The Well of Lost Plots n-3

by Jasper Fforde

  'We're down here.'

  It was a hedgehog and a tortoise. But the hedgehog wasn't like Mrs Tiggy-winkle, who was as tall as me; this hedgehog and tortoise were just the size they should have been.

  'Thursday Next?' said the hedgehog.

  'Yes,' I replied, 'what can I do for you?'

  'You can stop poking your nose in where it's not wanted,' said the hedgehog haughtily, 'that's what you can do.'

  'I don't understand.'

  'Painted Jaguar?' suggested the tortoise. 'Can't curl, can swim. Ring any bells, Smart Alec?'

  'Oh!' I said. 'You must be Stickly-prickly and Slow-and-Solid.'

  'The same. And that little mnemonic you so kindly gave to the Painted Jaguar is going to cause us a few problems — the dopey feline will never forget that in a month of Sundays.'

  I sighed. Living in the BookWorld was a great deal more complicated than I had imagined.

  'Well, why don't you learn to swim or something?'

  'Who, me?' said Stickly-prickly. 'Don't be absurd; whoever heard of a hedgehog swimming?'

  'And you could learn to curl,' I added to Slow-and-Solid.

  'Curl?' replied the tortoise indignantly. 'I don't think so, thank you very much.'

  'Give it a go,' I persisted. 'Unlace your backplates a little and try and touch your toes.'

  There was a pause. The hedgehog and tortoise looked at one another and giggled.

  'Won't Painted Jaguar be surprised!' they chortled, thanked me, and left.

  I closed the door, sat down and looked in the fridge, shrugged and ate a large portion of apples Benedict before having a long and very relaxing shower.

  The corridors of the Well were as busy as the day before. Traders bustled with buyers, deals were done, orders taken, bargains struck. Every now and then I saw characters fading in and out as their trade took them from book to book. I looked at the shopfronts as I walked past, trying to guess how they did what they did. There were holesmiths, grammatacists, pace-setters, moodmongers, paginators — you name it.[10]

  It was the junkfootnoterphone starting up again. I tried to shut it out but only succeeded in lowering the volume. As I walked along I noticed a familiar figure among the traders and plot speculators. He was dressed in his usual hunter/explorer garb, safari jacket and pith helmet with a revolver in a leather holster. It was Commander Bradshaw, star of thirty-four thrilling adventure stories for boys available in hardback at 7/6 each. Out of print since the thirties, Bradshaw entertained himself in his retirement by being something of an éminence grise at Jurisfiction. He had seen and done it all — or claimed he had.

  'A hundred!' he exclaimed bitterly as I drew closer. 'Is that the best you can offer?'

  The Action Sequence trader he was talking to shrugged.

  'We don't get much call for lion attacks these days.'

  'But it's terrifying, man, terrifying!' exclaimed Bradshaw. 'Real hot breath down the back of your neck stuff. Brighten up a chicklit no end, I should wager — make a change from parties and frocks, what?'

  'A hundred and twenty, then. Take it or leave it.'

  'Blood-sucker!' mumbled Bradshaw, taking the money and handing over a small glass globe with the lion attack, I presumed, safely freeze-dried within. He turned away from the trader and caught me looking at him. He quickly hid the cash and raised his pith helmet politely.

  'Good morning!'

  'Good morning,' I replied.

  He waved a finger at me.

  'It's Havisham's apprentice, isn't it? What was your name again?'

  'Thursday Next.'

  'Is it, by gum?' he exclaimed. 'Well I never.'

  He was, I noticed, a good foot taller than the last time we had met. He now almost came up to my shoulder.

  'You're much—' I began, then checked myself.

  '—taller?' he guessed. 'Quite correct, girlie. Appreciate a woman who isn't trammelled by the conventions of good manners. Melanie — that's the wife, you know — she's pretty rude, too. "Trafford," she says — that's my name, Trafford — "Trafford," she says, "you are a worthless heap of elephant dung." Well, this was out of the blue — I had just returned home after a harrowing adventure in Central Africa where I was captured and nearly roasted on a spit. The sacred emerald of the Umpopo had been stolen by two Swedish prospectors and—'

  'Commander Bradshaw,' I interrupted, desperate to stop him recounting one of his highly unlikely adventures, 'have you seen Miss Havisham this morning?'

