Turning tables I

Madame Sosotris huffed and puffed as she scrubbed the wooden table.  The table rocked and rattled; its legs were uneven after years of being dragged around a rough-planked floor with no consideration.  Madame Sosotris didn’t particularly mind, as its occasional tilts and jolts added atmosphere when she was reading Tarot cards for people.  It was more of a nuisance when she was eating soup, but she’d taken to eating that standing up in the kitchen as the soul of a chicken that she’d accidentally imbued into her cast-iron frying pan was summoned by the smell of fresh soup and would cluck around the kitchen for hours if she didn’t exorcise it immediately.  She huffed and puffed some more, scrubbing away at what she hoped wasn’t a bloodstain.  Her dress fell open and her breasts sagged across the table, but she didn’t notice.  Her mind was concentrating on the performance ahead.

The door shuddered under the weight of the blows hammering on it, and Madame Sosotris’s head snapped up like she wanted whiplash.  She looked at the grubby cloth in her hand and tossed it in the fireplace, where it sprawled across cold logs.  She swaggered to the door and flung it open, stretching her face into a slightly manic grin.

“Welcome!” she shouted.  “Welcome one and… one?”

The woman – short, dumpy, wearing a maid’s uniform – looked rather shocked, and it took Madame Sosotris several long seconds to realise that she was feeling a draft from her dress blowing yet further open in the brisk breeze.  She clutched her clothes about her, and tried hard to glare her embarrassment away.

“Who are you?” she said.  “I was expecting milords and miladies for the table turning.”

“I was sent to find out if you were ready yet,” said the dumpy woman.  Her face was scarred with ringworm and her nose looked as though it had been eaten away by something.  Madame Sosotris couldn’t get close enough to confirm her suspicions that it was rats, so she contented herself with jumping to that conclusion instead.

“I am always ready,” she said, ignoring that nagging voice in the back of her mind that said that this ugly little woman was going to go back and tell them that she was dressed now and hadn’t been before.  “Skyclad or no, womb-born or zombie, I am always ready.”

“Right,” said the dumpy woman.  “I’ll go and tell the gentlefolk that you’re not wearing any knickers and that you want to see them anyway.”  Madame Sosotris responded by slamming the door in her face, and then hastily tying her dress back together.  Something important seemed to have ripped, so she pulled the sash-cord from the curtains and tied that firmly around her waist as well.  As she coughed with the sudden constriction, someone knocked on the door again.

“Welcome?” said Madame Sosotris, peering around the edge of the door, this time applying caution.  There were a group of people, all wearing heavy, hooded cloaks and acting edgy: they switched their weight from one foot to the other, swung their hoods from side to side trying to see if anyone was watching, and pushed closer to the door when it looked like it was opening.  Recognising their need, Madame Sosotris backed away, pulling the door open, and they flooded into her room.

“You may leave your cloaks on the couch,” said Madame Sosotris, gesturing in the direction of the paired couches that faced each other.  One looked mildewed, and the other only smelled like it.  The participants muttered amongst themselves, hoods being placed close together to keep the conversations private.  Eventually a consensus was reached, and they all left their cloaks on the floor and took a chair at the table.

“Welcome,” said Madame Sosotris again.  It crossed her mind that she was sounding like a broken record.  “We are here today to contact the spirit world.  Is there anyone in particular you wish to speak to?”

The men and women, beautiful people all, looked at one another, and their gaze said the same thing: Is this woman really this stupid?  And is she really wearing a curtain sash as a belt?

“We wish to speak to the fallen City Director,” said a man, whose name was known to everyone in the room, and whose face would be instantly recognised by anyone of the street.  Madame Sosotris, her face impassive, nodded.

“Let us join our hands,” she said.

The instant the last two hands connected the table shook and jolted as though there had been a small earthquake.  The men and women around the table looked at each other, their faces grey and apprehensive, and Madame Sosotris gasped.  She had started the movement with the pedals under her chair that lifted the table from the floor, but the rest of it had come from somewhere else entirely.  For the first time in a long time she felt afraid.

“Is there anyone there?” she said, her voice thinner and more whiney that she would have liked.  As if in response the table leapt, and the circle barely managed to keep the hands joined and above it.

“Arthur?” asked a woman sat at four o’clock relative to Madame Sosotris, and the table gyrated, grinding out a low growl against the floor.  “Oh Arthur!” said the woman.

“How do you know it’s him?” said a man sat next to her, his eyelids painted with blue false eyes.

“That’s his orgasm noise,” said the woman, and everyone shifted, feeling slightly uncomfortable.

