Little People (7 page)

He waited a while second before prompting; ‘You were just what?'

‘Just, um, rehearsing.'
Christ
, said a voice inside my head,
couldn't you have done better than that?
‘For a play.'

He looked at me as if he'd just found half of me in an apple. ‘What play?'

‘School,' I said. ‘Next term.'

‘You didn't say anything about any play.'

‘Didn't I? Oh well. It's only a small part, you see, and—'

His nose twitched once. ‘Doesn't matter,' he replied. ‘Like they say, size isn't everything. Tell you what – after dinner tonight, your mother and I can help you learn your lines. How'd that be?'

Was I really so transparent, I wondered. If so, I had a wonderful career ahead of me as a plate-glass window. ‘That's really kind of you,' I said, ‘but I've only got three lines, so it isn't—'

‘Ah.' He nodded. ‘I see. You sure about that?'

I gulped. ‘What?'

‘I made it four,' Daddy George explained. ‘First you said sorry, then you didn't expect, then if it didn't agree with you, and finally—' He shrugged. ‘You're right, it was just three. My mistake. Must be a funny old play, though, if that's all you've got to say. Pinter?'

‘What?'

‘Harold Pinter? Samuel Beckett? The playwright,' he added, ‘not the time traveller.'

‘Um,' I replied. I guess I've just got a knack for repartee. ‘No, not them. Someone else.'

‘Ah. Who?'

‘I – it's on the tip of my tongue. Begins with an S.'

‘Shakespeare?'

I shook my head. ‘Sorry,' I said, ‘it's just sort of gone, for now. It'll come back to me in a moment, I'm sure.'

He nodded slowly. ‘I hope so,' he said. ‘After all, it's fairly essential when you're acting to know what play you're in, otherwise you might wander into the wrong theatre by mistake and screw everything up for everybody. Well-known theatrical adage, that is. You ask Ken Branagh or anybody like that, they'll tell you exactly the same thing.'

‘Thanks,' I muttered. ‘I'll remember that.'

‘Well, do your best,' he said. ‘But don't strain yourself. I'd start with easy stuff, if I were you, like your name and address; then you can work your way up to remembering tricky things like playwright's names and bits of useless advice. Well,' he added, sniffing, ‘I think I'll go in now. You coming, or are you going to rehearse some more?'

As I followed him into the house, not daring to look round at where the elf had been, I did a quick mental tally of the score so far. Clearly Daddy George knew that I knew something, but the fact that he hadn't said anything openly about it and had confined himself to menacing hints and similar melodrama implied that he didn't know for sure what I'd found out. On balance, then, a solid six out of ten was probably on the generous side of fair.

By dropping said hints, on the other hand, he'd tacitly admitted that there was something going on and that he was involved in it, and also that it was something at least vaguely disreputable (or else why hadn't he come straight out with it and yelled at me?) Once you'd taken out all the performance art and general presentation, even though I was the one who'd been careless enough to let himself be crept up on, when the whistle went for full time I'd learned rather more new and interesting stuff than he had. Seven out of ten for me, then, and there was a case to be made for upping that to seven point five or eight. That, of course, would depend on what action Daddy George now felt obliged to take. If the result was that he panicked and had me killed to stop me telling his secret to the world, my executors would probably feel they had no choice but to scale down that seven into a six, maybe even to a five-five.

Not that he'd go that far, of course.

Would he?

For some unaccountable reason I was as jumpy as a rat in a blender for the rest of the holiday. I was right off my food, didn't sleep much, stayed well away from mechanical or electrical apparatus; on the other hand, I was noticeably less antisocial, to the point where I was never alone from dawn to bedtime if I could possibly avoid it, which wasn't like me at all. When the holiday finally ground to a halt, I turned down an uncharacteristically considerate offer of a lift back to school from Daddy George, and made a point of not sitting in the seat on the train that he subsequently reserved for me. In fact, it was only once I was back in my study at school and I'd had a thorough snoop round for loose electrical connections, stray cobras and tarantulas and freshly loosened floorboards that I stopped twitching and managed to relax.

