Paint Your Dragon Read online

  ‘Peculiar.’ Bianca closed her mouth, which had fallen open. ‘Mike, if ever Mars challenges us to an understatement match, I’m going to nominate you for team captain. What the hell am I going to do?’

  Mike scratched his head. ‘You could start by telling somebody. The police. Birmingham City Council. Kawaguchiya Integrated...’

  He met Bianca’s eye. Comparable meetings include that between Napoleon and Wellington at Waterloo and the encounter between Mohammed Ali’s solar plexus and Joe Frazier’s fist back in 1974. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘I see what you mean. This is going to be a problem, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think,’ Mike suggested, after a moment’s consideration, ‘that you could, sort of, talk your way out of this? I mean, it’s your blasted statue. Convince ’em that there never was a dragon to begin with. Sort of, Saint George and the implied dragon. Saint George, just practising? Saint George and Imaginary Friend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe not. Or could you lose the armour, fiddle around with the sword a bit and rename it The Polo Player?’

  ‘Mike.’

  ‘Okay, okay, I’m just bouncing a few ideas here. Here, why not just call it Study for Saint George and the ...’

  Bianca closed her eyes and massaged them with the heel of her hand. ‘What I can’t imagine,’ she said, ‘is what the hell can have happened to it. I mean, dragons don’t just get up and walk away. Just to move something that size you’d need cranes, flat-bodied trucks, hydraulics, all that stuff. Believe me,’ she added, ‘I know. When I delivered that cameo group of Mother and Child in Macclesfield last year, they had to close off fifteen streets.’

  They stood for a few seconds longer, staring at the absence - a distinctly dragon-shaped absence, but an absence nevertheless. Compared to how Bianca was feeling about vacuums, Nature was honorary treasurer of their fan club.

  ‘Well,’ said Bianca at last, ‘there’s no point standing here like trainee lamp-posts. Help me cover the dratted thing up, what’s left of it, and I’ll get on to the wholesalers for some more white Carrera. I only hope they can match the grain.’

  Mike nodded. ‘What about him?’ he added, jerking a thumb at Saint George. ‘Want me to put a padlock on him or something?’

  Bianca gave him the last in a succession of withering looks; if the Americans had had looks like that in 1972, the Viet Cong would never have stood a chance. ‘Get real,’ she sighed. ‘Who the hell is going to steal a statue?’

  Chug, chug, chug; an elderly coach, the sort of vehicle that can still call itself a charabanc and get away with it, burbles slowly and cheerfully like a relaxed bumble-bee along a winding Oxfordshire lane.

  On either side of the road, Cotswold sheep, as self-consciously picturesque as the most highly paid super-model, ruminate and regurgitate in timeless serenity. Thatched cottages, tile-roofed golden-stone farmhouses, evocatively falling-down old barns and the last surviving old-fashioned telephone boxes in Albion are the only footprints left here by the long march of Humanity; and if these works of his hand were all you had to go by, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Man wasn’t a bad old stick after all. For this is the rural Thames Valley, the land that Time forgot, scenery pickled in formaldehyde. If England was Dorian Grey, this would be the watercolour landscape he keeps in his attic.

  Inevitably and on schedule, there to the left of the coach is a village cricket match, and the big, red-faced man toiling up to the crease is, ineluctably, the village blacksmith. For a slice of living palaeontology, forget Jurassic Park and come to North Oxon.

  And here is the village, and here is the village green, and here are the ducks. The coach pulls up, wheezing humorously, and the passengers spill out; fifteen elderly ladies with flasks and sandwiches, deck chairs and knitting. It’s all so sweet you could use it to flavour tea.

  Thirty seconds later, a black transit van with tinted windows purrs noiselessly up and parks at the back of the green. The doors do not open. It lurks.

  The old ladies have laid out their tartan rugs and, after much comical by-play and merry laughter, put up their deck chairs. The sun is shining. Tea flows. Sandwiches are eaten.

  Time is, of course, not a constant. Science would have you believe that it potters along at a fixed, unalterable speed, never accelerating, never slowing down; rather like a milk float. Big joke. Time has a gearbox; it can dawdle and it can race. This, in turn, can result in absolute chaos.

