Faust Among Equals (19 page)

It was a cover-up. I knew too much. They killed me because I knew too much
.

‘Too much about what?'

The table bucked like an unbroken colt, lifting all its feet off the ground and landing six inches from its original position.
I don't bloody well know, that's the whole bloody point. That's why I need help
.

The chief electrician raised an eyebrow. ‘Hang about,' he said. ‘If you're dead then it's all watchercallit, academic, innit? I mean, if you're dead, you're dead, doesn't matter a toss
why
. . .'

The table jumped again, landing on the chief electrician's foot.

It matters to me, Julian. Look, about seventy miles from here there's a sheep farm
. . .

‘So?'

Let me finish, will you? There's a sheep farm, called George's Sheep Farm. That's where I died. I want you to go and pick up a video camera, because there may be a clue
. . .

‘Seventy miles?'

Yes, more or less. There may be a clue
. . .

The chief cameraman furrowed his brows, creating the impression of copulating hedgerows. ‘You want us to go there.'

Thank you, Colin, yes.You see, there may be a clue
. . .

‘And we can claim the mileage?'

‘If we go there,' said the chief cameraman. ‘We can claim the mileage, can we, off the firm?'

How the hell should I know? Look
. . .

The chief cameraman looked at his colleagues. ‘And it'd have to be time and a half, because by the time we get there, if it's seventy miles like you said, not to mention getting back . . .'

Look
.

‘It's our rest and recreation period,' the sound recordist butted in. ‘If we work in R and R time, it's time and a half. Are you
sure
the firm'll pay the mileage? Mean sods, the lot of ‘em, I remember once in Finland—'

I neither know nor care, you bastards. Look, I'm dead, I need your help. I always thought you were my friends
. . .

The camera crew looked at each other; then they stood up and walked over to the other table.

The other table was, of course, bolted to the ground.

After a while, the hammering noise stopped, and the crew relaxed and calmed themselves with another round.

‘You know what?' said the assistant cameraman, wiping foam off his lips. ‘That was bloody Szechuan all over again.'

His colleagues nodded sagely. That, they felt, put it in a nutshell.

W
e have touched lightly on the subject of friendship.

The classic definition - friendship means never having to pay the full retail price for car spares - is all right as far as it goes, but there is another, more spiritual side to friendship.

A
true
friend is someone who'll lend you his Lear jet and a full tank of petrol without asking what you want it for.

‘Thanks,' George shouted, above the roar of the engine.

‘Any time, George, you know that. Thanks for the tip, by the way.'

‘Oh, that's all right,' George yelled back. ‘It works even better if you add a thimbleful of turps.' He opened the throttle, pulled back on the stick and let her have her head.

At least finding her would be easy, he said to himself. It might get a bit tricky after that, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

As soon as he'd worked out his course and pointed the plane in the right direction, he leant forward and grinned at the radio; which bleeped, crackled and homed in.

. . .
This is Radio Dante, I'm Danny Bennett, I'm your host for this afternoon, and later on I'll be talking to Benito Mussolini in our regular Where I Went Wrong spot. But first, this
.

George twiddled a knob slightly, leant back and took the two-way control in his hand. ‘Hi,' he said. ‘How's tricks?'

His voice echoed over every tannoy, loudspeaker and PA in the place; and, believe it or not, there are more speakers per square metre in Hell than anywhere else in Creation. For the piped music, you see.

The Finance Director swore.

‘Get him off the bloody air,' he shouted. ‘Switch ‘em all off or something.'

Once the nuisance had been confined to one small telephone, the Finance Director picked up the receiver and said, ‘Well, what is it now?'

‘I thought you said you were getting that nutcase off my back.'

‘We did.'

George shook his head. ‘No you didn't,' he replied. ‘And he's starting to get ever so slightly up my nose. In fact, his head is wedged up my sinuses and I want something done about it. Otherwise there's going to be trouble.'

The Finance Director winced. ‘We did our best,' he mumbled. ‘Put our crack team on it. What more—?'

‘I heard about that,' George said. ‘Got stuck in an onion, so I was told. Try again. Helen walks by six o'clock your time, or I won't be responsible for the consequences.' He paused, and the Finance Director could just picture the nasty little grin flitting across his face. ‘Well, actually I will be responsible for the whole lot of 'em, so think on. Over and out.'

Before the Finance Director could reply, the line went dead and almost immediately, every speaker in the Nine Rings started to play
Chicago
, until the Chief Technician pulled out all the wires.

The Head of Security held up both hands.

‘No can do,' he said. ‘If I ask those lads to go back out there again, I'll be going home tonight in a plastic bag. Can't you buy him off?'

‘Lundqvist?' The Finance Director considered. ‘Nah,' he said, ‘not this time. Anyway, even if I could I don't know where he is. He's not answering his carphone and his bleeper's switched off. We'll just have to let George do his worst and then blame it on someone else.'

The Head of Security frowned. ‘Who?'

‘I don't know,' replied the Finance Director. ‘The CIA. The nuclear power people. The Milk Marketing—'

‘Which reminds me . . .'

‘Anyway,' continued the Finance Director, ‘we'll just have to do the best we can. I wish I'd never started this whole perishing thing now,' he added.

The Head of Security shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe we're worrying too much,' he said. ‘I mean, when it comes right down to it, he can't do anything
too
terrible, can he?'

