Little People (29 page)

‘There you go,' said the sad elf. ‘Watch what you're doing, don't fall off the shelves or get under the loads when they're shifting. ‘Snot fair to the rest of the lads, having to scrape you off the deck.'

‘I can see that,' I told him. ‘I'll try and be careful.'

His shrug suggested that he'd heard that one before. ‘Right,' he said, ‘I'll be getting back. If you get any problems,' he added, and rounded off the statement with a vague hand gesture.

‘Thanks again,' I said.

He sighed, shook his head and walked away.

As I set off to plod the remaining distance to the foot of the nearest shelving unit, I tried to imagine what all this lot would look like if I were a story-book giant, five feet six in my bare feet. It'd all be completely different, I realised (though, of course, essentially the same), and all I'd see from my towering, thin-atmosphere height would be a poky little store where they kept a few things. If I needed something off the shelves, I'd just reach over and lift it off. No sweat.

A bit like being God, really.

But such speculations were foolish, because (as I recognised, probably for the first time) this was
it
; I'd never be five-six again, let alone a scrape under six feet, I'd never see things from that kind of Olympian perspective, and I'd quite definitely never get out of this dump alive. I was here for the duration, and I was what I'd become, the lowest grade of slave labourer in a vast, uncaring enterprise run by creatures immeasurably more powerful than I was. Something of a novelty for me, a spoiled kid from a rich and privileged background, and therefore even more of a culture shock. Suddenly, without warning or preparation, and without possibility of reprieve or parole, I'd been cut down to size. I was now, for ever and always, just one of the little people.

That's life for you. When I was at liberty and the world was a counter overflowing with free samples of wonderful new experiences for me to try out, I lost fifteen years as quickly and easily as you lose a screw or fiddly little spring out of some dismantled household appliance. In Daddy George's shoe factory, by contrast, each second of each minute of each hour of each day had to be got through, like those dinners I sat in front of when I was eight and really not in the mood for eating, but the plate had to be cleared before I could go upstairs and play, and no matter how furiously I munched and chewed, the measureless carrot mountains and Alpine mounds of mashed potato never seemed to get smaller.

I guess it was even worse for the elves, who were used to being able to fast-forward through Life's adverts and trailers; like South Sea islanders who'd never been exposed to flu, they had no inherent immunity to boredom. Now I'd been bored for a significant proportion of my time on this earth, what with school and family Christmases and Sunday visits to relatives; I could shrug off the regular kind of boredom, the sort that starts around ankle level and slowly works its way up your spine to your head, and the frantic if-I-don't-get-out-of-here-soon-I'll-explode fidgety boredom, and even the molybdenum-steel-acroprops-won't-keep-my-eyelids-apart narcoleptic boredom, or Brookside Syndrome. The boredom in the factory, however, was new to me, it was a deadly blend of extreme tedium and bowel-loosening terror, whereby quite often you're scared witless and bored silly at the same time. Unless you're a collector or compiling a Ph.D. Thesis I really wouldn't recommend that variety.

And yet; although every second of every minute was endlessly prolonged, to the point where I reckoned I could trace the path of every sluggardly photon, because every hour of every day was like every other hour of every other day, the whole experience soon melded seamlessly into one interminable continuum, and before I knew it, it was a whole lot later. I guess that losing track of time isn't so far removed from the Elfland fast-forwarding trick, at that.

So what did I do all day? Well, at five-thirty a.m. every morning the screamer went off, and we all rolled off our thin pile of threadbare blankets, yawned and trooped off to breakfast – one-fiftieth of a stale Ritz cracker and a Barbie-shoeful of brackish water. Ten minutes to grind the masonry-tough biscuit into swallowable paste, then the long march from the dormitory to the stockroom, a trailing grey-green crocodile, no talking, keeping step. Once there, we shuffled off into our respective groups – no need to tell us what to do, it took a whole thirty seconds to learn the trade to grand master level. Take a firm hold of your assigned eighteen inches of rope, and when the worried-looking elf with the clipboard shouts, ‘Pull,' you pull. When he says, ‘Stop pulling,' you stop pulling. So simple you could train Arts graduates to do it, given time.

