Little People (3 page)

Enter the second elf.

That particular end of term was hard for me. As if going home wasn't bad enough in itself, being parted from Cru for the whole of rotten Christmas and wretched New Year was going to be torture (and if it wasn't, every agonising, angst-crammed second of it, I'd want to know the reason why).

Our parting was such sweet sorrow –

(‘Well,' I said, as my train pulled in to the platform, ‘bye, then. See you next term.'

‘Yup,' she replied.)

– but not so sweet or so ostentatiously sorrowful as all that. To look at us, you'd think our relationship was something quite other – pedestrian and lollipop lady, for example, or stockbroker and not particularly affluent client. Then, at the very last moment, for the very first time, she grabbed at where my hand would've been if I hadn't moved it to scratch my nose. I reciprocated by putting my arms around her neck and carrying out a manoeuvre that would probably have ended with her head popping off her shoulders like a champagne cork if she hadn't snapped, ‘Stop it, you're pulling my hair,' in a tone of voice you could've shaved with. Personally, even after all these years, I don't think you could get more romantic than that without a general anaesthetic.

‘You'd better get on your train,' she said. ‘You'll look bloody silly if it goes without you.'

‘All right,' I said. ‘Bye, then.'

‘Bye.'

The train pulled away. I leaned out of the window and waved for as long as I could. She didn't exactly wave back, but she didn't exactly not wave either. I guess you had to have been there.

By the time the train reached my home station it was as dark as a bag and just coming on to rain, which suited my mood so perfectly that I decided I'd walk the mile and a half back to our house rather than take a taxi. After all, I wanted to arrive feeling weary, footsore, bedraggled and desolate, as a way of striking a theme note for the coming holiday. I put down my case, which was suitably heavy and cumbersome, wrapped my handkerchief around the handle, and set off at a deliberate slow trudge.

Half a mile into the mile and a half, I was beginning to feel that maybe gestures weren't everything. A fold in my sock had rubbed a patch on my right heel that was as raw as Parma ham, and in spite of the improvised padding the handle of the case was cutting into my hand like a cheese-wire. My trudge wasn't quite so deliberate any more, and it was also quite a bit slower. In addition, I was also going to be late for dinner, which would lead to a certain amount of ritual umbrage-taking and Force Two melodrama.
Sod
, I thought, and tried to pick up the pace a little.

Well, at least there's no better cure for a broken heart than a blistered heel and the prospect of a family row. I hadn't thought about Cru even once since the folded sock started to make its presence felt, and that was surely a good thing, considered objectively. All I was thinking about at that precise moment was how much more of this ill-advised and rotten hike remained, and how very much nicer and more sensible it would have been to get a taxi.

The very, very last thing on my mind right then was elves.

It happened suddenly to say the least. One moment I was slouching along, thinking unhappy thoughts; the next I was nose down in a muddy puddle, feeling a sharp pain in my right knee and the palm of my left hand.

‘Aaaaaa,' said a voice.

It was a curious sound – loud, but small, if you know what I mean, like the frantic buzzing of a wet bumblebee – and it seemed to be coming from my navel. At first I assumed I'd fallen on my Walkman and somehow simultaneously ejected the tape and switched it on, the
Aaaaaa
sound being the resultant white noise. I revised that opinion when something wriggled under me and jabbed me hard in the solar plexus.

Two theories; either I was pregnant and the baby was kicking, or I was lying on something small.

Call me unscientific, but I rejected the first hypothesis out of hand without even reviewing the evidence. The obvious thing to do was to get up and stop squashing whatever it was into the mud-coated tarmac, but that proved to be easier thought than done. For one thing, the mud I'd landed in was extra slithery plus, now with 20 per cent added slither. For another, my right leg seemed to be out of order.

‘AasaaaaaaAAAA!' said the voice, pointedly.

As it so happened, I was pretty well used to that tone of voice, since it was one of Cru's favourites, and I had a fairly shrewd idea of what it meant. ‘Hold
on
,' I snapped back. (Silly, of course, to talk to a rabbit or a duck or a baby deer or whatever it was, but that was just instinct, you know?)

‘Aaaaaa
offme
!' shrieked the voice; and it was like when you're twiddling with a radio dial and the signal suddenly becomes clear enough to understand. Who/whatever it was, it was talking to me in English. With a slight Welsh accent.

