Odds and Gods (33 page)

The lawyer shrugged. ‘I am,’ he said, with a flicker of pride, ‘the spirit of Litigation, I embody the Law. All lawyers are, in a sense, my children. In that respect I’ve known him, and his kind, ever since the first caveman filed suit against his neighbour for violating his patent on the wheel. A dispute,’ he added smugly, ‘which is still dragging on in some higher court or other, so I believe.’

‘I see.’ Osiris nodded. ‘Figures. You remind me a bit of Julian, oddly enough.’

‘You must be very proud.’

Osiris shifted a little in his seat, which was the archetypal lawyers’ office client’s-side-of-the-desk chair. Legend has it that the prototype was designed, five millennia ago, for a three-foot dwarf with granite buttocks who had lost both legs in a mining accident. ‘Let’s just go over this one more time, shall we?’ he said. ‘You’re advising that I should hand over control of the Universe to my godson, who’s a lawyer, because trying to resist his attempts to have me declared officially senile would be a lot of hassle and expense. Is that it?’

‘Broadly speaking,’ replied the lawyer, polishing his spectacles, ‘yes. I must, however, qualify that statement by urging you to consider the precise definition of hassle in this context, bearing in mind the complexity of the grey areas of the Law in this particular arena, not to mention the consideration that the Court is likely to take a poor view of your purportedly wasting its time, speaking entirely prima facie and playing devil’s advocate here for a moment, in resisting an application that really does make good practical sense from the feasibility and administrative viewpoints and is probably the best outcome for all parties when push comes to shove. I take it we’re basically in agreement on that score.’

Osiris stood up. ‘That’s your advice, is it?’ he said quietly.

‘In broad brush terms, taking a simplistic overview, yes, to a certain extent it is.’

‘Right.’ Osiris smiled. ‘Then fuck you.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

With a certain amount of surprise, Osiris noticed that he was standing up, which wasn’t bad going for someone who’d been confined to a wheelchair since Charlemagne was in nappies. ‘I said,’ he said, ‘fuck you. I can spell that if you like.’

The lawyer raised one eyebrow. ‘You’re provisionally pigeonholing my advice for mature consideration at a later date?’ he hazarded.

‘I’m telling you where you can stick your advice,’ Osiris replied, wiggling his toes. ‘If your basic anatomy’s a bit rusty, it’s the part of your body you seem to talk through. Goodbye.’

‘But I’m your
lawyer
,’ the lawyer said, and Osiris noticed that he’d gone bright red in the face, giving him the appearance of a giant strawberry. ‘You really ought to give very serious consideration—’

The door slammed.

For about fifteen seconds (or, to look at it another way, eighty-six thousand dollars exclusive of taxes) the lawyer sat motionless, staring at the closed door and wondering what on earth was going on. Then he leant forwards and pressed a buzzer on his desk.

‘Has Mr Osiris left the building, Miss Fortescue?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Did he pay in advance?’

‘Yes, sir. Bearer bond.’

‘Ah.’ The lawyer relaxed, and smiled. ‘That’s all right, then,’ he said.

 

In the corridor Osiris stopped and collected his thoughts. For the first time in centuries he found that he had nearly the complete set, including most of the first day covers.

Marvellous, he said to himself, money well spent. Now I know what to do.

Avoid going to law, because it doesn’t do any good.

The Law is my shepherd, wherefore shall I have nothing. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, shamming dead.

If Julian inherits the earth, that’s what God will look like for ever and ever.

I can stand up.

We created the world, they screwed it up. We created atoms, they split them. We gave them a garden, and now all that’s left is a few nibbled-off stumps, some patches of oil and the silver trails of lawyers. We gave them everything, and they have made it into nothing. We gave them Justice, and they invented the Law. And on the ninth day, they tried to have us locked up.