Even within this rather sparse framework there was scope for a certain amount of variety. Some days we worked in gangs of a hundred, pulling rolls of canvas or vinyl. Other days, we worked in gangs of fifty, hauling reels of sewing thread. Occasionally we were assigned to intimate little crews of fifteen or twenty, shifting cardboard boxes full of eyelets and laces and tissue paper and other evocatively labelled commodities straight out of a Masefield poem – at least, the boxes were marked ‘eyelets' or ‘laces' or ‘tissue paper'. We never actually got to see any of these fabulous artefacts, but it was just nice to believe they were in there, soft and shiny and smooth. Talking, singing, whistling and other forms of unproductive gaiety were strictly forbidden, needless to say – it wasn't clear who was enforcing the forbidding, because nobody ever broke the rules and I never got to find out; my guess is no one could be bothered to try.

At some unspecified hour the screamer went and we had our mid-morning break. I've already described that, and I won't enlarge on it, for fear of getting snotty letters from Dante's lawyers wanting to know what I think I'm playing at, plagiarising bits of the
Inferno
; suffice it to say that all my fellow-workers had long since abandoned Hope with the decisive speed you'd usually reserve for used styrofoam hamburger boxes. Please dispose of Hope tidily.

Time and the hour runs through the dreariest tea break, however, and the rest of the morning was spent pulling on topes, or not pulling on ropes, as directed by those with a broader perspective. Lunch (a fiftieth of a Ritz and the other Barbie-shoe of water) came and went and you just had to grit your biscuit-abused teeth and bear it before shuffling back to your assigned gang and your rope and whatever hoarded sliver of a dream you still had left. For a long time (don't ask me how long, something like a year, or two weeks; let's say the time it'd take for a glacier to slide three times round the world, and leave it at that) I kept going by thinking about Cru, remembering shy fragments of smiles, the sunlight glinting on her hair, the shape of her fingertips, selected insults, put-downs and cutting remarks. But memory wears out under heavy use quicker than a cheap cross-ply tyre, and it wasn't long before the image of her face got polished away into a silhouette, like the portrait on an old copper penny. As soon as I became aware of this effect I made a conscious decision to ration my as yet uneroded Cru memories and save them up for later. Instead, I tried remembering the happy, carefree days of my childhood (both of them), and after I'd worn through the chrome of them, I just remembered stuff – Pythagoras's theorem, camels' humps, the Tottenham Court Road in winter, the colour scheme of WD-40 tins, the tunes of soap-powder jingles, the arrangement of aisles in supermarkets I'd known over the years, the birthdays of aunts, bit-players in Coronation Street through the ages, the height of telegraph poles, the midnight murmurs of domestic plumbing. They all helped, a little; but the longer I was there, the more the very act of remembering became like chewing a piece of gum long after you've ground out the last vestiges of the flavour, and your jaws are just kneading putty. After all, where was the point? As far as I was concerned, none of that stuff existed any more. The whole of reality was confined to the dormitory, the stockroom and my personal eighteen inches of blue nylon rope.

Pain, they say, has the merit of reminding you that you're still alive; the time to start worrying is when it doesn't hurt any more. Now I'm prepared to go along with that view up to a point, preferably a very sharp point which I'm pressing against the neck of whatever wiseacre thought up such a stupid maxim. My personal take on pain is that it's very painful, and I'll do pretty much whatever it takes to make it stop. As far as I could tell, there were only two ways of achieving this highly desirable goal. I could drop down dead (tempting, but probably not very good for you) or I could escape.

Having decided to escape, the first issue to be addressed was why all the other inmates in this house of fun hadn't already done so. Double Nobel laureate or not, I doubted that I was the only poor sap in the place who'd thought how nice it'd be to get out of there, so there had to be a fairly good reason why none of them seemed particularly eager to give it a go. As far as I could see, the security arrangements weren't enough to merit even half a searchlight in the Colditz Guide; no human guard, no bars on the windows, there didn't even seem to be locks on the two or three doors I'd had occasion to see during my stay. There weren't morning and evening roll-calls, or dormitory inspections, or warders prising up floorboards looking for escape tunnels. Nobody, it seemed to me, gave a damn.

