My Hero by Tom Holt Page B

‘You’re going to say you’re the writer and I’m just a poor bloody character, so why don’t I do like I’m damned well told.’
    â€˜No,’ Jane said. ‘Actually, I wasn’t going to say anything of the sort.’
    â€˜Weren’t you? Going to rely on innuendo and the unspoken threat, were you?’
    â€˜I was going to say,’ Jane went on, ‘that that wasn’t all.’
    â€˜You mean there’s more?’
    â€˜Yes.’

    â€˜Dear God,’ Regalian exclaimed. ‘Don’t you think there’s a risk of you wearing your imagination out if you carry on like this? I mean, you need it for work.’
    â€˜ Look . . .’
    â€˜Go on.’ Regalian propped his feet on the table and unwrapped a toffee. ‘I’m listening.’

CHAPTER FOUR

    H aving extracted from Jane her solemn promise of assistance and ten pounds in change, Hamlet went in search of something to keep body and soul together. After weighing up the available alternatives, he decided on sellotape.
    They were due to meet again at four in Cheadle, under the station clock. Until then, all he had to do was stay out of trouble and try not to shed too many component parts. Easy enough, he reckoned, for someone who had spent the last four hundred years wrestling with insoluble moral dilemmas and stabbing people. A change is, after all, as good as a rest.
    He found a public lavatory with an empty booth, and sat for ten minutes or so taping himself up, until he resembled a transparent mummy or, if you prefer, a sausage in a skin. Provided that he avoided sudden movements and it didn’t rain, he was all right for the time being.
    He left the lavatory and strolled down the street. Up till now he had been too preoccupied with his problems to pay much attention to his surroundings, and it suddenly hit him that here he was, in Real Life.

    Gosh.
    Oh brave new world, that has such people in it. Hitherto, he had spent his life in the company of characters. Now characters aren’t like people in many respects, and appearance is one of them. Characters, like film stars, are invariably strikingly handsome, meltingly beautiful, or at the very least charmingly ugly. You don’t tend to get many ordinary-looking characters. Even First Citizen and A Courtier tend to look as if they’ve just stepped out of an underwear advertisement. It was only when passers-by started giving him odd looks and crossing the street that he realised that he was staring.
    Another thing that struck him forcibly was the total aimlessness of everything they did. Where he came from, all the world was a stage and all the men and women merely players; they had their exits and their entrances, and everything they did or said either advanced the plot, developed character or filled in the gaps with jokes. It meant that life was initially hectic and, once you’d been in the play a few times, mind-gnawingly repetitive. Out here, there was absolutely no way of knowing what anybody was going to do next. It was intoxicating.
    â€˜God,’ he said aloud (he was, after all, Hamlet, and old habits die hard), ‘this is absolutely amazing! I want to stay here for ever and ever.’
    He turned, and smiled winningly at a small child, who was prodding its mother in the ribs and drawing her attention to the fact that there was a man over there with a paper bag over his head. Because of the bag, the smile didn’t achieve much, and in any event the mother whisked the child away with the practised speed of a waiter on piecework; but Hamlet didn’t mind. It was all really fun . It was so much nicer than work.
    Work, he thought. Let’s see, it’s half past three. Matinée time. Right now, I’d be starting that dismal bloody scene
with the Players. Bugger that for a game of soldiers.
    (And just then, at the theatre in Stratford on Avon, a very bemused actor playing Polonius was explaining to the