I then ran around the flat like a lunatic, closing all the curtains and switching off the lights in case Miles decided to pop round to see me. I sat in the dark listening to Pickwick walking into the furniture for a bit before deciding I was being a twit and elected to go to bed with a copy of Robinson Crusoe.
   I fetched a torch from the kitchen, undressed in the dark and climbed into bed, rolled around a bit on the unfamiliar mattress and then started to read the book, somehow hoping to repeat the sort of semi-success I had enjoyed with The Flopsy Bunnies. I read of Crusoe’s shipwreck, his arrival on the island, and skipped the dull religious philosophising. I stopped for a moment and looked around my bedroom to see whether anything was happening. It wasn’t, the only changes in the room were the lights of cars sweeping around my bedroom as they turned out of the road opposite. I heard Pickwick plock-plocking to herself, and returned to my book. I was more tired than I thought and, as I read, I lapsed into slumber.
   I dreamt I was on an island somewhere, hot and dry, the palms languid in the slight breeze, the sky a deep blue, the sunlight pure and clear. I trod barefoot in the surf, the water cooling my feet as I walked. There was a wrecked ship, all broken masts and tangled rigging, resting on the reef a hundred yards from the shore. As I watched I could see a naked man climb aboard the ship, rummage on the deck, pull on a pair of trousers and disappear below. After waiting a moment or two, and not seeing him again, I walked farther along the beach, where I found Landen sitting under a palm tree gazing at me with a smile on his face.
   ‘What are you looking at?’ I asked him, returning his smile and raising my hand to shield my eyes from the sun.
   ‘I’d forgotten how beautiful you were.’
   ‘Oh, stop!’
   ‘I’m not kidding,’ he replied as he jumped to his feet and hugged me tightly. ‘I’m really missing you.’
   ‘I’m missing you, too,’ I told him, ‘but where are you?’
   ‘I’m not exactly sure,’ he replied with a confused look. ‘Strictly speaking I don’t think I’m anywhere—just here, alive in your memories.’
   ‘This is my memory? What’s it like?’
   ‘Well,’ replied Landen, ‘there are some really outstanding parts but some pretty dreadful ones too—in that respect it’s a little like Majorca. Would you care for some tea?’
   I looked around for the tea but Landen simply smiled.
   ‘I’ve not been here long but I’ve learned a trick or two. Remember that place in Winchester where we had scones that were warm from the oven? You remember, on the second floor, when it was raining outside and the man with the umbrella—’
   ‘Darjeeling or Assam?’ asked the waitress
   ‘Darjeeling,’ I replied, ‘and two cream teas. Strawberry for me and quince for my friend.’
   The island had gone. In its place was the tea room in Winchester. The waitress scribbled a note, smiled and departed. The rooms were packed with amiable-looking middle-aged couples dressed in tweed. It was, not surprisingly, just as I remembered it.
   ‘That was a neat trick!’ I exclaimed.
   ‘Naught to do with me!’ replied Landen, grinning. ‘This is all yours Every last bit of it. The smells, the sounds—everything.’
   I looked around in silent wonderment.
   ‘I can remember all this?’
   ‘Not quite, Thurs. Look at our fellow tea-drinkers again.’
   I turned in my chair and scanned the room. All the couples were more or less identical. Each was a middle-aged couple dressed in tweed and twittering in a Home Counties twang. They weren’t really eating or talking coherently; they were just moving and mumbling to give the impression of a packed tea room.
   ‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’ said Landen excitedly. ‘Since you can’t actually remember anything about who was here, your mind has just filled in the room with an amalgam of who you might expect to see in a teashop in Winchester. Mnemonic wallpaper, so to speak. There is nothing in this room that won’t be familiar. The cutlery is your mother’s and the pictures on the walls are all odd mixes of the ones we had up in the house. The waitress is a compound of Lottie from your lunch with Bowden and the woman in the chip shop. Every blank space in your memory has been filled with something that you do remember—a sort of shuffling of facts to fill in the gaps.’
   I looked back at our fellow tea-takers, who now seemed faceless.
   I had a sudden—and worrying—thought.
   ‘Landen, you haven’t been around my late teenage years, have you?’
   ‘Of course not. That’s like opening private mail.’
   I was glad of this. My wholly unlikely infatuation for a boy named Darren and my clumsy introduction to being a woman in the back of a stolen Morris 8 was not something I wanted Landen to witness in all its chilling glory. For once I was kind of wishing I had a bad memory—or that Uncle Mycroft had perfected his memory erasure device. Landen poured the tea and asked:
   ‘How are things in the real world?’
   ‘I have to figure out a way into books,’ I told him ‘I’m going to take the Gravitube to Osaka tomorrow and see if I can track down anyone who knew Mrs Nakajima—it’s a long shot, but who knows.’
   ‘Take care, won’t y—’
   Landen stopped short as something over my shoulder caught his eye. I turned to see probably the last person I wanted to be there. I quickly stood up, knocked my chair over backward with a clatter and aimed my automatic at the tall figure who had just entered the tea room.
   ‘No call for that!’ Acheron Hades grinned ‘The way to kill me here is to forget about me, and there is about as much chance of your doing that as forgetting little hubbies here.’
   I looked at Landen, who shrugged.
   ‘Sorry, Thurs. I meant to tell you about him. He’s quite alive here in your memories—but harmless, I assure you.’
   Hades told the couple next to us to scram if they knew what was good for them and then sat down, tucking into their unfinished seed cake. He was exactly as I had last seen him on the roof at Thornfield—his clothes were even smoking slightly. I could smell the dry heat of the blaze at Rochester’s old house, almost hear the crackle of the fire and the unearthly scream of Bertha as Hades threw her to her death. He gave a supercilious grin. He was relatively safe in my memories and he knew it—the worst I could do was to wake up.
   I reholstered my gun.
   ‘Hello, Hades,’ I said, sitting back down again. ‘Tea?’
   ‘Would you? Frightfully kind.’
   I poured him a cup. He stirred in four sugars and observed Landen for a bit with an inquisitorial eye before asking:
   ‘So you’re Parke-Laine, eh?’
   ‘What’s left of him.’
   ‘And you and Next are in love?’