  Supply and demand, twin pillars of the cosmos, apply to all things, and Time is no exception. In some places, such as this sleepy and idyllic village, they scarcely use any of the stuff. In Los Angeles, Tokyo and the City of London, where Time is Money, they burn it off at a furious rate. And, try as they might to wring every last drop of value out of each passing second, their officially allotted ration is pitifully inadequate.

  Sceptical? Here’s concrete evidence. Think how much time twenty pence buys you in a car park in Chipping Norton and the equivalent figure in Central London. Where there is supply and demand, wherever there are unfulfilled shortages, there are always entrepreneurs ready and willing to step in and sort things out. There are no exceptions to this rule. The black market in Time is probably the biggest growth area in the whole of the unofficial economy. It’s also the most antisocial, which is why it’s such a closely guarded secret.

  The sandwiches have been eaten. Jam tarts appear. Someone produces, as if from thin air, a wind-up gramophone.

  Something truly horrible is about to happen.

  It works like this. Time proverbially flies when you’re enjoying yourself; or, put rather more scientifically, pleasure electrolyses Time. The mere act of a human being unreservedly enjoying himself acts as a catalyst, speeding up the decay of raw Time in the atmosphere. In the same way, misery, suffering and having to go to work impede the decay of Time, causing a massive build-up of the stuff. In primitive rural communities, for example, where peasants grind out lives of bleak, hopeless toil, Time seems to stand still, until the very stones of the cottages and turf of the fields are marinaded in the stuff.

  To drill for Time, therefore, find a spot where countless generations of wretched serfs have had to get up at half-past five every morning to milk bad-tempered cows. Having located the spot, shout, ‘There’s Time in them thar hills!’ and assemble your drilling rig. This will consist of between seven and twenty happy souls who are blessed with the rare ability thoroughly to enjoy themselves, unself-consciously and without stint.

  Research has shown that little old ladies on outings do this best, with thirsty male Australians coming in a close second. Combine the little old ladies with the idyllic unspoilt village and stand well back, because you’ve just unleashed a chain reaction that makes nuclear fission seem wimpish in comparison. And be warned; it’s not a pretty sight.

  Inside the black transit, a small machine begins to run. Someone chuckles unpleasantly, mutters, ‘Time, gentlemen, please,’ and throws a switch.

  For the first thirty seconds, nothing much happens; nothing visible, anyway. The first perceptible changes are to the buildings. Thatch moults, dry stone walls collapse, oak beams sag. Entropy, acting as fast as the soluble aspirin of your dreams, is tearing the place apart as the surplus Time is leeched out of the fabric. Then, because Nature abhors a vacuum, raw present rushes in to take the place of the fossilised past, in the same way as a worked-out gravel pit floods with water. Thatch is replaced with tile, stone with brick and breeze-block. Barns fade away, and are replaced by barn conversions, complete with upper-middle-class occupants and a brace of Porsches in the driveway. Suddenly there’s a development of ninety-six executive retirement homes in the old orchard behind the village green. A business park springs mushroom-like out of the ground where a minute ago there were only cows. Cars sprout up beside the highway like newly sown dragons’ teeth. The handpumps in the public bar turn seamlessly into plastic boxes, and three racks of videos parthenogenetically appear in the window of the post offi
ce. We warned you; this is not a sight for the squeamish. It’s enough to make Stephen King sleep with the light on for a week.

  The old ladies don’t seem to have noticed. They’re exchanging photographs of their grandchildren and playing snap, while all around them the village green trembles, like the San Andreas fault having a temper tantrum, and design-and-build starter homes flip up out of the ground like poppers on a pinball table.

  In the black transit, now parked in the car park of the brand new plastics factory, the little machine is buzzing like a tortured wasp. A big glass bottle, coddled and cosseted in gyroscopically mounted cradles, lead and cotton wool, slowly fills. When the meniscus reaches the twenty-centilitre mark, the operator yanks back the handle, opens the door of the van and blows a whistle. The old ladies stop what they’re doing, grab their deck chairs and empty picnic baskets and make a run for the coach. Both vehicles gun their engines and race off with much spinning of wheels and burning of rubber because a village green in the process of going critical is no place to be. In fact, they’ve almost left it too late; just behind them the road uproots itself and contorts like a wounded python, coiling itself round a series of mini-roundabouts and branching off into a series of service roads leading to the new complex of out-of-town supermarkets. They’re level with the village church when it detonates and turns itself into a drive-in leisure multiplex, and only by standing on the accelerator can the driver get the coach clear of the Jacobean manor house before it implodes and shape-changes into Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits’ south-east regional management training centre.

