Nottingham Central Library
There was a modern, almost futuristic look to the glass doors of the Nottingham public library, running a ring around the ground floor so that the brickwork of the upper stories seemed to float above it, that should have improved Toby’s mood.
Only he oughtn’t to have been in Nottingham. Nottingham was a six-hour round trip. And he ought to have been grateful for the extra work, but there was only howling and static on the wireless and Ellie, when he’d phoned the post office and their lass had run down to fetch her, hadn’t been in the least sympathetic. She hadn’t even done him the courtesy of at least pretending to be a bit jealous and demanding that the bloke in Central Processing tell her himself that yes, it really was because of work that Toby would be home late. Which would have been trust he could brag about twenty years ago, but was going to look to the bloke like middle-aged indifference now.
And it was all right irregular. Toby had taken the lorry with the bins of Nelson, Bury, Bolton, Sawley, and Blackburn’s books for inter-library loan to the North West Libraries Central Processing location in Preston, just as usual, right on time. But then the man there had gone over all harried and said there was an awfully important delivery to be made from Nottingham Central—which wasn’t in their interlending partnership at all—and Nottingham wouldn’t spare a man—what with not being lending partners—but some mayor or other was breathing right down the library boards’ necks and Toby had best go fetch it.
Yes, even if it would be a bit less out of the way for the driver from Cheshire, or even the one from the libraries around Liverpool and Manchester. Toby was there to take the delivery now.
And now he was in Nottingham, and he didn’t want to be there. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure—but only because he wasn’t a hundred percent sure of anything from those days: he was nearly sure—that he remembered seeing the occasional stub for Nottingham bus tickets showing up in the expenses-and-receipts Eileen had tried to keep. A pair of them in August, just before Seth had first gone off to school, the occasional one after. Not always while Seth was home, either.
He also didn’t like being anywhere near the Malt Cross. The old music hall had been a warehouse last he’d heard, but he’d have wagered his Alfred Bester anthology that you could still find, on its steps, the sort of run-down old codgers who gravitated to it because their boots knew the way.
In other words, by exactly the sort of run-down old sots who’d known his mam (how well, Toby didn’t know and refused to consider; he did know standards had been declining sharply for some years by the time she’d managed to get out of show business, if moral standards had ever been very high backstage of the music halls, which he doubted) and, very occasionally, recognized him. Or, even more occasionally, took him for his da. He was never sure which was worse, which was why he’d stopped coming back here before he’d even met Eileen.
Then again, maybe they were all dead by now.
Toby had met people who looked as if, on occasion, they had cheering thoughts that weren’t twice as depressing (‘Christ, when did I get old’ was for when a bloke’s son first trounced him at football or some such, and Toby had never had that kind of Boys’ Own Magazine luck. Even when the lad had tried his hand at a bit of age-appropriate poaching and that he’d tried to do it intelligently, with attempts at engineering that were sometimes almost reasonable and sometimes hysterical, in any-to-all senses of the word), but they all looked to him as if they were simple, born with their teeth all stuck out from sucking on silver spoons (at least by Nelson standards), or faking it to keep up the wife’s spirits.
He had already been craving a good dark bitter for about four hours and a hundred windy, bumpy, twisty, fender-to-fender miles (mostly but by no means entirely on the A50m, and during rush hour for the last stretch) when he pulled up at Nottingham Central. And that was before the snotty little pimple behind the desk told him the library had no such request in its records, including the day’s message slips in the bin by the phone at the checkout desk. Not even on the ansaphone.
In fact, he’d already been wanting one so badly it had stopped being a thought and turned into a sort of dry pulse at the back of his tongue a good half hour before he’d even pulled into the city, let alone before the pimple had been reduced (rather too quickly for it to be at all satisfying) to a floppy, quivering sweat-rag and got on the phone with Central Processing. Who had no flipping idea what Toby was on about. Despite the signed order Toby had on his clipboard.
Slamming down the receiver onto the cradle, Toby was already thinking that it was more than any bloke could be expected to stand, and anyone would understand. He knew this area like the back of his hand, for all he hadn’t been here in years. They couldn’t all have closed. And all right, it was a bit late in the day, but people had to eat. People who’d had a domestic and couldn’t eat at home had to eat, and would want something to wash it down with while they moaned to a sympathetic ear. Nottingham was a big city. Something had to be open. Surely.
