Muddle and Win (10 page)

In the outside world she was now in her bedroom. She could see it out there, through the windows of her
mind
. It was neat and tidy, with her clothes put away and nothing on the floor, and her books and alarm clock set square upon her bedside table – all as she had left it this morning.

But inside her mind nothing had changed. She was still in the central chamber with the semicircle of statues around her. And Muddlespot was standing there watching, with a look of innocence on his face.

‘I HOPE YOU’RE SATISFIED!’ she screamed.

In her bedroom in the outer world there was only silence.

‘Don’t you feel better now?’ said Muddlespot.

‘NO!’

A bed appeared. She sat down on it and put her face in her hands.

‘Nice room,’ said Muddlespot, looking out through the windows. ‘Very tasteful. Very tidy.’

Sally did not answer.

‘Nice picture there,’ said Muddlespot. ‘You and your sister.’

Sally reached. The picture appeared in her hand.

It
was
a nice picture. It showed two girls; one blonde, one dark. They were the same age as each other, and maybe a couple of years younger than Sally and Billie were now. They were neatly dressed, with
their
hair washed and brushed and their arms around each other, smiling together at the camera.

‘You like each other really, don’t you?’ whispered Muddlespot.

Muddlespot danced a little jig on the rubble that had once been the statue of Calm.

IT’S FAIR TO
say that reactions in the Jones household varied.

To Mum, run ragged between managing an office during the day and trying to herd her family through the evenings, Sally’s outburst was a shock. It was worse because she knew Sally had a point. Billie did drag her heels over her homework, and even when she didn’t or said she hadn’t got any, there was usually some reason why it just wouldn’t be worth the effort of asking her to help wash up. (Most likely because Billie was already in a massive sulk, and standing over her and trying to make her clean each dish properly would just lead to something getting broken, as Sally had said.) So it was just easier to ask Sally. And everything would be done in ten minutes.

Except that now they wouldn’t be. Now suddenly, just when she had thought that everything was already as difficult as she could possibly manage, it had got more difficult still. So
her
reaction to Sally’s revolt was one of dismay.

Her dismay would increase when she discovered that Sally had chucked the photograph of herself and Billie into the bin. But she hadn’t found out about that yet.

Greg, Mum’s partner of four years’ standing, had spent the whole of supper eating in silence. He always did. He had lasted this long with Mum by taking up the least possible space, both in the house and in conversation. He liked being part of the family and had been pleased to find that he was more or less accepted into it. His desk at work was well decked with family photographs, and his drawers were stuffed with little gifts the girls had given him at odd times. He knew that Billie and Sally were entering their teens and that this was going to mean changes, but he also sensed that to try laying down house rules himself would be like dropping wildcats into a sack and then tying the sack over his head. He preferred to rely, lovingly and trustingly, on
Mum
to get them all through it. And also to have his dinner on the table for six o’clock, which would be five minutes after he got in through the door.

His
attitude to Sally’s performance, when he realized that it had happened, was therefore one of delegated dismay, and it didn’t stop him reading the sports pages.

Billie, who was a lot closer to everything that was going on than Greg, was at first as shocked as Mum. She was so surprised that by the time she had caught her breath to have a lovely and
totally
justified yell back at Sally, Sally had slammed the door and was halfway up the stairs. So her next feeling was frustration, followed almost immediately by a feeling of wonderful and secret delight that she would have found very hard to explain, but that lasted all evening and resulted in the best English essay she produced all term.

Shades registered no reaction at all. Except that it was time somebody filled his cat dish.

‘I can’t cope!’ said poor Mum.

‘Maybe you should have a word with her,’ said Greg, who was so deep into the football transfer market that it took him a little while to think about what his
mouth
had said automatically. ‘When she’s calmed down,’ he added.

Mum put her head in her hands.

‘Should the oven be on?’ said Greg helpfully.

‘No,’ said Mum. ‘Sally should have switched it off after she took the cake out.’

Greg tilted his chair back so he could reach the dial without getting up. ‘She has. But it’s still on. Dodgy connection maybe. There, that’s got it.’

‘That’s dangerous,’ said Mum. ‘I don’t want to wake up and find the house full of smoke.’

Greg stood on his chair to prod the smoke alarm. Nothing happened. ‘Battery’s gone.’

‘Everything’s falling to bits,’ groaned Mum.

‘I’ll get it fixed,’ said Greg.

(What this meant was that Greg had now said he would get it fixed, and would carry on saying he would get it fixed until Mum either bullied him into it or lost patience and called the electrician herself. And then she would have to miss a morning’s work waiting in for the electrician, who would promise to come some time between eight and twelve and would, in fact, arrive at about a quarter to one.)

Mum put her head on the table. ‘I want a new job.’

‘Mine’s taken,’ said Greg.

*

There was dismay, too, in the palaces above the clouds. Voices were raised. Discussions were heated. Fingers jabbed at charts on which lines dipped alarmingly. Angels hurried down corridors clutching sheaves of papers. Juniors followed seniors into meetings, wriggling their brows at bystanders in that way that says, ‘Don’t ask. It’s terribly important, but just don’t ask!’ And of course that meant the bystanders did ask. And the answer would be an urgent shake of the head and the words, mouthed through the crack of a closing door, ‘Sally Jones’.