Next day, after close of business, I went looking for Cru. I felt I probably owed her an apology for something or other, and if I didn't she could book it in on account for the next time I screwed up. I found her down by the tennis courts, throwing bits of gravel at small, gullible birds who assumed they were biscuit crumbs.

‘Hello,' I said.

‘Bastard,' she replied.

Well, in a way it was nice to have my intuition confirmed. ‘So,' I said, ‘how was your Christmas, then?'

‘Utterly horrible,' she replied. ‘Go away and get eaten by rats.'

I assumed a stationary orbit, so to speak, and waited while she scored one direct hit and four near misses. Her hand/eye co-ordination always was excellent. ‘Sorry you had a rotten holiday,' I ventured. ‘Me too, actually.'

‘Good. Serves you right.'

I sensed that something wasn't quite right between us. ‘Is something the matter?' I asked.

‘Yes. You. But nothing that couldn't be solved by you sharing a bath with an electric fire. Goodbye.'

I took a moderately deep breath. ‘Have I done something wrong?' I said.

This time she turned round and looked at me. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘And if your IQ was greater than your inside leg measurement, you'd know that. I'm so glad I'm not as stupid as you are – it must be so infinitely depressing.'

‘Oh well, then,' I said. ‘See you around.'

She frowned. ‘In the distance, preferably. Now, would you mind going and contaminating somewhere else? After all, what harm has this tennis court ever done you?'

I'm not totally insensitive; I can take a hint. So, with a glum sort of smile and a slight shoulder-shrug to convey bewildered regret, I pushed off and left her to her target practice.

It was easy enough to come to terms with the idea that my girlfriend – my only friend, if we're going to be grittily honest about it – had decided she never wanted to see me ever again in this or any parallel universe. After all, I'd never really been able to get my head around the idea that she'd ever liked me, let alone – well, there you go. There was a certain feeling of dreary inevitability about the while thing that made it easier to accept, though no less hard to bear. At least it removed a complication from my life; and one less thing to lose is one less thing to have to worry about.

(Did I ever mention that when I was nine my school nickname was Eeyore? Even the teachers called me that sometimes, when they weren't thinking.)

If there was a positive side to this development, it was that I could now give my full time and attention to the matter of elves. The drawback to that was that, in all honesty, I no longer cared. After all, what the hell was the point of gathering evidence for the existence of small, pointy-eared people? I already believed, and I'd long since reached the conclusion that I'd never be able to convince anybody else, not if I dragged out a live, kicking example and shoved it up their nose. What good would it do, in any event? The human race had managed to shuffle along quite happily for centuries not believing in elves. Finding out the truth would probably just get them mad at me.

Still, I'd come this far – which is just a sort-of-upbeat way of saying force of habit, but there are worse reasons for doing things. The first step, it occurred to me, was to make a start on some actual tangible written notes. Quite by chance, one of my Christmas presents had been a diary. To be precise, a give-away freebie promotional diary, the kind that businesses have done up with their name in gilt on the spine, so that every time you go to write down an appointment or whatever, you catch sight of the name and are reminded of their extreme generosity and general overall excellence. In case you think I'm just being paranoid, by the way, how else would you explain the fact that this particular diary, which came from my uncle Trevor the probate lawyer, was richly gold-embossed with the legend
T. J. Bardshaw & Sons Family Funeral Directors est. 1958
?

Not that that mattered a damn, since I wasn't even figuring on using it as a diary, just a useful notebook to write stuff down in. Besides, it wasn't as if anybody was ever likely to read it except me, so what difference did it make?

