Jasper Fforde - Lost in a Good Book

‘Saved by industrial action!’ said Dad, laughing. ‘Tell that to your friends at the Chamber!’

‘Bravo,’ replied Lavoisier sardonically, ‘bravo. I think we should just say au revoir , my friends—until we meet again.’

‘Do we have to make it au revoir ?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong with goodbye?’

He didn’t have time to answer as I felt Dad tense and we accelerated faster through the timestream. The pink slime was washed away, leaving only earth and rocks, and as I watched the river moved away from us, meandered off into the flood-plain and then snaked back, swept under our feet, and then undulated back and forth like a snake before finally being replaced by a lake. We moved faster, and soon I could see the earth start to buckle as the crust bent and twisted under the force of plate tectonics. Plains dropped to make seas, and mountains rose in their place. New vegetation established itself as millions of years swept past in a matter of seconds. Vast forests grew and fell in seconds. We were covered, then uncovered, then covered again, now by sea, now by rock, now surrounded by an ice sheet, now a hundred feet in the air. More forests, then a desert, then mountains rose rapidly in the east, only to be scoured flat a few moments later.

‘Well,’ said my father, ‘Lavoisier in the pocket of Goliath. Who’d have thought it?’

‘Dad,’ I asked as the sun grew visibly bigger and redder, ‘how do we get back?’

‘We don’t go back,’ he replied. ‘We can’t go back. Once the present has happened, that’s it. We just carry on going until we return to where we started. Sort of like a roundabout. Miss an exit and you have to drive around again. There are just a few more exits and the roundabout is much, much bigger.’

‘How much bigger?’

‘A shitload. Quiet, now—we’re nearly there!’

And all of a sudden we weren’t nearly there, we were there, back at breakfast in my apartment, Dad turning the pages of the newspaper.

‘Well, we tried, didn’t we?’ said my father.

‘Yes, Dad, we did. Thanks.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said gently, ‘even the finest eradications leave something behind for us to reactualise from. There is always a way—we just have to find it; Sweetpea, we will get him back—I’m not having my grandchild without a father.’

It did reassure me, and I thanked him.

‘Good!’ he said, closing his newspaper. ‘By the way, did you manage to get any tickets for the Nolan Sisters’ concert?’

‘I’m working on it.’

‘Good show. Well, time waits for no man, as we say—’

He squeezed my hand and was gone. The world started up again, the TV came back on and there was a muffled plocking from Pickwick, who had managed to lock herself in the airing cupboard again. I let her out and she ruffled her feathers in an embarrassed fashion before going off in search of her water dish.

I went into work but there was precious little to do. We had a call from an enraged Mrs Hathaway 34demanding to know when we were going to arrest the ‘unlick’d bear-whelp’ who had cheated her, and another from a student who wanted to know whether we thought Hamlet’s line was ‘this too too solid flesh’ or ‘this too too sullied flesh’, or even perhaps ‘these two-toed swordfish’. Bowden spent the morning mouthing the lines for his routine, and by noon there had been two attempts to steal Cardenio from Vole Towers. Nothing serious; SO-14 had doubled the guard. This didn’t concern SpecOps 27 in any way, so I spent the afternoon surreptitiously reading the Jurisfiction instruction manual, which felt a little like flicking through Bunty during school. I was tempted to have a go at entering a work of fiction to try out a few of their ‘handy book-jumping tips’ (page 28) but Havisham had roundly forbidden me from doing anything of the sort ‘until I was more experienced’. By the time I was ready to go home I had learned a few tricks about emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34), read about the aims of the Bowdlerizers (page 62), a group of well-meaning yet censorious individuals hell-bent on removing obscenities from fiction. I also read about Heathcliff’s unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name of Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of Wuthering Heights (page 71), the forty-six abortive attempts to illegally save Beth from dying in Little Women (page 74), details of the Character Exchange Program (page 81), using holorimic verse to flush out renegade book people, or PageRunners as they were known (page 96), and how to use spelling mistakes, misprints and double negatives to signal to other Prose Resource Operatives in case emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34) failed (page 105). I was just learning about protocols relating to historical novels (page 122) when it was time to clock off. I joined the general exodus and wished Bowden good luck with his routine. He didn’t seem in the least nervous, but then he rarely did.

I got home to find my landlord on my doorstep. He looked around to make sure Miss Havisham was nowhere in sight, then said:

‘Time’s up, Next’

‘You said Saturday,’ I replied, unlocking the door.

‘I said Friday,’ countered the man.

‘How about I give you the money on Monday when the banks open?’

‘How about if I take that dodo of yours and you live rent free for three months?’

‘How about you stick it in your ear?’

‘It doesn’t pay to be impertinent to your landlord, Next. Do you have the money or not?’

I thought quickly.

‘No—but you said Friday and it’s not the end of Friday yet In fact, I’ve got over six hours to find the cash.’

He looked at me, looked at Pickwick, who had popped her head round the door to see who it was, then at his watch.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But you’d better have the cash to me by midnight sharp or there’ll be serious trouble.’

And with a last withering look, he left me alone on the landing.

I offered Pickwick a marshmallow in an attempt to get her to stand on one leg. She stared vacantly at me so after several more attempts I gave up, fed her and changed the paper in her basket before calling Spike at SO-17. It wasn’t the perfect plan but it did have the benefit of being the only plan, so on that basis alone I reckoned it was worth a try. I was eventually patched through to him in his squad car. I related my problem and he told me that his freelance budget was overstuffed at present as no one ever wanted to be deputised, so we arranged a ludicrously high hourly rate and a time and place to meet. As I put the phone down I realised I had forgotten to say that I preferred not to do any vampire work. What the hell. I needed the money.