Little People (19 page)

Spiffing
, I thought.
And I've just squashed his wastepaper basket. He won't take kindly to that.

There was, of course, the sensible option; namely flight. I was only about ten paces from the door; through that, up the stairs, across the top landing, down the other stairs and out into the back courtyard and relative safety. Sounds easy, put like that. I expect you could make a trek to the South Pole sound like a cakewalk, too, if you set your mind to it.

Still, if I was going, I'd better go. A fraction of a second later I was by the door, hand on the doorknob, the long road to freedom only a wrist's turn away. I stopped dead in my tracks, not even trying to move.

Because I'm stupid? No, not on this particular occasion. I think that if you'd been in my shoes, you'd (a) have done the same (b) have blisters on both heels.

What prompted me to stop was a mirror, hanging just to the east of the light switch. My guess is that our beloved headmaster hung it there so that he could make a final check on his appearance – fine-tune his scowl, get his eyebrows really meshed together in the middle – before going out where we could see him. Not my favourite person, our headmaster.

Anyhow . . . what do you suppose I saw in that mirror? Correct, a reflection. And everything I'd learned in physics about reflection and refraction of light led me to conclude that it couldn't help but be
my
reflection, an accurate – albeit reversed – depiction of my appearance.

And therein lay the problem.

The face looking back at me was recognisable, sure. There were my lorry-wing-mirror ears, my superfluous length of nose, my turkey neck and Kirk Douglas Lite chin, exactly the same as they'd been the last time I'd seen them; apart, that is, from the differences.

Now, it wasn't the strange and subtle rearrangement of features, the strengthening and softening and blurring of edges and drawing in of bits that stuck out, though they were remarkable enough. God knows, they were an improvement. You could pay a cosmetic surgeon a year's wages and you still wouldn't get such a complete and flattering make-over. Just consider that, will you? In the time it'd taken me to go to Elfland and back – no time at all, since
there
was
here
– I'd shed the unlovely appearance I'd been hatefully self-conscious about all my life and acquired a face that'd earn me a living doing aftershave commercials. And I didn't even realise it until some time later, because I was too preoccupied in a completely stunned sort of way, with the other difference, the one that made me retrace my steps back to the desk, where I happened to remember there was a calendar.

It was one of those thought-for-the-day calendars, and the pearl of wisdom it offered me was
You're only as old as you feel
. I pulled off the leaf, stared at it, laughed bitterly and dropped it into the ruins of the bin.

The date on the calendar was 12 January, just as it would have been when I left. But I'd left in 1985, and the calendar said 19
9
5. Which was bad, because it meant that the clean-cut, distinctly good-looking twenty-five-year-old dressed in a brown suede waistcoat and green tights that I'd just seen in the mirror was indeed me.

CHAPTER NINE

T
hat was when I heard footsteps.

Sometimes, you know, I wonder about evolution. As I understand it, the general idea is that over millions of years the process of natural selection has weeded out those traits that are useless or counterproductive and favoured those that tend towards success in Life's demolition derby. Fine; it sounds reasonable enough until you get down to cases. For instance: can anybody tell me why the hell blind, limb-freezing panic got included in the package, at the expense of, say, wings, or a back-up central nervous system, or telepathy?

So there I was, frozen to the spot, unable to think anything much except
shit fuck help buggery
(and it was only because I still had some of that wonderfully forceful, abrasive Elf-side-acquired personality left that I was able to think in swear words; but even that was slipping away, and before my microsecond of panic was over I'd already started replacing the strong language with
oh dear oh my help oh Lord
) and the footsteps got closer and closer; and before I could get a grip on myself and start scanning for useful stuff such as windows or built-in wardrobes or sofas I could crawl behind, the doorknob turned (in perceived time, it rotated as slowly as a large hourly paid planet) and the door opened, and this stranger walked in.

‘Who the bloody hell are you?' he asked.

