Paint Your Dragon (34 page)

‘And when it reaches a hundred per cent?'

‘Hooray, hooray. And what about me?'

Chubby frowned. ‘Don't know him. Who he?'

‘Gosh.' Chubby smiled bleakly. ‘Lucky old me, huh?'

The screen flickered. The red light came on and, this time, stayed on.

 

Bianca stepped back to admire her work. A masterpiece, as always. Three down, fourteen to go.

The biggest problem had been getting hold of the photographs. First, she'd tried the local paper, but they'd got suspicious and refused to co-operate. The victims' families had virtually set the dogs on her. Finally, she'd hit on the idea of sending Mike round pretending to be the organiser of a Sadley Grange Disaster Fund. She'd felt very bad about that, but he'd come away with all the photographs she needed.

The walls of her studio were covered in them; enlarged, reduced, montaged, computer-enhanced, until the very sight of them gave her the creeps. Sixteen very ordinary people who happened to have been in the Sadley Grange Civic Centre when it blew up. The victims.

So far she'd done Mrs Blanchflower, Mrs Gray and Mr Smith, and she was knackered. Straight portraiture, no dramatic poses or funny hats; they had to be as lifelike as possible or the whole thing would be a waste of time. The worst part of it all was the responsibility, because she wasn't the one who was going to have to live with the consequences for the rest of her life if she made a mistake. Accidentally leave off a toe, or get an arm out of proportion, and she'd be ruining somebody's life.

The hell with that, she told herself. Makes it sound like they're doing me a favour.

Yes. Well. And whose dragon caused all this mess in the first place?

‘Mike,' she croaked, ‘I need a brand new set of the big chisels, another hide mallet and coffee, about a gallon and a half. Would you...?'

‘On my way.'

‘Mrs Cornwall's nose. Could you do me a six by four enlargement of the wart? I can't see from this whether it's a straightforward spherical type or more your cottage loaf job.'

‘No problem.'

She sighed, wiped her forehead with her sleeve. ‘And when you've done that,' she said, ‘if you could see your way to making a start on roughing out Mrs Ferguson with the angle grinder. I've marked her up, and it'd save ever such a lot of time.'

‘Mrs Ferguson, angle grinder. Right you are.'

‘Oh, and Mike.'

‘Yes?'

‘Thanks.'

Mike laughed, without much humour. ‘That's all right,' he said. ‘After all, what are friends for? Apart, that is, from heavy lifting, telling lies to next of kin, basic catering and other unpaid chores?'

‘Dunno. Moral support?'

Mike shrugged. ‘Don't ask me,' he said, ‘my morals collapsed years ago. Be seeing you.'

Left alone, Bianca tried to clear her mind of everything except the technicalities of sculpture. Easier said than done; it was like clearing a pub on Cup Final night, only rather more difficult. The hardest part, unexpectedly enough, was the way the faces from the photographs stayed in her mind, plastered across her retina like fly-posters, even when her eyes were tight shut. That meant something, she felt sure, but she hadn't the faintest idea what.

 

‘Excuse me.'

Kurt stopped dead in his tracks, closed his eyes and counted to ten. Once upon a time, that particular ritual had been a foolproof method of keeping his temper. Now all it meant was that he lost his rag ten seconds later.

‘Hi,' he replied, cramming a smile onto his face, which had never been exactly smile-shaped at the best of times. These past few days, however, cheerful expressions tended to perch apprehensively on his features, like a unicyclist crossing a skating rink.

‘Mr Lundqvist.' It was the Canova again. ‘May I have a word with you, please?'

‘Lady...'

Inside the Classical perfection of the Canova bivouacked all that was immortal of Mrs Blanchflower. By a prodigious effort of his imagination, Kurt had worked out a scenario where he would actually be pleased to see Mrs Blanchflower, but it involved her being in the water and him being a twenty-foot-long Mako shark. The only reason why he hadn't yet mortally insulted her was because he never seemed to be able to get a word in edgeways.

‘Mr Lundqvist,' said the Canova. ‘Now, as you know, I'm the last person ever to complain about anything, but I really most protest, in the strongest possible...'

Getting past Mrs Blanchflower, of course, was the beginning, not the end, of the aggravation. She was the worst individual specimen, yes, the gold medallist in the Pest Olympics, but there were fourteen others right behind her sharing silver. And it's no real escape to elude one Mohammed Ali only to be set upon by fourteen Leon Spinkses.

‘SHUTTUP!' Kurt therefore bellowed, as he shouldered past the Canova into the main area of the Nissen hut. That bought him, albeit at terrible cost, a whole half second of dead silence.

‘And LISTEN!' he said. ‘Thank you. Now then, folks, gather round. And you better pay attention, 'cos this is important.'

Fifteen statues all started to complain at once.

‘Okay.' Kurt backed away and climbed onto a chair. ‘Okay,' he repeated, just loud enough to be audible. ‘If you guys don't want to go home, that's up to you. Well, so long. It's been...'

Silence. Well, virtual silence. Mrs Hamstraw (by Bernini) finished her sentence about the sultanas in her muesli (she'd
told
him,
three
times, the doctor had told her no sultanas) and Ms Stones reiterated her threat of writing to Roger Cook for the seventy-eighth time, but apart from that there was a silence so complete, Kurt felt he knew what it must have been like at five to nine on the first day of Creation.

‘On the other hand,' he went on, calm and quiet as the Speaking Clock, ‘anybody who wants out had better listen good. Now, then...'

 

‘I still say that, after last time ...'

