Little People (15 page)

(The thing about elves is that, because they can choose which bits of their lives to experience in real time, so to speak, quite apart from making a lifespan last ever so much longer than humans can, they tend only to bother with the nice stuff. This has had the effect, over many thousands of years, of making them nauseatingly cheerful and pleasant and charitable and good-natured, while poor human suckers have to put up with all the tedious garbage, which is why they're all so miserable.)

Anyhow, enough about that. Back to the little girl. There she is, one Christmas Eve, lying in bed waiting for it to be morning so she can scamper down the little wooden hill and start shredding wrapping-paper. She hears a clunk, down below in the living room.
Hooray
, she thinks,
It's Santa!

Now, 999,999 times out of 1,000,000 she'd be wrong. Because of the various phenomena cited above, the actual amount of perceptible time Santa spends in any one house is something like a ninety-millionth of a nanosecond. In, get the job done, gobble the mince pie, swill the milk, out again like a rat up a kilt. But sometimes, in, say, one household in twenty million, he'll stop for a minute or so just to catch his breath, check his list, blow his nose, whatever. Throughout this time, of course, the transdimensional rift is wide open, which means that if an inquisitive and extremely stealthy little girl creeps downstairs and sneaks into the living room just as Santa's finished his breather and is all ready to get back to work, there's a risk, slight but real, that she might get sucked into the hyperspatial anomaly by the backwash of depolarised temporal ions (I'm making all this pseudo-technical garbage up, but you get the general idea) and find herself stuck in Elfland before she knows what's hit her.

Her name, by some sublime irony, was Carol. She was five years old when the vortex gobbled her up. As soon as the nice elves on the other side found her and realised what'd happened, they knew she'd have to go back, though of necessity they'd have to wait until next Christmas before it'd be possible to return her. A whole year in Elfland.

Being responsible and caring, the elves knew that the best thing for her would be to fast-forward her through her year of exile and fiddle the temporal divergence calibrations so she'd arrive back no more than five seconds after the moment in real time when she'd left; she'd still be five years old, her memories would seem like a pleasant dream, and everything would be OK. But, being loving and sweet to the point where they'd constitute a lethal threat to a diabetic, they couldn't bring themselves to do this. After all, a year in Elfland – how could they deprive this innocent wee mite of such a wonderful experience? Whisking her through it in a fingersnap and then effectively invalidating her memories? Too cruel, they felt, too callous and unfeeling.

Well, as I mentioned a moment ago, elves are red-hot when it comes to maths and physics. In most other respects, they've got the intelligence and common sense of educationally subnormal plankton.

Time passes, you see, even in Elfland. Especially in Elfland. One year on their side of the line can work out as anything from twenty to a thousand years on the human side, depending on a lot of technical stuff that I don't think even they understand. Furthermore, because Time is so profoundly squiffy there, the process of ageing works rather differently: everybody zooms to the age between eighteen and thirty that suits them best, and there they stay. There are no children and no wrinklies in Elfland, and no ugly or sick folks either – just healthy, beautiful young people. Imagine California, or the offices of a television company.

You can see where this is going, can't you? About ten minutes after setting pink-slippered foot on elf turf, little Carol was a gorgeous twenty-three-year-old, albeit with the outlook, experience and world-view of a wee tot. This would've been a problem if the same wasn't basically true of everybody else there.

And the highly predictable happened, as it so often does: she met a cute elf and they fell in love. Everybody in Elfland, without exception or excuse, is in love, needless to say, and everybody's love is perfectly requited, without any of the angst and mess that humans have to put up with, and they spend about ninety per cent of their time drifting vapidly from enchanted grove to fern-trimmed lake, hand in hand, gazing into each other's eyes like deranged optometrists.

Had Carol and her lover both been elves, of course, there wouldn't have been a problem. Without getting into the embarrassing details, little baby elves don't happen the same way that little baby humans do. (Actually, the stork brings them. Honest.) Accordingly, elves are rather less fussy about certain aspects of amatory relationships than humans are since the worst and most inconvenient thing that can happen is grass-stains on the elbows of their shirts. And, since most elves know approximately as much about humans as humans do about them, they naturally assume that it works the same way for
Homo sapiens
.

