Soul Music

Crash.
    “You can’t play your guitar anyway,” said Noddy.
    “I mean, look at my hand. Look at it.”
    They looked at his hand. Jimbo’s mum had put a glove on it after treating the wounds; they hadn’t been very deep, because even a stupid leopard won’t hang around anyone who wants to take its trousers off.
    “A glove,” said Crash, in a terrible voice. “Whoever heard of a serious musician with a glove? How can I ever play my guitar with a glove on?”
    “How can you ever play your guitar anyway?”
    “I don’t know why I put up with you three,” said Crash. “You’re cramping my artistic development. I’m thinking of leaving and forming my own band.”
    “No you won’t,” said Jimbo, “because you won’t find anyone even worse than us. Let’s face it. We’re rubbish.”
    He was voicing a hitherto unspoken yet shared thought. The other musicians around them were, it was true, quite bad. But that’s all they were. Some of them had some minor musical talent; as for the rest, they merely couldn’t play. They didn’t have a drummer who missed the drums and a bass guitarist with the same natural rhythm as a traffic accident. And they’d generally settled on their name. They might be unimaginative names, like “A Big Troll and Some Other Trolls,” or “Dwarfs With Altitude,” but at least they knew who they were .
    “How about We’re A Rubbish Band?” said Noddy, sticking his hands in his pockets.
    “We may be rubbish,” snarled Crash, “but we’re Music With Rocks In rubbish.”
    “Well, well, and how’s it all going, then?” said Dibbler, pushing his way through the sacking. “It won’t be long now—what’re you doing here?”
    “We’re in the program, Mr. Dibbler,” said Crash meekly.
    “How can you be in the program when I don’t know what you’re called?” said Dibbler, waving a hand irritably at one of the posters. “Your name up there, is it?”
    “We’re probably where it says Ande Supporting Bands ,” said Noddy.
    “What happened to your hand?” said Dibbler.
    “My trousers bit it,” said Crash, glowering at Scum. “Honest, Mr. Dibbler, can’t you give us one more chance?”
    “We’ll see,” said Dibbler, and strode away.
    He was feeling too cheerful to argue much. The sausages-in-a-bun were selling very fast, but they were just covering minor expenses. There were ways of making money out of Music With Rocks In that he’d never thought of…and C.M.O.T. Dibbler thought of money all the time.
    For example, there were the shirts. They were of cotton so cheap and thin that it was practically invisible in a good light and tended to dissolve in the wash. He’d sold six hundred already! At five dollars each! All he had to do was buy them at ten for a dollar from Klatchian Wholesale Trading and pay Chalky half a dollar each to print them.
    And Chalky, with un-troll-like initiative, had even printed off his own shirts. They said:

    C HAL K IES ,
12 T HE S COURS

    T HYNGS D ONE .

    And people were buying them, paying money to advertise Chalky’s workshop. Dibbler had never dreamed that the world could work like this. It was like watching sheep shear themselves. Whatever was causing this reversal of the laws of commercial practice he wanted in big lumps.
    He’d already sold the idea to Plugger the shoemaker in New Cobblers * and a hundred shirts had just walked out of the shop, which was more than Plugger’s merchandise usually did. People wanted clothes just because they had writing on!
    He was making money. Thousands of dollars in a day! And a hundred music traps were lined up in front of the stage, ready to capture Buddy’s voice. If it went on at this rate, in several billion years he’d be rich beyond his wildest dreams!
    Long Live Music With Rocks In!
    There was only one small cloud in this silver lining.
    The Festival was due to start at noon. Dibbler had planned to put on a lot of the small, bad groups first—that is to say, all of them—and finish with The Band. So there was no reason to worry if they weren’t here right now.
    But they weren’t here right now. Dibbler was worried.

    A tiny dark figure quartered the shores of the Ankh, moving so fast as to be a blur. It zigzagged desperately back and forth, snuffling.
    People didn’t see it. But they saw the rats. Black, brown and grey, they were leaving the godowns and wharfs by the river, running over one another’s backs in a determined attempt to get as far away as possible.

    A