His eyes shot wide open, and then closed again.
There must be some way out of this.
There were times, even now, when Vince felt just a little bit wistful about splitting up with Jane. Sure, she was difficult, querulous and, not to put too fine a point on it, on the chubby side of plump. And she had moods. And she didn’t like Indian food or the right music. And her voice, when you got to know it well, had that tiny edge to it that eventually had roughly the same effect as a dentist’s drill on an unanaesthetised tooth; on the other hand—
Lucky escape, Vince congratulated himself. Lucky escape.
Not, he realised as he switched out his bedside light and set his mind adrift for the night, like Sharon. True, Sharon had just enough brain to make up a smear on a microscope slide, but there were compensations. Sharon was what one might have expected to result if Pygmalion had been a photographer working on Pirelli calendars rather than a sculptor. He grinned at the darkness, and slipped away into sleep.
And dreamed a very peculiar dream.
He dreamed that he was asleep; and over his bed stood a huge, monstrous shape, towering above him like Nelson’s Column, all gleaming muscles, fiery red eyes and big canine teeth. And it seemed as if the vision spoke to him, saying
Listen, sunshine. Jane loves you and you love her. If you know what’s good for you, that is. Get my drift?
And in his dream he had cried out and tried to wriggle away; but the monstrous vision had grabbed him round the throat with a huge, clawed hand, and had said — Now you may be thinking, all that’s over, I don’t want to risk another broken heart. Well, there’s other bits that can get broken too, take my word for it, not to mention tied in knots and yanked out by the roots. So you can either listen to the promptings of your secret heart, or you can spend the rest of your life drinking all your meals through a straw. Think on.
And then he’d woken up.
“AAAAAA!” he’d started to say; but before he could develop this line of argument the dream had stuffed a pair of socks into his mouth, lifted him up by the lapels of his pyjama jacket and held him about an inch from the tip of its huge, flaring nose.
“Not,” the dream went on, “that I’m trying to influence you in any way. Heaven forbid. Just ask yourself one question. Is this Sharon the sort of girl who’d stick by you, come what may? Would she always be there to plump up the pillows, change the bedpans, maybe wheel you down the street as far as the library once a week? You reckon she is? Well, very soon you may well be ideally placed to find out. Sleep tight, punk.”
Then he fell, landing in an awkward heap on the mattress, and the dream turned out just to have been a dream after all. After three-quarters of an hour, he’d stopped shaking enough to switch out the light and—
In case I forgot to mention it before, looks aren’t everything. And even if they were, it’d be a bit academic anyway if you couldn’t see, on account of both your eyes having been pulled out and rammed up your ears. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
With a fantastic effort, Vince managed to ungum his mouth. “Hey,” he said.
In case you’ve lost it, I’ll just write Jane’s phone number on your chest with this red-hot — oh, you can remember it? That’s fine, then. Just remember, all the world loves a lover.
Vince gurgled and closed his eyes; then opened them again. Made no difference.
Last point, before I go. If I were you, I’d lay off the cheese last thing at night. Gives you bad dreams. Cheerio.
There was an old fisherman and he had three sons. They were called Malik, Ibrahim and Asaf.
Malik was very brave. Often when the wind was blowing in from the Gulf and the waves were so high that they seemed to splash against the clouds, Malik would take the boat and come back with his nets bursting with big, fat fish. Eventually Malik passed all his exams and became a chartered surveyor.
Ibrahim was very wise. Many a time, when the fish refused to leave the bottom and everybody else’s nets were empty, Ibrahim would bring his boat to shore and his nets would be so heavy with fish that it took five men to lift them out. In due course, Ibrahim won a scholarship and qualified as an accountant.
But Asaf was always lazy and good-for-nothing, and while his father and brothers were out with the nets he would stay at home lying on his bed and dreaming of far-off lands and beautiful princesses. As a result, when his two brothers had both left home and his father came up lucky in a spot-the-infidel competition in the New Islamic Herald and retired, Asaf was left with nothing but a leaky old boat, a lot of split old nets and the prospect of a lifetime in the wholesale fish trade. Which served him, of course, bloody well right.
On one particular day, Asaf had been out since first light, and when evening came he still hadn’t caught a single fish. Sadly he looked out over the Gulf, towards the burnt-out oil rigs that stood out from the leeward shore, and sighed. As he did so, a little voice inside him seemed to say, “Throw out your net just once more, Asaf, and see what Providence may bring you!”
And why not? Asaf asked himself, and he flung the net out as far as he could throw it, and started to draw it in. As it came, he could feel how light it was; no fish again this time, he reflected sadly, isn’t that just my bloody luck?
He was just about to stow the net away and head for home when he saw, hidden in the corner of the net, a tiny jewelled fish no bigger than a roulette chip. He picked it up in his cupped hands and was on the point of throwing it back when something caught this attention. He checked himself, and looked down at the little tiny body squirming in his hands.
“Just a cotton-picking minute,” he said.
The fish kicked frantically, opening and shutting its round little mouth. Asaf peered down at it and frowned. Then, quick as a flash, he grabbed his thermos flash with his other hand, shook out the dregs of tea, filled it with seawater and dropped the fish into it.
“Hello,” he said.
The fish released a stream of bubbles, flicked its tail and darted down into the bottom of the flask. Asaf considered for a moment, then covered the neck of the flask with the flat of his hand and shook it up and down for a few seconds.
“You’re not a fish, are you?” he said.
The fish flopped round through 180 degrees and burped drunkenly. “Fair crack of the whip, sport,” it gurgled. “What d’you take me for, a flamin’ King Charles spaniel?” It froze, mouth open in a perfect O. “Ah, shit,” it added.
“Quite.”
“Let the cat out of the old tucker-bag there, I reckon,” the fish went on, hiding its face behind a fin. “All right, fair dos, I’m not a fish.”
“Sure?”
“Fair dinkum,” the fish replied. “Since you ask, I’m the Dragon King of the South-East, and if you’ve quite finished…”
Asaf stroked his chin. “A Dragon King,” he mused. “I read about your lot once. You grant wishes.”
The fish thrashed its fins irritably. “Look, mate,” it spluttered “get real, will you? If I could grant flamin’ wishes, my first wish’d be I wish I wasn’t stuck in this bastard jar. My second wish—”
“Other people’s wishes, I mean,” Asaf corrected. “The poor fisherman catches you, he takes pity on the poor little fish trapped in his net and throws it back, and next thing he knows he’s knee-deep in junk mail from the financial services boys. It’s a standard wish-fulfilment motif in Near Eastern oral tradition,” he added. “Usually three.”
“Three what?”
“Wishes,” Asaf replied, “for fulfilment. Now we’ll start off with a nicely balanced eight-figure portfolio made up of say fifty per cent gilt-edged government stocks, twenty-five per cent offshore convertible…”
The fish squirmed. “Sorry,” it said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“No can do.” Fish can’t sweat, but the Dragon King was, by definition, not a fish. “Look, mate, if it was up to me it’d be no worries, straight up, Bob’s your uncle. But—”