Dad suddenly turned serious.
   ‘That’s why I’m here. Perhaps never. Did you see a cyclist on the road?’
   ‘Yes’
   ‘Well,’ he said, consulting the large chronograph on his wrist, ‘in ten seconds that cyclist will be knocked over and killed.’
   ‘And?’ I asked, sensing that I was missing something.
   He looked around furtively and lowered his voice.
   ‘Well, it seems that right here and now is the key event whereby we can avert whatever it is that destroys every single speck of life on this planet!’
   I looked into his earnest eyes.
   ‘You’re not kidding, are you?’
   He shook his head.
   ‘In December 1985, your 1985, for some unaccountable reason, all the planet’s organic matter turns to… this.’
   He withdrew a plastic specimen bag from his pocket. It contained a thick pinkish opaque slime. I took the bag and shook it curiously as we heard a loud screech of tyres and a sickly thud; a few moments later a broken body and a twisted bicycle landed close by.
   ‘On the twelfth of December at 20.23, give or take a second or two, all organic material—every plant, insect, fish, bird, mammal and the three billion human inhabitants of this planet—will start turning to that. End of all of us. End of Life—and there won’t be that boy band I was telling you about. The problem,’ he went on as a car door slammed and we heard feet running towards us, ‘is that we don’t know why. The ChronoGuard are not doing any upstreaming work at present; Downstreamers seem to be unaffected—’
   ‘Why is that?’
   ‘Industrial action. Upstreamers are on strike for shorter hours. Not actually fewer hours, you understand, it’s just the hours that they do work they want to be, er, shorter.’
   ‘So while they are on strike the world could end? Isn’t that sort of daft?’
   ‘From an industrial action viewpoint,’ said my father, thinking about it carefully, ‘I think it’s a very good strategy indeed. I hope they can thrash out a new agreement in time.’
   ‘But that’s crazy!’
   Dad shrugged.
   ‘I’m not in the Timeguild any more, Sweetpea. I went rogue, remember?’
   ‘So what can we do?’ I asked.
   ‘The centre of the disaster is unclear,’ replied my father as he patted his pockets for his pipe. ‘All my efforts to jump straight there have failed. I’ve run trillions of timestream models and the outcome is the same—whatever happens here and now somehow relates to the aversion of the crisis. And since the cyclist’s death is the only event of any significance for hours in either direction, it has to be the key event. The cyclist must live to ensure the continued health of the planet.’
   We stepped out from behind the billboard to confront the driver, a youngish man who was visibly panicking.
   ‘Oh my God!’ he said as he stared at the twisted body at our feet. ‘Oh my God! Is he—?’
   ‘At the moment, yes,’ replied my father in a matter-of-fact sort of way as he filled his pipe.
   ‘I must call an ambulance!’ stammered the man. ‘He could still be alive!’
   ‘Anyway,’ continued my father, ignoring the motorist completely, ‘the cyclist obviously does something or doesn’t do something, and that’s the key to this whole stupid mess.’
   The motorist stopped wringing his hands for a moment and looked at the pair of us suspiciously
   ‘I wasn’t speeding, you know,’ he said quickly. ‘The engine might have been revving but it was stuck in second…’
   ‘Hang on!’ I said, slightly confused ‘You’ve been beyond 1985, Dad—you told me so yourself!’
   ‘I know that,’ replied my father grimly, ‘so we’d better get this absolutely right.’
   ‘There was a low sun,’ continued the driver, as he thought hard, ‘and he swerved in front of me!’
   ‘Male guilt avoidance syndrome,’ explained my father. ‘It’s a recognised medical condition by 2054.’
   Dad held me by the arm and there was a series of rapid flashes, an intense burst of noise and we were about a half-mile and five minutes in the direction from which the cyclist had come. He rode past and waved cheerily.
   We returned the wave and watched him pedal off.
   ‘Don’t you stop him?’
   ‘Tried. Doesn’t work. Stole his bike—he borrowed a friend’s. Diversion signs he ignored and the pools win didn’t stop him either. I’ve tried everything. Time is the glue of the cosmos, Thursday, and it has to be eased apart—try to force events and they end up whacking you on the frontal lobes like a cabbage from six paces. Lavoisier will have locked on to me by now. The car is due in thirty-eight seconds. Hitch a ride and do your best.’
   ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘What about me?’
   ‘I’ll take you out again after the cyclist is safe.’
   ‘Back to where?’ I asked suddenly. I had no desire to return to the moment I’d left. ‘The SpecOps marksman, Dad, remember? Can’t you put me back, say, thirty minutes earlier?’
   He smiled and gave me a wink.
   ‘Give my love to your mother. Thanks for helping out. Well, time waits for no man, as we—’
   But he was gone, melted into the air about me. I paused for a moment and put out a thumb to hail the approaching Jaguar. The car slowed and stopped and the motorist, oblivious to the impending accident, smiled and asked me to hop aboard.
   I said nothing, jumped in and we roared off.
   ‘Just picked the old girl up this morning,’ he mused, more to himself than me. ‘Three point eight litres with triple DCOE Webers. Six cylinders of big cat—lovely!’
   ‘Mind the cyclist,’ I said as we rounded the bend. The driver stamped on the brake and swerved past the man on the bike.
   ‘Bloody cyclists!’ he exclaimed. ‘A danger to themselves and everyone else. Where are you bound, little lady?’
   ‘I’m, ah… visiting my father,’ I explained, truthfully enough.
   ‘Where does he live?’
   ‘Everywhere,’ I replied.


* * *

   ‘—wireless seems to be dead,’ announced Bowden, keying the mike and turning the knob. ‘That’s odd.’
   I picked up the Skyrail ticket as the shuttle approached high on the steel tracks.
   ‘What are you doing’’ asked Bowden.
   ‘I’m going to take the Skyrail; there’s a Neanderthal in trouble.’
   ‘How do you know?’
   I frowned.
   ‘Call it déjà vu this time. Something’s going to happen… and I’m part of it.’
   I left my partner and walked briskly up to the station, showed my ticket to the inspector and climbed the steel steps to the platform. The doors of the shuttle hissed open and I stepped inside, this time knowing exactly what I had to do.

4a. Five Coincidences, Seven Irma Cohens and One Confused Thursday Next

   ‘The Neanderthal experiment was simultaneously the high and low point of the genetic revolution. Successful in that a long-dead cousin of Homo sapiens was brought back from extinction, yet a failure in that the scientists, so happy to gaze upon their experiments from their ever lofty ivory towers, had not seen so far as to consider the social implications that a new species of man might command in a world unvisited by their like for over thirty millennia. It was little surprise that so many of the Neanderthals felt confused and unprepared for the pressures of modern life. It was Homo sapiens at his least sapient.’

