Paint Your Dragon (5 page)

George swivelled his eyeballs. ‘I sincerely hope I'm not stopping,' he replied. ‘Whatever happened to grass? We used to have a lot of it in my day.'

The pigeon shuffled its wings. ‘Still plenty of it about,' it replied. ‘But this is the middle of a city. Did they have cities then?'

‘A few.' George stopped talking and winced; two thousand years' worth of pins and needles was catching up with him. ‘Aaaagh,' he said.

‘Problem?'

‘My leg hurts. Go on with what you were saying.'

‘About Birmingham? Okay. Rated as Great Britain's second largest city, in its nineteenth-century heyday Birmingham truly merited its proud title of “workshop of the world”. Post-war recessions and the decline of British industry in general have inevitably left their mark, but the city continues to breed a defiantly positive and dynamic mercantile—'

‘Pigeon.'

‘Yes?'

‘I think,' said George, ‘I can now move my right arm. With it, as you may have observed, I am holding a very big sword. Unless you stop drivelling, I shall take this very big sword and shove it right up—'

‘All right,' replied the pigeon, offended. ‘You were the one who asked. Anyway,' it added, ‘that's a fine way for a saint to talk, I must say.'

George's eyebrows were mobile again and he frowned. ‘Is it?'

The pigeon nodded. ‘Sure. You're supposed to be all meek and holy and stuff.'

‘Bollocks.'

‘Straight up. I know these things. My address: The Old Blocked Gutter, West Roof, St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham 4. I know a lot of religion,' the pigeon continued proudly, ‘especially the lilies of the field and St Francis of Assisi. Saints don't eff and blind, it's the rules.'

‘Shows what you know,' George replied. ‘Right, I'm going to move now, so I suggest you piss off and go sit somewhere else. Before you go, however, I want you to tell me where a man can get a drink around here.'

‘A drink,' the pigeon repeated. ‘Milk?'

‘Don't be bloody stupid.'

‘Water, then?'

‘Booze,' George snarled. ‘Alcohol. Fermented liquor.' A horrible thought struck him. ‘They do still have it, don't they? Please tell me they haven't done away with it, because—'

‘Sure they do,' the pigeon said. ‘Beer and wine and gin and stuff, makes your mob sing a lot and fall over. Saints don't drink, though. Well-known fact.'

‘What you know about saints,' muttered George, ‘you could write on a grape pip in big letters. Just point me in the right direction and then clear off, before I use you to wipe my nose.'

The pigeon made the closest approximation it could to a disapproving tut and extended a wingtip. ‘Draught Mitchell and Butlers,' it said. ‘A word of warning, though.'

‘Well?'

Pigeons; Mother Nature's flying diplomatic corps. ‘The sword,' it said. ‘The armour. The horse. The being seven and a half feet high. Frowned upon.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Times change,' said the pigeon. ‘Not to mention fashions. Can you do anything about that?'

‘I'm not sure.' George concentrated. ‘Apparently I can. Is this better?'

The pigeon looked down. It was now sitting on the head of a short, bald man in a blue donkey jacket, jeans and scruffy trainers. ‘Fine,' it said. ‘How did you do that?'

George shrugged. ‘Dunno. Who cares? When I get there, what should I ask for?'

‘Um.' The pigeon searched its memory - about a quarter of a byte, say a large nibble - for a phrase overheard in crisp-shrapnel-rich beer gardens. ‘A pint of bitter, please, mate, and a packet of dry roasted peanuts. That usually does the trick.'

‘A pint of bitter, please, mate, and a packet of dry roasted peanuts.'

‘You've got it.'

‘Right. A pint of bitter, please, mate, and a packet of dry roasted peanuts. A pint of bitter, please, mate, and a packet of dry roasted peanuts. So long, birdbrain. A pint of bit ...'

Standing on the empty plinth, the pigeon watched until George disappeared through the pub doorway, still rehearsing his line. It waited for a while. Then it preened itself. Then it started to peck at a cigarette butt. Two minutes or so later, the whole incident had been edited out of the active files of its mind and was held in limbo, awaiting deletion. And then ...

The pigeon looked down.

It was, once again, standing on a statue.

Vaguely, it recalled something it had learned recently about statues. It took another look at what it was standing on. Ah
shit,
it said to itself.

 

‘Mike.'

‘Yes?'

‘Just come and have a look at this, will you?'

Instead of folding the tarpaulin, Bianca just let it fall. Then they stood for a while and took a long, hard look.

‘Swings and roundabouts,' Mike said eventually. ‘Snakes and ladders. Maybe even omelettes and eggs.'

‘What?'

Mike shrugged. ‘I'm trying to be balanced and unhysterical,' he said. ‘We now have the dragon back. True, we do seem to have lost Saint George, but...'

Slowly and very tentatively, Bianca leaned forwards. She laid the palm of her hand on the dragon's cold, scaly flank. Marble. Solid, cool, bloody-awkward-to-move-about stone. ‘This,' she said at last, ‘is beginning to get on my nerves.'

‘Maybe it's a form of advanced job-sharing,' Mike suggested. ‘You know, like flexi-time. I think West Midlands Council's all in favour of it, and I suppose you could just about classify these two as Council employees.'

‘Mike.'

‘Mm?'

‘Please go away.'

Alone with her creation, Bianca thought long and hard. Sometimes she leaned against the statue, holding it. Sometimes she pressed her ear against it, as if listening. From time to time she kicked it.

After a while, she opened her portfolio and studied some sketches and plans. She took out a tape and made some measurements, both of the statue and the surrounding area. She climbed up onto its front paws and sniffed its spectacular, gaping jaws.

A mother, they say, instinctively knows what her baby is thinking. If it's in trouble, she can feel it, deep inside. Bianca frowned. No, not
trouble,
exactly. More sort of up to something. But what?

