Attack of the Cupids Read online

  ‘Want me, want me,’ whispered the corridors. But what does she want me for? The whispers ran away, fading down the aisles and chambers.

  Then, just at the moment when they should have died altogether, there was an echo, or a shuffle of movement, round a corner where he could not see.

  ‘Who’s there?’ said Muddlespot, wondering if he had really heard it.

  Silence.

  Frowning, Muddlespot went to investigate.

  What he didn’t want to find was that Low Command had changed their minds about that ‘On His Own’ label and had sent someone up to replace him. If so, there was going to have to be a quick bit of murder behind the statues, because he was not going back downstairs for a career interview. Career interviews with Low Command tended to be painful and when they were over the only career options left would be as (a) somebody’s wall ornament, or (b) their mittens. The sort of people Muddlespot worked for did not like failure.

  He tensed. He leaped to the corner of the passage, claws bared. The passage was empty.

  ‘Hello?’

  In the darkness at the far end, something scuttled.

  Warily Muddlespot stole forward. He entered a small octagonal chamber. The light here was tinted just faintly maroon. The chamber too was empty. He listened. He heard nothing.

  Or maybe – maybe – the whisper of bare feet, receding quickly down a distant corridor, and a soft explosion of sound that disappeared with it.

  It might have been a snigger.

  The air had a huge stillness, as if the whole of Sally’s being was holding her breath. (Which it very well might be.)

  There was something in the room: something small, lying in the middle of the floor like a sweet packet that someone had dropped.

  Litter, in the mind of Sally Jones? The rules on litter were very strict.

  It was a folded bit of card. Muddlespot bent to pick it up.

  As he did so, the floor shook.

  ‘It’s not FAIR!’ Billie screamed.

  ‘Yes it is,’ said Sally. They were face to face in the kitchen at home. Sally’s feet were planted, her arms were folded. She wasn’t backing down. Not even when Billie thrust her face, red as a ripe tomato, within centimetres of Sally’s own.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Mum pleaded from the sidelines, ‘you don’t have to invite anyone you don’t want to . . .’

  ‘She already has,’ said Sally. ‘How’s Holly going to feel now if you tell her you don’t want her after all?’

  ‘But she makes me sick! I just look at her and I feel sick! All the time I’m sitting at the table with her in school, I’m trying not to throw up! And I’ve got to have her because Sally’s invited Kaz!

  ‘Kaz is coming,’ said Sally. ‘I can’t uninvite her.’

  ‘No,’ said Mum. ‘Of course Kathy is coming. Billie – why don’t you just talk to Holly and clear up whatever the matter is? Last week you were best friends . . .’

  ‘NO!’ shrilled Billie. ‘We weren’t ever! And the trouble with Holly is HOLLY!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mum.

  ‘All right. Tell Holly you don’t want her and invite someone else,’ said Sally.

  ‘There is no one else!’

  ‘What about Josh? He’s nice.’

  ‘NO. BOYS!’ screamed Billie.

  ‘That does it!’ fumed the Inner Sally, who wasn’t feeling nearly as calm as the Outer Sally was managing to look. ‘I’m going to kill her!’

  ‘No you aren’t,’ said Windleberry, who was being exactly as calm as the Outer Sally, and even had his arms folded and feet planted in the same way.

  ‘Then I hope she kills herself! Why doesn’t she?’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Don’t I? We’d all be happier – and so would she!’

  They stood side by side, looking out through the great windows which were the Outer Sally’s eyes, and which were largely filled with the sight of Billie’s red face.

  ‘You’re just so selfish!’ came Billie’s voice from outside. ‘Selfish-selfish-selfish!’

  ‘I’m selfish?’ screamed the Inner Sally. ‘Looked in a mirror lately, have you?’

  ‘I’m not going to uninvite people I’ve invited,’ said the Outer Sally, without raising her voice. ‘If you don’t want Holly to come, then invite Lauren or someone like that.’

  ‘Well done,’ said Windleberry.

  ‘When I need your advice . . .’ growled the Inner Sally.

  ‘. . . But Lauren won’t come if Freda isn’t there!’

  ‘Then invite both of them, sweetheart,’ said Mum. ‘Sally won’t mind, will you?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ said the Outer Sally.