GERHARD VON SQUID. Neanderthals—Back after a Short Absence


   Coincidences are strange things. I like the one about the poker player named Fallon, shot dead for cheating in San Francisco in 1858. It was considered unlucky to split the dead man’s $600 winnings so they gave the money to a passer-by, hoping to win it back. The stranger converted the $600 to $2,200, and when the police arrived was asked to hand over the original $600 as it was to be given to the dead gambler’s next of kin. After a brief investigation, the money was returned to the passer-by, as he turned out to be Fallon’s son, who hadn’t seen his father for seven years.
   My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored. ‘It would be much more remarkable,’ he would say, ‘if there weren’t any coincidences.’
   I stepped into the Skyrail car, pulled the emergency lever and ordered everyone off. The Neanderthal operator looked at me oddly as I jammed a foot in the open door of his driver’s cubicle. I hauled him out and thumped him on the jaw before handcuffing him. A few days in the cooler and he would be back to Mrs Kaylieu. There was shocked silence from the group of women in the Skyrail as I searched him and found… nothing. I looked in the cab and his sandwich box but the carved soap gun wasn’t there either.
   The well-heeled woman who had earlier been so keen to jab the driver with her umbrella was suddenly full of self-righteous indignation.
   ‘Disgraceful!’ Attacking a poor defenceless Neanderthal in this manner! I shall speak to my husband about this!’
   One of the other women had called SpecOps 21 and a third had given the Neanderthal a handkerchief to dab his bleeding mouth. I uncuffed Kaylieu and apologised, then sat down and put my head in my hands, wondering what had gone wrong. All the women were called Irma Cohen but none of them would ever know it. Dad said this sort of thing happened all the time.
   ‘You did what? asked Victor, a few hours later at the LiteraTec office.
   ‘I punched a Neanderthal.’
   ‘Why?’
   ‘I thought he had a gun on him.’
   ‘A Neanderthal? With a gun? Don’t be ridiculous!’
   ‘Granted, it was carved from soap—he wanted SO-14 to kill him. But that’s not the half of it. The intended victim was me. If I had journeyed on the Skyrail it would have been Thursday in the body-bag, not Kaylieu. I was set up, Victor. Someone manipulated events to try and bump me off with a stray SpecOps bullet—maybe that was their idea of a joke. If it hadn’t been for Dad taking me out I’d be playing a harp by now.’
   Victor frowned and I showed him that morning’s copy of The Owl, the three clues outlined in green He read them aloud.
   ‘Meddlesome, Thursday, Goodbye.’
   He shrugged.
   ‘Coincidence. I could make any sentence I wanted from any other clues just as easily. Look here.’
   He scanned the answers for a moment.
   ‘Planet, Destroyed, Soonest. What does that mean? The world’s about to end?’
   ‘Well—’
   He dumped my arrest report in his out-tray.
   ‘Take my advice, Thursday. Tell them you thought the Neanderthal was a felon, that he reminded you of the bogeyman—anything. Mention any unauthorised ChronoGuard shenanigans and Flanker will have your badge as a paperweight. I’ll write a good report to SO-1 about your work and conduct so far. With a bit of luck and some serious lying on your behalf, maybe you can get away with a reprimand. For goodness’ sake, Thursday, didn’t you learn anything from that Bad Time junket on the M1?’
   He got up and rubbed his legs. His body was failing him. The hip he had replaced four years ago needed to be replaced. Bowden joined us from where he had been running the copied pages of Cardenio through the Verse Metre Analyser. Unusually for him he seemed to be showing some form of outward excitement. Bouncing, almost.
   ‘How does it look?’ I asked.
   ‘Astounding!’ replied Bowden as he waved a printed report. ‘Ninety-four per cent probability of Will being the author—not even the best fake Cardenio managed higher than a seventy-six. The VMA detected slight traces of collaboration, too.’
   ‘Did it say who?’
   ‘Seventy-three per cent likelihood of Fletcher—something that would seem to bear out against historical evidence. Forging Shakespeare is one thing, forging a collaborated work is quite another.’
   There was silence. Victor rubbed his forehead and thought carefully.
   ‘Okay. Strange and impossible as it might seem, we may have to accept that this is the real thing. This could turn out to be the biggest literary event in history, ever. We keep this quiet and I’ll get Professor Spoon to look it over. We will have to be a hundred per cent sure. I’m not going to suffer the same embarrassment we had over that Tempest fiasco.’
   ‘Since it isn’t in the public domain,’ observed Bowden, ‘Volescamper will have the sole copyright for the next seventy-six years.’
   ‘Every playhouse on the planet will want to put it on,’ I added, ‘and think of the movie rights.’
   ‘Exactly,’ said Victor. ‘He’s sitting on not only the most fantastic literary discovery for three centuries but also a keg of purest gold. The question is, how did it languish in his library undiscovered all this time? Scholars have studied there since 1709. How on earth was it overlooked? Ideas, anyone?’
   ‘Retrosnatch?’ I suggested. ‘If a rogue ChronoGuard operative decided to go back to 1613 and steal a copy he could have a tidy little nest egg on his hands.’
   ‘SO-12 take retrosnatch very seriously and they assure me that it is always detected, sooner or later or both—and dealt with severely. But it’s possible. Bowden, give SO-12 a call, will you?’
   Bowden put out his hand to pick up the phone just as it started to ring.
   ‘Hello… It’s not, you say? Okay, thanks.’
   He put the phone down.
   ‘The ChronoGuard say not.’
   ‘How much do you think it’s worth?’ I asked.
   ‘Hundred million,’ replied Victor, ‘two hundred. Who knows? I’ll call Volescamper and tell him to keep quiet about it. People would kill to even read it. No one else is to know about it, do you hear?’
   We nodded our agreement.
   ‘Good. Thursday, the Network takes internal affairs very seriously. SO-1 will want to speak to you here tomorrow at four about the Skyrail thing. They asked me to suspend you but I told them bollocks so just take some leave until tomorrow. Good work, the two of you. Remember, not a word to anyone!’
   We thanked him and he left. Bowden stared at the wall for a moment before saying:
   ‘The crossword clues bother me, though. If I wasn’t of the opinion that coincidences are merely chance or an overused Dickensian plot device, I might conclude that an old enemy of yours wants to get even.’
   ‘One with a sense of humour, obviously,’ I told him sullenly.
   ‘That rules out Goliath, I suppose,’ mused Bowden. ‘Who are you calling?’
   ‘SO-5.’
   I dug Agent Phodder’s card out of my pocket and rang the number. He had told me to call him if ‘an occurrence of unprecedented weird’ took place, so I was doing precisely that.
   ‘Hello?’ said a brusque-sounding man after the telephone had rung for a long time.
   ‘Thursday Next, SO-27,’ I announced. ‘I have some information for Agent Phodder.’
   There was a long pause.
   ‘Agent Phodder has been reassigned.’
   ‘Agent Kannon, then.’
   ‘Both Phodder and Kannon have been reassigned,’ replied the man sharply. ‘Freak accident laying linoleum. The funeral’s on Friday.’
   This was unexpected news. I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say, so mumbled:
   ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
   ‘Quite,’ said the brusque man, and put the phone down.
   ‘What happened?’ asked Bowden.
   ‘Both dead,’ I said quietly.
   ‘Hades?’
   ‘Linoleum.’
   We sat in silence for a moment.
   ‘Does Hades have the sort of powers that might be necessary to manipulate coincidences?’ asked Bowden.
   I shrugged.
   ‘Perhaps,’ said Bowden thoughtfully, ‘it was a coincidence after all.’
   ‘Perhaps,’ I said, wishing I could believe it. ‘Oh—I almost forgot. The world’s going to end on the twelfth of December at 20.23.’
   ‘Really?’ replied Bowden in a disinterested tone. Apocalyptic pronouncements were nothing new to any of us. The imminent destruction of the world had been predicted almost every year since the dawn of man.
   ‘Which one is it this time?’ asked Bowden. ‘Plague of mice or the wrath of God?’
   ‘I’m not sure. I’ve got to be somewhere at five. Do us a favour, would you?’
   I handed him the small evidence bag my father had given to me. Bowden stared at the goo inside.
   ‘What is it?’
   ‘Exactly. Will you have the labs analyse it?’
   We bade each other goodbye and I trotted out of the building, bumping into John Smith, who was manoeuvring a wheelbarrow with a carrot the size of a vacuum cleaner in it. There was a big label attached to the oversized vegetable that read ‘evidence’. I held the door open for him.
   ‘Thanks,’ he panted.
   I jumped in my car and pulled out of the carpark. My appointment at five was at the doctor’s, and I wasn’t going to miss it for anything

6. Family

   ‘Landen Parke-Laine had been with me in the Crimea in ‘72. He lost a leg to a landmine and his best friend to a military blunder. His best friend was my brother, Anton—and Landen testified against him at the hearing that followed the disastrous “Charge of the Light Armoured Brigade”. My brother was blamed for the debacle, Landen was honourably discharged, I was awarded the Crimea Star for gallantry, I didn’t speak to him for ten years, and now we’re married. It’s funny how things turn out.’

