‘Hello, Thursday,’ he said. ‘Have you heard? Professor Spoon has given his hundred per cent backing to Cardenio—I’ve never heard him actually laugh before!’
‘That’s good, that’s good,’ I said absently. ‘Listen, this might seem an odd question, but do I have a boyfriend?’
‘A what?’
‘A boyfriend. You know. A male friend I see on a regular basis for dinner and picnics and… thingy, y’know?’
‘Thursday, are you okay?’
I took a deep breath and rubbed my neck.
‘No, no, I’m not,’ I gabbled. ‘You see, my husband was eradicated this afternoon. I went to see SO-1 and just before I went in the walls changed colour and Stig talked funny and Flanker didn’t know I was married—which I’m not, I suppose—and then Houson didn’t know me and Billden wasn’t in the Municipal Cemetery but Landen was and Goliath said they’d bring him back if I got Jack Schitt out and I thought I’d lost Landen’s baby which I haven’t so everything was fine and now it’s not fine any more because I’ve found an extra toothbrush and some men’s clothes in the bathroom.’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Bowden in a soothing voice. ‘Slow down a bit and just let me think.’
There was a pause as he mulled all this over. When he answered his voice was tinged with urgency—and concern. I knew he was a good friend, but until now I never knew how good.
‘Thursday. Calm down and listen to me. Firstly, we keep this to ourselves. Eradication can never be proved—mention this to anyone at SpecOps and the quacks will enforce your retirement on a Form D4. We don’t want that. I’ll try and fill you in with any lost memories I might have that you don’t. What was the name of your husband again?’
‘Landen.’
I found strength in his approach. You could always rely on Bowden to be analytical about a problem—no matter how strange it might seem. He made me go over the day again in more detail, something that I found very calming. I asked him again about a possible boyfriend.
‘I’m not sure,’ he replied. ‘You’re kind of a private person.’
‘Come on—office rumours, SpecOps gossip; there must be something.’
‘There is some talk but I don’t hear a lot of it since I’m your partner. Your love life is a matter of some quiet speculation. They call you—’
He went quiet.
‘What do they call me, Bowden?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Tell me.’
‘All right.’ Bowden sighed. ‘It’s… they call you the Ice Maiden.’
‘The Ice Maiden?’
‘It’s not as bad as my nickname,’ continued Bowden. ‘I’m known as Dead Dog.’
‘Dead Dog?’ I repeated, trying to sound as though I’d not heard it before. ‘Ice Maiden, eh? It’s kind of, well, corny. Couldn’t they think of something better? Anyway, did I have a boyfriend or not?’
‘There was a rumour of someone over at SO-14—’
I held up the croquet jacket, trying to figure out how tall this unnamed beau might be.
‘Do we have a positive ID?’
‘I think it’s only a rumour, Thursday.’
‘Tell me, Bowden.’
‘Miles,’ he said at last. ‘His name’s Miles Hawke.’
‘Is it serious?’
‘I have no idea. You don’t talk about these things to me.’
I thanked him and put the phone down nervously, butterflies dancing in my stomach. I knew I was still pregnant, but the trouble was: who was the father? If I had a casual boyfriend named Miles, then perhaps it wasn’t Landen’s after all? I quickly called my mother, who seemed more preoccupied with putting out a fire on the kitchen stove than talking to me. I asked her when she had last met one of my boyfriends and she said that, if memory served, not for at least six years, and if I didn’t hurry up and get married she was going to have to adopt some grandchildren—or steal some from outside Tesco’s, whichever was easier. I told her I would go out and look for one as soon as possible and put the phone down.