   ‘Yes.’
   I took Landen’s hand as though to reinforce the statement.
   ‘I was in love once, you know,’ murmured Hades with a sad and distant smile. ‘I was quite besotted, in my own sort of way. We used to plan heinous deeds together, and for our first anniversary we set fire to a large public building. We then sat on a nearby hill together to watch the fire light up the sky, the screams of the terrified citizens a symphony to our ears.’
   He sighed again, only this time more deeply.
   ‘But it didn’t work out. The course of true love rarely runs smooth. I had to kill her.’
   ‘You had to kill her?’
   He sighed. ‘Yes. But I spared her any pain—and said I was sorry.’
   ‘That’s a very heart-warming story,’ murmured Landen.
   ‘You and I have something in common, Mr Parke-Laine.’
   ‘I sincerely hope not.’
   ‘We live only in Thursday’s memories. She’ll never be rid of me until she dies. The same goes for you—sort of ironic, isn’t it? The man she loves, the man she hates!’
   ‘He’ll be returning,’ I replied confidently, ‘when Jack Schitt is out of The Raven.’
   Acheron laughed.
   ‘I think you overestimate Goliath’s commitment to their promises. Landen is as dead as I am, perhaps more so—at least I survived childhood.’
   ‘I beat you fair and square, Hades,’ I said, handing him a jam pot and a knife as he helped himself to a scone, ‘and I’ll take on Goliath and win, too.’
   ‘We’ll see,’ replied Acheron thoughtfully, ‘we’ll see.’
   I thought of the Skyrail and the falling Hispano-Suiza.
   ‘Did you try and kill me the other day, Hades?’
   ‘If only!’ he answered, waving the jam spoon in our direction and laughing. ‘But then again I might have done—after all, I’m here only as your memory of me. I sincerely hope that I am, perhaps, not dead, and out there somewhere for real, plotting, plotting…!’
   Landen stood up.
   ‘C’mon, Thurs. Let’s leave this clown to our scones. Do you remember when we first kissed?’
   The tea room was suddenly gone and in its place was a warm night in the Crimea. We were back at Camp Aardvark watching the shelling of Sevastopol on the horizon, the finest fireworks show on the planet if only you could forget what it was doing. The sound of the barrage was softened almost into a lullaby by the distance. We were both in battledress and standing together but not touching—and by God, how much we wanted to.
   ‘Where’s this?’ asked Landen.
   ‘It’s where we kissed for the first time,’ I replied.
   ‘No!’ replied Landen. ‘I remember watching the shelling with you but we only talked that evening. I didn’t actually kiss you until the night you drove me out to forward CP and we got stuck in the minefield.’
   I laughed out loud.
   ‘Men have such crap memories when it comes to things like this! We were standing apart like this and desperately wanting to just touch one another. You put your hand on my shoulder to pretend to point something out and I slid my hand into the small of your back like… so. We didn’t say anything but when we held each other it was like… like electricity!’
   We did. It was. The shivers went all the way to my feet, bounced back, returned in a spiral up my body and exited my neck as a light sweat.
   ‘Well,’ replied Landen in a quiet voice a few minutes later, ‘I think I prefer your version. So if we kissed here then the night in the minefield was—’
   ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘yes, yes, it was.’
   And there we were, sitting outside an armoured personnel carrier in the dead of night two weeks later, marooned in the middle of probably the best-signposted minefield in the area.
   ‘People will think you did this on purpose,’ I told him as unseen bombers droned overhead, off on a mission to bomb someone to pulp.
   ‘I got away only with a reprimand as I recall,’ he replied. ‘And anyway, who’s to say that I didn’t?’
   ‘You drove deliberately into a minefield just for a leg-over?’ I asked, laughing.
   ‘Not any old leg-over,’ he replied. ‘Besides, there was no risk involved.’
   He pulled a hastily drawn map out of his battledress pocket.
   ‘Captain Bird drew this for me.’
   ‘You scheming little shitbag!’ I told him, throwing an empty K-ration tin at him. ‘I was terrified!’
   ‘Ah!’ replied Landen with a grin. ‘So it was terror and not passion that drove you into my arms?’
   I shrugged. ‘Well, maybe a bit of both.’
   Landen leaned forward, but I had a thought and pressed a fingertip to his mouth.
   ‘But this wasn’t the best, was it?’
   He stopped, smiled and whispered in my ear:
   ‘At the furniture store?’
   ‘In your dreams, Land. I’ll give you a clue. You still had a leg and we both had a week’s leave—by lucky coincidence at the same time.’
   ‘No coincidence,’ said Landen with a smile.
   ‘Captain Bird again?’
   ‘Two hundred bars of chocolate but worth every one.’
   ‘You’re a bit of a rake, y’know, Land—but in the nicest kind of way. Anyhow,’ I continued, ‘we elected to go cycling in the Republic of Wales.’
   As I spoke the APC vanished, the night rolled back and we were walking hand in hand through a small wood by the side of a stream. It was summer and the water babbled excitedly among the rocks, the springy moss a warm carpet to our bare feet. The blue sky was devoid of clouds and the sunlight trickled in among the verdant foliage above our heads. We pushed aside low branches and followed the sound of a waterfall. We came across two bicycles leaning up against a tree, the panniers open and the tent half pegged out on the ground. My heart quickened as the memories of that particular summer’s day flooded back. We had started to put the tent up but stopped for a moment, the passion overcoming us both on the warm ground. I squeezed Landen’s hand and he put his arm round my waist. He smiled at me with his funny half-smile.
   ‘When I was alive I came to this memory a lot,’ he confided to me. ‘It’s one of my favourites, and amazingly your memory seems to have got most things correct.’
   ‘Is that a fact?’ I asked him as he kissed me gently on my neck. I shivered slightly and ran my fingers down his naked back.
   ‘Most—plock—definitely.’
   ‘What did you say?’
   ‘Nothing—plock-plock—why?’
   ‘Oh, no! Not now of all times!’
   ‘What?’ asked Landen.
   ‘I think I’m about to—’
   ‘—wake up.’
   But I was talking to myself. I was back in my bedroom in Swindon, my memory excursion annoyingly cut short by Pickwick, who was staring at me from the rug, leash in beak and making quiet plock-plock noises. I gave her a baleful stare.
   ‘Pickers, you are such a pest. Just when I was getting to the good bit.’
   She stared at me, little comprehending what she had done.
   ‘I’m going to drop you round at Mum’s,’ I told her as I sat up and stretched. ‘I’m going to Osaka for a couple of days.’
   She cocked her head on one side and stared at me curiously.
   ‘You and Junior will be in good hands, I promise.’
   I got out of bed and trod on something hard and whiskery. I looked at the object and smiled. It was a good sign. Lying on the carpet was an old coconut husk—and better than that, there was still some sand stuck to my feet. My reading of Robinson Crusoe hadn’t been a total failure after all.

14. The Gravitube

   ‘By the time this decade is out, we aim to construct a transport system that can take a man or a woman from New York to Tokyo and back again in two hours…’

US President John F. Kennedy


   ‘For mass transport over the globe there were primarily the railroads and the airship. Rail was fast and convenient but stopped short of crossing the oceans. Airships could cover greater distances—but were slow and fraught with delays due to weather. In the fifties the journey time to Australia or New Zealand was typically ten days. In 1960, a new form of transportation system was begun—the Gravitube. It promised delay-free travel to anywhere on the planet. Any destination, whether Auckland, Rome or Los Angeles, would take exactly the same time: a little over forty minutes. It was, quite possibly, the greatest feat of engineering that mankind would ever undertake.’