THURSDAY NEXT. Crimean Reminiscences


   ‘Honey, I’m home!’ I yelled out. There was a scrabbling noise from the kitchen as Pickwick’s feet struggled to get a purchase on the tiles in his eagerness to greet me. I had engineered him myself when you could still buy home cloning kits over the counter. He was an early-version 1.2, which explained his lack of wings—they didn’t complete the sequence for two more years. He made excited plock-plock noises and bobbed his head in greeting, rummaged in the wastebasket for a gift and eventually brought me a discarded junk-mail flyer for Lorna Doone merchandising. I tickled him under the chin and he ran to the kitchen, stopped, looked at me and bobbed his head some more.
   ‘Hell-ooo!’ yelled Landen from his study. ‘Do you like surprises?’
   ‘When they’re nice ones!’ I yelled back.
   Pickwick returned to my side, plock-plocked some more and tugged the leg of my jeans. He scuttled off into the kitchen again and waited for me at his basket. Intrigued, I followed. I could see the reason for his excitement. In the middle of the basket, amongst a large heap of shredded paper, was an egg.
   ‘Pickwick!’ I cried excitedly. ‘You’re a girl!’
   Pickwick bobbed some more and nuzzled me affectionately. After a while she stopped and delicately stepped into her basket, ruffled her feathers, tapped the egg with her beak and then walked round it several times before gently placing herself over it. A hand rested on my shoulder. I touched Landen’s fingers and stood up. He kissed me on the neck and I wrapped my arms round his chest.
   ‘I thought Pickwick was a boy,’ he said.
   ‘So did I.’
   ‘Is it a sign?’
   ‘Pickers laying an egg and turning out to be a girl?’ I replied. ‘What do you mean—you’re going to have a baby, Land?’
   ‘No, silly, you know what I mean.’
   ‘I do?’ I asked, looking up at him with carefully engineered innocence.
   ‘Well?’
   ‘Well what?’ I stared into his bright, concerned face with what I thought was a blank expression. But I couldn’t hold it for long and was soon a bundle of girlish giggles and salty tears. He hugged me tightly and placed his hand gently on my tum.
   ‘In there? A baby?’
   ‘Yes. Small pink thing that makes a noise. Seven weeks. Probably appear Julyish.’
   ‘How are you feeling?’
   ‘All right,’ I told him. ‘I felt a bit sick yesterday but that might have had nothing to do with it. I’ll work until I start waddling and then take leave. How are you feeling?’
   ‘Odd,’ said Landen, hugging me again. ‘Odd… yet elated.’ He grinned. ‘Who can I tell?’
   ‘No one quite yet. Probably just as well—your mum would knit herself to death!’
   ‘And what’s wrong with my mother’s knitting?’ asked Landen, feigning indignation.
   ‘Nothing.’ I giggled. ‘But there is a limit to storage space.’
   ‘At least it’s recognisable,’ he said. ‘That jumper your mum gave me for my birthday; what does she think I am, a squid?’
   I burried my face in his collar and held him close. He rubbed my back gently and we stood together for several minutes without talking.
   ‘Did you have a good day?’ he asked at last.
   ‘Well,’ I began, ‘we found Cardenio, I was shot dead by an SO-14 marksman, became a vanishing hitch-hiker, saw Yorrick Kaine, suffered a few too many coincidences and knocked a Neanderthal unconscious.’
   ‘No puncture this time?’
   ‘Two, actually—at the same time.’
   ‘What was Kaine like?’
   ‘I don’t really know. He arrived at Volescamper’s as we were leaving—aren’t you even curious about the marksman?’
   ‘Yorrick Kaine is giving a talk tonight about the economical realities of a Welsh free-trade agreement—’
   ‘Landen,’ I said, ‘it’s my uncle’s party tonight. I promised Mum we’d be there.’
   ‘Yeah, I know.’
   ‘Are you going to ask me about the incident with SO-14 now?’
   Landen sighed. ‘All right. What was it like?’
   ‘Don’t ask.’
   My Uncle Mycroft had announced his retirement. At the age of seventy-seven, and following the events of the Prose Portal and Polly’s imprisonment in ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, they had both decided that enough was enough. The Goliath Corporation had been offering Mycroft not one but two blank cheques for him to resume work on a new Prose Portal, but Mycroft had steadfastly refused, maintaining that the Portal could not be replicated even if he had wanted it to be. We took my car up to Mum’s house and parked a little way up the road.
   ‘I never thought of Mycroft retiring,’ I said as we walked down the street.
   ‘Me neither,’ Landen agreed. ‘What do you suppose he’ll do?’
   ‘Watch Name That Fruit! most likely. He says that soaps and quiz shows are the ideal way to fade out.’
   ‘He’s not far wrong,’ added Landen. ‘After a few years of 65 Walrus Street, death might become something of a welcome distraction.’
   We heaved open the garden gate and greeted the dodos, who all had a bright pink ribbon tied round their necks for the occasion. I offered them a few marshmallows and they pecked and plocked greedily at the proffered gifts.
   ‘Hello, Thursday!’ said the prematurely grey-haired man who answered the door.
   ‘Hello, Wilbur,’ I said. ‘How are you doing?’
   Wilbur and Orville were Mycroft and Polly’s only sons and were remarkable for… well, you’ll see.
   ‘I’m very well,’ replied Wilbur, smiling benignly. ‘Hello, Landen—I read your latest book. It was a big improvement on the last one, I must say.’
   ‘You’re very kind,’ replied Landen drily.
   ‘I was promoted, you know.’
   He paused to allow us to murmur a congratulatory sound before continuing:
   ‘Consolidated Useful Stuff always promote those within the company who show particular promise, and after ten years in pension fund management ConStuff felt I was ready to branch into something new and dynamic. I’m now Services Director at a subsidiary of theirs named MycroTech Developments.’
   ‘But my goodness, what a coincidence!’ said Landen. ‘Isn’t that Mycroft’s company?’
   ‘Coincidental,’ replied Wilbur stoically, ‘as you say. Mr Perkup—the CEO of MycroTech—told me it was solely due to my diligence; I—’
   ‘Thursday, darling!’ interrupted Gloria, Wilbur’s wife. Formerly a Volescamper, she had married Wilbur under the misapprehension that a) he would be coming into a fortune and b) he was as intelligent as his father. She had been wrong—in a spectacular fashion—on both counts.
   ‘Darling, you are looking simply divine—have you lost weight?’
   ‘I have no idea, Gloria, but… you’re looking different.’
   And she was. Habitually dressed up to the nines in expensive clothes, hats, make-up and lashings of what-have-you, tonight she was attired in chinos and a shirt. She was wearing hardly any make-up and her hair, usually perfectly coiffured, was tied up in a ponytail with a black scrunchie.
   ‘What do you think?’ she asked, doing a twirl for us both.