If my other personality hadn't more or less completely drained away into the floor by then, leaving me with the rotten old non-boo-to-geese-saying default personality I'd had before I crossed the line, I might easily have asked him the same question. I'd been expecting (dreading, to be pedantically correct) the headmaster, a seven-foot-tall, vicious, steel-haired bastard with enormous eyebrows and a bald head like the Kremlin dome. This joker was shorter than me by a head, in his mid-thirties and wearing a Microsoft T-shirt. Of course, I didn't know about Microsoft, but my headmaster would rather have worn a barbed-wire shroud than a T-shirt of any description. This bloke was no more a headmaster than I was.

‘Well?' he repeated. ‘And what are you doing in my office?'

‘Um,' I replied, and all things considered, I reckon it was a pretty good effort.

‘What?'

I tried smiling. A smile defuses even the most tense social situation, as well as releasing endorphins or something of the sort into the bloodstream, making you more relaxed and better able to cope. At least, that's what I read in a dentist's waiting room once, though I have to say that I tried smiling at the dentist shortly afterwards, and it didn't work then, either. ‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I think I may be lost.'

The short man didn't seem very impressed by that. ‘I'm going to call the police,' he said. ‘Stay right there. If you move, I'll smash your face in.'

He'd have needed a stepladder to make good on that threat, but I wasn't looking for a fight, even if for once there was a one-in-a-million chance that I might win. ‘Please,' I said, ‘don't do that. Is this – I mean, I was at school here.'

That seemed to calm him down just a tad; at least he didn't reach for the phone on the desk. ‘So what?' he said. ‘This place hasn't been a school for nearly ten years. What gives you the right to go prowling round my office like you owned the place? And how did you get in, anyway?'

That last one was going to be tricky, I could tell, and I was just wondering, in a very abstract and theoretical way, whether bashing the bloke on the head and running for it might not be such a bad idea at that, when he took a step back and looked at me.

‘Hold on,' he said, ‘I know you.'

Well, I wasn't going to call him a liar to his face, even if his face was on a level with my collar-bone, but if we'd met I didn't remember. ‘Do you?' I asked.

He didn't answer straight away. Then a sort of combination one-size-fits-all smile and frown lip up his fairly commonplace features. ‘You're him, aren't you? Bloody hell, you
are
him. Where did you suddenly pop up from, then?'

Not terribly helpful, you'll agree. ‘I'm sorry,' I said, ‘but I don't quite follow. Who do you think I am?'

He laughed. ‘You're my special benefactor,' he said, relaxing perceptibly (but he was still firmly between me and the door). “It's all thanks to you I was able to buy this place. Well, bugger me. Where have you been all this time?'

I was morally certain he didn't want to know that. ‘Please,' I said, ‘will you tell me what you're talking about? Only I've been, um, away, and—'

He laughed. Heartless git. ‘Oh, you've been away all right. Don't you know what happened?'

The urge to belt him one on the nose was getting stronger by the second, and it didn't have much to do with effecting an escape. ‘No,' I said. ‘Will you tell me, please?'

‘You vanished,' he replied, grinning. ‘The way I understand it, one minute you were there, one of the pupils at this exclusive toffee-nosed private school, and the next you'd gone. No clues, no ransom note, nothing. Cops turned the area upside down for a fortnight, your picture was on the news and in the papers, and they never had a clue what'd happened to you. Course, once they'd given up the search, the smelly stuff really hit the fan – your family sued the school for ten million, the school had to close and sell up; I was lucky, I nipped in and did a deal with the receivers, got this joint for pennies. Thank you,' he added, beaming. ‘You did me a right favour there. Now fuck off out of here before I have you arrested.'

‘Yes, but—'

‘Yes but nothing,' he growled, his grin dying away suddenly. ‘I'm not a bloody lawyer, don't know about these things; for all I know, your turning up again and not being dead after all might mean the whole deal's off or something.' He scowled at me. ‘How do I know you're really him, anyway? For all I know, you might just be some con artist pretending to be him, just to get money off me.'