I paced the room in a flurry of nerves. If I hadn’t introduced this Miles bloke to Mum, then it was quite likely he wasn’t that serious; yet if he did leave his gear here then it undoubtedly was. I had an idea and rummaged in the bedside table and found a packet of unopened condoms which were three years out of date. I breathed a sigh of relief—this did seem more like me, unless Miles brought his own, of course—but then if I had a bun in the oven, then finding them was immaterial as we didn’t use them. Or perhaps the clothes weren’t Miles’s at all? And what about my memories? If they had survived, then surely Landen’s share in junior-to-be had also survived. I sat down on the bed and pulled out my hair tie. I ran my fingers though my hair, flopped back, covered my face and groaned—long and loud.
11. Granny Next
‘Young Thursday came that morning, as I knew she would. She had just lost Landen, as I had lost my own husband all those years ago. She had youth and hope on her side, and although she did not know it yet, she had plenty of what we call the Other Stuff. She would, I hoped, use it wisely. At the time not even her own father knew quite how important she was. More than Landen’s life would depend on her. All life would depend on her, from the lowliest paramecium to the most complex life form that would ever exist.’
From papers discovered in ex-SpecOps agent Next’s effects
There was a thump on the door at 8 a.m. A dangerous-looking man was standing on my doorstep. I’d never seen him before, but he knew me well enough.
‘Next!’ he bellowed. ‘Back rent Friday or I’ll throw all your stuff in the skip!’
‘You can’t do that.’
‘I can,’ he said, holding up a dog-eared lease agreement. ‘Pets are strictly against the terms of the lease. Pay up.’
‘There’s no pet in here,’ I explained innocently.
‘What’s that, then?’
Pickwick had made a quiet plock-plock noise and poked her head round the door to see what was going on. It was a badly timed move.
‘Oh, that. I’m looking after her for a friend.’
My landlord’s eyes suddenly lit up as he looked closer at Pickwick, who shrank back nervously. She was a rare Version 1.2 and my landlord seemed to know this.
‘Hand over the dodo,’ he mused avariciously, ‘and I’ll give you four months’ free rent.’
‘She’s not for trading,’ I said firmly. I could feel Pickwick quivering behind me.
‘Ah,’ said my landlord greedily. ‘Then you have two days to pay all your bills or you’re out on your sweet little SpecOps arse.
‘You say the sweetest things.’
He glared at me, handed me a bill and disappeared off down the corridor to harass someone else.
My bank statements made for depressing reading. I was not good with money. My cards had reached their limit and my overdraft was nearly used up. SpecOps wages were just about enough to keep you fed and with a roof over your head, but buying the Speedster had all but cleared me out and I hadn’t even seen the garage repair bills yet. There was a nervous plock-plock from the kitchen.
‘I’d sooner sell myself,’ I told Pickwick, who was standing expectantly with collar and lead in her beak.
I stashed the bank statements back into the shoe box and took her to the park. Perhaps it would be better to say that she took me—she was the one who knew the way. She played coyly with a few other dodos while I sat on a park bench. A crotchety old woman sat next to me and turned out to be Mrs Scroggins, who lived directly below. She told me not to make so much noise in future, and then, without drawing breath, gave me a few extremely useful tips about smuggling pets in and out of the building. I picked up a copy of The Owl on the way home and was glad to see that the discovery of Cardenio had not yet broken. I smuggled Pickwick back into my apartment and decided that now was the time to visit the closest thing to the Delphic Oracle I would ever know: Granny Next.
Gran was playing Ping-Pong at the SpecOps Twilight Homes
when I found her. She was thrashing her opponent soundly while nervous nurses looked on, trying to stop her before she fell over and broke another couple of bones. Granny Next was old. Really old. Her pink skin looked more wrinkled than the most wrinkled prune I had ever seen, and her face and hands were livid with dark liver spots. She was dressed in her usual blue gingham dress and hailed me from the other side of the room as I walked in.
‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Thursday! Fancy a game?’
‘Don’t you think you’ve played enough today?’
‘Nonsense’ Grab a paddle and we’ll play to the first point.’
I picked up a paddle as a ball careened past me.