Meditation Medication

Saul looked at the street door to the office block.  He couldn’t help but feel that it ought to have, graven above it into the stone blocks that were undoubtedly nothing more than a façade, the words Abandon all hope you who enter here.  Every time he came here he felt his centre dissipate and his sense of calm, usually a firm and comforting presence, shatter into millions of fragments.  What had the poet said?  Things falls apart, the centre cannot hold.  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.  If only it were mere anarchy and not… demons.

He took a deep breath and crossed the road.  Taxis honked their horns at him, a man leaned out of a car-window and shouted something random about his mother, and a young girl who surely couldn’t be older than ten gave him the finger.  He checked: the crosswalk signal was telling him to go and the traffic to stop, but this was the city – no, this was the City – and the traffic wasn’t happy being stopped.  He smoothed his robe down, mentally sighed just a little bit that even a buddhist monk couldn’t get a little patience from this City, and reached the other side of the road.  The doorman at the office recognised him, and exchanged a look of world-weariness with him.

“Any chance you’re here for the other office?” asked the doorman.  His name was Samuel, he had a wife, two girlfriends, a drinking problem, a child from a previous marriage with behaviourial ‘issues,’ two dogs, a motorcycle and indecision over whether he should be taking his motorcycle repairman’s offer of an open relationship up.  Saul often stood and listened to Samuel’s soap-opera of a life to avoid going up to the office he was visiting, even though he knew he’d end up listening to a lecture about his time-keeping skills.

“No Sam,” said Saul, smiling broadly.  “I’d still need to have a sex-change, wouldn’t I?”

“That’s a pretty easy thing to arrange,” said Samuel.  “I think they’ll probably do it for you, I can ask at the reception desk.  Give me a moment.”

“No,” said Saul laying his hand on Samuel’s shoulder.  “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a generous offer and I appreciate you thinking of me, but I think I should go and see Dr. Fraud.”

“You keep coming to see him, week after week.  Is it charity work?”

Saul smiled again, this time a little more ruefully.  “Court-ordered, Sam,” he said.  “Court-ordered.”

Samuel stared at him.  “What the hell did you do?” he said finally.

*

Dr. Fraud was sitting in his chair near the window when Saul let himself into his office.  They were up on the thirtieth floor, and Dr. Fraud was staring pensively out of the window at the people on the sidewalk down below.

“They look like ants,” he said, his Austrian accent a little thicker and stronger than usual.  Saul wondered who had been in before him today; the different patients seemed to affect Dr. Fraud differently.  So far his favourite was a woman called Bethany.  Whatever she talked to Dr. Fraud about, he always seemed quite subdued and almost scared afterwards.  “I wonder if you could mount a magnifying glass up here and focus it on them like ants?”

“Ants are part of the living world,” said Saul.  “What reason is there for hurting them, for killing them?  Without reason there should be no action.  And it is hard to find a reason for killing anything; there are always other alternatives.”

“Not if you want to eat them,” said Dr. Fraud.  “It’s the standard flaw in the vegetarian argument.  Until we reduce the number of cows in the world stopping killing them would just mean that we’d be killing ourselves – slowly, mostly by means of being trampled or assaulted by angry cows.  And if we have to kill them, then we should eat them so that their deaths haven’t been in vain.”

“You want to eat people you’ve flash-cooked with a giant magnifying glass?” Saul sat down on the leather chaise-longue: Dr. Fraud was a traditionalist in a number of ways.

“No, but a nice steak sandwich wouldn’t go amiss right now,” he said.  “Now, who are you?”

“Saul Below,” said Saul.  “Not the novelist, his surname is Bellow.  My parents were just optimists.”

“Which comment suggests you think you’re not,” said Dr. Fraud.  He drew the blinds, long vertical sheets of ivory-coloured cloth that diffused the light more than kept it out.  He turned to his desk and picked a file up.  “Are you sure you’re not Bethany Price?”

“Very,” said Saul.  “Was she your previous patient?”  He concentrated on keeping the optimism out of his voice.

“No,” said Dr. Fraud.  “She’s next.  Ah, you must be this file then.”  He picked up a second manila folder that was substantially thinner and Saul felt an odd pang of jealousy.  He filed away the thought to come back to later and consider, and understand.  Emotions happened for reasons too, he felt.  “Mr. Below.  As above?”

“You make that joke every week,” said Saul.

“And you’re late every week,” said Dr. Fraud reading the front page of the papers held in the file.  “It suggests a reluctance to confront your problems.”

“Are you describing yourself as one of my problems?”

Dr. Fraud smiled thinly and twisted an egg-timer on his desk.  “Forty minutes remaining,” he said.  “Tell me about your mother.”