And then the pimple said, in a self-righteous tone, “See, Mr. Snape? I told you we’d never gotten any order like that.”
He turned with a snarl on the scrawny little oik. The flash of terror in its eyes was blue, and there was a spray of freckles standing dark against the extremely pink skin of its splodgy young nose, but the back of Toby’s hand was half-raised, just as if—just as if.
He lowered it, and took a deep breath, and said in the most even tone he could manage (not very), “You don’t want to go rubbing it in when a man’s been on the road three hours for no reason, son. Now, just you make a note here on my bit of paper that the order was in error, and I’ll be off. And sign it—and has your checkout date stamp got the library’s name on it? Just you fetch the book embosser then, let’s have them both—good lad.”
Shaken, still quaking somewhere inside, he headed back for the lorry the long way around the library, just to put the clipboard in. He’d still have to find a place to eat in town, but he needed the walk to clear his head enough to think where to go that wasn’t a pub. Or a chippy; most likely he wouldn’t go half a block without tripping over one of those, but he thought the smell of the grease might make him sick in his current state of mind.
He was having trouble remembering where else there might be a bite to be had. Just like he wasn’t sure about the old men, he wasn’t sure whether it would be worse if he couldn’t remember because he’d never gone anywhere hereabouts that wasn’t one, or because he just couldn’t get foam and amber out of his head.
Because it was that kind of day, he was startled but, on some fundamental level, not in the least surprised to see a rawboned figure lounging casually against his lorry, with a touch of offensive elegance that was begging to get his head clobbered in by some local tough with half a brick in a sock who was just bright enough to know a fancy boy when he saw one but couldn’t see when he was being invited to bite off more than a pit bull could chew.
Toby’s one consolation was that he wasn’t the only bloke in Nelson to have been rudely astonished by suddenly finding this out. That, and that no one had believed him about it, as scraggy and bookish a weed as the lad had been, and going about just with his books for friends and the one lass he trailed after like a puppy in the summers. No one had believed him and, which had at least been funny, in a darkish sort of way, for years they hadn’t believed their own lads who’d complained of coming off the worse for scrapping with Seth. Toby didn’t think he’d ever gotten more drunk in his life than when he’d noticed his mates had stopped chuckling about owl-eyed little Seth and his extended fits of the sullens and his nose that didn’t actually mean Toby was his da when he’d plainly just squished it hooked by reading too close-up to too many books, and started going edgy around the boy instead.
Seth was dressed normally, for once, in only slightly weird shirtsleeves and quite ordinary trousers, his hippie hair swept back in a short, tatty tail that was, most like, as near respectable as it was going to get without a cut. His shoes were a bit unusual, bit of an odd sheen to the leather that no doubt meant they were made of something unnatural, but nothing damning. Went up under his cuffs, of course, but then Seth never would wear shoes when he could get away with boots. He said he’d formed the habit because he was friends with girls who were always kicking him in the shins, but Toby knew it was from earlier than that.
If second-hand boots were too big for growing feet, they could be strapped down, tied tight to a boy’s legs and hidden under his trousers. You could tie a lad’s shoes tight, but there was no way to stop it looking like exactly what it was, even if he wore enough socks to stop the whole affair pinching. Ellie had suggested spats, but Toby hadn’t thought Seth needed to actively court fights with the other boys, and besides, since no one else had worn the things since before Toby was born, it wouldn’t have taken anyone long to work out what the boy was hiding under them.
Toby stopped short, and glared at him, and settled in to prepare to glare all day. No telling how long it would take the mid-sized brat to notice him. Anyone else would have been only pretending to read—well, some doorstopper of a hardcover—but given Seth, he probably really was.
Infuriatingly, Seth glanced at Toby as soon as he’d pulled up. And while he did look a bit surprised, it wasn’t so much fancy meeting you here as you have exceeded my expectations all out of proportion. “Straight home, then?” he inquired, as though they were already in the middle of a conversation, closing the book. In the moment before it disappeared (really disappeared) under his arm, Toby could see it was The Magic Mountain. Which he more-than-suspected was meant to provoke him on at least three levels, and that wasn’t even counting the title.
And Seth so clearly, clearly meant straight home rather than to a pub after your awful day I ought to know nothing about that all Toby could ask, flatly, was, “Why.”
