Nothing But Blue Skies Read online

  ‘Yes, Gordon.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what happens.’ Gordon sighed. ‘It rains.’ With that, the fury seemed to drain out of him, like oil from a classic British motorcycle. ‘And it’s all my fault,’ he added softly. ‘God says so. Can’t fight God, you know. No point trying. I think I’ll have another drink now.’

  ‘Coming up.’

  As the barman poured, he nodded discreetly to the customers at the other end of the bar, as if to say Show’s over, while the jukebox, punctual to the second, launched into ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head’. Gordon Smelt would be quiet now, for exactly fifty-two minutes, after which time he’d make one final noise by falling off his bar stool. Throughout the pub, the atmosphere thinned, muscles unclenched, the buzz of conversation grew louder. It was, as the barman liked to describe it, the quiet after the storm.

  For his part, Gordon was just about to climb into his sixteenth drink, the one that would carry him sweetly away to oblivion, when he became aware of somebody sitting next to him. This was unusual, as in unheard of. There are cocky peasants in Sicily who build houses on the lips of active volcanoes; but nobody ever sat next to Gordon Smelt in the pub.

  ‘You Smelt?’ the man asked.

  Still humming along to the music, Gordon nodded.

  ‘Thought so.’ The man sat still for a second or two, then suddenly reached across, grabbed Gordon by the shoulder and turned him through ninety degrees, nearly spilling him onto the floor. ‘All right,’ he said, so softly that Gordon could scarcely hear him. ‘Would you like to know why?’

  ‘I’m never gonna stop the rain by—Why what?’

  ‘Why,’ the man repeated.

  Gordon looked at him for a moment. ‘You’re drunk,’ he said. ‘Go away.’

  The man refused to let go. There was something very disconcerting about his eyes - apart, that was, from the fact that he appeared to have six of them. Gordon squinted, adjusting the parallax, until there were only two. ‘I said—’

  ‘Shut up,’ the man said, ‘and listen. If you want to know why it rains, even when all the data says it’s going to be ninety in the shade, I can tell you. Assuming you’re interested, that is.’

  Slowly and accusingly, Gordon stared into his glass. Then he put it down on the bartop, untasted. ‘What are you drivelling on about?’ he said. ‘I know why.’

  The man smiled. ‘Really?’

  ‘Course. It’s because I make it rain. Because God tells me to. I thought I just explained all that; or weren’t you listening just now?’

  ‘Bullshit,’ the man replied pleasantly. ‘There’s a perfectly simple, rational explanation. And if you want me to tell it to you, all you’ve got to do is ask.’

  Gordon’s face coagulated into a frown. ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘Three guesses. Then I’ll ask. Okay?’

  The man shrugged. ‘If you insist,’ he said.

  ‘All right, here goes.’ Gordon thought for a moment.

  ‘Global warming,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘The greenhouse effect.’

  The man pursed his lips. ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, I’m just a bloody weatherman.’

  ‘Let’s assume it’s the same thing. Two guesses left.’

  ‘All-righty. El Niño.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Not El Niño? Oh well. I know,’ Gordon said, smiling unexpectedly. ‘Obvious one. Secret nuclear testing.’

  The man shook his head. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ he said. ‘Secret nuclear testing. Well, well. I suppose I’d better tell you the truth, hadn’t I?’

  Gordon nodded. ‘Fire away,’ he said.

  ‘Dragons.’

  Gordon exhaled a lungful of air through his nose before replying. ‘Dragons,’ he repeated.

  ‘Dragons. To be specific, the dragon king of the north-west. Or rather, his adjutant general.’

  Gordon crowded his eyebrows together. ‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘If you hadn’t noticed, I’m the pub loony around here. This is my turf, and if there’s any gibbering to be done, I’m the one who does it. You want to gibber, find another bar.’