VINCENT DOTT. The Gravitube—Tenth Wonder of the World


   Pickwick insisted on sitting on her egg all the way to Mum’s house and plocked nervously whenever I went over twenty miles per hour. I made her a nest in the airing cupboard and left her fussing over her egg while the other dodos strained at the window, trying to figure out what was going on. I rang Bowden while Mum fixed me a sandwich.
   ‘Are you okay?’ he enquired. ‘Your phone’s been off the hook!’
   ‘I’m okay, Bowd. What’s happening at the office?’
   ‘The news is out.’
   ‘About Landen?’
   ‘About Cardenio. Someone blabbed to the press. Vole Towers is besieged by news channels as we speak. Lord Volescamper has been yelling at Victor about one of us talking.’
   ‘Wasn’t me.’
   ‘Nor me. Volescamper has turned down fifty million quid for it already—every impresario on the planet wants to buy the rights for first performance. And get this—you’ve been cleared by SO-1 of any wrongdoing. They thought that since Kaylieu was shot by SO-14 marksmen yesterday morning then you might have been right after all.’
   ‘Big of them. Does this mean my leave is over?’
   ‘Victor wants to see you as soon as possible.’
   ‘Tell him I’m ill, would you? I have to go to Osaka.’
   ‘Why?’
   ‘Best not to know. I’ll call you.’
   I replaced the receiver and Mum gave me some cheese on toast and a cup of tea. She sat down at the other side of the table and flicked through a well-thumbed copy of last month’s Femole—the one with me in it.
   ‘Any news from Mycroft and Polly, Mum?’
   ‘I got a card from London saying they were fit and well,’ she replied, ‘but they said they needed a jar of piccalilli and a torque wrench. I left them in Mycroft’s study and they’d vanished by the afternoon.’
   ‘Mum?’
   ‘Yes?’
   ‘How often do you see Dad?’
   She smiled. ‘Most mornings. He drops by to say hello. Sometimes I even make him a packed lunch—’
   She was interrupted by a roar that sounded like a thousand tubas in unison. The sound reverberated through the house and set the teacups in the corner cupboard rattling.
   ‘Oh, Lordy!’ she exclaimed. ‘Not mammoths again!’ And she was out of the door in a flash.
   And a mammoth it was, in name and stature. Shaggy and as big as a tank, it had walked through the garden wall and was now sniffing suspiciously at the wisteria.
   ‘Get away from there!’ yelled my mother, searching around for a weapon of some sort. Wisely, the dodos had all run away and hidden behind the potting shed. Rejecting the wisteria, the mammoth delicately pulled up the vegetables in the vegetable plot one by one, stuffed them into its mouth and munched slowly and deliberately. My mother was almost apoplectic.
   ‘Second time this has happened!’ she yelled defiantly. ‘Get off my hydrangeas, you… you… thing!’ The mammoth ignored her, emptied the entire contents of the ornamental pond in one go and clumsily trampled the garden furniture to matchwood.
   ‘A weapon,’ announced my mother, ‘I need a weapon. I’ve sweated blood over this garden and no reactivated herbivore is going to have it for dinner!’
   She disappeared into the shed and reappeared a moment later brandishing a yard broom. But the mammoth had little to fear, even from my mother. It did, after all, weigh almost five tons. It was used to doing exactly what it pleased. The only good news about the invasion was that it wasn’t the whole herd.
   ‘Giddout!’ yelled my mother, raising the broom to whack the mammoth on its hindquarters.
   ‘Hold it right there!’ said a loud voice. We turned. A SpecOps officer had hopped over the wall and was running towards us.
   ‘Agent Durrell, SO-13,’ he announced breathlessly, showing my mother his ID. ‘Spank the mammoth and you’re under arrest.’
   My mother’s fury switched to the SpecOps agent.
   ‘So he eats my garden and I do nothing?’
   ‘Her name is Buttercup,’ corrected Durrell. ‘The rest of the herd went to the west of Swindon as planned but Buttercup here is a bit of a dreamer. And yes, you do nothing. Mammoths are a protected species.’
   ‘Well!’ said my mother indignantly. ‘If you did your job properly then ordinary law-abiding citizens like me would still have gardens!’
   We looked around at the garden, which looked as though it had been the target of an artillery bombardment. Buttercup, her voluminous tum now full of Mum’s vegetable patch, stepped over the wall and scratched herself against an iron streetlamp, snapping it like a twig. The lamp standard dropped heavily on the roof of a car and popped the windscreen. Buttercup let out another almighty trumpeting, which set off a few car alarms, and in the distance there was an answer. She stopped, listened for a bit and then happily lumbered off down the road.
   ‘I’ve got to go!’ said Durrell, handing Mum a card ‘Compensation can be claimed if you call this number. You might like to ask for our free leaflet: “How to make your garden unpalatable to Proboscidea”. Good morning!’
   He tipped his hat and jumped over the wall to where his partner had pulled up in an SO-13 Land Rover. Buttercup gave out another call and the Land Rover screeched off, leaving my mother and me staring at her wrecked garden. The dodos, sensing the danger had passed, crept out from behind the potting shed and plock-plocked quietly to themselves as they pecked and scratched at the scoured earth.
   ‘Perhaps it’s time for a Japanese garden,’ sighed my mother, throwing down the broom handle. ‘Reverse engineering! Where will it all end? They say there’s a Diatryma living wild in the New Forest?’

   ‘Urban legend,’ I assured her as she started to tidy up the garden. I looked at my watch. I would have to run if I was to get to Osaka that evening.
   I took the train to the busy Saknussum International Gravitube Terminus, located just to the west of London. I made my way into the departures terminal and studied the board. The next DeepDrop to Sydney would be in an hour. I bought a ticket, hurried to the check-in and spent ten minutes listening to a litany of pointless anti-terrorist questions.
   ‘I don’t have a bag,’ I explained The woman looked at me oddly so I added. ‘Well, I did but you lost it the last time I travelled. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever had a bag returned to me after tubing.’
   She thought about this for a moment and then said:
   ‘If you had a bag and if you had packed it yourself, and if you had not left it unattended, might it contain any of the following?’
   She showed me a list of prohibited items and I shook my head.
   ‘Would you like an in-drop meal?’
   ‘What are my choices?’
   ‘Yes or no.’
   ‘No.’
   She looked at the next question on her sheet.
   ‘Who would you prefer to sit next to?’
   ‘A nun or a knitting granny, if that’s possible.’
   ‘Hmm,’ mused the check-in girl, studying the passenger manifest carefully. ‘All the nuns, grannies and intelligent non-amorous males are taken. It’s technobore, lawyer, self-pitying drunk or copiously vomiting baby, I’m afraid.’
   ‘Technobore and lawyer, then.’
   She marked me down on the seating plan and then announced:
   ‘There will be a slight delay in receiving the excuse for the lateness of the DeepDrop to Sydney, Miss Next. The reason for the delay in the excuse has yet to be established.’
   Another check-in girl whispered something in her ear.
   ‘I’ve just been informed that the reason for the excuse for the delay has been delayed itself. As soon as we find out why the reason for the excuse has been delayed we will tell you—in line with government guidelines. If you are at all unhappy with the speed with which the excuse has been delivered, you might be eligible for a one per cent refund. Have a nice drop.’
   I was handed my boarding card and told to go to the gate when the drop was announced. I thanked her, bought some coffee and biscuits and sat down to wait. The Gravitube seemed to be plagued with delays. There were a lot of travellers sitting around looking bored as they waited for their trip. In theory every drop took under an hour irrespective of destination; but even if they developed a twenty-minute accelerated DeepDrop to the other side of the planet, you’d still spend four hours at either end waiting for baggage or customs or something.
   The PA barked into life.
   ‘Attention, please. Passengers for the 11.04 DeepDrop to Sydney will be glad to know that the delay was due to too many excuses being created by the Gravitube’s Excuse Manufacturing Facility. Consequently we are happy to announce that since the excess excuses have now been used, the 11.04 DeepDrop to Sydney is ready for boarding at Gate Six.’
   I finished my coffee and made my way with the throng to where the shuttle was waiting to receive us. I had ridden on the Gravitube several times before, but never the DeepDrop. My recent tour of the world had all been Overmantles, which is more like a train. I carried on through passport control, boarded the shuttle and was shown to my seat by a stewardess whose fixed smile reminded me of a synchronised swimmer. I sat next to a man with a shock of untidy black hair who was reading a copy of Astounding Tales.
   ‘Hello,’ he said in a subdued monotone. ‘Ever DeepDropped before?’
   ‘Never,’ I replied.
   ‘Better than any rollercoaster,’ he announced with finality, and returned to his magazine.
   I strapped myself in as a tall man in a large-check suit sat down next to me. He was about forty, had a luxunant red moustache and wore a carnation in his buttonhole.
   ‘Good morning, Miss Next!’ he said in a friendly voice as he proffered his hand. ‘Allow me to introduce myself—Akrid Snell.’
   I stared at him in surprise and he laughed.
   ‘We needed some time to talk and I’ve never been on one of these before. How does it work?’
   ‘The Gravitube? It’s a tunnel running through the centre of the earth. We freefall all the way to Sydney. But… but… how on earth did you find me?’
   ‘Jurisfiction has eyes and ears everywhere, Miss Next.’
   ‘Plain English, Snell—or I could turn out to be the most difficult client you’ve ever had.’
   Snell looked at me with interest for a few moments as a stewardess gave a monotonous safety announcement, culminating with the warning that there were no toilet facilities until gravity returned to 40 per cent.
   ‘You work in SpecOps, don’t you?’ asked Snell as soon as we were comfortable and all loose possessions had been placed in zippered bags.
   I nodded.
   ‘Jurisfiction is the service we run inside novels to maintain the integrity of popular fiction. The printed word might look solid to you, but where I come from movable type has a much deeper meaning.’
   ‘The ending of Jane Eyre,’ I murmured, suddenly realising what all the fuss was about. ‘I changed it, didn’t I?’
   ‘I’m afraid so,’ agreed Snell, ‘but don’t admit that to anyone but me. It was the biggest Fiction Infraction to a major work since someone futzed so badly with Thackeray’s Giant Despair we had to delete it completely.’
   ‘Drop is D minus two minutes,’ said the announcer. ‘Would all passengers please take their seats, check their straps and make sure all infants are secured.’
   ‘So what’s happening now?’ asked Snell.
   ‘Do you really not know anything about the Gravitube?’
   Snell looked around and lowered his voice.
   ‘All of your world is a bit strange to me, Next. I come from a land of trench coats and deep shadows, complex plot lines, frightened witnesses, underground bosses, gangsters’ molls, seedy bars and startling six-page-from-the-end dénouements.’
   I must have looked confused for he lowered his voice farther and hissed:
   ‘I’m fictional, Miss Next. Co-lead in the Perkins & Snell series of crime books. I expect you’ve read me?’
   ‘I’m afraid not,’ I admitted.