  'Quite right to interrupt me,' he said cheerfully. 'Appreciate a woman who knows when to subtly tell a boring old fart to button his lip. You and Mrs Bradshaw have a lot in common. You must meet up some day.'

  We walked down the busy corridor.[11]

  I tapped my ears.

  'Problems?' enquired Bradshaw.

  'Yes,' I replied, 'I've got two gossiping Russians inside my head again.'

  'Crossed line? Infernal contraptions. Have a word with Plum at JurisTech if it persists. I say,' he went on, lowering his voice and looking round furtively, 'you won't tell anyone about that lion attack sale, will you? If the story gets around that old Bradshaw is cashing in his Action Sequences, I'll never hear the last of it.'

  'I won't say a word,' I assured him as we avoided a trader trying to sell us surplus B-3 Darcy clones, 'but do many people try and sell off parts of their own book?'

  'Oh yes,' replied Bradshaw. 'But only if they are out of print and can spare it. Trouble is,' he went on, 'I'm a bit strapped for the old moolah. What with the BookWorld Awards coming up and Mrs Bradshaw a bit shy in public I thought a new dress might be just the ticket — and the cost of clothes is pretty steep down here, y'know.'

  'It's the same in the Outland.'

  'Is it, by George?' He guffawed. 'The Well always reminds me of the market in Nairobi; how about you?'

  'There seems to be an awful lot of bureaucracy,' I observed. 'I would have thought a fiction factory would be, by definition, a lot more free and relaxed.'

  'If you think this is bad, you ought to visit non-fiction. Over there, the rules governing the correct use of a semi-colon alone run to several volumes. Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corruption and error hard-wired at inception, m'girl. I'm surprised you hadn't figured that out yet. What do you think of the Well?'

  'I'm still a bit new to it,' I confessed.

  'Really?' he replied. 'Let me help you out.'

  He stopped and looked around for a moment, then pointed out a man in his early twenties who was walking towards us. He was dressed in a long riding jacket and carried a battered leather suitcase emblazoned with the names of books and plays he had visited in the course of his trade.

  'See him?'

  'Yes?'

  'He's an artisan — a holesmith.'

  'He's a plasterer?'

  'No; he fills narrative holes, plot and expositional anomalies — Bloopholes. If a writer said something like: "The daffodils bloomed in summer" or: "They checked the ballistics report on the shotgun", then artisans like him are there to sort it out. It's one of the final stages of construction just before the grammatacists, echolocators and spellcheckers move in to smooth everything over.'

  The young man had drawn level with us by this time.

  'Hello, Mr Starboard,' said Bradshaw to the holesmith, who gave a wan smile of recognition.

  'Commander Bradshaw!' he muttered slightly hesitantly. 'What a truly delightful honour it is to meet you again, sir. Mrs Bradshaw quite well?'

  'Quite well, thank you. This is Miss Next — new at the department. I'm showing her the ropes.'

  The holesmith shook my hand and made welcoming noises.

  'I closed a hole in Great Expectations the other day,' I told him. 'Was that one of your books?'

  'Goodness me no!' exclaimed the young man, smiling for the first time. 'Holestitching has come a long way since Dickens. You won't find a holesmith worth his thread trying the old "door opens and in comes the missing aunt/father/business associate/friend, etc.", a
ll ready to explain where they've been since mysteriously dropping out of the narrative two hundred pages previously. The methodology we choose these days is to just go back and patch the hole, or more simply, to camouflage it.'

  'I see.'

  'Indeed,' carried on the young man, becoming more flamboyant in the light of my perceived interest, 'I'm working on a system that hides holes by highlighting them to the reader, which just says: "Ho! I'm a hole, don't think about it!", but it's a little cutting-edge. I think,' added the young man airily, 'that you will not find a more experienced holesmith anywhere in the Well; I've been doing it for more than forty years.'

  'When did you start?' I observed, looking at the youth curiously. 'As a baby?'

  The young man aged, greyed and sagged before my eyes until he was in his seventies and then announced, arms outstretched and with a nourish:

  'Da-daaaa!'

