Jasper Fforde - Lost in a Good Book

The scene changed to a field in Cornwall where a bored-looking mammoth had almost vanished inside a scrum of TV news reporters and crowds of well-wishers. Clarence Oldspot was still wearing his flak jacket and looked bitterly disappointed that he was reporting on hairy, once extinct herbivores and not the Crimean front line.

‘Thank you, Brett. Well, the migration season is truly upon us and Henry, a two-hundred-to-one outsider, wrong-footed the bookies when—’

I flicked channels Name That Fruit! , the nauseating quiz show, appeared. I flicked again to a documentary about the Whig political party’s links to radical Baconian groups in the seventies. I switched through several other channels before returning to the Toad News Network.

The phone rang and I picked it up.

‘It’s Miles,’ said a voice that sounded like a hundred push-ups in under three minutes.

‘Who?’

‘Miles.’

‘Aaah!’ I said in shock. Miles. Miles Hawke, the owner of the boxer shorts and the tasteless sports jacket.

‘Thursday? You okay?’

‘Me? Fine. Fine. Completely fine. Couldn’t be finer. How are you ?’

‘Do you want me to come round? You sound kinda odd.’

‘ No! ’ I answered a little too sharply. ‘I mean, no thanks—I mean we saw each other only, um—’

‘Two weeks ago?’

‘Yes. And I’m very busy. God, how busy I am. Never been busier. That’s me. Busy as a busy thing—’

‘I heard you went up against Flanker. I was concerned.’

‘Did you and I ever—’

I couldn’t say it but I needed to know.

‘Did you and I ever what?’

‘Did you and I—’

Think, think.

‘Did you and I ever… visit the mammoth migrations?’

Damn and blast!

‘The migrations? No. Should we have? Are you sure you’re okay?’

I started to panic—and that was daft, given the circumstances. When facing people like Hades I didn’t panic at all.

‘Yes—I mean no. Oops, there’s the doorbell. Must be my cab.’

‘A cab? What happened to your car?’

‘A pizza. A cab delivering a pizza. Got to go!’

And before he could protest I had put the phone down.

I slapped my forehead with the palm of my hand and muttered:

‘Idiot… idiot… idiot !’

I then ran around the flat like a lunatic, closing all the curtains and switching off the lights in case Miles decided to pop round to see me. I sat in the dark listening to Pickwick walking into the furniture for a bit before deciding I was being a twit and elected to go to bed with a copy of Robinson Crusoe .

I fetched a torch from the kitchen, undressed in the dark and climbed into bed, rolled around a bit on the unfamiliar mattress and then started to read the book, somehow hoping to repeat the sort of semi-success I had enjoyed with The Flopsy Bunnies . I read of Crusoe’s shipwreck, his arrival on the island, and skipped the dull religious philosophising. I stopped for a moment and looked around my bedroom to see whether anything was happening. It wasn’t, the only changes in the room were the lights of cars sweeping around my bedroom as they turned out of the road opposite. I heard Pickwick plock-plocking to herself, and returned to my book. I was more tired than I thought and, as I read, I lapsed into slumber.

I dreamt I was on an island somewhere, hot and dry, the palms languid in the slight breeze, the sky a deep blue, the sunlight pure and clear. I trod barefoot in the surf, the water cooling my feet as I walked. There was a wrecked ship, all broken masts and tangled rigging, resting on the reef a hundred yards from the shore. As I watched I could see a naked man climb aboard the ship, rummage on the deck, pull on a pair of trousers and disappear below. After waiting a moment or two, and not seeing him again, I walked farther along the beach, where I found Landen sitting under a palm tree gazing at me with a smile on his face.

‘What are you looking at?’ I asked him, returning his smile and raising my hand to shield my eyes from the sun.

‘I’d forgotten how beautiful you were.’

‘Oh, stop !’

‘I’m not kidding,’ he replied as he jumped to his feet and hugged me tightly. ‘I’m really missing you.’

‘I’m missing you, too,’ I told him, ‘but where are you?’

‘I’m not exactly sure,’ he replied with a confused look. ‘Strictly speaking I don’t think I’m anywhere—just here, alive in your memories.’

‘This is my memory? What’s it like?’

‘Well,’ replied Landen, ‘there are some really outstanding parts but some pretty dreadful ones too—in that respect it’s a little like Majorca. Would you care for some tea?’

I looked around for the tea but Landen simply smiled.

‘I’ve not been here long but I’ve learned a trick or two. Remember that place in Winchester where we had scones that were warm from the oven? You remember, on the second floor, when it was raining outside and the man with the umbrella—’

‘Darjeeling or Assam?’ asked the waitress

‘Darjeeling,’ I replied, ‘and two cream teas. Strawberry for me and quince for my friend.’

The island had gone. In its place was the tea room in Winchester. The waitress scribbled a note, smiled and departed. The rooms were packed with amiable-looking middle-aged couples dressed in tweed. It was, not surprisingly, just as I remembered it.

‘That was a neat trick!’ I exclaimed.

‘Naught to do with me!’ replied Landen, grinning. ‘This is all yours Every last bit of it. The smells, the sounds— everything .’

I looked around in silent wonderment.

‘I can remember all this?’

‘Not quite , Thurs. Look at our fellow tea-drinkers again.’

I turned in my chair and scanned the room. All the couples were more or less identical. Each was a middle-aged couple dressed in tweed and twittering in a Home Counties twang. They weren’t really eating or talking coherently; they were just moving and mumbling to give the impression of a packed tea room.

‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’ said Landen excitedly. ‘Since you can’t actually remember anything about who was here, your mind has just filled in the room with an amalgam of who you might expect to see in a teashop in Winchester. Mnemonic wallpaper, so to speak. There is nothing in this room that won’t be familiar. The cutlery is your mother’s and the pictures on the walls are all odd mixes of the ones we had up in the house. The waitress is a compound of Lottie from your lunch with Bowden and the woman in the chip shop. Every blank space in your memory has been filled with something that you do remember—a sort of shuffling of facts to fill in the gaps.’

I looked back at our fellow tea-takers, who now seemed faceless.

I had a sudden—and worrying—thought.

‘Landen, you haven’t been around my late teenage years, have you?’

‘Of course not. That’s like opening private mail.’

I was glad of this. My wholly unlikely infatuation for a boy named Darren and my clumsy introduction to being a woman in the back of a stolen Morris 8 was not something I wanted Landen to witness in all its chilling glory. For once I was kind of wishing I had a bad memory—or that Uncle Mycroft had perfected his memory erasure device. Landen poured the tea and asked:

‘How are things in the real world?’

‘I have to figure out a way into books,’ I told him ‘I’m going to take the Gravitube to Osaka tomorrow and see if I can track down anyone who knew Mrs Nakajima—it’s a long shot, but who knows.’

‘Take care, won’t y—’

Landen stopped short as something over my shoulder caught his eye. I turned to see probably the last person I wanted to be there. I quickly stood up, knocked my chair over backward with a clatter and aimed my automatic at the tall figure who had just entered the tea room.