A fellow author told me earlier this week that it probably wasn't a good idea to publish the whole of The Resurrection Bureau completely online, as there is little chance of online books ever being published by a mainstream publisher.
I felt a distinct moment of panic. Well, actually, I spent a distinct 48 hours of panic. Then I figured - actually I don't really care. The whole idea of The Resurrection Bureau was to challenge myself, and to give you something fun to read in instalments - something you haven't been able to do since Sherlock Holmes in Strand magazine.
I don't really want your money, and I don't really care if TRB is ever published - if you want to go out and buy Super Maxwell 3 next year, God bless you!
So The Resurrection Bureau will continue - and - thank Merlin - I now have a beginning, a middle and an end - which I certainly did not have a couple of weeks ago.
So on we go - and be careful never to whisper a secret to a crow - you'll find out why very soon...
Tony
Wednesday, 15 September 2010
Sunday, 12 September 2010
The Resurrection Bureau - part 3
4.
Rain fell in heavy bursts against Halcyon’s kitchen window, which rattled feebly. ‘Thank Lance,’ he murmured, sipping on a warm bottle of coke. The last thing in the world he needed in his current state was a hot, sunny day – wind, rain and general bitter cold were just the thing for your average four alarm hangover.
Halcyon started most of his days just exactly like this, stood naked in front of his window drinking warm coke and contemplating the black spots in his memories of the night before. It had been this way for years now, and the only variation was that occasionally he awoke with either Jaffa, Young Brian or Tetley (occasionally all three) asleep on his sofa, floor, or sometimes in his bed with him.
It had begun to worry Halcyon a little. He was twenty-two years old now, and while he did not consider himself to be old, he knew that he was not exactly a kid anymore either. He had known Jaffa since he was five, when they had met in the Green Ginger Orphanage, and Tetley and Young Brian he had since age eleven, when they had met at their first day of High Castle comprehensive school. None of them had married, and none of them had serious girlfriends (apart from Halcyon’s brief and painful relationship with Debbie, which Halcyon, at least, had thought was serious). Neither had any of them particularly well defined career paths. Jaffa worked at a call centre, Tetley had his own window cleaning round and Young Brian was an occasional painter and decorator, and almost full time pool hustler. In fact, Halcyon realised, of the four of them he had by far the most “career-y” job – and he had only fallen into that because a detached retina had ended his boxing career at aged nineteen.
A year ago, maybe even six months ago, he had stood in front of the window with his warm drink and his thoughts had turned to where he and the boys were going on Saturday night (though “Saturday Night” was more a state of mind, than an actual “night”, and as such tended to be quite fluid – there were, generally, four or five Saturday Nights in the average week), or the match, or what he would watch on telly tonight – now, well...
Now he looked at his bedsit, and the red stone horseshoe of the flats that surrounded him, and across the dirty rooftops and the gray sky, and he heard the sound of the busses and the honks of impatient cars and the distant hoot of fog horns, and he felt, more than anything else, like a man in a cage.
He knew what the lads thought. They thought it was all down to Debbie, but that wasn’t true. Well ... It wasn’t totally true. She had hurt him badly, and even now when he saw her with her new boyfriend Clive with his Corsa with its blacked out windows and his job at the council, it hurt him still ... But oddly, despite his occasional drunken ramble past her house on a night, he had long since realised that he really didn’t want Debbie back. She was as bad as the brick walls and plastic windows. It hadn’t worked out with Debbie because she had wanted Halcyon to be something he wasn’t – and Halcyon had wanted to be something other than what he was.
But what that was, what else he could possibly be, Eddie Halcyon had absolutely no idea.
‘Morning Sam.’
Sam gave a grunt, it was, Halcyon knew, Sam’s version of a hail and hearty good morning. It was when he gave you a snort you were in trouble.
Halcyon hung up his coat where it dangled wetly on its own. Sam never wore a coat, even in the snow. He considered the wearing of a coat to be effeminate, and the carrying of an umbrella to constitute an actual declaration of man love. Halcyon looked out of the window of Sam’s office while he dried his hair with a putrid green towel. The gym was almost entirely empty, except for Iron George, who was, as always, grimly pumping iron wearing a scowl and a massive pair of headphones. The Weywood sisters were all sat on exercise bikes in the window, and all three waved at Halcyon and he waved back, soliciting the usual dirty cackle from all three.
‘Is Mr Tree in yet, Sam?’
‘You see him?’ Sam grunted, not looking up from his computer screen, electric reflection playing across his glaring eyes and bristling black moustache.
Sam, Halcyon knew, considered himself permanently on the brink of financial ruin, and spent almost all of his time checking and rechecking the finances of Sam’s Gym and Solarium. In fact the gym was the only one within twenty miles of the city centre the either didn’t cost a small fortune to run, or wasn’t run by petty thieves, and as such was immensely popular among older people and young women. It was, Halcyon suspected, a small gold mine for Sam – but Sam, with his thinning hair and thickening waistline created by hours in front of his computer, viewed the gym as a huge and almost unbearable burden.
Sam had come second place in the 1987 World’s Strongest Man competition. The second place label still rankled with him, and had, in Sam’s eyes, been the chief architect of all his woes. He had, he believed, made bad decisions about the location (on a windy hill on the outskirts of the city), pricing policy (£1.50 a session, £1 if you were a member, fifty pence for pensioners and the unemployed) and clientele (few of whom paid more than 50p) of his gym. In Halcyon’s opinion Sam’s greatest error of judgement had been choosing a colour scheme of gangrene green, puss yellow and battleships gray for the gym.
‘I’ll go and see how the sisters are doing,’ Halcyon said, draping the vile green towel over the back of his chair.
‘I wouldn’t,’ Sam grunted. But Halcyon didn’t need telling that, Sam was thick muscle from the chest up, and thick fat from the chest down, and very rarely left his chair, never mind his office. ‘Toilet needs cleaning,’ he added grimly.
‘Right.’ Halcyon exited quickly, before the conversation turned to one of Sam’s favourite topics, The High Cost of Plumbing. It was among Sam’s top three favourite topics, alongside; Some Bastard’s Parked In My Spot, and Why Can’t Bastards Clean Their Shoes Before They Come In, The Bastards.
‘Good morning Vera, Emily, Betty.’
‘Good morning Eddie!’ trilled the Weywood sisters.
The Weywood sisters looked very little like each other, but were, they had assured Halcyon often, devoted sisters. Vera, the eldest (or at least Halcyon guessed she was, they never discussed their age) was a whip-thin woman with a beak of a nose and a candy floss explosion of red-brown hair billowing from the top of her head; Emily, who Halcyon always imagined to be the youngest of the sisters, was a fat little woman with a pale complexion, button nose, a love of pink clothing, hair and lipstick, and a slippery curly wig; Betty, Halcyon thought, probably shouldn’t be paying 50p. If she was a pensioner she certainly had looked after herself, Halcyon found it hard to believe she was over fifty. Betty was curvaceous, and dark skinned with large brown eyes twinkling behind big curling eyelashes. All three of the sisters were dressed in tracksuits – Vera’s sky blue, Emily’s bubblegum pink, and Betty’s chestnut brown, and were spinning, with very little consideration for any thought of exercise, on the big exercise bikes in the window.
‘Are you looking after us today, Eddie?’ chirped Emily with a giggle.
‘I’m supposed to be looking after Mr Tree--’
‘Lazy old sod,’ snapped Vera.
‘He has had a stroke, Vera,’ Emily said, as reproachful as a chipmunk.
‘He was a lazy old sod before he had the stroke,’ Vera replied waspishly. ‘I knew him when he worked at the gas board, spent all his time smoking fags and picking horses in his van.’
‘Vera!’
‘He did, as Merlin is my witness.’
‘Well,’ Halcyon didn’t quite know what to say to that, ‘Hee still needs his physical therapy, so I’d better—‘
‘Eddie?’ Betty Weywood’s voice curled out at Halcyon like a cat’s tongue. ‘I had a dream about you last night.’
To be continued...
Rain fell in heavy bursts against Halcyon’s kitchen window, which rattled feebly. ‘Thank Lance,’ he murmured, sipping on a warm bottle of coke. The last thing in the world he needed in his current state was a hot, sunny day – wind, rain and general bitter cold were just the thing for your average four alarm hangover.
Halcyon started most of his days just exactly like this, stood naked in front of his window drinking warm coke and contemplating the black spots in his memories of the night before. It had been this way for years now, and the only variation was that occasionally he awoke with either Jaffa, Young Brian or Tetley (occasionally all three) asleep on his sofa, floor, or sometimes in his bed with him.
It had begun to worry Halcyon a little. He was twenty-two years old now, and while he did not consider himself to be old, he knew that he was not exactly a kid anymore either. He had known Jaffa since he was five, when they had met in the Green Ginger Orphanage, and Tetley and Young Brian he had since age eleven, when they had met at their first day of High Castle comprehensive school. None of them had married, and none of them had serious girlfriends (apart from Halcyon’s brief and painful relationship with Debbie, which Halcyon, at least, had thought was serious). Neither had any of them particularly well defined career paths. Jaffa worked at a call centre, Tetley had his own window cleaning round and Young Brian was an occasional painter and decorator, and almost full time pool hustler. In fact, Halcyon realised, of the four of them he had by far the most “career-y” job – and he had only fallen into that because a detached retina had ended his boxing career at aged nineteen.
