Unseen Academicals (9 page)

Nice but odd, Glenda thought, watching him leap down the steps. Clever, too. To spot my scarf on a hook ten yards away.

The sound of a rattling tin can alerted Nutt to his boss’s presence before he had even hurried through the old archway to the vats. The other habitués had paused in their work, which, frankly, given its usual snaillike progress, meant hardly any change at all, and were watching him listlessly. But they were watching, at least. Even Concrete looked vaguely alert, but Nutt saw a little dribble of brown in the corner of his mouth. Someone had been giving him iron filings again.

The can shot up as Trev caught it with his boot, flew over his head, and then came back obliquely, as if rolling down an invisible slope, and landed in his waiting hand. There was a murmur of appreciation from the watchers and Concrete banged his hand on the table, which generally meant approval.

‘What kept you, Gobbo? Chatting up Glenda, were you? You’ve got no chance there, take it from me. Been there, tried that, oh yes. No chance, mate.’ He threw a grubby bag towards Nutt. ‘Get these on quick, else you’ll stand out like a diamond in—’

‘A sweep’s earhole?’ Nutt suggested.

‘Yeah! You’re gettin’ it. Now don’t hang about or we’ll be late.’

Nutt looked doubtfully at a long, a very long scarf in pink and green and a large yellow woolly hat with a pink bobble on it.

‘Pull it down hard so it covers your ears,’ Trev commanded. ‘Get a move on!’

‘Er…pink?’ said Nutt doubtfully, holding up the scarf.

‘What about it?’

‘Well, isn’t football a rough man’s game? Whereas pink, if you will excuse me, is rather a…female colour?’

Trev grinned. ‘Yeah, that’s right. Think about it. You are the clever one around here. And you can walk and think at the same time, I know that. Makes you stand out from the crowd in these parts.’

‘Ah, I think I have it. The pink proclaims an almost belligerent masculinity, saying as it does: I am so masculine I can afford to tempt you to question it, giving me the opportunity to proclaim it anew by doing violence to you in response. I don’t know if you have ever read Ofleberger’s
Die Wesentlichen Ungewissheiten Zugehörig der Offenkundigen Männlichkeit?
’

Trev grabbed his shoulder and spun him round. ‘Wot do you fink, Gobbo?’ he said, his red face a couple of inches from Nutt’s. ‘Wot is your problem? Wot are you all about? You come out with ten-dollar words an’ you lay ’em down like a man doin’ a jigsaw! So how come you’re down in the vats, eh, workin’ for someone like me? It don’t make sense! Are you on the run from the Old Sam? No problem, there, unless you did up an old lady or somethin’, but you got to tell me!’

Too dangerous, thought Nutt desperately. Change the subject! ‘She’s called Juliet!’ he gasped. ‘The girl you asked about! She lives next door to Glenda! Honestly!’

Trev looked suspicious. ‘Glenda told you that?’

‘Yes!’

‘She was windin’ you up. She knew you’d tell me.’

‘I don’t think she would lie to me, Mister Trev. She is my friend.’

‘I kept thinkin’ about her all last night,’ said Trev.

‘Well, she is a wonderful cook,’ Nutt agreed.

‘I meant Juliet!’

‘Um, and Glenda said to tell you that Juliet’s other name is Stollop,’ said Nutt, hating to be the bearer of worse news.

‘What? That girl is a Stollop?’

‘Yes. Glenda said I was to see how you liked that, but I know the meaning of irony.’

‘But it’s like findin’ a strawberry in a dogmeat stew, yeah? I mean, the Stollops are buggers, the lot of ’em, biters and cloggers to a man, the kind of bastards who’ll kick your family jewels up into your throat.’

‘But you don’t play football, do you? You just watch.’

‘Damn right! But I’m a Face, right? I’m known in all the boroughs. You can ask anyone. Everyone knows Trev Likely. I’m Dave Likely’s lad. Every supporter in the city knows about him. Four goals! No one else scored that much in a lifetime! And gave as good as he got, did Dad. One game he picked up the Dolly bastard holding the ball and threw ’im over the line. He gave as good as ’e got, my dad, and then some.’

‘So, he was a bugger and a clogger and a biter too, was he?’

‘What? Are you pulling my tonker?’

‘I would not wish to do so initially, Mister Trev,’ said Nutt, so solemnly that Trev had to grin, ‘but, you see, if he fought the opposing team with even more force than they used, does that not mean that he—’

‘He was my dad,’ said Trev. ‘That means you don’t try any fancy maths, okay?’

‘Okay indeed. And you never wanted to follow in his footsteps?’

