Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘Wow,’ she said again once we were seated in the rec room. ‘Charlie Worthing, the Novice to Jack Logan. Who’d a thought it?’

‘Not me.’

‘How has it felt staying thin when everyone you know gets fat?’

‘I stopped seeing them after a while.’

‘Always the same.’

It was them who stopped seeing me, in truth. As everyone swelled to their target weight to tackle the Winter, all they saw in me was poor health and tragedy. After a month they stopped calling. All, that is, except Lucy. She’d welcomed me to the broad overwintering family, and was full of praise and sound advice.

‘A good breakfast is key,’ she said, ‘and well-fitting boots, merino socks and a reliable supply of snacks. Adequate naps are always useful, a tube of Après-Froid – and never underestimate the value of agreeable wallpaper.’

‘How so?’

‘You’d be surprised how calming a well-decorated room can be. Soft furnishings in pastel tones can be helpful, too, and a collection of soothing chamber music – but on wax cylinder rather than vinyl or tape. Electricity can be tiresomely unreliable and batteries useless in the cold.’

She asked me how the Winter Consuls were treating me, and I said that I was doing their cooking, washing and ironing.

‘It was the same with my first Winter with HiberTech,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a form of hazing. In the military you’re dumped thirty miles away in your underwear in the snow, in civvy street it’s washing up and knitting. Mind you, it’s good for team-building, and you’ll find it improves your ironing.’

‘My ironing doesn’t need to improve.’

‘ Everyone’s ironing can do with improving.’

She then thought for a moment and asked me to ‘keep my eyes open’. I asked her for what, and why, and she replied that as a representative of HiberTech, she had a duty to maintain a good network of intelligence – and I was the only person in the Consuls she knew that she could trust.

‘What’s not to trust about a Consul?’ I’d asked.

She told me: ‘Lots’ but didn’t elaborate, and the conversation had swiftly moved to other matters.

‘May the Spring embrace you,’ I said, giving her a hug before we parted.

‘And embrace you, too,’ she said.

I didn’t see Logan again until ten days before Slumberdown. The days were now short, the temperature below zero, the snows long established. For the last week there hadn’t been a breath of wind, the snow heaped precariously on even the most steeply pitched of roofs. Every now and then I heard a muffled thud as a half-ton of snow slid off and onto the streets below. Drowning isn’t the only way water can kill you.

I was leaning on the broad tracks of the Sno-Trac, heart thumping, nervous as hell, looking as professional as I could in my snug-fitting Winter Consul’s uniform. Aside from my domestic duties within the Consulate I’d spent two weeks at the Consul Training Academy learning basic survival skills and various modules on the physiology of sleep, dreams, Villains, climate, wind-chill, the H4S radar set and even Wintervolk. The tutors had looked me up and down and there had been muttered conversations behind my back regarding preparedness. Most Novices got a whole Summer to train.

The door to the Ivor Novello Dormitorium opened and Logan stepped out, paused, then took a deep breath of the chill morning air. He looked refreshed, and was surprisingly lean – the month’s fat contingency I was carrying wasn’t something he was willing to carry himself.

‘Welcome back, sir,’ I said. ‘Sleep well?’

He looked me up and down with a quizzical expression.

‘Your new Novice,’ I reminded him, knowing that the mind can take a while to remap after hibernation, ‘I’m—’

‘—don’t tell me.’

He concentrated hard, then clicked his fingers and grinned.

‘Charlie Worthing. The kid with the memory over at Pru’s. Yes?’

‘Yes, sir. You never did tell me what you wanted my memory for.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I never did.’

We climbed into the Sno-Trac.

‘Do you have my briefing notes?’

I started the engine with a hiss of compressed air then handed him the binder. Logan flicked through the contents as we drove through the empty, snow-draped streets, the drifts piled high against the buildings. In the binder were updated guidance notes from HiberTech as regards nightwalker policy, a list of alerts, missing persons and most-wanteds.

‘Well, how about that,’ he said, ‘the bounty on Lucky Ned has been raised to ten thousand euros.’

‘Lucky’ Ned Farnesworth was one of the more daring members of the Winter off-grid community. He was an unapologetic male supremacist and also indulged in theft, murder, and kidnapping. He was also fond – obsessively, some say – of collecting stamps. Wise philatelists lodged their collections in vaults during the Winter.

‘Ten thousand? Is that enough to have his own people turn him in?’

‘Not a chance.’

As an example to others, Villains stuffed snitches and turncoats with snow while still alive, a form of retribution that, whilst barbaric, did lend itself to artistic interpretation: the body could be posed in almost any position before it froze solid. Emulating David was quite popular, with anything by Rodin a close second. Once, a squabble between two dynastic groups of Villains resulted in the vanquished being made into a very lifelike tableau of The Last Supper . It was a popular tourist attraction until they thawed, and for a short time became a best-selling picture-postcard.

We parked up outside the Cardiff Sector House and were buzzed in through the shock-gates where the team were waiting to greet their Sector Chief: Pryce, Klaar, Thomas, Price, Powell, Williams. There would be eight Consuls covering Cardiff including myself and Logan. As little as ten years ago there would have been twenty staff. Budget cuts hit everywhere.

The first day Logan spent settling in and getting up to speed with what was going on, especially as regards long range cold weather forecasts and Dormitoria thermal serviceability. I’d spent the previous six weeks with the team and had learned some of their foibles, both good and bad. It was indeed true they had me doing their domestic errands, but in exchange they regaled me with stories that were designed to both frighten and enlighten: about blizzards thicker than milk that lasted for weeks, of the trees cocooned in ice looking as though shrink-wrapped in glass. Of rain that fell frozen as jewels with a sweet tinkle of chimes upon the rocks, of temperatures so low that mercury solidified in the thermometers and those foolish enough to venture out could be frozen solid in minutes. They told me of snowflakes the size of dinner plates, drifts seventy-foot deep burying villages for weeks on end, of snow-sculptures carved by wind into shapes so jagged and perverse and beautiful they appeared as though hewn by gods.

I listened to each story with a mixture of wonder, fear and incredulity. But despite the Winter’s worst excesses, no one who spoke of it did so without a degree of affection.

On the second day we rounded up a confused-looking woolly rhinoceros from the Co-op’s car park, and drove it out west beyond the Megafauna fence. [16] Megafauna were a perpetual nuisance, but no one ever seriously considered them as anything but residents of northern Europe, same as us. Besides, pizza wouldn’t be the same without Rhinozella cheese, and the Autumn mammoth cull generated much-needed food. Once that was done, we processed the winsomniacs, who ranged from those with genuine medical contra-hibernation conditions all the way through to the morally reprehensible sleep-shy: the malingerers, lazy-arses and drug-addled dreamers. Winsomnia was regarded as a national problem, with a national solution – spread them around to share the food and heat burden equally. We packed three off to St David’s and another four to Presteigne, then received six from Oswestry.