The Beating of His Wings by Paul Hoffman Page B

you?’ said Vipond.
    IdrisPukke smiled and looked at Conn.
    ‘My dear boy,’ he began, winking at Conn so the others couldn’t see – a sign that he was on his side in conspiring against the other two.
    ‘If he touches me, I’ll cut his bloody head off,’ Conn said, interrupting IdrisPukke’s attempt to handle him.
    IdrisPukke smiled again as the others sighed and grimaced in exasperation.
    ‘You’re not going to cut his head off because you’re not going to let him touch you.’
    ‘And what if he does?’
    ‘You stand up,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘look at him as if you’d seen more lovely things coming out of the back end of a dog and leave the room in silence. You
say
nothing.’
    ‘If that’s the best you can do, don’t let us keep you,’ said Vipond.
    ‘The King is a snob,’ replied IdrisPukke, ‘and, like all snobs, at heart he’s a worshipper. All his life he’s been looking for someone who looks down on him to adore. Conn looks like a young god – a young god with a bloodline that goes back as far as the great freeze. He’s wonderstruck.’
    ‘I can think of another word,’ said Conn.
    ‘Maybe that, too. But he wants you to treat him with contempt. He won’t dare touch you. Every time you look at him – and don’t look at him except once or twice a meeting – you pour every quintilla of your loathing and disgust into it.’
    ‘That won’t be hard.’
    ‘There you are, then.’
    With this unexpected resolution, IdrisPukke chatted away about a dinner he’d been at the previous night and then Arbell eased Conn out of the door and the two brothers were left on their own.
    ‘I thought that went very well.’ It was not IdrisPukke talking in honeyed tones of self-congratulation but Vipond, whose scowl had vanished completely, to be replaced by a look of considerable satisfaction.
    ‘Do you think she caught on?’
    ‘Probably,’ replied Vipond. ‘But she’s a smart little miss. She won’t say anything.’
    ‘You’re wrong, by the way’ said IdrisPukke.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘You said, “Every problem is an opportunity.”’ IdrisPukke walked over to the window to catch the last rays of thesetting sun. ‘What I actually always say is, “Every opportunity is a problem.”’
    Vague Henri was disturbed, but in an unusual a-fish-has-just-fallen-out-of-the-sky-in-front-of-you way. Two days earlier he had reached into his pocket to pay for a pack of cigarillos at Mr Sobranie’s Health Tobacco shop and discovered that his loose change was gone and had been replaced by a carrot. More precisely, a carrot that had been not very skilfully carved into the shape of an erect penis with the word ‘YOU’ cut into the testicles. Eventually he decided that he’d been the victim of some smart alec street lurcher. The question why a skilled thief would steal the loose change in his left pocket but not the wallet in his right, which had nearly thirty dollars in it, he put to the back of his mind. But now the oddly peculiar thing that he had put to the back of his mind couldn’t stay there any longer because it had happened again. This time he had discovered a hard-boiled egg, with the two staring eyes of a village idiot and a mouth with the tongue flapping to one side drawn on the shell. On the reverse of the egg was a statement:
     
    VAGUE HENRI
    TRUE
     
    All through the night Vague Henri turned over in his brain what the significance of the two gibes might be and whether they were a threat or not. Then there was a knock at the door; he answered it, taking the precaution of hiding a long knife behind his back. But his visitor had the sense to stand well back.
    ‘So, it was you?’
    ‘Who else would it be?’ said Kleist. ‘Nobody else knows what a prick you are the way I do.’
    Vague Henri was so pleased to see his old friend that the bollocking that followed for running off on his own when they were in the Scablands lasted barely five minutes before they were sitting down and