Little People (24 page)

‘Talk English, you stupid woman. It isn't what?'

Honestly. To judge by the look on her face you'd think I'd just eaten her cat. ‘It isn't all right,' she simpered. ‘In fact, it's not very right at all. We think—' You could see she was all tensed up about something; probably that time of the month. ‘Well, we think you should go back.'

I tell you, you could've blown me down with a fart. ‘You what?'

‘It seems to us,' Melissa went on, averting her eyes like I was a road accident or something, ‘that you haven't really fitted in terribly well since you arrived, which makes us think you probably aren't all that happy here—'

‘Only because you buggers won't give me the chance,' I pointed out. ‘Bloody hell, every time I try and have a bit of fun, or even just put my feet up and veg out for half an hour, some daft clown zaps me into the middle of next week. Idiotic thing to do, and I won't stand for it. Apart from that, though, I could probably get used to it here.'

Somehow, I got the impression that the elves didn't want that to happen.

I wouldn't have thought it was possible for me to get angrier than I was already; but, as so often, I surprised myself by my ability to rise to the occasion. ‘For God's sake,' I snapped, ‘I wish you green-faced bunch of freaks'd make your stupid minds up, once and for all. One minute you're practically kidnapping me, and you—' Meaningful scowl at Melissa. ‘The moment I got here, you were trying to tear my clothes off. You don't need a degree in psychology to figure out what was on your mind.'

Melissa made a tiny whimpering noise, like a small dog whose tail's got sucked up the Hoover. ‘It wasn't like that at all, I thought we were—' She stopped and pulled herself together, or at least, she managed to rally some of the outlying areas. Pulling herself together would've netted all the king's horses and all the king's men some pretty juicy overtime. ‘I think we both got hold of the wrong end of the stick,' she said. ‘You see—'

‘Impossible,' I pointed out.

‘Sorry?'

‘We can't both have got hold of the wrong end of the stick,' I explained. ‘Stick's only got two ends, so one of 'em would have to be the right one. Do try and express yourself a bit more clearly, otherwise it's bloody wearing trying to make out what you're trying to say.'

Reasonable enough observation, I thought; but that bunch of goggle-eyed mutants just looked at each other and shuddered with refined disgust. If I'd had the energy I'd have given them something to shudder about.

‘My apologies,' Melissa said frostily. ‘What I meant to say was, we feel that we've made a serious error of judgement by encouraging you to come and settle here, when it's quite obvious that this environment really isn't at all suitable for someone with your temperament and attitude. So we all think—'

I waved a hand in a vague gesture of reassurance. ‘It's all right,' I said. ‘Please, don't get your knickers in a twist on my account. Look, if it makes you feel any better, I forgive you. There, now you can all stop wetting yourselves with sublimated guilt and shove off.'

‘Actually,' Melissa said, with a little tremor in her voice, ‘not us. You.'

All I could do for a moment was stare. ‘
Me
?'

She nodded. ‘You,' she said. ‘We'd be very grateful indeed if you could possibly see your way at some point in the nearish future to going sort of away. Please,' she added.

‘What? You're telling me to fuck off?'

Melissa sighed; the sigh seemed to be coming up out of the ground, like a geyser with wind. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘If you wouldn't mind too awfully much.'

‘Oh really? And if I
do
mind?'

‘Then we'd all feel terribly upset about it and blame ourselves for making you so unhappy.'

‘But I'd still have to fuck off?'

‘Yes.'

I didn't know what to say. I'd never been thrown out of a parallel dimension before. ‘But where am I supposed to go?' I demanded. ‘Fuck it, this is my home. I haven't got anywhere else. All thanks,' I pointed out,' to you lot.'

They didn't like that one bit; I could see them all squirming in unison. Enough to give a bloke vertigo.

