Muddle and Win Page 6

From down here, the huge forms of the humans were like clouds drifting in the sky. Yes, they were there. Yes, they were big. But it was impossible to say how big, how far away, or exactly what meaning they had down here at the level of cat spittle.

  There seemed to be three of them now, gathered round the table. They were Sally, her mother and the blonde, dishevelled girl whom Muddlespot vaguely remembered was Sally’s twin. Their voices filtered down to the cat dish like distant thunder.

  ‘But I can’t do my homework!’ the blonde girl was screaming. ‘She’s got the pencil sharpener!’

  ‘That’s Sally’s pencil sharpener, dear,’ said Mrs Jones. She sounded as if she felt like screaming herself. ‘So where’s yours?’

  ‘It’s not hers! She stole it and put her name on it!’

  ‘I put her name on it, Billie. I named hers and yours after the last time. Remember?’

  ‘She can have the pencil sharpener,’ said Sally.

  ‘Thank you, Sally,’ said Mum. ‘Now, Billie—’

  ‘I need the calculator too!’ said Billie crossly, and snatched at it.

  ‘But that’s Sally’s . . .’

  ‘She can have the calculator,’ said Sally.

  ‘Right,’ said Billie. ‘And I need quiet too! So you have to stop her from doing violin practice until I’ve finished. I’m already late starting because of her, and I won’t be able to get it all done in time and I’ll have to hand it in late again and I’ll probably get punished and I’ll get a bad report and it’ll be all her fault. AGAIN!’

  ‘I’ve done my violin practice,’ said Sally.

  BANG-rattle! Billie had somehow bumped into the leg of the table, knocking Sally’s glass of water over her carefully written page.

  ‘That looks like an easy number,’ said Muddlespot enviously.

  went the door behind Billie.

  ‘It is and it isn’t,’ said Scattletail.

  STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! went Billie’s feet on the stairs.

  ‘I bet she hasn’t got squadrons of Fluffies looking after her.’

  SLAM! went Billie’s bedroom door.

  ‘You can tell, can you?’ Scattletail lit a cigarette and put it into the corner of his mouth. (What with all his words and the cigarette, which was there most of the time, the left-hand corner of Scattletail’s mouth had a lot to do. The rest of him made up for it by doing as little as possible.)‘Nope. She just has the standard detail. One guardian angel. Name of Ismael. He works hard, I’ll give him that . . .’ He blew a long puff of sulphurous yellow smoke. ‘But most of the time I run rings around him.’

  Obediently, the smoke became a ring of little Scattletails, running busily around the figure of an angel who sat dejectedly in the middle of the circle.

  Muddlespot sat dejectedly in the middle of the cat dish. He looked at his toes. His ears drooped. He felt a lump forming in his throat and his eyesight was going misty.

  ‘Sally’s impossible,’ he said forlornly.

  Scattletail eyed him through narrow, dark, slitty eyes. ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  ‘I tried everything! She wouldn’t listen!’

  ‘Still in one piece, ain’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Muddlespot, thinking gloomily of the piles beneath Corozin’s windows. ‘For the moment I am.’

  ‘So what’d she say?’

  ‘She’s not interested,’ said Muddlespot. His words thudded in his ears like a brass hammer falling. He clamped his mouth shut and put his chin on his hands. He thought he was going to cry.

  ‘All right,’ said Scattletail after a bit. ‘What’d you say?’

  ‘Everything I could. I promised her the lot: the nations, wealth, fame, beauty . . .’

  ‘Everything that Low Command says, right?’

  ‘Even the apple!’

  Scattletail blew another puff of sulphurous smoke. He seemed to think for a moment. Then he sidled up to where Muddlespot sat. ‘You use that book, How to Tempt?’ he whispered.

  ‘MCCCLXXVIIIth edition,’ said Muddlespot tearfully.

  ‘Feed the furnace with it.’

  Muddlespot’s ears drooped further. ‘I lost the furnace,’ he said.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Dump the book. Get rid of it. It’s just dead weight.’

  ‘But then the Other Side will find it!’

  ‘Better still.’

  ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’

  Scattletail came closer. The waft of his breath made even Muddlespot gag. And his nose would have poked Muddlespot in the eye if he hadn’t turned his head sideways. But Scattletail was always turning his head sideways. It meant he could use the corner of his mouth better. Under the battered brim of his hat his eyes were like a gunfighter’s – a gunfighter who had seen a hundred fights and had survived them all.

  ‘Corozin give you that thing?’

  ‘Yes – well, his people did.’

  Puff. (Gag.)

  ‘Means they’re more scared of Low Command than anything else. They give it to you, at least Low Command can’t do them for the way they’ve briefed you. Corozin knows it doesn’t work. But Low Command – not one of them’s been up here for centuries. They think things up here are the same as they’ve always been. And things have changed. Things have changed lots.’

  Puff. (Gag, yuck!) In the yellow fumes around Scattletail’s head, more shapes were stirring. They were faces. A dozen Sallys opened their eyes. Twenty Billies spun slowly before Muddlespot’s face. And there were more. Many, many more.

  ‘Kids these days – they know things. More than Low Command dreams of. Or the Other Side, come to that. And what they don’t know they don’t need. Do they know a sell when they see one? You bet they do.’

  ‘Right,’ said Muddlespot, who was feeling ill.

  ‘And does Low Command listen? Like stone walls, that’s how they listen. “Kids are easy,” they say. “Get ’em young,” and all that.’

  He spat. A great yellow blob went whang-sizzlizzle! as it hit the floor of the cat dish.

  ‘Nope. Gimme a banker. A big-salary exec, just a couple of rungs off the top. Or a single working mum. Someone who’s had a bit of time to get afraid. They’re easy. But the kids . . .’ He spat another blob of yellow. The Jones family didn’t know it yet, but Shades wasn’t going to want anything out of this bowl for a week.

  ‘Right,’ said Muddlespot. He got to his feet.

  ‘Where’re you goin’?’

  ‘I’m going to report back down below,’ said Muddlespot. ‘And get spread all over the ceiling.’

  ‘Shouldn’t do that,’ said Scattletail calmly.

  ‘I thought it would save time.’

  ‘Now look, kid—’

  ‘Well, what’s the point? How do I even start? She’s under Sleepless Watch from about a million heavily armed Fluffies from On High! Her trap door’s blocked with fifty fathoms of solid diamond! She even ties herself up in her own head!’

  The little black eyes looked at him. ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean, why? That’s what she’s like – impregnable!’

  ‘I mean, why does she want to be like that? What makes her tick? Must be something.’

  Muddlespot frowned.

  ‘Quite a lot of work, to be that tough,’ Scattletail said. ‘Not easy. Not fun, for a kid. So why? You find out, maybe you find something to work on. More you work on it, easier it gets. And go for the little things. Forget the “bow down and worship me”. Little’s what you want. Stuff they can tell themselves doesn’t really matter. Then later’ – he winked – ‘you make sure it does, see?’

  ‘I can’t go in there again!’ cried Muddlespot. ‘There are guards all over the place!’

  ‘Ye-es, but . . .’ Scattletail sucked his cheeks. ‘If you go right now, maybe you’ll find they’re all shooting each other.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Sure. ’S the problem with the Other Side – they’ve got high standards. You weren’t supposed to have come within a mile of
her.’

  Muddlespot looked up. High above them loomed the figures of Sally and her mother, mopping up the water that Billie had spilled all over Sally’s homework. Distantly the voices filtered down into the cat dish.

  ‘She doesn’t mean to be like this, Sally . . .’

  ‘I know, Mum.’

  ‘It’s hard for her. At school and everything.’

  ‘I know, Mum. Could I have another glass of water?’

  ‘Of course, sweetheart . . .’

  ‘This could be your best chance,’ muttered Scattletail.

  ‘Right,’ sighed Muddlespot.

  He thought about Sally. He thought about going back down and prostrating himself under Corozin’s hammer.

  Sally?

  Hammer?

  Sally.

  Wearily, he picked up the remains of his gear. He pointed himself across the cat dish. He took one step. Then he took another.

