by Zizou Corder
I had never seen anything more wrong in my life.
I pressed my mouth against the glass.
‘Don’t worry,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll help you.’
Behind the whirr and slap I thought I heard a thin, sad noise. A moan.
Well, it was obvious really. Turn the bliddy machine off.
I couldn’t find the plug. It was all built-in, encased in rubberized plastic. I didn’t want to cut through anything, set everything on fire. Right, have to turn off the electricity where it came in.
Sheets of paper were still spitting out. I glanced at one, and thought, Those squiggles aren’t right. Look, it’s the same one over and over again. And as I did a voice behind me snapped out, ‘Who the hell are you? Stand up and step away from the scanner!’
Well, it was her – Romana Asteriosy. Up close she looked like a film star who’d been inflated with a bicycle pump. Still had boiled meat for a face though underneath.
‘You’re hurting it,’ I said. ‘Turn it off.’
‘What?’ She clearly couldn’t believe my cheek but I couldn’t give a toss about that.
‘You’re hurting the book,’ I said. ‘Turn off your stupid machine. A book’s not a factory – look, you’re exhausting it.’
I held out the piece of paper in my hand.
She looked at it. She swore. She turned to the control panel and pressed a few buttons.
The whirring stopped. The flicking stopped. The paper stopped shooting out of the back of the machine. The last page fell, and settled.
It was a moan I heard. It tore my heart.
She flicked another switch and the front of the case slid open. I was already there – before she turned around I was in there, lifting the book gently from its torture frame, closing it, cradling it in my arms.
‘It’s just the machine,’ she said. ‘There’s something wrong with the scanner. The book’s all right.’
‘No, it’s not, you stupid jerk,’ I said. My breath was going hard. Where before I had felt the life of the book when I held it, now I felt weakness, tiredness, old age. It was dry and limp. There was no strong breath of life in it. ‘You’ve used it up. Just stripping the heart out of it –what the hell did you think you were doing?’
‘Give it to me,’ she said, but the look in my eye must have scared her because then she said, ‘Show it to me.’
I wasn’t even going to bliddy open it. I held it close to my chest, safe in my arms, and surrounded it with everything in me that was warm and alive. I was murmuring to it under my breath, ‘I’ve got you. Don’t be scared. I’ll look after you.’ There were tears of anger in my eyes as I stared at this stupid woman.
‘Let me look,’ she said. She’d put on a sweet tone of voice.
I swore at her, calculating how to get past her to the door. I could kick her, if need be, but I couldn’t fight her off with my hands while I was holding the book.
She frowned and rubbed her nose.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘We just need to see if it’s all right. Come on, just open it.’
‘All right? What, all right so you can keep on exploiting it and working it to death?’
‘Let’s just see…’ she said.
I stared her right in the face. Gave her my iciest, palest look.
‘You,’ I said, ‘go over there. I will look at the book here. And if you move, I’ll break your jaw.’ I was taking a risk. She could have a securityguy on his way now.
She swallowed, then moved across in to the room to where I’d gestured.
I went towards the door and gently put the book on Julie’s small desk there. Julie shifted away, still rigid like a rabbit before a fox.
Tenderly, I opened it.
The pages were blank.
Ah – well, they would be, for me.
I stroked the opening page gently. No Dennis the Menace? No lions?
‘You,’ I called. ‘Julie. Have a look at this.’
Julie peered over at the page.
Nothing.
‘You – Mrs whoever you are, whatever you call yourself. Come over here. And if you make one move I don’t like, I’ll deck you. Don’t think I’d mind decking a bird. It’d be a pleasure, since it’s you.’
She came over – delicately. I’d scared her all right. No doubt she was working out in her mind how to call her security, but by my judgement she hadn’t called any yet.
‘Look,’ I said.
She looked down at the open pages. Nothing.
I stared down. Please, please, let something appear. Please.
Nothing.
Not a single illegible black squiggle emerged on that empty white page.
We waited far longer than was likely. Hoping.
