Lost in a Good Book tn-2

by Jasper Fforde

‘Since this morning, ma’am.’

  ‘A morning wasted, I shouldn’t wonder. Do you have a name?’

  ‘Thursday Next, ma’am.’

  ‘You may curtsy if you so wish.’

  So I did.

  ‘You will regret not learning with me, my dear—but you are, of course, merely a child and right and wrong are so difficult to spot at your tender age.’

  ‘Which floor, Your Majesty?’ asked the Neanderthal.

  The Red Queen beamed at him, told him that if he played his cards right she would make him a duke and then added ‘Three’ as an afterthought.

  There was one of those funny empty pauses that seem to exist only in elevators and dentists’ waiting rooms. We stared at the floor indicator as the lift moved slowly upward and stopped on the second floor. ‘Second floor,’ announced the Neanderthal, ‘Historical, Allegorical, Historical-allegorical, Poetry, Plays, Theology, Critical Analysis and Pencils.’ Someone tried to get in; but the Red Queen barked ‘Taken!’ in such a fearful tone that they backed out again.

  ‘And how is Havisham these days?’ asked the Red Queen with a diffident air as the lift moved upwards again.

  ‘Well, I think,’ I replied.

  ‘You must ask her about her wedding.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s very wise,’ I returned.

  ‘Decidedly not!’ said the Red Queen, guffawing like a sea lion, ‘But it will elicit an amusing effect. Like Vesuvius, as I recall!’

  ‘Third floor,’ announced the Neanderthal, ‘Fiction, Popular, Authors A–J.’ The doors opened to reveal a mass of book fans, fighting in a most unseemly fashion over what even I had to admit were some very good bargains. I had heard about these sorts of ‘fiction-frenzies’ before—but never witnessed one.

  ‘Come, this is more like it!’ announced the Red Queen happily, rubbing her hands together and knocking a little old lady flying as she hopped out of the elevator.

  ‘Where are you, Havisham?’ she yelled, looking to left and right. ‘She has to be… Yes! Yes! Ahoy there, Stella you old trollop!’

  Miss Havisham stopped in mid-stride and stared in the queen’s direction. In a single swift movement she drew a small pistol from the folds of her tattered wedding dress and loosed off a shot in our direction. The Red Queen ducked as the bullet knocked a corner off a plaster cornice.

  ‘Temper, temper!’ shouted the Red Queen, but Havisham was no longer there.

  ‘Hah!’ said the Red Queen, hopping into the fray. ‘The devil take her—she’s heading towards Romantic Fiction!’

  ‘Romantic Fiction?’ I echoed, thinking of Havisham’s hatred of men, ‘I don’t think that’s very likely!’ The Red Queen ignored me and made a detour through Fantasy to avoid a scrum near the Agatha Christie counter. I knew the store a little better and nipped in between Herge and Haggard where I was just in time to see Miss Havisham make her first mistake. In her haste she had pushed past a little old lady sizing up a buy-two-get-one-free offer on contemporary fiction. The little old lady—no stranger to department store sales battle tactics—parried Havisham’s blow expertly and hooked her bamboo-handled umbrella around her ankle. Havisham came down with a heavy thud and lay still, the breath knocked out of her. I kneeled beside her as the Red Queen hopped past, laughing loudly and making ‘nyah, nyah’ noises.

  ‘Thursday!’ panted Miss Havisham as several stockinged feet ran across her. ‘A complete set of Daphne Farquitt novels in a walnut display case—run!’

  And run I did. Farquitt was so prolific and popular she had a bookshelf all to herself and her recent boxed sets were fast becoming collector’s items—it was not surprising there was a battle in progress. I entered the fight behind the Red Queen and was instantly punched on the nose. I reeled with the shock and was pushed heavily from behind while someone else—an accomplice, I assumed—thrust a walking stick between my shins. I lost my footing and fell with a thud on the hard wooden floor. This was not a safe place to be. I crawled out of the battle and joined Miss Havisham where she had taken cover behind a display of generously discounted du Maurier novels.

  ‘Not so easy as it looks, eh, girl?’ asked Havisham with a rare smile, holding a lacy white handkerchief to my bleeding nose. ‘Did you see the royal harridan anywhere?’