A year ago, maybe even six months ago, he had stood in front of the window with his warm drink and his thoughts had turned to where he and the boys were going on Saturday night (though “Saturday Night” was more a state of mind, than an actual “night”, and as such tended to be quite fluid – there were, generally, four or five Saturday Nights in the average week), or the match, or what he would watch on telly tonight – now, well...
Now he looked at his bedsit, and the red stone horseshoe of the flats that surrounded him, and across the dirty rooftops and the gray sky, and he heard the sound of the busses and the honks of impatient cars and the distant hoot of fog horns, and he felt, more than anything else, like a man in a cage.
He knew what the lads thought. They thought it was all down to Debbie, but that wasn’t true. Well ... It wasn’t totally true. She had hurt him badly, and even now when he saw her with her new boyfriend Clive with his Corsa with its blacked out windows and his job at the council, it hurt him still ... But oddly, despite his occasional drunken ramble past her house on a night, he had long since realised that he really didn’t want Debbie back. She was as bad as the brick walls and plastic windows. It hadn’t worked out with Debbie because she had wanted Halcyon to be something he wasn’t – and Halcyon had wanted to be something other than what he was.
But what that was, what else he could possibly be, Eddie Halcyon had absolutely no idea.
‘Morning Sam.’
Sam gave a grunt, it was, Halcyon knew, Sam’s version of a hail and hearty good morning. It was when he gave you a snort you were in trouble.
Halcyon hung up his coat where it dangled wetly on its own. Sam never wore a coat, even in the snow. He considered the wearing of a coat to be effeminate, and the carrying of an umbrella to constitute an actual declaration of man love. Halcyon looked out of the window of Sam’s office while he dried his hair with a putrid green towel. The gym was almost entirely empty, except for Iron George, who was, as always, grimly pumping iron wearing a scowl and a massive pair of headphones. The Weywood sisters were all sat on exercise bikes in the window, and all three waved at Halcyon and he waved back, soliciting the usual dirty cackle from all three.
‘Is Mr Tree in yet, Sam?’
‘You see him?’ Sam grunted, not looking up from his computer screen, electric reflection playing across his glaring eyes and bristling black moustache.
Sam, Halcyon knew, considered himself permanently on the brink of financial ruin, and spent almost all of his time checking and rechecking the finances of Sam’s Gym and Solarium. In fact the gym was the only one within twenty miles of the city centre the either didn’t cost a small fortune to run, or wasn’t run by petty thieves, and as such was immensely popular among older people and young women. It was, Halcyon suspected, a small gold mine for Sam – but Sam, with his thinning hair and thickening waistline created by hours in front of his computer, viewed the gym as a huge and almost unbearable burden.
Sam had come second place in the 1987 World’s Strongest Man competition. The second place label still rankled with him, and had, in Sam’s eyes, been the chief architect of all his woes. He had, he believed, made bad decisions about the location (on a windy hill on the outskirts of the city), pricing policy (£1.50 a session, £1 if you were a member, fifty pence for pensioners and the unemployed) and clientele (few of whom paid more than 50p) of his gym. In Halcyon’s opinion Sam’s greatest error of judgement had been choosing a colour scheme of gangrene green, puss yellow and battleships gray for the gym.
‘I’ll go and see how the sisters are doing,’ Halcyon said, draping the vile green towel over the back of his chair.
‘I wouldn’t,’ Sam grunted. But Halcyon didn’t need telling that, Sam was thick muscle from the chest up, and thick fat from the chest down, and very rarely left his chair, never mind his office. ‘Toilet needs cleaning,’ he added grimly.
‘Right.’ Halcyon exited quickly, before the conversation turned to one of Sam’s favourite topics, The High Cost of Plumbing. It was among Sam’s top three favourite topics, alongside; Some Bastard’s Parked In My Spot, and Why Can’t Bastards Clean Their Shoes Before They Come In, The Bastards.
‘Good morning Vera, Emily, Betty.’
‘Good morning Eddie!’ trilled the Weywood sisters.
The Weywood sisters looked very little like each other, but were, they had assured Halcyon often, devoted sisters. Vera, the eldest (or at least Halcyon guessed she was, they never discussed their age) was a whip-thin woman with a beak of a nose and a candy floss explosion of red-brown hair billowing from the top of her head; Emily, who Halcyon always imagined to be the youngest of the sisters, was a fat little woman with a pale complexion, button nose, a love of pink clothing, hair and lipstick, and a slippery curly wig; Betty, Halcyon thought, probably shouldn’t be paying 50p. If she was a pensioner she certainly had looked after herself, Halcyon found it hard to believe she was over fifty. Betty was curvaceous, and dark skinned with large brown eyes twinkling behind big curling eyelashes. All three of the sisters were dressed in tracksuits – Vera’s sky blue, Emily’s bubblegum pink, and Betty’s chestnut brown, and were spinning, with very little consideration for any thought of exercise, on the big exercise bikes in the window.
‘Are you looking after us today, Eddie?’ chirped Emily with a giggle.
‘I’m supposed to be looking after Mr Tree--’
‘Lazy old sod,’ snapped Vera.
‘He has had a stroke, Vera,’ Emily said, as reproachful as a chipmunk.
‘He was a lazy old sod before he had the stroke,’ Vera replied waspishly. ‘I knew him when he worked at the gas board, spent all his time smoking fags and picking horses in his van.’
‘Vera!’
‘He did, as Merlin is my witness.’
‘Well,’ Halcyon didn’t quite know what to say to that, ‘Hee still needs his physical therapy, so I’d better—‘
‘Eddie?’ Betty Weywood’s voice curled out at Halcyon like a cat’s tongue. ‘I had a dream about you last night.’
To be continued...
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
Mid-week report: Big Brother, Tiffany Aching and a sticky bed
My plan to belt out 35 pages a week has gone slightly awry...Now, dear reader, I could lie to you and tell you that this is due to writers block, but actually it is due to a conspiracy of telly, good books and cold, wet mornings.
At the moment I am writing around 10-15 pages a week, which for me isn't bad, but obviously I'll never reach my target of finishing The Resurrection Bureau by the end of November at this rate.
But I am addicted to Big Brother - I know it's rubbish, but so are custard creams and I'm addicted to those too - so writing on a evening is out at least for the rest of this week. The weather is horrible at the moment, so I'm not getting up at 6.30 and writing for an hour as I normally do. Also I just bought I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett's brilliant new Tiffany Aching book - and I can not go to bed until I've read at least chapter, so late night writing is out - but I'll have read that by the end of the week too.
But don't worry, give me a couple of weeks to pull it together and I will be meeting my targets. After all I'm writing this for you, not for a publishers, not for an agent, but just for me and you - trust me, together we'll make it!
At the moment I am writing around 10-15 pages a week, which for me isn't bad, but obviously I'll never reach my target of finishing The Resurrection Bureau by the end of November at this rate.
But I am addicted to Big Brother - I know it's rubbish, but so are custard creams and I'm addicted to those too - so writing on a evening is out at least for the rest of this week. The weather is horrible at the moment, so I'm not getting up at 6.30 and writing for an hour as I normally do. Also I just bought I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett's brilliant new Tiffany Aching book - and I can not go to bed until I've read at least chapter, so late night writing is out - but I'll have read that by the end of the week too.
But don't worry, give me a couple of weeks to pull it together and I will be meeting my targets. After all I'm writing this for you, not for a publishers, not for an agent, but just for me and you - trust me, together we'll make it!
Sunday, 5 September 2010
The Resurrection Bureau - part 2
3.
‘So, what do I call you? Guinie, or Guin, or maybe G-Girl—‘
‘Eve,’ Eve interrupted. ‘Please call me Eve.’ She did her best to make the “please” not sound like “call me G-Girl, call me it just ONCE, and I will beat you repeatedly around the face and neck” - and she must have succeeded because John Crichton grinned like the Cheshire Cat, and said:
‘And is there an Adam at home?’
Eve was momentarily lost for words. ‘I beg your pardon?’
John Crichton held up both hands. ‘Or an Adamena, maybe? Hey, we’re very progressive here at the Bureau. Equal rights and proud. We’re a top ten employer in the Stonewall equality chart. So ... You’re a lesbian, right?’ Eve opened her mouth, and all that came out was a croak. ‘No need to answer,’ John Crichton said with a cheerful wink. ‘We are great believers in privacy at the Bureau. So ... Let’s talk about you duties, shall we?’
Eve sat up straight. She could just about bring herself to believe that her new boss, John Crichton, had been joking. That was the problem with managers, Eve thought, they all thought they had sparkling wit, good looks and talent, and they expected you to think it too. ‘Yes Mr Crichton,’ Eve began, ‘In London my duties included managing the portfolios of—‘
‘Can I just stop you there, Eve,’ Crichton leant over the desk and held up a finger inches from Eve’s face. Eve resisted the temptation to bite it off. ‘My name is not Mr Crichton, it is not boss, it is not chief, it is not gaffer, and it definitely is not “governor”,’ he said this last word with a cheeky “Cockerney” accent, and, to Eve’s amazement and considerable discomfort, he stood and did a little shuffling jig, with his thumbs thrust into imaginary waistcoat pockets. ‘My name is John, and this,’ he swept around a hand to indicate the large floor to ceiling window behind his desk. ‘Is not London.’
