Little People by Tom Holt Page A

mathematical ability doesn’t necessarily equate with common sense or intelligence. After all, look at you.’
    â€˜Well, quite,’ I replied. ‘Nevertheless, I think that’s what I’ll do.’ I looked away, breaking eye contact. ‘Thanks,’ I said.
    â€˜You’re grudgingly welcome. Thanks for what?’
    I sighed. ‘For listening. For not letting on that you’re trying to humour a lunatic, even if that’s what you’re actually doing. For – well, lots of things, I suppose.’
    â€˜Whatever.’ She opened a book and looked at it. I noticed it was the wrong way up. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’d better get to it, then. As and when I find anything, I’ll tell you straight away.’
    â€˜No, you bloody well won’t,’ she replied. ‘Not if it’s the middle of the night or I’m busy. Next time you see me will do just fine, thank you all the same.’
    So there I was, biro in hand, diary open in front of me, trying to think of something to say.
    Not a wholly unfamiliar sensation, at that. In fact, when I look back it seems to me that I’ve spent a depressingly large proportion of my life doing that sort of thing, starting with Christmas thank-you letters back when I’d only just grasped the concept that ink only came out of one end of the pen, on through hours of hunkering down writing history essays and geography essays and English essays and the like, to the point where my collected works would fill two shelves in the British Museum library and make Dickens look like a minimalist – and every line on every page ground out in spite of a writer’s block you could’ve carved the pyramids from.
    My literary compositions are very much like a ten-year-old Citroen: they’re a pain to get started, and when they stop they stay stopped. Eventually, after ten minutes of staring blankly at the empty page, I’d decided to begin with Dear elf – but that was just plain ridiculous, so I crossed it out and substituted To whom it may concern . Once I’d crossed that out as well, my creative battery was effectively flat, and no amount of scowling at the paper or sighing tragically was going to get me up and running again. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice, so I tore out the page and put down Hello instead.
    Well, quite; but I told myself that there’d be plenty of time to go back and revise later. The main thing was to crack on and get something down, no matter what. How are you? I wrote.
    That more or less drained me for the next hour; in fact, to be honest, I think I might have closed my eyes for a moment or so at some stage, because the next thing I was aware of was as light but insistent tugging on the lobe of my right ear, which had somehow wound up pressed to the desktop. Odd , I thought, and lifted my head. The tugging stopped, which was nice, but now I could hear a tiny voice calling my name, apparently from a long way away – the tennis courts, perhaps, or the cricket pavilion. I frowned as the sleep started to clear off the windscreen of my mind. Why would anybody be out on the playing field at this time of night?
    â€˜I said WAKE UP! ’ yelled the voice, gradually getting louder with each word. ‘Are you deaf or something?’ I looked round, towards the window, which was firmly shut. Weirder and weirder.
    â€˜No, you bloody fool, down HERE! Oh for crying out loud, can’t you – ? ’
    Down? Down where? I glanced down under my desk, behind my chair; nothing. Maybe I was imagining it; in which case –
    â€˜Behind your elbow, bird-brain. No, not that one, the other – ’
    And there it was. There she was. Shorter than the genuine accept-no-substitutes Barbie and with shorter hair and a rather less pronounced bust; wearing, if memory serves, a light green sleeveless cotton blouse and something that was either a fairly short skirt of a fairly