“Oh, well.” Seth shrugged an infuriating, airy little shrug he must have learned at school, it was so disgustingly upmarket. “I thought, if you were going to be hacked off at me, it might as well be for something that was my fault. Come on—it would have raised questions if I’d exchanged for sterling, so I can’t pay back your petrol—and in any case, if you’re not getting paid back for that you need to renegotiate your contract—but I’ll stand you tea.”
Toby breathed out through his nose. “How,” he demanded, in much the same tone as before, since his other option was to start shouting, which wasn’t on even though they were only behind the library, “do you mean to ‘stand me tea’ if you haven’t got money.”
“I haven’t got your money,” Seth corrected. He almost managed not to be a snotty brat about it, except that his eyebrows were slightly and politely up. “Can you leave your lorry here a while without my doing anything to it?”
“The question,” he growled, “won’t come up.”
The eyebrows went higher. “I got you here without doing one thing that’s beyond your powers, and that was a courtesy. How much time would you like to waste fratchin’ when I make it your dinner was six hours ago and you haven’t the first notion what the hell is going on and in no wise did I get this nose from Mam?”
His mouth twitched unwillingly, not least at the way all that had sounded in the slow-rolling RP Seth was refusing to drop. Which was pure needlesomeness: he’d let it bend a few times on Friday when he was talking to Eileen, and the other week, so it wasn’t that he couldn’t speak like a regular person any more.
“If you think you can butter me up on account of having no oil in me lamp you can think again, me lad,” he said sternly, letting his own voice fall back to the heavier, broader patter of his childhood, before the wireless and the telly had started changing everyone a bit without their really noticing. Just to make his point. “I haven’t forgotten those airs and graces m’ludd honored us mere mortals with the last time we was favored with yer presence.”
“They’re still trying to break me of ‘what the hell’ and that,” Seth offered, with a little smirk. “Or, I should say, again. Besides, it was only humane. Evan was there both times, and he flinches so much when I don’t speak public-school he’d have been knees over nose before we’d been there five minutes.”
Toby let his face express his opinion of that.
“No, it’s just the Lanky,” Seth said glumly, and now he had relaxed his voice a little, although he still would have gotten jeered at on their street. “He says it’s flat. Says it makes me sound like an elephant stepped on me throat. Hated it first day we met, and there’s all sorts at school and he doesn’t make faces at any of them. Not even the groundskeeper, and he’s got such a comfortable Tyke everyone treats him like an armchair with attached teakettle, even though he’s an absolute nutter who keeps for a pet a dog the size of a small gazebo who can set things on fire like a dragon, and his rock cakes may actually be made from rocks and I’d swear he uses cyanoacrylate in his treacle fudge.”
“…Uses what?”
Seth frowned a don’t-expect-me-to-remember-your-silly-real-world-brand-names frown. “…Special glue?”
“Superglue?”
“No doubt. Any road, either that or extraordinarily quick-drying cement.”
Toby stared at the deceptively distracted expression draped disinterestedly over the pale, sharp features and their dark, bland eyes and their darkish, bluish circles, then scrubbed a hand over his own eyes and down his face. “It is your damn fault I can’t have a drink,” he declared tiredly.
“I didn’t burn down the fucking mill,” Seth said irritably, blasé attitude instantly discarded if not forgotten, “and I didn’t tell you who to marry, and as far as I’m aware I didn’t fill out an order form on the subject of how to be born, and I sure as hell didn’t tell you how to feel about everything there is, in fact, not the least use in the world in pretending I was not born as and to be. Neither would I call it ‘my fault’ that you’ve apparently decided that being a man for once in my life is a decision you can stick to, although if you want to unaccountably give me credit I will, albeit in some confusion, graciously accept it. Now are you going to come and have tea or am I going to have to hie me back to Spinner’s End and tell Mam I tried to do the decent and wave goodbye with an olive branch but you were such a stiff-necked arse you couldn’t even swallow that?”
He stared some more. “I could almost believe,” he said slowly, refusing to ask what wave goodbye was about, since Seth so badly wanted him to. Not when he was acting like this. Acting like this ought not to be rewarded, “that you didn’t do anything unnatural to get me here, d’ye ken, because that was the most manipulative operation I’ve ever heard in me life.”