Eve felt her dislike of her new governor (and now he had said it in that ridiculous fake Cockney accent Eve realised she would always think of John Crichton as the Governor) soften as she looked out at the remarkable view. Crichton’s office was at the very top floor of the largest building in Excalibur Wharf. The Wharf, Eve knew, was as detested as it was admired. In ten short years it had become the financial centre of Britannia, but it had also become the focus of vilification and contempt, and Eve could understand why. From the window, beyond the manmade lake created by diverting the River Brue and starving the former farmlands that once surrounded Excalibur Wharf’s massive shining office blocks, the ancient tumbledown houses of Glastonbury grew, and beyond those the walls of Avalon began. Avalon City was over 100 square miles of museums, churches and banks owned by holy father church. Avalon was an independent sovereign state, legally a separate country from Britannia within its borders, and it was, Eve knew, the wealthiest and most secure place in the world. From where she sat she could see Glastonbury Tor, and beneath that, its golden dome shining in the sun, the Church of Arthur the Saviour sat in the centre of Saint Lancelot’s Square.
It was a sight that few people saw, Eve knew. She had visited Avalon City with her mother as one of hundreds of thousands of tourists when she was a child, and from nowhere within Avalon City could you see the Tor – you had to literally climb beyond the roof tops of the dozens of churches to see it – and of course, no one but the priests were allowed anywhere near the Tor except on Stone Week and at Arthur Mass.
And currently Glastonbury Tor was eclipsed by the painfully fashionable skinny black suit and tie of her new Governor, Mr John Crichton.
‘Are you religious, Eve?’ Crichton indicated the chain around Eve’s throat as he sat at his desk once again.
‘I’m not really...’ Eve hesitated. The question, one that she was rarely asked these days, always had the effect of instantly conjuring up a picture of Eve’s mother in her mind. Blood on her embroidered dress cuffs. ‘No, not really.’ She replied, but could not stop herself from fingering the thin gold cruciform medallion hanging from a chain around her neck, a tiny golden Excalibur.
‘Many people assume that the Bureau is a religious organisation, or at the very least is backed by a religious body. It is not.’ Eve sat up straight, it seemed, at last, that the Governors meandering induction had come to the point. ‘The Resurrection Bureau is an essentially humanist, non-religious body.’ He pointed slickly to Eve’s Excalibur pendant, like a gun fighter drawing a bead. ‘We leave saving people’s souls to the Knights.’
Crichton began telling her in depth about the Resurrection Bureau, and Eve tuned out. It was nothing Eve couldn’t have – and had – read in the charity’s promotional literature. Eve had worked as a fundraiser for almost five years now, first with Barnardo’s and then with Great Ormond Street children’s hospital. From selling raffle tickets and organising rubber duck races she had moved on to handling the accounts of major multi-national companies and a scattering of actors and pop stars. Some of these stars had wanted to dodge the tax man or a bad reputation, but a surprisingly high percentage of them were committed to giving something back to their fellow man. At least it had surprised the deeply cynical Eve Finbar. The Resurrection Bureau, despite its peculiar name, was not a particularly extraordinary charity. The only slightly odd thing about it was that its main business was to support and engage with religious groups and individuals, while maintaining a completely humanist philosophy, as Crichton had said. The two things seemed at odds to Eve – a completely non-religious charity that exclusively funded religious endeavours. And oddly, despite reading through reams of literature and drilling deep into the internet sites that weren’t just ridiculous knitted together conspiracy theories, Eve could find no explanation for this apparent contradiction.
‘—field work is of course a major part of that process.’
Eve blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’
John Crichton smiled. ‘It is the philosophy of the Resurrection Bureau, Miss Finbar, that every employee of this organisation fully understands all aspect of this charity’s work, and therefore—‘
‘Gov—Mr Crich – John,’ Eve gritted her teeth. ‘I am not a social worker, or an expert in mental illness,’ she said slowly, ‘I am an account manager, and I really don’t think I’d have the skills—‘
‘Please don’t interrupt me again, Eve,’ Crichton said. His voice was soft, and there was an easy smile on his face as he said it – but Eve looked into Crichton’s eyes and felt her mouth go dry. ‘Since the Bureau was created, many of hundreds of years ago now, we have tried to instil in our employees a total understanding of the workings of our charity. A total understanding, Miss Finbar.’ These words were snapped out with a cold efficiency that Eve would never have suspected from her initial impressions of John Crichton. Then he grinned, and gave her a wink. ‘Don’t worry, Eve, it’s just a couple of days of our working life once a year, and it’s nothing that will upset you or make you uncomfortable.’ He hoisted a thumb upwards, and whispered conspiratorially: ‘Got to keep the boss happy.’
Eve smiled, and nodded, and said “Yes of course” with a hint of a knowing laugh in her voice. She didn’t mention that the Governor’s office was on the top floor of Excalibur House, so God only knew where the Resurrection Bureau’s boss sat.
Two hours later Eve found herself at platform 5 of Glastonbury station looking at her tickets with a stunned expression.
In Crichton’s office Eve had moved to pull her diary out of her handbag, and the Governor had said, ‘You won’t be needing that.’
He wasn’t kidding. He had handed her return train tickets to Northumberland which she saw to her considerable astonishment she was scheduled to board in less than three hours. She had told Crichton she wasn’t sure if she could make the necessary arrangements – but, of course, the Governor knew she was single, he knew she was new to Glastonbury with no friends, no ties, and a suitcase half unpacked from her move from London.
All it taken had been a fast elevator from the top floor, a town car from the office to her apartment to the train station, and now, somehow she was here, about to board the first train in a five hour journey north.
‘They never mentioned this at the interview,’ she murmured.
‘I beg your pardon?’
Eve looked around and saw a small, elderly man in a raincoat was looking around at her questioningly. ‘Sorry, I was just thinking out loud...’ the little man turned, and she saw he wore a dog collar, a short sword was at his side and a six inch square of plate armour hung over his chest. The little man was a Knight, ‘...Sorry, father,’ she finished.
‘That’s quite all right,’ the little man replied jovially. ‘Are you heading far, I see you only have a small bag?’
Eve looked at her bag. It was small. More than likely she would have to buy some more clothes – that was definitely going on the company credit card. Assuming they had decent clothes shops that far north...
‘I’m going to Northumberland,’ she replied, and before the little man could ask, she added, ‘Business trip.’
‘Well, I wish you a safe journey,’ the little man said. He reached up and stroked his beard which, peculiarly, ended in two white forks. ‘Lovely country Northumberland. The home of one of our greatest saints, of course, Saint Lancelot’s family castle, Bamborough.’
‘Yes,’ Eve sighed inwardly, and looked urgently up and down platform 5. ‘As I say, I’m on a business trip, Mr...?’
She said it before she had realised, it was force of habit, too many years at charity drives and meet and greets – now she had given the little Knight the perfect opportunity to talk for hours.
‘My name is Merlin,’ said the little man, ‘But of course, that’s my middle name.’ He chuckled. ‘Well, I must be off Guinevere. Lovely to meet you,’ and he shook her warmly by the hand.
‘My name’s not—‘ she began, but the little man, middle name Merlin, had already turned on his heel and marched away. In a second he had vanished into the crowed platform.
As her train pulled into the station it finally occurred to Eve to stop fuming over the fact that the little man had used her hated full name, and wonder how he had known her name in the first place.
Eve stepped on the train, found a quiet carriage, fired up her iPad and tried her best to remember exactly why she had been employed by the Resurrection Bureau.
She thought no more about the priest Knight with the middle name Merlin, and she certainly did not notice him walking past her carriage two hours into her journey north, nor did she notice that he appeared to be wearing a brown tea cosy on his head
To be continued...
‘So, what do I call you? Guinie, or Guin, or maybe G-Girl—‘
‘Eve,’ Eve interrupted. ‘Please call me Eve.’ She did her best to make the “please” not sound like “call me G-Girl, call me it just ONCE, and I will beat you repeatedly around the face and neck” - and she must have succeeded because John Crichton grinned like the Cheshire Cat, and said:
‘And is there an Adam at home?’
Eve was momentarily lost for words. ‘I beg your pardon?’
John Crichton held up both hands. ‘Or an Adamena, maybe? Hey, we’re very progressive here at the Bureau. Equal rights and proud. We’re a top ten employer in the Stonewall equality chart. So ... You’re a lesbian, right?’ Eve opened her mouth, and all that came out was a croak. ‘No need to answer,’ John Crichton said with a cheerful wink. ‘We are great believers in privacy at the Bureau. So ... Let’s talk about you duties, shall we?’
Eve sat up straight. She could just about bring herself to believe that her new boss, John Crichton, had been joking. That was the problem with managers, Eve thought, they all thought they had sparkling wit, good looks and talent, and they expected you to think it too. ‘Yes Mr Crichton,’ Eve began, ‘In London my duties included managing the portfolios of—‘
‘Can I just stop you there, Eve,’ Crichton leant over the desk and held up a finger inches from Eve’s face. Eve resisted the temptation to bite it off. ‘My name is not Mr Crichton, it is not boss, it is not chief, it is not gaffer, and it definitely is not “governor”,’ he said this last word with a cheeky “Cockerney” accent, and, to Eve’s amazement and considerable discomfort, he stood and did a little shuffling jig, with his thumbs thrust into imaginary waistcoat pockets. ‘My name is John, and this,’ he swept around a hand to indicate the large floor to ceiling window behind his desk. ‘Is not London.’