Nothing.
‘Well,’ I said in the end. ‘Bravo. You’ve done what thousands of years of history have failed to do. You’ve killed it.’
‘No,’ she said, and to do her credit she did look upset. ‘No.’
‘Well, yeah, actually,’ I said.
She sat down, as if her knees had buckled.
Julie stood there goggling.
‘You stupid disgusting greedy woman,’ I said, and, taking the book into my arms again, I turned on my heel and scarpered.
CHAPTER 27
According to Janaki
When that film-star-looking woman came back and let herself into the back garden she closed the door behind her and there was nothing I could do.
So ten minutes later, when Joe reappeared over the wall, breathless and with high spots of colour in each cheek, I was still there at the door.
He was clutching the book and setting off at a run.
‘You’ve got it!’ I cried, taking off after him. ‘Fantastic! Oh, brilliant! What happened? I thought when that woman turned up – there was no way I could warn you, Joe, I’m sorry…’ I was really looking forward to getting a look at it, finally.
But his face was not a face of glory and success. He was nearly crying, and he was hurtling and stumbling. I raced alongside him.
‘Joe? What’s the matter?’
‘My name’s not Joe,’ he snapped as he ran.
Behind me I heard a door slam.
He glanced back and put on speed. Up the hill and then over towards the main road. I was panting already.
‘Joe!’ I yelled.
Footsteps behind us.
I couldn’t keep up with him.
Joe disappeared round the corner.
A tall blond man was gaining on us.
It was one of those do-or-die, whose-side-are-you-on moments. I didn’t hesitate. I just stuck my foot out and tripped him. The noise when he hit the pavement was quite unpleasant, but not as bad as his language.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘What a speed you were going. Can I help you up? Dreadfully clumsy…’
He stared at me and brushed himself down. He looked at the crossroads. He swore. I smiled politely.
‘Well, if you’re quite all right,’ I said, and strolled on. Behind me the woman and the girl appeared. The woman started shouting at the blond guy.
Tra la la. I just walked on up the hill getting my breath back and praying Julie not-so-innocent Mordy wouldn’t recognize the back of my head. The moment I was round the corner I hailed an electrocab, jumped in and followed the road Joe had taken. He hadn’t got far.
‘Pull over a moment,’ I said to the cabbie.
‘Joe!’ I called. ‘Come on – they think they’ve lost you.’
He got into the cab. All his cockiness was gone. All his cheek and know-all attitude. He slumped in the corner and there were tears on his face.
‘Where to then?’ asked the cabbie.
‘Just keep on,’ I said. ‘Joe – where shall we go? We should get back to Maggs…’
At that he turned on me. ‘I’m not going to bliddy Maggs. Now crike off and leave me alone.’
I sat quietly, just looking at him and thinking calmness. Calm, calm, calm. I tried to send it right inside him.
&n
bsp; ‘Maggs,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do they mend books and all?’
‘That’s exactly what we do,’ I said. ‘Buy them, sell them, store them, look after them, mend them, rebind them…’
A tiny flicker of hope appeared on his icy face. Then it faded again.
‘I can’t,’ he whispered. ‘He’ll tell the police… They think I had something to do with that murder.’
‘He won’t tell…’ I began to say, then I realized that I couldn’t promise that at all. Mr Maggs might well tell.
‘And they’ll take the book back…’ he was murmuring.
‘Well, you’ve got to go somewhere,’ said the cabbie. ‘Or will I drop you off here?’
Joe’s face was desperate. He flung his head back and he looked like he was dead.
Then he lifted his face. ‘Take us to Cromer,’ he said.
‘Cromer?’ said the cabbie. ‘You feeling all right? That’s 200 miles, and forty miles into the Drowned Lands.’
‘Course it is,’ said Joe. ‘Sorry – I was just thinking about my auntie. How much to take us to – oh – somewhere on the edge of the Drowned Lands? Anywhere.’