   ‘Limited print run.’ Snell sighed. ‘But we had a good review in Crime Books Digest. I was described as “a well-rounded and amusing character… with quite a few memorable lines”. The Mole placed us on their Read of the Week list but The Toad were less enthusiastic—but listen, who takes any notice of the critics?’
   ‘You’re fictional? I said at last.
   ‘Keep it to yourself, though, won’t you?’ he urged. ‘Now, about the Gravitube?’
   ‘Well,’ I replied, gathering my thoughts, ‘in a few minutes the shuttle will have entered the airlock and depressurisation will commence—’
   ‘Depressurisation? Why?’
   ‘For a frictionless drop. No air resistance—and we are kept from touching the sides by a powerful magnetic field. We then simply freefall the eight thousand miles to Sydney.’
   ‘So all cities have a DeepDrop to every other city, then?’
   ‘Only London and New York connecting to Sydney and Tokyo. If you wanted to get from Buenos Aires to Auckland you’d first take the Overmantle to Miami, then to New York, DeepDrop to Tokyo and finally another Overmantle to Auckland.’
   ‘How fast does it go?’ asked Snell, slightly nervously.
   ‘Peaks at fourteen thousand miles per hour,’ said my neighbour from behind his magazine, ‘give or take. We’ll fall with increasing velocity but decreasing acceleration until we reach the centre of the earth, at which point we will have attained our maximum velocity. Once past the centre our velocity will decrease until we reach Sydney, when our velocity will have decreased to zero.’
   ‘Is it safe?’
   ‘Of course!’ I assured him.
   ‘What if there’s another shuttle coming the other way?’
   ‘There can’t be,’ I assured him. ‘There’s only one shuttle per tube.’
   ‘What you say is true,’ said my boring neighbour. ‘The only thing we have to worry about is a failure of the magnetic containment system that keeps the ceramic tube and us from melting in the liquid core of the earth.’
   ‘Don’t listen to this, Snell.’
   ‘Is that likely?’ he asked.
   ‘Never happened before,’ replied the man sombrely. ‘But then if it had, they wouldn’t tell us about it, now, would they?’
   Snell thought about this for a few moments.
   ‘Drop is D minus ten seconds,’ said the announcer.
   The cabin went quiet and everyone tensed, subconsciously counting down. The drop, when it came, was a bit like going over a very large humpback bridge at great speed, but the initial unpleasantness—which was accompanied by grunts from the passengers—gave way to the strange and curiously enjoyable feeling of weightlessness. Many people do the drop for this reason only. I watched as my hair floated languidly in front of my face, and turned to Snell.
   ‘You okay?’
   He nodded.
   ‘So I’m charged with a Fiction Infraction, yes?’
   ‘Fiction Infraction Class II,’ corrected Snell. ‘It’s not as though you did it on purpose. Even though we could argue convincingly that you improved the narrative of Jane Eyre, we still have to prosecute; after all, we can’t have people blundering around in Little Women trying to stop Beth from dying, can we?’
   ‘Can’t you?’
   ‘Of course not. Not that people don’t try. When you get before the magistrate, just deny everything and play dumb. I’m trying to get the case postponed on the grounds of strong reader approval.’
   ‘Will that work?’
   ‘It worked when Falstaff made his illegal jump to The Merry Wives of Windsor. We thought he’d be sent packing back to Henry IV Pt 2. But no, his move was approved—the judge was an opera fan, so maybe that had something to do with it. You haven’t had any operas written about you by Verde or Vaughan Williams, have you?’
   ‘No’
   ‘Pity.’
   The feeling of weightlessness was odd but it didn’t last long, the increasing deceleration once more gently returning weight to us all. At 40 per cent normal gravity the cabin warning lights went out and we could move around if we wanted.
   The technobore on my right started up again.
   ‘But the real beauty of the Gravitube is its simplicity. Since the force of gravity is the same irrespective of the declination of the tunnel, the trip to Tokyo will take exactly the same time as the trip to New York—and it would be the same again to Carlisle if it didn’t make more sense to use a conventional railway. Mind you,’ he went on, ‘if you could use the wave induction system to keep us accelerating all the way to the surface at the other end, the speed could be well in excess of the seven miles per second needed to achieve escape velocity.’
   ‘You’ll be telling me that we’ll fly to the moon next,’ I said.
   ‘We already have,’ returned my neighbour in a conspiratonal whisper. ‘Secret government experiments in space travel have already constructed a base on the far side of the moon where transmitters have been set up to control our thoughts and actions from repeater stations atop the Empire State Building using interstellar wireless communications from extraterrestrial life forms intent on world domination with the express agreement of the Goliath Corporation and a secret cabal of world leaders known as SPORK.’
   ‘And don’t tell me,’ I added, ‘Diatrymas are living in the New Forest.’
   ‘How did you know?’
   I ignored him, and only thirty-eight minutes after leaving London we came in for a delicate dock in Sydney, the faintest click being heard as the magnetic locks held on to the shuttle to stop it falling back down again. After the safety light had been extinguished and the airlock pressurised we made our way to the exit, avoiding the technobore, who was trying to tell anyone who would listen that the Goliath Corporation were responsible for smallpox.
   Snell, who genuinely seemed to enjoy the DeepDrop, walked with me until Passport Control, looked at his watch and announced:
   ‘Well, that’s me. Thanks for the chat. I’ve got to go and defend Tess for the umpteenth time. As Hardy originally wrote it she gets off. Listen, try and figure some extenuating circumstances as to your actions. If you can’t, then try and think up some stonking great lies. The bigger the better.’
   ‘That’s your best advice? Perjure myself?’
   Snell coughed politely.
   ‘The astute lawyer has many strings to his bow, Miss Next. They’ve got Mrs Fairfax and Grace Poole to testify against you. It doesn’t look great, but no case is lost until it’s lost. They said I couldn’t get Henry V off the war crimes rap when he ordered the French POWs murdered, but I managed it—the same as Max DeWinter’s murder charge; no one figured he’d get off that in a million years. By the by, can you give this letter to that gorgeous Flakky girl? I’d be eternally grateful.’
   He handed me a crumpled letter from his pocket and made to move off.
   ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Where and when is the hearing?’
   ‘Didn’t I say? Sorry. The prosecution has chosen the examining magistrate from Kafka’s The Trial. Not my choice, believe me. Tomorrow at nine twenty-five. Do you speak German?’
   ‘No.’
   ‘Then we’ll make sure it’s an English translation—drop in at the end of Chapter Two; we’re on after Herr K. Remember what I said. So long!’
   And before I could ask him how I might even begin to enter Kafka’s masterpiece of frustrating circuitous bureaucracy, he was gone.
   I caught the Overmantle to Tokyo a half-hour later. It was almost deserted, and I hopped on board a Skyrail to Osaka and alighted in the business district at one in the morning, four hours after leaving Saknussum. I took a hotel room and sat up all night, staring out at the blinking lights and thinking about Landen.