Eve felt her dislike of her new governor (and now he had said it in that ridiculous fake Cockney accent Eve realised she would always think of John Crichton as the Governor) soften as she looked out at the remarkable view. Crichton’s office was at the very top floor of the largest building in Excalibur Wharf. The Wharf, Eve knew, was as detested as it was admired. In ten short years it had become the financial centre of Britannia, but it had also become the focus of vilification and contempt, and Eve could understand why. From the window, beyond the manmade lake created by diverting the River Brue and starving the former farmlands that once surrounded Excalibur Wharf’s massive shining office blocks, the ancient tumbledown houses of Glastonbury grew, and beyond those the walls of Avalon began. Avalon City was over 100 square miles of museums, churches and banks owned by holy father church. Avalon was an independent sovereign state, legally a separate country from Britannia within its borders, and it was, Eve knew, the wealthiest and most secure place in the world. From where she sat she could see Glastonbury Tor, and beneath that, its golden dome shining in the sun, the Church of Arthur the Saviour sat in the centre of Saint Lancelot’s Square.
It was a sight that few people saw, Eve knew. She had visited Avalon City with her mother as one of hundreds of thousands of tourists when she was a child, and from nowhere within Avalon City could you see the Tor – you had to literally climb beyond the roof tops of the dozens of churches to see it – and of course, no one but the priests were allowed anywhere near the Tor except on Stone Week and at Arthur Mass.
And currently Glastonbury Tor was eclipsed by the painfully fashionable skinny black suit and tie of her new Governor, Mr John Crichton.
‘Are you religious, Eve?’ Crichton indicated the chain around Eve’s throat as he sat at his desk once again.
‘I’m not really...’ Eve hesitated. The question, one that she was rarely asked these days, always had the effect of instantly conjuring up a picture of Eve’s mother in her mind. Blood on her embroidered dress cuffs. ‘No, not really.’ She replied, but could not stop herself from fingering the thin gold cruciform medallion hanging from a chain around her neck, a tiny golden Excalibur.
‘Many people assume that the Bureau is a religious organisation, or at the very least is backed by a religious body. It is not.’ Eve sat up straight, it seemed, at last, that the Governors meandering induction had come to the point. ‘The Resurrection Bureau is an essentially humanist, non-religious body.’ He pointed slickly to Eve’s Excalibur pendant, like a gun fighter drawing a bead. ‘We leave saving people’s souls to the Knights.’
Crichton began telling her in depth about the Resurrection Bureau, and Eve tuned out. It was nothing Eve couldn’t have – and had – read in the charity’s promotional literature. Eve had worked as a fundraiser for almost five years now, first with Barnardo’s and then with Great Ormond Street children’s hospital. From selling raffle tickets and organising rubber duck races she had moved on to handling the accounts of major multi-national companies and a scattering of actors and pop stars. Some of these stars had wanted to dodge the tax man or a bad reputation, but a surprisingly high percentage of them were committed to giving something back to their fellow man. At least it had surprised the deeply cynical Eve Finbar. The Resurrection Bureau, despite its peculiar name, was not a particularly extraordinary charity. The only slightly odd thing about it was that its main business was to support and engage with religious groups and individuals, while maintaining a completely humanist philosophy, as Crichton had said. The two things seemed at odds to Eve – a completely non-religious charity that exclusively funded religious endeavours. And oddly, despite reading through reams of literature and drilling deep into the internet sites that weren’t just ridiculous knitted together conspiracy theories, Eve could find no explanation for this apparent contradiction.
‘—field work is of course a major part of that process.’
Eve blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’
John Crichton smiled. ‘It is the philosophy of the Resurrection Bureau, Miss Finbar, that every employee of this organisation fully understands all aspect of this charity’s work, and therefore—‘
‘Gov—Mr Crich – John,’ Eve gritted her teeth. ‘I am not a social worker, or an expert in mental illness,’ she said slowly, ‘I am an account manager, and I really don’t think I’d have the skills—‘
‘Please don’t interrupt me again, Eve,’ Crichton said. His voice was soft, and there was an easy smile on his face as he said it – but Eve looked into Crichton’s eyes and felt her mouth go dry. ‘Since the Bureau was created, many of hundreds of years ago now, we have tried to instil in our employees a total understanding of the workings of our charity. A total understanding, Miss Finbar.’ These words were snapped out with a cold efficiency that Eve would never have suspected from her initial impressions of John Crichton. Then he grinned, and gave her a wink. ‘Don’t worry, Eve, it’s just a couple of days of our working life once a year, and it’s nothing that will upset you or make you uncomfortable.’ He hoisted a thumb upwards, and whispered conspiratorially: ‘Got to keep the boss happy.’
Eve smiled, and nodded, and said “Yes of course” with a hint of a knowing laugh in her voice. She didn’t mention that the Governor’s office was on the top floor of Excalibur House, so God only knew where the Resurrection Bureau’s boss sat.
Two hours later Eve found herself at platform 5 of Glastonbury station looking at her tickets with a stunned expression.
In Crichton’s office Eve had moved to pull her diary out of her handbag, and the Governor had said, ‘You won’t be needing that.’
He wasn’t kidding. He had handed her return train tickets to Northumberland which she saw to her considerable astonishment she was scheduled to board in less than three hours. She had told Crichton she wasn’t sure if she could make the necessary arrangements – but, of course, the Governor knew she was single, he knew she was new to Glastonbury with no friends, no ties, and a suitcase half unpacked from her move from London.
All it taken had been a fast elevator from the top floor, a town car from the office to her apartment to the train station, and now, somehow she was here, about to board the first train in a five hour journey north.
‘They never mentioned this at the interview,’ she murmured.
‘I beg your pardon?’
Eve looked around and saw a small, elderly man in a raincoat was looking around at her questioningly. ‘Sorry, I was just thinking out loud...’ the little man turned, and she saw he wore a dog collar, a short sword was at his side and a six inch square of plate armour hung over his chest. The little man was a Knight, ‘...Sorry, father,’ she finished.
‘That’s quite all right,’ the little man replied jovially. ‘Are you heading far, I see you only have a small bag?’
Eve looked at her bag. It was small. More than likely she would have to buy some more clothes – that was definitely going on the company credit card. Assuming they had decent clothes shops that far north...
‘I’m going to Northumberland,’ she replied, and before the little man could ask, she added, ‘Business trip.’
‘Well, I wish you a safe journey,’ the little man said. He reached up and stroked his beard which, peculiarly, ended in two white forks. ‘Lovely country Northumberland. The home of one of our greatest saints, of course, Saint Lancelot’s family castle, Bamborough.’
‘Yes,’ Eve sighed inwardly, and looked urgently up and down platform 5. ‘As I say, I’m on a business trip, Mr...?’
She said it before she had realised, it was force of habit, too many years at charity drives and meet and greets – now she had given the little Knight the perfect opportunity to talk for hours.
‘My name is Merlin,’ said the little man, ‘But of course, that’s my middle name.’ He chuckled. ‘Well, I must be off Guinevere. Lovely to meet you,’ and he shook her warmly by the hand.
‘My name’s not—‘ she began, but the little man, middle name Merlin, had already turned on his heel and marched away. In a second he had vanished into the crowed platform.
As her train pulled into the station it finally occurred to Eve to stop fuming over the fact that the little man had used her hated full name, and wonder how he had known her name in the first place.
Eve stepped on the train, found a quiet carriage, fired up her iPad and tried her best to remember exactly why she had been employed by the Resurrection Bureau.
She thought no more about the priest Knight with the middle name Merlin, and she certainly did not notice him walking past her carriage two hours into her journey north, nor did she notice that he appeared to be wearing a brown tea cosy on his head
To be continued...
Sunday, 29 August 2010
The Resurrection Bureau - part 1
1.
It was, give or take a decade, the early fourteenth century.
Mr Craft strongly suspected it was the year 1313, but he didn't like to mention this to Mr Grace. Mr Grace had become deeply superstitious, and not for the first time. There had been that awful business in the sixth century. One moment they had been on the verge of Saxon enlightenment, the next moment it had been all horsehead demons, cynocephali, magic swords and water witches. It had all been very embarrassing. And all because Mr Grace had refused to cross running water. Dreadful.
It was an inevitable part of the Mission that sometimes they saw patterns in the fabric of things - it didn't actually mean these things were true. But if they couldn’t see that pattern, then how would they ever unravel that fabric?
The problem was that Mr Grace and Mr Craft were entirely dependent upon one another, and the Mission could not be fulfilled if either one of them failed to pull their weight. Mr Grace was currently pulling Mr Craft's weight as he sat in a cart. For obviously reasons they did not have a horse, but Mr Grace was easily as strong as one of those animals.
Mr Grace was almost seven feet tall and broad enough to just fit between the cart's forks. Mr Craft was small, little more than five feet tall, but he had deceptively long legs that were folded under him now in the rank straw. They looked as different as it was possible for two men to look, even down to the colour of their skin, but they shared the same piercing blue eyes. Mr Craft took them from Mr Grace now, pushed them into his nicotine brown eye sockets, and looked out across the drab landscape.
Bleak hills sat beneath an iron-grey sky as rain fell indefectibly. Half way up the valley a stuttering light showed.