“I doubt it,” Seth said, doing a good impression of imperturbable for a short-fuse bottle rocket with a warped guide stick. “More like, it’s the least veiled one; in the art of manipulative operations I am the merest apprentice and, they tell me, persistently wearing oven gloves. But, in fact, I did not. Although, of course, even Mesmer himself never claimed his techniques worked for everyone, so I suppose one might have to be magical to use them. Wizards think it must be mind-magic, but they think so even when they can measure that there’s no magic in the room, and unmagical qi manipulators like reiki practitioners agree that something is going on when they see it. Anyway, it’s not doing something. I know the difference, I should think.”
“…You mesmerized Central Processing,” he abridged flatly, plastering a hand over his eyes, and, this time, leaving it there.
He could hear the crisp cloth rustle as Seth shrugged. “If you like. Not the whole office. And hypnotism doesn’t really sound any better, does it? But it’s probably the same thing with more paraphernalia and different jargon. All that matters is conviction, really. Although I’m told having eyes without apparent irises helps. On which subject, which is to say, conviction, don’t think for a moment I won’t slash your tires. I’d repair them when we were done, of course, but I was bluffing about Mam.”
He took his hand down and glared. For what must have been the nine millionth time, he asked, “Boy, what is the matter with you?!”
“I’m a cobra born of a lioness, in a pit of mostly rabid vipers,” Seth said, all matter-of-fact except for the disturbing sleep-what-sleep glint in his eye, “and the world is crashing down around my ears. An inevitability, no doubt, what with being made up largely of sheep, psychopaths, and overenthusiastic flailing gorillas with brick-thick skulls filled with the porridge of sloshing self-righteousness. And if I survive the next month I have to go teach a class with an actual sodding mortality rate in the same bloody secondary school full of the same smarmy little over-bred wankers who thought seeing me hexed inside-out and humiliated was either hilarious or just another Tuesday. And everyone’s going to tell me I’ve no one to blame but myself since if you want to be technical I asked for it, but to the best of my knowledge you didn’t burn down the mill, either.”
He paused, and added, more wry than sullen, “And it’s your fault, entirely, that I can’t drink. To get drunk, that is. I’m told it helps.”
Toby gave up. He hadn’t understood the half of that, but he knew that feeling, didn’t he just. And that last point… was a point, and since it wasn’t being slammed at him like a real accusation and no one was demanding he admit it, he could. “I thought all you little sods spent half your lives gobbling mushrooms and puffing weeds,” he commented.
Seth made a face. “I don’t, in fact, want my mind altered. My year did go through the phase, more and less embarrassingly. The grass, at any rate; we all learn enough about mushrooms in herbology to hesitate there. Well, most of us. Some of us. But the other, yes. And there are always morons experimenting, usually without any sound grounding in theory. I did try the usual with my roommates, but since everyone else enjoyed it on the first go and I didn’t, I decided not to repeat the experiment.” He gave Toby an inquisitive what about you? look. It might have been about 10% curiosity and 10% mischief, but the rest was pure, sardonic this is what you get for horning in where you’ve given up all rights to capital-S Sauce. “Watching them was entertaining until it wasn’t anymore, but the stuff just makes me twitchy.”
Twitchier, Toby substituted—silently, because he was sure rubbing it in was, at this point in Seth’s life, unnecessary. He sighed and, having already given up, gave in. “Oh, all right. Are you magicking me home after, then?”
“If you’re getting the lorry towed,” Seth said, eyeing it coolly. “I could slash the tires, if you like. Mixing magic and electronics is complicated where it’s not so improbable as to be impossible for all practical purposes, and while technomancy is a fascinating field and you’d like it, I shouldn’t care to try to apparate with even a smaller device, by myself, over a far shorter distance.”
“I must have been Jack the Ripper in a previous life,” Toby said to no one in particular. Anybody else in the world, he was sure, would have just said ‘no,’ ‘bad idea,’ or, at worst, ‘only if you want me to blow up your lorry trying.’
The headache wasn’t that he hadn’t understood Seth’s jargon. He had, he thought, more or less. It was that the young idiot apparently still wasn’t bothering to tune his tongue according to whether whoever he was talking to had a chance at following his blether or was going to belt him one for being an impenetrable, supercilious swot who was surely only talking like that as a way of looking down his considerable nose at the workaday folks.