He was going a bit too fast for me. ‘It's all right,' I said, ‘I don't want any money from anybody, I just wanted to know where everybody'd gone. My parents,' I added, as what he'd just said finally permeated through my thick skull. ‘They think I'm dead?'

‘Everybody thinks you're dead,' he replied. ‘Come on, get real. Do you honestly think you'd be worth ten million quid to anybody if you were alive?'

An entirely valid observation, if tactlessly phrased. ‘Everybody,' I repeated. ‘Oh.'

You're way ahead of me, I expect. Well: if it'd been ten years, and everyone was sure I'd snuffed it, there was absolutely no reason to think that she might have waited for me. Probably married with two kids by now, and who wasn't to say she hadn't had a lucky escape? Which was assuming the relationship would've lasted beyond the puppy-love stage, which of course it wouldn't, because how many people do you know who married their childhood sweethearts? Nevertheless and even so;
shit
, I thought.
Bloody interfering elves
.

‘You still here?' the short man said.

‘What? Oh, I see what you mean.' I tried to remember how to move. ‘I'll be going now, shall I?'

‘You do that, sunshine. And listen: if you so much as breathe a word about being him and not being dead after all, my lawyers'll be all over you like flies on a dog turd, so you just watch it, understood?'

He got his gardener, a very large man called Kurt, to show me to the end of the drive; in case, presumably, I'd forgotten the way. One thing that was definitely new since my time was the radio-controlled twelve-foot-high gates and the razor-wire fence. Getting back in was definitely not going to be easy, assuming I ever wanted to. Which I didn't. Probably.

The railway station in the small town five miles down the road from the school had closed and been turned into a tyre-and-exhaust outfit; not that it mattered, since elves apparently don't use money. I sat down on a low wall as the rain started to drizzle, and reflected on what the Melissa elf had said. Sure, I could go back, but the person who arrived could never be me, just some old guy inconveniently returned from the dead. Did I still exist, I wondered; was the me who'd crossed over into Elfland stranded somewhere in some spatio-temporal waiting room, twiddling his thumbs in a vortex of warped chronology and reading back issues of
Scientific Aztec
? I couldn't see how that could be possible. He'd gone, been blitzed out of existence when I crossed over; not like the bits of data you're supposed to be able to retrieve from a crashed hard drive, but lost for ever. Properly speaking, he'd been lost when I
entered
Elfland, when my personality changed from pathetic little weed into arrogant, aggressive jerk. Now I was back home, the jerk was fading away and the weed was, so to speak, growing up again through the cracks; but I was now a twenty-five-year-old pathetic weed, which was a very different kettle of scampi from the fifteen-year-old variety. After all, I didn't feel all that different, I still had the mindset and database of experiences and overall gauche unloveliness of a teenager. (
You're as young as you feel
, quoth the calendar), which wasn't going to sit well in the body of a man who was meant to be ten years older, wiser and more mature. As far as I could see, I was inevitably doomed for a life of solitude, inadequacy, stunted emotional growth and working in local government.

Now to be fair, it's not as though I'd been anticipating a wonderful life and a glorious career even if I hadn't been scooped up and dumped in a deep pool of weirdness; I was, after all, the kid who'd seen the elf – I wasn't ever going to amount to very much. But . . . all right, I'd have been pathetic and sad no matter what happened, but at least I'd have been pathetic and sad with Daddy George's money to fall back on – was he going to welcome me home with open arms if it meant parting with ten million quid? Somehow I had my doubts about that one – and there was at least the slender possibility that I had actually found true love, if only for the short period of time that it took Cru to grow sick of the sight of me. As it was, I hadn't even had that.

Not fair
, I thought.
Not fair.

So I could jump under a bus (not a train, since there weren't any), or I could drift aimlessly through life getting trodden on and serve me bloody well right; or I could do what I'd promised Melissa and the Fuller elf I'd do as soon as I got here – in fact, wasn't that supposed to be the main reason for returning, this frightfully important wrong to be righted that mattered so desperately much to me that I'd clean forgotten all about it until now?

Yeah, right. Might as well. Nothing better to do.