Free Muddle and Win by John Dickinson

time he was expecting doves to appear, angels to drop on top of him and all the rest of it, but they didn’t. So maybe Scattletail had been right, and the Other Side had been called off for an urgent discussion with whatever they used instead of brass hammers Up There.
    Finally he reached Sally’s ear. Still nothing terrible happened to him, as he crept down the first passage to the six-sided chamber. Everything was quiet. Everyone, it seemed, had gone. In the chamber up the stairs, the statue still pointed to the archway with the words LOOK FOR THE RIGHT over it.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Muddlespot politely as he passed.
    The fountain still played coolly in the courtyard. According to the archway on the far side it was, apparently, still better to GIVE than to RECEIVE .
    ‘Quite,’ said Muddlespot, who on his last time through this place had been giving out tar bombs for all he was worth and trying hard not to receive anything that anyone had wanted to give him in exchange. The stairs, wide as a hockey pitch, still led upwards beyond it.
    Pitch, pitch, pitch
went his footsteps on the stairs; a flat scraping sound echoing with emptiness.
Pitch, pitch, pitch
. Up and up.
    Still no one jumped on him.
    And here he was. The chamber was exactly the same. The semicircle of statues. The star-studded ceiling. The two great windows, showing the table in the outside world with the Jones family now at dinner. And the central self of Sally, sitting at the same table at the chamber’s centre. With one small difference.
    She was untying herself.
    She had got the loops from around her waist and the gag from off her face. The earmuffs lay discarded on the floor. She was bending down and working on the bonds that held her ankles. That was why she didn’t see him when he came in.
    ‘Ahem,’ said Muddlespot.
    She looked up. She scowled.
    And Muddlespot saw why. It wasn’t because he had come back. It was because he had
seen her freeing herself
. Tied up tightly at her table, she had remembered what it had felt like in that short moment when the bonds had been off her. And she had thought, after a bit, that maybe she would give it another try, on her own and in private. What she absolutely, definitely didn’t want was anyone seeing that she was doing it. Least of all, someone who might think it was because of something
he
had done. She wasn’t going to admit that someone might know what she wanted better than she did herself. She didn’t like that idea at all.
    ‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped.
    ‘Talking to you,’ said Muddlespot brightly.
    ‘And who asked you?’
    ‘I thought you might be uncomfortable. But I see you can look after yourself.’
    Sally shrugged elaborately. ‘They’re perfectly comfortable. I just thought I’d do without them for a bit.’
    ‘I see.’
    ‘Don’t get any ideas! I’m the good one here. You think you can change that, you’ve another think coming!’
    ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Muddlespot.
    And he thought:
I’m the good one here
. Meaning?
    ‘Why do you tie yourself?’ he asked innocently.
    ‘It’s none of your business.’
    ‘What would you do if you were untied?’
    ‘That’s none of your business either.’
    ‘Who would you do it to?’
    ‘Who  . . . ?’ she said sharply. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Oh, you know,’ said Muddlespot, who didn’t.
    ‘Look,’ said Sally, folding her arms. ‘I do what I do. I am what I am. My choice. Not yours.’
    ‘Oh, quite,’ said Muddlespot. ‘Your choice. No question. In fact, I wasn’t going to talk about you at all. I just wanted to ask  . . .’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘ . . . about Billie?’
    Silence.
    ‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ said Sally flatly.
    ‘It just seemed a bit clumsy – you know – the way she knocked the table and spilled water over your work like that.’
    ‘It wasn’t clumsy at all,’ said Sally.
    ‘She doesn’t
mean
to be like that,’ said Muddlespot. ‘Does she?’
    Sally