‘Well, actually,' said an elf in the second row, in a teeny-tiny little voice, ‘you have sort of lived most of your life over the other side, so—'

‘Oh sure,' I grunted. ‘And what a life it's been. Ever since I was a kid it's been sheer hell, and you want to know why? Because of you. Because, when I was still a little snotnose brat, I saw an elf. Have you any idea what that did to me? And that was just the start; since then I've vanished, been declared officially dead, lost a staggeringly huge amount of money and the only girl I ever loved; and if I ever show my face on the other side again, Daddy George'll have me hunted down like a cockroach in the Ritz and killed. Oh, and while we're at it, I'm half an elf. Half of me is one of you creeps, so I've got every bit as much right to be here as the whole bunch of you put together. So there.'

‘Actually,' Melissa whispered, ‘that's not entirely true either. Not if we all say you've got to go.'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' I shouted. ‘Or are you trying to tell me that your laws allow you to sling someone out of your poxy little world just because you don't like his face?'

‘We haven't got any laws,' Melissa said.

‘Haven't got any . . . ? Pull the other one, it's got a big heavy boot on the end. Of course you've got laws. Everybody's got
laws
.'

‘We haven't. We don't need them, you see, everybody here's civilised and nice. Everybody except—'

‘Except me.'

‘Nearly everybody,' Melissa said glumly. ‘So yes, if we say we think it's be quite a good thing if you were to go somewhere else, then, strictly speaking, you've got to go.'

‘Really,' I said, folding my arms defiantly. ‘And if I decide I don't want to go, who the bloody hell's going to make me?'

‘Um,' Melissa said. ‘Well, us.'

I laughed. ‘You. Oh, right. My God, I'm so scared.'

‘It's all right,' another elf broke in hastily, ‘we won't hurt you. It'll all be done as quickly and painlessly as possible. You honestly won't feel a thing.'

‘Too frigging right I won't,' I snorted. ‘Because the only thing I'll be feeling is my fist pushing your teeth down your poxy turkey throats. And don't say I haven't give you fair warning.'

Melissa looked so sad that if I hadn't been boiling with righteous fury I couldn't have helped feeling sorry for her. ‘Please,' she said, ‘just think of all the good you could do over on the other side. Rescuing all those poor elves trapped in your stepfather's factories, for a start. It'd be such a wonderful thing to do, we'd all be ever so grateful, and there isn't actually anybody else who could do it – well, apart from Santa Claus, of course, but he's ever so busy choosing toys for the children—'

‘Hey.'

‘Sorry?'

‘Stop drivelling,' I told her. ‘It's bad enough you coming here with a lynch mob trying to run me out of town without you drivelling on as well. I can't hear myself think for your incessant bloody yattering.'

‘Sorry.'

‘And don't keep saying you're sorry. I told you before—'

While I was still talking (how rude can you get?) they tried it on; I could feel the force of their united willpower pressing down on me like a vast soggy weight, beginning to push me down through the interface the way you'd stick a pen through damp blotting paper. No chance; I was, after all, half an elf, and half-human too, which gave me a huge reserve of bloody-mindedness and annoyability that their more rarefied genetic makeup denied them. I dug my extradimensional heels in and pushed back. They stopped shoving and stared at me.

‘Pathetic,' I said. ‘You're going to have to do better than that if you want to get rid of me. Now quit pissing about, before I lose my temper.'

Picture serried ranks of six-foot elves all sagging in unison. Funniest thing you could ever hope to see. Of course, I said to myself, two can play at that game. I reached out with whatever it was I'd been pushing back with, and sent the front two ranks sprawling in the grass. ‘I'm warning you,' I said. ‘Or do you want me to find out just how hard I can swat with this thing? I'm up for it if you are.'

It was rather satisfying to watch all those elves scrambling up and scurrying off to the sides, clearly scared out of their feeble wits. I'd often wondered what it'd feel like to push people around, after a lifetime of being on the other end of the procedure; for the first time, I could fully understand where all the kids who'd bullied me at school got their kicks from.

‘Please don't do that,' said an elf. ‘We have a saying here, a punch is the shortest distance between two victims. You're hurting yourself more than you're hurting us.'

