In Your Dreams (12 page)

Melze laughed. ‘Was it fun? Heroism?'

He shook his head. ‘Filling in forms, mostly,' he replied. ‘And I sat on a dragon. Small dragon,' he added. ‘Squashed it, poor little bugger. But apparently they're a real pain in the financial sector, so I'm not to lose any sleep over it. Also I had to read a lot of stuff about weapons and poison gas and blowing stuff up. Not my scene at all.'

‘Good,' she said. ‘So, what've you got to do for glamour? Or don't you know yet?'

Paul grinned. ‘I'm hoping it'll just be more filling in forms. It may be boring, but I can handle that. Did I tell you about the time—?' He hesitated. He'd been about to say
the time Sophie and I had to catalogue the strongroom.
‘The time I broke down out in the wilds somewhere, and there was this garage run entirely by kids.'

Melze looked suitably intrigued. ‘How do you mean, kids?'

‘Kids. None of them was older than twelve, I don't think. But they knew what was wrong with the car and fixed it, just like that. Spanners and screwdrivers and the hydraulic ramp and everything. Of course,' he added – was he showing off? Apparently. ‘Of course, it's not exactly a normal car.'

‘How do you mean, not normal?'

So Paul explained to her about Monika, and how she bossed him about in German, and how she'd originally been an agent for one of JWW's deadly rivals and how she'd been caught spying. ‘For all I know,' he went on, ‘she's not the only one. I mean, why spend money on office equipment when you can turn your enemies into it for free? You know about the photocopier, don't you?' he added.

She didn't, so he told her; and this gave him the opportunity to explain his part in the overthrow of Humphrey Wells and the rescue of old Mr Wells, the rightful senior partner. Somehow, Sophie didn't figure much in this version of the story. Nevertheless, Melze seemed to find it all quite fascinating.

‘I can see why you like it here,' she said.

‘But—' Paul was about to object that he didn't, not in the least; that he only stayed out of mortal fear of Dennis Tanner's malevolent sense of humour. ‘Well,' he heard himself say, ‘it does have its moments.'

She sighed. ‘I wonder,' she said. ‘Do you think there's any chance they'd take me on as a clerk? I mean, there's a vacancy, isn't there? At least, until the other clerk comes back from the States. I don't know if I could do the magic and stuff, but I could do the filing and sorting and paperwork and things.'
Like you
, her eyes said.
With you. It'd be fun.

‘I don't know,' he said awkwardly. ‘You could ask, I suppose.'

She frowned. ‘I don't know,' she said. ‘They probably wouldn't agree, because I can't do the magic.'

‘Maybe you can,' he said. ‘Have you tried?'

She shook her head. ‘I wouldn't know how to,' she said.

‘Neither did I.'

Melze was looking at him. ‘How did you find out you could do it?' she said. ‘Did they teach you, or did it just suddenly come, or what?'

Paul didn't answer straight away. The truth was, he'd got drunk out of wretchedness, been thrown out of a pub, and found himself forcing a policeman who was trying to arrest him to eat his own truncheon. ‘It's hard to say,' he said. ‘I suppose it was like suddenly remembering something you've forgotten for a long time. It didn't suddenly come so much as suddenly come
back
, if that makes any sense at all.'

‘I think so,' she said. ‘But now, presumably, you can do magic any time you want.'

‘Well—'
Well
, he thought,
I suppose I can, yes. But I never seem to want to unless I've got to. Why is that, anyhow?
‘Sometimes,' he said. ‘But I'm still a beginner. That's why I'm doing the time in each of the departments. Except there wasn't much magic in pest control; mostly it seems to be basic chemistry and use of power tools.'

There was a look in Melze's eyes. ‘Do some magic now,' she said. ‘Go on.'

Bad idea
, a voice in his head pointed out.
Very bad idea.
‘Well—'

‘Doesn't have to be anything spectacular,' she was saying. ‘Just a little bit, so I can see what it looks like. Please?'

He stalled. ‘I can't think of anything,' he said.

She looked round. ‘Can you turn that empty cup into a mouse or something?'

‘No.' Paul had an idea. ‘But I can make it wash itself up, that's easy. Look.' He considered the cup, identified the fact that it was dirty and ought to be clean; and then it was. ‘See?'