   ‘What happened to the five-hundred-pound dresses?’ asked Landen. ‘Bailiffs been in?’
   ‘No, this is all the rage—and you should know, Thursday. The Female is promoting the Thursday Next look. This is very much “in” at present.’
   ‘Ridiculous,’ I told her ‘If Bonzo the Wonder Hound had rescued Jane Eyre, would you all be wearing a studded collar and smelling each other’s bottoms?’
   ‘There is no need to be offensive,’ replied Gloria haughtily as she looked me up and down. ‘You should be honoured. Mind you, the December issue of The Female thinks that a brown leather flyer’s jacket is more in keeping with “the look”. Your black leather is a little bit passe, I’m afraid. And those shoes—hell’s teeth!’
   ‘Wait a moment!’ I returned. ‘How can you tell me that I don’t have the Thursday Next look? I am Thursday Next!’
   ‘Fashions evolve, Thursday—I’ve heard that next month’s fashions will be marine invertebrates. You should enjoy it while you can.’
   ‘Marine invertebrates?’ echoed Landen. ‘What happened to that squid-like jumper of your mum’s? We could be sitting on a fortune!’
   ‘Can neither of you be serious?’ asked Gloria disdainfully. ‘If you’re not in you’re out, and where would you be then?’
   ‘Out, I guess,’ I replied. ‘Land, what do you think?’
   ‘Totally out, Thurs.’
   We stared at her, half smiling, and she laughed. Gloria was a good sort once you broke down the barriers. Wilbur, seizing the chance to tell us more about his fascinating new job, carried on as soon as his wife stopped talking.
   ‘I’m now on twenty K plus car and a good pension package. I could take voluntary retirement at fifty-five and still draw two-thirds of my wage. What is the SpecOps retirement fund like?’
   ‘Crap, Wilbur—but you know that.’
   A slightly smaller and more follicularly challenged version of Wilbur walked up
   ‘Hello, Thursday.’
   ‘Hello, Orville. How’s the ear?’
   ‘Just the same. What was that you were saying about retiring at fifty-five, Will?’
   In all the excitement of pension plans I was forgotten. Charlotte, who was Orville’s wife, also had the ‘Thursday Next’ look, she and Gloria fell eagerly into untaxing conversation about whether leather shoes in ‘the look’ should be worn above or below the ankle, and whether a small amount of eyeliner was acceptable. As usual, Charlotte tended to agree with Gloria, in fact, she tended to agree with everybody about everything. She was as hospitable as the day was long, but it was important not to get caught in an elevator with her—she could agree you to death.
   We left them to their conversation and I walked in through the living room door, deftly catching the wrist of my elder brother Joffy, who had been hoping to give me a resounding slap on the back of my head as was his thirty-five-year-old custom. I had seen him lurking and was prepared. I twisted his arm into a half nelson and had his face pressed against the door before he knew what had happened.
   ‘Hello, Joff,’ I said. ‘Slowing up in your old age?’
   I let him go. He laughed energetically, straightened his jaw and dog-collar and hugged me tightly while proffering a hand for Landen to shake. Landen, after checking for the almost mandatory hand buzzer, shook it heartily.
   ‘How’s Mr and Mrs Doofus, then?’
   ‘We’re fine, Joff. You?’
   ‘Not that good, Thurs. The Church of the Global Standard Deity has undergone a split.’
   ‘No!’ I said with as much surprise and concern in my voice as I could muster.
   ‘I’m afraid so. The new Global Standard Clockwise Deity have broken away due to unresolvable differences over the direction in which the collection plate is passed round.’
   ‘Another split? That’s the third this week!’
   ‘Fourth,’ replied Joffy dourly, ‘and it’s only Tuesday. The standardised pro-Baptist conjoined Methodanan–Luthenan sisters of something-or-other split into two subgroups yesterday. Soon,’ he added grimly, ‘there won’t be enough ministers to man the splits. As it is I have to attend two dozen different breakaway church groups every week. I often forget which one I’m at, and as you can imagine, preaching to the Idolatry Friends of St Zvlkx the Consumer the sermon that I should have been reading to the Church of the Misrepresented Promise of Eternal Life can be highly embarrassing. Mum’s in the kitchen. Do you think Dad will turn up?’
   I didn’t know and told him so. He looked crestfallen for a moment and then said:
   ‘Will you come and do a professional mingle at my Les arts modernes de Swindon show next week?’
   ‘Why me?’
   ‘Because you’re vaguely famous and you’re my sister. Yes?’
   ‘Okay.’
   He tugged my ear affectionately and we walked into the kitchen.
   ‘Hello, Mum!’
   My mother was bustling around some chicken vol-au-vents. By some bizarre twist of fate they had turned out not at all burned and actually quite tasty—it had thrown her into a bit of a panic. Most of her cooking ended up as the culinary equivalent of the Tunguska event.
   ‘Hello, Thursday, hello, Landen. Can you pass me that bowl, please?’
   Landen passed it over, trying to guess the contents.
   ‘Hello, Mrs Next,’ he said.
   ‘Call me Wednesday, Landen—you’re family now, you know.’ She smiled and giggled to herself.
   ‘Dad said to say hello,’ I put in quickly before Mum cooed herself into a frenzy. ‘I saw him today.’
   My mother stopped her random method of cooking and recalled for a moment, I imagine, fond embraces with her eradicated husband. It must have been quite a shock, waking up one morning and finding your husband never existed. Then, quite out of the blue, she yelled:
   ‘DH-82, down!’
   Her anger was directed at a small Tasmainan tiger that had been nosing the remains of some chicken on the table edge.
   ‘Bad boy!’ she added in a scolding tone. The Tasmainan tiger looked crestfallen, sat on its blanket by the Aga and stared down at its paws.
   ‘Rescue Thylacine,’ explained my mother. ‘Used to be a lab animal. He smoked forty a day until his escape. It’s costing me a fortune in nicotine patches. Isn’t it, DH-82?’
   The small re-engineered native of Tasmania looked up and shook his head. Despite being vaguely dog-shaped this species was more closely related to a kangaroo than to a Labrador. You always expected one to wag its tail, bark or fetch a stick, but they never did. The closest behavioural similarities were a propensity to steal food and an almost fanatical devotion to tail-chasing.
   ‘I miss your dad a lot, you know,’ said my mother wistfully. ‘How—’
   There was a loud explosion, the lights flickered and something shot past the kitchen window.
   ‘What was that?’ said my mother.
   ‘I think,’ replied Landen soberly, ‘it was Aunt Polly.’
   We found her in the vegetable patch dressed in a deflating rubber suit that was meant to break her fall but obviously hadn’t—she was holding a handkerchief to a bloodied nose.
   ‘My goodness!’ exclaimed my mother. ‘Are you okay?’
   ‘Never been better!’ she replied, looking at a stake in the ground and then yelling. ‘Seventy-five yards!’
   ‘Righty-on!’ said a distant voice from the other end of the garden. We turned to see my Uncle Mycroft, who was consulting a clipboard next to a smoking Volkswagen convertible.
   ‘Car seat ejection devices in case of road accidents,’ explained Polly, ‘with a self-inflating rubber suit to cushion the fall. Pull on a toggle and bang—out you go. Prototype, of course.’
   ‘Of course.’
   We helped her to her feet and she trotted off, seemingly none the worse for her expenence.
   ‘Mycroft still inventing, then?’ I said as we walked back inside to discover that DH-82 had eaten all the vol-au-vents, the main course and the trifle for pudding.
   ‘DH!’ Mum said crossly to the guilty-looking and very bloated Tas tiger, ‘that was very bad! What am I going to feed everybody on now?’
   ‘How about Thylacine cutlets?’ suggested Landen.
   I elbowed him in the ribs and Mum pretended not to hear.
   Landen rolled up his sleeves and searched through the kitchen for something to rustle up. All of the cupboards were full of tinned pears.
   ‘Have you anything apart from canned fruit, Mrs… I mean, Wednesday?’
   Mum stopped trying to chastise DH-82, who, soporific through gluttony, had settled down for a long nap.
   ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘The man in the shop said there would be a shortage so I bought his entire stock.’
   I walked down to Mycroft’s laboratory, knocked and, when there was no reply, entered. All his machines had been dismantled and now lay about the room, tagged and carefully stacked. Mycroft himself, having obviously finished testing the ejection system, was now tweaking a small bronze object. He seemed somewhat startled when I spoke his name but relaxed as soon as he saw it was me.
   ‘Hello, love!’ he said kindly. ‘I’m off on retirement in one hour and nine minutes. You looked good on the telly last night.’
   ‘Thank you. What are you up to, Uncle?’
   He handed me a large book.
   ‘Enhanced indexing. In a Nextian dictionary, godliness can be next to cleanliness—or anything else for that matter.’
   I opened the book to look up ‘trout’ and found it on the first page I came to.
   ‘Saves time, eh?’
   ‘Yes; but—’
   Mycroft had moved on.
   ‘Over here is a Lego filter for vacuum cleaners. Did you know that over a million pounds’ worth of Lego is hoovered up every year, and a total often thousand man-hours are wasted sorting through the dust bags?’
   ‘I didn’t know that, no.’
   ‘This device will sort any sucked-up bits of Lego into colours or shapes, according to how you set this knob here.’
   ‘Very impressive.’
   ‘This is just hobby stuff. Come and look at some real innovation.’
   He beckoned me across to a blackboard, its surface covered with a jumbled mass of complicated algebraic functions.
   ‘This is Polly’s hobby, really. It’s a new form of mathematical theory that makes Euclid’s work seem like little more than long division. We have called it Nextian geometry. I won’t bother you with the details but watch this.’
   Mycroft rolled up his shirtsleeves and placed a large ball of dough on the workbench and rolled it out into a flat ovoid.
   ‘Scone dough,’ he explained. ‘I’ve left out the raisins for purposes of clarity. Using conventional geometry a round scone cutter always leaves waste behind, agreed?’
   ‘Agreed.’

