Unseen Academicals (34 page)

‘Never, ever?’ said Glenda, mystified at this unnatural history.

‘No, he’s always very polite and just a bit sad.’

That must mean he’s planning something, Glenda’s inner self provided. She said, ‘Well, it’s up to you. I can’t help here, but remember, you’ve always got your knee.’

‘And what about…?’ Juliet began.

‘Look,’ said Glenda firmly, ‘either you go off now and see the world and earn lots of money and get your picture in the papers and all of the other things I know you would really like to do, or you have to sort it out for yourself.’

‘We’re going to be here for some time,’ said Pepe. ‘You know, this sauce would be nice with a little bit of vodka in it. It really would give it a little bit of zest. A little bit of sparkle. Come to think of it, a lot of vodka would be even better.’

‘But I love ’im!’ Juliet wailed.

‘That’s all right, then, stay here,’ said Glenda. ‘Have you even kissed?’

‘No! He never quite gets round to it.’

‘Perhaps he’s one of those gentlemen who don’t like the ladies,’ said Pepe primly.

‘And we could really do without your input,’ snapped Glenda, turning on him.

‘I mean, for some of the others, like Rotten Johnny, I nearly wear my knee out, but Trev’s just…sweet, all the time.’

‘Look, I know you told me to keep out of this, and I know I’ve been a terrible sinner in my time and hope to remain so, but I have been
around the houses more times than a postman and the reason for this imp ass is obvious,’ Pepe volunteered. ‘He’s got the nous to see that she’s so beautiful that she should be painted standing on some shell somewhere without her vest on and little fat pink babies inexplicably zooming around all over the place and he’s some kid with nothing more than a bit of street smarts. I mean, it’s pointless, isn’t it? He’s not going to stand a chance and he knows it, even if he doesn’t know he knows it.’

‘I’d give him a kiss if he wanted one and would definitely not knee him in the tonker,’ said Juliet.

‘You have to sort it out,’ said Glenda. ‘I can’t sort it out for you. If I tried, it would get sorted out all wrong.’

‘But—’ Juliet began.

‘No, that’s it,’ said Glenda. ‘Off you go, buy yourself lots of nice stuff–it’s your money. And if you don’t look after her, Mister Pepe, a knee would only be the start.’

Pepe nodded and very gently tugged Juliet away and down the stone steps.

Now what would I do at this point if I were in a romantic novel? Glenda said to herself as the footsteps died away. Her reading had left her pretty much an expert on what to do if you were in a romantic novel, although one of the things that really annoyed her about romantic novels, as she had confided to Mr Wobble, was that no one did any cooking in them. After all, cooking was important. Would it hurt to have a pie-making sequence? Would a novel called
Pride and Buns
be totally out of the question? Even a few tips on how to make fairy cakes would help, and be pretty much in period as well. She’d be a little happier if, even, the lovers could be thrown into the mixing bowl of life. At least it would be some acknowledgement that people actually ate food.

Around about now she knew, and knew all through her body, that she should be dissolving into a flood of tears. She started cleaning up the floor. Then she cleaned up the ovens. She always left them sparkling, but that was no reason not to clean them again. She used an old toothbrush to ease minute amounts of dirt from odd corners,
scoured every pot with fine sand, emptied the grates, riddled the cinders, swept the floor, tied two brooms together to dislodge the spider’s webs of years from the high wall, and scrubbed again until the soapy water poured down the stone stairs and washed away the footprints.

Oh, yes–and one other thing. There were some anchovies on the freezing slab. She warmed up a couple and went to the large three-legged cauldron in the corner of the kitchen where last night she had chalked the words ‘Do Not Touch’. She took off the lid and peered into its depths. The crab that Verity Pushpram had given her last night, which seemed a very long time ago now, waved its eyeballs at her.

‘I wonder what would have happened if I had left the lid off?’ she said. ‘I wonder how fast crabs learn?’

She dropped in the soggy anchovies, which seemed to meet with crabby approval. With that done, she stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked for something else to clean. The black iron would never shine, but every surface had been scrubbed and dried. As for the plates, you could eat your dinner off them. If you wanted a job done properly, you had to do it yourself. Juliet’s version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen.

Something brushed against her face. She absent-mindedly swiped at it and found her fingers holding a black feather. Those wretched things in the pipes. Someone ought to do something about them. She took her longest broom and banged on a pipe. ‘Go on! Get out of there!’ she yelled. There was a scuffling in the darkness and a faint ‘Awk! Awk!’

