I could see Schitt-Hawse move towards me but he had started to become less tangible; although I could see his lips move, the sound arrived at my ears a full second later. I continued to read, and as I did so the room about me began to fworp from view.
‘Next!’ yelled Schitt-Hawse. ‘You’ll regret, this I swear!’
I carried on reading.
‘—reinforcing the serious mood of the library—’
‘Bitch!’ I heard Schitt-Hawse cry. ‘Grab her!’
But his words were as a zephyr; the room took on the appearance of morning mist and darkened. I felt a gentle tingling sensation, the feeling of tepid water brushing on the skin—and in the next instant, I had gone.
I blinked twice but Osaka was far behind. I closed the book, carefully placed it in my pocket and looked around. I was in a long, dark, wood-panelled corndor lined with bookshelves that reached from the richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling. The carpet was elegantly patterned and the ceiling was decorated with rich mouldings that depicted scenes from the classics, each cornice supporting the marble bust of an author. High above me, spaced at regular intervals, were finely decorated circular apertures through which light gained entry and reflected off the polished wood, reinforcing the serious mood of the library. Running down the centre of the corridor was a long row of reading tables, each with a green-shaded brass lamp. The library appeared endless; in both directions the corridor vanished into darkness with no definable end. But this wasn’t important. Describing the library would be like going to see a Turner and commenting on the frame. On all the walls, end after end, shelf after shelf, were books. Hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Hardbacks, paperbacks, leather-bound volumes, uncorrected proofs, handwritten manuscripts, everything. I stepped closer and rested my fingertips lightly on the pristine volumes. They felt warm to the touch, so I leaned closer and pressed my ear to the spines. I could hear a distant hum, the rumble of machinery, people talking, traffic, seagulls, laughter, waves on rocks, wind in the winter branches of trees, distant thunder, heavy rain, children playing, a blacksmith’s hammer—a million sounds all happening together. And then, in a revelatory moment, the clouds slid back from my mind and a crystal-clear understanding of the very nature of books shone upon me. They weren’t just collections of words arranged neatly on a page to give the impression of reality—each of these volumes was reality. The similarity of these books to the copies I had read back home was no more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject—these books were alive!
I walked slowly down the corridor, running my fingers along the spines and listening to the comfortable pat-pat-pat sound they made, every now and then recognising a familiar title. After a couple of hundred yards I came across a junction where a second corridor crossed the first. In the middle of the crossway was a large circular void with a wrought-iron rail and a spiral staircase bolted securely to one side. I peered cautiously down. Not more than thirty feet below me I could see another floor, exactly like this one. But in the middle of that floor was another circular void through which I could see another floor, and another and another and so on to the depths of the library. I looked up. It was the same above me, more circular light wells and the spiral staircase reaching up into the dizzy heights above. I leaned on the balcony and looked about me at the vast library once again.
‘Well,’ I said to no one in particular, ‘I don’t think I’m in Osaka any more.’
16. Interview with the Cat
‘The Cheshire cat was the first character I met at Jurisfiction and his somewhat sporadic appearances enlivened the time I spent there. He gave me much advice. Some was good, some was bad and some was so nonsensically nonsequitous that it confuses me even now to think about it. And yet, during all that time, I never learned his age, where he came from or where he went when he vanished. It was one of Jurisfiction’s lesser mysteries.’
THURSDAY NEXT. The Jurisfiction Chronicles
‘A visitor!’ exclaimed a voice behind me. ‘What a delightful surprise!’
I turned and was astonished to see a large and luxuriant cat sitting precariously on the uppermost bookshelf. He was staring at me with a curious mixture of lunacy and benevolence, and remained quite still except for the tip of his tail, which twitched occasionally from side to side. I had never come across a talking cat before, but good manners, as my father used to say, cost nothing.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Cat.’
The cat’s eyes opened wide and the grin fell from his face. He looked up and down the corridor for a few moments and then enquired:
‘Me?’
I stifled a laugh.
‘I don’t see any others.’