  A close shave, and the world owes a large debt of gratitude to the driver, for all that he’s a myrmidon of the Time thieves’ Mr Big. Because the transit van is carrying twenty centilitres of raw Time (destined to fill a lucrative order from Wall Street, which is frantically trying to make the most of the last few weeks of a Republican administration) and the thought of what would happen if that much ninety-eight-per-cent-pure stuff were to go off is enough to freeze the brain.

  Raw Time, spontaneously detonating in the Earth’s chronological field. Historical meltdown. A Time bomb.

  The man in the black transit is Chubby Stevenson, also known as The Temporiser and Mr Timeshare. Procrastination was framed; Chubby is the greatest thief of Time the world has ever seen. In his purpose-built silo, five hundred feet under the Nevada Desert, he has four hundred and sixteen litres of the stuff; enough to reprise the Renaissance and play Desert Island Decades. Do you suffer from persistent nostalgia? Do you wish it could be the Sixties all over again? Just send your order, together with a banker’s draft with more noughts on it than there are portholes in the side of a trans-Atlantic liner, to Mr C. Stevenson, PO Box 666, Las Monedas, Nevada.

  Trying to get the petrol out of a Scorpion tank, the dragon discovered the hard way, is like breaking into a can of Coke after the little ring-pull thing has snapped off and you haven’t got a tin-opener. It calls for ingenuity, patience and very robust fingernails.

  Two out of three will do at a pinch; and, having slaked his thirst, the dragon relaxed, closed his eyes and considered the situation, both in the short and medium term.

  He wasn’t, in his opinion, excessively thin-skinned (just as well, considering the number of things that had been fired at him in the last twelve minutes) but he did get the impression that for some reason, the humans had taken against him rather. Apart from a broken claw and some light bruises the tanks hadn’t bothered him very much, and the petrol was much more to his taste than all those funny drinks, but the next escalation of human disapproval would probably be aircraft, and he knew from recent observation that those things had rather more biff to them than the little self-propelled cocktail shakers. Time, he decided regretfully, to make himself inconspicuous, which would mean having to quit this exceptionally stylish and well-designed body for a while and go back into boring, silly two-legged mufti. A pity, particularly since it was now nicely fuelled-up and ready to go.

  He had business here in England, but it wouldn’t take long. Once that was out of the way, the world was his oyster, and there were bound to be big, flat, open spaces where a dragon could be without getting shot at all the time by cultural degenerates. So, under cover, do the job, and then we’re out of here. Can’t, frankly, wait.

  He opened his wings and, having disposed of the empties tidily by dropping them in the sea, he soared up above the clouds, giving as wide a berth as possible to any aircraft his exceptional senses detected, and circled round until he saw what he was looking for. When he saw his chance, he swooped.

  At more or less the same moment as the dragon was mangling armoured fighting vehicles on the playing fields of Lancashire, someone who had been asleep for a very long time woke up.

  You know what it’s like when you’ve overslept. Head full of sawdust. Eyelids as difficult to open as painted-over windowframes. Interior of mouth tasting so repulsive you wonder who’s been doing what in it while you’ve been sleeping. Multiply that by a couple of thousand years and maybe you get the idea.

  ‘Where,’ muttered George to himself, ‘the fuck am I?’

  A pigeon, who was sitting on his head, removed its head from its armpit and looked round. ‘Who said that?’ it demanded.

  George, who could understand the language of birds, cleared his throat. ‘Down here,’ he said.

  ‘What, you?’

  ‘Yes, me?’

  ‘The statue?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jeez!’ The pigeon froze, kebabbed with embarrassment.

  ‘I didn’t know statues could ... Look, I really am terribly sorry. I’ll clean it all off, promise.’

