Muddle and Win Page 13

  Look at me. Pity me.

  Pity me, a poor, lonesome, half-starved puss. Forget everything else. Forget your sister. Forget your mother. Here, in the empty night, there is only pitiful me.

  Look. Pity Me. Love Me.

  You are in my power.

  Something that was tight around Windleberry’s hand seemed to twitch. And it wasn’t so tight any more.

  ‘In the oven,’ hissed the Enemy. ‘You were putting them in the oven!’

  ‘Wait,’ sighed Sally.

  She put down the tray. She picked up the cat. She was thinking, as she lifted him, I know your game, Shades. Attention. That’s all you want. You’re a heartless, selfish beast. You’ll take it from anyone who’ll give it to you. But you’re warm and you’re furry and – I could do with a cuddle.

  ‘Poor puss,’ she said, holding his face right close to hers, so they touched at the nose. ‘It’s the middle of the night, isn’t it? What are we doing here?’

  Windleberry could move his elbow. An inch more . . .

  Corozin saw in the cat’s eyes a look he knew.

  ‘MUDDLESPOT?’ He leaned out through Sally’s eyes. He leaned in through the cat’s. He thrust his face into Muddlespot’s face, right close so that their noses touched. ‘WHAT are you doing here?!?’

  ‘Er . . . talking to you?’ simpered Muddlespot.

  Corozin’s arm joined his face in the cat’s inner chamber. In his fist he held his huge brass hammer. ‘Prepare to be horribly smashed into horrible little pieces!’ he hissed.

  ‘Look behind you,’ said Muddlespot, grinning.

  And Windleberry, bonds loosed, flew from his chair. ‘FIEND!’ he roared. ‘FACE THE WRATH OF HEAVEN!’

  IT WAS COLD in the kitchen. Especially around her neck and wrists and ankles.

  Still holding the cat to her shoulder, Sally opened the fridge door with her foot. With one hand, she slid the tray of muffins back where they belonged. She wasn’t really thinking about it. It was just her body doing what it always did – putting things back where they should be.

  She stood in the middle of the kitchen, feeling the empty, dazed wrongness of being upright in the middle of the night.

  Somehow it was hard to think.

  DOWN CAME THE hammer again. Windleberry back-flipped, picked up the statue of Trufe and flung it at his oncoming foe.

  ‘Hey!’ said the Inner Sally.

  Brass and crystal exploded together in a cloud of shimmering dust. Corozin stumbled forward, wiping his eyes. Fragments of crystal smouldered, embedded in his skin like thorns. ‘You will pay for this!’ he snarled.

  ‘Hey,’ said the Inner Sally. ‘I said no—’

  Windleberry vaulted – hands-feet-hands-and-fly forward – feet first, like a missile at the Enemy’s face. But the Enemy was no longer there. He hit the far wall, gathered himself and looked up – into the falling hammer!

  He flung himself aside. Brass crashed into the crystal floor, and the floor crumbled. Windleberry fell through and his enemy fell with him. They grappled in midair.

  ‘Hey, guys!’ called Sally through the hole. ‘I’m getting a headache here!’

  Windleberry tumbled down the broad stairs. He had his hands on the hammer. It burned. With a mighty heave, he tore it from his enemy’s grasp. He bent it into a pretzel-shape and threw it at the fiend’s head.

  The Enemy screamed in rage.

  ‘Is anyone listening to me?’ said Sally.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Sally. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  SLOWLY SHE CLIMBED the stairs. She felt very out of place. She was wandering around the house in her pyjamas when she should be in bed. And as for the muffins – hadn’t she been going to put them in the oven? But she had put them in the fridge instead.

  It was just that her subtle, clever bid for freedom hadn’t actually seemed so subtle or clever after all. Not when she had got there and looked at it. It had seemed the sort of thing a four-year-old would do.

  Except four-year-olds were too sensible, she thought wearily. You had to wait to reach fourteen before you got this dumb.

  What a choice:

  Cat / Burn Muffins

  Cat / Burn Muffins

  Somehow she had ended up with ‘cat’.

  So what was she going to do now? Sleep? How was she going to sleep, feeling the way she did?

  None of it made sense. Only the cat, warm and purring in her arms, seemed real. And if she let him spend the night in her room, he wouldn’t just settle down quietly. He’d be poking his face into hers whenever he thought things were getting boring.

  ‘You’re a fat slob, Shades,’ she murmured.

  ‘Grrr,’ replied Shades happily.

  She got them both to her room. She found her way to the bed and turned back the duvet. She lay down and put her head on her pillow. Shades settled beside her, pushed her nose with his and sneezed over her face.

  ‘Stop it,’ groaned Sally. ‘I’m trying to think.’

  She had been going to do something. She hadn’t exactly decided not to do it, but she hadn’t done it.

  Sometimes, not deciding something is a decision in itself.

  Poot! went something very small in her ear. So small she did not notice it. And then something very small tumbled through the air and landed Plop! on her pillow. She didn’t notice that either.

  *

  Muddlespot did.

