In Your Dreams Read Free

Money Fairy had left him a four-figure surprise. She hadn’t. ‘I can do plastic,’ he said. ‘Or,’ he remembered, ‘a company cheque.’ Mr Shumway had let him loose with the firm’s chequebook, on the strict understanding that any misuse thereof would be punished by unspeakable atrocities. ‘Otherwise, I don’t—’
    â€˜Cash,’ the child repeated; and then she caught sight of the JWW chequebook, lying inside Paul’s open wallet. BANK OF THE DEAD , unmissable on the cover. She looked like she had the knack of reading upside down. ‘Or a cheque’ll do fine,’ she said pleasantly.
    â€˜Um,’ Paul replied. It had just occurred to him that, according to Mr Shumway, the term ‘misuse’ specifically included giving JWW cheques to anybody outside The Business. Given who JWW banked with, he could see Mr Shumway’s point. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea. If someone could give me a lift to the nearest cashpoint—’
    â€˜A cheque,’ the girl repeated firmly, ‘will do just fine. We’ve got a stamp,’ she added, making it sound like a threat.
    So Paul wrote her a cheque. The girl waved away the card, then took the cheque in her left hand, produced a cigarette lighter and—
    â€˜And then,’ Paul said, ‘you’ll never guess what she did.’
    Sophie yawned. ‘Set light to it,’ she said, pouring water from the kettle into her hot water bottle.
    Paul looked at her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How did you—?’
    Sophie had joined JWW on the same day as Paul; they’d found out the great secret together, at roughly the same time that they’d discovered that they were, somewhat improbably, in love. But whereas there were still mornings when Paul woke up and assumed his recent memories were the shrapnel from a particularly bizarre dream, Sophie seemed to have adapted remarkably well to the ambient weirdness. She tightened the hottie-bottle stopper and yawned again. ‘Bank of The Dead,’ she said. ‘You don’t know, right?’
    Paul nodded.
    â€˜It’s a Chinese thing originally,’ she said. ‘They believe it’s your duty to provide for your ancestors in the next world by sending them money; you buy Bank of The Dead banknotes with real money, and then you burn them, which credits their account.’
    Paul frowned. ‘Yes, but surely that’s just a—’
    â€˜Tax fiddle, yes,’ Sophie said, her hand in front of her mouth. ‘Other companies bank offshore, but JWW has to go one better.’ She opened the kitchen door. ‘You think that’s strange, you wait till you see what happens when you use a Bank of The Dead cashpoint card in an ordinary machine. Well, I’m going to bed. G’night.’
    â€˜â€™Night, then,’ Paul said. He felt faintly disappointed; not that it was the most grippingly fascinating story ever or anything like that, but . . . Still; on balance, he approved of the way that Sophie could shrug off the bizarre and the disturbing, the way he still couldn’t. A sense of perspective, he supposed you’d call it, a vitally important part of being grown-up and all that stuff he’d never quite been able to master. But so long as she had one, he didn’t have to. That’s partnership for you, the Jack Sprat equilibrium. She had her own special strengths, and he—
    Paul still couldn’t see what the hell Sophie saw in him.
    He caught sight of his reflection in the kitchen window, and found no answers there; tall, thin, unfinished-looking young Englishmen aren’t hard to find, the supply tends to exceed demand, whereas beautiful, intelligent, courageous, resourceful, small thin girls with enormous eyes are a scarce commodity, always highly sought after, even if they do have an unfortunate manner which you can get