‘It’s a disaster!’ exclaimed a Seraph, sitting halfway down a table of polished rainwater.

‘We’ve been caught with our cassocks down,’ said another. ‘We must rectify the situation immediately!’

‘I have an attack choir standing by, Archagent.’

On his throne of rose petals the Archagent brooded. His wings were a hundred fathoms in length and rippled with the light of rainbows. They wavered gently, reaching to the distant walls and up into the great dome above him. His eyebrows were small thunderclouds. He had ten thousand of them. When he frowned it was really quite impressive.

He was frowning now.

‘The LDC still registers zero, Archagent,’ said the last speaker. ‘There’s time. If we move quickly—’

‘Infiltration has occurred,’ said the Archagent.

All down the long table, rows of faces watched him. He could look each one of them in the eye. Many times over. And he had also been around for a few thousand years more than any of them. He understood some things they didn’t. ‘It is a situation of Potential.’

Of course the golden trumpets could blow. The Divine Wind could breathe upon the invader. The ranks of angels could descend with fire upon the mind of Sally Jones, and very quickly there would not be much of this particular infiltrator left.

But once the mind had opened to the ideas of the Enemy, the Enemy could keep coming back. There would be another infiltration, and another, and another. And sometimes it happened that the Enemy chose to meet force with force. Legions of demons and cacodemons might come surging up to meet the powers of Heaven head-on. With consequences that could be
very
undesirable for the subject.

‘Ground once lost to the Enemy can never be wholly regained,’ he said.

There was a dispirited rustle of feathers down the long table.

‘We should cut our losses,’ said a young angel. ‘Go to Early Martyrdom.’

Another rustle greeted his words. They were thinking about it. If there was a knife fight at school (unheard of at Darlington High, but not impossible). If Sally tried to intervene. If it happened tomorrow, while the LDC still read zero  . . .

‘Drastic, Simael,’ said the Archagent, mentally recording the young angel as someone who, given a red button, would find a reason to press it no matter what. ‘Drastic – if direct.’

‘Shall I arrange it, sire?’

‘No.’ He rose from the throne of petals. He was taller than a cathedral spire and as gentle as a cloud in the soft south wind. He looked out of the window of opal down at the little world below. ‘This is the Long War,’ he said. ‘There is disappointment, but no defeat. There is valour, but no victory.’

His thousands of years of struggle had taught him many things. One of them was that however high you got, no one ever told you what was
really
going on.

Another was that, no matter what the LDCs said
at
any particular moment, the worst heart on Earth was never very far from Glory, and the purest was never far from Disaster. A soul that had been clean, clean, clean all along was in some ways more vulnerable than one chequered with successes and failures. The Enemy was cunning. He knew how to use self-hatred. He knew how to use shame. For Sally, the smallest failure now could be terrible. It had happened many times before.

‘We are not bidden to despair,’ he said.

Though indeed, he did feel very close to despair.

‘What can we do?’ they said to him.

He faced them.

‘We shall play the game as it must be played. One to one  . . .’

They sighed, reverently.

‘ . . . And we shall send our best. Send  . . .’

He paused. He counted
one, two
 . . .

‘ . . . Agent Windleberry!’

Once more the feathers rustled all down the table.
Windleberry
, the whisper seemed to say.
Our best. Agent Windleberry
.

It is also possible that they said
Windleberry? Oh, the boss’s bright-eyed boy! Why’s it always Windleberry? Don’t know what he sees in him
.

Windleberry? Again! Makes you sick, doesn’t it?

Maybe he’ll come a cropper this time
 . . .

That’d be good
 . . .

If bosses everywhere are the same, then so too are the poor bossed.

One person did share the Archagent’s opinion of Windleberry. That was Windleberry himself.

Windleberry was not smug or self-satisfied or conceited. He was just the best. He knew it.

No one carried angelic perfection to the same lengths that he did. No one watched more sleeplessly, praised more mightily or fought the good fight more fiercely. His jaw was long and lean and square. His forehead was high and square. Under his crisp white shirt his pectorals were massive – and square. His wings were made of bright white light (and they were square too). His flaming eyes were shaded behind Ray-Bans of translucent ebony. His bow tie was vermillion and his tuxedo was a daring cream. His long, square fingers flew lightly over the keys of his tenor sax, and the notes he played made angels weep – for the right reasons.

He had served in every heavenly department and was thorough in everything he did. Other angels marked the sparrow’s fall, but Windleberry gave it marks out of
ten
and made it fall again if it scored less than three. Other angels counted the hairs on a human’s head, but Windleberry clipped a tiny numbered label to each one and offered them around for sponsorship. He had spent a century on the watchtowers. He had given artists and poets such visions of inspiration that most of them had been locked up before their work could be completed. He had reduced the composer Handel to tears over writing the Hallelujah chorus. He had slain dragons, carried stars and sung so loudly in the countertenor line that the angelic choirmasters had despaired of ever getting the balance right.

He had served with the cupids. Cupids have a culture all of their own. It comes from doing what they do stark naked and showing their bums all the time. You go with the cupids with a name like ‘Windleberry’ – you
have
to be tough.