Cautiously, trying not to notice himself doing it in case his brain suddenly remembered about the paralysis business, he glanced down at his feet, then his shins, then his knees. Been a long time, he thought. Still, it’s like riding a bicycle. Well, hopefully not at all like riding a bicycle, which is all about wobbling precariously along for two or three yards and then falling over. He raised one foot and put it down, and then repeated the experiment with the other foot. And again. And again.

Gee whiz, World, my feet work! Isn’t that amazing?

I can use them for standing.

I can use them for walking.

I can use them for running.

I can use them for standing on tiptoe to reach things on high shelves.

I can use them for dancing.

And, (said the god to himself and thereby parenthetically to the cosmos at large) best of all, I can use them for giving Julian a bloody good kick up the backside.

 

The science of surgery has come a long way since the days when a doctor was a sawbones and the contents of his little black bag looked horribly like a collation of a carpenter’s tool-roll and a torturer’s equipment chest. The modern surgeon tends to use such precision implements as the fine scalpel, the forceps, the roll of suture, the miniature laser . . .

The 105mm recoilless rifle . . .

‘There he is,’ hissed the first doctor. He slammed in the high explosive shell and closed the breech. ‘Remember, squeeze the trigger, don’t pull.’

Even in his semi-trance of private meditation, Osiris heard the click of the breech-block falling into place. He turned and stared . . .

‘Ah,’ said the first doctor, grinning in the shadows. ‘Now then, hold still, this isn’t going to hurt one little bit.’

Before Osiris could move or speak, the second doctor squeezed (not pulled) the trigger, and the ground shook with the thump of the artillery piece going off. The muzzle blast knocked the first doctor to the ground.

‘Hoy,’ said his colleague, scrambling to his feet, ‘did I get him?’

The first doctor nodded. ‘You could say that,’ he replied. ‘All the king’s horses job, by the look of it.’ He removed a finger - not his own - from his ear and discarded it. ‘Put another way,’ he went on, ‘all his insides are now outsides. Let’s get out of here, quick. I never did like the sight of blood.’

The second doctor sneered. ‘Huh,’ he said, ‘you’re just like him, aren’t you?’

‘Am I?’

‘Absolutely,’ replied the second doctor. ‘At the first sign of trouble you go all to pieces.’

‘A
s a slogan,’ said Ahura Mazda, sun god of the ancient Persians, ‘it lacks a certain something, don’t you feel?’

Baldur, Norse god of fertility, looked up irritably, aerosol in hand. ‘You reckon?’ he said.

‘Well . . .’ Ahura Mazda took a step back and scrutinised the wall further. ‘You do want me to be honest, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Not neces . . .’

Great oaks from little acorns; very prudently, the Sunnyvoyde Residents Direct Action Committee had decided to try out its blitzkrieg graffiti campaign on the back wall of the coal bunker, down at the far end of the garden, behind the compost heap. That way, if it turned out not to be the stunningly effective medium of protest they confidently anticipated, nobody would ever know.

‘I mean,’ Ahura Mazda drawled on, ‘banality is all right in its way, but if we were going all out for the trite approach, we can still do better than that.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as, let me see, um, “Gods united can never be defeated”. Or “Rice pudding? No thanks”. Or “Together we can stop the courgettes”. Something like that.’

‘ “Gods of the cosmos unite”,’ suggested Nkulunkulu, the Great Sky Spirit of the Zulus. ‘ “You have nothing to lose but your . . . your . . .” Hell,’ he said, furrowing his brows into a single black hedgerow. ‘Nothing to lose but what, for pity’s sake?’

‘I like it,’ Baldur growled. ‘I think it has relevance.’

On the wall he had painted:
in wobbly green letters. On the other hand, it was his aerosol.

‘I still think,’ muttered Vulcan, the Roman god of fire,

‘you should have said something about that tapioca last Thursday. It was really horrible, I thought, and lumpy, too. I can’t be doing with lumpy tapioca.’

‘The tapioca was fine,’ retorted Viracocha, the pre-Inca All-Father of Argentina, ‘compared to that yuk we had yesterday, whatever it was supposed to be.’