‘Ah!’ replied the cat, grinning more than ever. ‘That’s because you have a temporary form of cat blindness.’
‘I’m not sure I’ve heard of that.’
‘It’s quite common,’ he replied airily. ‘I suppose you have heard of knight blindness, when you can’t see any knights?’
‘It’s night, not knight,’ I corrected him.
‘It all sounds the same to me.’
‘Suppose I do have cat blindness,’ I ventured. ‘Then how is it I can see you?’
‘Suppose we change the subject?’ retorted the cat. ‘What do you think of the library?’
‘It’s pretty big,’ I murmured, looking all around me.
‘Two hundred miles in every direction,’ said the cat offhandedly, beginning to purr, ‘twenty-six floors above ground, twenty-six below.’
‘You must have a copy of every book that’s been written,’ I observed.
‘Every book that will ever be written,’ corrected the cat, ‘and a few others besides.’
‘How many?’
‘Well, I’ve never counted them myself but certainly more than twelve.’
‘You’re the Cheshire cat, aren’t you?’ I asked.
‘I was the Cheshire cat,’ he replied with a slightly aggrieved air. ‘But they moved the county boundaries, so technically speaking I’m now the “Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat”, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it. Oh, and welcome to Jurisfiction. You’ll like it here; everyone is quite mad.’
‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ I replied indignantly.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
I snapped my fingers.
‘Wait a moment!’ I exclaimed. ‘This is the conversation you had in Alice in Wonderland, just after the baby turned into a pig!’
‘Ah!’ returned the cat with an annoyed flick of his tail. ‘Fancy you can write your own dialogue, do you? I’ve seen people try; it’s never a pretty sight. But have it your own way. And what’s more, the baby turned into a fig, not a pig.’
‘It was a pig, actually.’
‘Fig,’ said the cat stubbornly. ‘Who was in the book, me or you?’
‘It was a pig,’ I insisted.
‘Well!’ exclaimed the cat. ‘I’ll go and check. Then you’ll look pretty stupid, I can tell you!’
And so saying, he vanished.
I stood there for a moment or two, and pretty soon the cat’s tail started to appear, then his body and finally his head and mouth.
‘Well?’ I asked.
‘All right,’ grumbled the cat. ‘So it was a pig. My hearing is not so good; I think it’s all that pepper. By the by, I almost forgot. You’re apprenticed to Miss Havisham.’
‘Miss Havisham? Great Expectations Miss Havisham?’
‘Is there any other? You’ll be fine—just don’t mention the wedding.’
‘I’ll try not to. Wait a moment—apprenticed?’
‘Of course. Getting here is only half the adventure. If you want to join us you’ll have to learn the ropes. Right now all you can do is journey. With a bit of practice on your own you might learn to be page accurate when you jump. But if you want to delve deep into the back-story or take an excursion beyond the sleeve notes, you’re going
to have to take instruction. Why, by the time Miss Havisham has finished with you, you’ll think nothing of being able to visit early drafts, deleted characters or long-discarded chapters that make little or no sense at all. Who knows, you may even glimpse the core of the book, the central nub of energy that binds a novel together.’
‘You mean the spine?’ I asked, not quite up to speed yet.
The cat lashed its tail.
‘No, stupid, the idea, the notion, the spark. Once you’ve laid your eyes on the raw concept of a book, everything you’ve ever seen or felt will seem about as interesting as a stair carpet. Try and imagine this: you are sitting on soft grass on a warm summer’s evening in front of a dazzling sunset; the air is full of truly inspiring music and you have in your hands a wonderful book. Are you there?’
‘I think so.’
‘Okay, now imagine a simply vast saucer of warm cream in front of you and consider lapping it really slowly until your whiskers are completely drenched.’
The Cheshire cat shivered deliriously.
‘If you do all of that and multiply it by a thousand, then perhaps, just perhaps, you will have some idea of what I’m talking about.’
‘Can I pass on the cream?’
‘Whatever you want. It’s your daydream, after all.’
And with a flick of his tail, the cat vanished again. I turned to explore my surroundings and was surprised to find that the Cheshire cat was sitting on another shelf on the other side of the corridor.