‘What, and get brung home on a stretcher? I got my brains from my ol’ mum, not from Dad. He was a good bloke and loved his football, but he wasn’t flush with brains to start with an’ on that day some of ’em were leakin’ out of his ear. The Dollies got ’im in the melee and sorted ’im out good and proper. That’s not for me, Gobbo. I’m smart.’

‘Yes, Mister Trev, I can see that.’

‘Get the gear on and let’s go, okay? We don’t want to miss anything.’

‘Fing,’ said Nutt automatically, as he started to wind the huge scarf around his neck.

‘What?’ said Trev, frowning.

‘Wot?’ said Nutt, his voice a little muffled. There was a lot of scarf. It was almost covering his mouth.

‘Are you pulling my chuff, Gobbo?’ said Trev, handing him an ancient sweater, faded and saggy with age.

‘Please, Mister Trev, I don’t know! There appears to be so much I might inadvertently pull!’ He tugged on the big woolly hat with the pink pompom on it. ‘They are so very pink, Mister Trev. We must be bursting with machismo!’

‘I don’t know what you person’ly are bursting with, Gobbo, but here’s somethin’ to learn. “Come on if you think you’re hard enough.” Now
you
say it.’

‘Come on if you think you’re hard enough,’ said Nutt obediently.

‘Well, okay,’ said Trev, inspecting him. ‘Just remember, if anyone starts pushing you around during the game, and givin’ you grief, just you say that to ’em and they’ll see you’re wearing the Dimmer colours and they’ll think twice. Got it?’

Nutt, somewhere in the space between the big bobbly hat and the boa constrictor of a scarf, nodded.

‘Wow, there you are, Gobbo, a complete…fan. Your own mother wouldn’t recognize you!’

There was a pause before a voice emerged from inside the mound of ancient woollens, which looked very much like a nursery layette made by a couple of giants who weren’t sure what to expect.

‘I believe you are accurate.’

‘Yeah? Well, that’s good, innit? Now let’s go and meet the lads. Move fast, stay close.’

‘Now remember, this is a pre-season friendly between the Angels and the Whoppers, right?’ said Trev, as they stepped out into a fine rain which, because of Ankh-Morpork’s standing cloud of pollution, was morphing gently into smog. ‘They’re both pretty crap, they’ll never amount to anythin’, but the Dimmers shout for the Angels, right?’

It took some explaining, but the core of it, as far as Nutt could understand it, was this: All football teams in the city were rated by Dimwell in proportion to their closeness, physical, psychological or general gut feeling, to the hated Dolly Sisters. It had just evolved that
way. If you went to a match between two other teams, you automatically, according to some complex and ever-changing ready-reckoner of love and hate, cheered the team most nearly allied to your native turf or, more accurately, cobbles.

‘Do you see what I mean?’ Trev finished.

‘I have committed what you said to memory, Mister Trev.’

‘Oh Brutha, an’ I’ll bet you ’ave, at that. And it’s just Trev when we’re not at work, right? We shout together, right?’ He punched Nutt playfully on the arm.

‘Why did you do that, Mister Trev?’ said Nutt. His eyes, almost the only part of him visible, looked hurt. ‘You struck me!’

‘That wasn’t me hitting you, Gobbo! That was just a friendly punch! Big difference! Don’t you know that? It’s a little tap on the arm, to show we’re mates. Go on, do it to me. Go on.’ Trev winked.

…
You will be polite and, most of all, you will never raise your hand in anger to anyone
…

But this wasn’t like that, was it? Nutt asked himself. Trev was his friend. This was friendly. A friend thing. He punched the friendly arm.

‘That was a punch?’ said Trev. ‘You call that a punch? A girl could punch better’n that! How come you’re still alive with a weedy punch like that? Go on, try a proper punch!’

Nutt did.

Be one of the crowd? It went against everything a wizard stood for, and a wizard would not stand for anything if he could sit down for it, but even sitting down, you had to stand out. There were, of course, times when a robe got in the way, especially when a wizard was working in his forge, creating a magic metal or mobiloid glass or any of those other little exercises in practical magic where not setting fire to yourself is a happy bonus, so every wizard had some leather trousers and a stained, rotted-by-acid shirt. It was the shared dirty little secret, not very secret, but ingrained with deep-down dirt.

Ridcully sighed. His colleagues had aimed for the look of the common man, but had only a hazy grasp of what the common man
looked like these days, and now they were sniggering and looking at one another and saying things like ‘Cor blimey, don’t you scrub down well, as it were, my ol’ mate.’ Beside them, and looking extremely embarrassed, were two of the university’s bledlows, not knowing what to do with their feet and wishing that they were having a quiet smoke somewhere in the warm.

‘Gentlemen,’ Ridcully began, and then with a gleam in his eye added, ‘or should I say, fellow workers by hand and brain, this afternoon we—Yes, Senior Wrangler?’