  'No one likes a show-off, Llyster,' said Bradshaw, looking at his watch. 'I don't want to hurry you, Tuesday, old girl, but we should be getting over to Norland Park for the roll-call.'

  He gallantly offered me an elbow to hold and I hooked my arm in his.

  'Thank you, Commander.'

  'Stouter than stout!' Bradshaw laughed, and read us both into Sense and Sensibility.

  10

  Jurisfiction session number 40319

  'JurisTech: Popular contraction of Jurisfiction Technological Division. This R&D company works exclusively for JunsFiction and is financed by the Council of Genres through Text Grand Central. Owing to the often rigorous and specialised tasks undertaken by Prose Resource Operatives, JurisTech is permitted to build gadgets deemed outside the usual laws of physics — the only department (aside from the SF genre) licensed to do so. The standard item in a PRO's manifest is the TravelBook (q.v.), which itself contains other JurisTech designs like the Martin-Bacon Eject-O-Hat, MV Mask, Textmarker, String™ and textual sieves of vanous porosity, to name but a few.'

  UA OF W CAT — The Jurisfiction Guide to the Great Library (glossary)

  The offices of Jurisfiction were situated at Norland Park, the house of the Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility. The family kindly lent the ballroom to Jurisfiction on the unspoken condition that Jane Austen books would be an area of special protection.

  Norland Park was located within a broad expanse of softly undulating grassland set about with ancient oaks. The evening was drawing on, as it generally did when we arrived, and wood pigeons cooed from the dovecote. The grass felt warm and comfortable like a heavily underlaid carpet, and the delicate scent of pine needles filled the air.

  But all was not perfect in this garden of nineteenth-century prose; as we approached the house there seemed to be some sort of commotion. A demonstration, in fact — the sort of thing I was used to seeing at home. But this wasn't a rally about the price of cheese or whether the Whig Party were dangerously right wing and anti-Welsh, nor about whether Goliath had the right to force legislation compelling everyone to eat SmileyBurger at least twice a week. No, this demonstration was one you would expect to find only in the world of fiction.

  The Bellman, elected head of Jurisfiction and dressed in the garb of a town crier, was angrily tingling his bell to try to persuade the crowd to calm down.

  'Not again,' muttered Bradshaw as we walked up. 'I wonder what the Orals want this time?'

  I was unfamiliar with the term, and since I didn't want to appear foolish, I tried to make sense of the crowd on my own. The person nearest to me was a shepherdess, although that was only a guess on my part as she didn't have any sheep — only a large crook. A boy dressed in blue with a horn was standing next to her discussing the falling price of lamb, and next to them was a very old woman with a small dog which whined, pretended to be dead, smoked a pipe and performed various other tricks in quick succession. Standing next to her was a small man in a long nightdress and bed hat who yawned loudly. Perhaps I was being slow, but it was only when I saw a large egg with arms and legs that I realised who they were.

  'They're all nursery rhyme characters!' I exclaimed.

  'They're a pain in the whatsit, that's what they are,' murmured Bradshaw as a small boy jumped from the crowd, grabbed a pig and made a dash for it. Bo-Peep hooked his ankle with her crook and the boy sprawled headlong on the grass. The pig rolled into a flower bed with a startled oink and then beat a hurried escape as a large man started to give the boy six of the best.

  '… all we want is the same rights as any other character in the BookWorld,' said Humpty Dumpty, his ovoid face a deep crimson. 'Just because we have a duty to children and the oral tradition doesn't mean we can be taken advantage of.'

  The crowd murmured and grunted their agreement. Humpty Dumpty continued as I stared at him, wondering whether his belt was actually a cravat, as it was impossible to tell which was his neck and which his waist.

  '… we have a petition signed by over a thousand Orals who couldn't make it today,' said the large egg, waving a wad of papers amid shouts from the crowd.

  'We're not joking this time, Mr Bellman,' added a baker, who was standing in a wooden tub with a butcher and a candlestick maker. 'We are quite willing to withdraw our rhymes if our terms are not met.'

  There was a chorus of approval from the assembled characters.

  'It was fine before they were unionised,' Bradshaw whispered in my ear. 'Come on, let's use the back door.'

  We walked around to the side of the house, our feet crunching on the gravel chippings.