'Straight on, Mr Grace.'
It was undeniably, and predictably, a hovel.
A more cynical creature than Mr Craft would have been disappointed, but Mr Craft understood the intricate pattern of Creation. He understood humble birth led to spiritual and philosophical enrichment, and eventually...
Well, “eventually” was the whole point of course, “eventually” was why Mr Craft’s boots were filled with mud and his hair was plastered across his mahogany brow.
‘Shepherds, Mr Grace,’ he commented, climbing down from the cart.
Mr Grace nodded minutely, his empty eye sockets sinking into his doughy white face. ‘Inevitable,’ he sighed.
Mr Craft stepped up to the grey and brown structure, momentarily considered knocking on the reed screen, and then simply stepped inside.
The room – to call it a house would be a gross exaggeration – was dimly lit by yellow candlelight, and was filled with a stench of manure so thick that Mr Craft was certain he could chew the air. Mr Craft found himself looking into the baleful brown eyes of a cow. A sheep, and then a large rat pressed against his calf.
‘Can we help you, sir?’ a man’s voice, Mr Craft wasn’t surprised. The woman, he knew, would be silent and pious, and probably no older than fourteen. He always chose the mothers very carefully.
‘Stars,’ Mr Craft said. He looked up, and through the patched and rotten ceiling he saw nothing but iron cloud. ‘What do you make of clouds, humans?’
The shepherd did not reply. The silence that followed was broken by the sound of Mr Craft drawing his sword from its silver scabbard, and the low whine of the newborn baby.
2.
Eddie Halcyon was the sort of bloke who seemed to inevitably collect nicknames. He had many at the orphanage when he was a kid – Teddy Edward, Teddy Have a Poo, and Thick Ed were just three of the more pleasant. His foster mum, Tracy, had called him “Bear” and he had rather hoped this name would stick, but it never did. He just didn’t look like a “Bear”, he had long ago accepted. Halcyon’s friends called him “The Ghost” and occasionally “Captain Kirk” due to his habit of suddenly disappearing half way through a night out.
The nickname didn’t bother Halcyon – well, it didn’t bother him much anyway. With his skinny frame geeky red hair and spectacles the last thing he wanted to be associated with was Star Trek. But the fact was at age 22 it was up to him when the night was over, not anyone else, they could call him what they wanted. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t take his drink.
Halcyon stepped out of the pub’s doors and took a deep lung full of cold night air. It tasted a lot better than another pint, he decided. He took a big step forward – and a small step back.
He was not drunk. Definitely not drunk.
He walked out of the pub somewhat jerkily and looked up into the blue night sky and the rash of star immediately above his head. Halcyon never got drunk, he always knew when he had had enough, and he was not drunk now.
‘Blimey,’ he murmured. ‘Stars...are like...like pure brilliant.’
Halcyon stumbled forward, was surprised to find the steps his feet had expected were not there, remembered soberly at there had never been steps outside The Bitter Drayman, and finally looked down.
He squinted around. The city glimmered in front of him, casting a bow of blue light pollution across the sky. Somewhere behind him he heard the scream of an accelerating car and the persistent bark of a small dog. A white horse cantered down the centre of the road.
‘Um,’ Halcyon murmured.
The horse trotted by looking momentarily ghostly in the yellow light of the pelican crossing. The illusion passed, and the horse was within inches of Halcyon. The creature was startling white with blackened hooves, nostrils and eyes. It smelled of tangy sweat and stagnant water, and it was big. The horse’s back was higher than Halcyon’s head, its own head almost two feet long.
The horse cantered down the centre of the street, and then, with a snort and a toss of its huge head, it broke into a run. In a moment the horse had disappeared into the darkness.
Halcyon looked left and right at the pelican crossing, then crossed slowly, turned at the other side of the street, and looked up and down. Dirty brick houses, some of their windows blocked with dull steel, battered and rusty car, pizza boxes, Carlsberg cans and red elastic bands. No horses.
‘Where you headed, pilgrim?’
Halcyon frowned, looked up and down the street once more, and then turned on his heels.
In a rubbish choked garden, in a house with broken windows and a gaping front door, an old man sat in front of a blazing fire. The old man was dressed in a green parka, blue suede brogues upon his feet. A brown woollen hat that looked, to Halcyon, like a tea cosy, cover his grey head. Green eyes sparkled like emeralds beneath the shadow of his brow, and the old man’s white beard ended in two forks, crooked white teeth grinned at Eddie Halcyon.
It occurred to Halcyon he had not seen the man when he had looked across the street just moments before, but it didn’t seem to matter much. ‘Did. Um.’ Halcyon scratched his head, waved his hand mutely down the deserted street, and burped. ‘Sorry. Horse.’
The old man’s grin did not falter. His eyebrows wiggled expressively. ‘You might want to sit down before you fall down, pilgrim.’ He indicated a striped deckchair across the fire from him.
‘I’m okay.’ Halcyon squinted at the deckchair. It was the old-fashioned wooden kind of deckchair with a striped canvas seat. It was impossible in the flickering firelight to see just how dirty the chair was. Very dirty, Halcyon suspected, though the old man, with his startling white teeth, looked very clean. ‘Did you ... see ...?’
‘Where you headed, sunshine?’ the old man interrupted cheerfully. ‘Off on an odyssey?’
‘Just...’ it had been on the tip of his tongue to say he was heading home, but that wasn’t true, was it? Halcyon looked back across the street over the squat shape of The Bitter Drayman to the horseshoe shape of the block of flats where he lived. He had been heading ... No, he hadn’t. He hadn’t been thinking of her. Definitely not.
‘That,’ the old man’s cheerfully voice interrupted the run of Halcyon’s thoughts, ‘That is one of the last deckchairs from the Titanic.’ The old man pointed a long-nailed manicured finger across the fire, ‘One just like that sold a few years ago for thirty five thousand pounds.’
‘Titanic?’ Halcyon stepped closer to the chair and squinted at it. Sure enough, in the centre of its striped canvas were the words RMS Titanic and a crest showing a red flag with a white star in its centre. Halycon made an impressed sound and cautiously sat on the chair. The instant he sat back he found he couldn’t imagine a more comfortable place to be than sitting in the Titanic deckchair by the firelight. ‘Where’d you, like, get it?’ he asked, wiggling comfortably and sighing.
‘From the Titanic, of course,’ the old man replied with a grin. ‘I was asleep on it, sunbathing, when the ship sank. I awoke with surf around my knees. Luckily these are sturdy chairs,’ he slapped his own deckchair to demonstrate. ‘So I just lay back and floated away to safety.’
Halcyon frowned at the old man, who grinned back at him, firelight twinkling in his eyes. ‘You were sunbathing,’ he said slowly, ‘when you were hit by an iceberg?’
The old man chuckled. ‘You got me there, pilgrim. I was up on deck awaiting a young lady for a romantic dalliance. Molly Juniper was her name. I’d had a mite too much champagne, and maybe just a little bit whisky too, and I fell asleep on the deckchair. Woke up all at sea, in more ways than one.
‘I floated along for twenty days and twenty nights, with nothing to sustain me but a small bratwurst sausage and a half bottle of champagne I had taken from the buffet earlier that evening. Eventually I was cast ashore on a desert island which was occupied almost entirely by dog headed men and cat head women. Fortunately I’ve always had a way with animals.’
The old man smiled, and, as if on cue, a large black cat sprang from the shadows of the rubbish-strewn garden onto his lap. The old man began stroking the cat, ‘This is Bas, a cat of my acquaintance.’
Halcyon digested this information for several moments while the old man contentedly stroked Bas, the black cat. Then he leaned forward, squinting through the flames, and asked, ‘What’s your name?’
‘My name is Eddie,’ the old man replied.
Halcyon frowned, confused. ‘That’s my name!’ he exclaimed.
‘Eddie Ambrosius,’ the old man added, ‘but I have a middle name, if that’s of any help?’
Halcyon shook his head. ‘How could you have been on the Titanic? That sank in, like, 1930 or something.’
‘Actually,’ Ambrosius replied, ‘it sank on April 14, 1912 at around midnight. I can’t be exact on the time, as I said, I was asleep and quite drunk at the time.’
‘1912, so that would make you, um...’ Halcyon counted and recounted his fingers several times over. ‘At least, like 120 years old, right?’
Ambrosius chuckled. ‘That would be quite ridiculous,’ he replied.
‘Exactly!’ Halcyon cried triumphantly.
‘I am much, much older than that.’ Ambrosius smiled serenely while Halcyon did his best to focus on the odd little figure. The cat, Bas, stared impassively at Halcyon with, he noticed, eyes that were exactly the same green as the old man’s. Eddie Halcyon pondered the old man’s ridiculous story, and then asked the question that bothered him the most. ‘What happened to the girl you were supposed meet?’ Halcyon asked. ‘What happened to Molly Juniper?’
The old man leaned forward, his forked beard almost touching the flames of his camp fire. ‘Now that,’ he replied, ‘is a very interesting story.’
There was a loud thump, making Halcyon jump in his chair. The thump was followed by a raucous cheer, and Halcyon turned to see his three friends – Tetley, Young Brian and Jaffa – stagger out of the doors of The Bitter Drayman. Halcyon turned back to Ambrosius, half expecting to see the old man had disappeared. He had not disappeared, but he looked so odd that it occurred to Halcyon for the first time that he must either be very, very drunk indeed, or more likely was dreaming this whole thing while lying in a beer sozzled heap in the snug of the Drayman.