15. Curiouser & Curiouser in Osaka

   ‘I first learned of my strange book-jumping skills as a little girl in the English school where my father taught in Osaka. I had been instructed to stand up and read to the class a passage from Winnie-the-Pooh. I began with Chapter 9: “It rained and it rained and it rained…” but then had to stop abruptly as I felt the Hundred Acre Wood move rapidly in all around me. I snapped the book shut and returned, damp and bewildered, to my classroom. Later on I visited the Hundred Acre Wood from the safety of my own bedroom and enjoyed wonderful adventures there. But I was always careful, even at that tender age, never to alter the visible storylines. Except, that is, to teach Christopher Robin how to read and write.’

O. NAKAJIMA. Adventures in the Book Trade


   Osaka was less flashy than Tokyo but no less industrious. In the morning I took breakfast at the hotel, bought a copy of the Far Eastern Toad and read the home news, but from a Far Eastern viewpoint—which made for a good take on the whole Russian thing. During breakfast I pondered just how I might find one woman in a city of a million. Apart from her surname and perfect English, there was little to go on. As a first step I asked the concierge to photocopy all the Nakajima entries from the telephone directory. I was dismayed to discover that Nakajima was quite a common name—there were 2,729 of them. I called one at random and a very pleasant Mrs Nakajima spoke to me for about ten minutes. I thanked her profusely and put the phone down, having not understood a single word. I sighed, ordered a large jug of coffee from room service, and began.
   It was 351 non-book-jumper Nakajimas later, and in the doldrums of the depression that brings forth an abundance of negatives, that I started telling myself that what I was doing was useless—if Mrs Nakajima had retired to the distant back-story of Jane Eyre, was she really going to be anywhere near a telephone?
   I stretched one of those groany-clicky stretches, drank the rest of my cold coffee and decided to go for a brief walk to loosen up. I was staring at the photocopied pages as I strolled along, trying to think of something to narrow the search, when a young man’s jacket caught my eye.
   In the Far East many T-shirts and jackets have English writing on them—some of them making sense, but others just collections of words that must appear as fashionable to the Japanese youth as Kanji appears elegant to us. I had seen jackets with the strange legend ‘100% Chevrolet OK Fly-boy’ and later one with ‘Pratt & Whitney squadron movie’, so I should have been ready for anything. But this one was different. It was a smart leather jacket with the following message embroidered on the back. ‘Follow me, Next Girl!’
   So I did. I followed the young man for two blocks before I noticed a second jacket much like the first. By the time I had crossed the canal I had seen another jacket with ‘SpecOps this way’ emblazoned on the back, then ‘Jane Eyre for ever!’ followed quickly by ‘Bad Boy Goliath’. But that wasn’t all—as if following some bizarre homing call, all the people wearing these jackets, hats and T-shirts seemed to be heading in the same direction. Thoughts of falling Hispano-Suizas and ambushed Skyrails suddenly filled my head, so I dug the entroposcope from my bag, shook it and noticed a slight separation between the rice and lentils. Entropy was decreasing. I rapidly turned and started walking in the opposite direction. I took three paces and stopped as a daring notion filled my head. Of course—why not make the entropic failure do the work for me? I followed the logos to a nearby market square where the rice and lentils in the entroposcope now formed into curved bands—coincidence had increased to the point where everyone I saw was wearing something with a relevant logo. ‘MycroTech developments’, ‘Charlotte Brontë’, ‘Toad News Network’, ‘Hispano-Suiza’, ‘Goliath’ or ‘Skyrail’ were all sewn or stuck to hats, jackets, umbrellas, shirts, bags. I looked around, desperately trying to find the coincidental epicentre. Then I saw him. In an inexplicably vacant gap within the busy market, an old man was seated in front of a small table. He was as brown as a nut and quite bald, and opposite him the other chair had just been vacated by a young woman. A piece of battered card leaning against his small valise declared, in eight languages, the fortune-teller’s trade and pledge. The English part of the sign read: ‘I have the answer you seek!’ and I was in no doubt that whatever he said would be so—and probably, yet very improbably in its undertaking, almost certainly result in my death. I took two paces towards the fortune-teller and shook the entroposcope again. The patterns were more defined but not the clean half-and-half separation I needed. The little man had seen me dither and beckoned me closer.
   ‘Please!’ he said. ‘Please come. Tell you everything!’
   I paused and looked around for any sign of jeopardy. There was nothing. I was in a perfectly peaceful square in a prosperous area of a small provincial town in Japan. Whatever my anonymous foe had in store for me, it was something that I would least expect.
   I stayed back, unsure of the wisdom of what I was doing. It was the appearance of a T-shirt that had nothing to do with me which clinched it. If I let this opportunity slide I would never find Mrs Nakajima this side of next month. I took out my ballpoint, clicked it open and marched purposefully towards the small man, who grinned wildly at me.
   ‘You come!’ he said in poor English. ‘You learn everything. Good buy, from me!’
   But I didn’t stop. As I walked towards the fortune-teller I thrust my hand in my bag and pulled out a sheet of the Nakajima pages at random, then, just as I passed the little nut-brown man, I stabbed randomly on the page with my pen and broke into a run. I didn’t stop to look when I heard the lightning strike, nor the horrified gasps of onlookers. I didn’t stop until I was away from that place, back to plain polo shirts and ordinary designer labels and my entroposcope had returned to random clumping. I didn’t investigate what had happened; I didn’t need to. The fortune-teller was dead—and I would have been too if I had stopped to talk to him. I sat on a bench to get my breath back, felt nauseous again and almost threw up in a nearby trash can, much to the consternation of a little old lady who was sitting next to me. I recovered slightly and looked at the Nakajima that the fall of my ballpoint had decreed. If coincidences were running as high as I hoped, then this Nakajima had to be the one I sought. I asked the woman sitting on the bench next to me for directions. It seemed that a small amount of negative entropy still lingered—I was barely two minutes’ walk from my quarry.
   The apartment block I was directed to was not in a very good state of repair. The plaster that was covering the cracks had cracks, and the grime on the peeling paint was itself starting to peel. Inside there was a small lobby where an elderly doorman was watching a dubbed version of 65 Walrus Street. He directed me to the fourth floor, where I found Mrs Nakajima’s apartment at the end of the corridor. The varnish on the door had lost its shine and the brass doorknob was tarnished, dusty and dull, no one had been in here for some time. I knocked despite this and, when silence was all that answered me, grasped the knob and turned it slowly. To my surprise it moved easily and the door creaked open I paused to look about me and, seeing no one, stepped inside.
   Mrs Nakajima’s apartment was ordinary in the extreme. Three bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen. The walls and ceiling were plainly painted, the flooring a light-coloured wood. It seemed as though she had moved out a few months ago and taken almost everything with her. The only notable exception to this was a small table near the window of the living room, upon which I found four slim hide-bound volumes lying next to a brass reading lamp. I picked up the uppermost book. It had ‘Jurisfiction’ embossed on the cover, above a name I didn’t recognise. I tried to open the book but the covers were stuck fast. I tried the second book with no better luck, but paused for a moment when I saw the third book. I gently touched the slim volume and ran my fingertips across the thin layer of dust that had accumulated on the spine. The hair bristled on my neck and I shivered. But it wasn’t a fearful feeling. It was the light tingle of apprehension; this book, I knew, would open. The name on the cover was my own. I had been expected. I opened the book. On the title page was a handwritten note from Mrs Nakajima that was short and to the point:
   For Thursday Next, in grateful anticipation of good work and fine times ahead with Jurisfiction. I jackanoried you into a book when you were nine but now you must do it for yourself—and you can, and you shall. I also suggest that you are quick, Mr Schitt-Hawse is walking along the corridor outside as you read this and he isn’t out collecting for ChronoGuard orphans.  —Mrs Nakajima
   I ran to the door and slid the bolt just as the door handle rattled. There was a pause and then a loud thump on the door.
   ‘Next!’ came Schitt-Hawse’s unmistakable voice. ‘I know you’re in there! Let me in and we can fetch Jack together!’
   I had been followed, obviously. It suddenly struck me that perhaps Goliath were more interested in how to get into books than in Jack Schitt himself. There was a billion-pound hole in the budget for their advanced weapons division and a Prose Portal, any Prose Portal, would be just the thing to fill it.
   ‘Go to hell!’ I shouted as I returned to my book. On the first page, under a large heading that read ‘READ ME FIRST!’, there was a description of a library somewhere. I needed no second bidding; the door flexed under a heavy blow and I saw the paint crack near the lock. If it was Chalk or Cheese they wouldn’t take long to gain entry.
   I relaxed, took a deep breath, cleared my throat and read in a clear, strong and confident voice, expressive and expansive. I added pauses, inflections and raised the tone of my voice where the text required it. I read as I had never read before.

