Thud! (Discworld 34)

Fun. What is it good for?

It"s not pleasure, joy, delight, enjoyment or glee. It"s a hollow, cruel, vicious little bastard, a word for something sought with an hilarious couple of wobbly antennae on your head and the words "I want It!" on your shirt, and it tends to leave you waking up with your face stuck to the street.

Somehow, Angua had acquired a magenta feather boa. It wasn"t her. It wasn"t anyone. It had just turned up. The sheer fakery of it made her more gloomy. Something was nagging at the back of her mind, and it annoyed her that she didn"t know what it was.

They had ended up in Biers, as she knew they would. It was the undead bar, although it tolerated anyone who wasn"t too normal.

It certainly tolerated Tawneee. She just didn"t get it, did she? The reason why men never talked to her. The trouble was, thought Angua, that Nobby wasn"t actually a bad ... person. As such. As far as she knew, he"d always been faithful to Miss Pushpram, which was to say that when it came to being hit with a fish and then pelted with clams, he never thought of any other girl but her. He actually had quite a romantic soul, but it was encased in what could only be called ... Nobby Nobbs.

Sally had accompanied Tawneee to the Ladies, which always came as a shock to people who hadn"t seen it before. Now Angua was staring at yet another cocktail menu, painted on a board above the bar, in a very shaky script, by Igor. [1]

He"d done his best to flow with the zeitgeist - or would have done if he"d known what the word meant - but had totally failed to grasp the subtleties of the modern cocktail bar, so that the drinks on offer included:

HAVIN YOUR TEEF SMASHED IN BY A BIG STINKIN FIST

HEAD NAILED TO THE DOOR

KICK INNA FORK

LIKE BIG LUMP OF STEEL HAMMER FIN YOUR EARS

NECK BOLT

Actually, the Neck Bolt wasn"t too bad, Angua had to admit.

""scuse me," said Cheery, teetering on a bar stool, "but what was all that about Tawneee? I could see you and Sally nodding to each other!"

"That? Oh, it"s the jerk syndrome: Angua remembered who she was talking to, and added: "Er ... dwarfs probably don"t have that. It means ... sometimes a woman is so beautiful that any man with half a brain isn"t going to think of asking her out, okay? Because it"s obvious that she"s far too grand for the likes of him. Are you with me?"

"I think so."

"Well, that"s Tawneee. And, for the purposes of this explanation, Nobby has not got half a brain. He"s so used to women saying no

[1] Who wasn"t an Igor, but was merely called one. It was best not to have fun with him on this subject, and especially not to ask him to sew your head back on.

when he asks them out that he"s not afraid of being blown out. So he asks her, because he figures, why not? And she, who by now thinks there"s something wrong with her, is so grateful she says okay."

"But she likes him."

"I know. That"s where it all gets strange."

"It"s much simpler for dwarfs," said Cheery.

"I expect it is."

"But probably not as much fun," said Cheery, looking crestfallen.

Tawneee was returning. Angua ordered three Neck Bolts while Cheery hopefully negotiated for a Screaming Orgasm. [1] And then, with occasional assistance from Sally, Angua explained to Tawneee the facts of ... well ... everything.

It took some while. You had to keep changing the shape of sentences to get them to fit into the currently available space in Tawneee"s brain. Angua clung to the idea, though, that the girl couldn"t be that stupid. She worked in a strip club, didn"t she?

"I mean, why do you think men pay to watch you on stage?" she asked.

"Because I"m very good," said Tawneee promptly. "When I was ten I got the dancer of the year award in Miss Deviante"s ballet and tap class."

"Tap-dancing?" said Sally, grinning. "Hey, why don"t you try that on stage?"

Angua closed her mind to the image of Tawneee tap-dancing. The club would probably burn to the ground.