Finally, she packed up, replaced the tarpaulin and started to walk away. Having covered ten yards she turned, faced the statue, and put on her most menacing scowl.

‘Sit!'
she commanded, and stalked off down Colmore Row.

H
aving parked his shape in Victoria Square, the dragon ambled down Colmore Row to Snow Hill and consulted the railway timetable. Three minutes later a rather bemused train pulled up (wondering, among other things, how the hell it had managed to get there from Dumfries in a hundred and eighty seconds) and he climbed aboard.

‘Colchester,' he said aloud.

The voice of the train, inaudible to everyone except the dragon, pointed out that the Snow Hill line doesn't go to Colchester. The dragon smiled pleasantly and invited the train to put its money where its mouth was.

Alighting at Colchester, a place he had heard of but never actually been to, the dragon took a taxi to 35 Vespasian Street, explained to the driver and climbed the stairs.

The top floor of 35 Vespasian Street is given over to a suite of offices consisting of a chair, a desk, a computer terminal, an electric kettle, an anomaly in the telephone network and seven hundred and forty-three filing cabinets. The door says:

Lin Kortright was on the anomaly when the dragon walked in. He was explaining to Horus, the Egyptian charioteer of the Sun, that simply picking it up, moving it along in a straight line and putting it down again without dropping it was no longer good enough to guarantee him full employment, and had he considered, for example, juggling with it or balancing it on a stick while riding a unicycle. As the door opened he didn't look up, merely made a go-away gesture. He was about to suggest training it to do simple tricks when he noticed that the receiver was back on its cradle and he was, in fact, talking to the palm of his hand. He raised his eyes, impressed.

‘Hey,' he said, ‘how'd you do that?'

‘Do what?'

‘It's purely instinctive with you, huh? No matter. What can I do for you?'

‘I'm looking,' the dragon replied, sitting on a chair last seen two seconds previously under an actuary in Stroud and still warm, ‘for a job. I imagine you might be able to help.'

Mr Kortright studied the chair for a while, and then nodded. ‘Possibly, possibly,' he said. ‘What d'you do?'

‘What needs doing?'

Mr Kortright frowned. ‘No, no, no,' he said, ‘that's not the way it works. You gotta have an act before you come bothering me. Let's see. You can do telekinesis, right?'

‘Can I?'

‘Oh boy, a natural,' Mr Kortright sighed, rather as Saint Sebastian would have done if, just as the last arrow thudded home in his ribcage, he also remembered he'd left home without switching off the oven. ‘Don't get me wrong,' he added, ‘maybe I can still find you something, if you don't mind touring. Done any poltergeisting?'

The dragon's brow furrowed in thought until he looked like a fight between two privet hedges. Ever since he'd come back, he'd been letting his subconscious fill in as many of the gaps as possible, mostly by opening a direct line from his exceptional ears to his memory. In consequence, the back lots of his brain were stuffed with thousands of unprocessed eavesdroppings, waiting to be filtered and condensed into usable ready-to-wear background information. ‘Poltergeists,' he mused, accessing a fragment of a documentary overheard when the taxi drove within a mile of a TV showroom. ‘That's a ghost or similar evil spirit who throws things, yes?'

‘Yup.'

‘No. Sorry.'

Mr Kortright's shoulders rose and fell like share prices during a closely contested election. ‘Okay,' he said. ‘You wanna learn?'

‘Not really, no. All seems a bit gratuitous if you ask me. And besides, I don't plan on being here very long, so there's little point learning new skills.'

‘Picky, huh? You got a nerve.'

‘Several,' replied the dragon, absently. ‘In this body, anyway. The other one's just animated rock.'

It took Mr Kortright's brain three quarters of a second to pick up on the words
this body and the other one,
speculate on the significance and dismiss the whole as too much hassle. ‘So what did you used to do? Have an act then?'

The dragon nodded. ‘I flew about breathing fire, making rain, that style of thing.'

‘Dragon, huh?'

‘You're very perceptive.'

After a moment's hesitation Mr Kortright correctly interpreted the dragon's remark as a compliment. ‘Not much around at the moment for dragons,' he said. ‘Endangered species regulations,' he added.

‘Ah.' This seemed to confirm what the dragon had assumed about a national dragon shortage. ‘So dragons are protected, are they?'

Mr Kortright grinned. ‘Dragons?' he said. ‘No way. Nothing in the legislation about dragons. Now crocodiles, yes. Which means the supply of raw material for the handbag trade is down to last knockings. But if you're good you can make dragon
look
like crocodile ... You get my meaning?'

A corner of the dragon's mouth twitched. ‘I seem to remember you people have a saying,' he said. ‘First catch your...'

‘Been away a long time, have you?' The Kortright grin widened, until it looked like the aftermath of seismic activity. ‘In which case, here's a tip for you. If you're flying along and you see something long and grey and kind of tube shaped with little fins coming straight at you, don't try chatting it up or asking it out to the movies. They call them wire-guided missiles, and—'

‘Yes, thanks,' said the dragon. ‘I found out about those for myself. So there are still dragons about, then? People seem to react as if I'm extinct or something.'

‘In these parts,' Mr Kortright explained, ‘you are. In this century, in fact. That doesn't worry transtemporal poachers any; just means that by the time they market the goods, they're also genuine antiques and therefore legal to sell.'

‘Ah.' The dragon shrugged. ‘But so long as I'm now, I'm relatively safe?'

‘Safe.' Mr Kortright savoured the word. ‘From poachers, maybe. I mean, chances are, if you stick around any year with nineteen on the front of it, you won't suddenly find yourself full of powder compacts with a zip up your back. There are,' he added, ‘other dangers.'