‘Wasn’t ready!’ I protested as another ball came over the net. I swiped at it and missed.
‘Ready is as ready does, Thursday. I’d have thought you knew that more than most!’
I grunted and returned the next ball, which was deftly deflected back to me.
‘How are you, Gran?’
‘Old,’ she replied, whacking the ball towards me with savage backspin. ‘Old and tired and I need looking after. The Grim Reaper is lurking close by—I can almost smell him!’
‘Gran!’
She missed my shot and called ‘No ball’ before pausing for a moment.
‘Do you want to know a secret, young Thursday?’
‘Go on, then,’ I replied, taking the opportunity to retrieve some balls.
‘I am cursed with eternal life!’
‘Perhaps it just seems like it, Gran.’
‘Insolent pup. I didn’t attain one hundred and eight years on physical fortitude or a statistical quirk alone. I got mixed up with some oddness in my youth and the long and short of it is that I can’t shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics.’
I looked at her earnest expression and bright eyes. She wasn’t kidding.
‘How far have you got?’ I replied, returning a ball that went wide.
‘Well, that’s the trouble, isn’t it?’ she replied, serving again. ‘I read what I think is the dullest book of God’s own earth, finish the last page, go to sleep with a smile on my face and wake up the following morning feeling better than ever!’
‘Have you tried Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene?, I asked. ‘Six volumes of boring Spenserian stanzas, the only saving grace of which is that he didn’t write the twelve volumes he had planned.’
‘Read them all,’ replied Gran, ‘and his other poems, too, just in case.’
I put down my paddle. The balls kept plinking past me.
‘You win, Gran. I need to talk to you.’
She reluctantly agreed and I helped her to her bedroom, a small, chintzily decorated cell she darkly referred to as her ‘departure lounge’. It was sparsely furnished; there was a picture of me, Anton, Joffy and my mother alongside a couple of empty frames.
‘They sideslipped my husband, Gran.’
‘When did they take him?’ she asked, looking at me over her glasses in the way that grannies do; she never questioned what I said and I explained everything to her as quickly as I could—except for the bit about the baby. I’d promised Landen I wouldn’t.
‘Hmm,’ said Granny Next when I had finished. ‘They took my husband too—I know how you feel.’
‘Why did they do it?’
‘The same reason they did it to you. Love is a wonderful thing, my dear, but it leaves you wide open to blackmail. Give way to tyranny and others will suffer just as badly as you—perhaps worse.’
‘Are you saying I shouldn’t try to get Landen back?’
‘Not at all; just think carefully before you help them. They don’t care about you or Landen; all they want is Jack Schitt. Is Anton still dead?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘What a shame. I hoped to see your brother before I popped myself. Do you know what the worst bit about dying is?’
‘Tell me, Gran.’
‘You never get to see how it all turns out.’
‘Did you get your husband back, Gran?’
Instead of answering she unexpectedly placed her hand on my midriff and smiled that small and all-knowing smile that grandmothers seem to learn at granny school, along with crochet, January sales battle tactics and wondering what you are doing upstairs.
‘June?’ she asked.
You never argue with Granny Next, nor seek to know how she knows such things.
‘July. But Gran, I don’t know if it’s Landen’s, or Miles Hawke’s, or whose!’
‘You should call this Hawke fellow and ask him.’
‘I can’t do that!’
‘Worry yourself woolly, then,’ she retorted. ‘Mind you, my money is on Landen as the father—as you say, the memories avoided the sideslip, so why not the baby? Believe me, everything will turn out fine. Perhaps not in the way that you imagine, but fine nonetheless.’
I wished I could share her optimism. She took her hand off my stomach and lay back on the bed, the energy expended during the Ping-Pong having taken its toll.
‘I need to find a way to get back into books without the Prose Portal, Gran.’
She opened her eyes and looked at me with a keenness that belied her old age.
