“Sorry, I’m sure. Do you want me to make a start on the conservatory?”

“All this,” Jane mumbled “It is real, isn’t it? I mean…”

Kiss clicked his tongue. “Try banging your head on it if you’re in any doubt. I have to say, I find all this ever so slightly wounding. I mean, I do my level best to make things nice for you, and the first thing I know you’re questioning its very existence. Gift horses’ teeth, in other words.”

“I thought I told you to be quiet.”

“You asked me a question.”

“Did I? Sorry.” Jane closed her eyes and tried to clarify her mind. “Will you help me with this?” she asked.

“Depends,” Kiss replied huffily, “on whether I’m allowed to talk.”

“Oh, stop being aggravating.” Jane took a deep breath. “There I was,” she said, “an ordinary person—”

Kiss cleared his throat. “Jane Wellesley,” he recited. “Age, twenty-eight. Height, five feet one inch. Weight—”

“Thank you, yes. Following a distressing scene with someone I had thought really cared about me—”

“Vince. Vincent Martin Pockle. Age, thirty-one. Height, six feet two inches. Eyes a sort of—”

“Either help,” Jane snapped, “or go and empty the dustbins. Following a distressing scene, I resolved — stupidly, I admit — to kill myself. When I opened the aspirin bottle, out jumped a genie.”

“At your service.”

“Or so it seemed. At any rate, at the time I accepted you at face value, and I’ve been doing so ever since.”

“So I should damned well—”

“Ever since,” Jane went on, “I’ve been ordering you to do seemingly impossible things, and you’ve apparently been doing them. The things you bring appear to be real.”

“You and I are going to fall out in a minute if you carry on with all this seems-to-be stuff,” Kiss growled. “The last person to call me a liar to my face, namely the erstwhile Grand Vizier of Trebizond, spends most of his time these days sitting on a lily-pad going rivet-rivet-rivet and wondering why people don’t bring him things to sign any more. I invite you to think on.”

“And now you tell me,” Jane continued, “that another genie — was he one of the ones we met at that peculiar night club?”

“No.”

“Another genie is planning to destroy the human race, using overgrown carnivorous plants. And it’s not,” Jane added, after glancing at her watch, “April the first. Now then, what the hell am I meant to make of all that?”

Kiss shrugged. “The best you can,” he replied. “It’s called coping. Like I said, some people find it helps to posit the existence of an omnipotent supreme being. I know for a fact He does. Other people,” Kiss added, materialising a decanter and a soda siphon, “get drunk a lot. It all comes down to individual preferences in the long run.”

“Look—”

“As a matter of fact, He’s all right, and so’s the second one, Junior. It’s the Holy Ghost you’ve got to watch out for. Forever walking through walls with its head under its arm, which for someone in its position is taking light-hearted frivolity a bit too far, in my opinion. Still, there it is…”

“Kiss…”

“Not to mention,” the genie continued, “jumping out during séances and banging things on tables. And, of course, trying to exorcise it is an absolute hiding to nothing. Sorry, you were saying?”

“What is going on?”

The genie shrugged. “Can’t rightly say,” he replied. “By the looks of it, some raving nutcase or other’s decided to annihilate his own species. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you get used to it. You get used to pretty well everything eventually.”

“I see.” Jane started to pick at the stitching on her shoe. “Happen a lot, does it?”

“Once every forty years, on average. Usually, though, — it’s just a war. When We get involved, it tends to get a bit heavy. Still, like I told you the other day, for every genie commissioned to destroy the world there’s another told off to save it, so things even out in the long run. Last time I looked, the planet was still here.”

Jane opened her eyes. “I think I’m beginning to see,” she said. “Sort of. Just when this other genie — Pennsylvania something?”

“Philadelphia Machine and Tool. Actually there is a genie called Pennsylvania Farmers’ Bank III — Penny Three — but he’s no bother to anyone.”

“This Philadelphia person,” Jane continued coldly, “is going to wipe out the human race, you suddenly pop up and stop him doing it. That’s why all this is happening. And I’m…”

She stopped. She felt cold. In her anxiety, she broke the heel off her shoe.

“Look.” Kiss frowned, summoning up soft, heavenly music in the far distance. “Nice try, but it doesn’t quite work like that. Things aren’t all neatly ordained and settled the way you seem to think — unless, of course, you posit the existence of a…”

“But it makes sense,” Jane protested. “Someone wants the world destroyed. I want it saved.”

Kiss clapped his hands. “Ah,” he said, “now we seem to be getting somewhere. That sounded remarkably like a Wish to me.”

“Did it?”

Kiss nodded. “I reckon so. You Wish the world to be saved. I take it,” he added, “that you do?”

“I suppose so.”

“Give me strength!” Kiss took a deep breath. “Either you do or you don’t, it’s not exactly a grey area. Toss a coin if you think it’ll help you decide.”

Jane shook her head. “Of course I want the world saved,” she said. “Or at least, I suppose I do. The last thing I can remember before all this was wishing it would all go away.”

“That’s just typical sloppy mortal thinking,” Kiss replied crossly. “This is what comes of giving your lot free will without making you send in the ten coupons from the special offer box-lids first. You mortals,” Kiss went on, with a slight nuance of self-righteousness in his voice, “think that just because you come to an end, the world comes to an end too. Well, I’m an immortal and I’m here to tell you it doesn’t. If you ask me, they should print Please Leave The World As You Would Wish To Find It in big letters on the inside of wombs and coffins, and then there’d be no excuse for all this messing about. I’m sorry,” he said, calming down, “but there are some things I feel strongly about. Well, stronglyish, anyway.”

“Sorry,” Jane said meekly. “I’m not really used to all this yet.”

“That’s all right,” the genie replied, turning the music up a very little. “Look, take it from me, you want the world saved.”

“Right.”

“Save the world,” Kiss continued, “and you get merit in Heaven.”

“If we posit its existence, of course.”

Kiss sighed. “Everyone’s a comedian,” he grumbled. “Look—”

“Save ten worlds and you get a free alarm clock radio—”

“That,” snapped the genie, “will do. It’s quite simple, as far as I’m concerned. The human race is the measure of everything that’s prosaic and mundane. If there weren’t any humans, there’d be no point being a genie, because there wouldn’t be anyone to be bigger and stronger and cleverer than. So, as a favour to me, I suggest you Wish the human race saved. OK?”

Jane squinted into the middle distance, trying to see what the world would look like if she wasn’t there. She couldn’t.

“Put like that,” she said, “how can I refuse? But hang on,” she added. “I thought you said all the nasty plant seeds had got burned up. Doesn’t that mean—”

Kiss grinned unpleasantly. “It means,” he said, “that my old mate Philly Nine has failed. If he’d succeeded, the human race would have been annihilated. Since he’s failed, with all the loss of face that entails…” The genie laughed without humour. “That means,” he went on, “he’s honour bound to get even. Which means,” he concluded, materialising a paint roller and a five-gallon tin of pink emulsion, “you lot really are in trouble. Are you absolutely dead set on having pink, by the way? It’ll make the whole room look as if it’s been whitewashed with taramasalata.”

Jane considered for a moment and then nodded. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Definitely pink.”