“She died before I was born,” said Saul.  “So I’d rather not, I think it might engender trauma.  I’m having trouble meditating.  Very often now I’ll manage to clear my mind of thought and I’ll find myself thinking about something, as though it’s being thought about at the bottom of my mind, underneath all the everyday thoughts.  But I can’t push it out of my mind to properly achieve the nothingness that leads to transcendence.”

“Boring,” said Dr. Fraud.  “I only recommend meditation for patients who need to sleep more.  Or who need a decent dietician but are too neurotic to admit it.  You don’t need to sleep more, you need to admit you have problems and confront them.  And from the sound of it, you can confront them, but you want help running away from them. I can’t help you with that, I’m a doctor!”

“A decent dietician?” Saul lay down on the couch, noting that it seemed to be ripped in several places.  “You prescribe meditation in place of a diet-plan?”

“It stops them eating,” said Dr. Fraud.  “Make the mantra complicated enough and it’ll be hours before they get done and can eat again.”

“That’s not what meditation is about!” Saul felt pleased that despite the emotion conveyed by his words he was feeling entirely calm.  “And it’s not why I want to talk about my problems acheiving a meditative state.”

“Well I don’t want to talk about them,” said Dr. Fraud.  “This is a talking cure, not a knitting circle where we all gossip about our sex-lives, small children and sharp knives.”

“How do you manage to link those three things?” Saul felt a stirring of interest and made himself push it aside.

“Aharrumph,” said Dr. Fraud, suddenly shuffling papers.  “That’s just three things you’ve spoken about in the past.  How about I prescribe you some meditation medication?”

“There’s such a thing?” asked Saul.  “Well, that might help.”

“Excellent,” said Dr. Fraud, scribbling something on a pad.  “Here you go.  Same time next week!”

Saul stood up, and accepted the prescription.  He tried to read it, but gave up quickly: it could have said Viagra or Valium at a best guess, but neither sounded plausible.  “Same time next week,” he said.

A short enough skirt

Bob Martin was trying to hide in the supermarket.  He’d been looking (a little sadly) at the high-fibre cereals and wondering if he should pick one or just buy them all when Dr. Malmstein walked past the end of the aisle.  He was carrying one of those wire shopping baskets that support much more weight than the arm carrying can, in which was a restaurant-sized can of palm oil and a box of tissues.  He glanced down the aisle just as Bob glanced up it, and though their eyes didn’t meet, and Dr. Malmstein walked past apparently not seeing Bob, Bob knew from long experience that it would only take about ten seconds for Dr. Malmstein to realise what he’d seen and come back.  He’d bolted out of his end of the aisle and run in the opposite direction until he collided with a trolley being pushed by a frazzled-looking woman with a small crocodile of children behind her.

“Ugh!” he gasped, the wind knocked out of him.  The woman ran a hand through red frizzy hair and let loose a torrent of swear-words that would have made a Tourette’s sufferer look askance.  None of the children behind her, even the two clutching her skirt, looked at all shocked.

“Sorry,” he managed, the word sounded half-strangled as he tried to get enough air in his lungs to breathe again.  “I have to hide!”

He crab-walked into the aisle out of her way, and discovered he was in the home baking aisle.  He looked up it, checking that Dr. Malmstein wasn’t at the top, and his gaze stopped half-way along as he realised that the eggs were all held in metal cages that could be easily pulled out and replaced.  His heart nearly skipped a beat as he realised his opportunity, and he struggled over to them as quickly as he could, one hand still clutching his stomach and his breaths short and laboured.  He elbowed a short man in a loud, check sportscoat out of the way and pulled the egg-box cage forwards until he could slip behind it, and then he pulled the cage back after him.  Then he sank to the floor, confident now that no-one could see him without actually pulling the cage out.

“That’s him,” said a whiny voice as the cage was pulled forward, barely thirty seconds later.  “He’ll be playing with himself, he’s disgusting.”  Bob looked up, and found a shelf-stacker looking down at him through thick-lensed glasses that made their eyes look terrifyingly huge.

“You have to come out from there, please,” said the shelf-stacker.  Beyond the glasses she was a handsome woman, probably in her early thirties, with blonde hair and the beginnings of a blonde moustache.

“Has he gone yet?” asked Bob, not moving.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said the handsome woman.  “I was told that you were playing with yourself back here, and that’s unhygienic and against store policy.”

“I’m not playing with myself!”

“I don’t really care,” said the handsome woman.  “Come out now or I’ll get security and tell them you’re aggressive and refusing to co-operate.”