‘The road’s all right as far as Norwich,’ the cabbie said with a little laugh. ‘I’ll take you to Norwich for a hundred.’ He quite clearly didn’t think we had five dirhams between us.
Joe smiled and produced a roll of cash from his pocket. ‘Fifty now,’ he said, ‘and here’s the fifty for when we get there.’ Then he turned to me. ‘We’ll drop you at the station,’ he said.
‘Oh no, you won’t,’ I replied. ‘I’m coming with you.’ We argued about it almost as far as Cambridge.
CHAPTER 28
According to Lee
So I was sitting there in the back of the electrocab, just holding the book, up to my neck in misery. I thought if I held him, my warmth, my life, might seep into him and give him strength. He had learned to talk when I needed him to! So I would somehow give him what he needed.
What did he need?
He needed to rest and be loved. He needed to tell stories. He needed to tell them to human beings, who would laugh and cry and be interested not to a machine.
He needed to be read. Well, I couldn’t read him. I couldn’t learn to read… Could I? I –
Crike, but my head ached.
But even though I couldn’t read him, that didn’t mean I didn’t want the stories. He knew that. So I sat in the back of the electrocab, holding him safe in my arms and telling him, quietly, how much I wanted to hear the rest, when he was ready.
Janaki was giving me some strange looks, it’s true. I wasn’t bothered.
She leaned forward and turned off the speakerphone to the driver’s cab.
‘Joe,’ she said in important tones.
‘My name ain’t Joe.’ I’d told her before.
‘What is your name?’
‘Lee,’ I said.
‘Lee. Oh. OK. Lee, why are you talking to the book?’ She asked it in a very tender voice, like I was a halfwit or a moody two-year-old or something.
‘Mind your own sniking business,’ I said.
She did, for a little while. Then she started up again.
‘Lee,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Why did you call yourself Joe?’
‘So you wouldn’t know who I was,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Mind your own sniking business,’ I said.
So then she snuckled back in the seat a bit and took to just looking at me sideways.
I didn’t have the energy to make her go away, so I let her stay. She wanted the book, I wanted the book – so what? The book wasn’t going anywhere till it was well again. If it got well again. I was so done in, to tell the truth, that I didn’t care if she was there or not.
And she had been all right so far. Kicking Romana’s bloke!
Ah yes, Romana. Or Nigella.
It was the same woman, no doubt about it. Nigella, the authoress who’d disappeared off the face of the earth, and Romana, the crooked mastermind who’d appeared out of nowhere – and maybe wanted to go back to nowhere again – with the book.
Some time after Cambridge Janaki dropped off. I felt like dropping off myself, after the night we’d had. But I carried on murmuring to the book, concentrating on him, comforting him, loving him.
For a while he just lay, light and dry, still and strange. You remember what I said earlier about holding an animal or a baby when they’re sleeping? The book wasn’t asleep.
He was sick. So so sick.
I kept on murmuring, wanting, hoping, needing.
I don’t know how long it was. We were just driving on and on. Trundle trundle trundle.
It must have been great when there were petrol cars, when the motorways were new and had no potholes, and people could go a hundred miles in an hour. Now we had to stop every hour to juice up, and the driver kept muttering about not ruining his suspension for a couple of daft kids. Tall forests of wind turbines glided by beside the road, some of them ankle-deep in water. At the juice-stops I pulled my hood round me and pretended to be asleep.
After a long long while, I gently opened him again. His spine was stiff and rasping to the touch. I held him carefully, only opened him a little way.
And a tiny voice drifted out. So feeble – a tiny little voice like Granddad Fred’s when he was in the hospital with his emphysema.
He said, ‘Oh, Lee.’
Crike, if he’d been human I would have given him such a hug!
‘Booko!’ I whispered intensely. ‘Booko! Talk to me, man! You all right?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m… Thank you, Lee.’
‘S’all right, mate,’ I said. I was embarrassed suddenly.
‘You saved me,’ he murmured.
‘Hope so,’ I said.