   ‘I was in a long, dark, wood-panelled corridor,’ I began, ‘lined with bookshelves that reached from the richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling—’
   The sound of thumping increased and as I spoke the door frame splintered near the hinges and collapsed inward as Chalk fell with a heavy thump on to the floor, closely followed by Cheese, who landed on top of him.
   ‘The carpet was elegantly patterned and the ceiling was decorated with rich mouldings that depicted scenes from the classics—’
   ‘Next!’ yelled Schitt-Hawse, putting his head round the door as Chalk and Cheese struggled to get up. ‘Coming to Osaka was not part of the deal! I told you to keep me informed. Nothing will happen to you—’
   But something was happening. Something new, something other. My utter loathing of Goliath, the urge to get away, the knowledge that without entry to books I would never see Landen again—all of these things gave me the will to soften the barriers that had hardened since the day I first entered Jane Eyre in 1958.
   ‘High above me, spaced at regular intervals, were finely decorated circular apertures through which light gained entry—’
   I could see Schitt-Hawse move towards me but he had started to become less tangible; although I could see his lips move, the sound arrived at my ears a full second later. I continued to read, and as I did so the room about me began to fworp from view.
   ‘Next!’ yelled Schitt-Hawse. ‘You’ll regret, this I swear!’
   I carried on reading.
   ‘—reinforcing the serious mood of the library—’
   ‘Bitch!’ I heard Schitt-Hawse cry. ‘Grab her!’
   But his words were as a zephyr; the room took on the appearance of morning mist and darkened. I felt a gentle tingling sensation, the feeling of tepid water brushing on the skin—and in the next instant, I had gone.
   I blinked twice but Osaka was far behind. I closed the book, carefully placed it in my pocket and looked around. I was in a long, dark, wood-panelled corndor lined with bookshelves that reached from the richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling. The carpet was elegantly patterned and the ceiling was decorated with rich mouldings that depicted scenes from the classics, each cornice supporting the marble bust of an author. High above me, spaced at regular intervals, were finely decorated circular apertures through which light gained entry and reflected off the polished wood, reinforcing the serious mood of the library. Running down the centre of the corridor was a long row of reading tables, each with a green-shaded brass lamp. The library appeared endless; in both directions the corridor vanished into darkness with no definable end. But this wasn’t important. Describing the library would be like going to see a Turner and commenting on the frame. On all the walls, end after end, shelf after shelf, were books. Hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Hardbacks, paperbacks, leather-bound volumes, uncorrected proofs, handwritten manuscripts, everything. I stepped closer and rested my fingertips lightly on the pristine volumes. They felt warm to the touch, so I leaned closer and pressed my ear to the spines. I could hear a distant hum, the rumble of machinery, people talking, traffic, seagulls, laughter, waves on rocks, wind in the winter branches of trees, distant thunder, heavy rain, children playing, a blacksmith’s hammer—a million sounds all happening together. And then, in a revelatory moment, the clouds slid back from my mind and a crystal-clear understanding of the very nature of books shone upon me. They weren’t just collections of words arranged neatly on a page to give the impression of reality—each of these volumes was reality. The similarity of these books to the copies I had read back home was no more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject—these books were alive!
   I walked slowly down the corridor, running my fingers along the spines and listening to the comfortable pat-pat-pat sound they made, every now and then recognising a familiar title. After a couple of hundred yards I came across a junction where a second corridor crossed the first. In the middle of the crossway was a large circular void with a wrought-iron rail and a spiral staircase bolted securely to one side. I peered cautiously down. Not more than thirty feet below me I could see another floor, exactly like this one. But in the middle of that floor was another circular void through which I could see another floor, and another and another and so on to the depths of the library. I looked up. It was the same above me, more circular light wells and the spiral staircase reaching up into the dizzy heights above. I leaned on the balcony and looked about me at the vast library once again.
   ‘Well,’ I said to no one in particular, ‘I don’t think I’m in Osaka any more.’

16. Interview with the Cat

   ‘The Cheshire cat was the first character I met at Jurisfiction and his somewhat sporadic appearances enlivened the time I spent there. He gave me much advice. Some was good, some was bad and some was so nonsensically nonsequitous that it confuses me even now to think about it. And yet, during all that time, I never learned his age, where he came from or where he went when he vanished. It was one of Jurisfiction’s lesser mysteries.’

