The next morning dawned bright and clear. The Pan donned his Mervinette disguise and sold the ring. Then he returned home to the Parrot to change – entering the usual way, up the drainpipe. Disguise jettisoned, he left, dressed as himself and took the money to Gerry the Work Experience Creature at Snurd and they spent the morning discussing the finishing touches to be made to his own set of wheels. He returned to the Parrot at lunchtime with a bunch of flowers he’d stolen for Gladys and Ada and went to his room.
He had slept little the previous night, but he had done a lot of thinking, partly about his enigmatic conversation with Ada and partly about the things he had been given by Big Merv. He opened the bag Harry had removed from the last safety deposit box and spread the contents across his bed. It was odd stuff. He opened the sewing kit. First he examined the scissors. The Pan knew good craftsmanship when he saw it. This was the best, which was only to be expected if his theory as to the previous owner’s identity was correct. The Nimmists were never ones to stint when it came to commissioning works of art. In many respects the Nimmists were never ones to stint full stop. Perhaps that was where the K’Barthans had earned their reputation of being happy-go-lucky. The scissors were gold, intricately patterned and too distinctive to be sellable. On to the needles and bobbins then. The needles were newer, ordinary and therefore worth very little, the bobbins were as problematic as the scissors and the thimble ... the thimble. He held it up to the light and turned it over and over in his hands.
“Oh man,” he said and whistled.
It had a border depicting tiny scenes that he recognised from his brief Nimmist education as episodes from the life of Arnold, The Prophet. It was beautiful, exquisite and would be even more impossible to sell than the scissors. He could have it melted down he supposed ... no he couldn’t. Had he finished his education, he’d planned, against his father’s wishes, to go to Art School. He would starve before he trashed anything so beautifully made.
“This is a serious piece of kit,” he told himself.
Oooh. There was something stuffed into it. Interesting.
A piece of paper. He took it out and unfolded it. It was old and yellowed and covered in mathematical symbols. Adding up had never been The Pan’s forte, let alone reading equations, and he wished he’d paid more attention in his maths classes at school. There were geometric drawings, too and he wondered what they were all for.
He folded up the paper but when he came to put it back in the thimble he noticed something very strange. A faint glow appeared to be coming from inside. He turned it over, puzzled. The top was made of the same gold as the sides but when he held it open-end up there was a small dot of light in the bottom as if he was looking towards the end of a tunnel. He held it up to his eye and almost dropped it in astonishment.
He could see through it, but the view was not his room. Instead he saw the sea bathed in sunlight, gulls circling and small ships dancing on the waves. The picture was so bewitchingly realistic he could almost feel the wind on his face. It made him intensely homesick. He thought about the seaside in Hamgee, about the bar where he and his brother had gone to hang around and chat up girls. He thought about his sister, who had usually spent her time warning the other girls about her brothers while allowing their friends to chat her up. She was the middle one of the three, his older brother was a regular Casanova. The Pan was not. There had been girlfriends but nothing like the numbers who had flocked around his big brother.
It wasn’t that girls weren’t attracted to him initially – the difficulties usually began when he spoke.
The Pan wanted a girl he could really talk to but most seemed to find his jokes offensive and anything more than small talk off-putting – and what with all the trouble he got into at school, they tended to regard him as a dangerous freak. He had hoped the problem would go away when he became an adult, but being blacklisted, he’d never had the chance to test the theory.
“It would probably help if you managed to grow up and actually become an adult,” he told himself in his Virtual Father’s voice.
“I am an adult.”
“I was talking about mental maturity.”
“OK, you have me there.”
He didn’t have the energy for a row with his Virtual Father right now and turned his mind to remembering happier days. As he did so, the view through the thimble changed. When he thought about the bar he’d visited in his youth he saw it as he imagined it might be currently and when he thought about his other childhood haunts they also appeared as if in the present, bathed in warm evening sunlight.
“Hmm, showing me what I want to see are you? In that case ...”
He thought about his family but no matter how vividly he tried to imagine his parents or his brother and sister, the thimble produced nothing but a misty grey blur. Perhaps they were dead, or maybe it had been so long since he’d seen them that his subconscious mind – or whatever was feeding the images he could see in the bottom of the thimble – had forgotten what they looked like.
It was time for the pubs to open, so he experimented with a more immediate subject, the saloon bar of the Parrot and Screwdriver. To his surprise, in his thimble’s faintly fish-eye view, none of the regular early evening clientele were there, only a group of Grongles. The inside of the thimble had seemed to be showing his dreams, it must be showing his fears now. He shoved the bag, the thimble and the rest of the strange items it contained in the bottom of the wardrobe and went downstairs.
Seven Grongles looked up sharply as a shifty young man in blue canvas jeans and a loud green and purple paisley silk shirt walked into the deserted bar. Apart from the Grongles it was empty, all other customers having wisely made their excuses and left. Even Humbert, Ada’s foul-mouthed parrot, had been sensible enough to shut up. Any conversation the Grongles had been making died on their lips at the appearance of The Pan. For his part he was in shock. Grongles hardly ever came into the Parrot. He was suddenly afraid it might be all his fault and that while playing with the thimble he had inadvertently imagined them there.
“Ah,” he said.