‘You did,’ he murmured. ‘Not since I was kidnapped by the storm god Zu have I been so well rescued… You came after me and got me. You said you’d look after me and you did…’
‘S’all right,’ I said again, whispering, holding him. ‘Is it OK to be open? It doesn’t hurt you?’
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Stay with me.’
‘Ain’t going nowhere, man.’
I tucked him into my jacket, next to my heart, where he’d be warm. And as I did so, I looked up to find Janaki’s big eyes just goggling at me.
‘It’s talking,’ she said.
‘What? What’s talking?’ I said automatically.
‘That book,’ she said. Staring.
‘Book? Talking? What you on about?’
She wasn’t falling for that.
‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘I just heard that book talking to you and you were talking to it. It said, “Stay with me”, and you said you weren’t going anywhere.’
Well, she was bound to find out sooner or later.
‘OK, yeah,’ I said. ‘And if you ever mention it to anybody, ever, I will cut your tongue out and sell it for salami down Leather Lane Market.’
‘I don’t think you will,’ she said. ‘You’re not the type. But don’t worry, I won’t tell.’ She looked a bit green.
‘Hey, take it easy,’ I said. ‘You want the window open?’
She did. She breathed deeply out of it for a few moments. Then she turned back to me.
‘Joe,’ she said. ‘Lee, what is it?’ She was talking in a kind of frozen way. Shock.
‘It’s a book with peculiar powers,’ I said gently. ‘It’s something quite amazing, actually. But I ain’t going to tell you that much about it because it’s secret, if you see what I mean…’
‘And Mr de Saloman was murdered because of it… Oh, my days, I have to ring Mr Maggs…’
‘No, you don’t,’ I said. ‘And that is why I ain’t going to tell you anything else. You got what we call divided loyalties, and I only got room for one set of loyalties, which is – the book. That bliddy woman just nearly killed it. You didn’t see what I saw,
Janaki…’
‘I wouldn’t do anything to hurt the book,’ she declared. ‘Ever. Nor would Mr Maggs. I promise you. He could help. He knows about books…’
‘Not this one,’ I hissed.
The cabbie was pulling over.
I shot Janaki a shut-it look and turned on the speakerphone.
‘We there then?’ I asked.
‘Yup,’ he said. ‘Cathedral do you? Station?’
‘High street,’ I said.
We’d need some supplies for where we were headed.
CHAPTER 29
Mrs Lurch
That boy. That dreadful dirty thieving little guttersnipe. That he could just walk in and help himself to my book, after all that I have been through to get it, and in my hour of glory he just marches into my house, ignoring my security, threatening my staff, tricking me, and then just gets away with it… The back garden is meant to be secure. Maxim is meant to monitor the CCTV. Jenny is meant to have a tiny spot of intelligence – enough to press the panic button you’d think. But no. Nothing. He walks in, insults me and jumps off over the wall, and Maxim falls over while chasing him. For crike sake, this would never have happened in Russia. We could have just shot him. My compound in Moscow was surrounded by landmines and everybody knew it. You don’t get many burglars then, I can tell you. But here they still have all these stupid laws.
God, I’m fed up with being outside the law. A quiet life is all I want. A nice quiet life like I had when I was Nigella – that’s all I want. Country home. Dogs. My marvellous new business. First I would be Queen of Books, and then I would single-handedly destroy books, clearing the way for a new and brilliant future! The name of Lurch would no longer be just that of a poor unpublished author and his sad little family…
And now that boy, that filthy little white-faced child, has… Oh, I could spit.
That Joe English. Oh, I knew it was him. That ludicrous hair dye didn’t fool me. He stole my purse and now he has stolen my book.
I couldn’t go to the police. The last thing I needed now was a connection to be made in public between Nigella, whose book had been stolen, and Romana, who had been robbed of her purse. Romana was the past and Nigella was to be a new clean future. As far as the police knew, Nigella had made her offer of a reward and that was it. I couldn’t exactly tell them I had acquired it by other means and lost it again.