“No, that was me, I expect,” Seth said in the same indifferent tone. “You incurred your karmic debt in this one, but I suppose it could have been worse.”
“Probably weren’t Jack the Ripper, then,” he pointed out, droll, winning a black, humorless smile and a sardonic ha. No more carelessly-smooth nervous jibber-jabber, he noted, realizing with a pang he’d never have admitted to that he wasn’t at all sure whether this meant that Seth’s nerves were getting to him more than ever because they were coming to the meat of his matter, or settled now he knew he’d won. “Let’s have at it, then. Where did you want to eat?”
“I want to eat at home,” Seth said, with a trace of that sullen insistence on being far more perfectly accurate than the situation required that had so often earned him, as a boy, not one of the beatings that Toby had been ashamed of after, but a sound and sorely-needed ding alongside the ear. Not because Toby had felt it was misbehavior that deserved punishing, exactly, but because he’d had wildly optimistic dreams of making Seth stop being an unpleasant brat no one wanted to have a drink with before he was old enough bring on himself more trouble than a cautionary swat. “But we’re going to the Sherwood.”
“There’s nowt but tourist traps in there,” Toby protested.
He’d opened his mouth to tell the lad that they were already in an area with plenty of probably quite reasonably places to eat or grab a bite, but the side of Seth’s mouth had curled. “That’s what you think,” he said, and stepped forward to take Toby’s arm, for all the world like a gentleman escorting a lady twice his size.
The world spun.
“So,” Toby glared, when he’d finished retching into the grass, caught onto the nearest tree and staggered upright, and wiped his mouth. “We’ve found something you’re bad at, to the tune of ‘bloody awful.’”
“Not too bad,” Seth said in his judicious eighty-year-old-gaffer voice, “considering my age. It would be strange to be able to take a passenger smoothly before, oh, sixty, perhaps forty if one was much practiced.” He glanced at Toby, and relented with a taking-pity look that, as it didn’t involve actual pity, was forgivable. “There’s always a sacrifice, in travel,” he explained. “If it’s not a capital-T Theory, it’s close. Travel takes time or is uncomfortable. The best unmagical solutions, the ones with motors and reasonably comfortable seats—they’re not as fast as magical travel, but not as much of a short, sharp shock to the system… but the emissions situation is only better than it was since the Industrial Revolution, not good.”
Toby supposed he ought to be pleased Seth was still keeping track of real life at least a little bit, but somehow he wasn’t.
“No, I’m not the only one to be aware of the fact,” Seth said sharply, watching his face, “and you ought to be concerned. For perfectly mundane reasons as well, of course.” He shrugged. “Our closest equivalent is faster, but doesn’t have the comfortable seats and is most like bicycles, one-seaters only. The real public-transit system isn’t as uncomfortable as what you just went through, but there’s a monetary cost involved in every use—that is to say, you have to pay for what makes it work—and setting it up was at least as big a project as the Underground, in its own way. There are two sorts of cab equivalents, both uncomfortable.”
“Worse’n that?” Toby asked dryly.
Seth looked judicious again, and waggled a hand. “Both will leave you dizzy and knocked on your arse, both want paying for, and the one that’s an actual vehicle is, as you might expect, far more traumatizing than the one that is, at least theoretically, rather tightly in Ministry control. Although they’ll sell you hot chocolate if you really feel it’s the thing to wear this season. And what we just did… learning it is hard, and you have to be licensed, and what you just experienced is ‘average.’ ‘Bloody awful’ involves leaving bits of yourself behind.”
Toby was staring again, and not just out of retroactive horror. If Ellie had ever told him this much, he didn’t remember it.
Seth added, enjoying himself, “Flying carpets exist, and have very little in the way of down-side as far as I’m aware, apart from not being demonically swift, but there’s an embargo on and no sign of lifting it. I’m sure it’s only because the broom-makers lobbied to cut out their competition. Which, I suppose, would have been forgivable if any of them were showing any signs of putting out some sort of family or even couple’s transport themselves.”
