Wish You Were Here (4 page)

It had taken God, he reflected, seven days to make this. His clients would take seven years, but they'd do a
proper
job. Not that he was knocking God; the guy hadn't had the advantages. For a start, He hadn't had the benefit of top-flight legal advice from Hernan Piranha and Cal Dieb. All in all, it was a miracle the roof hadn't fallen in yet.

But that's what lawyers are for; to put the Real in realty. He scanned the lake and caught sight of something moving on the surface of the water. A fingertip adjustment to his executive Zeiss binoculars revealed it to be just an otter, furrowing the water and pulling runs in the reflections like unravelling knitting. Dieb frowned. He'd heard horror stories of dream deals crashing headlong to the ground, their wing-wax melted by the presence on-site of one miserable rare bird or endangered frog. Only last month, he'd been talking to a guy at a seminar who'd nearly lost a deal because of Lexington's Vole; except that the guy had had the foresight to fly in ten crates of heather-buzzards from Colombia and have them turned loose one dark night when the protesters were too cold to keep a proper watch. The buzzards had scarfed up the voles inside a month; and, since the birds were even more protected than the wee rodents, there was nothing anybody could do. Then, when the food supply was exhausted, the buzzards had moved on, leaving the site clear for the diggers to roll. Best of all, the feathered pests had taken residence on a neighbouring development site owned by clients of a rival law firm, and put them out of business. It put a whole new slant on the term legal eagles.

Wonder what eats otters? Something must. He murmured a few words into his pocket dictaphone. Wolves? Bears? Giant turtles? Were otters a big deal anyway? Probably worth checking while he was here. He took his phone from his belt.

‘Cindi? Is Jack there? Thanks. Jack, otters.Yeah. Look, I'm at the Lustmord Corporation site and it's ankle deep in goddamn otters. Can we waste the buggers or—? We can? Good work, Jack. Ciao.' He snapped the phone shut and put it away; another crisis averted, another five hundred bucks on the bill. It was turning into a good day.

But, he reflected as he swung the binoculars round, just because otters weren't going to be a problem, it didn't necessarily follow that there weren't a whole load of other furry saboteurs out there all poised and ready to pounce. Now sure, he could wait for the report; but then he'd be getting the data at the same time as the clients, which wasn't his style. Far better to be able to turn to Frank Lustmord at their next meeting and say, ‘Oh, and by the way, Frank, you'll be pleased to hear we've got the Van Sittaert's Rat situation nicely in hand.' And Frank would look worried and say, ‘I didn't know we had a Van Sittaert's Rat situation, Cal,' and then he could say, ‘This time next week you won't, Frank'; and that'd be worth another ten grand, possibly even a step closer to getting Lustmord's corporate acquisition business. Worth a little mud on the trouser leg, particularly since he was doing it on Frank's time.

He returned to the car, pulled on a pair of thousand-dollar gumboots and started off down the slope towards the lake. It wasn't easy going underfoot; bits of the hill tended to break off under his heel, roll down and go splash in the lake. He tried not to watch them; heights made him nervous, and if he were to fall and injure himself horribly, he wasn't quite sure who would be the appropriate person to sue. A fine fool he'd look, a man in his position, ending up all hideously mangled and not a cent in damages to show for it. Above all, he didn't want to fall in the lake, because he couldn't swim.Well, why should he? Never, in twenty years in the legal profession, had he found occasion to include in any of his bills the entry:
To swimming, pursuant to your instructions ........ $1,000.00
- so why bother with it? If any swimming ever needed doing, he could hire some guy. From an agency or something.

He felt a stone break loose under his left foot, listened as it bounced and clattered down the hill and heard the splash as it hit the water.

Trouble is, there isn't always an agency handy when you need one.

Perhaps, he decided, quickly, it would be a good idea to stay exactly where he was until he'd had a chance to collate relevant data, assess the position as regards short, medium and long term eventualities, formulate a plan of action and only then implement it. He did so. Then he started to yell for help.

‘Howdy, mister,' said a voice behind him. ‘Fine day again. What you hollerin' fer?'

‘I need help,' he replied, not turning round. ‘I'm stuck.'

‘Don't look stuck to me,' said the voice. ‘What's the matter? Put yer foot in a bear-trap or something?'

Being rooted to the spot, he couldn't turn and look at whoever it was, but the voice alone was enough to rough out a picture in his mind. It was one of those folkloric, old-fashioned All-American voices that go hand in glove with the expression ‘old-timer'. It wasn't a section of American society he was familiar with. Presumably they did go to law sometimes - all Americans go to law sooner or later - but they never walked into his office, quite possibly because they couldn't afford to talk to his receptionist, let alone him. He assumed they consulted check-shirted, chaw-chewing, four-wheel-drive-driving, stoop-sitting, harmonica-playing, sandpaper-chinned lawyers with offices over lumber mills in towns with quaintly evocative names; the sort who still use embossed letterhead. On the other hand, their legendary woodcraft and oneness with the environment probably made them experts in the field of getting people off dangerous hillsides. In any event, it was a fair bet that the concept of money as a reward for services had permeated this far by now.

‘Get me off this goddamn hillside,' he said, ‘and I'll give you twenty bucks.'

Behind him he could hear a wheezy cackle, like a bad telephone connection in a high wind. ‘Say, mister, why don't you just walk back up the hill and save the twenty bucks?'

‘I can't. I'm stuck.'

More cackling. ‘You mean you're too darn scared.'

‘Yes. Look, get me out of this and I'll make it fifty bucks.'

‘You got it.'

As fingers like steel rods gripped his arm and wrenched him up the slope, he was already wondering whether he might not have been too generous in his offer. Twenty bucks cash and a Piranha & Dieb gift voucher, fifty dollars off the divorce of your choice, might have done just as well.

