Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘I can’t wait sixteen weeks. I need to be back home now .’

‘Perhaps you should have thought of that before you delayed the train in Cardiff. There’s a moral in this story, my friend. Piss around with our timetables, and we’ll piss around with yours. Enjoy your stay in the Douzey. You’ll like it here. No wait, hang on, my mistake – you won’t. If luckless circumstance, Villains, Toccata, cold or Wintervolk don’t get you, the poor food almost certainly will.’

And she smiled.

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so instead told her where to go and what to do with herself when she got there – a futile comment and she and I both knew it – then walked outside the station and stood in the gently falling snow, clenching and unclenching my fists as I tried to make sense of what had just happened. I wanted to find something to kick, but there was little around that wouldn’t have been hard and unyielding and ultimately painful, so I just stood there, seething quietly, the snow gathering silently on the shoulders of my greatcoat, like great big crystallised tears.

I stood in a marinade of my own self-pity for ten minutes or so until the chill made me shiver, and more practical matters took precedence: survival. I moved to the top of the station footbridge to get a better sense of the local geography. The town was not located specifically around the town square as I had first supposed, but strung out in a line that began at HiberTech on the hill behind me, then stretched along a main road that headed off to the north-west, where forty or so Dormitoria rose in ranks on the opposite slope of the shallow valley, two or three miles distant. The only lights showing were the lanterns over the porters’ lodges, and the gas lamps that illuminated the connecting roadway. There was almost no sound, and it already felt like midwinter, even though it was still officially Autumn for another twenty-nine hours.

‘Worthing?’ came a voice below me. ‘What the hell are you still doing here?’

Below me was Aurora. She was alone, and buttoned up against the cold. It was, I confess, a relief to see her.

‘They let the train go early,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘I’ll come down.’

I walked down from the footbridge to where she was waiting for me.

‘I’d upset the stationmaster when I delayed the train in Cardiff,’ I explained. ‘Sort of payback.’

‘That’s annoying,’ she said, ‘but not unexpected. What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. I was going to go back to the Consulate and see if they could get me out.’

‘Probably not the wisest of moves, especially as you’ll have to justify your actions to Toccata at some point. I know it was me that pulled the trigger, but you got into this situation because you insisted on retrieving Bouzouki Girl. While a brave act, it could be seen as reckless, and, well, you did disobey orders and a Chief Consul ended up dead.’

It didn’t sound good when she said it like that.

‘One who was involved in illegal activity.’

‘I wish things were that simple,’ she said, ‘but when Toccata’s involved, logic becomes somewhat… mutable .’

She stared at me for a moment.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘this is kind of my fault, so I’ll wangle you a Sno-Trac and you can drive yourself to Hereford; the Winter network Railplane [38] An overhead-gantry propeller-driven monorail that can sail above the drifts. Covers only major routes during the Winter. goes from there. The road is flagged all the way, so pretty easy to navigate. But don’t go in the dark as Villains have been active recently – I’ll find you a bed for a night. Sound okay?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘sounds very okay. Thank you.’

She gave me a smile that was really very charming.

‘Okay, then. Now, if you don’t mind swapping anonymity for squalor, there’s space in the Sarah Siddons , where you can crash for a couple of days in case the weather’s no good tomorrow. It’s a Beta Pay Ceiling Dormitorium so you’ll be slumming it with natural sleepers, but it’s warm and dry and vermin-free, which is more than can be said for the Howell Harris. They had rats in there a couple of years back, and three residents were eaten. It was kind of funny, actually, given the inflated rates they charge. What do you say?’

‘What you suggest,’ I said, glad that I at least had a plan of sorts – and, more importantly, shelter.

Aurora said the walk would do us good, so we started off down the road towards the gaggle of Dormitoria at the other end of town, our voices muffled, our breath showing white in the sharp air. The low rooftops of the surrounding houses were smooth-capped with snow that looked as though it had been sculpted from polystyrene foam, and a noise limit sign close by read 55 decibels, [39] 55 db: normal speaking level. a level of hush that would be unworkable in Cardiff. We only started making arrests above 62 dB [40] 62 db: restaurant conversation. these days, and even a momentary spike beyond 75 dB [41] 75 db: vacuum cleaner in front room on ‘full’. was hardly regarded as criminal.

‘I’m really sorry about Mr Hooke being such an arse,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t my choice, but sometimes you have to work with what you’re given.’

We both turned as we heard a noise behind us. It was the drowsy I’d seen earlier in the Wincarnis, shuffling through the snow. She was swathed in large and expensive badger-furs that would have looked a lot better – and fresher – when they were on the badger.

‘Good evening. Zsazsa,’ said Aurora, ‘have you met Deputy Worthing?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘delighted.’

She gave me a welcoming smile instead of an embrace, then turned back to Aurora.

‘Tell Mr Hooke from me that I don’t do non-sleepy-fun-freebies, and if he persists on asking me to recite Ozymandias pro bono, I’ll punch him in the eye.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ she said.

‘Good of you,’ said Zsazsa, and she shuffled off into the gathering gloom, stumbled on a hidden kerbstone, swore, then moved on.

‘Why does Zsazsa look so familiar?’ I asked once she was out of earshot.

‘She was the third Mrs Nesbit, the one between Gina Lollobrigida and Brenda Klaxon.’

She wasn’t the Mrs Nesbit I knew when I was a kid, obviously, but knowing all the old Nesbits was like knowing every actor who ever played Jane Bond, especially the solitary male one, something that was quite controversial at the time. [42] Who was surprisingly good, as it turned out, if a little oversensitive.

‘How on earth did she end up here?’ I asked.

‘Four ill-advised marriages and some truly appalling financial advice.’

The actress playing the folksy homespun icon of the food giant in all the TV ads was periodically regenerated to great fanfare and publicity. Former Mrs Nesbits usually went on to a career in celebrity endorsements, book deals and then either panto or politics – sometimes both – which made it all the more unusual that Zsazsa LeChat, to give her her full name, had ended up eking out a living as a drowsy in the fringe sectors.

‘The fixed line will save your life in a blizzard,’ said Aurora as we walked on, indicating the cable that was running through eyelets bolted to a succession of white-painted posts by the side of the road. ‘All the arrows point to the main square, so if you get lost the default option is to go back there and start again.’

‘Useful to know,’ I said.

We passed a yard selling trailers with an ancient BP sign outside and there chanced across a man leaning against a lamp-post. He was wrapped up against the cold in a Woncho, a poncho made of heavy Welsh blanket, and was smoking a long corncob pipe that was a good three decades out of fashion, and six refills past replacement.