Little People (27 page)

Still no answer required; and I was damned if I was going to be the straight man in this comedy routine. If he wanted to do stand-up, he'd have to do all the work himself.

‘But,' he went on, with a sigh like a Kansas twister, ‘much as I'd like to encourage you in your career in not living, I'm afraid this is one time when I can't afford to indulge your every whim. It's a distressing fault of mine, but having people killed just isn't my style – even,' he added thunderously, ‘people I could squash flat with one well-aimed swat and a rolled-up
Independent on Sunday
. There'd be this little voice in the back of my mind telling me I'm a rotten bully and why don't I pick on someone my own size? Besides,' he went on lugubriously, ‘you may be annoying and pathetic, not to mention a potential source of considerable embarrassment, but you're still the nearest thing I've got to a son of my own, and I suppose I'm just a great big softie.'

Well, two out of three, anyhow. I wasn't reassured by this declaration; if Daddy George had decided to keep me alive, it could only be for the purpose of finding out by controlled scientific experiment whether there really was a fate worse than death.

‘So instead,' he went on, ‘I'm going to be merciful and kind and even generous above and beyond the call. I'm going to start you off in the family business. At the bottom,' he added, ‘on the shop floor. But that's all right, isn't it?' he said. ‘It's so traditional it's practically compulsory. You'll enjoy it there. Plenty of your own kind, for one thing.'

I'd thought as much when he said the words ‘family business' – he was going to lock me up in the shoe factory with the rest of the slaves. As a future, it had a slight edge on being killed, but I'd sort of guessed that wasn't an immediate threat from the fact that I was still alive, albeit considerably condensed, like a
Readers Digest
potted novel. Why bother to bring me all the way here, instead of simply having his employees kill me back at the police station? No, he was too deeply into his James Bond villain trip; at the very least he'd keep me alive so I could watch him launch his secret master plan. (Utterly safe bet to assume he had one; a supervillain without a plan is as unthinkable as a headmaster without trousers.)

‘Thank you,' I replied. It was the first thing I'd said since my nasty slide down the Y axis, and although it sounded just normally loud to me, I don't think he heard me or even knew I'd spoken. No big deal; it wasn't exactly the cleverest thing I'd ever said. I think it was just a very deep-seated reflex prompting me to be polite to my elders and betters.

‘I'm assuming,' he thundered on, ‘that either you've figured out what happens here for yourself, or one of your prickle-eared relatives has told you the whole sad story. Just in case you're in any doubt, just think of it as the old folk tale of the shoemaker and the elves, updated and put on a sound commercial footing. Now I know you're far too feeble and chickenshit to cause me anything interesting enough to merit the term trouble, but just in case you're minded to make a pest of yourself here's a couple of things you might care to consider. First, the height thing isn't the only useful effect of my electric elf-zapper. I won't bore you with the technical stuff and you're too ignorant to understand it anyway, but what it boils down to is that the zapper freezes you in a state of interdimensional flux, whereby about ninety-five per cent of you is on this side of the line, and the other five per cent is over there among the Kate Greenaway types. Not only does this limit you to a much smaller slice of our airspace – there's a diminishing-returns effect that you'd find utterly fascinating if you were really enough of a mathematician to spell Nobel prize, let alone win one, but you're not, so screw it; it also means that the only people who can see you are either humans with amazingly complicated light-band filters built into their contact lenses – of whom there's presently one and you're looking up at him – and other elves. So,' he continued with an edge to his voice that you could've performed surgery with, ‘if you think you can give me the slip, make a run for it and go find your mother, who'll save you from me and make everything all right again, forget it. For what little it's worth, she hasn't got the faintest idea how I earn my living; she thinks I'm just exceptionally good at running a business, which is true but not nearly enough in these hard times.
She
thinks you were kidnapped by aliens, which is why she gives millions of dollars a year to the flying-saucer freaks in hopes they'll find the bug-eyed critters who took you and persuade them to bring you back.' He sighed, nearly blowing me off the desk. ‘Your mother may be as thick as a lorryload of bricks, but she has an extraordinarily compassionate nature. In fact, she's a truly wonderful person, and it's a very great shame that she's had to go through so much sorrow and pain on account of a worthless little gob of snot like you. Oh, and in case you were wondering, because we never ever got around to having one of those quality-time stepfather-to-stepson chats that can make all the difference in an awkward family structure, I don't like you very much. Never have, never will; and if you think I enjoy having to pretend that what measure of success I've had in the last fifteen years or so is down to your incredibly prodigious talents rather than my own hard work, scientific genius and sheer dogged determination, then you take after your mother when it comes to thickness quotients. Any questions?'

