Overtime. Part 40

The section of the audience turned to the two men sitting beside him. They looked identical; not surprisingly.

'Pity,' he continued, 'we could only get two tickets. I don't like having to pull rank like that, let alone use a forged ticket. Bad form. Still, I didn't want you two to miss the fun.'

His two companions nodded. Simultaneously. With one voice they said, 'Thanks.'

The section of the audience waved a deprecating hand.

'That's all right,' he said. 'Now then, let's have a look at the programme. Oh good, he's doing Mihi Est Propositum. I remember at the Orleans gig of '88 ...'

Guy wasn't having the best of luck. The bar was packed, the hot dog stall had been stripped down to bare wood within thirty seconds of opening, and he found when he reached the front of the queue that the candy-floss, at ST125 a go, was beyond his means. He was beginning to feel decidedly peckish.

He walked along the front of the stage, trying not to trip over the various serpentine bunches of wires, heading for the electricians' staff canteen. With luck there might be a cheese roll or so over there. Electricians of this particular type were outside his immediate knowledge, but the rules of their guild never change; if these electricians were anything like the ones they'd had in the 1940s, they never moved a step without an adequate supply of cheese rolls. Stale, usually, and with bits of translucent yellow rind on the exposed edges of the cheese; but edible, within the broad meaning of the term.

He stopped. In the middle of one of the middle rows there was a man who was only half there.

Guy's mother had taught him three guiding rules of civilised behaviour, and his ability to forget them was a pretty effective gauge of his efficient functioning as a human being in the real world. They were:

(1).

Don't push in queues.

(2).

Don't talk with your mouth full.

(3).

Don't stare.

As to the first; if he'd ever paid any heed to it, he'd still be standing in line in the sub-post office at the end of Garner Street waiting to buy ten first-cla.s.s stamps for the cards for Christmas 1931. As to the second; as matters stood at present, chance would be a fine thing. And as to the third; well, the possibility of men who were only half there had obviously not been within his mother's contemplation when she formulated the rule. He stared.

The man - he could see him very clearly indeed, although he was quite some way off - didn't seem at all put out about being only fifty per cent present. He was laughing at a joke or something similar, and his hand was extracting peanuts from a packet balanced precariously on his one knee. Peanuts!

Guy wrenched his mind away from thoughts of peanuts. There were plenty of odd-looking people in the audience - the party sitting in the front row were not the sort of thing Guy had ever come across outside the Sat.u.r.day morning Buck Rogers serial - but none as odd as ... The man was split neatly and precisely down the middle. The dividing line ran down across his forehead, followed his nose down through his lips and chin, bisected his neck and continued down his s.h.i.+rt front. Guy felt a strong urge not to find out what the man looked like viewed in right profile.

'I'd better tell Blondel,' he said to himself.

He turned and walked up the stage towards the small door in the back, which led to the dressing rooms; and would undoubtedly have reached his destination, woken Blondel, told him what he'd seen and so changed the course of past and future history, if only he hadn't caught sight of an unfamiliar figure holding a heaped plate of individual pork pies flitting like a shadow through the wings. He changed course abruptly and followed.

It goes without saying that the pork pie carrier was Pursuivant, and that he wasn't wearing a hat.

Guy made a m.u.f.fled grunting noise and tried to move his feet. Pointless.

Out of either irony or compa.s.sion, they had stopped his mouth with a ham and watercress club sandwich of phenomenal proportions; too thick to bite through without the use of one's hands, at any rate. His tongue could sense the presence of tomato, cuc.u.mber and (he felt sure) green peppers and English mustard. He gave up grunting and tried growling instead.

No chance of being heard, of course; not with that noise going on out there. To be sure, it wasn't an unpleasant noise - it was Blondel singing the big numbers from the White Alb.u.m, and on a number of occasions Guy would have stopped struggling and sat open-mouthed with admiration if it hadn't been for the club sandwich - but what with the amplification and the acoustics and Blondel's natural power of voice projection, the likelihood of anybody hearing his frantic oinking noises, or wis.h.i.+ng to leave the music and come and investigate if they did, were pretty well minimal. He was stuck.

Being a realist, therefore, he stopped making a noise and tried thinking instead. The only conclusion which ensued, however, was the feeling that contemplation was probably overrated as against, for example, escaping from tight knots or eating. The thinking made his head hurt, especially on the lower left back where whoever it was had hit him, and he packed it in. The only thing left to do was to sit still and stare at the heaped plate of sausage rolls which some s.a.d.i.s.t had left on the straight-backed chair opposite.

In the auditorium, Blondel was launching into yet another popular favourite. Guy stretched out his hands, which were tied firmly behind his back, and groped to see if his fingers could encounter anything sharp and useful. No such luck; only what felt, to Guy at least, like a plateful of cheese sandwiches.

Then the door opened and a man came tiptoeing in. Guy froze (not that that made a vast amount of difference in the circ.u.mstances, but he was always one to show willing) and watched.

The man's eyes clearly hadn't got used to the nearly complete darkness in the room (whatever sort of room it was) and quite soon he barked his s.h.i.+n on something, swore quietly and stopped to rub himself. Then he lit a cigarette lighter, and found himself staring straight at Guy.

'Mnnnnnnnn,' Guy said, tersely.

'Who are you?' the man replied, thereby demonstrating a complete absence of all the qualities that Guy had hoped to find in him.

'Mnnn,' he explained. 'Mnnnn mnnnn mnn mnn inn.'

'What?'

By the light of his cigarette lighter, the man appeared to be of medium height, thirtyish, with scruffy long hair, dressed in a sports jacket, an open-necked s.h.i.+rt, light blue baggy trousers and white canvas shoes. He wore spectacles and had the kind of face you'd expect to register bewildered surprise no matter what you said to it. Guy shook his head, causing the club sandwich to oscillate wildly.

'Has someone tied you up?' the man said.

'Mnn,' Guy replied with studied irony. 'Mnnn mnn mnnnn.'

'Here,' the man said, 'this is my card, I'm with BBC television. My name's Danny Bennett.'

'Mnn.'

The man thought for a moment, and then said, 'Would it help if I took that sandwich out of your ...? Right, fine, hold on.'

'Thank you,' Guy replied. 'Now get these ropes off me, for crying out loud.'

'Ropes?'

'The ropes with which my hands are tied behind my back,' Guy said. He remembered something his mother had told him, many years ago. 'Please,' he added.

'Sure, sure,' the man said. He picked up a bread knife -someone has been using that to make sandwiches, Guy reflected - and started to saw at the ropes.

'I'm covering this concert,' the man said, 'for the North Bank Show. Perhaps you could explain something for me. When is this?'

'Ouch,' Guy replied, 'that was my -'

'Sorry,' the man said. 'Only my producer said I was to get in the car and not ask daft questions, and when I got here my calendar watch was reading 35th March 2727. I reckoned -sorry - that it must have gone funny so I reset it, and now it says 43rd August 1364. And not only that, but -'

'What's a calendar watch?' Guy asked.

'Don't worry about it,' Guy added quickly. 'Look, if you could just hurry up with these ropes ...