Jasper Fforde - Lost in a Good Book

I didn’t know and told him so. He looked crestfallen for a moment and then said:

‘Will you come and do a professional mingle at my Les arts modernes de Swindon show next week?’

‘Why me?’

‘Because you’re vaguely famous and you’re my sister. Yes?’

‘Okay.’

He tugged my ear affectionately and we walked into the kitchen.

‘Hello, Mum!’

My mother was bustling around some chicken vol-au-vents. By some bizarre twist of fate they had turned out not at all burned and actually quite tasty—it had thrown her into a bit of a panic. Most of her cooking ended up as the culinary equivalent of the Tunguska event.

‘Hello, Thursday, hello, Landen. Can you pass me that bowl, please?’

Landen passed it over, trying to guess the contents.

‘Hello, Mrs Next,’ he said.

‘Call me Wednesday, Landen—you’re family now, you know.’ She smiled and giggled to herself.

‘Dad said to say hello,’ I put in quickly before Mum cooed herself into a frenzy. ‘I saw him today.’

My mother stopped her random method of cooking and recalled for a moment, I imagine, fond embraces with her eradicated husband. It must have been quite a shock, waking up one morning and finding your husband never existed. Then, quite out of the blue, she yelled:

‘DH-82, down !’

Her anger was directed at a small Tasmainan tiger that had been nosing the remains of some chicken on the table edge.

‘Bad boy!’ she added in a scolding tone. The Tasmainan tiger looked crestfallen, sat on its blanket by the Aga and stared down at its paws.

‘Rescue Thylacine,’ explained my mother. ‘Used to be a lab animal. He smoked forty a day until his escape. It’s costing me a fortune in nicotine patches. Isn’t it, DH-82?’

The small re-engineered native of Tasmania looked up and shook his head. Despite being vaguely dog-shaped this species was more closely related to a kangaroo than to a Labrador. You always expected one to wag its tail, bark or fetch a stick, but they never did. The closest behavioural similarities were a propensity to steal food and an almost fanatical devotion to tail-chasing.

‘I miss your dad a lot, you know,’ said my mother wistfully. ‘How—’

There was a loud explosion, the lights flickered and something shot past the kitchen window.

‘What was that?’ said my mother.

‘I think,’ replied Landen soberly, ‘it was Aunt Polly.’

We found her in the vegetable patch dressed in a deflating rubber suit that was meant to break her fall but obviously hadn’t—she was holding a handkerchief to a bloodied nose.

‘My goodness!’ exclaimed my mother. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Never been better!’ she replied, looking at a stake in the ground and then yelling. ‘Seventy-five yards!’

‘Righty-on!’ said a distant voice from the other end of the garden. We turned to see my Uncle Mycroft, who was consulting a clipboard next to a smoking Volkswagen convertible.

‘Car seat ejection devices in case of road accidents,’ explained Polly, ‘with a self-inflating rubber suit to cushion the fall. Pull on a toggle and bang —out you go. Prototype, of course.’

‘Of course.’

We helped her to her feet and she trotted off, seemingly none the worse for her expenence.

‘Mycroft still inventing, then?’ I said as we walked back inside to discover that DH-82 had eaten all the vol-au-vents, the main course and the trifle for pudding.

‘DH!’ Mum said crossly to the guilty-looking and very bloated Tas tiger, ‘that was very bad! What am I going to feed everybody on now?’

‘How about Thylacine cutlets?’ suggested Landen.

I elbowed him in the ribs and Mum pretended not to hear.

Landen rolled up his sleeves and searched through the kitchen for something to rustle up. All of the cupboards were full of tinned pears.

‘Have you anything apart from canned fruit, Mrs… I mean, Wednesday?’

Mum stopped trying to chastise DH-82, who, soporific through gluttony, had settled down for a long nap.

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘The man in the shop said there would be a shortage so I bought his entire stock.’

I walked down to Mycroft’s laboratory, knocked and, when there was no reply, entered. All his machines had been dismantled and now lay about the room, tagged and carefully stacked. Mycroft himself, having obviously finished testing the ejection system, was now tweaking a small bronze object. He seemed somewhat startled when I spoke his name but relaxed as soon as he saw it was me.

‘Hello, love!’ he said kindly. ‘I’m off on retirement in one hour and nine minutes. You looked good on the telly last night.’

‘Thank you. What are you up to, Uncle?’

He handed me a large book.

‘Enhanced indexing. In a Nextian dictionary, godliness can be next to cleanliness—or anything else for that matter.’

I opened the book to look up ‘trout’ and found it on the first page I came to.

‘Saves time, eh?’

‘Yes; but—’

Mycroft had moved on.

‘Over here is a Lego filter for vacuum cleaners. Did you know that over a million pounds’ worth of Lego is hoovered up every year, and a total often thousand man-hours are wasted sorting through the dust bags?’

‘I didn’t know that, no.’

‘This device will sort any sucked-up bits of Lego into colours or shapes, according to how you set this knob here.’

‘Very impressive.’

‘This is just hobby stuff. Come and look at some real innovation.’

He beckoned me across to a blackboard, its surface covered with a jumbled mass of complicated algebraic functions.

‘This is Polly’s hobby, really. It’s a new form of mathematical theory that makes Euclid’s work seem like little more than long division. We have called it Nextian geometry. I won’t bother you with the details but watch this.’

Mycroft rolled up his shirtsleeves and placed a large ball of dough on the workbench and rolled it out into a flat ovoid.

‘Scone dough,’ he explained. ‘I’ve left out the raisins for purposes of clarity. Using conventional geometry a round scone cutter always leaves waste behind, agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

‘Not with Nextian geometry! You see this pastry cutter? Circular, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Perfectly circular, yes.’

‘Well,’ carried on Mycroft in an excited voice, ‘it isn’t. It appears circular but actually it’s a square. A Nextian square. Watch.’

And so saying he deftly cut the dough into twelve perfectly circular shapes with no waste. I frowned and stared at the small pile of discs, not quite believing what I had just seen.

‘How—?’

‘Clever, isn’t it?’ He chuckled. ‘But quite, quite simple, really. A baked-bean tin is circular, wouldn’t you say?’

I nodded.

‘But viewed from the side it looks like an oblong. What Nextian geometry does—in very simple terms—is bring the plane of a solid from the horizontal to the vertical but without altering the vertices of the solid in space Admittedly it only works with Nextian dough, which doesn’t rise so well and tastes like denture paste, but we’re working on that.’

‘It seems impossible, Uncle.’

‘We didn’t know the nature of lightning or rainbows for three and a half million years, pet. Don’t reject it just because it seems impossible. If we closed our minds there would never be the Gravitube, antimatter, Prose Portals, Thermos flasks—’

‘Wait!’ I interrupted ‘How does a Thermos fit in with that little lot?’

‘Because, my dear girl, no one has the least idea why they work.’ He stared at me for a moment and continued: ‘You will agree that a vacuum flask keeps hot things hot in the winter and cold things cold in the summer?’