Faust Among Equals (38 page)

 

‘Three cheers,' yelled the lead demon, pulling off his rubber mask, ‘for Lucky George.
Hip hip
. . .'

‘Hooray!' bellowed Julius Vanderdecker, Sir Thomas More, Hieronymus Bosch and Leonardo da Vinci, through their latex mouthpieces.

‘Hip hip . . .'

‘Hooray!' answered Niccolò Machiavelli, Christopher Columbus, Pieter Breughel the Elder, William Caxton, two seagulls, Lorenzo de' Medici, Sir Thomas Malory, Pol de Limbourg and Andrea del Sarto.

‘Hip hip . . .'

‘Hooray!' shouted the rest of the friends of Lucky George, raising their burden, pink with embarrassment and smiling foolishly, shoulder-high.

 

The barfiend turned and scowled meaningfully.

‘Hooray,' muttered Kurt Lundqvist into his glass. ‘Satisfied?'

 

All stories in Hell have an unhappy ending. The trick is therefore to keep going, so that there can be no ending.

The procession halted, dumped their rubber masks and stood. No prizes for guessing what was expected to happen next. Nevertheless, Lenny da Vinci, master of the unnecessary remark, shouted, ‘Speech!'

Lucky George looked down, smiled, and scratched his ear.

‘Thanks,' he said. ‘I owe you all one.'

‘Any time,' chorused the friends of Lucky George; and, for the first time, Helen guessed exactly why they called him Lucky.

The procession stayed halted and continued to stand. It's at times like this that inevitably somebody says, ‘First of all I want to thank my agent.'

It is to George's eternal credit that he didn't. Instead, he made a vague gesture with his left hand and smiled . . .

. . . Whereupon the biggest, shiniest yellow brick road you ever saw materialised under everyone's feet. Straight as an arrow it ran, right across the middle of the theme park, due north. It was at this point that the Production Director, who'd been watching gobsmacked from the Bridge Embattled by Armies, leant over the parapet and threw up.

‘Well, quite,' said the Marketing Director, standing next to him. ‘On the other hand . . .'

His colleague looked up, hurriedly wiping his face with his sleeve. ‘You can't be serious,' he gasped.

The Marketing Director shrugged. ‘Okay,' he said, ‘integrity counts for something in this game, but we've got shareholders to consider. And what it all boils down to in the final analysis is bums on seats.'

‘Not seats,' insisted the Production Director. ‘Spikes.'

‘Whatever.' The Marketing Director stood for a moment, his head tilted slightly to one side, visualising. ‘All right, maybe it's not our idea of Hell, yours and mine. But so what? We have,' he added ingenuously, ‘a duty to the public. Elitism's a thing of the past, you know. You've got to go with the mood, right?'

‘No.'

‘That's your final word, then, is it?'

‘Yes.'

‘The hell with you then,' replied the Marketing Director affably, pushing his colleague off the bridge into the leaping flames below. Then he straightened his tie, and marched purposefully away in search of Walt Disney.

 

‘George,' said Helen.

‘Mmmm?'

‘Where exactly are we going?'

George looked down. Under his feet, still yellow bricks, although the procession had now diminished down to two, plus a pair of seagulls circling high overhead.

‘Does it matter?'

Helen snuggled closer. ‘Not really, I suppose,' she replied. ‘Just so long as when we get there, there's going to be fitted carpets.'

‘Maybe, love.'

‘And matching curtains. Say there's going to be matching curtains, George, go on please.'

‘All right,' said George, ‘there'll be matching curtains. Somewhere.'

‘Where?'

George thought for a moment. ‘Would “over the rainbow” be sufficiently precise, do you think?'

‘No.'

‘Oh.' He sucked his lower lip. ‘Do they really have to match?' he asked.

‘Yes.'

‘Couldn't they clash even slightly?'

Helen shook her head. ‘George,' she said, ‘I've waited for you over three thousand years, I've lied for you, stolen for you, been kidnapped for you, followed you to Hell and back, don't you think I've
earned
matching curtains?'

‘Well . . .' George considered. ‘Just so long as they're not pink,' he said.

‘What I had in mind was more a sort of pinky peach,' Helen replied, ‘to go with the loose covers, which I thought of as being something like pale apricot, with perhaps just a hint of—'

‘And a shed,' he added. ‘I really must insist on a shed. Somewhere I can work on the magic and that sort of thing.'

Helen laughed musically. ‘If there's time,' she said. ‘I shall need a lot of shelves putting up.'

The sun chose that moment to glint on Helen's hair, as golden as ripe corn; or, as George couldn't help thinking, more a sort of light honey with just a soupçon of goldy fawn.

‘All right,' said George, meekly. ‘Anything you say.'

 

Somewhere in the Sublime, God looked up from his lathe and laughed.