Unfortunately it doesn't.

So; when Carol – my mum – returned to the human side a year later, wafted back across the line on a flying sleigh drawn by eight light-speed-capable reindeer, she unwittingly brought with her a little souvenir of her visit, which soon grew into a big souvenir, namely me.

When she reached home, there were a few more surprises waiting for her. No sooner had Santa deposited her at chimney's end than she noticed that her living room had changed somewhat since she'd last been there. Different wallpaper, different carpets and curtains, different furniture, not to mention five unshaven men in shirtsleeves sitting round a table playing stud poker.

There was, inevitably, a certain initial awkwardness. The card-players, who were sports reporters working for a certain tabloid newspaper, weren't nearly as surprised as members of almost any other calling might have been at finding a beautiful girl in a very short skirt and green tights suddenly in their midst, and for a few minutes Carol couldn't make herself heard about the baying sound of the four guests thanking their host for his extremely imaginative hospitality. Eventually, several spilled beers and slapped faces later the truth was gradually winked out of its shell. Carol's parents didn't live there any more; they'd sold the house over ten years ago, and the present owner had been living there ever since – ‘ever since', in this context, meaning eight years.

Needless to say, the story made the front page of a certain tabloid newspaper the very next working day. A quick rummage in the files had turned up the story of the little girl who'd vanished without trace on Christmas Eve eighteen years ago, and one glance at the archive photos and the girl who'd come down the chimney was enough to confirm the latter's identity. In the limited time available the reporters weren't able to locate Carol's parents, but it was a fair bet that wherever they lived now, a copy of the paper would reach them before the day was out.

When Carol's mummy and daddy saw the picture under the inspired headline –

I WAS ABDUCTED BY ALIENS,

CLAIMS ESSEX BEAUTY

– they could hardly believe their eyes. As you can imagine, the disappearance of their only daughter had done a fairly thorough job of screwing up their lives, and getting her back – radiant, healthy and clutching an exclusive-rights contract that was worth three times as much as their house - was truly the stuff of dreams and fairy tales. At once her father threw in his job sweeping floors at the local abattoir in order to become her business manager, and they settled down in confident expectation of a golden future of love, togetherness and lucrative product endorsements. Even the discovery that a little stranger was on the way was greeted as a marvellous blessing (I'M CARRYING ALIEN'S LOVE CHILD, REVEALS TV'S CAROL). In short, despite all the pain and loss and confusion surrounding the unfortunate affair, everything seemed as firmly locked on to the happy ending as a wire-guided missile when an unexpected visitor showed up at the gatehouse of the family's new 4,500-acre Wiltshire estate.

You've guessed it. Humans, being born to sorrow, expect love not to last and are accordingly equipped to get over it. Not so elves. After pining as tragically as a restaurant critic on a diet, Carol's elven lover had turned desperate. He hijacked the sleigh, rustled the reindeer and punched a nasty jagged hole in the spatio-temporal whatsisface big enough to drive a century through.

Being an elf – sheer tabasco at long division but otherwise thick as a brick – he hadn't planned any further ahead than actually breaching the barrier and getting to the human side. I guess he assumed that once he was across, kindly humans would pick him up, give him some warm bread and milk, and take him to see his beloved. As luck would have it a bunch of humans did find him almost immediately; with the result that, ten hours after leaving Elfland and trashing the sleigh, he found himself sitting in a glass tank in a strange, rather grim-looking building in the middle of nowhere, while serious men in white coats and carrying clipboards drew off syringefuls of his blood and attached electrodes to various parts of his anatomy.