‘I must be going now young pilgrim,’ said Ambrosius, springing to his feet with the vigour of a much younger man, and folding his deckchair with a single dexterous movement. ‘I just thought I would look in on you before it all began.’
Halcyon barely heard the old man’s words. He pointed at the brown tea cosy hat Ambrosius wore on top of which, much to Bas the cat’s fascination, sat a small bird with a bright red breast.
‘Yes, of course, if you get in trouble,’ the old man touch his index finger to his forehead and the bird hopped down onto it, ‘do tell a robin.’
‘Um...’ Halcyon held out his hand and the bird hopped onto the palm and looked up at him with inquisitive black eyes. ‘Um...Trouble?’
‘Oi! Oi! Captain Kirk!’ came a loud shout, and the robin flew off, vanishing into the night instantly in an explosion of feathers. Bas gave a loud and frustrated yowl.
‘What do you mean, trouble?’
‘Trouble,’ said Ambrosius, ‘is definitely not my middle name,’ and with that he swirled his folded deckchair in front of the fire, which disappeared in a puff of smoke which blinded Halcyon in a choking cloud. ‘You can keep the deckchair, by the way.’
‘What you doing, Kirky?’ Halcyon blinked up at the unshaven face of Young Brian, then looked around. The old man, his cat and the red robin had gone, and of the fire there was no sign at all.
‘Come on Eddie,’ said Tetley, grabbing Halcyon under his arms and pulling him to his feet, ‘We’ll get you home.’
‘That deckchair is worth three hundred and fifty grand,’ Halcyon said pointing at what, somehow, had transformed into an upended milk crate. ‘Um.’
‘Time to go home, Ghost,’ said Jaffa, throwing Halcyon’s arm over his shoulder. ‘Deb won’t want you coming round tonight.’
‘The bitch,’ spat Tetley.
Halcyon looked up guiltily from the milk crate that was definitely not the remnant of a lost ocean liner. ‘I wasn’t.’ He said weakly – but of course he had been. And that more than anything else – more than a crazy old man or a red red robin – that convinced Halcyon it really was time to go home. He had been heading for Debbie’s. Arthur help us.
‘Course not, but let’s get you home anyway,’ Tetley replied, and he saw the three of them exchange a knowing look as they carried Halcyon out of the junk-strewn garden.
They stopped at the edge of the road while Young Brian threw up unselfconsciously in the gutter. Halcyon took the opportunity to look up and down the street. Barred windows, pizzas boxes, and an absurdly large collection of red elastic bands – check. Old geezers with forked beards, galloping giant white horses – negative.
Halcyon closed his eyes. The world spun pleasantly in the dark. It was nice being drunk with his friends, even if he hadn’t just inherited a priceless deckchair—
‘Blimey, look at that!’
Halcyon almost fell face-first into the gutter as Jaffa slipped from beneath his arm. He opened his eyes – counted himself very lucky he had not fallen into the gutter considering what Young Brian had just deposited there – and was just about to start shouting, when he saw what Jaffa had dropped him for.
At the other side of the pelican crossing sat a black cat. It was looking at the four drunken men with insightful green eyes. Sitting on the top of the cat’s head was a tiny robin.
‘Can you see that!’ Jaffa pulled his phone out of his pocket. ‘I’ve got to get a ... Oh. Crap.’
The cat had gone. Jaffa shoved his phone back into his jeans pocket. ‘Bugger. I could have got two hundred and fifty notes for that!’
‘That’s not for photos, it’s for videos,’ Tetley replied.
‘That’s right,’ Young Brian nodded, wiping the sick off his face. ‘You’ve been framed, two hundred and fifty quid.’
‘I never said You’ve Been Framed. When did you hear me say You’ve Been Framed?’
‘Where you going to get two hundred and fifty for a photo of a cat and a sparrow then?’ Tetley demanded.
‘Robin,’ Halcyon said. ‘It wasn’t a sparrow. It was a robin.’
‘Come on, let’ get Bill Oddie home before any bobbies show up,’ said Jaffa.
And between them the three carried Halcyon home.
Halcyon awoke in the middle of the night, and stared into total blackness, his heart pounding. He tried to gather the threads of his dream, but all he could remember was a cat headed woman had been walking towards him. She had been naked, but it barely seemed to matter – she had been tattooed from head to foot with weird designs that covered her skin much more effectively than ever clothes could. The cat woman had stared at Halcyon, and then, in a voice that was a deep purr turned into words, she had said, ‘You must pull it out.’
‘I don’t even remember putting it in,’ Halcyon murmured, and within seconds he had fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep.
To be continued...
It was, give or take a decade, the early fourteenth century.
Mr Craft strongly suspected it was the year 1313, but he didn't like to mention this to Mr Grace. Mr Grace had become deeply superstitious, and not for the first time. There had been that awful business in the sixth century. One moment they had been on the verge of Saxon enlightenment, the next moment it had been all horsehead demons, cynocephali, magic swords and water witches. It had all been very embarrassing. And all because Mr Grace had refused to cross running water. Dreadful.
It was an inevitable part of the Mission that sometimes they saw patterns in the fabric of things - it didn't actually mean these things were true. But if they couldn’t see that pattern, then how would they ever unravel that fabric?
The problem was that Mr Grace and Mr Craft were entirely dependent upon one another, and the Mission could not be fulfilled if either one of them failed to pull their weight. Mr Grace was currently pulling Mr Craft's weight as he sat in a cart. For obviously reasons they did not have a horse, but Mr Grace was easily as strong as one of those animals.
Mr Grace was almost seven feet tall and broad enough to just fit between the cart's forks. Mr Craft was small, little more than five feet tall, but he had deceptively long legs that were folded under him now in the rank straw. They looked as different as it was possible for two men to look, even down to the colour of their skin, but they shared the same piercing blue eyes. Mr Craft took them from Mr Grace now, pushed them into his nicotine brown eye sockets, and looked out across the drab landscape.
Bleak hills sat beneath an iron-grey sky as rain fell indefectibly. Half way up the valley a stuttering light showed.
'Straight on, Mr Grace.'
It was undeniably, and predictably, a hovel.
A more cynical creature than Mr Craft would have been disappointed, but Mr Craft understood the intricate pattern of Creation. He understood humble birth led to spiritual and philosophical enrichment, and eventually...
Well, “eventually” was the whole point of course, “eventually” was why Mr Craft’s boots were filled with mud and his hair was plastered across his mahogany brow.
‘Shepherds, Mr Grace,’ he commented, climbing down from the cart.
Mr Grace nodded minutely, his empty eye sockets sinking into his doughy white face. ‘Inevitable,’ he sighed.
Mr Craft stepped up to the grey and brown structure, momentarily considered knocking on the reed screen, and then simply stepped inside.
The room – to call it a house would be a gross exaggeration – was dimly lit by yellow candlelight, and was filled with a stench of manure so thick that Mr Craft was certain he could chew the air. Mr Craft found himself looking into the baleful brown eyes of a cow. A sheep, and then a large rat pressed against his calf.
‘Can we help you, sir?’ a man’s voice, Mr Craft wasn’t surprised. The woman, he knew, would be silent and pious, and probably no older than fourteen. He always chose the mothers very carefully.
‘Stars,’ Mr Craft said. He looked up, and through the patched and rotten ceiling he saw nothing but iron cloud. ‘What do you make of clouds, humans?’
The shepherd did not reply. The silence that followed was broken by the sound of Mr Craft drawing his sword from its silver scabbard, and the low whine of the newborn baby.
2.
Eddie Halcyon was the sort of bloke who seemed to inevitably collect nicknames. He had many at the orphanage when he was a kid – Teddy Edward, Teddy Have a Poo, and Thick Ed were just three of the more pleasant. His foster mum, Tracy, had called him “Bear” and he had rather hoped this name would stick, but it never did. He just didn’t look like a “Bear”, he had long ago accepted. Halcyon’s friends called him “The Ghost” and occasionally “Captain Kirk” due to his habit of suddenly disappearing half way through a night out.
The nickname didn’t bother Halcyon – well, it didn’t bother him much anyway. With his skinny frame geeky red hair and spectacles the last thing he wanted to be associated with was Star Trek. But the fact was at age 22 it was up to him when the night was over, not anyone else, they could call him what they wanted. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t take his drink.
Halcyon stepped out of the pub’s doors and took a deep lung full of cold night air. It tasted a lot better than another pint, he decided. He took a big step forward – and a small step back.
He was not drunk. Definitely not drunk.
He walked out of the pub somewhat jerkily and looked up into the blue night sky and the rash of star immediately above his head. Halcyon never got drunk, he always knew when he had had enough, and he was not drunk now.
‘Blimey,’ he murmured. ‘Stars...are like...like pure brilliant.’
Halcyon stumbled forward, was surprised to find the steps his feet had expected were not there, remembered soberly at there had never been steps outside The Bitter Drayman, and finally looked down.
He squinted around. The city glimmered in front of him, casting a bow of blue light pollution across the sky. Somewhere behind him he heard the scream of an accelerating car and the persistent bark of a small dog. A white horse cantered down the centre of the road.
‘Um,’ Halcyon murmured.
