Good Omens

“No sugar for me, please,” said Madame Tracy.

She lined up the cups on the table in front of her, and took a long sip from the tea-with-sugar.

“Now,” she said, in a voice that anyone who knew her would have recognized as her own, although they might not have recognized her tone of voice, which was cold with rage. “Suppose you tell me what this is about. And it had better be good.”

A LORRY HAD SHED its load all over the M6. According to its manifest the lorry had been filled with sheets of corrugated iron, although the two police patrolmen were having difficulty in accepting this.

“So what I want to know is, where did all the fish come from?” asked the sergeant.

“I told you. They fell from the sky. One minute I’m driving along at sixty, next second, whap! a twelve-pound salmon smashes through the windscreen. So I pulls the wheel over, and I skidded on that,” he pointed to the remains of a hammerhead shark under the lorry, “and ran into that.” That was a thirty-foot-high heap of fish, of different shapes and sizes.

“Have you been drinking, sir?” asked the sergeant, less than hopefully.

“Course I haven’t been drinking, you great wazzock. You can see the fish, can’t you?”

On the top of the pile a rather large octopus waved a languid tentacle at them. The sergeant resisted the temptation to wave back.

The police constable was leaning into the police car, talking on the radio. “. . . corrugated iro

n and fish, blocking off the southbound M6 about half a mile north of junction ten. We’re going to have to close off the whole southbound carriageway. Yeah.”

The rain redoubled. A small trout, which had miraculously survived the fall, gamely began to swim toward Birmingham.

“THAT WAS WONDERFUL,” SAID NEWT.

“Good,” said Anathema. “The earth moved for everybody.” She got up off the floor, leaving her clothes scattered across the carpet, and went into the bathroom.

Newt raised his voice. “I mean, it was really wonderful. Really really wonderful. I always hoped it was going to be, and it was.”

There was the sound of running water.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Taking a shower.”

“Ah.” He wondered vaguely if everyone had to shower afterwards, or if it was just women. And he had a suspicion that bidets came into it somewhere.

“Tell you what,” said Newt, as Anathema came out of the bathroom swathed in a fluffy pink towel. “We could do it again.”

“Nope,” she said, “not now.” She finished drying herself, and started picking up clothes from the floor, and, unself-consciously, pulling them on. Newt, a man who was prepared to wait half an hour for a free changing cubicle at the swimming baths, rather than face the possibility of having to disrobe in front of another human being, found himself vaguely shocked, and deeply thrilled.

Bits of her kept appearing and disappearing, like a conjurer’s hands; Newt kept trying to count her nipples and failing, although he didn’t mind.

“Why not?” said Newt. He was about to point out that it might not take long, but an inner voice counseled him against it. He was growing up quite quickly in a short time.

Anathema shrugged, not an easy move when you’re pulling on a sensible black skirt. “She said we only did it this once.”

Newt opened his mouth two or three times, then said, “She didn’t. She bloody didn’t. She couldn’t predict that. I don’t believe it.”

Anathema, fully dressed, walked over to her card index, pulled one out, and passed it to him.

Newt read it and blushed and gave it back, tight-lipped.

It wasn’t simply the fact that Agnes had known, and had expressed herself in the most transparent of codes. It was that, down the ages, various Devices had scrawled encouraging little comments in the margin.

She passed him the damp towel. “Here,” she said. “Hurry up. I’ve got to make the sandwiches, and we’ve got to get ready.”

He looked at the towel. “What’s this for?”