Carpet Diem Read online

  Carpet Diem

  or

  How to Save the World by Accident

  By

  Justin Lee Anderson

  * Cover art by Martin Lennon

  A Wild Wolf Publication

  Published by Wild Wolf Publishing in 2015

  Copyright © 2015 Justin Lee Anderson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed by a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  First print

  All Characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  E-BOOK EDITION

  www.wildwolfpublishing.com

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal reading only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the law.

  For Juliet, Kieran, Nick, Adrienne, Grace and Jamie, who inspire me every day.

  There are a huge number of people who’ve contributed in some way to making this book happen: friends and family who have been unwaveringly supportive and patient; writers who’ve offered helpful advice and constructive opinions. But a number need specific thanks for really going out of their way in one way or another.

  Lots of people have been kind enough to read full drafts of the book at different stages, and their feedback has directly contributed to the final story. In no particular order, thank you Kim Curran, Steve Rapaport, Hannah O’Reilly, Keith Shaw, Mandy Ward, Elizabeth Bank, Cat Macdonald-Home, Simon Hemmings, Jess Naylor, Avril Hofman and Jaqueline Wheddon. I think I’ve remembered everyone, but if I’ve missed anyone I’m deeply sorry.

  One person not only read an early draft and gave me great feedback, he also created the beautiful artwork for my cover. Martin Lennon, you are an amazing talent and a good friend.Thank you.

  Ross Garner was the last reader and it was his edits and observations that finally got me to a finished product I was proud of. Thank you.

  Poppet’s unwavering support, encouragement, patience and tolerance were all invaluable and, without her, there’s a good chance I’d still have a work in progress, not a published book. Thank you.

  Of course, without Rod Glenn and Wild Wolf Publishing, I’d literally still be unpublished. Thanks for your faith and for taking a gamble on me.

  And finally, the person who has supported me for years, made sacrifices to give me time to write and edit, read the book multiple times and believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. To my wonderful wife, Juliet, without whom this book simply would not exist. Thank you.

  Justin

  Fifteen years ago

  Harriet woke on the floor; wet, confused and reeking of whisky. This was not unusual.

  She wiggled her fingers and toes. They all seemed to be there. With a deep breath, she raised her head off the floor.

  Ouch.

  Carefully, she rolled onto her side to look around. The gentle crunch of shattered glass made her stop. The off license sparkled under a layer of the stuff. Rivulets of booze ran from the shelves, escaping shattered bottles to pool on the floor.

  Sirens.

  Harriet pressed herself up onto her elbows.

  No glass in the window frame. That explained the floor.

  Something was burning. Something big.

  She grasped the counter, grunting with the effort of pulling herself up. Fragments of glass rained musically onto the floor. From the new angle, Harriet could see that the wet patch on her stomach was the Lagavulin she had been about to buy. She only briefly considered sucking it.

  Her head pounded as her heart forced blood upwards; eyes black, ears squealing in protest. She waited, head hanging. After a moment, black turned to red and the world returned.

  There was no sign of the assistant who’d been serving her.

  She hobbled to the window. Her balance was less than perfect anyway, and the floor was slick as fresh ice. And her back hurt. A lot.

  At least six fire engines across the road.

  Blinking, she leaned against the door frame. The air reeked of acrid smoke and this wasn’t the only building that had lost windows. Outside, scattered pockets of hushed witnesses held each other and stared at the chaos across the road.

  Across the road.

  The hotel restaurant.

  The building where she had left her entire family yawned a gaping wound of flame, breathing thick black smoke into the night.

  Oh, Hell.

  Harriet lifted the nearest intact bottle - Malibu, more’s the torture - and choked down a glug. She coughed so hard it almost came straight back up. Instead, she snorted black mucus over her hand.

  Mindlessly wiping it on her trousers, Harriet sat on the destroyed window display.

  Faced with the fact that the she was probably the only surviving member of her family, and that she had been perilously close to joining them all in the choir immortal, Harriet muttered the only phrase that accurately reflected the gravity of the situation:

  “Fuck me ragged.”

  ----

  Now

  Simon is falling.

  This is not in the plan.

  Of all the things he had expected to be doing this week, falling off a cliff was low on the list.

  Though, to be precise, he isn’t exactly falling off a cliff - he’s falling beside one. He hadn’t been on it to begin with - he’d been above it, and then been dropped. Quite unreasonably. In fact, the whole situation was unreasonable. What had he done to deserve a smashy death on huge, slimy rocks?

  Still. It could be worse.

  He could have been burned alive in his own living room, or had his head lopped off. At least he’s still alive.

  Sighing, Simon resigns himself to his helplessness and waits patiently for a sudden and messy stop - or for someone to catch him.

  At what point should he have said ‘no’? This afternoon? Yesterday? Tuesday?

  There is no escaping it; the answer is clear. Simon had made one fundamental mistake a week ago, whence all of the ensuing tortures, misfortunes and calamities had emanated.