All the time he'd been talking, I'd been fidgeting around inside my mind, looking for a volume control. I knew there had to be one, because I could remember how Melissa had been able to speak up so I could hear her, when she'd been over this side of the line. Eventually I did find it, purely by fluke; I have no idea what I did, but it worked.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘If you don't mind my asking. What happened to my
real
father?'

He laughed. ‘I was telling you how clever I am,' he said, ‘and there's a case in point. Now, if you were good enough at maths to be able to do long division without a calculator, you'd have figured out for yourself that having me and him together in the same dimension wouldn't be a good idea; a bit like mixing matter and antimatter in a cocktail shaker with a sprig of mint and an olive. It was only the fag end of the original interface that saved England from getting blown into orbit, that night when I nobbled the creep; whittling him down to your present size helped a bit, because the five per cent of him on the other side helped stabilise the whole mess a little, just long enough for me to invent an unbelievably cool and brilliant dimensional-implosion stabiliser – think of it as a magnetic acroprop wedged under the crumbling foundations of the cosmos – that sorted the problem out once and for all and also gave me a stable interface with a wonderful source of cheap labour.' He laughed again. ‘Bless their feckless little hearts,' he added. ‘No matter how much evidence snowdrifts up to the contrary, there'll always be a healthy supply of utterly stupid people, your side and this, who truly believe they can get a fresh start and a new, wonderful life just by crossing a border. Greenbacks, I call 'em, and long may they continue to trickle through. Anyhow, your old man. Well, I needed a specimen for some fairly essential tests I had to do in order to calibrate the interface controls, so I sent him back. All of him,' he added cheerfully. ‘Eventually.'

I suddenly felt cold, as if I'd just stepped out of a warm house into the snow. ‘You killed him, then,' I said.

The great laugh rolled out once more. ‘You bet I did,' he said. ‘In fact, saying I killed him is a bit like saying America is bigger than the Isle of Wight. I killed him a
lot
. Partly for sound commercial, just-business-nothingpersonal reasons, because he'd been the one who burst through the interface and might have used his elves-being-good-at-sums brains to figure out a way of jamming it up. Partly because of what he'd been and done with your mother – and bringing you into my life, let's not forget that. Partly, I suppose, because by the very nature of things he was my exact equal and opposite, so it's just straightforward physics that I'd have to cancel him out. But mostly because he was a pointy-eared green-skinned freak, and I hate elves. Always have, ever since I was a snot-nosed brat. I was drawing horns and blackening teeth on pictures of elves in my
First-Ever Story Book
before I could walk, and if Tolkien was alive today I'd have him executed for crimes against humanity. That's mostly why I killed your dad. That, and I needed something to do my experiments on, like I said. One thing I've never ever been guilty of is random, senseless violence. Don't hold with it – complete waste of time and effort.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘Well, thank you for explaining.'

That made him laugh even louder. ‘Oh yes,' he said, ‘that sort of thing puts it beyond a shadow of a doubt, you really are one of them. Only an elf could thank his father's murderer for taunting him with it. You people, you're worse than Canadians. Well, as bad as, anyway.'

I couldn't really think of anything else to say to him; the sheer size of what he'd done was so unimaginable, like he was himself, that even hating him seemed faintly ridiculous, like trying to exact a terrible vengeance on the sea by pissing in Morecambe Bay. In fact, just being in the same space as him was starting to make me feel almost embarrassed. He was overdoing the Evil Overlord stuff so painfully that he was undercutting his own credibility. To be helpless and at the mercy of a vicious, sadistic monster is one thing; being in the power of a vicious, sadistic
silly
monster, the sort who'd prompt you to yawn and switch channels if you saw him on the box, is something else entirely. It's a very bad sign when you can't respect your arch-enemy.

(And he was being so like himself, too; that may have been the worst thing of all. The harsh mocking laughter, the melodramatic exaggerations, the brutal insults – these were all things I'd fidgeted and stifled yawns through all my life, in respect of such issues as broken windows, untidy rooms and unfinished mashed potato. It was all so dreadfully familiar, and familiarity was breeding what it always tends to breed with the speed and efficiency of a state-of-the-art rabbit factory farm.)