‘ ’scuse me, miss,’ said a voice, and she looked down the steps into the misshapen face of…What was his name? Oh, yes. ‘Good morning, Mister Concrete,’ she said to the troll. She couldn’t help but notice the brown stains coming from his nose.

‘Can’t find Mister Trev,’ Concrete stated.

‘Haven’t seen him all morning,’ said Glenda.

‘Can’t find Mister Trev,’ the troll repeated, louder.

‘Why do you need him?’ said Glenda. As far as she knew, the vats just
about ran themselves. You told Concrete to dribble candles and he dribbled candles until he’d run out of candles.

‘Mister Nutt sick,’ said Concrete. ‘Can’t find Mister Trev.’

‘Take me to Mister Nutt right now!’ said Glenda.

It’s a bit harsh to call anybody a denizen, but the people who lived and worked in the candle vats fitted the word to a T. The vats were, in fact, their den. If you ever saw them anywhere in the underground maze, they were always scuttling very fast, but most of the time they just worked and slept and stayed alive. Nutt was lying on an old mattress with his arms wrapped tightly around himself. Glenda took one look and turned to the troll. ‘Go and find Mister Trev,’ she said.

‘Can’t find Mister Trev,’ said the troll.

‘Keep on looking!’ She knelt down beside Nutt. His eyes had rolled back inside his head. ‘Mister Nutt, can you hear me?’

He seemed to wake. ‘You must go away,’ he said. ‘It will be very dangerous. The door will open.’

‘What door is that?’ she said, trying to remain cheerful. She looked at the denizens, who were watching her with a kind of meek horror. ‘Can’t one of you find something to put over him?’ The mere question sent them scurrying in panic.

‘I have seen the door, so it will open again,’ said Nutt.

‘I can’t see any door, Mister Nutt,’ said Glenda, looking around.

Nutt’s eyes opened wide. ‘It’s in my head.’

There was no privacy to the vats; it was just a wider room off the long, endless corridor. People went past all the time.

‘I think you may have been overdoing it, Mister Nutt,’ said Glenda. ‘You rush around working all hours, worrying yourself sick. You need a rest.’ To her surprise, one of the denizens turned up holding a blanket, quite large parts of which were still flexible. She put it over him just as Trev arrived. He had no choice about arriving as Concrete was dragging him by the collar. He looked down at Nutt and then up at Glenda. ‘What’s happened to him?’

‘I don’t know.’ She raised a finger to her head and swivelled it a little, the universal symbol for ‘gone nuts’.

‘You must go away. Things will be very dangerous,’ Nutt moaned.

‘Please tell us what is going on,’ said Glenda. ‘Please tell me.’

‘I can’t,’ said Nutt. ‘I cannot say the words.’

‘There are words you want to say?’ said Trev.

‘Words that don’t want to be said. Strong words.’

‘Can’t we help?’ Glenda persevered.

‘Are you sick?’ said Trev.

‘No, Mister Trev. I passed an adequate bowel motion this morning.’ That was a flash of the old Nutt-precise, but slightly odd.

‘Sick in the head?’ said Glenda. That came out of desperation.

‘Yes. In the head,’ said Nutt. ‘Shadows. Doors. Can’t tell you.’

‘Is there anyone who can cure that kind of sickness?’

Nutt didn’t answer for a while and then said, ‘Yes. You must find me a philosopher trained in Uberwald. They will help the thoughts come straight.’

‘Isn’t that what you did for Trev?’ said Glenda. ‘You told him what he was thinking about his dad and everything, and that made him a lot happier, didn’t it, Trev?’

‘Yes, it did,’ said Trev. ‘And there’s no need to elbow me in the ribs like that. It really did help. Couldn’t you be hypnotized?’ he said to Nutt. ‘I saw a man in the music hall once and he just waved his shiny watch at them and it’s amazing the kind of things they did. Barked like dogs, even.’

‘Yes. Hypnosis is an important part of the philosophy,’ said Nutt. ‘It helps to relax the patient so that the thoughts get a chance to be heard.’

‘Well, there you are, then,’ said Glenda. ‘Why not try doing it on yourself? I’m sure I could find something shiny for you to wave.’

Trev pulled his beloved tin can out of his pocket. ‘Tra-la. And I think I’ve got a piece of string here somewhere.’

