Good Omens

However, if a person just happened to press the EMERGENCY CARGO RELEASE switch on the bridge, the automatic systems would take care of releasing huge quantities of black sludge into the sea, millions of tons of crude oil, with devastating effect on the birds, fish, vegetation, animals, and humans of the region. Of course, there were dozens of fail-safe interlocks and foolproof safety backups but, what the hell, there always were.

Afterwards, there was a huge amount of argument as to exactly whose fault it was. In the end it was left unresolved: the blame was apportioned equally. Neither the captain, the first mate, nor the second mate ever worked again.

For some reason nobody gave much of a thought to Seaman White, who was already halfway to Indonesia on a tramp steamer piled high with rusting metal barrels of a particularly toxic weedkiller.

AND THERE WAS ANOTHER. He was in the square in Kumbolaland. And he was in the restaurants. And he was in the fish, and in the air, and in the barrels of weedkiller. He was on the roads, and in houses, and in palaces, and in hovels.

There was nowhere that he was a stranger, and there was no getting away from him. He was doing what he did best, and what he was doing was what he was.

He was not waiting. He was working.

HARRIET DOWLING returned home with her baby, which, on the advice of Sister Faith Prolix, who was more persuasive than Sister Mary, and with the telephonic agreement of her husband, she had named Warlock.

The Cultural Attaché returned home a week later, and pronounced the baby the spit of his side of the family. He also had his secretary advertise in The Lady for a nanny.

Crowley had seen Mary Poppins on television one Christmas (indeed, behind the scenes, Crowley had had a hand in most television; although it was on the invention of the game show that he truly prided himself). He toyed with the idea of a hurricane as an effective and incredibly stylish way of disposing of the queue of nannies that would certainly form, or possibly stack up in a holding pattern, outside the Cultural Attaché’s Regent’s Park residence.

He contented himself with a wildcat tube strike, and when the day came, only one nanny turned up.

She wore a knit tweed suit and discreet pearl earrings. Something about her might have said nanny, but it said it in an undertone of the sort employed by British butlers in a certain type of American film. It also coughed discreetly and muttered that she could well be the sort of nanny who advertises unspecified but strangely explicit services in certain magazines.

Her flat shoes crunched up the gravel drive, and a gray dog padded silently by her side, white flecks of saliva dripping from its jaw. Its eyes glinted scarlet, and it glanced from side to side hungrily.

She reached the heavy wooden door, smiled to herself, a brief satisfied flicker, and rang the bell. It donged gloomily.

The door was opened by a butler, as they say, of the old school.13

“I am Nanny Ashtoreth,” she told him. “And this,” she continued, while the gray dog at her side eyed the butler carefully, working out, perhaps, where it would bury the bones, “is Rover.”

She left the dog in the garden, and passed her interview with flying colors, and Mrs. Dowling led the nanny to see her new charge.

She smiled unpleasantly. “What a delightful child,” she said. “He’ll be wanting a little tricycle soon.”

By one of those coincidences, another new member of staff arrived the same afternoon. He was the gardener, and as it turned out he was amazingly good at his job. No one quite worked out why this should be the case, since he never seemed to pick up a shovel and made no effort to rid the garden of the sudd

en flocks of birds that filled it and settled all over him at every opportunity. He just sat in the shade while around him the residence gardens bloomed and bloomed.

Warlock used to come down to see him, when he was old enough to toddle and Nanny was doing whatever it was she did on her afternoons off.

“This here’s Brother Slug,” the gardener would tell him, “and this tiny little critter is Sister Potato Weevil. Remember, Warlock, as you walk your way through the highways and byways of life’s rich and fulsome path, to have love and reverence for all living things.”

“Nanny says that wivving fings is fit onwy to be gwound under my heels, Mr. Fwancis,” said little Warlock, stroking Brother Slug, and then wiping his hand conscientiously on his Kermit the Frog overall.

“You don’t listen to that woman,” Francis would say. “You listen to me.”

At night, Nanny Ashtoreth sang nursery rhymes to Warlock.

Oh, the grand old Duke of York

He had Ten Thousand Men

He Marched them Up To The Top of The Hill

And Crushed all the nations of the world and brought them

under the rule of Satan our master.

and