Read Online Falling Sideways by Tom Holt - Free Book Online Page A

bit of trouble with her voice; she spoke like you do when you’ve been to the dentist, and half your face is dead and feels like it’s been blown up with a bicycle pump. But there was enough voice there to give a fairly good idea; lower than he’d expected, and gorgeous  . . .
    â€˜Date,’ she repeated angrily.
    Date. Date. Date , for pity’s sake. Could mean the kind of date you eat; possibly a rather direct way of asking him if he fancied dinner or a movie sometime, but he doubted that. Date. Oh, right, yes, date —
    â€˜It’s, um.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Wednesday, thirteenth of March.’
    She scowled impatiently. ‘Year.’
    â€˜2002.’
    â€˜Wussat?’
    â€˜2002.’
    She paused for a moment, thinking. (He knew the feeling: brain clogged up with little wispy strands of sleep.) Then she grinned. ‘Yippee!’ she said.
    â€˜Yippee?’
    â€˜Good,’ she explained, beaming, and hopped to her feet. She staggered. ‘Much better,’ she added. ‘Gimme.’
    â€˜Gimme?’
    â€˜That.’ She reached out, slightly unsteady on her feet, and grabbed the robe from his hands. ‘Get lost,’ she added.
    â€˜Ah. Right.’
    â€˜Now.’
    â€˜Um. All right, then. I’ll be in the—’
    â€˜ Now .’
    â€˜Right. Sure.’ He turned round (he could feel his face burning, like a bombed oilfield) and strode into the bathroom, straight-legged like John Cleese. He shut the door behind him and leaned against it.
    Huh? he thought.
    Well. From one perspective at least, it had all gone much, much better than he’d dared to expect. From another— He thought about Mr Dean, and Honest John, and Mr Van Oppen. Was it just conceivably possible that someone was taking him for a mug?
    â€˜Hairbrush!’
    He opened the door just a little. ‘Sorry?’
    â€˜ Hairbrush! ’
    A frown folded his face. ‘Sorry,’ he repeated, ‘would you like me to get you a—?’
    â€˜Forget it.’ She wrenched the door from his grip. She was wearing his bathrobe, and a smile you could have poured on strawberries. ‘Bath first. Go away.’
    The door closed, with her on the inside, and once again he heard the sound of whooshing taps, followed by an angel singing:
    â€˜My old man’s a dustman,
    â€˜He wears a dustman’s hat—’
    David nearly fell over. The voice: unmistakable. And, if he wasn’t mistaken, he’d heard that voice in his dreams since he was a kid—
    (No, really . He had this recurring dream where he’d died and gone to heaven, and there was this incredibly lovely angel who just happened to look like the girl in the painting, and she was singing – exactly that voice – and then, just as he realised he wasn’t wearing any trousers, a huge silver trombone snuck up beside him and ate him, whereupon he woke up. A few years ago, when it was really bad, he’d been to see a shrink about it. The shrink had asked him a few questions about his personal life and relationships with women, looked at him in silence for about thirty seconds and advised him to stop drinking strong black coffee last thing at night.)
    She’d known what the light switch was for; and ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’ was an old song, sure, but not that old. Explanations, please? Well, the easiest one was that the lock of hair he’d paid so much money for wasn’t a genuine relic of the early seventeenth century but rather a snipping that some cunning bastard had picked up off a hairdresser’s floor a week ago last Tuesday; in which case, the voice and the total similarity between the clone and the girl in the painting was just a coincidence—
    Yeah, right. It was still a damn’ sight easier to believe than any of the alternative versions—
    The bathroom door opened and she came out, still wearing his robe and now