Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

All of this was worrying. Not the dream itself, which was undeniably enjoyable yet random nonsense, but the very act of dreaming. Only Sub-beta payscalers actually dreamt . If it got out that I was a dreamer, I would be finished socially and, worse, I’d have taken on the risks of the Winter Consul Service for nothing. Until I figured out what was what, no one could know.

I stretched my muscles and felt them cramp again almost instantly.

‘Take it easy to begin with,’ said Jonesy as she opened the shutters, ‘slow wins prizes.’

A grey light flooded the apartment. I sat up in bed, pushed back the bedclothes and had my third big shock of the morning.

I was thin. Really thin.

Jonesy raised an eyebrow.

‘Sailing a bit close to the wind?’ she asked, staring at my scrawny body. ‘It’s a brave or foolhardy person who heads into their first Winter without contingency. Don’t let Toccata find out. She takes reckless disregard of the BMI seriously. Actually,’ she added after a moment’s thought, ‘she kind of takes everything seriously. Even taking seriously she takes seriously.’

For the moment, Toccata’s opinion didn’t really matter. It would later – big time – but not right now. I had only one question.

‘What day is it?’

‘Slumberdown plus twenty-seven.’

‘What?’

‘Plus twenty-seven. You’ve been out four weeks.’

It took a moment or two for me to digest this fact. I looked at my alarm clock, which had stopped not long after I’d gone to sleep. Without it, I’d inadvertently tumbled down the slope into hibernation. It was embarrassing. Falling asleep on your first overwintering gig was strictly for amateurs.

‘So,’ said Jonesy, ‘let’s start again: what are you doing here?’

I explained about as quickly and truthfully as I could. That Aurora had saved me from Logan; that I’d spoken to Laura and Fodder in the Consulate; that I’d been marooned; had met up again with Aurora; was going to drive myself out; was allocated this room.

‘The next thing I know, you’re waking me up.’

‘Oversleep, did you?’ she said with a smile. ‘That’s not a good start.’

‘No,’ I agreed, ‘ not a good start at all. But why wake me now,’ I added, ‘why not four weeks ago?’

‘Your office in Cardiff,’ she said, ‘they called several times asking where you were as they need confirmation of Aurora’s account of what happened to Logan. We’d told them you’d departed on the last train, but when they insisted we look further four weeks later, that dope Treacle said he’d walked with you and Aurora in this direction. We did a sweep of the Domitoria, and there you were. You were lucky.’

She was right. If I’d only been carrying two weeks’ contingency instead of four I’d likely be dead right now.

‘Now,’ said Jonesy, ‘you need to explain everything to Toccata. She’s busy until one o’clock. Do you want breakfast?’

I nodded. She told me to keep stretching and then went back into the kitchen area. I moved to the end of the bed, grasped the bedstead and heaved myself to my feet. I paused, took a few steps, stumbled, regained my balance then walked unsteadily to the bathroom, where I relieved myself of something that smelled of overripe silage, looked like yacht varnish and felt as though it were burning a new way out.

This done, I stepped into the shower to wash the gammy night-crust from my wintercoat, and while I did so, I thought about the painter. Oddly, the dream had not been a faint jumble of broken images softened into broad ambiguity by the fog of sleep, but as strong and as real as anything that actually had happened: the trip up here, Logan’s death, Foulnap – even the flailing nightwalker on the operating table at HiberTech and the shiny wetness of the cobbles where Hooke had whacked Moody.

Once I’d soaped and scrubbed twice I ran a number-two clipper through my felted hair and dumped the tangled mass in the bin. I stopped frequently to stretch the gnawing stiffness from my limbs, and once I’d combed all over to remove the lice eggs, eight night-worms and a half-dozen hook-daddies, I stood under the gloriously hot water [50] Another huge advantage of nuclear heating: abundant hot water. and tried to push down a sense of rising panic and failure. After ten minutes and with no positive thoughts about my current predicament, I stepped out, gazed at my scrawny body in the mirror, then clipped my nails short, felt my teeth for any telltale signs of decay or looseness, and slipped on a pair of Suzy’s jogging trousers and a T-shirt. I then went to the window to peer at the Winter, something I’d never witnessed before.

The landscape was utterly without colour. A grey overcast stretched to the mountains, the town and country draped in white, the hard edges of the buildings rounded and softened by the heaps of accreted snow. There was barely any movement; the only sign of life was half a dozen dog-head buzzards wheeling tightly over some waste ground behind the Siddons .

‘They’ll be circling the landfill,’ said Jonesy, who had arrived by my side. ‘We dumped a couple of winsomniacs up there a few days ago; things aren’t freezing as quickly so the scent carries.’

‘The thaw?’ I asked.

‘No, just the end of a milder spell. There’s worse weather on the way – a pretty big one in a couple of days: fifty below freezing, they say. The porters will be pulling the rods in preparation. We’ll want to be inside when it hits. Breakfast is ready.’

We sat down at the table. There was everything: bacon, beans, two kippers, buttered toast, mushrooms, sausage and sauté potatoes. Despite the joyous bounty of the spread, everything was either long-life, tinned or dry-packed. Nothing is fresh in the Winter, they say – except the wind.

We tucked in; Jonesy had made almost the same size for herself.

‘This is nice,’ she said.

She looked at me and smiled, then patted my hand in an oddly affectionate manner, and left hers resting on mine. It was her tattered hand, all livid scar tissue and string-sized stitch marks. I didn’t move my hand away through not wanting to offend, so waited until she moved her hand to pass me the salt, and then elected to keep my hands off the table in future.

‘It’s sort of like being long-partnered,’ she added.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Sort of like being long-partnered,’ she repeated, ‘sitting here together, enjoying our retirement and sharing a sense of past histories together, a warm and cosy sense of familiarity.’

The alarm bells started ringing.

‘I’m… not sure I follow you. Retirement sounds nice, but hardly realistic.’

‘That’s the whole idea. Since Consuls rarely die of old age, I thought we could have our fond dotage now , while we still can. We could meet up after work, and just kind of sit together in companionable silence. You might darn a sock and make comments from time to time while I read, and you could say “Yes, dear”, or “That’s interesting” when I say something intelligent you don’t understand. We could even play Cluedo, but only if I can be Miss Scarlett and not the murderers.’

‘That’s not quite how Cluedo works,’ I said, and she frowned, so I gave her a quick run-down on the rules while we ate.

‘You seem very expert,’ she said, which was hardly a word I’d use – Cluedo isn’t that complex.

‘Sister Zygotia used to play it with us at the Pool,’ I said.

Not many people talked about the Pool. But now that we were, Jonesy was curious.

‘Were you there long?’

‘Last one out.’

‘What was it like?’

Pools, like meals, terriers and promises, all varied in quality – there were Pools barely suitable for livestock and there was the highly desirable Wackford & Co. with branches in Paris, London and New York.