‘Pease pudding,’ said Vulcan.

‘Whatever,’ Viracocha snarled. ‘It was absolutely yetch, you know?’

‘Absolutely,’ Ahura Mazda agreed. ‘They make a dessert and they call it pease. I still don’t think we’ve quite taken the possibilities of this medium of expression to their absolute limits, do you?’

Ogun, the Nigerian god of war, shook his head. ‘I’m going in,’ he said, ‘before I catch my death of cold. If anyone wants me, I’ll be in the television room.’

‘Scab,’ Baldur hissed, shaking the aerosol aggressively. ‘Blackleg.’

Ogun gave him a long stare. ‘I’ll take that as a statement of fact,’ he said frostily. ‘So long, losers.’

Baldur sighed. In his face was reflected the transcendent pain and sorrow of all organisers everywhere who come up against total unrelenting apathy. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘fine. From now on you can use your own bloody aerosol. I’m going to my room.’

The other members of the committee lingered a little longer, contemplating the despised graffiti. So nearly there, they thought, but not quite.

What we need, they realised, is a Leader.

‘I think there’s a spelling mistake in there,’ Viracocha observed. ‘Aren’t there two Gs in Bage?’

‘I wonder where Osiris has really got to?’ somebody asked.

Ahura Mazda nodded. ‘Good question,’ he replied. ‘Typical of him, that, making himself scarce as soon as he’s needed.’

‘He’d know what to do.’

‘Oh come on.’ Ahura Mazda yawned and polished his spectacles. ‘We all know what to do. It’s how to do it that’s got us a bit stumped just at the moment.’ He looked round. ‘Any suggestions, anyone?’

‘Are you a doctor?’

‘I suppose we could look it up in a dictionary,’ Viracocha suggested.

‘Look up what?’

‘Bage.’

Ahura Mazda sighed. Then, from the pocket of his raincoat, he produced his own aerosol (cobalt blue gloss, for touching up scratches on 1974 Cortinas). He shook the can, playing a merry if avant-garde tune with the little ball bearing in the neck.

‘Try this,’ he said, and started to spray.

What he sprayed was:
Once, in the Great Night that preceded the First Day, a woman had stooped over the mangled corpse of her husband. Red to the elbows with his blood, she had gathered the torn scraps of his body in a basket and stolen them away. Under the dim light of the newly lit stars, she had put them back together, refusing to acknowledge the existence of Death, as if it had been some unstable totalitarian regime in some little dominion far away.

In her hand, cupped against the faint breezes of the first dawn, she had shielded the guttering flame of his life. Because she did not recognise Death, because she had refused to admit the possibility of something ending, her work was successful and the body, stitched together with papyrus thread and linen bandage, eventually twitched and stirred; and the mouth opened and said, ‘. . . -Handed cow, you’ve gone and bolted my trapezus slap bang in the middle of my pectoral major. Do you realise that from now on, whenever I want to scratch my ear I’m going to have to wiggle my toes?’

But that was a long time ago; and since then, Death has opened his embassies and consulates in every corner of the cosmos. Undoing Death’s work is no longer a matter of putting the bits back together and turning the starting handle. Or so they say.

‘Search me,’ said Pan, scratching his chin. ‘Try turning it round the other way and belting it a few times with the heel of your shoe.’

Sandra looked up at him. Her clothes were soaked in blood, there was blood on her face, in her hair, everywhere. In her hand she held seven inches of warm grey tubing and a bone.

‘You’re not really helping, you know,’ she said.

Pan shrugged. ‘I was beginning to wonder,’ he said glumly. ‘I think I’ll go and see if I can get hold of lots of hot water and some clean towels.’

With an effort, Sandra cleared her mind. On the one hand, it surely stood to reason; in the old days, he was always being dismantled and put together again, so there had to be a way of doing it, a simple way that a trained nurse like herself could work out, from first principles if necessary. On the other hand . . .