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘this is a moment I'm going to savour for a very long time. I'd like to say that all through your childhood I tried to like you, or at least get to the point where I could be in the same room with you without wanting to throw up; but we can't have everything we want in this life and that's all there is to it. Like I said just now, you're the closest thing I've ever had to a kid of my own, and that's still too bloody close for me.

So I guess this is goodbye for ever, you horrible little shit.'

There he went again: I don't know, maybe he believed it himself. But the plain fact was that he hadn't always been like that – oh, sure, he'd never exactly been a TV-commercial father, playing football in the backyard and taking me fishing at weekends, but there had been times, not many but some, when he'd forgotten he was the arch-villain wicked stepfather and been quite normal, even relatively pleasant. When I was ten, he'd made me a kite and helped me build a plastic scale-model kit of the
Ark Royal
. You'd never have caught Darth Vader doing that, or at least not in the version I saw.

If this really was the last time I'd ever see him, I had a feeling I'd miss him.

‘Bye, then,' I said. ‘And thank you for the kite.'

‘Kite?' He blinked, then nodded. ‘Oh,' he said, ‘
that
kite. The one I got you just so as to lull you into a false sense of security, and then you flew it slap bang into a tree first time out and shredded the bloody thing.'

I wondered if he'd been resenting that all these years. Well, obviously he had. But really it was his fault, he'd mucked up the airframe and the kite wouldn't fly straight. But that was typically him, too, rewriting history so everything was someone else's fault and done regardless of his best efforts to avert disaster, usually just to spite him.

If he hadn't been twelve times bigger than me and about to send me to a forced labour camp to die, I'd probably have felt sorry for him.

He must've pressed some kind of hidden bell or buzzer, because I heard the door sweep open behind me, and tyrannosaurus footsteps padding towards me from behind. Call me a pessimist if you must, but I had an idea that this probably wasn't a positive development, seen from my perspective.

‘Well,' boomed Daddy George, ‘I suppose this is it. You know, things just won't be the same without you hanging round the place – I mean, they'll be better, absolutely no question about that, but they'll be different. Not all that different, of course, because you've been away fifteen years, but somehow knowing you'll be gone for good – it's like the place where the aching tooth you had pulled out used to be not hurting any more. The end of an era, if you like. Goodbye.'

‘Goodbye,' I replied, half a second before a giant hand closed around me and hoisted me into first the air, second a Marks & Spencer plastic carrier bag. (One instance where putting your name and logo on your give-away peripherals proved to be counter-productive; for some reason I blamed them for their unwitting complicity and swore an oath never to buy another pair of socks from them as long as I lived.) I hit the bottom of the bag squirming, gave that up as a bad job and flopped.

‘All right,' said Daddy George, ‘he's all yours. Here you go.'

A rustle and a vertiginous vertical take-off suggested that he was handing the bag over to whoever it was who'd just come in. Some thug, I supposed, or hired myrmidon. Still—

Still, I said to myself, mostly in a vain effort to take my mind off the stomach-churning unpleasantness of being carried around in a plastic bag. (Guilt spanned a chasm of years, whisking me back to a ten-year-old me carrying home a goldfish I'd won at a fair; in particular the moment when I nearly dropped the poor wee sod, and only managed to retrieve it inches from the ground with a rather remarkable juggling catch.) Still, this wasn't so much an ending as a new beginning. True, it was the beginning of a long and probably horrible career in the shoe manufacturing business, and I'd have had to be as optimistic as twelve short planks to believe that it was going to be fun, challenging, fulfilling or a barrel of laughs. But at least I'd be somewhere, doing something, able to go to sleep at night with a moderate chance of waking up the next morning in the same place in the same dimension, the same size and only a few hours older than when I'd gone to bed. And yes, I'd just lost the only girl I'd ever loved, just when I was on the point of uncrossing the galaxy of crossed stars we'd somehow managed to blunder into; and yes, this time it did rather look as if I'd lost her for ever, since even if we did ever meet again, I'd be six inches tall and she wouldn't be able to see me. But – actually there wasn't a ‘but' to that one, it was a silver-lining-free zone and immune to all forms of positive thinking and bright-side visual inspection.
Damn
, I thought.
Still, better than being dead. Probably.