Bob had seen security taking people out of the supermarket before, usually for breaking things accidentally, or asking too many questions about the contents of some of the more heavily processed foods, and was not keen on the idea of them deciding that he was undesirable.  He got back to his feet, hunching over because of the shelves above the cage, and crept out.

“Thank-you,” said the handsome woman.

“Bob?” said Dr. Malmstein, who was standing nearby holding a single egg that he’d apparently taken out of a box of a dozen.

“Ye Gods,” said Bob, putting his hands to his face.

*

Bob sat down at MSPARKER’s keyboard.  MSPARKER was a quipping machine, built by the university for anyone to use, and in actuality mostly used by Bob because she unnerved everybody else.  Even the undergraduates seemed scared of her, and classes that offered a chance to use her were now barely attended.  And Bob wasn’t sure when she’d become a She and a Her to everybody instead of the It that she so clearly was.  He’d been avoiding Dr. Malmstein for weeks because he’d not wanted to have to talk to her any more, but having been accosted in the supermarket he had a new task for her, which Dr. Malmstein wanted results from by the end of the week.  As Bob would have expected, it was already Thursday.

“MSPARKER?” he said, hoping that she was broken, or in scheduled downtime.

“Good evening,” said a slightly feminine, heavily robotic voice.  They’d used an undergraduate for the syllabary, the collection of syllables that MSPARKER created her spoken answers from, who’d been on a bet to lisp inconsistently.  It made MSPARKER sound vaguely sinister, and Bob usually preferred to use the keyboard interface.  The keyboard, however, was missing.

“MSPARKER, where is the party at?”  Dr. Malmstein had a list of rhetorical questions that he wanted putting to the quipping machine to see what answers came back.  Bob had reason to believe that this was a bad idea (a list of ways to end the world that he found both fascinatingly inventive and scarily prescient), but Dr. Malmstein wouldn’t listen.

“If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you,” said MSPARKER.  Bob wrote it down, read it through, and shivered.  Surely the machine was just looking these things up?  Perhaps in a dictionary of quips?

“MSPARKER, what time is now?”

“The rain is falling and the days run together like droplets on a window-pane.”

“MSPARKER, if a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?”

“Are you feeling disgruntled?”

Bob set down his pen and very carefully, very slowly, absolutely not running at all, left the room.  Dr. Malmstein was waiting outside in the corridor.

“Ah Bob, I didn’t want to disturb you!” he said, sounding much more jovial than his saturnine countenance would suggest.

“I wish you had,” said Bob.  His looked at his shoes.  “I think she just called me a pig.”

“That was nice of her,” said Dr. Malmstein.  “Have you asked her about the party yet?”

“She said that if you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you,” said Bob.

“Ah.  I see.  Um, I appreciate this is a rather personal question, but how short a skirt do you own?”

Hegatonic

Hegatonic is what they called the language of the Eidolons.  There was an ancient book, its stitching rotted away and its pages yellowed and crumbling, that was kept in a small box filled with inert gas that was the original dictionary.  The front-page contained one word: Hegaton, and so the language had been given its name.  There were scholars, a small minority, who argued that a Hegaton was actually a measurement, the amount of explosive required to kill an Eidolon.  Since no-one had ever succeeded in killing an Eidolon though this theory was largely ignored.

The classroom where Hegatonic was taught was dark and hot.  The room itself was a cube, four metres to a side, buried inside a grain silo and accessed from an underground tunnel.  There was a single electric light bulb that contributed to the heat, an elaborate ventilation system that sourced air from three different directions in case any were blocked, and a pneumatic tube down which incriminating material could be flushed in the event of discovery.  The walls were plain steel, though there was a chart of basic letters taped up on one of them.  The chart was made from tissue paper and there was a bucket of water nearby to dissolve it in if needed.  There were four desks and seven chairs, and several solid-state sonjeu with white earphone cords.  Three people occupied some of the chairs, and a fourth, Milady Beth-Rachel was standing at the chart, her fingers pressed against her throat as she practised making the sounds that the letters represented.

Serjeant Thomas removed earphones from his ears and touched the sonjeu, a palm-sized black plastic device.  The front of it lit up, showing icons for recording, playback, pause and stop at the bottom, and a list of audio tracks above them.  He pressed stop and the screen went black again.

“I hakegh gha,” he said, and stopped and coughed.  His fingers massages his throat before he tried again.  “I hate this language,” he said, his voice a little scratchy from repeating sentences in Hegatonic.

“We all do,” said Milady Beth-Rachel.  “But we have to learn it, Tom.  You have to learn it.  There’s no other way for us to know what the Eidolons are up to.”

“They tell us what they’re up to.  That’s what Court is for, that’s what the newspapers report!”