I grinned. ‘No, I'm not,' I said. ‘Here, I'll show you,' I added, scattering another swathe of the buggers. ‘See? Didn't hurt me a bit.'

Before that lot had picked themselves up off the deck and legged it into the wings, I felled another tranche, and another one after that. Resistance? They were too scared. And to think I'd been missing this much fun all my life!

‘Stop it Michael, please!' There was Melissa, or at least her head, sticking out from under a pile of toppled elves. ‘Stop now, before it's too late!'

I ignored her and launched another sweep at the last few still standing. Down they went. But when they picked themselves up, they didn't run like the others. They just stood there instead. That struck me as off, and prompted me to wonder where the others had run to.

A quick look round answered that question. They hadn't run so much as regrouped; in fact, they had me surrounded.
Big deal
, I thought. Couldn't matter less to me which direction they came from, there still wasn't anything they could do.

‘Well,' I sneered, ‘what are you waiting for?'

They didn't move. Too scared, I reckoned, to do anything except stand there and cower. More chicken than Colonel Sanders.

By the time I realised what they were really up to, and that the real reason for their regrouping was to form a circle in the grass around me, it was significantly too late.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
he first thing that struck me when I opened my eyes was that I wasn't in Elfland any more. The second thing was a boot.

It was a black boot, as I recall, with decorative white stripes stitched up the side, and several rows of studs moulded into the sole. It seemed to take an awful long time getting to me as I lay on my back watching it, and yet by the time it made contact with my jaw I got the impression that it was travelling really rather fast. One of those relativistic paradoxes, I guess.

About half a second after that, someone blew a whistle.

I was a bit too preoccupied with the pain in my face to be properly aware of what was going on around me, but there seemed to be a whole bunch of people in shorts and long woolly socks standing around, and I think I heard someone asking someone else where the fuck he – me, presumably – had suddenly appeared from. A wonderful thing, the human brain; even while I was still three-quarters stunned from the kick, a part of my brain was patiently, diligently sorting through the data and analysing various alternative hypotheses. Shorts, for example, might be taken to imply a hot summer on the beach; but the muddy grass and long socks suggested winter, which also happened to be the football season. Add in the whistle and the studded boots, unsheathe Occam's razor and there you have it. A football match.

‘Yes, you,' said a voice directly over me, ‘I'm talking to you. What do you think you're playing at? And how did you get on the pitch in the first place?'

It was at about this stage in the proceedings that I became aware of approximately twenty thousand people watching me. Yes, they were a long way away, behind a load of barriers, but even so it was a bit embarrassing.

‘Well?'

Even if I'd had a plausible explanation all worked out and ready to roll, my jaw wasn't exactly in prime working condition, which made it pretty well impossible for me to say anything much apart from ‘Aung'. This didn't seem to have occurred to the owner of the voice, who must accordingly have taken my silence for dumb insolence.

(That same scrupulously conscientious part of my brain that had figured out the football match solution now chimed in to point out that since everything in Elfland is the same as it is here, apart from the differences, if when I'd left Elfland I'd been surrounded by a huge crowd of people, it was only logical that a similar crowd would be all around me as soon as I reached the human side. Very well-reasoned and helpful, my internal research department; if only I'd known how, I'd have fired the lot of them.)

‘On your feet,' somebody said; a different voice, though, but nevertheless familiar. ‘I said, on your – oh, for crying out loud. You.'

A face appeared, looming up in front of me. Hardly surprising that I remembered him, since in my timescale it was only a few hours since the last time he'd arrested me. I was impressed, however, that he recognised me so readily. Still, I guess a policeman needs a good memory for faces.

‘You know this clown?' muttered the first voice.

‘Too right,' said the policeman, sideways. ‘I nicked him five years ago for vagrancy.'

Five years . . . With my jaw still numb, all I could do was groan.

‘Fine,' said the first voice. (I decided I didn't like him very much, whoever he was). ‘Practice makes perfect, arrest him again. Assault. He head-butted my boot.'

It may just have been my imagination, but the policeman seemed to hesitate for a split second. Then he told me to get up.