  He came sliding down the cat’s hairy haunch at speed and scuttled over to where the thing had landed. It was . . .

  ‘Corozin?’ he gasped.

  Stunned, battered and very much the worse for wear, the figure of Corozin lay full length upon the pillow and did not stir.

  Muddlespot looked up, up the cliff face that was the side of Sally’s head, to the ear from which Corozin had fallen. ‘He did it! That Fluffy did it! Amazing!’

  He looked at his prostrate master. He turned away. He took three paces and turned again.

  Then he ran up one-two-three and kicked the fiend smartly on the butt. Corozin twitched, gratifyingly. Muddlespot danced away, snapping his fingers, to the fall of Sally’s hair. Eagerly, he began to climb.

  The mind of Sally Jones that night was like the scene of some disaster. Smoke hung in the corridors. Piles of crystal rubble were scattered everywhere. In the chambers, small crowds of ideas huddled together for comfort, clinging to each other and sobbing out their stories. The lights flickered on and off. Alarms were wailing in the distance and no one knew how to stop them.

  ‘Windleberry did it,’ breathed Muddlespot. He could hardly believe it was true.

  He passed a row of statues. Two were headless and one had been broken off at the knees. A great hole gaped in the wall behind them. It looked very Corozin-shaped.

  ‘Amazing!’

  A clutch of hysterical ideas barged past him and ran down a stairway screaming. They seemed to be mathematical equations, but for some reason they were carrying hockey sticks. The fountain below the central chamber was choked with rubble. On the stairs, Muddlespot found the remains of Corozin’s brass hammer. He picked it up and tried to unbend it. He couldn’t.

  Sally herself was not in the central chamber, but Windleberry was. He had a broom in his hands and was quietly sweeping up a pile of glass rubble.

  ‘You did it!’ cried Muddlespot.

  Windleberry turned.

  It was a Windleberry scarred by battle. His face was bruised, his cream tuxedo was torn and his vermillion bow tie was badly rumpled. His magnificent Ray-Bans, when Muddlespot looked closely, had been reassembled with sticking plaster.

  But it was Windleberry as was, undefeated. His shoulders were square. His head was more or less (give or take the odd swelling) square. His teeth – those he had left – were square. He towered over the little imp.

  ‘Er, you’re not going to do that to me, are you?’ said Muddlespot.

  ‘Too right I am,’ said Windleberry. He thrust the broom under Muddlespot’s nose. ‘Unless you instantly take this out of my hands a
nd get sweeping.’

  Muddlespot’s hands closed on it. ‘Deal,’ he said.

  ‘This is nice, you know,’ he added, as he began to brush up the fragments of the statue of Trufe. ‘Just you and me. No bosses.’

  Windleberry was examining the statue of Fairness. It had fallen from its pedestal. The base was damaged, but . . .

  He bent down, picked up the statue by the shoulders and heaved.

  ‘It’s better to keep things local, don’t you think?’ said Muddlespot. ‘Nobody interfering, from your place or mine?’

  ‘Shut up and sweep,’ said Windleberry.

  Clunk went the statue as it was set on its feet again. It wobbled a bit. Windleberry gave it a fierce look. It stopped wobbling, sheepishly.

  ‘ . . . I want this place cleared up by morning,’ he said, turning away.

  ‘You think you had it hard?’ said Muddlespot. ‘I had to sell my soul to a cat!’

  The statue of Fairness tumbled once more from its pedestal.

  Some things could be mended. Some couldn’t. Some could be patched up. Other places had to be taped off with yellow warning tape and marked DON’T GO HERE! HEALING PROCESS AT WORK. Many ideas were homeless and had to be rehoused. Pretty much the whole of the French vocabulary corridor was uninhabitable, so entire families of verbs, declensions, subjunctives and irregulars got herded in together wherever there was space. Sally’s French grades would not recover for a month.

  It was during this part of the night that they noticed that the trap door had gone from the little room just behind the central chamber. Windleberry frowned.

  ‘Well, we can put the pin numbers and passwords in here,’ said Muddlespot. ‘Until we can get them properly sorted out, at least.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Windleberry.

  Muddlespot knew what was worrying him. Jumbling up the numbers would definitely cause problems later on, but it wasn’t that. It was the trap door.

  The trap door never went away. It might move, but it would always be somewhere. If there was one thing worse than having it close to the central chamber, it was not knowing where it was at all.

  In the small hours, Muddlespot found it. He was rounding up some runaway Possible Boyfriends in the lower back rooms of Sally’s mind, when, down a passage where the light flickered, he spotted a door.

  He left the Boyfriends to their own devices – they were all pretty vague and shapeless, unlikely to do any harm – and tiptoed down to the door. Softly, he opened it and looked in.

  There it was, in the middle of the floor. Closed. There was a lock on it. He looked at it and pursed his lips.

  Locks could be opened, of course; that was the point of them.

  But Sally would have the key.

  He looked around the room. It was quite large, in fact. Dark. In the gloom he could make out a table, and against the walls there were cabinets and things. Little points of light showed here and there, as if from electric sockets. It might have been a kitchen.