The Great Goat turned his head about twenty-seven degrees and scowled.

‘Thank you,' he said, in a voice you could have freeze-dried coffee in. ‘Shall we proceed?'

A nice man, Dr Thwaites; all his patients would have agreed, likewise his colleagues, his neighbours, even some of his relations. A kind man, for whom nothing would ever be too much trouble. A patient man, prepared to listen politely and attentively to every hypochondriac who ever thought mild indigestion was a heart attack. But flawed, nevertheless. Albert Schweitzer was the same, and likewise Walt Disney.

‘If you insist,' muttered the Lesser Goat. ‘Now then, where's that wretched skull?'

Because Dr Thwaites, having paid Farmer Melrose six months' rent for conjuring rites on Lower Copses Meadow, was damned if he was going to forfeit half his money - thirty pounds, fifty pence - with three months still to run. It was, as far as he was concerned, a matter of principle.

‘When you're ready, Miss Frobisher. Now then.' He cleared his throat. ‘By Asmoday and Beelzebub I conjure you, spirits of—' He stopped. If someone had just popped an apple in his mouth, they couldn't have shut him up quicker or more effectively.

‘Don't mind us,' said the Captain of Spectral Warriors, in a soft, speaking-in-church voice. ‘Just pretend we aren't here, okay?'

The Great Goat would dearly have liked to do just that, but unfortunately it was out of the question. It takes a special sort of mental discipline to ignore five hundred of Hell's finest, in full battledress uniform, all displaced heads, unexpected limbs and weird appendages, creeping stealthily past you in the early hours of the morning.

“Ere, doc,' said the thurifer at his elbow. ‘You're really good at this, aren't you?'

The Great Goat swallowed hard. ‘Apparently,' he said. In his subconscious he was wondering whether he could persuade Mr Melrose to impose a retrospective rent increase, because the thought of performances like this every week for the next three months was enough to drive a man insane. He'd have to rethink all his cosy preconceptions about anatomy, for a start.

‘Excuse me.' The Captain was talking to him. He forced himself to listen.

‘Sorry, I was, um, miles away. Can I, er, be of assistance?'

‘We're trying to get to—' The Captain consulted a clipboard. ‘Place called Birmingham. Would you happen to know where that is?'

‘Birmingham.'

‘That's right. I've got this map here, but it hasn't photocopied terribly well, so if you could just set us on the right track, we'd be ever so grateful.'

His disbelief suspended on full pay, the Great Goat felt in the pockets of his robes and produced a pencil and the back of an envelope.

T
he Big Fight.

Seen purely from the viewpoint of logistics and administration, it was the greatest show in history. Everybody who was, had been or would be anybody was there, and the complexities of setting up a switchboard for the retrospective booking office had taxed Mr Kortright's ingenuity to its fullest extent. Or take the popcorn concession, a chronological disaster poised to happen. Any popcorn eaten by visitors from the past or the future would leave a serious imbalance in the fabric of reality, particularly after it had passed through the visitor's digestive system and entered the ecology of his native century. In order to compensate, Kortright had had to estimate the amount of popcorn likely to be eaten and arrange for compensatory amounts of matter to be removed from/added to a whole series of past and future destinations. As for the envelope of artificial Time in which the auditorium was contained, it had cleaned out Chubby's stocks down to the last second. God only knew what would happen if the fight lasted beyond the twelfth round.

All these problems, of course, were more than adequately accounted for in the price of the tickets; and that caused yet another organisational nightmare, given that (for example) in order to pay for his ticket the Emperor Nero had leeched out the entire economy of the Roman Empire, which could only mean total fiscal meltdown, violence in the streets and the fall of the Empire several centuries ahead of schedule. Fortunately, a client of Lin Kortright's who controlled various financial syndicates in the first century AD was able to offer bridging finance; disaster was averted, ten per cent was earned for the Kortright Agency, and Nero (who paid the first instalment of the loan by insuring Rome and then burning it down) was sitting in the front row, munching olives and trying unsuccessfully to persuade Genghis Khan to take St George to win at fifteen to one.

There was also a band, and cheer-leaders, and huge spotlights producing as much light and heat as a small star, and commentators from every TV station in Eternity all getting ready to provide simultaneous coverage (live was, in context, a word best avoided), and cameras and film crews and sound crews and men in leather jackets with headphones on wandering about prodding bits of trailing flex and engineers swearing at each other, and all the spectacle and pageantry of a galaxy-class sporting event. The panel of judges (two saints, two devils and, representing the saurian community, two enormous iguanas) were sworn in. There was an awed hush as the doors at the back swung open to admit the referee; no less a dignitary than Quetzalcoatl, Feathered Serpent of the Aztecs. Had his worshippers in pre-Conquest Mexico known that when he promised to come again to judge the quick and the dead, he meant this, maybe they'd have been a little bit less forthcoming with the gold and blood sacrifices.

It was nearly time. The food vendors left the auditorium, trays empty. The roar of voices dwindled down to an expectant buzz. All it needed now was for the contestants to show up, and the contest for the ethical championship of the universe could begin.

And Kortright turned to Stevenson and said, ‘Well, where the fuck are they?'

And Stevenson leant across to Kortright and said, ‘I thought they were with you.'

 

‘Finished,' Bianca gasped.

Forget the aesthetics for a moment; in terms of sheer stamina, it was the greatest achievement in the history of Art. With an effort she unclenched her cramped fingers sufficiently to allow chisel and mallet to fall to the ground and collapsed backwards into her chair, only to find there was someone already sitting in it.