‘Cool.' Her eyes were actually shining. ‘That's so amazing. Do it again.'

‘I can't. Someone'll see.'

‘Please?'

It was, just as his mother had always told him, the magic word. ‘Oh, all right then,' he said magnanimously, and cleaned another cup.

‘That's amazing,' she said again.

‘Well.' Paul shrugged. ‘Fairly amazing. But you can do it just as well with a J-cloth and Fairy Liquid.'

Melze didn't seem to have heard him. ‘Can you teach me to do that?' she said eagerly.

He shook his head. ‘Truth is,' he said, ‘I haven't got a clue how it's done. I just look at the cup and realise that in an ideal world it wouldn't have brown rings round the inside and an eighth of an inch of cold coffee in the bottom.'

‘Oh.' She leaned across to the next table, said, ‘Excuse me' to its rather startled occupant, and took his empty cup. ‘All right,' she said, ‘I'm looking at it. Yes, I can see what's wrong. This cup is very dirty, it's an absolute disgrace.' Behind her, Paul could see the waitress turn her head.

‘No,' Melze announced sadly. ‘No luck. Look, still dirty.'

Paul smiled weakly. ‘I think it's one of those things,' he said. ‘Actually, I've thought about it a lot, and my theory is, it's – well, this sounds really silly, but it's all to do with how you look at things, things that've gone wrong. I mean, if you look at them and you say to yourself, Oh well, that's life, I guess, only to be expected, and there's nothing I can do about it, then I don't suppose you can do magic. It's what I said just now about in an ideal world. I suppose that deep down you've got to believe that there's an ideal world out there somewhere, and you believe in it strongly enough that you can sort of swap: one little bit of our rotten old real world for one little bit of the ideal one.' He tailed off and looked at her hopefully. ‘What do you reckon?' he asked.

‘I think you're right,' she said.

‘Really?'

‘Yes. I think you were spot on, about it sounding really silly. Because,' Melze continued, as a stray flicker of annoyance crossed Paul's face, ‘that'd mean that in order to do magic you'd have to be, what's the word? You'd have to be an idealist. And, well, I've met the partners, and presumably they're all very good indeed at magic, and they don't look like a bunch of starry-eyed dreamers to me. No way. If you met them in the street, you'd think they were probably lawyers.'

She had a point there. ‘I suppose,' he said. ‘But—'

‘And then there's you,' she said. ‘No disrespect, in fact quite the opposite, because I wouldn't put you down as a bleeding-heart pacifist whale-saver. You're too—'

‘Selfish?'

Melze shook her head. ‘It's not that,' she said. ‘I imagine that if you ever found yourself in a situation where you could save a whale, you would, provided there weren't loads of people standing around watching. But that's not the issue; you're more the sort of person who's convinced that he could never save a whale, because it's probably too difficult, and you're not brave or clever enough. You'd say, no point me trying to end acid rain or Third World debt when I haven't even got a girlfriend. Right?'

Paul didn't say anything; whereupon Melze came over all remorseful, as though she'd just trodden on a kitten's tail. ‘Sorry,' she said, ‘I didn't mean to get at you particularly, all I meant was, I think you've got to have an ego the size of Mount Rushmore if you're going to be an idealist, because you're saying to yourself, here's this problem and I'm just the person to do something about it. And that's not you, is it?'

Paul shrugged. ‘No, it's not,' he said. ‘I'm a coward and selfish. No point pretending otherwise.'

That seemed to make Melze angry. ‘No, you aren't,' she said. ‘I know you aren't, because you rescued that Mr Wells who got turned into a stapler; and that was very dangerous and you didn't have to get involved, but you did it anyway. But I think you did it because you thought, it must be really horrible being a stapler for a hundred years, not because you were on some sort of idealistic crusade to stamp out illegal shape-shifting. Do you see what I mean?'

‘Yes,' he said, mostly because he wanted to change the subject. ‘I guess so. Anyhow,' he went on, ‘that's all I can tell you about how to do magic. Not much help, I guess.'

‘Doesn't matter,' she replied, smiling brightly. ‘Presumably I just haven't got the knack. No big deal. And I won't persecute you about doing magic any more. And I do think it's really clever of you, and so cool.'