  The man looked hurt. ‘Sceptical bastard, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Just because I’m a paranoid drunk with a persecution complex doesn’t necessarily mean I’m stupid. Which is it; practical joker or undercover tabloid journalist?’ Gordon smiled hazily. ‘Think carefully before you answer. Practical jokers get kicked across the bar and jumped on. I don’t like tabloid journalists.’

  The man stood up. ‘Please yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you what you need to know, what you do with the information is up to you. Meanwhile—’ He picked up a beer mat and scribbled on it. ‘Here’s where you can find us, if you want to. If not - well, enjoy the rest of your life.’

  ‘Are you crazy? I’m a weatherman.’

  ‘Aren’t we all,’ the man replied, walking away, ‘in a sense.’

  The beer mat lay on the bar top, just an inch or so from Gordon’s hand, right next to the full whisky glass. No more effort needed to pick up one rather than the other.

  Dragons.

  Well, quite.

  Nevertheless, it wouldn’t do any harm to look. Gordon flipped the beer mat over and saw, scrawled in green (for some reason) ink, the words:

  www.stormtroopers.co.uk

  - which even he recognised as being an Internet website address. He drummed his fingers in a pool of spilt beer, thinking.

  Well why not? First, however, there’d be no harm in drinking this glass of fine single malt whisky.

  He tilted the glass, absorbed its contents, closed his eyes and, just as he’d done every night for as long as anybody could remember after his sixteenth drink, slid gradually and with the poise of a trained judo expert to the floor. Twenty minutes later, the barman and one of the regulars scooped him up, dusted him off and laid him gently to rest in his usual eyrie in the broom cupboard.

  ‘Seven minutes late tonight,’ the regular observed.

  The barman thought for a moment. ‘Must be British Summer Time again,’ he replied. ‘Just as well you noticed, or I’d have forgotten to do the clocks.’

  Snuggled upright among the mops and brushes, Gordon slept the sleep of the totally zonked. Atypically, however, he dreamed; and in his dream a great green dragon with fiery red eyes, perfumed breath, wings like a DC10 and a belly plated with twenty thousand letters addressed to Points of View in place of the conventional scales hovered over him, fanning him with its slow, measured wingbeats and widdling in his ear. When he tried to shoo it away by flapping an umbrella in its face, it did a double back somersault, opened its jaws to full gape and turned seamlessly into the Director General of the BBC, thereby causing the graveyard shift in Gordon’s subconscious mind to file a memo recommending that in future he should avoid eating pickled eggs when going on a binge.

  At midnight they woke him up and threw him out, and he wandered home in a thoughtful mood that severely impeded his ability to avoid lamp-posts. It was as he was picking himself up off the deck after a particularly close encounter that he remembered the beer mat, which he’d folded and tucked in his top pocket before sinking the last whisky.

  Dragons, he thought. Yeah, right, he thought.

  But as Gordon continued on his way (typically he walked twenty-five per cent further on the way home than on the way out; the difference between a boring old straight line and a sequence of aesthetically pleasing jags and swerves) he found himself considering, with the brand of logic that only kicks in when the brain is sufficiently lubricated, whether he shouldn’t at least give the theory a fair trial. Now would be the time to do it, of course, while he was revoltingly drunk; sober, he wouldn’t even contemplate doing something so utterly stupid, and so might just miss out on the discovery of a lifetime. After all, some great truths can only be fully appreciated when one’s consciousness has been suitably enhanced, and if this happened to be one of them, he was ideal
ly placed to handle it right now, being, by anybody’s definition, as consciousness-enhanced as a newt.