  ‘Can I say “Well Done” again?’ said Windleberry.

  ‘She’s got one more than me, now,’ said Sally. ‘I knew she would.’

  ‘You don’t mind about that. You said so yourself.’

  ‘I mind that she’s got it by shouting and screaming.’

  ‘Greg’s not doing the barbecue, is he?’ Billie said dangerously.

  ‘He’d like to,’ said Mum.

  ‘Seconds out, round two,’ said Sally. ‘She’ll get at Mum about Greg now. She knows they’re going through a bad patch.’

  ‘. . . Well, I can’t do it, sweetheart! I’m not going to have the time. It’ll give him something to do . . .’ Mum continued.

  ‘But he’s so embarrassing! He tries to be cool. And his hairy paunch!’

  ‘Darling – he’ll wear a nice plain T-shirt, I promise . . .’

  ‘He should wear a nice plain sign round his neck that says I Am Embarrassing.’

  ‘Actually I agree with her there,’ said Sally.

  . . . He mustn’t talk to anybody. He mustn’t even look at them . . .’

  ‘He’s just trying to be friendly . . .’

  ‘Friendly? He makes me sick! I just don’t understand why you . . .’

  ‘Time to step in,’ said the Inner Sally.

  ‘So,’ came her own voice from outside. ‘Does this mean you’re uninviting Holly and inviting Freda and Lauren instead?’

  Through the windows onto the world they saw Billie’s face swing round upon them like the gun turret of a tank.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m going to invite Cassie and Viola.’

  ‘What?’ cried the Inner Sally.

  And the Outer Sally said, ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘I’ll invite who I want to,’ said Billie, reddening again. ‘You have.’

  ‘But Cassie and Viola. Won’t. Come.’

  ‘It’ll just look like we’re trying to get in with their group,’ groaned the Inner Sally. ‘And that’ll never happen, unless we invite the twenty coolest sixth-form boys in the county too. Which would be nice, but they wouldn’t come either.’

  ‘YES THEY WILL!!!!’

  ‘Social suicide,’ said the Outer Sally.

  ‘Sally . . .’ said Mum. But it was too late.

  ‘You always think I’m wrong! You’re always being snide and mean! And you’re always talking me down at school . . .’

  ‘Why should I? You do it every time you open your mouth.’

  ‘Sally!’ said Mum.

  ‘Sally!’ said Windleberry.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Muddlespot.

  He was peeping round the archway into the chamber where the two of them stood. He had wisely swapped his red pillbox hat for a workman’s helmet, in case the roof fell or something came flying in through one of the windows. A mind in the middle of a family row is a hard hat area.

  ‘Just another day in the Jones house,’ said the Inner Sally bitterly. ‘Where’ve you been? I’ve really needed you.’

  ‘No, you really haven’t,’ said Windleberry.

  ‘Tidying up, I think,’ said Muddlespot innocently. ‘Did anybody drop this?’

  Windleberry looked at it.

  It was a small, folded piece of card. Inside the fold, crudely-drawn and coloured, was the shape of a pink heart.

  Something ins
ide Windleberry went very quiet and cold.

  ‘That?’ he said carefully. ‘No, I didn’t drop that.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  Angels are not allowed to lie.

  ‘It is a heart, crudely drawn and coloured in pink,’ Windleberry said.

  The voices of the row outside seemed suddenly far away. The taste of old, bad memories flooded into his mouth. He turned away and drew something from the breast pocket of his dinner jacket.

  ‘. . . I’m calling Viola now. And after that I’m calling Cassie!’

  ‘Kamikaze,’ sighed the Inner Sally.

  ‘And you can’t stop me!’

  ‘And what’s that?’ said Muddlespot.

  ‘This? – Oh . . .’ said Windleberry, putting it back again. ‘Something I happened to have with me. Standard issue.’

  It had been a small but powerful hand torch. And for a second, as the twins stood face-to-face in the kitchen, something had flickered in Sally’s eye. It had been a signal – for anyone who knew how to read it.

  ‘Really?’ said Muddlespot, interested.

  ‘Have you got her number?’ said Billie.

  Tight-lipped, Sally gave her the number.

  ‘That looked like a signal,’ said Muddlespot.