It was all rather unpleasant to begin with - which was strange, because the serious men turned out to be scientists (in the broadest sense of the term; he soon discovered that by elf standards their knowledge of science was ludicrously elementary) and so they should have had a lot in common and been friends, especially after he taught them a few junior bite-sized gobbets of basic theory that just about blew their minds. But the more he told them, the more needles they stuck into him and the less inclined they were to let him go. He tried asking nicely, then asking nicely but forcefully, then insisting. They took no notice. Finally, twenty-four hours after landing, he was forced to the conclusion that the people on this side of the line weren't as nice as elves, not by some considerable margin.

Whether it was because he was upset at the way he'd been treated, or whether it was something to do with gradually adapting himself to his new environment, the elf started to get annoyed. Annoyance escalated into irritation, irritation erupted into outright crossness, and the resulting explosion gouged a crater three-quarters of a mile wide and blew out windows in three adjacent villages. A cross elf is a dangerous entity, not to mention a cartographer's nightmare.

Once he realised what he'd done, and that the building disappearing in a sheet of red and yellow fire was all his fault, the elf was filled with horror and dismay. He sat at the very centre of the crater, watching the twisted steel girders dropping out of the sky like autumn leaves and wondering, for the first time, whether he might not have been better advised to stay at home and find someone else. But the feeling passed – remarkably quickly, in fact – and in its place was a little raw patch of resentment.
Dratted humans
, he said to himself,
being all nasty and horrid like that
. In a sense, it almost served them right, picking on a visitor from another dimension and making a pincushion out of him. Sure enough, he was very sad about the damage he'd done, especially the scientists he'd reduced to a fine red mist, but it had to be said, if they didn't want to be vaporised they shouldn't have shone lights in his eyes and prodded his tongue with wooden sticks. What was more, if any of them tried any more of that stuff, he'd probably do it again.

Now then, let's see if you've been paying attention. Elfland and our world are exactly the same (except for the differences). Consequently, every elf has a human counterpart, which does everything exactly the same (only differently). Therefore it follows that the lovestruck elf who'd gatecrashed our side of the line had a counterpart too, and that when the elf suddenly popped into existence and crash-landed in a field near Swindon, the counterpart had to be in precisely the same place.

Fortunately for him, the human counterpart (later known to me as Daddy George) had the good sense to leave that place, albeit only by about twenty yards, as soon as the fiery sleigh burst out of the sky and plummeted like a meteor or a dot-com share towards the ground. At the actual moment when the sleigh crashed into the exact same square food of grass he'd been standing on twenty seconds earlier, Daddy George was on the ground, rolling like a croquet ball, the unfortunate result of having put his foot down a rabbit hole as he scampered for cover. His head happened to coincide with a tree root, and he went to sleep for a while. When he woke up, the air was buzzing with helicopters, their floodlights scything the ground all about him and creating bizarre kaleidoscopic effects when they happened to coincide with the flashing blue lamps of the police's panda cars and the local hospital's ambulances.

Now, as everybody knows, the innocent citizen has nothing to fear from the police. Daddy George, on the other hand, was not an innocent citizen. The only reason he was in a cold, muddy field on a dark night was because he was on his way to steal a tractor, left lying around by some over-trusting farmer. The
son et lumière
of police helicopters evoked some painful memories in various strata of his subconscious, and as soon as he was able to get to his feet without falling over, he ran away as fast as he could in the first direction that came to hand.

Ah, you're saying, how could he do this? Surely if the cops and the guys in white coats and carrying clipboards had marched his elven oppo off to the freak-dissecting plant, he had no choice but to be there too.

Full marks for being the kind of observant, nit-picking, fault-finding reader who gives poor narrators ulcers. But you've failed to take into account (maybe because I haven't told you about it yet) the fact that once a stranger comes over from the other side, the link between him and his identical-except-for-the-differentbits twin is severed, although a strong subliminal urge to be close to him remains buried deep among the other submerged wiffin in the bottom of the shoebox of the mind.

Quite possibly it was this latent impulse that led Daddy George to try and burgle the secret government research station about ten seconds before the elf reduced it to widely dispersed brick dust. It's hard to think of any other reason why he should try and do such a bloody stupid thing.