‘Humph!’ she said, then added: ‘I was SpecOps for seventy-seven years in eighteen different departments. I jumped backwards and forwards and even sideways on occasion. I’ve chased bad guys who make Hades look like St Zvlkx and saved the world from annihilation eight times. I’ve seen such weird shit you can’t even begin to comprehend, but for all of that I have absolutely no idea how Mycroft managed to jump you into Jane Eyre.’
‘Ah.’
‘Sorry, Thursday—but that’s the way it is. If I were you I’d work the problem out backwards. Who was the last person you met who could book-jump?’
‘Mrs Nakajima.’
‘And how did she manage it?’
‘She just read herself in, I suppose.’
‘Have you tried it?’
I shook my head.
‘Perhaps you should,’ she replied with deathly seriousness. ‘The first time you went into Jane Eyre—wasn’t that a book jump?’
‘I guess.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, as she picked a book at random off the shelf above her bed and tossed it across to me, ‘perhaps you had better try.’
I picked the book up.
‘The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies?’
‘Well, you’ve got to start somewhere, haven’t you?’ replied Gran with a chuckle. I helped her take off her blue gingham shoes and made her more comfortable.
‘One hundred and eight!’ she muttered ‘I feel like the bunny in that Fusioncell ad—you know, the one that has to run on “Brand X”?’
‘You’re Fusioncell all the way to me, Gran.’
She gave a faint smile and leaned back on the pillows.
‘Read the book to me, my dear.’
I sat down and opened the small Beatrix Potter volume. I glanced up at Gran, who had closed her eyes.
‘Read!’
So I did, right from the front to the back.
‘Anything?’
‘No,’ I replied sadly, ‘nothing.’
‘Not even the whiff of garden refuse or the distant buzz of a lawnmower?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘Hah!’ said Gran. ‘Read it to me again.’
So I read it again, and again after that.
‘Still nothing?’
‘No, Gran,’ I replied, beginning to get bored.
‘How do you see the character of Mrs Tittlemouse?’
‘Resourceful and intelligent,’ I mused. ‘Probably a gossip and likes to name-drop. Leagues ahead of Benjamin in the brain department.’
‘How do you figure that’’ queried Gran.
‘Well, by allowing his children to sleep so vulnerably in the open air Benjamin clearly shows minimal parenting skills, yet he has enough preservation to cover his own face. It was Flopsy who had to come and look for him as this so
rt of thing has obviously happened before—it is clear that Benjamin can’t be trusted with the children. Once again the mother has to show restraint and wisdom.’
‘Maybe so,’ replied Gran, ‘but there wasn’t a great deal of wisdom in creeping into the garden and watching from the window while Mr and Mrs McGregor discovered they had been duped with the rotten vegetables, now, was there?’
She had a point.
‘A narrative necessity,’ I replied. ‘I think there is more high drama if you follow the outcome of the rabbit’s subterfuge, don’t you? I think Flopsy, had she been making all the decisions, would have just returned to the burrow but was, on this occasion, overruled by Beatrix Potter.’
‘It’s an interesting theory,’ commented Gran, stretching her toes out on the counterpane and wiggling them to keep the circulation going. ‘Mr McGregor’s a nasty piece of work, isn’t he? Quite the Darth Vader of children’s literature.’
‘Misunderstood,’ I told her ‘I see Mrs McGregor as the villain of the piece. A sort of Lady Macbeth. His laboured counting and inane chuckling might indicate a certain degree of dementia that allows him to be easily dominated by Mrs McGregor’s more aggressive personality. I think their marriage is in trouble, too. She describes him as a “silly old man” and “a doddering old fool” and claims the rotten vegetables in the sack are just a pointless prank to annoy her.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Not really. I think that’s about it Good stuff, isn’t it?’
But Gran didn’t answer; she just chuckled softly to herself.
‘So you’re still here, then,’ she commented. ‘You didn’t jump into Mr and Mrs McGregor’s cottage?’
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