Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘By her husband for five years.’

Most people to whom I mentioned this displayed a sense of disgust; not the actor.

‘He must have loved her.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘he gave everything he had to protect her.’

While Mr Tiffen had regarded his wife as someone with profound neurological issues, we saw her as little more than another casualty of the Winter. The bouzouki playing was merely a quirk, a vestigial memory from a mind that once crackled with personality and creative energy. Almost all of her was gone; only the skill remained.

We pulled into Abercynon station with a hiss. The passengers moved about the platform with commendable silence, easily explained: those now heading for the grateful joy of slumber were too fatigued to celebrate, and those planning to overwinter had only the anxieties of a lonely sixteen weeks to dominate their thoughts. Little was said as the passengers embarked and disembarked, and even the signalman’s clicker seemed to have lost its usual sharpness.

‘The courts are usually lenient if there’s a family component,’ said the actor in a quiet voice. ‘Mind you, harbouring is harbouring.’

‘There’ll be no trial,’ I said. ‘Her husband’s dead – and with honour.’

‘The best sort in my view,’ said the woman thoughtfully. ‘I hope for the same myself. What about you? Many Winters under your belt?’

‘This is my first.’

She looked at me with such a sense of shocked surprise that I felt quite unnerved.

‘First Winter? ’ she echoed incredulously. ‘And they’ve sent you on nightwalker delivery duty to Sector Twelve?’

‘I’m not exactly alone,’ I said, ‘there’s—’

‘—first Winters should always be spent indoors, taking notes and acclimatising,’ she said, ignoring me. ‘I’ve lost far too many newbies to be anything but sure of that . What did they do? Threaten to thump you?’

‘No.’

They didn’t need to. I’d volunteered, quite happily, eight weeks before, during Fat Thursday celebrations.

Fat Thursday had been long established as the first day of serious gorging, the time to indulge in the latest faddy get-fat-quick diets and to take a vow of abstinence from the mass-stealing sin of exercise. Yesterday you could run for a bus and no one would turn a hair, tomorrow it would be frowned upon as almost criminally irresponsible. For the two months until Slumberdown, every calorie was sacred; a fight to keep every ounce. Spring only ever welcomed the mass-diligent.

My job of Assistant House Manager was under the generally amenable and delegation-addicted Sister Zygotia, which made Fat Thursday celebrations pretty much my responsibility. And while leaving me open to perhaps more criticism than usual, it was a welcome break from the day-to-day tedium of running St Granata’s Pooled Parentage Station. [3] Unofficial motto: ‘Keeping up the numbers so you don’t have to’. Basically, Fat Thursday required only three things: enough food, enough chairs, and trying not to let Sister Placentia get her hands on the gin.

Megan Hughes was the first to arrive. She’d spent twelve years at the Pool until she got picked out by a wealthy couple in Bangor. Was married last I heard to someone big in the Mrs Nesbit Traditional Tearooms empire, and was now one of St Granata’s patrons: we made a good income selling child offsets to people like Megan, who saw the whole baby thing as insufferably farmyard. [4] Offsets were classed as childbearing avoidance rather than evasion – a subtle, yet legal, distinction. It was sort of ironic, really, that she had a career at OffPop – the Office for Population Control – ensuring other women were responsibly discharging their duties. Megan and I had not met for a couple of years but every time we did, she told me how much she really admired me when we were growing up, and how inspiring I was.

‘Wonky!’ she said in a mock-excited kind of way. ‘You look absolutely marvellous.’

‘Thank you, but it’s Charlie now.’

‘Sorry. Charlie .’ She paused for thought. ‘I think of you and St Granata’s all the time.’

‘Do you now?’

‘Yes. And,’ she added, leaning closer, ‘you know what?’

Here it comes.

‘What?’

‘I always really admired you growing up. Always smiling through your unhappiness. A real inspiration.’

‘I wasn’t unhappy.’

‘You looked unhappy.’

‘Looks can be deceptive.’

‘All too true,’ she said, ‘but I meant what I said: inspirational in a sort of tragic way, like you’re the failure in the family, but always looked on the bright side of everything.’

‘You’re very kind,’ I said, long used to Megan’s ways, ‘but it could have been much worse: I could have been born without tact or empathy, and be shallow, self-absorbed and hideously patronising.’

‘That’s true too,’ she said with a smile, laying a hand on my arm. ‘We are so blessed, you and I. Did I tell you that I got a promotion at OffPop? Thirty-four K plus car and pension.’

‘That’s a huge weight off my mind,’ I said.

She beamed.

‘You are so very kind. Well, mustn’t tarry. So long, Wonky.’

‘Charlie.’

‘Right. Charlie. Inspirational.’

And she walked off up the corridor. It would have been easy to dislike her intensely, but I actually felt nothing for her at all.

Lucy Knapp was the next person of note to walk through the doors. We’d seen each other daily for eighteen years until she left to go to HiberTech Training College. Friendships ebbed and flowed in the Pool, but Lucy and I had always been close. In the six years since she’d left we’d spoken at least once a month.

‘Hey,’ I said, and we tapped fists together, one on top of another, a sort of secret handshake from way back I-don’t-know-when.

Lucy and I were responsible for the dried smear of banoffee pie still stuck to the face of St Somnia on the ceiling frieze overhead, a reminder of a memorable food-fight back in ’96. There was even the dent in the plasterwork where Donna Trinket, intent on breaking the ground-floor lap record on roller skates, had come a cropper owing to some recklessly spilt Heinz spaghetti hoops by the kitchens.

‘So what’s this about you joining Prudential Winter Life?’ she asked with, I think, a sense of friendly derision.

‘Anything to get me out of this dump,’ I replied, ‘but it’s not like I can only sell Hibernational Cover with optional Redeployment and Mandatory Transplant payments – there’s also whole-life insurance, term, dental, fire and auto, not to mention frost damage. What do you think?’

‘I can hardly contain my indifference.’

‘I feel the same way, but, well, y’know, Morphenox.’

I would be expected to work the first ten years at minimum wage, but it would be worth it. Not for the job, of course, which was dull as meltwater, but for the specific perk that went with it: Prudential would transfer my rights to Morphenox across from St Granata’s without interruption. I could, quite literally, sleep easy. Despite the strict contractual obligations, lack of job mobility and freedom of choices that it entailed, the career move would be a no-brainer. I could finally get away from here with pharmaceutical privileges undiminished.