  ‘Oh, and kid,’ said Scattletail behind him.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She’s important, yeah?’

  ‘Top Priority,’ said Muddlespot, surprised at the question.

  ‘Low Command’s interested, right?’

  ‘You bet they are.’

  ‘Then, if you do get anywhere with her . . .’

  ‘What?’

  Scattletail’s eyes flicked left and right, like little black fish in dark water. ‘Then watch your back,’ he whispered. ‘Watch . . . Corozin.’

  IT’S AS GOOD to travel as to arrive.

  Muddlespot certainly found it so. And he had plenty of time to think about it because he had plenty of travelling to do. So long as he was travelling, no one was shooting at him and no one was hitting him with hammers. As soon as he arrived, however, he could expect the shooting and possibly quite a lot of hitting to begin all over again.

  He managed to cross the floor and get himself up onto Sally’s shoe before she finished her homework.

  Then he had to hang on for a bit while Sally did some travelling of her own, to and from the kitchen, helping to get dinner on the table.

  Then he had a long climb up Sally’s jeans, jumper, collar and hair while dinner was underway. All the time he was expecting doves to appear, angels to drop on top of him and all the rest of it, but they didn’t. So maybe Scattletail had been right, and the Other Side had been called off for an urgent discussion with whatever they used instead of brass hammers Up There.

  Finally he reached Sally’s ear. Still nothing terrible happened to him, as he crept down the first passage to the six-sided chamber. Everything was quiet. Everyone, it seemed, had gone. In the chamber up the stairs, the statue still pointed to the archway with the words LOOK FOR THE RIGHT over it.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Muddlespot politely as he passed.

  The fountain still played coolly in the courtyard. According to the archway on the far side it was, apparently, still better to GIVE than to RECEIVE.

  ‘Quite,’ said Muddlespot, who on his last time through this place had been giving out tar bombs for all he was worth and trying hard not to receive anything that anyone had wanted to give him in exchange. The stairs, wide as a hockey pitch, still led upwards beyond it.

  Pitch, pitch, pitch went his footsteps on the stairs; a flat scraping sound echoing with emptiness. Pitch, pitch, pitch. Up and up.

  Still no one jumped on him.

  And here he was. The chamber was exactly the same. The semicircle of statues. The star-studded ceiling. The two great windows, showing the table in the outside world with the Jones family now at dinner. And the central self of Sally, sitting at the same table at the chamber’s centre. With one small difference.

  She was untying herself.

  She had got the loops from around her waist and the gag from off her face. The earmuffs lay discarded on the floor. She was bending down and working on the bonds that held her ankles. That was why she didn’t see him when he came in.

  ‘Ahem,’ said Muddlespot.

  She looked up. She scowled.

  And Muddlespot saw why. It wasn’t because he had come back. It was because he had seen her freeing herself. Tied up tightly at her table, she had remembered what it had felt like in that short moment when the bonds had been off her. And she had thought, after a bit, that maybe she would give it another try, on her own and in private. What she absolutely, definitely didn’t want was anyone seeing that she was doing it. Least of all, someone who might think it was because of something he had done. She wasn’t going to admit that someone might know what she wanted better than she did herself. She didn’t like that idea at all.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped.

  ‘Talking to you,’ said Muddlespot brightly.

  ‘And who asked you?’

  ‘I thought you might be uncomfortable. But I see you can look after yourself.’

  Sally shrugged elaborately. ‘They’re perfectly comfortable. I just thought I’d do without them for a bit.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Don’t get any ideas! I’m the good one here. You think you can change that, you’ve another think coming!’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Muddlespot.

  And he thought: I’m the good one here. Meaning?

  ‘Why do you tie yourself?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘What would you do if you were untied?’

  ‘That’s none of your business either.’

  ‘Who would you do it to?’

  ‘Who . . . ?’ she said sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ said Muddlespot, who didn’t.

  ‘Look,’ said Sally, folding her arms. ‘I do what I do. I am what I am. My choice. Not yours.’