THURSDAY NEXT. The Jurisfiction Chronicles


   ‘A visitor!’ exclaimed a voice behind me. ‘What a delightful surprise!’
   I turned and was astonished to see a large and luxuriant cat sitting precariously on the uppermost bookshelf. He was staring at me with a curious mixture of lunacy and benevolence, and remained quite still except for the tip of his tail, which twitched occasionally from side to side. I had never come across a talking cat before, but good manners, as my father used to say, cost nothing.
   ‘Good afternoon, Mr Cat.’
   The cat’s eyes opened wide and the grin fell from his face. He looked up and down the corridor for a few moments and then enquired:
   ‘Me?’
   I stifled a laugh.
   ‘I don’t see any others.’
   ‘Ah!’ replied the cat, grinning more than ever. ‘That’s because you have a temporary form of cat blindness.’
   ‘I’m not sure I’ve heard of that.’
   ‘It’s quite common,’ he replied airily. ‘I suppose you have heard of knight blindness, when you can’t see any knights?’
   ‘It’s night, not knight,’ I corrected him.
   ‘It all sounds the same to me.’
   ‘Suppose I do have cat blindness,’ I ventured. ‘Then how is it I can see you?’
   ‘Suppose we change the subject?’ retorted the cat. ‘What do you think of the library?’
   ‘It’s pretty big,’ I murmured, looking all around me.
   ‘Two hundred miles in every direction,’ said the cat offhandedly, beginning to purr, ‘twenty-six floors above ground, twenty-six below.’
   ‘You must have a copy of every book that’s been written,’ I observed.
   ‘Every book that will ever be written,’ corrected the cat, ‘and a few others besides.’
   ‘How many?’
   ‘Well, I’ve never counted them myself but certainly more than twelve.’
   ‘You’re the Cheshire cat, aren’t you?’ I asked.
   ‘I was the Cheshire cat,’ he replied with a slightly aggrieved air. ‘But they moved the county boundaries, so technically speaking I’m now the “Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat”, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it. Oh, and welcome to Jurisfiction. You’ll like it here; everyone is quite mad.’
   ‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ I replied indignantly.
   ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
   I snapped my fingers.
   ‘Wait a moment!’ I exclaimed. ‘This is the conversation you had in Alice in Wonderland, just after the baby turned into a pig!’
   ‘Ah!’ returned the cat with an annoyed flick of his tail. ‘Fancy you can write your own dialogue, do you? I’ve seen people try; it’s never a pretty sight. But have it your own way. And what’s more, the baby turned into a fig, not a pig.’
   ‘It was a pig, actually.’
   ‘Fig,’ said the cat stubbornly. ‘Who was in the book, me or you?’
   ‘It was a pig,’ I insisted.
   ‘Well!’ exclaimed the cat. ‘I’ll go and check. Then you’ll look pretty stupid, I can tell you!’
   And so saying, he vanished.
   I stood there for a moment or two, and pretty soon the cat’s tail started to appear, then his body and finally his head and mouth.
   ‘Well?’ I asked.
   ‘All right,’ grumbled the cat. ‘So it was a pig. My hearing is not so good; I think it’s all that pepper. By the by, I almost forgot. You’re apprenticed to Miss Havisham.’
   ‘Miss Havisham? Great Expectations Miss Havisham?’
   ‘Is there any other? You’ll be fine—just don’t mention the wedding.’
   ‘I’ll try not to. Wait a moment—apprenticed?’
   ‘Of course. Getting here is only half the adventure. If you want to join us you’ll have to learn the ropes. Right now all you can do is journey. With a bit of practice on your own you might learn to be page accurate when you jump. But if you want to delve deep into the back-story or take an excursion beyond the sleeve notes, you’re going to have to take instruction. Why, by the time Miss Havisham has finished with you, you’ll think nothing of being able to visit early drafts, deleted characters or long-discarded chapters that make little or no sense at all. Who knows, you may even glimpse the core of the book, the central nub of energy that binds a novel together.’
   ‘You mean the spine?’ I asked, not quite up to speed yet.
   The cat lashed its tail.
   ‘No, stupid, the idea, the notion, the spark. Once you’ve laid your eyes on the raw concept of a book, everything you’ve ever seen or felt will seem about as interesting as a stair carpet. Try and imagine this: you are sitting on soft grass on a warm summer’s evening in front of a dazzling sunset; the air is full of truly inspiring music and you have in your hands a wonderful book. Are you there?’
   ‘I think so.’
   ‘Okay, now imagine a simply vast saucer of warm cream in front of you and consider lapping it really slowly until your whiskers are completely drenched.’
   The Cheshire cat shivered deliriously.
   ‘If you do all of that and multiply it by a thousand, then perhaps, just perhaps, you will have some idea of what I’m talking about.’
   ‘Can I pass on the cream?’
   ‘Whatever you want. It’s your daydream, after all.’
   And with a flick of his tail, the cat vanished again. I turned to explore my surroundings and was surprised to find that the Cheshire cat was sitting on another shelf on the other side of the corridor.
   ‘You seem a bit old to be an apprentice,’ continued the cat, folding its paws and staring at me so intensely I felt unnerved. ‘We’ve been expecting you for almost twenty years. Where on earth have you been?’
   ‘I… I… didn’t know I could do this.’
   ‘What you mean is that you did know that you couldn’t—it’s quite a different thing. The point is, do you think you have what it takes to help us here at Jurisfiction?’
   ‘I really don’t know,’ I replied, truthfully enough, adding ‘What do you do?’ as I didn’t see why he should be asking all the questions.
   ‘I,’ said the cat proudly, ‘am the librarian.’
   ‘You look after all these books?’
   ‘Certainly,’ replied the cat proudly. ‘Ask me any question you want.’
   ‘Jane Eyre,’ I said, intending only to ask its location but realising when the cat answered that a librarian here was far removed from the sort I knew at home.
   ‘Ranked the 728th favourite fictional book ever written,’ the cat replied parrot-fashion. ‘Total readings to date: 82,581,430. Current reading figure 829,321—1,421 of whom are reading it as we speak. It’s a good figure; quite possibly because it has been in the news recently.’
   ‘So what’s the most read book?’
   ‘Up until now or for ever and all time?’
   ‘For all time.’
   The cat thought for a moment.
   ‘In fiction, the most read book ever is To Kill a Mocking Bird. Not just because it is a cracking good read for us, but of all the vertebrate überclassics it was the only one that really translated well into Arthropod. And if you can crack the lobster market—if you’ll pardon the pun—a billion years from now, you’re really going to flog some copies. The Arthropod title is: tlkîltlîlkîxlkilkïxlklï or, literally translated, The past non-existent state of the angel fish. Atticus Finch is a lobster called Tklîkï, and he defends a horseshoe crab named Klikïflik.’
   ‘How does it compare?’

   ‘Not too bad, although the scene with the prawns is a little harrowing. It’s the crustacean readership that makes Daphne Farquitt such a major player, too.’
   ‘Daphne Farquitt?’ I echoed with some surprise. ‘But her books are frightfull!’
   ‘Only to us. To the highly evolved Arthropods, Farquitt’s work is considered sacred and religious to the point of lunacy. Listen, I’m no fan of Farquitt’s but her bodice-ripping pot-boiler The Squire of High Potternews sparked one of the biggest, bloodiest, shellbrokenist wars the planet has ever witnessed.’
   I was getting off the point.
   ‘So all these books are your responsibility?’
   ‘Indeed,’ replied the cat ainly.
   ‘If I wanted to go into a book I could just pick it up and read it?’
   ‘It’s not quite that easy,’ replied the cat. ‘You can only get into a book if someone has already found a way in and then exited through the library. Every book, you will observe, is bound in either red or green. Green for go, red for no-go. It’s quite easy, really—you’re not colour blind, are you?’
   ‘No. So if I wanted to go into—oh, I don’t know, let’s pull a title out of the air—The Raven, then—’
   But the cat flinched as I said the title.
   ‘There are some places you should not go!’ he muttered in an aggrieved tone. ‘Edgar Allan Poe is one of them. His books are not fixed; there is a certain oddness that goes with them. Most macabre Gothic fiction tends to be like that—Sade is the same; also Webster, Wheatley and King. Go into those and you may never come out—they have a way of weaving you into the story and before you know it you’re stuck there. Let me show you something.’
   And all of a sudden we were in a large and hollow-sounding vestibule where huge Doric columns rose to support a vast vaulted ceiling. The floor and walls were all dark red marble and reminded me of the entrance lobby of an old hotel—only about forty times as big. You could have parked an airship in here and still had room to hold an air race. There was a red carpet leading up from the tall front doors, and all the brasswork shone like gold.
   ‘This is where we honour the boojummed,’ said the cat in a quiet voice. He waved a paw in the direction of a large granite memorial about the size of two upended cars. The edifice was shaped like a large book, open in the centre and splayed wide, with a depiction of a person walking into the left-hand page, his form covered by text as he entered. On the opposite page was row upon row of names. A mason was delicately working on a new name with a mallet and chisel. He tipped his hat respectfully and resumed his work.
   ‘Prose Resource Operatives deleted or lost in the line of duty,’ explained the cat from where he was perched on top of the statue. ‘We call it the Boojumorial.’
   I pointed to a name on the memorial.
   ‘Ambrose Bierce was a Jurisfiction agent?’
   ‘One of the best. Dear, sweet Ambrose! A master of prose but quite impetuous. He went—alone—into The Literary Life of Thingum Bob—a Poe short story that one would’ve thought held no terrors.’
   The cat sighed before continuing.
   ‘He was trying to find a back door into Poe’s poems. We know you can get from Thingum Bob into The Black Cat by way of an unstable verb in the third paragraph, and from Black Cat into The Fall of the House of Usher by the simple expedient of hiring a horse from the Nicaean stables, from there he was hoping to use the poem within Usher, The Haunted Palace, to springboard him into the rest of the Poe poetical canon.’
   ‘What happened?’
   ‘Never heard from him again. Two fellow booksplorers went in after him—one lost his breath and the other… well, poor Ahab went completely bonkers—thought he was being chased by a white whale. We suspect that Ambrose was either walled up with a cask of amontillado or burried alive or some other unspeakable fate. It was decided that Poe was out of bounds.’
   ‘So Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, he disappeared on assignment too?’
   ‘Not at all; he crashed on a reconnaissance sortie.’
   ‘It was tragic.’
   ‘It certainly was,’ replied the cat. ‘He owed me forty francs and promised to teach me to play Debussy on the piano using only oranges.’
   ‘Oranges?’
   ‘Oranges. Well, I’m off now. Miss Havisham will explain everything. Go through those doors into the library, take the elevator to the fourth floor, first right and the books are about a hundred yards on your left. Great Expectations is green bound so you should have no trouble.’
   ‘Thanks.’
   ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ said the cat, and with a wave of his paw he started to fade, very slowly, from the tip of his tail. He just had time to ask me to get some tuna-flavoured Moggilicious for him the next time I was home—before he vanished completely and I was alone in front of the granite Boojumorial, the quiet tapping of the mason’s hammer echoing around the lofty heights of the library vestibule.
   I took the marble stairs into the library, ascended by one of the wrought-iron lifts, and walked down the corridor until I came across several shelves of Dickens novels. There were, I noted, twenty-nine different editions of Great Expectations from early drafts to the last of Dickens’s own revised editions. I picked up the newest tome, opened it at the first chapter and heard the gentle sound of wind in the trees. I nipped through the pages, the sounds changing as I moved from scene to scene, page to page. I located the first mention of Miss Havisham, found a good place to start and then read loudly to myself, willing the words to live. And live they did.

