“Is there anything,” he said, taking a deep breath, “you want to ask before I go?”
“No, Uncle.”
Max shut his eyes, broadcast a prayer to any passing gods and smiled wretchedly.
“Right,” he said, winding his scarf round his neck, “it’s all yours.”
He took three steps towards the door, stopped and looked round. Of course he would see it all again, and when he came back everything would be all right. But there was no harm in taking one last, long look, just to be on the safe side.
"Bye, Uncle.”
“See you, Justin.”
The bell on the door clanged and Justin was alone with the shop, the till, the books and seventy square miles of the choicest, rarest, most valuable Oriental carpets in the whole of the United Kingdom.
He sneezed.
Carpets attract dust, and dust played hell with Justin’s sinuses. The next two hours, he just knew, were going to be very, very long.
He sat down behind the desk and found his place in his book, trying his best to breathe in through his mouth only. He hadn’t read more than five or six pages when the bell tinkled. He looked up.
“Can I help?” he asked, and froze.
During the previous night, when he’d been lying awake fretting about having to mind the shop on his own the next day, he had finally managed to reconcile himself to the thought that there might be customers. He had squared up to that one, looked the impostor Fear straight in the eye and stared him down. It hadn’t occurred to him, however, that there might be female customers. Young female customers. If the thought had crossed his mind, come to that, he wouldn’t be here now.
“I expect so,” Jane replied, looking round. “I want to buy a rug.”
“Gosh.”
“Looks like I’ve come to the right place.”
“Crumbs.”
“I mean,” Jane went on, with that awful feeling you get when you know you’ve got to keep talking because the silence that’ll follow when you stop will be too embarrassing to contemplate, “you look like you’ve got a very wide selection.”
“Have we? Yes.”
Jane subsided. What she really wanted to do now was leave the shop and never come back; but it looked like there was a sporting chance that the implied rejection would drive the young man behind the desk to slash his wrists, if he didn’t break his thumbnail getting the big blade out first. She was stuck.
“Gosh,” she said, selecting a carpet at random, “what have we here?”
The young man said nothing. His expression seemed to suggest that as far as he was concerned, all carpets were too ghastly for words and he wanted nothing to do with them, ever, not in this world or the next.
“No,” Jane muttered, “maybe not. Or rather,” she added quickly, in case the negative vibes might just be the final shove that would send him over the edge, “it’s a really nice carpet, but not quite in keeping with… Yes, this one’s even nicer. Don’t you think?”
The young man lifted his head and gazed at the example she’d put her hand on. “Do you want to, er, buy…?”
His tone of voice suggested that Jane was trying to seduce him into committing some luridly unnatural act. “Well,” she mumbled, “I do quite like…”
“I’ll look,” said the young man, “in the book.”
He ducked under the counter, and for on awful moment Jane wondered if he was ever going to reappear. Just when she was steeling herself to go and see what he’d done to himself under there, he bobbed back up again with a shoebox full of tatty notebooks.
“It’ll be inhere somewhere,” the young man said hopelessly.
Oh Christ, Jane thought, I’m going to be here for the rest of my life. Kiss, where the devil are you when I need you? Beam me up quick.
“Look, if it’s any trouble…”
The young man favoured her with a look that wouldn’t have been out of place on the face of a sheep in an abattoir. “I’m quite capable of looking it up, thank you very much,” he said, with a sort of hideous mangled dignity that made Jane wish very much that her father had never met her mother. “I’ll try not to keep you.”
“I’ll buy it anyway,” Jane whimpered, “if that’s all right with you, I mean.”
The young man didn’t reply. He was nose-deep in the box. It looked very much as if he was going to be there for some considerable time.
Eventually, just as Jane was wondering whether she could surreptitiously roll herself up in the carpet like Cleopatra, wait till he’d gone and then make good her escape, the young man lifted his head and coughed nervously.
“Excuse me.”
“Yes?”
“Can you see a ticket on it anywhere? It should say 2354/A67/74Y”
“Ah.” Jane examined the carpet. “Doesn’t seem to be.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Oh.” The young man winced, as if the book in his hand was red-hot. “I’d better just look, I suppose,” he muttered, and crossed the floor towards her. “Maybe it’s on the back of something. There should be one somewhere,” he added poignantly.
They were both standing on the carpet. “Can I help?” Jane asked.
“It’s all right, really, I can manage.”
“What does it say in the book?”
“It’s a…” The young man squinted. “Sorry, I can’t quite pronounce it. Bokhara something or other.”
“And that’s what you think this is?”
“I think so. Mind you, I’m really not an expert. If you wouldn’t mind waiting till Uncle gets back, I’m sure he’d be able to…”
Oh no, thought Jane, I wasn’t born yesterday. This is one of those traps, like the Flying Dutchman or the Lorelei. You promise to wait ten minutes, and five hundred years later you’re still there, and everybody you ever knew on the outside has died. “Here,” Jane said, press-ganging the first words ill-advised enough to come near her, “I’ve got a book here, let’s see if there’s a picture we can identify it from.” She opened Kiss’s book, and as she was rather preoccupied she failed to notice the slight hum, or the pale blue glow from the endpapers.
God, she thought. I wish I was out of here.
COMPUTING
The voice was inside her, tiny, clear and sharp. She was sure she’d heard it. Oh wonderful, now I’m going potty. If ever I get out of this alive, it’s going to be wall-to-wall limo for ever and ever.
I wish, she added in mental parenthesis, Kiss was here.
DOES NOT CORRELATE
“Did you say…”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing.”
Definitely, Jane said to herself, I want to be out of here. Immediately.
WHOOSH!
“Good on yer, mate,” said the Dragon King of the SouthEast, emerging from behind a pile of coiled-up rope.
“Look…”
“Like a rat,” the Dragon King continued, “up a drain. No worries. Like they say out Paramatta way: you can take the bloke out of the bottle, but you can’t take the bottle out of the bloke.”
This remark was so puzzling that Asaf dismissed his daydream of making the King swallow his own tail, and he sat down on a barrel. “Where the hell am I?” he asked.
“On the high seas, me old mate,” the King replied. “On your way to seek fame, fortune, and the sheila with the big—”
“Please be more specific.”
The King smiled; that is to say, the corners of his jaws lifted, and his bright, small blue eyes sparkled even more than usual. “We’re on a ship,” he said.
“I had in fact come to that conclusion already. What bloody ship, and why?”
The King chuckled. “Because,” he replied, “you’d get pretty flamin’ wet trying to cross the old surf without one. Eh?”
Asaf sighed. It wasn’t, he said to himself, fair; not on him, and not on everybody else. Why should the rest of the world be deprived of their ration of idiots just so that he could have an embarrassing profusion?
“Where,” he asked, “are we going?”
“Pommieland,” the King said. “The old country. Gee, you’ll love it there, mate. It’s really beaut, trust me.”