  ‘Oh, quite,’ said Muddlespot. ‘Your choice. No question. In fact, I wasn’t going to talk about you at all. I just wanted to ask . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘ . . . about Billie?’

  Silence.

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ said Sally flatly.

  ‘It just seemed a bit clumsy – you know – the way she knocked the table and spilled water over your work like that.’

  ‘It wasn’t clumsy at all,’ said Sally.

  ‘She doesn’t mean to be like that,’ said Muddlespot. ‘Does she?’

  Sally said nothing.

  ‘It’s hard for her,’ Muddlespot went on. ‘At school and everything.’

  ‘I know your game,’ said Sally. ‘I’m not listening.’

  ‘I just wondered’ – Muddlespot’s gaze had fallen on the foot of the statue of Calm; there seemed to be a tiny crack running up the ankle from the heel – ‘in what way school was actually so hard?’

  ‘Where are those earmuffs?’ asked Sally.

  ‘They were round here somewhere,’ said Muddlespot, who had them behind his back.

  ‘I don’t need them anyway.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Muddlespot absently. ‘You’re the good one.’ He thought the crack had grown just a fraction. ‘Tantrums, tantrums, tantrums,’ he mused. ‘“My pencil sharpener. My calculator. Your fault.” Is she like that all the time?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, no.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I bet when she does something good, they praise her to the skies. Don’t they?’

  ‘Shut up! And leave me alone!’

  ‘And then they turn round and ask you to—’

  ‘NO!’ cried Sally. She had jumped to her feet. Her voice echoed round the chamber. It came from everywhere. It came from outside.

  The view through the windows had altered. In the outside world, Sally had jumped to her feet too. She was glaring at her mother across the table. Mum’s face stared back in surprise.

  ‘No?’ came her voice. ‘But Sally . . .’

  ‘It’s her turn to do the washing-up!’

  ‘But she’s still got to do her homework!’ pleaded Mum.

  ‘She should have done it yesterday!
’

  ‘Why should I have to . . .’ murmured Muddlespot.

  ‘Why should I have to do the washing-up just because she can’t . . .’

  ‘ . . . be bothered . . .’ murmured Muddlespot, with a dizzy feeling as if he was pushing at a revolving door that had suddenly started to revolve rather fast.

  ‘ . . . be bothered to do what she’s supposed to do?’

  ‘But you do it so well, sweetheart—’

  ‘Is that right? So maybe I should break things from time to time . . .’

  ‘ . . . Like she does,’ added Muddlespot.

  ‘Like SHE does!’ yelled Sally in the chamber of her mind. She flung herself away from the table. It disappeared. A door appeared in the air between two of the statues. She went through it, SLAM! and a split second later there was another SLAM! from the outer world, where her body had put her thoughts into action. Stairs appeared beneath her feet and she went up them, STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! echoed by STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! STOMP! from the outer world. Then another door appeared, adorned with tastefully coloured wooden letters which spelled SALLY’S ROOM. That too went SLAM! SLAM! On the far side she paused for breath.

  In the outside world she was now in her bedroom. She could see it out there, through the windows of her mind. It was neat and tidy, with her clothes put away and nothing on the floor, and her books and alarm clock set square upon her bedside table – all as she had left it this morning.

  But inside her mind nothing had changed. She was still in the central chamber with the semicircle of statues around her. And Muddlespot was standing there watching, with a look of innocence on his face.

  ‘I HOPE YOU’RE SATISFIED!’ she screamed.

  In her bedroom in the outer world there was only silence.

  ‘Don’t you feel better now?’ said Muddlespot.

  ‘NO!’

  A bed appeared. She sat down on it and put her face in her hands.

  ‘Nice room,’ said Muddlespot, looking out through the windows. ‘Very tasteful. Very tidy.’

  Sally did not answer.

  ‘Nice picture there,’ said Muddlespot. ‘You and your sister.’

  Sally reached. The picture appeared in her hand.

  It was a nice picture. It showed two girls; one blonde, one dark. They were the same age as each other, and maybe a couple of years younger than Sally and Billie were now. They were neatly dressed, with their hair washed and brushed and their arms around each other, smiling together at the camera.