   ‘Not with Nextian geometry! You see this pastry cutter? Circular, wouldn’t you say?’
   ‘Perfectly circular, yes.’
   ‘Well,’ carried on Mycroft in an excited voice, ‘it isn’t. It appears circular but actually it’s a square. A Nextian square. Watch.’
   And so saying he deftly cut the dough into twelve perfectly circular shapes with no waste. I frowned and stared at the small pile of discs, not quite believing what I had just seen.
   ‘How—?’
   ‘Clever, isn’t it?’ He chuckled. ‘But quite, quite simple, really. A baked-bean tin is circular, wouldn’t you say?’
   I nodded.
   ‘But viewed from the side it looks like an oblong. What Nextian geometry does—in very simple terms—is bring the plane of a solid from the horizontal to the vertical but without altering the vertices of the solid in space Admittedly it only works with Nextian dough, which doesn’t rise so well and tastes like denture paste, but we’re working on that.’
   ‘It seems impossible, Uncle.’
   ‘We didn’t know the nature of lightning or rainbows for three and a half million years, pet. Don’t reject it just because it seems impossible. If we closed our minds there would never be the Gravitube, antimatter, Prose Portals, Thermos flasks—’
   ‘Wait!’ I interrupted ‘How does a Thermos fit in with that little lot?’
   ‘Because, my dear girl, no one has the least idea why they work.’ He stared at me for a moment and continued: ‘You will agree that a vacuum flask keeps hot things hot in the winter and cold things cold in the summer?’
   ‘Yes.’
   ‘Well, how does it know? I’ve studied vacuum flasks for many years and not one of them gave any clues as to their inherent seasonal cognitive ability. It’s a mystery to me, I can tell you.’
   ‘Okay, okay, Uncle—how about applications for Nextian geometry?’
   ‘Hundreds. Packaging and space management will be revolutionised overnight. I can pack Ping-Pong balls in a cardboard box without any gaps, punch steel bottle tops with no waste, drill a square hole, tunnel to the moon, divide cake more efficiently, and also—and this is the most exciting part—collapse matter.’
   ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
   ‘Not at all,’ replied Mycroft airily. ‘You accept that all matter is mainly empty space? The void between the nucleus and the electrons? Well, by applying Nextian geometry to the subatomic level. I can collapse matter to a fraction of its former size. I will be able to reduce almost anything to the microscopic!’
   ‘Are you going to market this idea?’
   It was a good question. Most of Mycroft’s ideas were far too dangerous to even think about, much less let loose on a world unprepared for hyper-radical thought.
   ‘Miniaturisation is a technology that needs to be utilised,’ explained Mycroft. ‘Can you imagine tiny nanomachines barely bigger than a cell building, say, food protein out of nothing more than garbage? Banoffee pie from landfills, ships from scrap iron—! It’s a fantastic notion. Consolidated Useful Stuff are financing some R&D with me as we speak.’
   ‘It’s very impressive, Uncle, but what do you know about coincidences?’
   ‘Well,’ said Mycroft thoughtfully, ‘it is my considered opinion that most coincidences are simply quirks of chance—if you extrapolate the bell curve of probability you will find statistical abnormalities that seem unusual but are, in actual fact, quite likely given the number of people on the planet and the number of different things we do in our lives.’
   ‘I see,’ I replied slowly. ‘That explains things on a minor coincidental level, but what about the bigger coincidences? How high would you rate seven people in a Skyrail shuttle all called Irma Cohen and the answers to crossword clues reading out “meddlesome Thursday goodbye” just before someone tried to kill me?’
   Mycroft gave a low whistle.
   ‘That’s quite a coincidence. More than a coincidence, I think.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Thursday, think for a moment about the fact that the universe always moves from an ordered state to a disordered one; that a glass may fall to the ground and shatter yet you never see a broken glass reassemble itself and then jump back on to the table.’
   ‘I accept that.’
   ‘But why doesn’t it?’
   ‘Search me.’
   ‘Every atom of that glass that shattered would contravene no laws of physics if they were to rejoin—on a subatomic level all particle interactions are reversible. Down there we can’t tell which event precedes which. It’s only out here that we can see things age and define a strict direction in which time travels.’
   ‘So what are you saying, Uncle?’
   ‘That these things don’t happen is because of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that disorder in the universe always increases; the amount of this disorder is a quantity known as entropy.’
   ‘So how does this relate to coincidences?’
   ‘I’m getting to that; imagine a box with a partition—the left side is filled with gas, the right a vacuum. Remove the partition and the gas will expand into the other side of the box—yes?’
   I nodded.
   ‘And you wouldn’t expect the gas to cramp itself up in the left-hand side again, would you?’
   ‘No’
   ‘Ah!’ replied Mycroft with a smile ‘Not quite right. You see, since every interaction of gas atoms is reversible, some time, sooner or later, the gas must cramp itself back into the left-hand side!’
   ‘It must?’
   ‘Yes, the key here is how much later. Since even a small box of gas might contain 1020 atoms, the time taken for them to try all possible combinations would be far greater than the age of the universe, a decrease in entropy strong enough to allow gas to separate, a shattered glass to re-form or the statue of St Zvlkx outside to get down and walk to the pub is not, I think, against any physical laws but just fantastically unlikely.’
   ‘So what you are saying is that really, really weird coincidences are caused by a drop in entropy?’
   ‘Exactly so. But it’s only a theory. Why entropy might spontaneously decrease and how one might conduct experiments into localised entropic field decreasement. I have only a few untried notions that I won’t trouble you with here, but look, take this—it could save your life.’
   He passed me a sealed jam jar, the contents of which were half rice and half lentils.
   ‘I’m not hungry, thanks,’ I told him.
   ‘No, no I call this device an entroposcope. Shake it for me.’
   I shook the jamjar and the rice and lentils settled together in that sort of random clumping way that chance usually dictates.
   ‘So?’ I asked.
   ‘Entirely usual,’ replied Mycroft. ‘Standard clumping, entropy levels normal. Shake it every now and then. You’ll know when a decrease in entropy occurs as the rice and lentils will separate into more ordered patterns—and that’s the time to watch out for ludicrously unlikely coincidences.’
   Polly entered the workshop and gave her husband a hug.
   ‘Hello, you two,’ she said. ‘Having fun?’
   ‘I’m showing Thursday what I’ve been up to, my dear,’ replied Mycroft graciously.
   ‘Did you show her your memory erasure device, Crofty?’
   ‘No, he didn’t,’ I said.
   ‘Yes I did,’ replied Mycroft with a smile, adding: ‘You’re going to have to leave me, pet—I’ve work to do. I retire in fifty-six minutes precisely.’
   My father didn’t turn up that evening, much to my mother’s disappointment. At five minutes to ten Mycroft, true to his word, and with Polly behind him, emerged from his laboratory to join us for dinner. Next family dinners are always noisy affairs and tonight was no different. Landen sat next to Orville and did a very good impression of someone who was trying not to be bored. Joffy, who was next to Wilbur, thought his new job was utter crap and Wilbur, who had been needled by Joffy for at least three decades, replied that he thought the Global Standard Deity faith was the biggest load of phoney codswallop he had ever come across.
   ‘Ah,’ replied Joffy loftily, ‘wait until you meet the Brotherhood of Unconstrained Verbosity.’
   Gloria and Charlotte always sat next to one another, Gloria to talk about something trivial and Charlotte to agree with her. Mum and Polly talked about the Women’s Federation and I sat next to Mycroft.
   ‘What will you do in your retirement, Uncle?’
   ‘I don’t know, pet. I have some books I’ve been wanting to write for some time.’
   ‘About your work?’
   ‘Much too dull. Can I try an idea out on you?’
   ‘Sure.’
   He smiled, looked around, lowered his voice and leaned closer.
   ‘Okay, here it is: brilliant young surgeon Dexter Colt starts work at the highly efficient yet underfunded children’s hospital doing pioneering work on relieving the suffering of orphaned amputees. The chief nurse is the headstrong yet beautiful Tiffany Lampe. Tiffany has only recently recovered from her shattered love affair with anaesthetist Dr Burns and—’
   ‘—they fall in love?’ I ventured.
   Mycroft’s face fell.
   ‘You’ve heard it, then?’