17. Miss Havisham

   ‘Great Expectations was written in 1860-61 to reverse flagging sales of All the Year Round, the weekly periodical founded by Dickens himself. The novel was regarded as a great success. The tale of Pip the blacksmith’s apprentice and his rise to the position of young gentleman through an anonymous benefactor introduced readers to many new and varied characters: Joe Gargery, the simple and honourable blacksmith, Abel Magwitch, the convict Pip helps in the first chapter, Jaggers, the lawyer, Herbert Pocket, who befriends him and teaches him how to behave in London society. But it is Miss Havisham, abandoned at the altar and living her life in dreary isolation dressed in her tattered wedding robes, that steals the show. She remains one of the book’s most memorable fixtures.’

MILLON DE FLOSS. Great Expectations, a Study


   I found myself in a large and dark hall which smelt of musty decay. The windows were tightly shuttered, the only light from a few candles scattered around the room; they added little to the room except to heighten the gloominess. In the centre a long table was covered with what had once been a wedding banquet but was now a sad arrangement of tarnished silver and dusty crockery. In the bowls and meat platters dried remnants of food were visible, and in the middle of the table a large wedding cake bedecked with cobwebs had begun to collapse like a dilapidated building. I had read the scene many times, but it was somehow different when you saw it for real. I was on the other side of the room from Miss Havisham, Estella and Pip. I stood silently and watched.
   A game of cards had just ended between Pip and Estella, and Miss Havisham, resplendently shabby in her rotting wedding dress and veil, seemed to be trying to come to a decision.
   ‘When shall I have you here again?’ she said in a low growl. ‘Let me think.’
   ‘Today is Wednesday, ma’am—’ began Pip, but he was silenced by Miss Havisham.
   ‘There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?’
   ‘Yes, ma’am.’
   Miss Havisham sighed deeply and addressed the young woman, who seemed to spend most of her time glaring at Pip, his discomfort in the strange surroundings seemed to fill her with inner mirth.
   ‘Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him roam and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip.’
   They left the darkened room and I watched as Miss Havisham stared at the floor, then at the half-filled trunks of old and yellowed clothes that might have accompanied her on her honeymoon. I watched her as she pulled off her veil, ran her fingers through her greying hair and kicked off her shoes. She looked about her, checked the door was closed and then opened a bureau which I could see was full, not of the trappings of her wretched life, but of small luxuries that must, I presumed, make her existence here that much more bearable. Amongst other things I saw a Sony Walkman, a stack of National Geographics, a few Daphne Farquitt novels, and one of those bats that has a rubber ball attached to a piece of elastic. She rummaged some more and took out a pair of trainers and pulled them on with a great deal of relief. She was just about to tie the laces when I shifted my weight and knocked against a small table. Havisham, her senses heightened by her long incarceration in silent introspection, gazed in my direction, her sharp eyes piercing the gloom.
   ‘Who is there’’ she asked sharply. ‘Estella, is that you?’
   Hiding didn’t seem to be a worthwhile option, so I stepped from the shadows. She looked me up and down with a critical eye.
   ‘What is your name, child?’ she asked sternly.
   ‘Thursday Next, ma’am.’
   ‘Ah!’ she said again. ‘The Next girl. Took you long enough to find your way in here, didn’t it?’
   ‘Sorry?’
   ‘Never be sorry, girl—it’s a waste of time, believe me. If only you had seriously attempted to come to Jurisfiction after Mrs Nakajima showed you how up at Haworth… well, I’m wasting my breath, I can see.’
   ‘I had no idea!’
   ‘I don’t often take apprentices,’ she carried on, disregarding me completely, ‘but they were going to allocate you to the Red Queen. The Red Queen and I don’t get along. I suppose you’ve heard that?’
   ‘No, I’ve—’
   ‘Half of all she says is nonsense and the other half is irrelevant. Mrs Nakajima recommended you most highly but she has been wrong before; cause any trouble and I’ll bounce you out of Jurisfiction quicker than you can say ketchup. How are you at tying shoelaces?’
   So I tied Miss Havisham’s trainers for her, there in Satis House among the rotted trappings of her abandoned marriage. If you had told me I would be doing this even an hour previously I would have considered you insane.
   ‘There are three simple rules if you want to stay with me,’ began Miss Havisham in the sort of voice that brooks no argument. ‘Rule One—you do exactly as I tell you. Rule Two—you don’t patronise me with your pity. I have no desire to be helped in any way. What I do to myself and others is my business and my business alone. Do you understand?’
   ‘Yes, ma’am. What about Rule Three?’
   ‘All in good time. I shall call you Thursday and you may call me Miss Havisham when we are together; in company I shall expect you to call me “ma’am”. I may summon you at any time and you will come running. Only funerals, childbirth or Vivaldi concerts take precedence. Is that clear?’
   ‘Yes, Miss Havisham.’
   I stood up and she thrust a candle up to my face and regarded me closely. It allowed me a close look at her too. Despite her pallid demeanour, her eyes sparkled brightly and she was not nearly as old as I supposed—all she needed was a fortnight of good meals and some fresh air. I was tempted to say something to enliven the dismal surroundings but her iron personality stopped me, I felt as though I were facing my teacher at school for the first time.
   ‘Intelligent eyes,’ muttered Havisham, ‘committed and honest. Quite, quite sickeningly self-righteous. Are you married?’
   ‘Yes,’ I mumbled, ‘that is to say—no.’
   ‘Come, come!’ said Havisham angrily. ‘It is a simple enough question.’
   ‘I was married,’ I answered.
   ‘Died?’
   ‘No,’ I mumbled, ‘that is to say—yes.’
   ‘I’ll try harder questions in future,’ announced Havisham, ‘for you are obviously not adept at the easy ones. Have you met the Jurisfiction staff?’
   ‘I’ve met Mr Snell—and the Cheshire cat.’
   ‘As useless as each other,’ she announced shortly. ‘Everyone at Jurisfiction is either a charlatan or an imbecile—except the Red Queen, who is both. We’ll go to Norland Park and meet them all, I suppose.’
   ‘Norland? Jane Austen? The house of the Dashwoods? Sense and Sensibility?’
   But Havisham had moved on. She held my wrist to look at my watch, took me by the elbow and, before I knew what had happened, we had joggled out of Satis House to the library. Before I could recover from this sudden change of surroundings, Miss Havisham was reading from a book she had drawn from a shelf. There was another strange joggle and we were in a small kitchen parlour somewhere.
   ‘What was that?’ I asked in slight alarm, I wasn’t yet used to the sudden move from book to book but Havisham, well accustomed to such manoeuvres, thought little of it.