  After a mildly frustrating fifteen minutes spent trying all the keys on his keyring to see which of them opened his front door, he made it safely through to the hallway and stood still for a moment, trying to remember if he was still married. The issue was entirely relevant to the matter in hand. Jennifer would have his scalp if he started turning on lights and playing with computers at one in the morning, but he was morally certain that Jennifer had left him after the sea lion-in-the-bath incident. What he couldn’t recall offhand was whether Jennifer had come before or after Trudy, and whether one or the other of them still lived here. There was only one certain way to find out and that was to turn on the light, an experiment that quickly gave him the answer he’d been looking for. Various subtle clues about the way the room looked - the trousers draped over the back of the sofa, the half-empty vindaloo cartons on the floor, the craggy yellow growth in the necks of several milk bottles - strongly suggested to the trained eye that he was once again a single man and perfectly within his rights to start up the computer any time he felt like it.

  A little archaeology duly revealed the computer plug and matching wall socket, and soon the system was humming merrily - surely the whirring of a Pentium fan ranks with the soft gurgle of a brook and the distant click of bat on ball across a village green among the most soothing sounds available to a distempered mind - and the screen was urging him to buy more Microsoft products now, while stocks lasted. Somehow managing to resist the allure of these offers, he carefully unfolded the beer mat, typed in the address, hit ‘Send’ and went to sleep.

  The common or garden office chair, as sold for computer workstation use, is a masterpiece of design, arrived at after hours of painstaking research and input from the CBI, Department of Industry and a number of consultants recruited from former members of the Haitian secret police. One of its most valuable features is the way it wakes you up, with extreme prejudice as regards the back of the neck, if you’re slothful enough to fall asleep in it. The deterrent effect of this design has so far saved British industry enough man-hours to staff the next industrial revolution; but it was easy to overlook these positive aspects if you woke up in one after a night on the razzle.

  ‘Agh,’ said Gordon, and opened his eyes. He was in that uncomfortable transitional stage of being both drunk and hung-over at the same time, and the glare and movement of the screen saver was already doing peculiar things to his eyes. Experience had taught him some time ago that slapping the side of the box with the flat of his hand made the screen saver go away, so he did that, and found himself staring at the words -

  WEATHER FORECASTERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

  - in lurid green letters several inches high against a disturbingly purple background. His first reaction was that it was marginally better than pink elephants and crawling bugs; then he remembered, and narrowed his eyes to read the small print.

  If you want get even, it advised him, get MAD.

  He lifted his head and blinked once or twice. Maybe crawling bugs would have been preferable after all. He read on.

  MAD - Meteorologists Against Dragons - is a direct-action organisation whose aim is to end once and for all the misery, suffering and humiliation caused to thousands of weathermen right across the globe by the recklessly malicious activities of so-called dragons. From our purpose-built headquarters securely hidden in a cavern somewhere beneath the Andean deserts of South America - the only place on Earth where rain has never fallen - we monitor dragon activity worldwide, coordinate anti-dragon initiatives, research potential dragon-prevention technology and support a far-reaching campaign of public education and opinion-reprofiling. If you want to know more about MAD and how it can help you get even, click HERE.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Gordon sighed, and went to hit ‘Exit’; but the mouse slipped from his hand and landed on its own left-hand button. The screen changed.

  WHAT ARE DRAGONS?

  Completely potty, Gordon muttered to himself; still, he could always use a good laugh. He continued reading;

  Modern scientists, assessing the ancient Chinese myth of the rain-bringing dragon, have argued an entirely plausible case for regarding the dragon as the prehistoric forerunner of the UFO. All the traditional dragon attributes - fiery objects hurtling across the sky, disturbed weather patterns and the like - almost exactly mirror the sights and sounds reported by present-day UFO spotters. From this they conclude that both phenomena represent the layman’s misinterpretation of natural, easily explained occurrences such as meteorite showers and swamp gas. There are, they assure us, no such things as dragons.

  Bullshit.

