The Devil You Know

IT WAS A FRIDAY, RICH SAID, AND IT WAS ALREADY a quarter to six. His hours were from eight-thirty to five, and he didn’t get any overtime, but it was nothing special for him to be working late. Sometimes you just had a job to finish, and if you went home before it was done, then something you’d spent days or weeks putting together might fall through. In this case, he was finding and retrieving a whole stack of maps and plans on London’s hidden waterways for a group of primary-school kids who were going to be coming in on the following Monday.

“That’s part of business as usual, is it?” I asked. Just checking.

“Oh Jesus, yeah. We’re a public facility, don’t forget. Not many people wander in here off the street, but one of our official targets is throughput. We’ve got to make sure that the archive gets used by at least ten thousand people this year. And next year it’s twelve thousand, and so on. We’ve got two classrooms and an open-access library up on the third floor.”

“But taking the sessions is Jon Tiler’s job, not yours? I mean, he’s the teacher.”

“Interpretation officer. Yeah, too right—I wouldn’t take that job on for a big clock. But London rivers are one of my specialties, so I ended up doing some of the prep for this one. And there was a particular map that had it all—all the original tributaries superimposed on a surface map of the city. Only it was splitting right down the middle, on one of the folds, and I could see what was going to happen if Jon used it in that state. So I decided to fix it. I got sidetracked.

“Cheryl was up there, too, finishing off some bits and pieces of her own before the weekend. Alice was going over the next week’s schedules with Jon, and Faz—Farhat, I mean; she’s a part-timer—was doing some typing for Jon off in the corner. A worksheet or something.

“And I was more or less done. I mean, I’d found all the bits and pieces I’d set out to find, and all I had to do with the map was put a patch in it. It sounds dodgy, but that’s how we deal with splits and tears, unless the original is too precious to mess with. We paste in new material—unbleached Japanese paper and pH-neutral paste—and stain it the right color so it doesn’t look like a pig’s breakfast. I was cutting my patch to size. We’re meant to tear rather than cut, but I usually cut and then fray the edges with the edge of a scissor blade. Anyway, that’s where I’d got to.”

Rich took a long swig on the Lucozade bottle, wiped his mouth.

“And then the lights flickered. Just for a second. Alice said something about brownouts, and Jon turned that into a joke—I can’t remember what, just something crude. But then it happened again, and suddenly it was like we were at a disco and they’d turned on the strobes. I stood up—I was going to walk over and turn the lights on and off a few times, see if that did the trick.

“But I never got there. Something pushed me back down into the chair. There was a bang—like something heavy landing on the table in front of me—and the floor shook. The map, the stain pots, all the stuff I was using, it just went flying into the air. The lights went out altogether, then a second later they came back on again. And the scissors”—he lifted a hand to touch the bandage on his cheek—“they sort of twisted around in my hand. I could see it happening, but I couldn’t stop it. It hurt like a bastard, too. I managed to slip my finger out of the grip, but my thumb was still trapped, all twisted around.

“I was shit-scared, mate, I don’t mind saying. I shouted out something. ‘Fuck,’ or something like that. ‘Look what’s fucking happening.’ Cheryl came running over to help me, but the scissor blades were pulling me around by my own thumb—up and down and all over the place. I must have looked like Peter Sellers in that movie where he’s trying not to do a Nazi salute.

“The scissors were hacking at my body and my face, and the only way I could protect myself was to turn with them and keep ducking out of the way. I barged into Cheryl, and she went over on the floor. Christ knows where Jon and Alice were. Farhat just kept screaming and screaming, which was a sod of a lot of use. Then I got the idea of banging my hand against the edge of the desk. It took about five or six goes, but in the end I got my thumb free, and the scissors just fell to the floor. Cheryl was thinking more clearly than I was—she trapped them with her foot in case they got up again.

“I looked across at Cheryl. I was going to say something like, ‘Bloody hell, that was intense.’ But then I saw she was looking at my face, so I put my hand up and touched my cheek. And it was wet. There was blood pouring down out of this cut. Spattering all over the worksheet and the desk, all over everything.