‘You OK now?'

He opened his eyes. Below him, the lake sparkled. The otter, still ploughing its way through the water, was nearly to the shore. A few mallard pitched out near the western edge, shattering a mirror mountain.

‘I think so,' he said. ‘Jesus, I was scared there for a minute. It's a long way down.'

‘Sure is, mister. I recollect you saying something about fifty dollars.'

Why am I not surprised?
‘That's right,' he said, turning round. ‘Will you take a cheque? Only I haven't . . .'

He stopped. Facing him was no grizzled old wood-whittler, as traditionally portrayed in the movies by Slim Pickens; instead, he was staring at a beautiful young girl, with straight black hair, skin the colour of peanut butter and the lissome grace of a top-flight defence attorney squirming his way past the prosecution's key forensic evidence.

‘No cheques,' said the vision of loveliness, her full lips slightly parted. ‘Strictly cash.'

Whereupon she put her foot in the middle of his chest and pushed him back down the hill.

 

 

‘S
orry?'

‘I said,' Wesley repeated, ‘are we nearly there yet?'

‘What? Oh, yes, right.' The otter nodded a couple of times. ‘I was miles away,' it added. ‘Look, here we are. You can wade from here.'

Whereupon it let go of Wesley's collar. After a few panic-stricken kicks he managed to get his feet onto something solid, and stood up, to find himself still waist-deep in water. Straight ahead of him was the lake shore. He waded towards it, and the water seemed to drift away from him as if it was some heavy, swirling gas. He wasn't at all wet. His knees hurt, and he had pins and needles in his feet.

‘Hurry up,' the otter called.

There was something odd about its voice. Up till now, it had been a sort of falsetto squeak, the way you'd expect an otter to sound if you'd been brought up on cartoons. Now there was a rather more human tone in it; feminine, even.

‘I'm coming as fast as I can,' he shouted back. ‘My feet have gone to sleep.'

‘Probably got bored waiting for the rest of you. I haven't got all day, you know.'

As Wesley limped up out of the water, a human figure appeared from behind a rock. The sight of it stopped him in his tracks.

Facing him was no sleek-furred water-mammal; instead, he was staring at a beautiful young girl, with straight black hair, skin the colour of peanut butter and the lissome grace of an elf-maid at a Broadway audition. Wesley, who had always tended to regard young women with the mixture of admiration and apprehension that a dedicated trainspotter might feel at the sight of a perfectly restored vintage steam locomotive coming straight at him down a tunnel at seventy miles an hour, wasn't entirely happy at the substitution. Somehow, he knew he'd be better able to cope with talking otters than girls; especially pretty girls.

‘Welcome to your heart's desire,' said the pretty girl.

In the circumstances, Wesley took it quite well. It wasn't the usual sort of thing that girls, pretty or otherwise, tended to say to him. Even short, circular girls with complexions like the skin on cold custard tended to talk to him as if he was something they'd just trodden in. To be welcomed to his heart's desire by something out of one of the better-class mail order catalogues was something entirely new. It was as if, a second or so before the train hit him, he'd realised that it was a 1930s' Castle class Swindon-built double-chamber locomotive in fully authentic GWR livery, still retaining its original glass oil-valves.

‘Oh,' said Wesley, beetroot-coloured from collar to hairline. ‘You mean . . .'

‘Get real,' the girl replied (normality has been restored; we apologise for any inconvenience). ‘I mean, we're now on the other side of Lake Chicopee. You understand what that means?'

‘No.'

The girl sighed. ‘Fine. Then I'll tell you.' She sat down on the rock, pushing her hair back over her shoulders in a way that made Wesley want to climb a tree and hide in a hornets' nest till she'd gone away. ‘I'm not sure how observant you are, but did you notice something about the lake? How perfectly it reflects everything around it?'

‘Sure,' Wesley replied, truthfully as a newspaper. ‘What about it?'

The girl swung her head, so that her hair swayed. ‘The surface of the lake's a sort of mirror-fronted door, like the ones you get in shops and bathrooms. That's rather a confusing way of putting it, but you'll get the general idea later on. There's the side you come from; let's call that topside. We've come through that and now we're on the flipside. It's an exact mirror image of topside, except that here the rules are different.'

‘What rules?'

The girl shrugged, doing things to parts of her anatomy that Wesley really didn't want to know about just then. ‘Any rules you like, that's the whole point. On Flipside, the world's the way you want it to be.'

‘Oh.'

‘Or rather,' the girl went on, ‘it's the way you
think
you want it to be. You made a wish when you jumped in the lake. Right?'

Wesley nodded.

‘What you wished for, you got.' She smiled, rather unpleasantly. ‘Whether you like it or not. Go forth and enjoy.' She yawned, putting one hand over her mouth and the other behind her head. ‘You get the bill later.'

‘The
bill
—?'

‘Of course the bill. You think I run this place as a public service? Yes,' she added, looking at him, ‘probably you do. I don't suppose such concepts as overheads and maintenance and repair mean an awful lot to you. Remind me later on and I'll let you see last year's accounts.'

Her tone of voice made Wesley feel he ought to apologise, though he wasn't sure what it was he'd done wrong. The least he could do, he reflected, was try and show a little enthusiasm. The fact that he didn't really believe that any of this was actually happening was neither here nor there; even if it was only a dream, he reckoned that he stood a far better chance of waking up if he didn't antagonise anybody until he was safely back under his own duvet, with Old Mister Sun beaming in at him through the mildewed curtains. ‘I'm sure you're right,' he therefore said, ‘and I didn't mean any offence, honestly. It's just I didn't realise . . . I mean, I spent all my savings on the air fare, so if there's going to be a bill to pay, maybe we'd better call it a day now.'