Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘We don’t serve the dead in here.’

The comment came from a woman who I guessed by her almost translucent pallor and two Gold Solstice stars was a long-time Winterer. Most Winter branches of Mrs Nesbit’s were run by burned-out ex-Consuls who would keep the supply of tea and fresh scones uninterrupted until their decades-long sleep deficit finally caught up with them.

‘I’m not asking you to serve her,’ I retorted, ‘I’m asking you to serve me… who will then serve her.’

‘The answer’s no. Her dead body in here over my dead body in here.’

‘Linguistically that was quite… poetic,’ I conceded. ‘A chiasmus , I think?’

‘Closer to polyptoton , my guess. Now why don’t you take the abomination and piss off?’

‘I’m a Winter Consul,’ I said, flashing my badge.

‘My sincere apologies,’ said the proprietress. ‘Piss off… with all due respect .’

She held me in about as much esteem as a nightwalker. Just as I was wondering if I could fit Mrs Tiffen into a left-luggage locker for an hour and whether that was ethical or not, a voice piped up.

‘Is that bouzouki tetrachordo or trichordo ?’

It was a man’s voice, low and confident.

‘I have no idea,’ I said, still staring at the proprietress but jabbing a thumb in Mrs Tiffen’s direction, ‘it belongs to her.’

The proprietress grimaced.

‘It’s worse when they’re Tricksy. Like they’re pretending they’re alive.’

‘It’s called Nonsentient Vestigial Memory ,’ I said, ‘and they can’t pretend to be anything. But yes, she plays the bouzouki. And quite well, if you’re interested.’

As if in response, the dead woman’s fingers felt across me for the instrument. As soon as I handed it to her she launched once again into ‘Help Yourself’.

‘Why not let them stay?’ said the man who had asked the bouzouki question. ‘The deadhead can play for us. Besides, service retired look after service active.’

It was one of those adages that was based more on hope than reality, but I liked the sound of it.

‘Very well,’ said the proprietress at length, ‘you and the Vacant can stay. But if it starts freaking out my customers, it’s history.’

I thought of insisting Mrs Tiffen was a ‘she’ and not an ‘it’, but decided instead to take my small victory with quiet grace and say nothing. I ordered two bacon sandwiches – one for me, one to go, two coffees, same – then sausages, Jaffa cakes and marshmallows for Mrs Tiffen.

‘With apricot jam,’ I added.

‘On what?’

‘On everything of hers and quite thick.’

The proprietress growled at me and lumbered off. I pushed Mrs Tiffen into a booth and shoved her across so I could sit, then gave her the sugar lumps to eat.

‘Mind if I join you?’

It was my benefactor from the other side of the room.

‘Please do,’ I said, welcoming the company.

He was, I guessed, somewhere between his fourth and fifth decade. His hair was already fully white and he was dressed in the solidly tailored clothes of a career Winterer. He sported a lopsided jaw from a poorly-healed break and he had a balding patch on the side of his head – follicle frost damage, most likely. Most noticeably, he was at Spring weight. In any other context he’d appear almost obscenely underweight. He might once have been Consular staff, but I had a pretty good idea of what he was now.

‘She plays it quite well, doesn’t she?’ he said.

‘If you like to listen to a short instrumental of a Tom Jones hit from the sixties and nothing else,’ I said, ‘it could become tolerable, given time.’

‘Does she play “Delilah”?’

‘Everyone asks that. No. And thanks for just now.’

‘Think nothing of it,’ he said with a boyish smile. ‘You taking her up to HiberTech to be redeployed?’

‘Yes; do you know how they do it?’

‘No idea. HiberTech guard their secrets aggressively. The name’s Hugo Foulnap.’

‘Charlie Worthing,’ I said, taking the calling card he’d offered me. I’d guessed correct – he was a Footman. He’d do anything for anybody, so long as you paid his hourly rate. They were mercenaries, Dormeopaths, odd-job men, nannies and bounty hunters all rolled into one. They’d even play Scrabble with you if you paid their rate, but only to win. Like most Winterers, Footmen took pride in their work.

‘First Winter?’ he asked.

‘Do I wear it that badly?’

‘Yup,’ he said, ‘I can see the fatigue on you already.’

I could feel it too, a dull ache that gnawed in my joints, and the deep-seated sense of nausea that belongs only with consciously delaying hibernation.

The coffees arrived. The proprietress scowled at me, stared daggers at the dead woman, then departed again.

‘I had this call last week,’ said Foulnap, stirring his coffee, ‘from a woman who was going to go deep in the family’s traditional sleep-spot, up in the hills beyond Abergavenny. Family farm or something, near Cwmyoy. Anyway, she’d packed the car, but the duvet was sticking out and jammed the boot lid. You know what she did?’

‘What did she do?’

‘She set fire to the duvet.’

‘Did that work?’

‘Worked really well. By the time I arrived, the car was completely burned out. All her food, her bedding, Morphenox – all gone. I had to resource everything.’

‘How did you resource her Morphenox?’

‘Let’s just say I know a girl who knows a guy who knows a person who knows a girl.’

I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted like last season’s acorns seared with a paraffin blowtorch.

‘This coffee’s terrible ,’ I said.

‘Welcome to the Winter.’

We chatted some more. He told me an amusing story about how hibernating mammoths near Treherbert had been false-dawned [29] False dawn: waking earlier than usual, generally due to increased warmth. Waking a sleeper can be achieved quite easily by warming them, although it can take four to five days. Ten ccs of Kenorbarbydol works faster – but with far greater risk. by the encroaching underground fires, and how they had been herded out through the snow and up and over the mountain to Hirwauna in a Hannibalesque adventure that had been the subject of a best-selling book and was soon to be a musical, using the puppeteers from Warphant .

‘Actually, the mammoths sort of did it on their own,’ said Foulnap, ‘nose to tail, like some great big shaggy-haired pachydermical charm bracelet.’

We chatted politics as the clock wound round to our departure time. I asked Foulnap where the restrooms were and after he’d told me, suggested I left Mrs Tiffen with him.

I thanked him, left the tearooms and walked down the platform to the toilets. Once I’d had a pee, I washed my hands and then soaked my face in cold water and stared in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot and seemed sunken into my head, my pallor grey. My ears had started ringing, my fingers and hands felt oddly large and I’d had several hot sweats. I’d been told to expect any or all of these symptoms as indications of Sleep Deprivation Narcosis, but as with altitude sickness, there was no good indication of who would get it, who would not, and to what degree of severity. But the thing I feared most was hallucinations. Had them once during a bad fever, and imagined myself playing pass-the-parcel – but no matter how much paper I tore off, the parcel never got any smaller.

Glad to have a few moments free of the relentless plucking of the bouzouki, I wandered absently onto the station concourse. It was a large, airy chamber with a glass ceiling now covered in snow, the light soft and directionless, the interior dim. The ticket office was still open but unmanned, and Welsh Tourist Office posters covered the walls.