  ‘I last saw her fighting somewhere between Irvine and Euripides.’

  ‘Blast!’ replied Havisham with a grunt. ‘Listen, girl, I’m done for. My ankle’s twisted and I think I’ve had it. But you—you might be able to make it.’

  I looked out at the squabbling masses as a pocket Derringer fell to the ground not far from us.

  ‘I thought this might happen, so I drew a map.’

  She unfolded a piece of Satis House headed notepaper and pointed out where she thought we were.

  ‘You won’t make it across the main floor alive. You’re going to have to climb over the Police Procedurals bookcase, make your way past the cash register and stock returns, crawl under the Seafaring section and then fight the last six feet to the Farquitt boxed set—it’s a limited edition of a hundred—I will never get another chance like this!’

  ‘This is lunacy, Miss Havisham!’ I replied indignantly. ‘I will not fight over a set of Farquitt novels!’

  Miss Havisham looked sharply at me as the muffled crack of a small-calibre firearm sounded and there was the thud of a body falling.

  ‘I thought as much!’ she sneered. ‘A streak of yellow a mile wide all the way down your back! How did you think you were going to handle the otherness at Jurisfiction if you can’t handle a few crazed fiction-fanciers hell-bent on finding bargains? Your apprenticeship is at an end. Good day, Miss Next!’

  ‘Wait! This is a test?’

  ‘What did you think it was? Think someone like me with all the money I have enjoys spending my time fighting for books I can read for free in the library?’

  I resisted the temptation to say: ‘Well, yes’ and answered instead:

  ‘Will you be okay here, ma’am?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she replied, tripping up a woman near us for no reason I could see. ‘Now go!’

  I turned and crawled rapidly across the carpet, climbed over the Police Procedurals to just beyond the registers, where the sales assistants rang in the bargains with a fervour bordering on messianic. I crept past them, through the empty returns department, and dived under the Seafaring section to emerge a scant two yards from the Daphne Farquitt display; by a miracle no one had yet grabbed the boxed set—and it was very discounted: down from ?300 to only ?50. I looked to my left and could see the Red Queen fighting her way through the crowd. She caught my eye and dared me to try to beat her. I took a deep breath and waded into the swirling maelstrom of popular prose-induced violence. Almost instantly I was punched on the jaw and thumped in the kidneys; I cried out in pain and quickly withdrew. I met a woman next to the J.G. Farrell section who had a nasty cut above her eye; she told me in a concussed manner that the Major Archer character appeared in both Troubles and The Singapore Grip. I glanced over to where the Red Queen was cutting a swathe through the crowd, knocking people aside in her bid to beat me. She smiled triumphantly as she head-butted a woman who had tried to poke her in the eye with a silver-plated bookmark. On the floor below a brief burst of machine-gun fire sounded. I took a step forward to join the fray, then stopped, considered my condition for a moment and decided that perhaps pregnant women shouldn’t get involved in bookshop brawls. So instead, I took a deep breath and yelled:

  ‘Ms Farquitt is signing copies of her book in the basement!’

  There was a moment’s silence, then a mass exodus towards the stairs and escalators. The Red Queen, caught up in the crowd, was dragged unceremoniously away, in a few seconds the room was empty.

  Daphne Farquitt was notoriously private—I didn’t think there was a fan of hers anywhere who wouldn’t jump at the chance of actually meeting her.

  I walked calmly up to the boxed set, picked it up and took it to the counter, paid and rejoined
Miss Havisham behind the discounted du Mauriers, where she was idly flicking through a copy of Rebecca. I showed her the books.

  ‘Not bad,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Did you get a receipt?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘And the Red Queen?’

  ‘Lost somewhere between here and the basement,’ I replied simply.

  A thin smile crossed Miss Havisham’s lips and I helped her to her feet.

  Together we walked slowly past the mass of squabbling book bargainers and made for the exit.

  ‘How did you manage it?’ asked Miss Havisham.

  ‘I told them Daphne Farquitt was signing in the basement’

  ‘She is?’ exclaimed Miss Havisham, turning to head off downstairs.

  ‘No no no,’ I added, taking her by the arm and steering her to the exit. ‘That’s just what I told them.’