‘Eek,' I replied, and rolled over onto my back. From my point of view, this wasn't a good idea, since it meant I was now soaked to the skin and covered in runny mud the consistency of thin Bisto both front and back. But it shut up the little shrieking voice, so it was worth it.

And that was the moment when I thought,
Elves
. Or, to be precise,
Elves, shit, not again
.

‘Hello?' I said. ‘Who's there?'

‘
Arsehole
.' The same voice again, this time with the gain turned up or the tweeter tweeted or whatever you call it when the signal's cleaned up and made easier to understand. ‘
You fell on me, you bastard
.'

Swift and fleeting as a half-glimpsed Perseid, the thought crossed my mind that this probably wasn't the same elf that was featured in Cru's
Blue Fairy Book
. Well, maybe in the director's cut, but not the version that made it out on general release. ‘Hello?' I repeated.

‘Hello to you too,' the voice snapped back. It was much louder now, and perfectly in tune. ‘Now fuck off and die, and leave me alone.'

‘Are you all right?' I asked.

‘Am I all right?' the voice repeated. ‘Oh sure, couldn't be better. Apart from the broken leg and the broken arm and the three broken ribs, that is. Oh, and I think you've trodden on my hat, too.'

I sat up and looked round, trying to figure out where in all that wet dark the voice was coming from. ‘Are you serious,' I said, ‘about the broken bones and stuff? Where are you?'

‘Serious?' jeered the voice. ‘Me? Nah. That's not our way, being serious. Smashed bones? Ho, ho, ho. Of course I'm serious, you tall git.'

Something in the way he said it suggested that
tall
was the worst possible epithet in his vocabulary. ‘If you're hurt, we've got to get you to hospital, quick – Why are you laughing?'

More than that, though of course I didn't mention it; every time he laughed, I could distinctly hear air whistling, like a plastic bag with a tiny hole in it. Not just broken ribs but a punctured lung as well. ‘Where
are
you?' I yelled.

‘Where you can't find me, traitor.' The sudden bitterness in the voice made me shrink back as if I'd just been slapped across the face. ‘So this is as far as I get, after all that work; it's still out. Death is freedom too, tall bastard.'

‘What the hell are you going on about?' I shouted.

‘And will you bloody well stop playing about and tell me where you are? Please?'

More laughter, getting steadily more ragged and frightening. ‘You'd love that, wouldn't you? Wanted, dead or alive – isn't that what you people say?' I'd found a bit of old stick and I was poking about at random, trying to locate the owner of the voice by touch. Well, you do some pretty dumb things when you're all rattled to hell. ‘You won't find me, tall person. Oh, don't worry, I know who you are, I know you're able to see me; but I'm outside the limits, remember, I'm actually me again, even if it's only for as long as it takes to—'

Funny
, I thought,
why's he stopped talking in mid-sentence like that
? Then I felt something soft and sort of padded under the point of my stick, and looked down. Odd that I hadn't seen it before, when I'd been looking at that exact spot just a second ago, or so I'd thought.

An elf. A palpable elf. Dead, but palpable.

Now that was a moment of great weirdness, let me tell you. I'd never seen a dead person before, but I'd seen plenty of roadkill, muddy corpses of foxes and rabbits and badgers. But what it – he – reminded me of most strongly was a doll or a teddy bear, pitched out in the mud and trodden on; more upsetting, in a way, than any dead life form.

Zippy
, I thought,
absolutely bloody fantastic. Seen two; killed one
. And what in God's name was I supposed to do with a dead elf?

(
Hey
, said a nasty little voice inside me,
wouldn't that make a great one of those little Christmas joke books, a hundred and one uses for—
)

Real-life instinct cut in, and I spun round, staring into the gloom in case anybody'd seen me. As far as I could tell, I was on my own, unobserved. The sensible course of action, needless to say, was to run away as fast as possible.

One of these days, I may actually do the sensible thing, though most likely only by accident and coincidence. One of these days.