  He should never have answered the bloody door.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A week ago

  Simon Debovar had come to a conclusion: he hated other people. Not any specific other people; just everyone who wasn’t him.

  He hated their demands on his time. He hated how they made him wait behind them in queues; got in his way on the street; filled up the bus before he could get on it; asked him questions and then expected answers. But most of all, he hated how they smelled: sweaty and sweet and spicy.

  Simon Debovar had two baths a day and never smelled of anything but clean, and that’s exactly how everyone else should smell, in his opinion. Anything else was inconsiderate. And lazy. Most inconsiderate people were lazy and most lazy people were inconsiderate, in Simon’s experience. And most people were one or the other. Usually both.

  Having given up hope of finding a quiet corner of Edinburgh which he could have entirely to himself, Simon had decided to lock out the rest of the world and create his own kingdom: the Royal Burgh of 42 Queen’s Drive (“just past the Post Office with the two oaks outside, if you hit the Shell garage you’ve gone too far”, as it was known to the local Pizza, Chinese, Indian and Thai restaurants).

  For thirteen years, Simon ha
d lived a hermit’s life in the middle of one of Scotland’s busiest, most throbbing metropolises. Of course, he had to have some communication with the outside world, but he kept it to a minimum. When delivery drivers or repairmen necessarily came round, he would hide upstairs and shout directions. Had any of them ever challenged him as to why he remained a floor above, he was prepared to feign illness and/or injury as an excuse. In fact, he enjoyed dreaming up a new ailment each time such a visit was expected: “Today I shall have a broken toe, caused when I dropped a small antique clock in the shape of an elephant on it whilst visiting my Auntie Agnes.” He hadn’t dropped his Auntie Agnes’ clock, of course. He didn’t have an Auntie Agnes.

  His living family consisted of, to his knowledge, a distant cousin called George, who’d married an Australian and moved to Switzerland (why an Australian would want to live in Switzerland bewildered Simon, sometimes keeping him awake at night wondering what Switzerland might have that Australia lacked), another called Sabrina, a lesbian who lived in New York, and Great Aunt Harriet, who, despite seeing all her peers and most of the generations after her pass on, had stubbornly refused to shuffle off her mortal coil.

  Fifteen years ago, the rest of Simon’s family had been killed in a tragic, pudding-related accident.

  A huge family reunion had been organised for the Debovar clan. Simon’s mother came from an unusually small Irish Catholic family, so they had been invited, too. The meal had been a huge success and everyone was just about drunk enough to throw themselves onto the dance floor when dessert was served.

  Tragically, the chef had overloaded the flambés with alcohol at Harriet’s insistence. When he set the first one alight, the fumes in the air went up like the Hindenburg.

  Luckily for them, Sabrina and George were outside, in the back of George’s car, being seventeen. George was a second cousin once removed on Simon’s father’s side, while Sabrina was a great niece to Simon’s mother’s mother – or something. Suffice to say that, had they not been interrupted by the explosion and gone on to procreate, the fruit of their union would not have had to worry about its eyes being overly close together. George had later confessed to Simon, at one of the funerals (he couldn’t remember which), that it would have been Sabrina’s first time with a boy, and that they had been at a fairly crucial stage when the building exploded.

  Simon had wondered whether it was psychologically significant that an Irish Catholic girl had turned out a lesbian after her entire family was blown to pieces the first time she touched a penis.

  George and Sabrina had been saved by their rampaging hormones. Simon found that oddly romantic. But then, Simon found a lot of things odd.

  Harriet, on the other hand, had fancied a whisky with her dessert. When the waiter offered her a choice of what she called “cheap, dirty water”, she had barged out of the hotel and across the road to the off license for a bottle of Lagavulin. She had barely put her purse away when the fireball burst, shattering both the window of the shop and her newly purchased bottle. It took a protracted letter writing campaign, but Harriet had eventually managed to make the chain’s head office accept that, while she had paid for the bottle, having not yet picked it up she had not, in fact, taken ownership of it and that, as such, they were obliged to send her a replacement. They eventually sent her a case, just to make her stop.

  Harriet had been saved by her refusal to drink cheap whisky and her determination not to go without it. Or, as she liked to describe it, by her high standards and a steadfast refusal to compromise.

  Simon had stayed home to watch Friends. He didn’t like crowds. In the end, it had turned out to be a flashback episode, so he almost wished he’d gone, just for the hell of it.

  Until the police arrived.

  He sometimes wondered whether the officers had stood outside debating how to break the news to him.

  “Son, we’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is: Christmas will be cheap this year…”

  Fortunately for Simon, his mother’s brief resuscitation in the ambulance had made her officially the last to die, helpfully leaving him as the main heir to most of the wills, including his inexplicably wealthy Uncle Marvin. Thus, Simon hadn’t had to work a day since. He largely survived on interest from the stupidly large sum of money in his account, and if he ever ran a little low, he only needed to sell one of the hideous ‘artefacts’ Marvin had ‘collected’ throughout his ‘archaeological’ career. (Whenever Simon’s father had discussed his brother, there was always a proliferation of implied quotation marks left dangling in the air.)

