A Blink of the Screen

and turn around slowly, as though on castors.
    Erdan had mastered shopping trolleys. Of course, he was really quite bright. He’d worked out the Maze of the Mad God in a matter of hours, after all, so a wire box on wheels was a doddle.
    He’d even come to terms with the freezer cabinets. Of course, Dogger thought.
Erdan and the Top of the World
, Chapter Four: he’d survived on 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth, fortuitously discovered in the frozen tundra. Dogger had actually done some research about that. It had told him it wasn’t in fact possible, but what the hell. As far as Erdan was concerned, the wizard Tesco had simply prepared these mammoths in handy portion packs.
    ‘I watch everyone,’ said Erdan proudly. ‘I like being dead.’
    Dogger crept up to the trolley. ‘But it’s not yours!’
    Erdan looked puzzled.
    ‘It is now,’ he said. ‘I took it. Much easy. No fighting. I have drink, I have meat, I have My-Name-Is-TRACEY-How-May-I-Help-You, I have small nuts in bag.’
    Dogger pulled aside most of a cow in small polystyrene boxes and Tracey’s mad, terrified eyes looked up at him from the depths of the trolley. She extended a sticker gun in both hands, like Dirty Harry about to have his day made, and priced his nose at 98p a lb.
    ‘Soap,’ said Dogger. ‘It’s called soap. Not like
Neighbours
, this one is useful. You wash with it.’ He sighed. ‘Vigorous movements of the wet flannel over parts of your body,’ he went on. ‘It’s a novel idea, I know.
    ‘And this is the bath,’ he added. ‘And this is the sink. And this is called a lavatory. I explained about it before.’
    ‘It is smaller than the bath,’ Erdan complained mildly.
    ‘Yes. Nevertheless. And these are towels, to dry you. And this is a toothbrush, and this is a razor.’ He hesitated. ‘You remember,’ he said, ‘when I put you in the seraglio of the Emir of the White Mountain? I’m pretty certain you had a wash and shave then. This is just like that.’
    ‘Where are the houris?’
    ‘There are no houris. You have to do it yourself.’
    A train screamed past, rattling the scrubbing brush into the washbasin. Erdan growled.
    ‘It’s just a train,’ said Dogger. ‘A box to travel in. It won’t hurt you. Just don’t try to kill one.’
    Ten minutes later Dogger sat listening to Erdan singing, although that in itself wasn’t the problem; it was a sound you could imagine floating across sunset taiga. Water dripped off the light fitting, but that wasn’t the problem.
    The problem was Nicky. It usually was. He was going to meet her after work at the House of Tofu. He was horribly afraid that Erdan would come with him. This was not likely to be good news. His stock with Nicky was bumping on the bottom even before last night, owing to an ill-chosen remark about black stockings last week, when he was still on probation for what he’d said ought to be done with mime-artists. Nicky liked New Men, although the term was probably out of date now. Jesus, he’d taken the
Guardian
to keep up with her and got another black mark when he said its children’s page read exactly like someone would write if they set out to do a spoof
Guardian
children’s page … Erdan wasn’t a New Man. She was bound to notice him. She had a sort of radar for things like that.
    He had to find a way to send him back.
    ‘I want to drink your blood,’ said Skung, from behind the sofa.
    ‘Oh, shut up.’
    He tried some positive thinking again.
    It is absolutely impossible that a fictional character I created is having a bath upstairs. It’s hallucinations, caused by overwork. Of course I don’t feel mad, but I wouldn’t, would I? He’s … he’s a projection. That’s right. I’ve, I’ve been going through a bad patch lately, basically since I was about ten, and Erdan is just a projection of the sort of macho thingy I secretly want to be. Nicky said I wrote the books because of that. She said I can’t cope with the real world, so I turned all the problems into monsters and invented a character that could handle them. Erdan is how I cope with the world. I never realized it myself. So all I need do is be positive, and he won’t exist.
    He eyed the pile of manuscript on the table.
    I wonder if Conan Doyle had this sort of problem? Perhaps he was just sitting down to tea when Sherlock Holmes knocked at the door, still dripping wet from the Richtofen Falls or whatever, and then started hanging around the house making clever remarks