Terminal Two - Second Episode: My Summer Of Tennis

We played no tennis that summer. I spent the hottest days holed up in an improvised hillfort lobbing machine parts at bears. My aim was always true but the trouble with bears is they don't know when to give something up as a bad job. I'd almost dismantled an entire printing press when I discovered a Bren gun wrapped in oilcloth under the floorboards. I don't have to tell you that those furry bastards got their comeuppance in spades.

Ever since then the summer months have served as unwelcome reminders of the madness that dangles under my life like a flamingo's other leg. Of course guns in Maranaloka are as redundant as the last word of this sentence is. Instead of heat I pack a fake diploma from some cruddy backstreet law school that lets me call up damnation's dregs for mutually beneficial frolics. I create a lot of paperwork for the bow-backed clerks of the Outer Circles. No one's ever been crushed by giant dice. That motto's kept my soul blissfully uncondemned since God invented little apples.

I tucked my penis back inside the folds of my beggar disguise and tried to look hireable. Two Blade was breathing like a scuba diver.

'Quite a switcheroo,' snickered Brahmini, tumbling his callused hands, 'for a Solicitor to be Solicit-ed.' He trilled a cascade of giggles and Two Blade grinned the grin of a hollow loon. 'Don't you think? Don't you suspect? Does it not drag your heart for a grand reluctant waltz across the crowded ballroom?'

Two Blade turned to me. 'Hey Chief ' this joker's snatching the credit for getting us here. Are you going let him get away with that?'

I contemplated summoning fifty-seven varieties of brimstone-spitting backup but the vibe was that this was a plane held together only by the flimsy guy ropes of Brahmini's whim. Any flicker of dissent and the whole sideshow might snap shut like a handbag, squelching me and my venerable partner and leaving the half-daemon to drift unharmed to whatever dimension he so desired.

'What?' I managed.

Brahmini fluttered the thin frills of shredded ganglia that hung beneath his tusks. His eyes rolled like fruit machine barrels, first red, now green, blue, magenta, bronze, settling at last on a sparkling turquoise like the scales of a sea bass.

He drummed his fingers upon the desk, leaving dents that smouldered. 'I can read you like a suicide note, my sick and baffled twain. A big heist is afoot, or am I delusional?'

TB looked at me. He wore his permission face. I let the grey tip of my tongue poke out the corner of my mouth and went boss-eyed ' code for 'tell the slick bastard stuff he wants to hear, but hold back several crucial details'. Tragically, the code was of my own devising, and had never been discussed with another living soul for fear that it might one day be used against me. I have nightmares of being impaled on a meathook and used as a putrefied centrepiece for government functions. Thus Two Blade's uncomprehending smirk made me want to drive an awl through his jugular.

'Who wants to know?' said Two Blade. 'And in what language?' He whipped a paper bag of currants from his shawl and began snaffling, watching Brahmini with a look of guarded admiration.

'Not I,' said Brahmini. As I watched, his left iris nudged down, replaced by one of blazing amber. 'I'm already quite aware of your designs on the Phase Vault.'

Two Blade sprayed currants like rabbit shit and I was forced to quit with the stonewalling.

'Okay Jones ' the jig's up. You gonna collapse us now or should we all stand here in awkward silence? I ought to warn you I'm extremely flammable.'

'And I'm impervious to whips, barbed or otherwise,' Two Blade chirped.

'I can personally vouch for that.' I beat my chest in a display of masculine sincerity. 'Flails, scourges, goads ' nothing gets through. Oh, the evenings we've spent,' and Teeb and I gazed at one another in a moment of shared affection.

'Which means you're free to squish our corporeal bodies and send us spiralling to the Outer Circles. I'm sure we'd find work as bellhops or some such tomfoolery.'

'Probably enjoy it too,' said I, 'twisted monkeys that we are.' I pointed at the half-daemon, as if to say: And that, my friend, was a show of lexical wizardry entirely for your benefit. Feel grateful. Feel grateful and humbled.

'Oh pish.' Brahmini dismissed our prattle with a flick of his slabby hand. 'My books are full and anyway, I steer clear of Phasecasters, whatever their stripe or wage bracket. Enslaving colleagues has a way of boomeranging and nipping you in the goolies ' I've seen it many a time, many a time.' He winced at some remembered trauma. I must confess the memory of my penis was still fresh in my mind and at his evocation of injured genitals I felt the tiniest bit aroused. Perhaps sensing this, Brahmini grew sterner as he went on. 'The plain face-licking truth of the matter is I'm stymied. An inconvenient crossbreed of daemon and, and¦' the ragged crevasse of his gob curled shut in disgust, '¦ you urchins. Keeps me in crappy limbo. Can't settle anywhere. Always seem to phase out during sleep. Wake up pink and gaseous the size of a grape. Tricky, ugly business.' Antennae extruded from an otherwise average forehead and gestured fitfully at the four treehouse walls, all made from planks and plastered with blueprints that had wrinkled in the intense humidity. 'Built this place myself, doncha know. Forged from psychic effluvia and a hefty portion of my own impatience. That's the trouble with being a mongrel, y'see. Underspace is never sure where to plonk you. You drift. Unless you've got a ramrod will you end up sloughing apart with the tides. Ach.' His fizzog puckered like an anemone. The antennae retracted, shivering. 'Fortunately some cavalier motorist managed to ding my stretch limousine just moments before my latest plummet through the many veils of existence, and my rage lit me from within like a lantern. Sweet, tight purpose held me together while I staked out a plot on the fringes of reality, constructing a bolthole to house my identity ' such as it is ' all the while kept whole by fantasies of hunting down the bastard and salting his eyes.'