In retrospect, Paul decided later, that was probably the moment that Cupid decided to stop mucking about with bows and arrows and went in with the old cold steel. In the past, people had occasionally told him that he was kind of sweet, but that was about as far as it went. Even Sophie hadn't said nice things about him. Praise and flattery came his way about as often as claret and foie gras did to someone in prison. Probably he mumbled something by way of reply, some sort of denial or half-hearted rebuttal, he couldn't remember. Love he'd just about learned to handle. Admiration, on the other hand, was as new, strange and intimidating to him as photography to a Trobriand Islander, and deep down he was afraid that it just might steal his soul.

Paul could remember pointing out that it was getting late and they'd better get back to the office; and Melze had looked slightly sad, because their time together was almost over. To someone whose relatives had been known to put their clocks forward an hour to hasten his departure, that was dangerously rich, too. All in all, when he knocked on Countess Judy's door at a quarter past two for their scheduled meeting, he felt as though he'd just drunk a pint of champagne far too quickly: light-headed and blown up like a balloon.

‘I expect you've been wondering,' Countess Judy was saying, ‘about how magic works.'

Paul gulped so sharply that he almost gave himself hiccups. ‘Well,' he said, ‘it's crossed my mind occasionally, yes.'

She nodded, just a little, like a nodding dog in the back window of a Cortina abandoned in the desert. ‘It didn't occur to you to ask, of course. Instead, you preferred to try and figure it out from first principles. Maybe a rather strange way of demonstrating your commitment to your chosen career.'

Suddenly he was in trouble again; but he was used to that. Having spent so much of his life in the wrong that it counted as his domicile for tax purposes, he could slip as effortlessly into guilty mode as a cat through a cat flap. ‘Sorry,' he said.

She didn't react. ‘At the very least,' she said, ‘you could've come and asked me for a book about it. There are several, you know. But instead, you think about it. And no doubt you've reached a conclusion.'

It took Paul a second or two to realise that she was asking him a question. ‘Well, sort of,' he said. ‘Only now I'm pretty sure it's wrong,' he added.

‘Let me be the judge of that.'

So he explained, for the second time in sixty minutes, how he thought (had previously thought) magic worked. When he'd ground to a halt, the Countess looked at him for a moment, then went on as if he hadn't said anything.

‘Magic,' she said, ‘falls into two distinct categories. There is practical magic, and effective magic. So far, you've experienced a little practical magic. I'm concerned almost entirely with the other kind.'

Pause. Paul knew better now than to give in to the urge to fill these silences with inane chatter.

‘Practical magic,' the Countess said, ‘is magic that does something. It cleans a dirty cup, for example, or shifts a mountain a metre to the left. Effective magic, by contrast, creates an effect. It makes you believe something that may not be true – like, for instance, a love potion. You'll shortly come to learn that a great deal of magic which you believe is practical is in fact effective, for the simple reason that it's often easier and cheaper to make someone
believe
something is true than actually to make it so; and we are, after all, in business to earn a living. Are you with me so far?'

To his surprise, he was. He nodded.

‘I'll give you an example,' she went on. ‘Imagine, if you will, a young and immature magical practitioner, who gets drunk and meets a policeman in the street. The policeman is about to arrest him, so he forces the policeman to eat his own truncheon. Would that be,' she asked, vulture-eyed, ‘practical or effective magic?'

Practical, of course, since it was making someone do something. It was so obvious it had to be a trick question. ‘Effective,' he said.

‘Very good. Why?'

Paul looked at her. ‘Don't know,' he confessed.

‘Clearly,' the Countess said. ‘Effective, because the young magician, untutored and untrained, will not have mastered the exceptionally difficult and abstruse skills required to practice telekinesis on human nerves and muscle. It'd be very difficult. I could do it.'
Yes
, Paul thought,
I bet you could
. ‘But I would find it difficult, and the effort involved would be out of all proportion to the benefits to be gained. Instead, the young magician would simply persuade the policeman that what he most wanted to do in all the world at that exact moment was take his truncheon and bite it as hard as he possibly could, until his teeth started to snap off. And that,' she added casually, ‘is very easy. So easy, in fact, that humans with no talent whatsoever can sometimes be trained to do it. You've heard,' she said, ‘of hypnotism.'