  There was a faint smell of burning in the air. It was not a smell that he could ever scrub away.

  He closed the door softly and put some yellow tape across it. Not that he was changing sides or anything, but as he had said to Windleberry, he now firmly believed in keeping things local.

  Then he picked up his broom and went whistling down the corridor in search of those Boyfriends. After all, one of them might come in useful one day.

  ‘SALLY!’ CALLED MUM from downstairs. ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘No,’ said Sally. At least, she thought she did.

  ‘Sally!’

  Sally sat up. It was light. The alarm said 7:15. When she had last looked at it, it had said 5:45. She must have slept, then. Finally. She groaned and got up. Shades was at the door, mewing pitifully to be let out. She opened it and watched him flit down the stairs in the direction of the kitchen.

  Billie’s door opened. Billie hurried out and down the stairs. ‘Hi,’ she said as she passed.

  ‘What’s the rush?’ mumbled Sally.

  ‘Baking the muffins for breakfast. Done you an extra one.’

  ‘Oh . . . thanks,’ said Sally.

  The stairs were seeing a lot of traffic. Here came Mum, up from below. ‘Morning, sweetheart. How do you feel?’

  ‘Didn’t sleep too well,’ said Sally. ‘But I’m OK now.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Have a hug. Mmmm. Big hug. Better?’

  ‘Yeah, a bit. Can I have a bath?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Mum hesitated. ‘A quick one. But you mustn’t be late.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘You may be right, you know,’ said Windleberry reluctantly. He was sitting side by side with Muddlespot, on the fallen statue of Fairness. The Inner Sally passed, towel in hand.

  ‘No looking, you two,’ she said.

  Obediently they turned and sat facing the other way. Hot water splashed behind them. From somewhere the smell of fresh baking stole into the air.

  ‘You pull your side,’ said Windleberry, after a little while. ‘I pull mine.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Muddlespot. ‘Nice. And easy.’

  ‘She has to find her own way, in the end.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Muddlespot. ‘Keep it warm,’ he added, dreamily.

  ‘Muffins are done,’ called someone from below. ‘But the oven won’t switch off again!’

  ‘Oh God – Greg, you have to ring the electrician! No, do it now!’

  Windleberry frowned. ‘I wouldn’t go that far. Mutual respect. Lines that can’t be crossed. That kind of thing. But let’s face it . . .’

  ‘And easy,’ murmured Muddlespot.

  ‘What . . .?’

  Somewhere a voice called, ‘Sally? Are you coming down?’

  ‘They’re calling you, Sally,’ said Windleberry.

  ‘Mmmmmm,’ said Muddlespot.

  ‘Sally?’

  ‘Sally?’

  There was no answer. The house was a jumble of voices. Billie hunting for her sports kit. Greg on the phone to the electrician. Mum calling. But it all seemed to be coming from very far away. Windleberry risked a look over his shoulder. ‘You fiend!’ he cried. ‘You’ve sent her to sleep in the bath! We’ll be late for school!’

  Mum was knocking on the bathroom door. ‘Sally? Are you coming down?’

  ‘Sally! Wake up!’ trumpeted Windleberry. ‘SALLY? ARE YOU RECEIVING ME? ALERT! THIS IS AN EMERGENCY! ALERT!’

  ‘You could try blowing soap up her nose,’ said Muddlespot helpfully. ‘That might work . . .’

  So you dreamed of a city of fire and brass, and you’ve woken in lukewarm water with soap bubbles in your nose. And worse, you’re late.

  You tumble out of the bath, towel yourself off (a bit), chuck on your clothes (they stick to your wet skin) and . . .

  . . . start running!

  There may be a place like Pandemonium. There may not be.

  There may be watchtowers above the clouds, where thousand-eyed angels look down on Earth and all that happens there. You’ll think about that later.

  But when you do think about it, maybe you’ll find those places in other things. Little things. And not where you thought they were. In soap and warm water, maybe, and a quick doze after a bad night’s sleep. These can seem pretty close to Heaven all by themselves. So can a hug on the landing, which says (without saying it), Let’s Forget About Yesterday. And so can a freshly baked muffin. Even if you have to eat it while running down the pavement.

  OK, so it’s not really Heaven. But who wants to get to Heaven?

  Like someone said: It’s as good to travel as to arrive.

  About the Author

  John Dickinson was born in London in 1962. Educated at St Paul’s School London and Trinity College Oxford, he joined the Ministry of Defence in 1985, with spells at the Cabinet Office and NATO. In 2002 he left MOD to be house-husband, touchline Dad and writer. He is also the household cook, a struggling tenor and treasurer for the parish church. John lives in Painswick, Gloucestershire.

 
; Also by John Dickinson

  The Cup of the World

  The Widow and the King

  The Fatal Child

  The Lightstep

  W.E.

  MUDDLE AND WIN

  AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 9781446479926

  Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK

  A Random House Group Company

  This ebook edition published 2012

  Copyright © John Dickinson, 2012

  First Published in Great Britain

  David Fickling Books 2012

  The right of John Dickinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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