  'Why can't characters from the oral tradition be a part of the Character Exchange Programme?' I asked.

  'Who'd cover for them?' snorted Bradshaw. 'You?

  'Couldn't we train up Generics as sort of, well, "character locums"?'

  'Best to leave industrial relations to the people with the facts at their fingertips,' replied Bradshaw. 'We can barely keep pace with the volume of new material as it is. I shouldn't worry about Mr Dumpty; he's been agitating for centuries. It's not our fault he and his badly rhyming friends are still looked after by the old OralTradPlus agreement— Good heavens, Miss Dashwood! Does your mother know that you smoke?'

  It was Marianne Dashwood, and she had been puffing away at a small roll-up as we rounded the corner. She quickly threw the butt away and held her breath for as long as possible before coughing and letting out a large cloud of smoke.

  'Commander!' she wheezed, eyes watering. 'Promise you won't tell!'

  'My lips are sealed,' replied Bradshaw sternly, just this once.'

  Marianne breathed a sigh of relief and turned to me.

  'Miss Next!' she enthused. 'Welcome back to our little book — I trust you are well?'

  'Quite well,' I assured her, passing her the Marmite, Mintolas and AA batteries I had promised her from my last visit. 'Will you make sure these get to your sister and mother?'

  She clapped her hands with joy and took the gifts excitedly.

  'You are a darling!' she said happily. 'What can I do to repay you?'

  'Don't let Lola Vavoom play you in the movie.'

  'Out of my hands,' she replied unhappily, 'but if you need a favour, I'm here!'

  We made our way up the servants' staircase and into the hall above where a much-bedraggled Bellman was walking towards us, shaking his head and holding the employment demands that Humpty Dumpty had thrust into his hands.

  'Those Orals get more and more militant every day,' he gasped. 'They are planning a forty-eight-hour walk-out tomorrow.'

  'What effect will that have?' I asked.

  'I should have thought that would be obvious,' chided the Bellman. 'Nursery rhymes will be unavailable for recall. In the Outland there will be a lot of people thinking they have bad memories. It won't do the slightest bit of good — a story book is usually in reach wherever a nursery rhyme is told.'

  'Ah,' I said.

  'The biggest problem,' added the Bellman, mopping his brow, 'is that if we give in to the nursery rhymsters everyone else will want to renegotiate their agreements — from th
e poeticals all the way through to nursery stories and even characters in jokes. Sometimes I'm glad I'm up for retirement — then someone like you can take over, Commander Bradshaw!'

  'Not me!' he said grimly. 'I wouldn't be the Bellman again for all the Ts in Little Tim Tottle's twin sisters take time tittle-tattling in a tuttle-tuttle tree — twice.'

  The Bellman laughed and we entered the ballroom of Norland Park.

  'Have you heard?' said a young man who approached us with no small measure of urgency in his voice. 'The Red Queen had to have her leg amputated. Arterial thrombosis, the doctor told me.'

  'Really?' I said. 'When?'

  'Last week. And that's not all.'

  He lowered his voice.

  'The Bellman has gassed himself! '

  'But we were just talking to him,' I replied.

  'Oh,' said the young man, thinking hard, 'I meant Perkins has gassed himself.'

  Miss Havisham joined us.

  'Billy!' she said in a scolding tone. 'That's quite enough of that. Buzz off before I box your ears!'

  The young man looked deflated for a moment then pulled himself up, announced haughtily that he had been asked to write additional dialogue for John Steinbeck and strode off. Miss Havisham shook her head sadly.

  'If he ever says "good morning",' she said, 'don't believe him. All well, Trafford?'

  'Top hole, Estella, old girl, top hole. I bumped into Tuesday here in the Well.'

  'Not selling parts of your book, were you?' she asked mischievously.

  'Good heavens, no!' replied Bradshaw, feigning shock and surprise. 'Goodness me,' he added, staring into the room for some form of escape, 'I must just speak to the Cheshire Cat. Good day!'

  And, tipping his pith helmet politely, he was gone.

  'Bradshaw, Bradshaw,' sighed Miss Havisham, shaking her head sadly, 'soon Bradshaw defies the Kaiser will have so many holes we could use it as a colander.'