   ‘The bit about the orphaned amputees is good,’ I added, trying not to dishearten him. ‘What are you going to call it?’
   ‘I thought of Love among the Orphans. What do you think?’
   By the end of the meal Mycroft had outlined several of his books to me, each one with a plot more lurid than the last. At the same time Joffy and Wilbur had come to blows in the garden, discussing the sanctity of peace and forgiveness amid the thud of fists and the crunch of broken noses.
   At midnight Mycroft took Polly in his arms and thanked us all for coming.
   ‘I have spent my entire life in pursuit of scientific truth and enlightenment,’ he announced grandly, ‘answers to conundrums and unifying theories of everything. Perhaps I should have spent the time going out more. In fifty-four years neither Polly nor myself has ever taken a holiday, so that is where we’re off to now.’
   We walked into the garden, the family wishing Mycroft and Polly well on their travels. Outside the door of the workshop they stopped and looked at one another, then at all of us.
   ‘Well, thanks for the party,’ said Mycroft. ‘Pear soup followed by pear stew with pear sauce and finishing with bombs surprise—which was pear—was quite a treat. Unusual, but quite a treat. Look after MycroTech while I’m away, Wilbur, and thanks for all the meals, Wednesday. Right, that’s it,’ concluded Mycroft. ‘We’re off Toodle-oo.’
   ‘Enjoy yourselves,’ I said.
   ‘Oh, we will!’ he said, bidding us all goodbye again and disappearing into the workshop. Polly kissed us all, waved farewell and followed him, closing the door behind her.
   ‘It won’t be the same without him and his daft projects, will it?’ said Landen
   ‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s—’
   I felt a strong tingling sensation as a noiseless white light erupted from within the workshop and shone in pencil-thin beams from every crack and rivet hole, each speck of grime showing up on the dirty windows, every crack in the glass suddenly alive with a rainbow of colours. We winced and shielded our eyes, but no sooner had the light started than it had gone again, faded to nothing in a crackle of electricity. Landen and I exchanged looks and stepped forward. The door opened easily and we stood there, staring into the large and now very empty workshop. Every single piece of equipment had gone. Not a screw, not a bolt, not a washer.
   ‘He isn’t just going to write romantic novels in his retirement,’ observed Joffy.
   ‘Most probably he just took it all so no one else would carry on with his work. Mycroft’s scruples were the equal of his intellect.’
   My mother was sitting on an upturned wheelbarrow, her dodos clustered around her on the off-chance of a marshmallow.
   ‘They’re not coming back,’ said my mother sadly. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
   ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know.’

7. White Horse, Uffington, Picnics for the Use of

   ‘We decided that “Parke-Laine-Next” was a bit of a mouthful, so I kept my surname and he kept his. I called myself “Ms” instead of “Miss”, but nothing else changed. I liked being called his wife in the same way I liked calling Landen my husband. It felt sort of tingly. I had the same feeling when I stared at my wedding ring. They say you get used to it but I hoped that they were wrong. Marriage, like spinach and opera, was something I had never thought I would like. I changed my mind about opera when I was nine years old. My father took me to the first night of Madame Butterfly at Brescia in 1904. After the performance Dad cooked while Puccini regaled me with hilarious stories and signed my autograph book—from that day on I was a devoted fan. In the same way, it took being in love with Landen to make me change my mind about marriage. I found it exciting and exhilarating, two people, together, as one. It was where I was meant to be. I was happy, I was contented, I was fulfilled.
   And spinach? Well, I’m still waiting.

THURSDAY NEXT—private diaries


   ‘What do you think they’ll do?’ asked Landen as we lay in bed, he with one hand resting gently on my stomach and the other wrapped tightly around me. The bedclothes had been thrown off and we had only just regained our breath.
   ‘Who?’
   ‘SO-1 this afternoon. About you punching the Neanderthal.’
   ‘Oh, that. I don’t know. Technically speaking I really haven’t done anything wrong at all. I think they’ll let me off, considering all the good PR work I’ve done—looks a bit daft to arrest their star operative, don’t you think?’
   ‘That’s always assuming they think logically like you or I.’
   ‘It does, doesn’t it?’
   I sighed.
   ‘People have been busted for less. SO-1 like to make an example from time to time.’
   ‘You don’t have to work, you know.’
   I looked across at him but he was too close to focus on, which was sort of nice, in its way.
   ‘I know,’ I replied, ‘but I’d like to keep it up. I don’t really see myself as a mumsy sort of person.’
   ‘Your cooking might tend to support that fact.’
   ‘Mother’s cooking is terrible, too—I think it’s hereditary. My SO-1 hearing is at four. Want to go and see the mammoth migration?’
   ‘Sure.’
   The doorbell rang.
   ‘Who could that be?’
   ‘It’s a little early to tell,’ quipped Landen. ‘I understand the “go and see” technique sometimes works.’
   ‘Very funny.’
   I pulled on some clothes and went downstairs. There was a gaunt man with lugubrious features standing on the doorstep. He looked as close to a bloodhound as one can get without actually having a tail and barking.
   ‘Yes?’
   He raised his hat and gave me a somnolent smile.
   ‘The name is Hopkins,’ he explained. ‘I’m a reporter for The Owl. I was wondering if I could interview you about your time within the pages of Jane Eyre?’
   ‘You’ll have to go through Cordelia Flakk at SpecOps, I’m afraid. I’m not really at liberty—’
   ‘I know you were inside the book; in the first and original ending Jane goes to India, yet in your ending she stays and marries Rochester. How did you engineer this?’
   ‘You really have to get clearance from Flakk, Mr Hopkins.’
   He sighed.
   ‘Okay, I will. Just one thing. Did you prefer the new ending, your new ending?’
   ‘Of course. Didn’t you?’
   Mr Hopkins scribbled in a notepad and smiled again.
   ‘Thank you, Miss Next. I’m very much in your debt. Good day!’
   He raised his hat again and was gone.
   ‘What was all that about?’ asked Landen as he handed me a cup of coffee.
   ‘Pressman.’
   ‘What did you tell him?’
   ‘Nothing. He has to go through Flakk.’
   Uffington was busy that morning. The mammoth population in England, Wales and Scotland amounted to 249 individuals in nine groups, all of whom migrated north to south around late autumn and back again in the spring. The routes followed the same pattern every year with staggering accuracy. Inhabited areas were mostly avoided—except Devizes, where the high street was shuttered up and deserted twice a year as the plodding elephantines crashed and trumpeted their way through the centre of the town, cheerfully following the ancient call of their forebears. No one in Devizes could get any sleep or proboscidea damage insurance cover, but the extra cash from tourism generally made up for it.
   But there weren’t just mammoth twitchers, walkers, Druids and a Neanderthal ‘right to hunt’ protest up the hill that morning, a dark blue automobile was waiting for us, and when somebody is waiting for you in a place you hadn’t planned on being, then you take notice. There were three of them standing next to the car, all dressed in dark suits with a blue enamelled Goliath badge on their lapels. The only one I recognised was Schitt-Hawse; they all hastily hid their ice creams as we approached.
   ‘Mr Schitt-Hawse,’ I said, ‘what a surprise! Have you met my husband?’
   Schitt-Hawse offered his hand but Landen didn’t take it. The Goliath agent grimaced for a moment, then gave a bemused grin.
   ‘Saw you on the telly, Ms Next. It was a fascinating talk about dodos, I must say.’
   ‘I’d like to expand my subjects next time,’ I replied evenly. ‘Might even try and include something about Goliath’s malignant stranglehold on the nation.’
   Schitt-Hawse shook his head sadly.
   ‘Unwise, Next, unwise. What you singularly fail to grasp is that Goliath is all you’ll ever need. All anyone will ever need. We manufacture everything from cots to coffins and employ over eight million people in our six thousand or so subsidiary companies. Everything from the womb to the wooden overcoat.’
   ‘And how much profit do you expect to scavenge as you massage us from hatched to dispatched?’
   ‘You can’t put a price on human happiness, Next. Political and economic uncertainty are the two biggest forms of stress. You’ll be pleased to know that the Goliath Cheerfulness Index has reached a four-year high this morning at 9.13.’
   ‘Out of a hundred?’ asked Landen sarcastically.
   ‘Out of ten, Mr Parke-Laine,’ Schitt-Hawse replied testily. ‘The nation has grown beyond all measure under our guidance.’
   ‘Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer, Schitt-Hawse.’
   His face dropped and he stared at us for a moment, doubtless wondering how best to continue.
   ‘So,’ I said politely, ‘out to watch the mammoths?’
   ‘Goliath don’t watch mammoths, Next. There’s no profit in it. Have you met my associates Mr Chalk and Mr Cheese?’
   I looked at his two gorilla-like lackeys. They were immaculately dressed, had impeccably trimmed goatees, and stared at me through impenetrable dark glasses.
   ‘Which is which?’ I asked
   ‘I’m Cheese,’ said Cheese