  ‘Oh, I get it!’ replied Havisham. ‘Very good indeed. Resourceful and intelligent. Mrs Nakajima was quite right—I think you will do as an apprentice after all.’

  She regarded me for a moment, as if making up her mind about something. Eventually she nodded, gave another rare smile and handed me a simple gold ring that slipped easily over my little finger.

  ‘Here—this is for you. Never take it off. Do you understand?’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Havisham, it’s very pretty.’

  ‘Pretty nothing, Next. Save your gratitude for real favours, not baubles, my girl. Come along. I know of a very good bun shop in Little Dorrit—and I’m buying!’

  * * *

  Outside, paramedics were dealing with the casualties, many of them still clutching the remnants of their bargains for which they had fought so bravely. My car was gone—towed away, most likely—and we trotted as fast as we could on Miss Havisham’s twisted ankle, round the corner of the building until—

  ‘—not so fast!’

  The officers who had chased us earlier were blocking our path.

  ‘Looking for something? This, I suppose?’

  My car was on the back of a low-loader, being taken away.

  ‘We’ll take the bus,’ I stammered.

  ‘You’ll take the car,’ corrected the police officer, ‘my car… Hey! Where do you think you’re going?’

  He was talking to Miss Havisham, who had taken the Farquitt boxed set and walked into a small group of women to disguise her bookjump—back to Great Expectations or the bun shop in Little Dorrit, or somewhere. I wished I could have joined her, but my skills in these matters were not really up to scratch. I sighed.

  ‘We want some answers, Next,’ said the policeman in a grim tone.

  ‘Listen, Rawlings, I don’t know the lady very well. What did she say her name was? Dame-rouge?’

  ‘It’s Havisham, Next—but you know that, don’t you? That “lady” is extremely well known to the police—she’s racked up seventy-four outrageously serious driving offences in the past twenty-two years.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. In June she was clocked driving a chain-driven Liberty-engined Higham Special Automobile at 171.5 m.p.h. up the M4. It’s not only irresponsible, it’s… Why are you laughing?’

  ‘No reason.’

  The officer stared at me.

  ‘You seem to know her quite well, Next. Why does she do these things?’

  ‘Probably,’ I replied, ‘because they don’t have motorways where she comes from—or twenty-seven-litre Higham Specials.’

  ‘And where would that be, Next?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘I could arrest you for helping the escape of an individual in custody.’

  ‘She wasn’t arrested, Rawlings, you said so yourself.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but you are. In the car.’

  20. Yorrick Kaine

  ‘In 1983 the youthful Yorrick Kaine was elected leader of the Whigs, at that time a small and largely inconsequential party whose desire to put the aristocracy back in power and limit voting rights to homeowners had placed it on the outer edges of the political arena. A pro-Crimean stance coupled with a wish for British unification helped build nationalist support, and by 1985 the Whigs had three MPs in Parliament. They built their manifesto on populist tactics such as reducing the cheese duty and offering dukedoms as prizes on the National Lottery. A shrewd politician and clever tactician, Kaine was ambitious for power—in whatever way he could get it.’

  A.J.P. MILLINER. The New Whigs—From Humble Beginnings to Fourth Reich

  It took two hours for me to convince the police I wasn’t going to tell them anything about Miss Havisham other than her address. Undeterred, they thumbed through a yellowed statute book and eventually charged me with a little-known 1621 law about ‘Permissioning a horse and carte to be driven by personn of low moral turpithtude’, but with the ‘horse and carte’ bit crossed out and ‘car’ written in instead—so you can see how desperate they were. I would have to go before the magistrate the following week. I started to sneak out of the building to go home but—

  ‘—so there you are!’

  I turned and hoped my groan wasn’t audible.

  ‘Hello, Cordelia.’

  ‘Thursday, are you okay’ You look a bit bruised!’

  ‘I got caught in a fiction frenzy.’

  ‘No more nonsense, now—I need you to meet the people who won my competition.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  Flakk looked at me sternly.

  ‘It’s very advisable.’

  ‘Okay,’ I replied, let me have a pee and I’ll be with you in five minutes. Okay?’

  ‘Right!’ Cordelia beamed.