So: all I needed now was a quiet place to work and some privacy. Unfortunately, both commodities tend to be rare verging on non-existent in the context of boarding-school life. Short of locking myself in the lavatory, I couldn't rely on an undisturbed hour from wake-up bell to lights out. It's also an awkward fact of human nature that if you look like you're doing something you don't want other people to see, you broadcast some sort of psychic wave that attracts all the busybodies and amateur comedians within a two-mile radius. If you want to be left alone to get on with something, your best bet is to sit in the open in the busiest part of the premises; and if you keep stopping people and asking them for help with some aspect of what you're doing, suddenly you'll find you're the next best thing to invisible and inaudible.

(Of course, I'd learned this particular survival maxim back when I was seven and desperately trying to find an uninterrupted fifteen minutes to finish reading my
Secret Seven
adventure. In our house, for some reason, sitting in a chair reading a book is and always has been interpreted as a cry for help, an expression of loneliness and depression one step removed from the empty aspirin bottle or the teetering walk along the window ledge. Just open a book at random – doesn't even matter if it's the right way up or not – and before you can say ‘Jack Robinson', or even ‘Piss off, I'm trying to read', you're surrounded by bouncy, cheerful people asking you how your day's been, and would it help to talk about it?)

So I parked myself on a bench on the westerly side of the dining hall, with my notebook open on my knee, some book picked out at random on the other side of me, and a pencil stuck behind my ear, as if I was locked in some particularly arduous and potentially contagious piece of homework. It should've worked; but I hadn't been there more than a minute when a shadow fell across my page, and I heard a voice above me saying, ‘What're you reading, then?'

As a precaution, I'd made a point of noting the title of the book selected at random. ‘
Moby Dick
,' I told him. ‘Got to get it done by tomorrow, or I'm history. And geography and possibly physics too.'

‘Oh. Right.' The shadow (which belonged to an exceptionally annoying youth called Ben Thaxton) stayed where it was, right across my page. ‘Funny word, that,' the voice went on.

I tried not to be too obvious about taking a deep, calming breath. ‘What word, Ben?'

‘Moby,' he replied. ‘Looked it up once, couldn't find it. Not in the dictionary.'

‘It's short for Möbius,' I replied, not looking up. ‘I know,' I went on, ‘Möbius Dick, it does conjure up a profoundly disturbing mental image. Still, that's writers for you. Perverts, the lot of 'em. Now, since you're here, perhaps you could help me out with this bit. It says here—'

Thaxton shrugged, gave me a funny look and moved on. I counted up to ten under my breath, just in case he decided to come back, and then opened the diary.

To start with, I'd decided, I'd draw up a grid with ‘sightings' all down the left-hand side of the page, and—

I stopped, and blinked. On the first blank page in the diary, dead centre of the sheet of paper – useful addresses of some such – there was some writing. It said –

HELP

– in teeny-weeny little letters, traced in some kind of brownish ink.

Odd
, I thought. I held the book a few inches from my nose, just in case I'd misinterpreted it or missed something else that might explain it, but there was nothing more that I could see. I had no idea human beings could write that small.

Looking at it was putting me off, spoiling my concentration, so I turned the page, found myself looking at a list of decimal conversions (you know – how many scruples to the kilo and how much is one metre in perches) and flicked on through in search of blank stuff I could write on. There was a nice white patch like a croquet lawn in ‘Personal Details'. I picked up my pencil to begin writing, and—

HELP

– exactly the same as on the addresses page; even the same distinctive and rather unappealing shade of rusty-brown ink.

I studied it at nose's length, just to be sure, making a point of looking out for stray hairs, spots and discolorations. Nothing – not even a wispy fine spray of brown where the nib had dragged on something. What on earth could it mean? Had my uncle Trevor, or possibly even T. J. Bardshaw & Sons Family Funeral Directors est. 1958, been drinking, or just bought a new ultra-fine Rotring mapping pen? Maybe it was one of these new performance-art things, like the one where there's this guy all covered in white paint, standing on a plinth pretending he's a statue.

I sighed. Darwin probably never had all this trouble; nor David Attenborough. I flicked on a couple more pages until I hit more empty white. Only it wasn't as empty as it had looked at first sight, and this time, right there in the middle of the page, same handwriting, same ink, was –

PLEASE