enough for evolution to be something you do your best to keep up with, like fashion – when her sweet-pea got himself killed, she wasn't inclined to view this as anything more than a temporary inconvenience. You're the supreme being, she said to me, with that uniquely contemptuous scowl that can only pass from daughter to father: do something.

Didn't do me much good to explain that I'm not the supreme being, just
a
supreme being, and that whisking someone back from the Hereafter isn't quite as simple as glueing together the sundered fragments of a Barbie hairdryer. She wasn't in the mood for explanations; she wanted action, and she wanted it
then
. I don't think I need point out that this is your essential female, your
ewig-weiblich
; if you haven't figured that out for yourself at your age, I suggest you find a nice lighthouse somewhere and arrange for the coastguard to airdrop regular supplies of TV dinners.

Unfortunately, I was in no position to shrug my shoulders and say, ‘Sorry, no can do'; because of course I
could
fix things, no question about that. It was just that it was going to take an awful lot of time and effort, and complicate things horribly, to the point where doing the stuff I was supposed to be doing – running an orderly cosmos, superintending the growth of
Homo sapiens
into a good and useful member of society – was going to be seriously prejudiced. Obvious solution in terms of the well-being of all other sentient life was for her to get over it, count up to ten and fall in love with some other schmuck, like normal girls do. Where I made my most serious tactical error, of course, was in trying to explain this. The more I pushed the logic and common sense of this suggestion, the more determined she became, to the point where her heels were dug in so firmly they were practically down to the planetary core. So I did what any loving, caring parent would've done at this juncture. Gave in.

Gave it my best shot; wasn't good enough, of course, still had to put up with decades of moping, sulking, her pretending I wasn't in the room. But it was the best I could come up with, and pretty damn inventive, though I say it myself.

Point is, people can't be returned from the dead, it's not like leaning over the fence, asking, ‘Please can we have our ball back, mister?' Different principles at work. Requires fundamental understanding of what death is: namely, very bad thing, thoroughgoing pain in bum, to be avoided at all costs.

Tried explaining all this to daughter. Needn't have bothered, and breath thereby saved would have cooled an infinite ocean of porridge. Instead, had to find a way of sorting out mess without bending the world too much. Took a while.

Fortunately, we immortals have all the while we can handle, and then some.

Out of the question, as previously stated, to bring back dead person. Like microwaving last night's chips; result never satisfactory, always taste funny. Same with reanimating dead body, because no matter how hard you try, all you ever seem to get is a walking, talking, breathing, living doll. I can tell by your expression and the funny colour you've turned that you've intuitively grasped the point I'm trying to make. So: however you care to approach the problem, you've got to be prepared to accept a certain degree of compromise. This is where daughter and I wasted a lot of time on convoluted and acrimonious discussion. I supported duck principle: if walks and quacks like, is. Daughter maintained that this view not acceptable, suggested uses for duck that even supreme being would have had trouble accommodating. Ultimately, compromised on compromise, basically duck approach but with full spread of supplementary bells and whistles, very awkward to achieve, typical.