The horse trotted by looking momentarily ghostly in the yellow light of the pelican crossing. The illusion passed, and the horse was within inches of Halcyon. The creature was startling white with blackened hooves, nostrils and eyes. It smelled of tangy sweat and stagnant water, and it was big. The horse’s back was higher than Halcyon’s head, its own head almost two feet long.
The horse cantered down the centre of the street, and then, with a snort and a toss of its huge head, it broke into a run. In a moment the horse had disappeared into the darkness.
Halcyon looked left and right at the pelican crossing, then crossed slowly, turned at the other side of the street, and looked up and down. Dirty brick houses, some of their windows blocked with dull steel, battered and rusty car, pizza boxes, Carlsberg cans and red elastic bands. No horses.
‘Where you headed, pilgrim?’
Halcyon frowned, looked up and down the street once more, and then turned on his heels.
In a rubbish choked garden, in a house with broken windows and a gaping front door, an old man sat in front of a blazing fire. The old man was dressed in a green parka, blue suede brogues upon his feet. A brown woollen hat that looked, to Halcyon, like a tea cosy, cover his grey head. Green eyes sparkled like emeralds beneath the shadow of his brow, and the old man’s white beard ended in two forks, crooked white teeth grinned at Eddie Halcyon.
It occurred to Halcyon he had not seen the man when he had looked across the street just moments before, but it didn’t seem to matter much. ‘Did. Um.’ Halcyon scratched his head, waved his hand mutely down the deserted street, and burped. ‘Sorry. Horse.’
The old man’s grin did not falter. His eyebrows wiggled expressively. ‘You might want to sit down before you fall down, pilgrim.’ He indicated a striped deckchair across the fire from him.
‘I’m okay.’ Halcyon squinted at the deckchair. It was the old-fashioned wooden kind of deckchair with a striped canvas seat. It was impossible in the flickering firelight to see just how dirty the chair was. Very dirty, Halcyon suspected, though the old man, with his startling white teeth, looked very clean. ‘Did you ... see ...?’
‘Where you headed, sunshine?’ the old man interrupted cheerfully. ‘Off on an odyssey?’
‘Just...’ it had been on the tip of his tongue to say he was heading home, but that wasn’t true, was it? Halcyon looked back across the street over the squat shape of The Bitter Drayman to the horseshoe shape of the block of flats where he lived. He had been heading ... No, he hadn’t. He hadn’t been thinking of her. Definitely not.
‘That,’ the old man’s cheerfully voice interrupted the run of Halcyon’s thoughts, ‘That is one of the last deckchairs from the Titanic.’ The old man pointed a long-nailed manicured finger across the fire, ‘One just like that sold a few years ago for thirty five thousand pounds.’
‘Titanic?’ Halcyon stepped closer to the chair and squinted at it. Sure enough, in the centre of its striped canvas were the words RMS Titanic and a crest showing a red flag with a white star in its centre. Halycon made an impressed sound and cautiously sat on the chair. The instant he sat back he found he couldn’t imagine a more comfortable place to be than sitting in the Titanic deckchair by the firelight. ‘Where’d you, like, get it?’ he asked, wiggling comfortably and sighing.
‘From the Titanic, of course,’ the old man replied with a grin. ‘I was asleep on it, sunbathing, when the ship sank. I awoke with surf around my knees. Luckily these are sturdy chairs,’ he slapped his own deckchair to demonstrate. ‘So I just lay back and floated away to safety.’
Halcyon frowned at the old man, who grinned back at him, firelight twinkling in his eyes. ‘You were sunbathing,’ he said slowly, ‘when you were hit by an iceberg?’
The old man chuckled. ‘You got me there, pilgrim. I was up on deck awaiting a young lady for a romantic dalliance. Molly Juniper was her name. I’d had a mite too much champagne, and maybe just a little bit whisky too, and I fell asleep on the deckchair. Woke up all at sea, in more ways than one.
‘I floated along for twenty days and twenty nights, with nothing to sustain me but a small bratwurst sausage and a half bottle of champagne I had taken from the buffet earlier that evening. Eventually I was cast ashore on a desert island which was occupied almost entirely by dog headed men and cat head women. Fortunately I’ve always had a way with animals.’
The old man smiled, and, as if on cue, a large black cat sprang from the shadows of the rubbish-strewn garden onto his lap. The old man began stroking the cat, ‘This is Bas, a cat of my acquaintance.’
Halcyon digested this information for several moments while the old man contentedly stroked Bas, the black cat. Then he leaned forward, squinting through the flames, and asked, ‘What’s your name?’
‘My name is Eddie,’ the old man replied.
Halcyon frowned, confused. ‘That’s my name!’ he exclaimed.
‘Eddie Ambrosius,’ the old man added, ‘but I have a middle name, if that’s of any help?’
Halcyon shook his head. ‘How could you have been on the Titanic? That sank in, like, 1930 or something.’
‘Actually,’ Ambrosius replied, ‘it sank on April 14, 1912 at around midnight. I can’t be exact on the time, as I said, I was asleep and quite drunk at the time.’
‘1912, so that would make you, um...’ Halcyon counted and recounted his fingers several times over. ‘At least, like 120 years old, right?’
Ambrosius chuckled. ‘That would be quite ridiculous,’ he replied.
‘Exactly!’ Halcyon cried triumphantly.
‘I am much, much older than that.’ Ambrosius smiled serenely while Halcyon did his best to focus on the odd little figure. The cat, Bas, stared impassively at Halcyon with, he noticed, eyes that were exactly the same green as the old man’s. Eddie Halcyon pondered the old man’s ridiculous story, and then asked the question that bothered him the most. ‘What happened to the girl you were supposed meet?’ Halcyon asked. ‘What happened to Molly Juniper?’
The old man leaned forward, his forked beard almost touching the flames of his camp fire. ‘Now that,’ he replied, ‘is a very interesting story.’
There was a loud thump, making Halcyon jump in his chair. The thump was followed by a raucous cheer, and Halcyon turned to see his three friends – Tetley, Young Brian and Jaffa – stagger out of the doors of The Bitter Drayman. Halcyon turned back to Ambrosius, half expecting to see the old man had disappeared. He had not disappeared, but he looked so odd that it occurred to Halcyon for the first time that he must either be very, very drunk indeed, or more likely was dreaming this whole thing while lying in a beer sozzled heap in the snug of the Drayman.
‘I must be going now young pilgrim,’ said Ambrosius, springing to his feet with the vigour of a much younger man, and folding his deckchair with a single dexterous movement. ‘I just thought I would look in on you before it all began.’
Halcyon barely heard the old man’s words. He pointed at the brown tea cosy hat Ambrosius wore on top of which, much to Bas the cat’s fascination, sat a small bird with a bright red breast.
‘Yes, of course, if you get in trouble,’ the old man touch his index finger to his forehead and the bird hopped down onto it, ‘do tell a robin.’
‘Um...’ Halcyon held out his hand and the bird hopped onto the palm and looked up at him with inquisitive black eyes. ‘Um...Trouble?’
‘Oi! Oi! Captain Kirk!’ came a loud shout, and the robin flew off, vanishing into the night instantly in an explosion of feathers. Bas gave a loud and frustrated yowl.
‘What do you mean, trouble?’
‘Trouble,’ said Ambrosius, ‘is definitely not my middle name,’ and with that he swirled his folded deckchair in front of the fire, which disappeared in a puff of smoke which blinded Halcyon in a choking cloud. ‘You can keep the deckchair, by the way.’
‘What you doing, Kirky?’ Halcyon blinked up at the unshaven face of Young Brian, then looked around. The old man, his cat and the red robin had gone, and of the fire there was no sign at all.
‘Come on Eddie,’ said Tetley, grabbing Halcyon under his arms and pulling him to his feet, ‘We’ll get you home.’
‘That deckchair is worth three hundred and fifty grand,’ Halcyon said pointing at what, somehow, had transformed into an upended milk crate. ‘Um.’
‘Time to go home, Ghost,’ said Jaffa, throwing Halcyon’s arm over his shoulder. ‘Deb won’t want you coming round tonight.’
‘The bitch,’ spat Tetley.
Halcyon looked up guiltily from the milk crate that was definitely not the remnant of a lost ocean liner. ‘I wasn’t.’ He said weakly – but of course he had been. And that more than anything else – more than a crazy old man or a red red robin – that convinced Halcyon it really was time to go home. He had been heading for Debbie’s. Arthur help us.
‘Course not, but let’s get you home anyway,’ Tetley replied, and he saw the three of them exchange a knowing look as they carried Halcyon out of the junk-strewn garden.
They stopped at the edge of the road while Young Brian threw up unselfconsciously in the gutter. Halcyon took the opportunity to look up and down the street. Barred windows, pizzas boxes, and an absurdly large collection of red elastic bands – check. Old geezers with forked beards, galloping giant white horses – negative.
Halcyon closed his eyes. The world spun pleasantly in the dark. It was nice being drunk with his friends, even if he hadn’t just inherited a priceless deckchair—
‘Blimey, look at that!’
Halcyon almost fell face-first into the gutter as Jaffa slipped from beneath his arm. He opened his eyes – counted himself very lucky he had not fallen into the gutter considering what Young Brian had just deposited there – and was just about to start shouting, when he saw what Jaffa had dropped him for.
