Jasper Fforde - Lost in a Good Book

‘How fishy on the fishiness scale?’ I asked him. ‘Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark.’

‘A whale isn’t a fish, Thursday.’

‘A whale shark is—sort of.’

‘All right, it’s as fishy as a crayfish.’

‘A crayfish isn’t a fish,’ I told him.

‘A starfish, then.’

‘ Still not a fish.’

‘A silverfish?’

‘Try again.’

‘This is a very odd conversation, Thursday.’

‘I’m pulling your leg, Bowden.’

‘Oh, I see,’ he replied as the penny dropped. ‘Tomfoolery.’

Bowden’s lack of humour wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, none of us really had much of a sense of humour in SpecOps. But he thought it socially desirable to have one, so I did what I could to help. The trouble was, he could read Three Men in a Boat without a single smirk and viewed P. G. Wodehouse as ‘infantile’, so I had a suspicion the affliction was long lasting and permanent.

‘My tensionologist suggested I should try stand-up comedy,’ said Bowden, watching me closely for my reaction.

‘Well, the “How do you find the Sportina/Where I left it” was a good start,’ I told him.

He stared at me oddly. It hadn’t been a joke.

‘I’ve booked myself in at the Happy Squid talent night on Monday. Do you want to hear my routine?’

‘I’m all ears.’

He cleared his throat.

‘There are these three anteaters, see, and they go into a—’

There was a bang, the car swerved and we heard a fast flapping noise.

‘Damn!’ muttered Bowden. ‘Blowout.’

There was another bang like the first, and we pulled in to the carpark at the South Cerney stop of the Skyrail.

‘ Two blowouts?’ muttered Bowden as we got out. We looked at each other quizzically and then at the road. No one else seemed to be having any trouble, the traffic zoomed up and down the road quite happily.

‘How is it possible for two tyres to go at the same time?’

‘Just bad luck, I guess.’ I shrugged.

‘Wireless seems to be dead,’ announced Bowden, keying the mike and turning the knob. ‘That’s odd.’

‘I’ll find a call-box,’ I told him. ‘Do you have any change—’

I stopped because I’d just noticed a ticket by my foot. As I picked it up a Skyrail shuttle approached high on the steel tracks, as if on cue.

‘What have you found?’ asked Bowden.

‘A Skyrail day pass,’ I replied thoughtfully ‘I’m going to take the Skyrail and see what happens.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s a Neanderthal in trouble.’

‘How do you know?’

I frowned.

‘I’m not sure. What’s the opposite of déjà vu; when you see something that hasn’t happened yet?’

‘I don’t know— avant verrais ?’

‘That’s it. Something’s going to happen… and I’m part of it.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No, Bowden; if you were meant to come we would have found two tickets. I’ll send a tow truck out.’

I left my partner looking confused and walked briskly up to the station, showed my ticket to the inspector and climbed the steel steps to the platform fifty feet above ground. I was alone apart from a young woman sitting by herself on a bench, checking her make-up in a mirror. She looked up at me for a moment before the doors of the shuttle hissed open and I stepped inside, wondering what events were about to unfold.

Coincidences are strange things. I like the one about Sir Edmund Godfrey, who was found murdered in 1678 and left in a ditch on Greenberry Hill in London. Three men were arrested and charged with the crime—Mr Green , Mr Berry and Mr Hill . My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored: they were merely the chance discovery of one pertinent fact from a million or so possible daily interconnections. ‘Stop a stranger in the street,’ he would say, ‘and delve into each other’s past. Pretty soon an astounding, too-amazing-to-be-chance coincidence will appear.’

I suppose he was right, but that didn’t help explain how a twin puncture outside the station, a broken wireless, one fortuitous ticket and an approaching Skyrail could all turn up together out of the blue.

I stepped into the single Skyrail car and took a seat at the front. The doors sighed shut and we were soon gliding effortlessly above the Cerney lakes as we crossed into Wessex. I was here for a purpose, I thought, and looked around carefully to see what that might be. The Neanderthal Skyrail operator had his hand on the throttle and gazed absently at the view. His eyebrows twitched and he sniffed the air occasionally. The car was almost empty, seven people, all of them women and no one familiar.

‘Three down,’ exclaimed a short woman who was staring at a folded-up newspaper, half to herself and half to the rest of us. ‘ Well decorated for prying, perhaps ? Ten letters.’

No one answered as we sailed past Cricklade station without stopping, much to the annoyance of a large, expensively dressed lady who huffed loudly and pointed at the operator with her umbrella.

‘You there!’ she boomed like a captain before the storm. ‘What are you doing? I wanted to get off at Cricklade, damn you!’

The operator seemed unperturbed at the insult and muttered an apology. This obviously wasn’t good enough for the loud and objectionable woman, who jabbed the small Neanderthal violently in the ribs with her umbrella. He didn’t yell out in pain; he just flinched, pulled the driver’s door closed behind him and locked it. I snatched the umbrella from the woman, who seemed shocked and outraged at my actions.

‘What the—!’ she said indignantly.

‘Don’t do that,’ I told her, ‘it’s not nice.’

‘Poppycock!’ she guffawed in a loud and annoying manner. ‘He’s only a Neanderthal!’

‘ Meddlesome ,’ said one of the other passengers with an air of finality, staring at an advert for the Gravitube that was pinned at eye level.

The objectionable lady and I stared at her, wondering who she was referring to. She looked at us both, flushed, and said:

‘No, no. Ten letters, three down Well decorated for prying. Meddlesome .’

‘Very good,’ muttered the lady with the crossword as she scribbled in the answer.

I glared at the well-heeled woman, who eyed me back malevolently.

‘Jab the Neanderthal again and I’ll arrest you for assault.’

‘I happen to know,’ announced the woman tartly, ‘that Neanderthals are legally classed as animals. You cannot assault a Neanderthal any more than you can a mouse!’