 

There's a time differential between Hell and the rest of the cosmos, naturally. In Hell, however, time is told not in hours and minutes but episodes, such as half past four on a Sunday afternoon when there's nothing on the television except the Olympics, or three minutes after the bar you've just walked into closes.

One minute past six in Infernal Mean Time is, therefore, the split second between the moment when you've just let go of the china ornament that's been in your employer's family since 1868 and the point in time when it hits the lino. To match this up with Greenwich, you multiply by four, divide by six and forget to turn off the gas before leaving for a fortnight's holiday.

And that was the precise moment when . . .

 

‘Brilliant,' said the Finance Director, between gritted fangs. ‘You've got to hand it to him. For sheer brilliant simplicity . . .'

‘The switchboard,' reported the Marketing Director, ‘has just overloaded.'

‘Oh good. Now perhaps we can hear ourselves think.'

(In the clouds above New South Wales, Lucky George felt a tug on one of the tendrils of his mind. He smiled, and four hundred thousand miles of fused fibre-optic cable running through the centre of the earth took on a new lease of life . . .)

‘Malcolm!' The Finance Director waved a hand vaguely at the Duty Officer. ‘Get that for me, will you?' He turned to his fellow directors. ‘Let's go down to the executive lavatory for a bit. There's no phones there.'

‘Basically,' he went on, when the meeting had reconvened,

‘the situation is that, thanks to Lucky George and his magic bloody wand, the entire human race have all gone on holiday at precisely the same moment.' He paused and tried to take a sip from his glass of water, the meniscus of which danced like a formation flamenco team. ‘This has, of course, produced complete and utter havoc in every country in the world except France, where they're used to it. The tailbacks on all major roads leading to airports and coastal resorts are causing a critical mass which is threatening to send the whole works shooting off into another dimension, and the price of a pair of Bermuda shorts has now risen to approximately twice the gross national product of the United States. Now, what are we going to do about it?'

He looked up. The room was empty.

‘Come back!' he roared, and flung open the door.

He was just in time to see the Production Director and the Marketing Director, in bathing trunks, heading for the car park with a plastic bucket and spade and a large rubber ball.

 

And there it was. Plain as the proverbial pikestaff.

A three mile tailback of articulated lorries in the middle of the Australian Outback, it is fairly safe to say, is probably a symptom of something; apart, that is, from road works. George peered down from the cockpit of the Lear, grinned and circled away.

His second pass over the traffic jam, a few hundred feet lower, simply confirmed his diagnosis. He read the names on the sides of the lorries and that was enough. Certainty.

There were soft-furnishing lorries, DIY homecare lorries, carpet vans, lorries of all descriptions, delivering to a small, bleak wooden shed in the middle of half a million acres of wind-scoured, sand-blasted nothing. What you might call a woman's touch.

In the back yard of the shed, a team of forklifts were staggering about like exhausted dung-beetles under enormous loads of big cardboard cartons, while on the other side, a team of crack carpenters were starting work on a huge, Versailles-dwarfing extension to the shed, presumably to provide a bit of space for all the stuff to go. Two enormous industrial cement-mixers stood like hormone-stuffed dinosaurs round the back, while conveyor belts fed them unlimited supplies of cans of paint. George nodded; Helen's favourite colour, what she in her artistic way called Harvest White. Many years ago, George had made himself temporarily unpopular by pointing out that you could get exactly the same effect by painting the room in question ordinary white and smoking unfiltered cigarettes in it for twenty years.

He knew without having to look that one of the giant artics backed up out there in the desert was carrying a cargo of forty square miles of anaglypta.

With a flick of a wingtip he turned the plane round and headed off. When the curvature of the Earth had hidden him from the shed, he landed the plane, got out and whistled . . .

. . . Whereupon two seagulls drifted down out of the sky, perched on his tail plane and tried to eat it.

‘Dry old place, this,' said Larry, critically. ‘Gives me bad vibes, to be honest. Dunno where my next fish is coming from.'

‘Yes,' George replied. ‘Putting that to one side for a moment, I want you two to do something for me.'

‘You're
sure
you like it?' Helen enquired. ‘I mean, really
really
sure?' She observed Lundqvist carefully. ‘You aren't, you know. Admit it.'

‘It's fine.' Lundqvist ground the words out like flour. ‘I love it. Really.'

‘No.' Helen shook her head. ‘You're just saying that to please me.' She leant out of the window, picked up the loudhailer and shouted, ‘Excuse me!'

The wall paper-pasting squad heard her, downed tools and signalled to the rest of the workforce, using flags and mirrors. A few minutes later, there was silence.

‘Sorry to be a pest,' Helen loudspoke sweetly, ‘but I'm afraid we've changed our minds again. Could we try a paleish sort of Chrysoprase White on the walls of the ballroom, please, with Crushed Eglantine on the ceilings and the Summer Caramel carpet. No, not the Axminster, the Wilton. Thank you.'

There was a moment of complete stillness; then a great deal of subvocal muttering; then an emptying and refilling of cement-mixers, a ripping-up of carpets and a cleaning of brushes, like the foreriders of a tsunami hitting the outlying coral reefs of a Pacific atoll. There was a certain practised resignation about the whole scene. Not all that surprising; it was the fifth time she'd changed her mind that morning.

‘Now then,' Helen said brightly, ‘if you don't like it, promise you'll say, won't you? I mean, you've got to live here too, you know.'