At the other side of the pelican crossing sat a black cat. It was looking at the four drunken men with insightful green eyes. Sitting on the top of the cat’s head was a tiny robin.
‘Can you see that!’ Jaffa pulled his phone out of his pocket. ‘I’ve got to get a ... Oh. Crap.’
The cat had gone. Jaffa shoved his phone back into his jeans pocket. ‘Bugger. I could have got two hundred and fifty notes for that!’
‘That’s not for photos, it’s for videos,’ Tetley replied.
‘That’s right,’ Young Brian nodded, wiping the sick off his face. ‘You’ve been framed, two hundred and fifty quid.’
‘I never said You’ve Been Framed. When did you hear me say You’ve Been Framed?’
‘Where you going to get two hundred and fifty for a photo of a cat and a sparrow then?’ Tetley demanded.
‘Robin,’ Halcyon said. ‘It wasn’t a sparrow. It was a robin.’
‘Come on, let’ get Bill Oddie home before any bobbies show up,’ said Jaffa.
And between them the three carried Halcyon home.
Halcyon awoke in the middle of the night, and stared into total blackness, his heart pounding. He tried to gather the threads of his dream, but all he could remember was a cat headed woman had been walking towards him. She had been naked, but it barely seemed to matter – she had been tattooed from head to foot with weird designs that covered her skin much more effectively than ever clothes could. The cat woman had stared at Halcyon, and then, in a voice that was a deep purr turned into words, she had said, ‘You must pull it out.’
‘I don’t even remember putting it in,’ Halcyon murmured, and within seconds he had fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep.
To be continued...
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
This is possibly the worst idea I've ever had in the whole of my life...
I am trying over the next few weeks to put together a new book. For various complex, ambitious, and downright daft reasons I am going to try to finish it completely by the end of November. The book, The Resurrection Bureau, is not actually a children's book - but not for the usual reasons, but just because there are no children in it. It is about...
Well, always better to show than tell, I always say.
From next Monday I will start publishing weekly sections of The Resurrection Bureau online. As with any book you start it with no clear certainty that you are actually going to be able to finish it, but, what the hell - it'll be fun to find out if I can actually do it, won't it?
So, be here Monday August 30 for part one of The Resurrection Bureau - and keep your fingers crossed that there'll be more than 5 pages a week!
To whet your appetite, here's a bit of a taster...
The Resurrection Bureau
1.
It was, give or take a decade or so, the early fourteenth century.
Mr Craft strongly suspected it was the year 1313, but he didn't like to mention this to Mr Grace. Mr Grace had become deeply superstitious, and not for the first time. There had been that awful business in the sixth century. One moment they had been on the verge of Saxon enlightenment, the next moment it had been all horsehead demons, cynocephali, magic swords and water witches. It had all been very embarrassing. And all because Mr Grace had refused to cross running water. Dreadful.
It was an inevitable part of the Mission that sometimes they saw patterns in the fabric of things - it didn't actually mean these things were true. Though, of course, they inevitably were true.
The problem was that Mr Grace and Mr Craft were entirely dependent upon one another, and the Mission could not be fulfilled if either one of them failed to pull their weight. Mr Grace was currently pulling Mr Craft's weight as he sat in a cart. For obviously reasons they did not have a horse, but Mr Grace was easily as strong as one of those animals.
Mr Grace was almost seven feet tall and broad enough to just fit between the cart's forks. Mr Craft was small, little more than five feet tall, but he had deceptively long legs that were folded under him now in the rank straw. They looked as different as it was possible for two men to look, even down to the colour of their skin, but they shared the same piercing blue eyes. Mr Craft took them from Mr Grace now, pushed them into his nicotine brown eye sockets, and looked out across the drab landscape.
Bleak hills sat beneath an iron-grey sky as rain fell indefectibly. Half way up the valley a stuttering light showed.
'Straight on, Mr Grace.'
To be continued...
Well, always better to show than tell, I always say.
From next Monday I will start publishing weekly sections of The Resurrection Bureau online. As with any book you start it with no clear certainty that you are actually going to be able to finish it, but, what the hell - it'll be fun to find out if I can actually do it, won't it?
So, be here Monday August 30 for part one of The Resurrection Bureau - and keep your fingers crossed that there'll be more than 5 pages a week!
To whet your appetite, here's a bit of a taster...
The Resurrection Bureau
1.
It was, give or take a decade or so, the early fourteenth century.
Mr Craft strongly suspected it was the year 1313, but he didn't like to mention this to Mr Grace. Mr Grace had become deeply superstitious, and not for the first time. There had been that awful business in the sixth century. One moment they had been on the verge of Saxon enlightenment, the next moment it had been all horsehead demons, cynocephali, magic swords and water witches. It had all been very embarrassing. And all because Mr Grace had refused to cross running water. Dreadful.
It was an inevitable part of the Mission that sometimes they saw patterns in the fabric of things - it didn't actually mean these things were true. Though, of course, they inevitably were true.
The problem was that Mr Grace and Mr Craft were entirely dependent upon one another, and the Mission could not be fulfilled if either one of them failed to pull their weight. Mr Grace was currently pulling Mr Craft's weight as he sat in a cart. For obviously reasons they did not have a horse, but Mr Grace was easily as strong as one of those animals.
Mr Grace was almost seven feet tall and broad enough to just fit between the cart's forks. Mr Craft was small, little more than five feet tall, but he had deceptively long legs that were folded under him now in the rank straw. They looked as different as it was possible for two men to look, even down to the colour of their skin, but they shared the same piercing blue eyes. Mr Craft took them from Mr Grace now, pushed them into his nicotine brown eye sockets, and looked out across the drab landscape.
Bleak hills sat beneath an iron-grey sky as rain fell indefectibly. Half way up the valley a stuttering light showed.
'Straight on, Mr Grace.'
To be continued...
Thursday, 29 July 2010
The busy, busy world of a multi-dimensional being
I am off on holiday soon (hurray!) but while I catch up on reading all the Neil Gaiman and Charles Dickens books I keep promising myself I'll read, I'll leave you with the intro to Trevor and the Dragon. You won't see any more of this until Halloween, when I'll begin to serialize it in the run up to Christmas - but it is worth noting that when you're a 200 year old teenage alien dinosaur with a love of fish fingers and chocolate, then the history and the future of the human race doesn't mean a jot to you. Trevor would never be welcomed inside the Tardis...
Trevor and the Dragon
Trevor Smethurst is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most intelligent creature in the whole of the universe.
Unfortunately Trevor Smethurst is also, without the slightest atom of doubt, the stupidest person in the entire universe.
I don’t really need to explain this to you, as Trevor will do his absolute best to prove this himself in no time at all.
But … if you really do need proof…
Trevor has just invented, alongside Dr Lambton Arcania (probably the second most intelligent creature in the universe) a device called a Chunk. A Chunk is a computer made entirely out of wood, but as well as being the most advanced computer in existence it is also a functioning time machine, a compass, can make coffee and cola and knows all the words to every song ever written in existence (including the ones everyone would much rather forget about).
Brilliant, you might think, absolutely brilliant.
But Trevor being Trevor he decided to test the Chunk on himself…
…Which is why he is currently hurtling through time and space completely out of control.
This sounds extraordinarily exciting. It is not. All of time and space, all packed together all at once, is a sort of dirty beige colour, and by far the most interesting thing about all of time and space is Trevor himself.
Trevor Smethurst looks like a small tyrannosaurus rex dressed in a maroon blazer. In fact he is an alien called a Killian dressed in a maroon blazer. In one pocket he has five bars of chocolate, in another he has a Monkey Master Blaster collector’s edition ruler (Trevor’s favourite comic book) and on his right inside pocket he has a pair of spectacles. These spectacles are another astonishing invention (created by Dr Arcania) which transform the wearer into whatever species is on that particular planet in that particular time period – which is just about to come in very handy indeed.
Trevor and the Dragon
Trevor Smethurst is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most intelligent creature in the whole of the universe.
Unfortunately Trevor Smethurst is also, without the slightest atom of doubt, the stupidest person in the entire universe.
I don’t really need to explain this to you, as Trevor will do his absolute best to prove this himself in no time at all.
But … if you really do need proof…
Trevor has just invented, alongside Dr Lambton Arcania (probably the second most intelligent creature in the universe) a device called a Chunk. A Chunk is a computer made entirely out of wood, but as well as being the most advanced computer in existence it is also a functioning time machine, a compass, can make coffee and cola and knows all the words to every song ever written in existence (including the ones everyone would much rather forget about).
Brilliant, you might think, absolutely brilliant.
But Trevor being Trevor he decided to test the Chunk on himself…
…Which is why he is currently hurtling through time and space completely out of control.
This sounds extraordinarily exciting. It is not. All of time and space, all packed together all at once, is a sort of dirty beige colour, and by far the most interesting thing about all of time and space is Trevor himself.
Trevor Smethurst looks like a small tyrannosaurus rex dressed in a maroon blazer. In fact he is an alien called a Killian dressed in a maroon blazer. In one pocket he has five bars of chocolate, in another he has a Monkey Master Blaster collector’s edition ruler (Trevor’s favourite comic book) and on his right inside pocket he has a pair of spectacles. These spectacles are another astonishing invention (created by Dr Arcania) which transform the wearer into whatever species is on that particular planet in that particular time period – which is just about to come in very handy indeed.
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