Asaf gritted his teeth. “I promise I’ll sign them the moment I’m free,” he said. “Word of honour.”
Ah yes, Pivot replied, but how do I know you’re not a FIMBRA agent in disguise? You could be trying to entrap me.
“Why not-take the risk? I’ll have you know I’m shortly going to come into wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.” He paused significantly. “I shall need,” he said, biting his tongue, “all sorts of financial advice, I feel sure.”
Is that so?
“Definitely.”
Life insurance?
“As much as I can lay my hands on.”
Pensions?
“By the bucketful. I shall want as many pensions as I can possibly get.”
Stone me. It’s been months since I sold a pension. Are you sure you’re not a FIMBRA agent?
“Absolutely bloody positive. Now, could you please get me out of this fucking bottle?”
At the back of his mind, Asaf could feel Pivot wriggling uncomfortably. I still have bad feelings about all this. The rules really are terribly strict.
“Couldn’t you…” Asaf squirmed with agony as a spasm of cramp shot down his spinal column. “Couldn’t you sign them for me? As my agent or whatever?”
Hum. Not really. Not unless you sign a power of attorney I happen to have one with me, by the way.
“Oh, for crying out loud…”
I’m sorry, sighed Pivot. I’d really love to help, but you know how it is. Now, are you ready for some homely snippets yet? We could start with, “It’s always darkest before the dawn”, or we could…
“No!” Asaf jerked violently in protest, and in doing so fetched the back of his head a terrific crack on the wall of the bottle. “Just you dare, and the moment I’m out of this sodding contraption—”
He stopped in mid-snarl. The walls were creaking. Obviously, the blow from his head had damaged the glass. Now if he could only…
I’ve also got one about not beating your head against a brick wall, continued Pivot helpfully. And I can customise it to refer to the sides of glass bottles for a very modest…
Crash. The glass gave way and suddenly Asaf was out, sprawled full-length — six feet of cramp and muscle spasms — on a flat field of grass. There were shards of broken bottle sticking into him in all sorts of places.
There, I told you we’d have you out of there in no time, said Pivot, recovering well. That’ll be, let’s see, seven minutes at a hundred dirhams an hour, so by my reckoning that’s…
Asaf lifted his head, and thought long and hard about what he would like to do to the next supernatural being who crossed his path. By the time he’d finished, something told him he was very much alone.
TEN
Jane looked around her, and clicked her tongue. She was bored.
Not just bored in the nothing-to-do sense; she was bored to the marrow, half-past-four-on-a-Sunday-afternoon-in-Wales bored. And nothing much, as far as she could see, to be done about it.
Bloody genie! What the hell was the point of being able to have anything you want if all you have to do in order to get it is want it?
Still, she consoled herself while moving a small china ornament two inches to the right, once we’re married there won’t be any more of that. No more of this supernatural nonsense. We can just be ordinary people…
Ordinary people…
Yes, well. At least ordinary people can go shopping. When you’re the proprietress of a Force Twelve genie, one thing you can’t do is shop. No sooner have you written down something on your list than it’s there, delivered in a fraction of a second, very best quality, from Harrods. But what’s the point of having things if you can’t shop for them first?
Jane steeled herself. She was a free woman, with an inalienable right to shop. And shop she would.
She glanced down at her feet and noticed that on the patch of floor directly below her, approximately five feet by seven, there was no rug. Everywhere else there were rugs; the very finest rugs ever, whisked here by arcane forces and precisely, down to the last fibre, what she’d wanted. Well, it would have to stop somewhere, and here was as good a place as any. She would go out, and buy a rug.
The resolution once made, she softened slightly. All the other rugs in the place — all the furniture and fittings, come to that — were her choice, and she knew for a fact that Kiss didn’t really like them much. A bit thin on the barbaric splendour, he considered, while maybe slightly overstressing the cosy and colour-coordinated.
There, now. Two birds with one stone. She would buy a rug, in (she almost hugged herself with pleasure at the thought) a shop, and it would be the sort of rug Kiss would like. Persian or something. She could stand a coffee-table on it so that she wouldn’t have to see it, but he would still know it was there.
Problem; although all Oriental carpets looked exactly the same to her, she was sure she remembered something about each one being unique, and some sorts being wonderfully marvellous works of art, and others being the sort of thing that’s left unsold after a church bazaar. Obviously, it was incumbent upon her to buy one of the approved models.
Why is life so complicated?
The thought had scarcely crossed her mind when she caught sight of a book on the arm of the sofa. It was big and fat, and on the cover it had a photograph of a Persian rug. She picked it up.
It was written in Arabic.
That aside, it was promising; it was full of pictures of rugs, all of which looked pretty well identical to her, but it stood to reason that nobody, not even an Arab in the grips of vanity-publishing mania, would go to the trouble of producing a chunky great tome full of pictures of just one rug. Even if he was desperately attached to it, he’d probably just have its portrait painted and let it go at that.
Therefore, she argued, this must be a book, belonging to Kiss, on the subject of rugs; approved rugs, presumably. All she had to do was go to an emporium, find a rug which looked tolerably similar to the pictures in the book, and buy it. Problem solved. She dumped the book in her bag and went out.
Arguably, a more perceptive person might have noticed the wires coming out of the spine, and wondered what business a book had with sockets and electrodes.
The young man (his name was Justin) was tall and thin. L.S. Lowry would have hired him as a model without a moment’s hesitation. He was wearing a hairy tweed jacket whose sleeves appeared to have eaten his hands right down to the middle joints of the fingers. He seemed nervous.
But not as nervous as the other man (his name was Max). If Justin resembled a golf club, Max was a dead ringer for the ball.
“Now you’ve got the number?” Max said.
“Yes, Uncle.”
“And you’ll phone me if there’s any problems? Any problems at all?”
“Yes, Uncle.”
“And you know where everything is?”
“Yes, Uncle.”
Max chewed his lip. “The key to the safe is in the coffee tin on the top shelf of the stockroom, just under the—”
“Yes, Uncle.”
“And you’re sure you’ll be all right?”
“Yes, Uncle.”
There’s only so much you can do, thought Max; and I’ll only be gone two hours, and there’s never any customers on a Thursday afternoon, and all the prices are clearly marked, and I’ve told him nineteen times not to let anybody haggle…”
“Justin.”
“Yes, Uncle?”
“Remember, don’t let anybody haggle. The prices as marked are non-negotiable. You’ve got that?”
“Yes, Uncle.”
…Twenty times, so what could possibly go wrong? no, don’t even think that. Just keep everything crossed, and hurry back as soon as possible.
“Oh, and Justin.”
“Yes, Uncle?”
“Don’t buy anything.”
“No, Uncle.”
It’s impossible, Max reassured himself, completely out of the question, that the boy could be as dozy as his mother. For a start, he seems able to remember to breathe regularly without anybody having to remind him. The shop will be in safe hands. Everything’s going to be all right.