  ‘Did it?’ said Windleberry. He shut his mouth firmly.

  But when he checked his hands, they were shaking.

  The Jones household at night. The girls are in bed. So is Mum, who has taken herself off early with a headache. The only ones awake are Greg, down in the living room watching the football, and Shades the cat, crouched on the landing and sifting the darkness with his yellow eyes.

  The house is a vast, shadowed wilderness, tumbled with belongings. Menace is everywhere. It crouches behind the water glass. It waits beyond the pot of skin cream on the bedside table. It watches from between the sheets of homework, piled untidily beside the door.

  On Earth, an angel is an idea. Ideas have to fit inside people’s heads. So angels have to be very small, and when they step out of the head that houses them they find the world is very large indeed.

  There’s no truce out here. Inside the mind there may be rules about what happens when you meet with The Enemy. Outside, there are no limits. Eyes may be gouged, heads split, backs stabbed and tongues torn out by the roots. Out here, you must watch every shadow. And when The Enemy appears, you’d better pray you’ve got him outnumbered.

  On a high, flat hilltop (in fact a pile of books), Windleberry waited. He looked out across the sea of chaos that was Billie’s room. Billie did not do tidy. Billie had never done tidy. Parents of career teenagers, who thought that nothing could surprise them any more, peeped in on Billie’s room from time to time and were impressed. There were clothes, clothes and more clothes upon the floor (every third item was an odd sock). There were books, papers, sweet wrappers, cassettes, CDs, pencils, pens, sharpeners and – oh, more books, some make-up things that possibly she’d forgotten about and (what was this?) an audiotape, her recorder that she didn’t play any more, some pictures that at one time she had been going to put into her album but had in fact been left to crumple under the weight of a pile of shoes that were now too small for her. Every flat surface was crowded, and where things didn’t get moved around very often the dust would have come up to Windleberry’s knees. The house mites ploughed through it like small komodo dragons.

  In the darkness, the shelves and the top of the chest of drawers were mountains crowned with forests. The floor was a mass of waves and shapes and canyons, a volcanic surface where huge lakes of molten lava have flowed and cooled and cracked into piles of tortured rock.

  ‘Guard us,’ Windleberry murmured, ‘from all perils and dangers of this night . . .’

  He turned his head slowly, staring into the darkness. He could see little more than outlines. This was partly because he was wearing sunglasses. But he did not take them off. Angels on Earth never do.

  ‘From all evil and mischief. From the crafts and assaults . . .’

  Under her blankets, like a mountainside trembling, Billie shifted and sighed in her sleep.

  ‘From lightning and tempest; from battle and murder . . .’

  A shape dropped lightly out of the air and landed on two feet on the far side of the book. It strode towards him, darkness moving in darkness. Windleberry straightened.

  ‘From all sedition . . .?’ he said.

  ‘Aw, heck!’ came a voice. ‘Who’re ya kiddin’? No one does that stuff any more.’

  ‘From all sedition,’ said Windleberry more firmly.

  ‘Conspiracy, rebellion, from all false doctrine, heresy and schism, from hardness of heart et cetera. That do?’

  ‘Close enough,’ said Windleberry coldly. ‘Pass, friend . . .’

  ‘Hey, that’s nice of you.’

  ‘. . . Though I think you’ll find it’s privy conspiracy.’

  ‘Privy conspiracy? Is it now? Guess that must be the kinda conspiracy that gets worked up in the johns. How ya doin’, Wimple?’

  It was an angel. Of a sort. It had the square head, the square shoulders, the dinner jacket, the bow tie and the sunglasses. It had the wings. But it also limped a little as it walked. Its mouth twitched and one hand trembled slightly. Its blank, steady gaze was just a shade less steady than it should have been, as if behind the shelter of its sunglasses its eyes were revolving slowly in opposite directions. As if, sometime in the last half hour or so, it had been picked up by the ankles and used to stun a mammoth.

  Ismael was Billie’s guardian angel. It was one tough assignment.

  ‘I’ve had a busy day,’ said Windleberry coolly. ‘What with that scene Billie threw this evening. I guess you were taking time out?’

  Ismael pursed his lips. ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘After she pushed me through a wall a coupla times, yeah, I think I lay down for a bit. And when she had me in the arm lock – you could say I took time out. I’m kinda attached to my arms. I want to stay that way.’