You, of course, being an insufferable cleverclogs, have already worked it out for yourself; if you're six inches tall and invisible, where the hell do you go that isn't likely to be worse than a weathertight building with regular meals? Outside in the world, everything was scaled up for the convenience of the indigenous race of giants. Supposing you got away without being trodden on or run over by a lorry (it'd take
days
to cross a dual carriageway), the undergrowth was positively teeming with furry predators who hunted more by smell than sight. If the term of these perils was finite, if it was just a matter of evading death or capture long enough to nip across the Swiss border and find the nearest town hall, it might be worth taking the risk. But there was, quite literally, nowhere to go to, this side of the line, unless you got really lucky and found your way to Legoland or somewhere with a good old-fashioned doll's house.

True; but you're forgetting something. All the other elves were stuck here, true enough, because they could never get back across the line. Not so in my case. Admittedly I'd been slung out of Elfland on my non-pointy ear. But if only I could get out of the factory, I'd be able to find a patch of grass and something to make a circle with. Then I could get to Elfland, and if they threw me out again, at least there was a sporting chance I'd re-enter the human side my proper height and visible, which was all I could possibly ask of Providence at that stage in my career.

(Before you ask: yes, I'd tried the circle trick, it was practically the first thing I did when I arrived. On one of the stockroom shelves there were traces of an ancient coffee-mug stain, a ring of blackened stickiness still clinging to the grey metal. I'd jumped into it and done what I reckoned were all the things that had worked the previous times, but nothing happened other than some very odd looks from my co-workers. The obvious conclusion, from that and stuff I remembered from Melissa's downloaded history lesson was that Daddy George had set up some kind of technobabble field or incomprehensibility generator that damped down any and all elven superpowers. Well, he would, wouldn't he? A simple thing like that, even an Evil Underling should be able to hack it, let alone a full-blown Overlord. Needless to say, there was also the possibility that the anti-superpowers fix was something to do with the big electric shock, rather than a territorial thing, and that even if I got outside I'd still be fixed every bit as good as I'd been back in the stockroom. But I passed a unilateral resolution to forget I'd ever thought of that, since it was far too discouraging.)

Escape. Well, according to my observations, it might well be as easy as heading for a doorway and keeping going. I couldn't see that playing hookey from the work gang for a day while I did some essential reconnaissance was going to get me into any fatal kind of trouble, since I hadn't as yet seen any evidence to suggest that anybody else remembered who I was or where I was meant to be. Admittedly it might all end in tears and six weeks in solitary, but what was six weeks – or six months, or sixteen years – in a place where time was about as relevant as degree-level pure maths in a Latvian brothel?

Nothing to lose. Go for it.

So, the very next day (I couldn't quite bring myself to let go of my rope and walk away in the middle of the afternoon) I put my plan, or at least the big fuzzy hole in my mind marked as SPACE RESERVED FOR PLAN, into operation. When the screamer went and the elves trooped out for breakfast, markedly not singing hi-ho, hi-ho, I hung around at the back of the crowd and, when I was fairly sure nobody was looking, I sneaked off as fast as my wee short legs would carry me, due east. I had an idea I knew where east was because of the angle of the light slanting in through the windows each morning, and it seemed likely that there was an external door somewhere in the east wall because I fancied I'd heard the revving of artic engines coming from that direction, albeit filtered through many inches of brick.

Nothing like being proved right, even if your road to the correct conclusion was paved with false premises, as mine was. A morning spent snooping around the eastern elevation of the factory (I managed to snag a clipboard and a pencil – add a worried expression, and walk quickly at all times) didn't reveal the loading bay or the factory gate or any of the apertures I'd been expecting to find; but there was a small door with frosted glass in the top half, through which leaked palpable daylight. Trouble was, of course, that the handle was seven times my height off the ground.

But I was feeling pretty good about finding a door of any description; added to which, I had a huge reserve of pent-up energy to spend on anything that looked like a good idea, and a chocolate-free diet and hauling on ropes had left me in pretty good, though miniature, shape. A bit of hunting around unearthed a ball of string, a pocket tape-measure and an old-fashioned metal ruler. The rest was sheer ingenuity, though I say so myself.