   ‘I’m Chalk,’ said Chalk.
   ‘When is he going to ask you about Jack Schitt?’ asked Landen in an unsubtly loud whisper.
   ‘Pretty soon,’ I replied.
   Schitt-Hawse shook his head sadly. He opened the briefcase Mr Chalk was holding and inside, nestled in the carefully cut foam innards, lay a copy of The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
   ‘You left Jack imprisoned in this copy of The Raven. Goliath need him out to face a disciplinary board on charges of embezzlement, Goliath contractual irregularities, misuse of the Corporation’s leisure facilities, missing stationery… and crimes against humanity.’
   ‘Oh yes?’ I asked. ‘Why not just leave him in?’
   Schitt-Hawse sighed and stared at me.
   ‘Listen, Next. We need Jack out of here, and believe me, we’ll manage it.’
   ‘Not with my help.’
   Schitt-Hawse stared silently at me for a moment.
   ‘Goliath is not used to being refused. We asked your uncle to build another Prose Portal. He told us to come back in a month’s time. We understand he left on retirement last night. Destination?’
   ‘Not a clue.’
   Mycroft had retired, it seemed, not out of choice but out of necessity. I smiled. Goliath had been hoodwinked and they didn’t like it.
   ‘Without the Portal,’ I told him, ‘I can’t jump into books any more than Mr Chalk can.’
   Chalk shuffled slightly as I mentioned his name.
   ‘You’re lying,’ replied Schitt-Hawse ‘The ineptness card doesn’t work on us. You defeated Hades, Jack Schitt and the Goliath Corporation. We have a great deal of admiration for you. Goliath has been more than fair given the circumstances, and we would hate for you to become a victim of corporate impatience.’
   ‘Corporate impatience? What’s that, some sort of threat?’
   ‘This unhelpful attitude of yours might make me vindictive—and you wouldn’t like me when I get vindictive.’
   ‘I don’t like you when you’re not vindictive.’
   Schitt-Hawse shut the briefcase with a snap. His left eye twitched and the colour drained out of his face. He looked at us both and started to say something, stopped, got a hold of his temper and managed to squeeze out a half-smile before he climbed back into his car with Chalk and Cheese and was gone.
   Landen was still chuckling as we spread a groundsheet and blanket on the well-nibbled grass just above the White Horse. Below us, at the bottom of the escarpment, a herd of mammoths were quietly browsing, and on the horizon we could see several airships on the approach to Oxford. It was a pleasant day, and since airships don’t fly in poor weather, they were all making the best use of it.
   ‘You don’t have much fear of Goliath, do you, darling?’ Landen asked.
   I shrugged.
   ‘Goliath is nothing more than a bully, Land. Stand up to them and they’ll soon scurry away. All that large car and henchman stuff—it’s for frighteners. But I’m kind of intrigued as to how they knew we would be here.’
   Landen shrugged.
   ‘Cheese or ham?’ [11]
   ‘What?’
   ‘I said: “Cheese or ham?’
   ‘Not you.’
   Landen looked around. We were about the only people within a hundred-yard radius.
   ‘Who, then?’
   ‘Snell.’
   ‘Who?’
   ‘Snell!’ I yelled out loud. ‘Is that you?’ [12]
   ‘I didn’t!’ [13]
   ‘Prosecution? Who?’ [14]
   ‘Thursday,’ said Landen, now slightly worried, ‘what the hell’s going on?’
   ‘I’m talking to my lawyer.’
   ‘What have you done wrong?’
   ‘I’m not sure.’
   Landen threw his hands up in the air and I addressed Snell again.
   ‘Can you tell me the charge I’m facing at the very least?’ [15]
   I sighed.
   ‘She’s not married, apparently.’ [16]
   ‘Snell! Wait! Snell? Snell—!’

   But he had gone. Landen was staring at me.
   ‘How long have you been like this, darling?’
   ‘I’m fine, Land. But something weird is going on. Can we drop it for the moment?’
   Landen looked at me, then at the clear blue sky, and then at the cheese he was still holding
   ‘Cheese or ham?’ he said at last.
   ‘Both—but go easy on the cheese; this is a very limited supply.’
   ‘Where did you find it?’ asked Landen, looking at the anonymously wrapped block suspiciously.
   ‘From Joe Martlet at the Cheese Squad. They intercept about twelve tons a week coming over the Welsh border. It seems a shame to burn it so everyone at SpecOps gets a pound or two. You know what they say: “Cops have the best cheese”.’
   ‘Goodbye, Thursday,’ muttered Landen, looking at the ham.
   ‘Are you going somewhere?’ I replied, unsure of what he meant.
   ‘Me? No. Why?’
   ‘You just said “goodbye”.’
   He laughed. ‘No. I was commenting on the ham. It’s a good buy.’
   ‘Oh.’
   He cut me a slice and put it with the cheese in a sandwich, then made one for himself. In the distance a mammoth trumpeted as it made heavy weather of the escarpment, and I took a bite.
   ‘It’s farewell and so long, Thursday.’
   ‘Are you doing this on purpose?’
   ‘Doing what? Isn’t that Major Tony Fairwelle and your old school chum Sue Long over there?’
   I turned to where Landen was pointing. It was Tony and Sue, and they waved cheerily before walking across to say hello.
   ‘Goodness!’ said Tony when they had seated themselves ‘Looks like the regimental get-together is early this year! Remember Sarah Nara, who lost an ear at Bilohirsk? I just met her in the carpark; quite a coincidence.’
   As he said the word my heart missed a beat. I rummaged in my pocket for the entroposcope Mycroft had given me.
   ‘What’s the matter, Thurs?’ asked Landen. ‘You’re looking kind of… odd.’
   ‘I’m checking for coincidences,’ I muttered, shaking the jam jar of mixed lentils and rice. ‘It’s not as stupid as it sounds.’
   The two pulses had gathered in a sort of swirly pattern. Entropy was decreasing by the second.
   ‘We’re out of here,’ I said to Landen, who looked at me quizzically. ‘Let’s go. Leave the things.’
   ‘What’s the problem, Thurs?’
   ‘I’ve just spotted my old croquet captain, Alf Widdershaine. This is Sue Long and Tony Fairwelle; they just saw Sarah Nara—see a pattern emerging?’
   ‘Thursday!’ Landen sighed. ‘Aren’t you being a little—’
   ‘Want me to prove it? Excuse me!’ I said, shouting to a passer-by. ‘What’s your name?’
   ‘Bonnie,’ she said, ‘Bonnie Voige. Why?’
   ‘See?’
   ‘Voige is not a rare name, Thurs. There are probably hundreds of them up here.’
   ‘All right, smarty-pants, you try.’
   ‘I will,’ replied Landen indignantly, heaving himself to his feet. ‘Excuse me!’
   A young woman stopped and Landen asked her name.
   ‘Violet,’ she replied.
   ‘You see?’ said Landen. ‘There’s nothing—’
   ‘Violet De’ath,’ continued the woman. I shook the entroposcope again—the lentils and rice had separated almost entirely.
   I clapped my hands impatiently. Tony and Sue looked perturbed but got to their feet nonetheless.
   ‘Everybody! Let’s go!’ I shouted.
   ‘But the cheese—!’
   ‘Bugger the cheese, Landen. Trust me—please!’
   They all grudgingly joined me, confused and annoyed by my strange behaviour. Their minds changed when, following a short whooshing noise, a large and very heavy Hispano-Suiza motor-car landed on the freshly vacated picnic blanket with a teeth jarring thump that shook the ground and knocked us to our knees. We were showered with soil, pebbles and a grassy sod or two as the vast phaeton-bodied automobile sunk itself into the soft earth, the fine bespoke body bursting at the seams as the massive chassis twisted with the impact. One of the spoked wheels broke free and whistled past my head as the heavy engine, torn from its rubber mounting blocks, ripped through the polished bonnet and landed at our feet with a heavy thud. There was silence for a moment as we all stood up, brushed ourselves off and checked for any damage. Landen had cut his hand on a piece of twisted wing mirror but apart from that—miraculously, it seemed—no one had been hurt. The huge motor-car had landed so perfectly on the picnic that the blanket, Thermos, basket, food—everything, in fact—had disappeared from sight. In the deathly hush that followed, everyone in the small group was staring—not at the twisted wreck of the car, but at me, their mouths open. I stared back, then looked slowly upward to where a large airship freighter was still flying, minus a couple of tons of freight, on to the North and—one presumes—a lengthy stop for an accident inquiry. I shook the entroposcope and the random clumping pattern returned.
   ‘Danger’s passed,’ I announced.
   ‘You haven’t changed, Thursday Next!’ said Sue angrily. ‘Whenever you’re about something dangerously other walks with you. There’s a reason I didn’t keep in contact after school, you know—Weirdbird! Tony, we’re leaving.’
   Landen and I stood and watched them go. He put his arm round me.
   ‘Weirdbird?’ he asked.
   ‘They used to call me that at school,’ I told him. ‘It’s the price for being different.’
   ‘You got a bargain. I would have paid double that to be different. Come on, let’s skedaddle.’
   We slipped quietly away as a crowd gathered around the twisted automobile, the incident generating all manner of ‘instant experts’ who all had theories on why an airship should jettison a car. So to a background muttering of ‘Needed more lift’ and ‘Golly, that was close’ we crept away and sat in my car.
   ‘That’s not something you see very often,’ murmured Landen after a pause. ‘What’s going on?’
   ‘I don’t know, Land. There are a few too many coincidences around at present—I think someone’s trying to kill me.’
   ‘I love it when you’re being weird, darling, but don’t you think you are taking this a little too far? Even if you could drop a car from a freighter, no one could hope to hit a picnic blanket from five thousand feet. Think about it, Thurs—it makes no sense at all. Who would do something like this anyway?’
   ‘Hades,’ I whispered, hardly daring to say the word out loud.
   ‘Hades is dead, Thursday. You killed him yourself. It was a coincidence, pure and simple. They mean nothing—you might as well rail against your dreams or bark at shadows on the wall.’
   We drove in silence to the SpecOps building and my disciplinary hearing. I switched off the engine and Landen held my hand tightly.
   ‘You’ll be fine,’ he assured me. ‘They’d be nuts to take any action against you. If things get bad, just remember what Flanker rhymes with.’
   I smiled at the thought. He said he’d wait for me in the café across the road, kissed me again and limped off.