  But I didn’t have a pee, instead I nipped up to the LiteraTec office.

  ‘Thursday!’ said Bowden as I entered. ‘I told Victor you had the flu. How did you get on?’

  ‘Pretty well, I think. I’ve been inside books again without a Prose Portal. I can do it on my own—more or less.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘No,’ I told him, ‘deadly serious. Landen’s almost as good as back. I met Miss Havisham.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Odd. It seems there is something very like SpecOps 27 inside books—I’ve yet to figure it all out. How have things been out here?’

  He showed me a copy of The Owl. The headline read: ‘New play by Will found in Swindon’. The Mole had the headline: ‘Cardenio sensation!’ and The Toad, predictably enough, led with. ‘Swindon croquet supremo Aubrey Jambe found in bath with chimp’.

  ‘So Professor Spoon authenticated it?’

  ‘He did indeed,’ replied Bowden. ‘One of us should take the report up to Volescamper this afternoon. This is for you.’

  He handed me the bag of pinkish goo attached to a report from the SpecOps forensic labs. I thanked him and read the analysis of the slime Dad had given me with interest and confusion in equal measures.

  ‘…sugar, fatty animal protein, calcium, sodium, maltodextrin, carboxy-methyl-cellulose, phenylalnine, complex hydrocarbon compounds and traces of chlorophyll.’

  I flicked to the back of the report but was none the wiser. Forensics had faithfully interpreted my request for analysis—but it told me nothing new.

  ‘What does it mean, Bowd?’

  ‘Search me, Thursday. They’re trying to match the profile to known chemical compounds, but so far nothing. Perhaps if you told us where you got it?’

  ‘I don’t think that would be safe. I’ll drop the Cardenio report in to Volescamper—I’m keen to avoid Cordelia. Tell forensics that the future of the planet depends on them—that should help. I have to know what this pink stuff is.’

  I saw Cordelia waiting for me in the lobby with her guest, who had a Finis Hotel carrier bag in one hand and a young daughter in the other. Unluckily for him Spike Stoker had been passing and Cordelia, eager to do something to amuse her competition winner, had obviously asked him to say a few words. The look of frozen, jaw-dropping horror on her guest’s face said it all. I hid my face behind the Carde
nio report and left Cordelia to it.

  I blagged a ride in a squad car up to the crumbling Vole Towers. The house had changed a lot since I was last there. The mansion was besieged by the news stations, all keen to report any details regarding the discovery of Cardenio. Two dozen outside broadcast trucks were parked on the weed-infested gravel, all humming with activity. Dishes were trained into the afternoon sky, transmitting the pictures to an airship repeater station that had been routed in to bounce the stories live to the world’s eager viewers. For security, SpecOps 14 had been drafted in and operatives stood languidly about, idly chatting to one another. Mostly, it seemed, about Aubrey Jambe’s apparent indiscretion with the chimp.

  ‘Hello, Thursday!’ said a handsome young SO-14 agent at the front door. It was annoying; I didn’t recognise him. People I couldn’t remember hailing me as friends was something that had happened a lot since Landen’s eradication; I supposed I would get used to it.

  ‘Hello!’ I replied to the stranger in an equally friendly tone. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Yorrick Kaine is giving a press conference.’

  ‘Really? What’s Cardenio got to do with him?’

  ‘Hadn’t you heard? Lord Volescamper has given the play to Yorrick Kaine and the Whig party!’

  ‘Why would Volescamper have anything to do with a minor right-wing pro-Crimean Welsh-hater like Kaine?’

  ‘Because he’s a lord and wants to reclaim some lost power?’

  At that moment two other SpecOps operatives walked past and one of them nodded to the young agent at the door and said: ‘All well, Miles?’

  The dashing young SO-14 agent said that all was well, but he was wrong—all was not well, at least it wasn’t for me. I thought I might bump into Miles eventually but not unprepared, like this. I stared at him, hoping my shock and surprise wouldn’t show. He had spent time in my flat and knew me a lot better than I knew him. My heart thumped inside my chest and I tried to say something intelligent and witty but it came out more like:

  ‘Asterfobulongus?’

  ‘I’m sorry, what was that?’