“Hah.”  There was no amusement there, just a strong sarcasm.  “No, Tom.  Court and the newspapers tell us what the Eidolons want us to believe and do.  They are instruments of the state.  The Eidolonic state.  What the Eidolons say to their instars is what they are actually thinking and doing, what they say to each other when they talk is what they are thinking and doing.  That is why we learn their language.”

“Instars?”

Milady Beth-Rachel looked at him now, her hand falling from her throat to her side.  “You don’t know what an Instar is?”

“Never heard of them.”  Serjeant Thomas shook his head to emphasise his words.  He’s dark hair tousled up immediately and Milady Beth-Rachel thought he looked like he’d just got out of bed.

“They’re related to the Eidolon, I think,” she said, suddenly realising that there was a lot she took for granted about the Instars but didn’t actually have any supporting evidence for.  “They’re not children exactly, but they kind of fill that role.  If an Eidolon dies then an Instar will grow into a new Eidolon.  I think.”

“When has an Eidolon ever died?  And what happens if an Instar starts to grow before an Eidolon dies?”

“I don’t know, and Eidolons die occasionally.  There was a war, decades ago, because an Eidolon died and another Eidolon tried to take over from it.  There’s a book somewhere that tells about it.”  Milady Beth-Rachel wiped her forehead, feeling the heat of the room intently.  She didn’t like talking about things she wasn’t complete certain of.  Serjeant Thomas looked interested now though and had put the sonjeu down on the table while he talked to her.

“There was an Eidolon war?  Then we know how to kill an Eidolon?”

“I don’t know, really Thomas.  I only know what I read, and that was a few years ago.”

“Oh.”  He looked downcast, and his fingers started tugging at a little scab on his wrist.  Then he looked up again.  “Have you still got the book?”

“It wasn’t mine.”

“Oh.”  He worried at the scab again.  “I suppose I’d better get back to practising then,” he said.

“Well… look, I think I remember who I borrowed the book from.  I can ask them if they’ve still got it,” she said.  She wiped her forehead again; she thought she knew who had had the book, but she didn’t like the risk involved in asking for it.  Learning Hegatonic was illegal enough, and there were always people who preferred the rule of the Eidolons, but actively seeking out ways to kill Eidolons was probably the highest treason.

“That’d be fantastic!”  Serjeant Thomas was smiling broadly at her, and she could see the gaps where he’d lost teeth.  It was ridiculous that they had had all this medical technology and science, and now the Eidolons made them suppress it and live like it was the Middle Ages.  Thomas definitely wasn’t her type, but even she could see how stupid it was that he had to lose teeth when they could be regrown; why they had to worry about every cut and scratch when they could have applied healpax.  Why they had to do everything the Eidolons said instead of living their own lives for themselves.

The Corner Pie House

“Do they know him in there?” I asked, thinking that a plum pie wasn’t all that much to go on.

“Yes,” she said, her lips twisting thinly in an approximation of a smile that only a physicist could accept.  “He’s the guy who buys their plum pies.”

I left Mother Hubbard to her heeling, which neither Damned Simon or the little ferrety man looked much enthusiastic about, and walked back into the main bar of the Cow and Spoon.  Tom was still waving his pint glass of slops at me like he thought I’d come to heel if he tried it for long enough, so I walked over to the bar and just stood there.  About fifteen seconds later he recoiled, dropping the pint glass on the black rubber mats that covered the floor behind the bar.

“Jesus Mac!  What have you been rolling around in this time?”  He was coughing and tears were running from his eyes.  I watched his enviously for a moment – Mad Frankie had my tear ducts cauterised a few years back as the easiest way to not have to see a grown man cry – and then I told him.

“Holy….  They’re still running the Blue Swan?  I thought that got closed down after it got flooded.”

“Nah,” I said, remembering the first couple of days after the flood when you had to wade through waist-deep water to get to the bar and push the occasional dying swimmer out of the way.  “It’s still going.  It’s a bit drier than it was of course.  And I bumped into Jackie outside, though she’s calling herself something else now.”

“Mad Jackie?  Jackie “they’ll steal your prayers” Jackie?  I heard she was a bit of a looker in her day.”

“Depends on where you were looking, I guess,” I said.  I could remember Jackie back when she started, a chubby girl with a big smile, frightened eyes and rat-tailed hair.  The smile disappeared with her first scar, a beauty that ran from her collar-bone to her hip that she eventually got covered up with a tattoo of a shopping trolley.  The weight just disappeared; it’s hard not to be hungry in her line of work, whether it’s aspirational hunger or just plain starvation.  The hair was now hidden under her tin-foil rollers I supposed, but I doubted that it had changed all that much.

