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‘Aaaagh!’ he screamed, as the past life slideshow started up in front of his eyes. Scrolled through quickly, his life seemed to have been about as interesting as a race down a window-pane by two docile flies. Then the ground reared up and hit him.
‘There he is!’ Desmond was shouting. ‘Quick, grab the bugger before he gets…’
Julian squirmed. He’d landed on his back, cushioned somewhat against the fall by a broken-down straw bale, and he thrashed his legs in the air like an overturned woodlouse until, after what seemed like a very long time, he contrived to flip himself over right way up, find his feet and make a run for the door. It was a close-run thing, at that; he had to swerve violently to avoid Eugene’s outstretched trotters, and a pitchfork hurled by Desmond nearly kebabed him before he bounded out into the sunlight, leaving the smoke and the heat and the shouting behind him.
Odd thing was, while he was making his escape under such difficult circumstances his attention was elsewhere. He steered his narrow course between fire and assault on a combination of instinct and extremely good luck, while his brain was entirely preoccupied with a topic far more engrossing and fascinating than mere survival.
He cleared the farmyard and trotted up to the top of a low hill, from which there was a fine panoramic view of the valley, the farm, the huge column of black smoke reaching up into the clouds. He lay down in the shade of a young oak tree and tried to figure it all out.
It had been in that brief moment, no more than the slightest paring from Father Time’s toenail, when he’d been falling and (as advertised, and nicely on time) his past life had flashed in front of his eyes in a subliminal blur.
He hadn’t remembered any of it.
Oh, the memories were all exceptionally clear and strong: falling off his first ever tricycle, lying awake on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa, fishing off the end of the pier with his Uncle Joe, the first time he’d ever set eyes on Tracy — splendid memories all of them, utterly convincing, a selection you’d be ever so pleased with if you’d bought them by mail order; but not his. Somebody else’s perhaps, but not his.
In particular, the flashback had been markedly reticent on such subjects as wolves, houses and sudden, destructive gusts of doggy-breath. As far as his memory was concerned, none of that had ever happened. Except that it had.
Had it?
Below in the valley, the fire had spread from the barn to the cowsheds and, with a cluck-cluck here and a quack-quack-aaagh! there, Old Macdonald’s life work was going up in flames. Viewed from a distance it was rather a grand spectacle, though of course most of the piquant detail was lost. No sign of Eugene and Desmond, which implied that either they’d been consumed in the inferno or else they were showing signs of hitherto unexpected good sense and keeping well out of the way. Under other circumstances his heart would have bled for Old Macdonald; except that he knew for a fact that the old swindler was up to his ears in entirely justified aggravation from the Revenue, and the whole place was heavily over insured. Julian salved his sense of universal guilt by picturing Old Mac wandering round the burnt-out shell of his property with a big silly grin and a claim form, scribbling down here a cluck, there a cluck, everywhere a cluck-cluck, while the figures in the right-hand column soared exponentially.
My name is Julian. I am a little pig. All my life I’ve been terrorised by a big bad wolf, who used to huff and puff and blow our houses down; first the house of straw, then the house of sticks — Put like that, of course, the whole thing sounded absurd.
First: who’d be thick enough to try building houses out of straw or sticks? Second: there are many ways of demolishing buildings, especially buildings made out of one hundred per cent organic and biodegradable materials sourced from sustainable natural materials, but simply blowing on them isn’t one of them. Surely, therefore, those memories couldn’t possibly be true. Could they?
Well, of course not; so it was just as well that he had a second layer to the onion of his memory, a recollection of buildings massively fortified and defended, blockhouses that ought to have been able to withstand direct hits from nuclear warheads; except that that was absurd as well, since pigs, even pigs as clever and resourceful as he was, can’t do that sort of work. It’d take an army of skilled craftsmen with an open cheque from the UN two years to put together some of the structures he seemed to remember throwing together in an afternoon — only to see them going down like card houses at one mild puff from the Wolf. Impossible. And what’s impossible can’t be true. Therefore.
But I remember. I was there. It happened.
All of it.
Both versions.
I am not a number. I am a free pig.
Julian frowned and rubbed his shoulder against the trunk of the oak tree. That last bit wasn’t him either; it had seeped through from those damned synthetic memories that had somehow got into his head while he was falling — hardly surprising, seeing how vivid and evocative they were, like a hologram show inside his mind, but completely alien. He took a deep breath and allowed himself to examine them, as objectively as he could. They were fine memories, to be sure; and through them ran a convincingly logical thread; a bad case of sibling rivalry between himself, the puny but brainy younger piglet, and his two big thick brothers. He distinctly recalled, as if it was yesterday, that first tree-house their Dad built for them in the low branches of the old, droopy crab-apple tree; how Des and Gene hadn’t let him go with them to play in it, how he’d gone off on his own and built another, better tree-house in the tall sycamore, how Des and Gene had almost died of jealousy and had pulled it down and smashed it; how he’d built another one after that, which they’d also wrecked. The pattern was perfect, the way his patient perseverance had only served to infuriate them further, until one day — No, it hadn’t been like that. The hell with what’s logical and what’s possible. We’re three little pigs who built houses out of stupid stuff and had them all trashed by a wolf. The wolf blew on them and they fell down. The wolf was not my brothers. I know. I was there. — Picture of himself standing blubbering in front of his father, telling him what they’d done; and Des and Gene, red in the face and looking away. He could hear Gene’s voice in his head as clear as anything; wasn’t us, it was the big bad wolf.
And a little voice said in the back of his mind that the past doesn’t matter anyway, who can say for certain what happened in the past, because the past doesn’t exist any more, it’s only there to explain the present, and if this version explains the present better than any other version, then why the hell shouldn’t it be the past? So much easier. So much more convenient for all concerned.
Away in the distance, there was a queue of backed-up fire engines waiting at the farm gate, which was chained and padlocked; and there was Old Macdonald himself, furtively creeping round the back of the cider house with a can of petrol. In his past, no doubt, facts were quietly stabbing each other in the back, pushing each other out of twelfth-storey windows, sorting out an expedient explanation of the present that would result in the highest possible insurance payout. Here a barn full of valuable antique furniture, there a barn full of valuable antique furniture. So much more convenient.
Julian grunted. Then he stood up and went into the wood to gather sticks.
‘Completely,’ the Brother Grimm confirmed into his mobile phone, ‘and utterly. In fact, I reckon it’s getting near the point where it’s beyond salvaging… Yes, possibly, but would it be worth it? Surely it’d be simpler to start over again from. Okay, sure, you’re the boss. We’ll see what we can do. Yes, goodbye.’