  ‘I’m not really,’ George explained, ‘a statue.’

  ‘I see. You’re a very big, grey person lying absolutely still. Well, it takes all sorts, I can see that, I just naturally assumed you were a statue. If you’ll just bear with me I can be back with a cloth and some white spirit before you can say—’

  ‘Shut up and listen, you stupid bird. I’m inside the statue. Sort of. I’m a saint.’

  The pigeon hesitated a while before replying. ‘Fine,’ it said. ‘Where I come from we call that a non-sequitur, but never mind. Logic is for wimps, right?’

  ‘I am a saint,’ George repeated, the fuel gauge on his patience edging audibly into the red. ‘I appear to have reincarnated into a statue of myself. And before you ask, I have no idea why. Now then, where is this...’ George looked round; a circumscribed view, since he couldn’t move his head, but sufficient for his purposes ‘... ghastly, awful, God-forsaken place? Last thing I knew I was in open countryside.’

  ‘Birmingham,’ replied the pigeon promptly. ‘West Midlands metropolitan district, England, Europe. Population—’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Really?’ The pigeon sounded surprised. ‘Been away long?’

  ‘Last time I looked, it was a hundred and something AD.’

  Pigeons can’t whistle. ‘Strewth, mate, that’s a long time. Eighteen hundred years, give or take a bit. This is ...’ The pigeon counted on its feathers. ‘Nineteen ninety-eight. June. Welcome back,’ it added tentatively.

  George swivelled his eyeballs. ‘I sincerely hope I’m not stopping,’ he replied. ‘Whatever happened to grass? We used to have a lot of it in my day.’

  The pigeon shuffled its wings. ‘Still plenty of it about,’ it replied. ‘But this is the middle of a city. Did they have cities then?’

  ‘A few.’ George stopped talking and winced; two thousand years’ worth of pins and needles was catching up with him. ‘Aaaagh,’ he said.

  ‘Problem?’

  ‘My leg hurts. Go on with what you were saying.’

  ‘About Birmingham? Okay. Rated as Great Britain’s second largest city, in its nineteenth-century heyday Birmingham truly merited its proud title of “workshop of the world”. Post-war recessions and the decline of British industry in general have inevitably left their mark, but the city continues to breed a d
efiantly positive and dynamic mercantile—’

  ‘Pigeon.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think,’ said George, ‘I can now move my right arm. With it, as you may have observed, I am holding a very big sword. Unless you stop drivelling, I shall take this very big sword and shove it right up—’

  ‘All right,’ replied the pigeon, offended. ‘You were the one who asked. Anyway,’ it added, ‘that’s a fine way for a saint to talk, I must say.’

  George’s eyebrows were mobile again and he frowned. ‘Is it?’

  The pigeon nodded. ‘Sure. You’re supposed to be all meek and holy and stuff.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘Straight up. I know these things. My address: The Old Blocked Gutter, West Roof, St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham 4. I know a lot of religion,’ the pigeon continued proudly, ‘especially the lilies of the field and St Francis of Assisi. Saints don’t eff and blind, it’s the rules.’

  ‘Shows what you know,’ George replied. ‘Right, I’m going to move now, so I suggest you piss off and go sit somewhere else. Before you go, however, I want you to tell me where a man can get a drink around here.’

  ‘A drink,’ the pigeon repeated. ‘Milk?’

  ‘Don’t be bloody stupid.’

  ‘Water, then?’

  ‘Booze,’ George snarled. ‘Alcohol. Fermented liquor.’ A horrible thought struck him. ‘They do still have it, don’t they? Please tell me they haven’t done away with it, because—’

  ‘Sure they do,’ the pigeon said. ‘Beer and wine and gin and stuff, makes your mob sing a lot and fall over. Saints don’t drink, though. Well-known fact.’

  ‘What you know about saints,’ muttered George, ‘you could write on a grape pip in big letters. Just point me in the right direction and then clear off, before I use you to wipe my nose.’

  The pigeon made the closest approximation it could to a disapproving tut and extended a wingtip. ‘Draught Mitchell and Butlers,’ it said. ‘A word of warning, though.’