‘Are we, in point of fact, workers? This is a university, after all,’ said the Senior Wrangler.

‘I agree with the Senior Wrangler,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘Under university statute we are specifically forbidden to engage, other than within college precincts, in any magic above level four, unless specifically asked to do so by the civil power or, under clause three, we really want to. We are acting as place holders, and as such, forbidden from working.’

‘Would you accept “slackers by hand and brain”?’ said Ridcully, always happy to see how far he could go.

‘Slackers by hand and brain
by statute
,’ said the Senior Wrangler primly.

Ridcully gave up. He could do this all day, but life couldn’t be all fun.

‘That being settled, then, I must tell you that I have asked the stalwart Mister Frankly Ottomy and Mister Alf Nobbs to join us in this little escapade. Mister Nobbs says that since we are not wearing football favours we should not attract unwanted attention.’

The wizards nodded nervously at the bledlows. They were, of course, merely employees of the university, while the wizards were, well,
were
the university, weren’t they? After all, a university was not just about bricks and mortar, it was about people, specifically wizards. But to a man, the bledlows scared them.

They were all hefty men with a look of having been carved out of bacon. And they were all descendants of, and practically identical to, those men who had chased those wizards–younger and more limber,
and it was amazing how fast you could run with a couple of bledlows behind you–through the foggy night-time streets. If caught, said bledlows, who took enormous pleasure in the prosecution of the university’s private laws and idiosyncratic rules, would then drag you before the Archchancellor on a charge of Attempting to Become Rascally Drunk. That was preferable to fighting back, when the bledlows were widely believed to take the opportunity for a little class warfare. That was years ago, but even now the unexpected sight of a bledlow caused sullen, shameful terror to flow down the spines of men who had acquired more letters after their names than a game of Scrabble.

Mr Ottomy, recognizing this, leered and touched the brim of his uniform cap. ‘Afternoon, gents,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing. Me and Alf here will see you right. We’d better get movin’, though, they bully off in half an hour.’

The Senior Wrangler would not have been the Senior Wrangler if he did not hate the sound of silence. As they shuffled out of the back door, wincing at the unfamiliar chafing of trouser upon knee, he turned to Mr Nobbs and said, ‘Nobbs…that’s not a common name. Tell me, Alf, are you by any chance related to the famous Corporal Nobby Nobbs of the Watch?’

Mr Nobbs took it well, Ridcully thought, given the clumsy lack of protocol.

‘Nosir!’

‘Ah, a distant branch of the name, then…’

‘Nosir! Different tree!’

In the greyness of her front room, Glenda looked at the suitcase, and despaired. She’d done her best with brown boot polish, week after week, but it had been bought from a shonky shop and the cardboard under the leather-ish exterior was beginning to show through. Her customers never seemed to notice, but she did, even when it was out of sight.

It was a secret part of a secret life that she lived for an hour or two
on her half-day off once a week, and maybe a little longer if today’s cold calls worked out.

She looked at her face in the mirror, and said in a voice that was full of jaunt: ‘We all know the problem of underarm defoliation. It is so hard, isn’t it, to keep the lichens healthy…But,’ she flourished a green and blue container with a golden stopper, ‘one spray with Verdant Spring will keep those crevices moist and forest fresh all day long…’

She faltered, because it really wasn’t her. She couldn’t do jaunty. The stuff was a dollar a bottle! Who could afford that? Well, a lot of troll ladies, that’s who, but Mr Stronginthearm said it was okay because they had the money, and anyway it did let the moss grow. She’d said all right, but a dollar for a fancy bottle of water with some plant food in it was a bit steep. And he’d said you are Selling the Dream.

And they bought it. That was the worrying part. They bought it and recommended it to their friends. The city had discovered the Heavy Dollar now. She’d read about it in the paper. There had always been trolls around, doing the heavy lifting and generally being there in the background if not being the actual background itself. But now they were raising families and running businesses, moving on and up and buying things, and that made them people at last. And so you got other people like Mr Stronginthearm, a dwarf, selling beauty products to Miss and Mrs Troll, via ladies like Glenda, a human, because although dwarfs and trolls were officially great chums these days, because of something called the Koom Valley Accord, that sort of thing only meant much to the sort of people who signed treaties. Even the most well-intentioned dwarf would not walk down some of the roads along which Glenda, every week, dragged her nasty, semi-cardboard case, Selling the Dream. It got her out of the house and paid for the little treats. There was money to put away for a rainy day. Mr Stronginthearm had the knack of coming up with new ideas, too. Who would have thought that lady trolls would go for fake-tan lotion? It sold. Everything sold. The Dream sold, and it was shallow and expensive and made her feel cheap. It—