8. Mr Stiggins and SO-1

   ‘Contrary to popular belief, Neanderthals are not stupid. Poor reading and writing skills are due to fundamental differences in visual acuity—in humans it is called dyslexia. Facial acuity in Neanderthals, however, is highly developed—the same silence might have thirty or more different meanings depending on how you looked. “Neanderthal English” has a richness and meaning that are lost on the relatively facially blind human. Because of this highly developed facial grammar, Neanderthals instinctively know when someone is lying—hence their total lack of interest in plays, films or politicians. They like stories read out loud and speak of the weather a great deal—another area in which they are expert. They never throw anything away and love tools, especially power tools. Of the three cable channels allocated to Neanderthals, two of them show nothing but woodworking programmes.’

GERHARDT VON SQUID. Neanderthals—Back after a Short Absence


   ‘Thursday Next?’ enquired a tall man with a gravelly voice as soon as I stepped into the SpecOps building.
   ‘Yes?’
   He flashed a badge.
   ‘Agent Walken, SO-5; this is my associate, James Dedmen.’
   Dedmen tipped his hat politely and I shook their hands.
   ‘Can we talk somewhere privately?’ asked Walken.
   I took them down the corridor and we found an empty interview room.
   ‘I’m sorry about Phodder and Kannon,’ I told them as soon as we had sat down
   ‘They were careless,’ intoned Dedmen gravely. ‘Contact adhesive should always be used in a well-ventilated room—it says so on the tin.’
   ‘We were wondering,’ asked Walken in a slightly embarrassed manner, ‘whether you could fill us in on what they were up to, they both died before submitting a report.’
   ‘What happened to their case notes?’
   Dedmen and Walken exchanged looks.
   ‘They were eaten by rabbits.’
   ‘How could that happen?’
   ‘Classified,’ announced Dedmen. ‘We analysed the remains but everything was pretty well digested—except these.’
   He placed three small scraps of tattered and stained paper wrapped in cellophane on the desk. I leaned closer. I could just read out part of my name on the first one; the second was a fragment of a credit card statement and the third had a single name on it which made me shiver Hades.
   ‘Hades?’ I queried ‘Do you think he’s still alive?’
   ‘You killed him, Next—what do you think?’
   I had seen him die up there on the roof at Thornfield and even found his charred remains when we searched the blackened ruins. But Hades had died before—or so he had made us believe.
   ‘As sure as I can be. What does the credit card statement mean?’
   ‘Again,’ replied Walken, ‘we’re not sure. The card was stolen. Most of these purchases are of women’s clothes, shoes, hats, bags, and so forth—we’ve got Dorothy Perkins and Camp Hopson under twenty-four-hour observation. Does any of this ring any bells?’
   I shook my head.
   ‘Then tell us about your meeting with Phodder.’
   I told them as much as I could about our short meeting while they made copious notes.
   ‘So they wanted to know if anything odd had happened to you recently?’ asked Walken. ‘Had it?’
   I told them about the Skyrail and the Hispano-Suiza and they made even more notes. Finally, after asking me several times whether there was anything more I could add, they got up and Walken handed me his card.
   ‘If you discover anything at all—?’
   ‘No problem,’ I replied. ‘I hope you catch them.’ They grunted in reply and left.
   I sighed, got up and walked back into the lobby to await Flanker and SO-1. I watched the busy station buzzing around me and then suddenly felt very hot as the room started to swim. The edges of my vision started to fade and if I hadn’t put my head between my knees I would have passed out there and then. The buzz from the room became a dull rumble and I closed my eyes, temples thumping. I stayed there for several moments until the nausea lessened. I opened my eyes and stared at the flecks of mica in the concrete floor.
   ‘Lost something, Next?’ came Flanker’s familiar voice.
   I very gently raised my head. He was reading some notes and spoke without looking at me.
   ‘I’m running late—someone’s misappropriated an entire cheese seizure. Fifteen minutes’ time, interview room three—be there.’
   He strode off without waiting for a reply and I stared at the floor again. The baby was making itself known. Somehow Flanker and SpecOps seemed insignificant given that this time next year I could be a mother. Landen had enough money for us both and it wasn’t as though I needed to actually resign—I could go on the SpecOps reservist list and do the odd job when necessary. I was just starting to ponder on whether I was really cut out for motherhood when I felt a hand on my shoulder and someone pushed a glass of water into my line of vision. I gratefully took the glass and drank half of it before looking up at my rescuer. It was a Neanderthal dressed in a neat double-breasted suit with an SO-13 badge clipped to his top pocket.
   ‘Hello, Mr Stiggins,’ I said, recognising him.
   ‘Hello, Ms Next—the nausea will pass.’
   There was a shudder and the world snapped back a couple of seconds so harshly it made me jump. Stiggins spoke again but this time made less sense:
   ‘Helto, our m Ms Next—the nauplea will knoass.’
   ‘What the hell—’ I muttered as the lobby snapped again and the mauve-painted walls switched to green. I looked at Stiggins, who said:
   ‘Hatto, is our am Mss Next—bue nauplea will kno you.’
   The people in the lobby moved abruptly and were suddenly wearing hats. Stiggins jumped back again and said:
   ‘That is our ame Miss Next—bue hoivplea kno you?’
   My feet felt strange as the world rippled again and I looked down and saw that I was wearing trainers instead of boots. It was clear now that time was flexing slightly and I expected my father to appear, but he didn’t. Stiggins flicked back to the beginning of his sentence yet again and said, this time in a clearer voice:
   ‘That is our name, Miss Next, but how know you?’
   ‘Did you feel anything odd just then?’
   ‘No. Drink the water. You are very pale.’
   I had another sip, leaned back and took a deep breath.
   ‘This wall used to be mauve,’ I mused as Stiggins looked at me.
   ‘How you know our name, Miss Next?’
   ‘You turned up at my wedding party,’ I told him. ‘You said you had a job for me.’
   He stared at me for almost half a minute through his deep-set eyes. His large nose sniffed the air occasionally. Neanderthals thought a great deal about what they said before they said it—if they said anything at all.
   ‘You speak the truth,’ he said at last. It was almost impossible to lie to a Neanderthal and I wasn’t going to try. ‘We are to represent you on this case, Miss Next.’
   I sighed. Flanker was taking no chances. I had nothing against Neanderthals but they wouldn’t have been my first choice of defence, particularly against the charge of an attack on one of their own.
   ‘If you have a problem you should tell us,’ said Stiggins, eyeing me carefully.
   ‘I have no problem with you representing me.’
   ‘Your face does not match your words. You think we have been placed here to hurt your case. It is our belief too. But as to whether it will hurt your case, we shall see. Are you well enough to walk?’
   I said I was and we went and sat down in the interview room. Stiggins opened his case and drew out a buff file. The contents were typed in large underlined capitals. He brought out a wooden ruler and placed it across the first page to help him read.
   ‘Why you hit Kaylieu, the Skyrail operator?’