“Eileen always said she mustn’t tell me anything,” he said suspiciously. And Seth was making it all sound… well, actually, just like science fiction did. Utterly people-are-people, under the flashy props. Lobbyists! But then, Seth knew what Toby liked to read, didn’t he just, and he’d somehow got proud of being a slippery customer. “She said—”
“Either what her father convinced her of,” Seth said, sounding as if he wanted to spit, his upper lip curling like a homicidal camel, which was a new expression for him to be aiming at someone else, and Toby rather enjoyed the novelty, “or what was true thirty years ago. Of course,” he added thoughtfully, “‘unwise,’ as a word, is still such an unutterable understatement that its failure to describe the situation is like unto an ant and its little roll of measuring tape trying to tackle a giraffe.”
Full of the familiar sense of baffled that, on top of everything else that had been on top of him, had kept biting his ankles all the way to the pub, Toby demanded, “Then why are you doing it?”
Seth frowned as if he hadn’t even noticed being barked at, which had to be acres worse in the getting-old department than getting trounced at football. As if feeling his way, he tried, “Because… because there was that book you read about the black horse, before we couldn’t stand each other any more, and the most willing and sweet-tempered horses shied when they were blinkered, and jaded their mouths and frightened or angered their drivers into laying on the whip. Because everyone I know thinks the unmagical are either disgusting beasts or an encroaching threat or precious little children, and if anyone’s tried before, without really meaning to bring someone in who wasn’t naïve and didn’t want to change worlds already, I don’t know about it. Because it’s less of a bad idea here; the Sherwood is different and word won’t get out.”
He paused. It was the one Toby had always thought meant he’d churned through enough faux-reasonable justifications that he thought maybe he could try adding on a touch of honesty for flavor. Eileen said that was unfair, and maybe it was. Either way, Toby knew it meant he was about to hear what was at the heart of it now, or at least, as much as Seth was willing to risk letting on to.
“Because you were appalling,” Seth did, in fact, add, in what would have been nearly a blurt if it hadn’t been such a tightly-regulated and resigned tone, “but I have it on good authority that I’m not any great pleasure when those under my aegis are keeping secrets that might be hurting them, either. Because I don’t know what’s coming, and Mam’s a mule about closing her eyes to a world that knows who she is and how to find her, and I’m not as much of a nobody as would make me quite comfortable—”
Toby rolled his eyes while Seth was itchily winding his gaze around a rock off to the right. Comfortable. This from someone who’d been snapping at adults that they shouldn’t use words they didn’t understand when he was scarce up to their hips.
“—And I won’t be around for a few weeks, and once back I won’t be as free in my movements.”
His eyes snapped to Toby’s, hard. “Because I think, perhaps, you might not have been fully yourself when you rendered her helpless, but she was fully herself when she decided to live with it, to live that way. She thinks that to be fully herself would hurt you. Would, somehow, unman you. Rubbish. But you’ve always felt it would, haven’t you. When actually you don’t know a damned thing about it.”
He bristled, and snapped back, “Well, you’ve got one thing right—I don’t. And you needn’t be so high and mighty, my lad, I don’t recall your being in any ripping hurry—”
“I shouldn’t, if I were you,” Seth said, silky soft, “begin any sentences to me with ‘I don’t recall.’ You don’t recall, I suppose. I do. I was in a ‘hurry.’ Once. I do, indeed, recall the reception I was met with, that first Christmas, just trying to tell about being grateful for the chance to learn what I was learning, trying to assure you and Mam I wasn’t ungrateful for my opportunities, even as miserable as I was that first year. Oh, I remember.”
“You always were a hard one,” Toby said after a moment, more subdued. “End of the universe, and you’ll be ordering cold grudge on toast.”
Seth looked at him as if he were mad.
“Sequel to Hitchhikers’,” he explained.
This did not appear to help.
On balance, he decided, “Never mind. You wouldn’t like it. Surrealistic.”
Seth considered this, and offered, “I sent a flying… er, like a leather gauntlet, for sports, a glove, I turned it blue and sent it to keep poking a particular irritant in the head every time he ruffled his hair until Lily took pity on him and told him what to sing.”[1]
“…Right, then.” He supposed he ought to be glad that the boy had taken something from that film, but what he had taken from it was a pounding headache, what with all the highly critical and disapproving commentary from either side of him, vivisecting into whimpering submission everything that would otherwise have been funny or charming as it assuredly was bizarre, the offended-goose hissing from the seats behind, and the going-down-in-flames of the lovely, normal family outing they’d been scrimping for weeks for.
