Good Omens

hadn’t ever realized that she’d been an Old Woman, but after some thought she decided that titles like that were all one with the romance and the knitting and the orgasms, and the really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could. She’d always been inclined to dress in black and white. All she needed to do was raise the hemlines, raise the heels, and leave off the wimple.
    It was while leafing through a magazine one day that she learned that, around the country, there was an apparently insatiable demand for commodious buildings in spacious grounds run by people who understood the needs of the business community. The following day she went out and ordered some stationery in the name of the Tadfield Manor Conference and Management Training Center, reasoning that by the time it had been printed she’d know all that was necessary to know about running such places.
    The ads went out the following week.
    It had turned out to be an overwhelming success, because Mary Hodges realized early in her new career as Herself that management training didn’t have to mean sitting people down in front of unreliable slide projectors. Firms expected far more than that these days.
    She provided it.
    CROWLEY SANK DOWN with his back against a statue. Aziraphale had already toppled backward into a rhododendron bush, a dark stain spreading across his coat.
    Crowley felt dampness suffusing his own shirt.
    This was ridiculous. The last thing he needed now was to be killed. It would require all sorts of explanations. They didn’t hand out new bodies just like that; they always wanted to know what you’d done with the old one. It was like trying to get a new pen from a particularly bloody-minded stationery department.
    He looked at his hand in disbelief.
    Demons have to be able to see in the dark. And he could see that his hand was yellow. He was bleeding yellow.
    Gingerly, he tasted a finger.
    Then he crawled over to Aziraphale and checked the angel’s shirt. If the stain on it was blood, something had gone very wrong with biology.
    â€œOo, that stung,” moaned the fallen angel. “Got me right under the ribs.”
    â€œYes, but do you normally bleed blue?” said Crowley.
    Aziraphale’s eyes opened. His right hand patted his chest. He sat up. He went through the same crude forensic self-examination as Crowley.
    â€œPaint?” he said.
    Crowley nodded.
    â€œWhat’re they playing at?” said Aziraphale.
    â€œI don’t know,” said Crowley, “but I think it’s called silly buggers.” His tone suggested that he could play, too. And do it better.
    It was a game. It was tremendous fun. Nigel Tompkins, Assistant Head (Purchasing), squirmed through the undergrowth, his mind aflame with some of the more memorable scenes of some of the better Clint Eastwood movies. And to think he’d believed that management training was going to be boring, too. …
    There had been a lecture, but it had been about the paint guns and all the things you should never do with them, and Tompkins had looked at the fresh young faces of his rival trainees as, to a man, they resolved to do them all if there was half a chance of getting away with it. If people told you business was a jungle and then put a gun in your hand, then it was pretty obvious to Tompkins that they weren’t expecting you to simply aim for the shirt; what it was all about was the corporate head hanging over your fireplace.
    Anyway, it was rumored that someone over in United Consolidated had done his promotion prospects a considerable amount of good by the anonymous application of a high-speed earful of paint to an immediate superior, causing the latter to complain of little ringing noises in important meetings and eventually to be replaced on medical grounds.
    And there were his fellow trainees—fellow sperms, to switch metaphors, all struggling forward in the knowledge that there could only ever be one Chairman of Industrial Holdings (Holdings) PLC, and that the job would probably go to the biggest prick.
    Of course, some girl with a clipboard from Personnel had told them that the courses they were going on were just to establish leadership potential, group cooperation, initiative, and so on. The trainees had tried to avoid one another’s faces.
    It had worked quite well so far. The white-water canoeing had taken care of Johnstone (punctured eardrum) and the mountain climbing in