‘You seem a bit old to be an apprentice,’ continued the cat, folding its paws and staring at me so intensely I felt unnerved. ‘We’ve been expecting you for almost twenty years. Where on earth have you been?’
‘I… I… didn’t know I could do this.’
‘What you mean is that you did know that you couldn’t—it’s quite a different thing. The point is, do you think you have what it takes to help us here at Jurisfiction?’
‘I really don’t know,’ I replied, truthfully enough, adding ‘What do you do?’ as I didn’t see why he should be asking all the questions.
‘I,’ said the cat proudly, ‘am the librarian.’
‘You look after all these books?’
‘Certainly,’ replied the cat proudly. ‘Ask me any question you want.’
‘Jane Eyre,’ I said, intending only to ask its location but realising when the cat answered that a librarian here was far removed from the sort I knew at home.
‘Ranked the 728th favourite fictional book ever written,’ the cat replied parrot-fashion. ‘Total readings to date: 82,581,430. Current reading figure 829,321—1,421 of whom are reading it as we speak. It’s a good figure; quite possibly because it has been in the news recently.’
‘So what’s the most read book?’
‘Up until now or for ever and all time?’
‘For all time.’
The cat thought for a moment.
‘In fiction, the most read book ever is To Kill a Mocking Bird. Not just because it is a cracking good read for us, but of all the vertebrate uberclassics it was the only one that really translated well into Arthropod. And if you can crack the lobster market—if you’ll pardon the pun—a billion years from now, you’re really going to flog some copies. The Arthropod title is: tlkiltlilkixlkilkixlkli or, literally translated, The past non-existent state of the angel fish. Atticus Finch is a lobster called Tkliki, and he defends a horseshoe crab named Klikiflik.’
‘How does it compare?’
‘Not too bad, although the scene with the prawns is a little harrowing. It’s the crustacean readership that makes Daphne Farquitt such a major player, too.’
‘Daphne Farquitt?’ I echoed with some surprise. ‘But her books are frightfull!’
‘Only to us. To the highly evolved Arthropods, Farquitt’s work is considered sacred and religious to the point of lunacy. Listen, I’m no fan of Farquitt’s but her bodice-ripping pot-boiler The Squire of High Potternews sparked one of the biggest, bloodiest, shellbrokenist wars the planet has ever witnessed.’
I was getting off the point.
‘So all these books are your responsibility?’
‘Indeed,’ replied the cat ainly.
‘If I wanted to go into a book I could just pick it up and read it?’
‘It’s not quite that easy,’ replied the cat. ‘You can only get into a book if someone has already found a way in and then exited through the library. Every book, you will observe, is bound in either red or green. Green for go, red for no-go. It’s quite easy, really—you’re not colour blind, are you?’
‘No. So if I wanted to go into—oh, I don’t know, let’s pull a title out of the air—The Raven, then—’
But the cat flinched as I said the title.
‘There are some places you should not go!’ he muttered in an aggrieved tone. ‘Edgar Allan Poe is one of them. His books are not fixed; there is a certain oddness that goes with them. Most macabre Gothic fiction tends to be like that—Sade is the same; also Webster, Wheatley and King. Go into those and you may never come out—they have a way of weaving you into the story and before you know it you’re stuck there. Let me show you something.’
And all of a sudden we were in a large and hollow-sounding vestibule where huge Doric columns rose to support a vast vaulted ceiling. The floor and walls were all dark red marble and reminded me of the entrance lobby of an old hotel—only about forty times as big. You could have parked an airship in here and still had room to hold an air race. There was a red carpet leading up from the tall front doors, and all the brasswork shone like gold.
‘This is where we honour the boojummed,’ said the cat in a quiet voice. He waved a paw in the direction of a large granite memorial about the size of two upended cars. The edifice was shaped like a large book, open in the centre and splayed wide, with a depiction of a person walking into the left-hand page, his form covered by text as he entered. On the opposite page was row upon row of names. A mason was delicately working on a new name with a mallet and chisel. He tipped his hat respectfully and resumed his work.