As I stood there, like a life-size statue of an idiot, several distinct trains of thought were chuffing chaotically through my fuzzed-up little brain.
Elves aren't human
, one of them whispered seductively,
so therefore killing one can't be murder, because surely it's only murder when you kill
people
. Nothing to be afraid of
, proclaimed another,
because after all, it was an accident, you didn't do anything wrong, you're innocent; and if you're innocent, well, what have you got to be scared about?
A third one was saying,
Don't listen to them, you've got to hide the body
right now
before anybody comes past, sees you and calls out all the coppers in Surrey. Furthermore
(continued the third tempter)
it's such a wee tiddly little body, surely it's not going to take all that much cleverness and ingenuity to find an equally wee and tiddly little coffin-shaped hole to stuff it into?
The fourth voice, which was just plain dead miserable, was warning me in a dull mumble against getting so much as a single elf hair or flake of elven dandruff on myself, because all modern forensic science needed to nail my bum to the floor was just a quarter of a molecule of misplaced DNA. There were fifth, sixth and seventh voices too, but even I wasn't gullible enough to take any stock of what they said; my guess was that in their spare time they wrote the leader columns for the newspapers with the small pages, they were that implausible.

While I was busy listening to all these bloody stupid voices, I guess I got so distracted I didn't realise what I was doing; because the next thing I knew, I was dragging the snuffed elf by its little ankles off the road and onto the verge. I've never had what you'd call outstandingly good night vision, but by a weird chance I did actually know precisely where I was; namely, five yards or so short of a field gate, on the other side of which was an old cracked cattle trough that ought to have been, according to my best guesstimate, just about long and wide enough to stow an elf in. I knew this spot so well because I'd fallen off my bike there about three years earlier and the surrounding area had well and truly impressed itself onto my mind, as well as other parts of my anatomy.

Of course, I was navigating entirely by dead reckoning and touch, and I'm still amazed and really quite proud of the fact that I found that damned trough, and it was more or less where it ought to have been. It was more of a job than I'd anticipated, hefting a dead elf over a gate and then trundling it over sticky mud and up into the trough; I've never been your barrel-chested village-blacksmith type, and I have an idea that elf-meat is heavier, cubic centimetre for cubic centimetre, than the ordinary human kind. Also, slipping over backwards and sitting down in the mud two or three times didn't help matters. Eventually, though, the moment came when I let go and the slimy green trough-water went ‘glop' over the pathetic little body, the side of the trough and the front of my trousers, in that order, and I straightened my aching back and breathed a ragged sigh of relief.
Job done
, I thought.
So that's all right
.

I'd retrieved my case and was a mile closer to home when the flaw in my logic hit me like a wrecking ball. HORROR OF MIDGET DROWNED IN TROUGH, shouted my mind's eye's tabloid headlines:
police are searching for the crazed killer whose ruthless hands thrust itinerant circus artiste Thomas Thumb, 46, down into his watery grave. ‘This unspeakable crime,' said Inspector Fang of Surrey CID . . .

Yes. Well. Hysterical melodrama aside, it wasn't exactly the smartest thing I could have done under the circumstances. A dead elf lying by the side of the road is one thing; the same, face down in a watering-trough, is an entirely different kettle of piranhas.

I stopped dead in my tracks and tried very hard to figure out what I should do next. Go back, fish the little bugger out, put him back? Yes, but that'd be begging Providence on bended knee to line me up with one or more eyewitnesses; and even if, by some miracle, I got away without being seen, even the dimmest of coroners was going to wonder how a body found in the road came to be all covered with green trough-sludge. Besides, for all I knew the horrible thing could already have been discovered and the whole place crawling with fuzz; and what was that statistic I'd heard about the vast proportion of malefactors nabbed and incarcerated because of their lemming-like urge to return to the scene of the crime?

Short of finding a tree with a conveniently placed overhanging branch and hanging myself with my school tie, I couldn't see any way out of it at all. On balance, however, going back would be marginally more suicidal than pressing on home. Groaning aloud, I squelched the last mile and was welcomed home with the most eloquent and forceful telling-off I've ever had the bad luck to get in the way of. Water off a duck's back, of course: when you're facing the prospect of thirty years in jail for murder, even a level six tongue-lashing from your Mum dwindles instantly into perspective. I kicked off my shoes, muttered something like, ‘Yes, you're absolutely right,' and pottled sadly away to have my last-ever bath with the door shut.