  We, of course, know different. We know that the world is divided up into four spheres of dragon influence, roughly matching the cardinal points of the compass, each presided over by a dragon king supported by a complex and well-organised hierarchy of adjutants, marshals, signifers, lightning conductors and masters-at-arms. We have a pretty good idea of how dragons go about summoning clouds, precipitating rain at will out of a clear blue sky, and targeting rainfall to cause maximum disruption and embarrassment to the members of our profession. Make no mistake: those scaly bastards are out to get YOU, because you represent a significant threat to the veil of secrecy, superstition and ignorance behind which they’ve successfully cloaked their activities for countless centuries. By sabotaging our work and discrediting our members, dragons are seeking to undermine public confidence in weather forecasting in general, leading to the cutting of research and operational funding, marginalisation of weather broadcasting slots and the irreversible decline and demise of our trade. With us out of the way, dragons will once again be able to rule the skies without fear of detection and opposition.

  We at MAD feel it’s time we stopped these uppity critters from raining on our parade. We believe that it’s not just a matter of our jobs and vocation being put on the line by a posse of overgrown iguanas. There are more public health and safety issues at stake here than you can shake a stick at; but so long as the Surgeon General, the military and the Federal Aviation Authority continue to stand by, sit back and do nothing, we get the feeling it’s up to us to make sure something gets done, before homo sapiens is forced back into the dark ages of fiddling with seaweed and watching cows lying down.

  To see what MAD action is planned for your region in the short and middle term, click HERE.

  The icon referred to, a colourful thumbnail sketch of a dragon hanging by the neck from a lamp-post, seemed to be urging him personally to continue with the briefing. Shaking his head for as long as he could bear to do so, Gordon clicked, and was presented with a pie chart of the world, neatly divided into four quadrants. Clicking on ‘North-West’ brought up something that looked like a family tree, only it wasn’t. Instead, it was a schematic diagram of the dragon chain of command for the north-western sector. Regarded purely as a work of art, it was quite something, with its rainbow colour-coding and elegant traceries of connecting lines and dots; if only he’d had a colour printer, he’d have run off a sheaf of copies and wallpapered the toilet with them.

  Under the diagram was another block of text, headed What YOU can do. Well, Gordon said to himself, indeed; then he yawned and glanced up at the clock. If he wanted to spend more time asleep than it’d take him to brush his teeth and put his pyjamas on, he needed to go to bed now. Before hitting the kill button, however, he took the time to bookmark the page under the file name KOOKS -

  - Because, he decided, he could do worse than come back to this site the next time he was filled with rage and fury against the elements. It demonstrated that he wasn’t alone, that there were other weathermen out there, perched on the far shores of cyberspace, who’d been pushed even further than he had, to the point where they’d obviously dropped clean off the edge. Comparing them with himself was the most comforting activity he’d indulged in for years; indeed, just looking at the unmitigated drivel they’d come out with scatt
ered the clouds of his anger (Freudian metaphor; so what?) and replaced the furious glare with a broad grin. As the old saying went: too many kooks spoil the wrath.

  After an untroubled night’s sleep soothed by dreams of blue skies, Gordon woke up with only a token hangover, which a pot of strong coffee and a pint of orange juice soon dissipated entirely, allowing him to go to work for the first time in as long as he could remember without a goblin chain-gang quarrying the insides of his skull. And, although his postbag was as full as ever and the warm, fine day he’d forecasted was riven at frequent intervals by inexplicable electric storms, somehow none of it seemed to matter quite as much as it usually did; indeed, when he picked up an evening newspaper on his way out of the office and saw the headline ENGLAND SAVED BY RAIN on the sports page, he felt a tiny glow of pride.

  Accordingly, he didn’t stop off for a drink on his way home, and the regulars at the Cat’s Whiskers were forced to set their watches by the TV news instead. It felt distinctly odd going to bed sober, but not entirely unpleasant. All in all, it had been a better than average day, and although he certainly wouldn’t have described himself as happy - if only because he was way-wise enough to know that in the Really Accurate Oxford English Dictionary, ‘happy’ is defined as a divine dialect term meaning asking for trouble, and that admitting happiness even in private is effectively the same as twiddling a catnip mouse directly under Fate’s nose - he had to concede in all fairness that he was rather less unhappy than he’d been for some time.