‘Prose Resource Operatives deleted or lost in the line of duty,’ explained the cat from where he was perched on top of the statue. ‘We call it the Boojumorial.’
I pointed to a name on the memorial.
‘Ambrose Bierce was a Jurisfiction agent?’
‘One of the best. Dear, sweet Ambrose! A master of prose but quite impetuous. He went—alone—into The Literary Life of Thingum Bob—a Poe short story that one would’ve thought held no terrors.’
The cat sighed before continuing.
‘He was trying to find a back door into Poe’s poems. We know you can get from Thingum Bob into The Black Cat by way of an unstable verb in the third paragraph, and from Black Cat into The Fall of the House of Usher by the simple expedient of hiring a horse from the Nicaean stables, from there he was hoping to use the poem within Usher, The Haunted Palace, to springboard him into the rest of the Poe poetical canon.’
‘What happened?’
‘Never heard from him again. Two fellow booksplorers went in after him—one lost his breath and the other… well, poor Ahab went completely bonkers—thought he was being chased by a white whale. We suspect that Ambrose was either walled up with a cask of amontillado or burried alive or some other unspeakable fate. It was decided that Poe was out of bounds.’
‘So Antoine de Saint-Exupery, he disappeared on assignment too?’
‘Not at all; he crashed on a reconnaissance sortie.’
‘It was tragic.’
‘It certainly was,’ replied the cat. ‘He owed me forty francs and promised to teach me to play Debussy on the piano using only oranges.’
‘Oranges?’
‘Oranges. Well, I’m off now. Miss Havisham will explain everything. Go through those doors into the library, take the elevator to the fourth floor, first right and the books are about a hundred yards on your left. Great Expectations is green bound so you should have no trouble.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ said the cat, and with a wave of his paw he started to fade, very slowly, from the tip of his tail. He just had time to ask me to get some tuna-flavoured Moggilicious for him the next time I was home—before he vanished completely and I was alone in front of the granite Boojumorial, the quiet tapping of the mason’s hammer echoing around the lofty heights of the library vestibule.
I took the marble stairs into the library, ascended by one of the wrought-iron lifts, and walked down the corridor until I came across several shelves of Dickens novels. There were, I noted, twenty-nine different editions of Great Expectations from early drafts to the last of Dickens’s own revised editions. I picked up the newest tome, opened it at the first chapter and heard the gentle sound of wind in the trees. I nipped through the pages, the sounds changing as I moved from scene to scene, page to page. I located the first mention of Miss Havisham, found a good place to start and then read loudly to myself, willing the words to live. And live they did.
17. Miss Havisham
‘Great Expectations was written in 1860-61 to reverse flagging sales of All the Year Round, the weekly periodical founded by Dickens himself. The novel was regarded as a great success. The tale of Pip the blacksmith’s apprentice and his rise to the position of young gentleman through an anonymous benefactor introduced readers to many new and varied characters: Joe Gargery, the simple and honourable blacksmith, Abel Magwitch, the convict Pip helps in the first chapter, Jaggers, the lawyer, Herbert Pocket, who befriends him and teaches him how to behave in London society. But it is Miss Havisham, abandoned at the altar and living her life in dreary isolation dressed in her tattered wedding robes, that steals the show. She remains one of the book’s most memorable fixtures.’
MILLON DE FLOSS. Great Expectations, a Study
I found myself in a large and dark hall which smelt of musty decay. The windows were tightly shuttered, the only light from a few candles scattered around the room; they added little to the room except to heighten the gloominess. In the centre a long table was covered with what had once been a wedding banquet but was now a sad arrangement of tarnished silver and dusty crockery. In the bowls and meat platters dried remnants of food were visible, and in the middle of the table a large wedding cake bedecked with cobwebs had begun to collapse like a dilapidated building. I had read the scene many times, but it was somehow different when you saw it for real. I was on the other side of the room from Miss Havisham, Estella and Pip. I stood silently and watched.
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