  George, Sabrina and Harriet were the only people Simon had any sort of normal contact with, and it was mainly to ensure the safe passage of regular payments he had promised them all after The Explosion. It only seemed fair that, with only the four of them left, he should share the wealth. Without the need to earn money, Sabrina had opted for life as a poet. Harriet had retired a few years before The Explosion, so only George had decided on a traditional career - as a lawyer. He had once tried to explain to Simon that he just couldn’t accept not earning his own keep, even if his salary was effectively just a top up on the significant monthly allowance Simon paid him. Simon couldn’t understand why anyone would choose an office over the comfort of their own living room, but there were a lot of things about people that Simon didn’t understand.

  He was probably closest to understanding Harriet. His great aunt had a unique vision of the world. She imagined herself much like Jimmy Stewart in her favourite movie, Harvey - bumbling around the screen effortlessly while chaos cavorted around him. In reality, she bumbled around chaotically while the world occasionally stopped to scratch its head in bemusement. Sometimes, it got a black eye for its trouble.

  Of all the people in the world Simon almost liked, he almost liked Harriet the most.

  Simon kept the necessity for anyone other than himself to be in the house to an absolute minimum. Food shopping had initially been a problem. To begin with, he had paid a local child to get some groceries for him once a week. He would use the same child for a few years at a time, until they became curious beyond his tolerance. When Tesco announced home shopping over the internet, Simon threw himself a small party with a bag of 50 mini sausage rolls and a bottle of Dr Pepper.

  Then he bought a computer. By phone.

  During these 13 years, Simon became something of a mythical figure amongst his neighbours. Nicknamed “Herman”, after Herman’s Hermits, they saw him as a comical, disgruntled little gnome. Rumours spread that he had a rare skin disease, which prevented him from coming out into the sunlight. Others said that he was a vampire and, thanks to the imagination of 8-year-old Mikey McCormack, that he was half goat and didn’t want anyone to see his hooves. The neighbourhood children could sometimes be heard taunting each other with cries of “Herman’s going to get you,” or “You’re going to be goat food”.

  Suffice to say, Simon Debovar was not about to appear on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, unless the FBI actually wanted a slightly tubby, greying man with a penchant for Eggs Benedict and an allergy to other people.

  Incidentally, Simon did suspect Harriet might be the ‘Mozzarella Mugger’ who’d been terrorising the suburbs of Melton Mowbray this last year. Apparently, there had been a rash of pensioners knocked unconscious by a sharp blow to the back of the head with a blunt object - possibly an umbrella or walking stick - who later woke up to find their noses stuffed full of Italian cheese. Harriet seemed a likely candidate. She lived in Melton Mowbray, owned both an umbrella and a walking stick and abhorred old people, since they reminded her that she, herself, was old. There was also the fact that she constantly referred to her peers as “stinking old cheesebags” and had vowed one day to make them all suffer as she did. Simon wasn’t sure how seriously she meant that, but she was almost as committed to the cause of antisocialism as he was, and he respected her geriatric nod in his direction. Were she slightly more antisocial, Simon might even ask her round for dinner. Of course, he wouldn�
�t, because she might actually come, and then he’d have to buy a load of new stuff: another plate, another fork, another knife - the things people selfishly expected a person to own purely for times when they came to visit.

  Simon secretly hoped Harriet was the Mozzarella Mugger of Melton Mowbray because he was a big fan of alliteration. He respected her choice of cheese because of this. Ideally, she probably would have gone for a more pungent nose filling, but she’d have had to move and resort to murder to make the “Camembert Killer of Cambridge” work, and even Simon agreed that was extreme.

  Besides, people only smelled worse after they died.

  It was not so much a surprise, then, as cause for serious alarm when Simon was awoken from his mid-afternoon siesta (as opposed to his mid-morning, mid-evening and mid-bath siestas) by what seemed for all intents and purposes to be the ringing of his doorbell.

  He sat bolt upright in bed, shook his head in an attempt to inject some clarity into his still dozy brain, yawned and stretched.

  Of course he hadn’t heard the doorbell.

  The doorbell didn’t work. Simon had it disconnected ten years ago as a birthday present to himself. (He’d enjoyed awarding himself the ‘no-bell’ prize and briefly lamented having nobody with whom to share the joke.)

  Thus, having logically decided the noise that had awoken him was nothing more than a lingering dream, Simon swung his feet out from under the covers, stood up to his full 5 foot 9 inches and stretched for the ceiling.

  He nearly threw out a vertebra when the doorbell rang again.

  There was no denying it this time - it was definitely the doorbell. Could doorbells repair themselves? He really had no idea how they worked.