“I’d have done her,” said Tom, going a little dreamy-eyed on me.  I snorted, and he blinked, took a step backward, trod on the fallen pint-glass and went arse-over-tit onto the floor.  He groaned, the patrons took a moment out from beating up the poor wretch now curled up foetally on the pool-table to laugh, and I left with someone else’s bottle of WKD.

The drink tasted like bubble-gum but I knocked it back anyway for the sugar.  It seemed like a long time since I’d last eaten as well, and the memory of Miss Sapphire’s pasta was starting to seem more edible by the minute.  I spat the dregs out into the gutter and abandoned the bottle, and then strolled down the street towards the Corner Pie House.  Mother Hubbard had nothing against me at the moment – nothing more than the general animosity I generate from everyone – so I was only watching the street like a paranoiac, checking the shadows, anything that moved, most things that didn’t.  Nothing seemed too unusual, and when I stopped at the Pie House it seemed like the kind of place I wouldn’t get kicked straight out of.  There was no doorman, and the shop was in a building that looked like it had been a chemicals warehouse once.  I racked my brains, trying to remember what this part of the city had looked like fifteen years ago but all that came to mind was a nightclub that had its own abortionist on the premises.

Inside it smelled like an abattoir and I had another flashback to the nightclub abortionist.  There were lots of scrubbed wooden tables with four chairs arranged at each as you’d expect.  They were laid out in a rectangular pattern like a child-labour sweat shop, and against the left-hand side of the shop was the counter where you ordered your pies and got served.  A blackboard on the wall behind it listed the pies and sides that were available and their prices, all of which struck me as rather more reasonable than I was expecting.  A woman wearing a maternity dress and an ivory apron was stood at the counter watching me with little piggy eyes and a nose so smashed it might well have been a snout.

“Yers?” she said, her words slurred and only one side of her mouth working.

“Plum Pie,” I said.  There were no customers in here yet, so I’d have to ask about Jack Horner and find out when he was likely to be in.

“Yers,” she said.  “‘Ow many plumsh der yet want?”

“No,” I said getting close enough to the counter for my stench to repel her.  She stayed put, and didn’t even look like she’d smelled me.  “No, you’ve got a customer who buys your plum pies.  I want to meet him.”

“‘Ow many plumsh der yet want?”

“I want to know who buys your plum pies.”

“I’ll give yer six.”

“I’m not paying.”  That was enough to break her chain of thought (a very small, circular chain that clearly went round and round a lot without ever stopping) and her eyes lit up like little furnaces and she huffed and snorted through her mashed-up nose.

“Rowghghghghg!”

For a moment I thought she was going to charge at me like an enraged wild boar, and I instinctively checked her for tusks, hooves, sharp teeth and anything else that might cause injury.  But she didn’t move, and my body stepped down from Defcon I and went back to aching painfully.  I watched her still, wondering what she’d do next, but then a young boy appeared through a curtained doorway behind her, took in the scene, and walked steadily over to us.

“Are you upsetting my aunt, Mister?” he said.  He couldn’t have been older than twelve, and given how thin he was he clearly wasn’t eating any of the pies.  His eyes were grey and slightly misty, and I suspected he had the onset of cataracts.

“She’s upsetting me,” I said.  “I thought she was going to try and eat me a moment ago.”

“What do you want?”  He sounded like a man twenty years older.

“I want to know who buys your plum pies.”

“Customers, Mister.  We don’t do wholesale.”  His aunt growled to herself again and lumbered off along the counter to pick up a dirty cloth and start rubbing the tables down with it.

“You’ve got a man who comes in on Thursdays just for the plum pies.  I want to know who he is.”

“Sounds like nothing I’d know about, Mister.  That’s gotta be covered by the Data Protection Act.”

I eyed him up again, noticing that it took him a couple of seconds to realise what I was doing and start eyeballing me back.

“I come in on Thursdays and order a plum pie,” I said.  “I’d like to see the data you keep on me.”

Mother Hubbard

She was no-one’s mother.  She said that she’d never had the maternal instinct, that when she was a little girl she’d preferred to drown her dolls than look after them.  She said that her sisters would find their dolls all wrapped up tight in swaddling cloths, heavy fabric pressed down heavily over china noses and mouths.  She said that she was allergic to child-spit, that the sound of childish laughter made her skin crawl and that even the sight of a child was enough to make her break out in hives.

Mad Frankie had let it be known that she was nobody’s mother because she’d tried stiffing him some of the take when she was one of his girls and he’d had her spayed as a punishment.  There were people who’d claimed to have seen the scars as well.