Brahmini let out a sigh. His knuckled shoulders slumped as if he had just divested himself of a gross, pernicious burden. 'Of course, now I've established myself the hate nugget's a redundancy. I called in a few favours and had the automobile-molesting cad's living quarters flooded with ocelots. He died trying to scramble onto a chest of drawers, blood gurgling from his ears like red champagne.'

'All of which leaves me empty,' uttered Two Blade, gazing morosely at the last of his currants.

'So what's our role in this shambolic carnival?' I enquired, teasing a plug of hardened wax out my ear with an extended index finger. Brahmini didn't deign to flinch at the unholstered weapon ' here he called the shots and Phasecasting was worthless as a spaniel's promise.

'We both want items currently stowed inside the city's ostensibly top secret Phase Vault.' He stroked one of his tusks with mannered, delicate sweeps. 'Sadly I'm yoked to this daft parody of fleshy existence until such time as I require certain, ah, requisites. You pair, of course, are free to bumble back to Maranaloka whenever you damn well please and, much as I despise you for it, I should like to make the trip myself.'

'Really?' Two Blade piped up.

'Sure as eggs is eggs,' Brahmini confirmed, clucking his satisfaction. 'The city might be a festering arsehole but it's my festering arsehole.'

'Uh, the Sixth Day Sequesterists believe it's Indra's Arsehole,' said Two Blade. 'They might object to your-'

'Sure I could splat you into jammy oblivion but that would be uncharitable. In any case the law's the law. Without rules the whole system comes unstrung. Whatever you two divvies believe, I summoned you here, not t'other way round. The urinary incident was mere bamboozling happenstance.'

I ground my teeth. 'You taking the piss, buddy?'

'You're by no means obliged to listen to my offer ' just make the exit passes and you're out of here.'

'Sweet!' Two Blade gushed. He dabbled his fingers in the swimmy air before him then with a pop irised through an aperture in Underspace.

'Goody gumdrops,' said Brahmini. 'Now maybe at last we can talk Turkistan.'

'I thought that's what we'd been doing.'

'Very shrewd, comrade. Very shrewd.'

'Cut to the cheese, Jones. Years of necking uppers have left me with the attention span of a¦' and I broke off to watch a mosquito turning reckless loops in the faux noonlight. It buzzed like an electrical fault. 'What the Jenkins is an insect doing in your dreamworld?'

Brahmini frowned. 'Not my doing. You must have carried him here trapped amongst your filthy rags. That's just dandy. Without ecology, a food chain or proper logic constraints it'll probably evolve into some vengeful deity come teatime.'

I was composing a list of dog breeds that rhyme with foodstuffs. 'Say what?'

'How does a fellow taunt those duff lugs of yours into operating?' growled Brahmini.

'Ah ' wait, wait. I know this one. I'm a man of simple needs: facts, commands or a dry place to die.'

'Patience comes to those who wait.' Brahmini's jaw ganglia swayed like seaweed. 'There is a certain item in the vault,' he pressed his thumbs and forefingers together so they described a rectangle, 'about yay big and grey. Cuboid. In layman's terms, a box.'

'A box?'

'A box.' He dragged a digit across the desk, leaving a smoky trail. 'I'd very much like you to retrieve it for me.'

I went through the motions of weighing up the half-daemon's proposal, rubbing my chin, holding both palms out like scales, muttering frantic advice to myself with eyelids scrunched.

'So, extrapolating, let's say I agree, you allow me to depart with my face intact, then safe back in Maranaloka I yell bollocks to your hokey scheme and toddle off to do my own thing with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. I don't get it. How d'you intend to enforce this fiat, Jones? Or are you begging?'

'It's neither a demand nor a plea. I'm trying to broker an exchange.'

'Exchange?' I felt horny again.

'Yup. I have something you want, Solicitor.'

I stewed wordlessly beneath my rags for a good ten minutes, feigning insouciance. Finally I accepted the bait.

'What you got?'

Brahmini opened a drawer in the escritoire. After riffling through a heap of yellowed papers he slapped a document onto the desk. His eyeballs spun, clunking home like wallsafe drums on a duo of irisless pupils that looked pilfered from some unfortunate librarian.

'Hmm¦ quite so.' He adjusted his spectacles. 'I may be quasi-real but I keep impeccable files.' Brahmini Jones was suddenly wearing a bowler hat. I felt compelled to match his headwear but the closest I had was an old saucepan blackened with age. I donned it without comment, hoping against hope that Brahmini would be distracted by the mosquito, which had grown to the size of a housecat and now sat in the corner thrumming with green light. To my chagrin, he looked straight up and at me. 'Fabulous headwear. Now, let's see. Yes, here you are. Known as the Chief, correct?'

'It was the Chef for a while but I changed it back after perfect strangers started pelting me with glassware and fire ants.'

'Momentarily gratifying to hear the citizenry is not completely bereft of morals. Now, about your problem.'

'Problem?' I echoed.

He tapped his strange noggin conspiratorially.

'Ohh,' I said. 'That problem.'

'The previous occupant ' am I right?'

I nodded glumly.

'I am a specialist at dealing with¦ unwanted guests, shall we say? No. No, we shan't. Look, I know you're the product of a botched possession. Hence amnesia, confusion, hallucinations... a sudden unexplained fondness for the type of aphorism that helps no one.'

'Like a talking spoon, a maxim is ideal for enthralling both the very stupid and the very clever.'

'You may be a combination wastrel, ex-Chef and git, but I can help you.'

'Oh?'

'Certainly!' Brahmini leant forward with vast eagerness. 'Let me sketch out the lay of the landing craft.'

But as the Fleshbroker talked his words became a lurid reservoir purling through my skull. I began to dream, and in my dream two daemons played chess.