He’d thought at the time that he should have saved his ticket money for the other children’s movie, the one with Dick van Dyke and the flying car and the Morris-dancing-more-or-less, but in retrospect (and having seen the reviews) he ought either to have pleased himself and gone to 2001 or taken Ellie and Seth to The Lion in Winter. He’d thought at the time it would be miles over Seth’s head and would flatter Eileen’s pretentions, but now he knew the pretentions were beyond hope and in the bone and it was quite possible he’d been pulling the wool over his own eyes on the other count as well, no matter how young the boy had been.
Seth was giving him that wary look, so he explained. Mostly. Leaving Ellie’s airs out of it.
“Why would it have been over my head?”
“It’s meant to have been a very clever script, with enough politics and backstabbing to make your head spin,” he explained. Resentfully, because (in retrospect), he wasn’t half sure it would have done, he further elaborated, “You were eight.”
“Oh. Still, I wish you had,” Seth said frankly. “The quarter of the school I ended up in prides itself on being exactly like that.” He thought about it. “Only the script often isn’t very clever at all. They wanted to put me either where Mam was when she was at school, or her mother, and I might have agreed to that if I’d known what I was risking, fighting so hard. It would have been easier.”
Toby snorted. In his experience, every time his lad was offered an easier way, he eviscerated it and then plunged a handful of rock salt in the hole, just to make sure it got extra-offended and hit him harder.
“But I wouldn’t have had to be like that, in Hufflepuff,” Seth said irritably, apparently reading his mind. “They’re not the amiable milksops Mam’s House seems to think they are, by and large, but they do culturally think that kindness is something one does by reflex, unless there’s a good reason not to.”
“And what would your ‘House’ substitute there, for kindness?” he asked, half wary and half skeptical.
Seth frowned again, considering. “I don’t think it’s the same,” he said finally. “You can’t plug in a substitute, it doesn’t work. They want to be kind, when they can, they think they ought. There’s nothing that we all, each of us, as a group, aspires to be. People say there is, but we’re not of a type, and don’t try to be. They are, we do. In terms of self-conception. And in how we’re described. Hufflepuff duffers are loyal plodders, while those ambitious Slytherins are cunning plotters. So it is said.”
“And what are you plotting, then?”
“I’ve already said, do keep up.”
He eyed Seth skeptically, meeting Sardonic Face, which was, he supposed, at least on a grown lad, different from Cheeky Little Bastard face. “How cunning a plan’s that, then?”
“We’ll find out, won’t we?” Seth retorted, and, turning, strode away, towards an apparently random tree. He peered at it, hand held out as if feeling his way, and then moved to another, and another. Finally, he said, “Ah,” and reached out, fingers pointed down, to touch it.
Tobias thought the branches tried to draw away from him.
Seth scowled at it, evidently taking personal offense. “Excuse us,” he said curtly, “but we need to get through.” He plastered his hand on the oak’s trunk and turned his hand until his fingers were skyward. Then he shook that pale stick of his out from up his sleeve with a flick of his wrist (which he must have thought was funny, because Toby remembered he’d used to carry it at his hip, like a shortsword, and the Rosier-thing had carried its own that way) and scribbled something on the bark.
The tree made a protesting noise, more like branches creaking in the wind than splinters. It pulled away from itself, leaving a hole through its middle wide and tall enough for them both to pass through.
Seth tried to tug him through, and then got behind him and shoved. He was, a corner of Toby’s mind admitted grudgingly while the rest of it froze, strong for some cross between an especially scrawny greyhound and a cranky dwarf bloodhound. But then, he had played that flying footie.
The tree-thing wasn’t as bad as whatever Seth had done earlier. It must have been that cabbie equivalent he’d mentioned, because it only left Toby dizzy and reeling. This, however, was most unfortunate, because it also left him—all right, them—standing behind a public loo. Really right next to it, just where the oak had been.
And really quite dizzy. Which was not a state one wanted to be in while a foot and a half from the back wall of a public loo.
[1]The Blue Meanies from the animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine (which was rather lovely but/and on an awful lot of crack) attacked their targets with the creatures... er, weapons... er, beings... objects.. entities seen below, until Our Heroes struck up a rousing (but rather droning) chorus of All You Need Is Love.