There was a place where, if you knew where to go, what the right time was, and who to ask, a man with a glass eye and breath like a gasworks would tell you that she was nobody’s mother because she’d had a lover who’d left her to do a job and had never returned.  He would tell you that she’d sworn never to sleep with another man again so that she couldn’t be hurt any more.  Then you’d probably pass out from his breath, and when you woke up you’d find your pockets lighter by the wallet-load and your clothes sold to the charity shops where charity was something definitely only practised at home.  Which is not to say a determined man couldn’t get them back, but you had to be willing to threaten elderly women with artificial limbs.  And no, I won’t explain how you’re intended to parse that sentence.

And then there were the hospital records that most everyone thought had been incinerated in a fire twenty years ago.  They made for some very interesting reading indeed.

But no matter what you chose to believe, everyone called her Mother Hubbard, and no-one ever asked her either to go to her cupboard or if her poor doggie had a bone.  Her poor doggie was actually a pack of seventeen armoured chihuahuas, and while that may not sound very scary you’ve not been pursued by them late at night, knowing that they get through gaps much smaller than any you can, and that they’re effectively bullet-proof and psychotic.  To my credit, I did manage to get away, but I was a whole lot younger then, and Mother Hubbard’s been teaching them new tricks ever since.

I pushed open the door of the Cow and Spoon, and leaned cautiously round it.  The pub’s interior was dark and damp and smelled like a tramp’s armpit.  There were people stood around the bar, and someone was getting beaten up over the pool-table.  I heard the mutter of odds being called, the scrunch of money changing hands, and the pitiful wail of the victim as a pool-cue was jabbed somewhere painful.  The man behind the bar, Tom, looked at me with disdain and wrung the barmat into a pint-glass.

“The usual, Mac?” he called, setting the glass on the counter.  I shrugged, and stumbled inside.  They’d cleaned the floor and my shoes weren’t sticking as much as usual; I kept overcompensating for how hard I had to pull my feet up, and it meant I was walking like a clown.

“Mother Hubbard?” I said.  Tom pointed to the Saloon.

“Holding court,” he said.  She’s been there since eleven, so she’s gonna be packing up soon.  Not drinking, Mac?”  He waved the pint-glass of slops at me.

“Not right now,” I said, ignoring the growl of my stomach reminding me that I’d not been able to eat Miss Sapphire’s pasta either.  “I need to see a woman about a dog.”

“Har, har, har,” said Tom.  “You should tell her you said that.”  Somewhere beyond the Saloon door I heard an angry yip, the kind of bark a small dog makes to let you know that you’re making far too much of the size issue.

“Yeah, I will,” I said.  “Just as soon as she tells me who Jack Horner is.”

*

I opened the door to the Saloon and walked inside; there’s no point peering in at Mother Hubbard.  She’ll only send someone out to bring you back.  She was sat in the middle of a horseshoe of chairs, her back ramrod straight, wearing a hat covered with mouldy fruit.  Only two of the horseshoe of chairs were occupied.  I recognised Damned Simon, who was nursing a dislocated shoulder, and I didn’t recognise a little ferrety man who was clutching a miniature traffic cone to his chest like a nipple protector.  Mother Hubbard turned and looked at me as I came in.

“Don’t sit down, MacArthur,” she said.  “I’ll have to get them to wash the chairs then.  What do you want?”

I gestured to her audience.  “Looks like I’m not first,” I said.  “I can wait.”

“Yeah, sure you can.  Well both of these are calling for a personal touch,” she said, cracking her knuckles on the word personal.  “So I think I’ll get your little complaint dealt with first, and then I can start heeling.”  There was a lot of emphasis on that last word, and neither Damned Simon nor the ferrety man looked happy.

“Jack Horner,” I said.  She didn’t react.  “Jack Horner had hired me to do a little watching,” I said.  “Only there’s no cash up front, and you know how I feel about that.”

“You worried you might end up doing a good deed and get kicked out of Hell, Mac?”  She giggled like the little girl she hadn’t been for over fifty years.  “I reckon the inmates down there won’t let that happen to a nice guy like you!“

“I like to watch whoever’s promising me the cash,” I said.  “Call it paranoia if you must.”

“I call it business sense,” said Mother Hubbard, the mirth dying away.  “Doesn’t explain what you’re doing here interrupting my little judgements though.”

“I need to know where to find Mr. Horner,” I said.  “And his real name might be nice, too.”

“Names I ain’t got,” said Mother Hubbard.  Her voice was pitched slightly higher, slightly snappier.  She sounded a little bit aggrieved.  “All I’ve got for you is that he likes the Corner Pie House, especially on a  Thursday.”