‘That is all very well, but I would not be able to ask myself the right kinds of questions because I will have been hypnotized. How the questions are posed is very important,’ said Nutt.

‘I know what,’ said Trev. ‘I’ll tell you to ask yourself to ask the right questions. You’d know what questions to ask if it was someone else, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes, Mister Trev.’

‘You didn’t need to hypnotize Trev,’ Glenda pointed out.

‘No, but his thoughts were close to the surface. I fear that mine will not be so easy to access.’

‘Can you really be hypnotized to ask yourself the right questions?’

‘In
The Doors of Deception
, Fussbinder did report on a way of hypnotizing himself,’ said Nutt. ‘It is conceivably possible…’ His voice trailed off.

‘Then let’s get on with it,’ said Trev. ‘Better out than in, as my old granny used to say.’

‘I think perhaps that it is not such a good idea.’

‘Didn’t do me any harm,’ said Trev robustly.

‘The things that I do not know…The things that I do not know…’ muttered Nutt.

‘What about them?’ said Glenda.

‘The things that I do not know…’ said Nutt, ‘I think are behind the door, because I think I put them there because I think I do not want to know them.’

‘So you must know what it is you don’t want to know?’ said Glenda.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, how bad could it be?’ said Trev.

‘Perhaps it is very bad,’ said Nutt.

‘What would you say if it was me?’ said Glenda. ‘I want the truth, now.’

‘Well,’ said Nutt, stuttering slightly, ‘I think I would say that you should look behind the door to face the things that you do not want to know so we may confront them together. That would certainly be the advice of Von Kladpoll in
Doppelte Berührungssempfindung
. Indeed, doing so would almost be a fundamental part of the analysis of the hidden mind.’

‘Well then,’ said Glenda, standing back.

‘But what sort of bad things could possibly be in your head, Miss Glenda?’ said Nutt, managing gallantry even in the fetid circumstances of the vats.

‘Oh, there’s a few,’ said Glenda. ‘You don’t go through life without picking up a few.’

‘I’ve had dreams in the night,’ said Nutt.

‘Oh, well, everyone has bad dreams,’ said Glenda.

‘These were more than dreams,’ said Nutt. He unfolded his arms and held up a hand.

Trev whistled.

Glenda said, ‘Oh,’ and then, ‘Should they be like that?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Nutt.

‘Do they hurt?’

‘No.’

‘Well, maybe that sort of thing ’appens when goblins get a bit older,’ said Trev.

‘Yes, perhaps they need claws,’ said Glenda.

‘Yesterday was wonderful,’ said Nutt. ‘I was part of the team. The team were around me. I was happy. And now…’

Trev held up a piece of grubby string and the battered but shiny tin can. ‘Perhaps you
should
find out?’

‘I might be getting all this wrong,’ said Glenda, ‘but if you don’t want to know what the things are that you don’t want to know, then that means that there are going to be even more things that you don’t want to know and I imagine that sooner or later, if that goes on, your head will cave in around the hole.’

‘There is something in what both of you say,’ said Nutt reluctantly.

‘Then give me a hand to put him on the couch,’ said Trev. ‘Should he be covered in sweat like that?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Glenda.

‘I would be happier if you chained me down,’ said Nutt.

‘What? Why do you think we should do that?’ said Glenda.

‘I think you should beware. Some things leak around the door. They may be bad.’

Glenda looked at the claws. They were a shiny black and, in their way, quite neat, but it was hard to imagine them being used for, say, painting a picture or cooking an omelette. They were claws, and claws were for clawing, weren’t they? But this was Mr Nutt. Even with claws it was still Mr Nutt.

‘Shall we get started?’ said Trev.

‘I insist on the chains,’ said Nutt. ‘There are all sorts of metal things in the old storeroom four doors down. I saw chains there. Please hurry.’

Automatically Glenda looked down at the claws and saw they had grown longer. ‘Yes, Trev, please hurry.’

Trev followed her gaze and said brightly, ‘I’ll be back before you know I’ve gone.’

In fact, it was less than a couple of minutes, and she could hear the clanking as he dragged them all the way down the passageway.

Glenda was fighting tears at the simple strangeness of the whole business. Nutt lay there, looking at the ceiling, as they lifted him on to the couch and carefully wrapped the chains around him.

‘There’s padlocks, but there’s no keys. I can close them, but I can’t open them.’

‘Close them,’ said Nutt.