  ‘Pushed you through a wall?’

  ‘I tell ya, Winkie. What she let out this evening was nothing. There was plenty more where that came from. Plenty. She’s a good kid. But yeah, she’s got issues. Is that why you flashed me the light? You want to tell me to make her better? Easy for you to talk . . .’

  ‘Will she behave at the party?’

  ‘Behave? Depends what you mean. But Billie – she kinda swings. She’s had her shout so maybe she’ll be sweet for a while. She’ll be sweet just because she knows everyone’s expecting her to shout again. That’s how she is.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You think you can do better? Try coming over sometime. I’ll sew up my sides so I don’t split ‘em watching you.’

  ‘Maybe I will. But that’s not why I called you out. It’s this.’ Windleberry handed him the small, folded piece of card.

  Ismael opened it. ‘Sheesh!’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘Have you had one?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Ismael, slowly shaking his head. ‘Not that I’ve seen.’

  ‘Sometimes they hide it. So they can say it’s been delivered. But the Guardian doesn’t find it. And then the first he knows is . . .’

  ‘Sheesh!’

  ‘I’ll put in an objection on Sally’s behalf,’ said Windleberry. ‘Wrong time, exams, commitments and so on. But it’ll make no difference.’

  ‘Nope. I guess it won’t.’

  ‘Keep your eyes open. They’re coming.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Trust me,’ said Windleberry. ‘I know them.’

  Not far away on the same bedside table, two other figures crouched in a cave. The cave was formed by a money pot, some cardboard packaging from a new school shirt, a broken alarm clock and a roulette set that was missing half its counters and hadn’t been played in months. Nevertheless it was a cave. Angels may hang out on high hilltops, but to another sort of person, a cave is a reassuring place. It reminds them of home.

  Opposite Muddlespot
sat the smallest, shabbiest, evillest-looking creature ever to creep down Darlington Row. His eyes were little horizontal slits, somehow bright and black at the same time. His nose was twice the length of his head, curving and pointed like the beak of a wading bird. He wore a battered broad-brimmed hat the same brown colour as his skin and a shapeless, rumpled coat that covered him from his lips all the way down to his toes. His mouth was tiny and sloped a little to one side. When he spoke all his words seemed to drop out of that downward pointing corner, as if they had trickled down his tongue in blobs of yellow spit and then dribbled out under the force of gravity. He looked like the sort of nightmare that a cockroach might get after pigging on bad cheese.

  His name was Scattletail. Like Muddlespot he was an agent from Down Below, from the City of Pandemonium. He was the mouthpiece of Low Command in the mind of Billie Jones.

  ‘What it means, kid,’ he said to Muddlespot, ‘is he’s been tipped the Pink Heart.’

  ‘But what does that mean?’ asked Muddlespot.

  Scattletail spat. ‘It means cupids.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Cupids. They’re another lot of Fluffies.’

  (‘Fluffies’ = angels. As in: ‘Death to the Fluffies’ and other battle cries of the Low Brigade.)

  ‘. . . What they do is get the humans to fall in love with each other. The pink heart is like their calling card. “We will be working in your neighbourhood” kind of thing. They’re s’posed to give the other Fluffies notice that they’re coming. Guardians don’t like it if their humans go falling in love without warning. They don’t like it even when they do get warning. It’s their job to keep humans on the straight an’ narrow. But straight an’ narrow don’t get much of a look-in when a human falls in love. All sorts of funny things start happening. Black becomes white, right becomes wrong. An’ they start singing.’ He shuddered. ‘That’s usually the worst part.’

  ‘So this is just between the Fluffies? Nothing to do with us?’

  ‘Ye-es. An’ no. It depends. Me ‘n Ismael – we have this deal. ‘Stead of fighting or arguing, we play at cards. He wins, he gets to say something to Billie. I win, I do. Keeps it civil. We know where we are. ‘S far as either of us know where we are with Billie. But,’ – he spat again. Out in the darkness, something sizzled – ‘I reckon neither of us’d take it kindly if the cards started flying around or the table started walking or the chairs started chucking themselves. That’s what it’s like when you get hit. Nothing’s where you think it is any more.’