“What’s so special about Thursday?”

“They serve plum pie.”

White-knuckled

I’ve gone through life white-knuckled and knock-kneed, and running away from the Blue Swan was no different.  Thankfully Jackie was still playing doggo and staying where I’d told her to, so I wasn’t pursued.  As I veered left at the T-junction I heaved a huge breath into my aching lungs and wondered when I be able to stop running away.  I didn’t think there was a whole lot of hope unless I’d finally broken my legs.  I took the next left, a quick right, and then fell against the first lighted doorway that I saw and only sobbed a little when it didn’t open for me.

No-one had followed me, it seemed.  I wheezed heavily, getting my breath back and feeling the aches and pains molest me like an eighties television presenter, but there were no running feet, no cries for people to stop me, and best of all, no sounds of gunshot or angry people hitting defenceless street furniture with heavy tools.  Eventually I pulled my legs in, listened to the cartilage in my knees crunch, and wondered what I was going to do next.  I was still looking for Boy Blue, if only to let him know that Natasha Monkeybutt was looking for him too, and I was kind of curious about whoever had redecorated his room with sheep’s blood.  I knew there were better things to do than get involved with any part of a case more than treating it as just a job: like Miss Sapphire had said, people tend to die around me and it’s better that I don’t let myself get attached.  I’ve watched kids get orphaned while I was on their case, and I’ve watched relationships fizzle and die just because I’ve been sat at a nearby table.  My record is emptying an entire restaurant on Valentine’s day, with all the men going one way and the women another.  It’s not a proud moment, but I ever write up a CV it’s going on there.

Then there was the Jack Horner angle.  There was a name I’d not come across before, and I thought I knew all the low-life in this city.  From what Miss Sapphire had been saying it sounded like it might be a pseudonym, which is a long word for a small-time crook.  And he had to be small time, or Mad Frankie would be putting me on his case in the hopes that he’d be the next victim of the MacArthur curse.  Or blessing, depending on who you asked.

The gentle patter of rain started, soot-laden droplets splashing down on the filthy, pot-holed streets and making me glad I was sat in a doorway.  I looked out across the street into the fading light of late-afternoon, and the door I was leaning against pushed out squashing me against the wall.

“Move it, you piece of crap,” snarled a woman with a red face like she’d been washing it in the floor-scrubbing bucket.  She was wearing a heavy woollen coat and carrying a handbag like a mattock.  She swung it at me to make her point, and I ducked, to avoid it.  “Get out of my bloody doorway,” she continued.  “It’s scum like you that make an honest woman like me afraid to walk the streets at night.  You disgust me, you tramp.”  Her handbag struck the wall with the clatter of cutlery and she didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed.  I wriggled out from behind the door as she put her weight against it, and I just got out of the way in time.  The door struck the wall and the glass in the top quivered with the impact.

“Now look what you’ve made me do, wretch,” she said.  Little flecks of white spittle flew out of her mouth, and I flinched away.  I have a mild germophobia about other people, which my doctor says he can’t understand given where I seem to spend most of my time.  Then he orders me out of his office before he autoclaves me, which is a threat I know he’d like to make good on.

“Harridan,” I said, racking my brains as to why she looked familiar.

“Hah!  Big words.  What a shame your wallet can’t match your mouth.”  Her words dripped with sarcasm the way a cobra’s fangs drip with venom and suddenly I knew who she was; the last time I’d seen her was a few years ago when she was still a stripper at Lucy Locket’s.  She’d been hanging upside down from a sequined pole wearing a g-string, high-heels and an ill-fitting wig that didn’t really hide either her dandruff or her cradle cap, glaring at me while I crawled under the seating pursuing the Legless Wonder.  She’d spat at me then too, and I’d thrown a handful of change at her.

“Belle Peep,” I said, my cough hacking its way through her surname and dragging it out for a whole six seconds.  She didn’t look happy that I knew it.

“The next show’s at nine,” she said.  “Pay on the door.”

I looked up: the doorway I was in was the side-door of the Municipal Library.  I don’t know if she saw my quizzical face (it’s a lot like my orgasm face, I’ve been told, which fact I ascribe to the infrequency of my orgasms) but she swung her bag at me again.  I dodged once more to the sound of crashing cutlery, and then she was past me, stalking off down the street like an old whore with too much pride to pick her breasts up off the floor and retire.

“Jack Horner,” I muttered under my breath, hoping it wouldn’t start my cough off again.  My doctor’s written on my records that he’s hoping its consumption and refusing to test me for it so as not to jinx things.  “I know how to find you.”