The well of lost plots (5 page)

“Right,” I said to myself, marching across the room, “I’ve had it with you three.”

I pulled open the door and said, “Listen here, hag, I’m really not interested, nor ever will be in your . . . Oh.”

I stared. Granny Next. If it had been Admiral Lord Nelson himself I don’t think I could have been more surprised.

“Gran!?!” I exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing here?”

She was dressed in her usual outfit of spectacular blue gingham, from her dress to her overcoat and even her hat, shoes and bag.

I hugged her. She smelt of Bodmin for Women. She hugged me in return in that sort of fragile way that very elderly people do. And she
was
elderly — 108, at the last count.

“I have come to look after you, young Thursday,” she announced.

“Er — thank you, Gran,” I replied, wondering quite how she had got here.

“You’re going to have a baby and need attending to,” she added grandly. “My suitcase is on the jetty and you’re going to have to pay the taxi.”

“Of course,” I muttered, going outside and finding a yellow TransGenre Taxi.

“How much?” I asked the cabby.

“Seventeen and six.”

“Oh, yes?” I replied sarcastically. “Took the long way round?”

“Trips to Horror, Bunyan and the Well cost double,” said the cabbie. “Pay up or I’ll make sure Jurisfiction hears about it. I had that Heathcliff in the back of my cab once.”

“Really?” I replied, handing him a pound.

He patted his pockets. “Sorry, have you got anything smaller? I don’t carry much change.”

“Keep it,” I told him as his footnoterphone muttered something about a party of ten wanting to get out of Florence in
The Decameron
. I got a receipt and he melted from view. I picked up Gran’s suitcase and hauled it into the Sunderland.

“This is ibb and obb,” I explained. “Generics billeted with me. The one on the left is ibb.”

“I’m obb.”

“Sorry.
That’s
ibb and
that’s
obb. This is my grandmother.”

“Hello,” said Granny Next, gazing at my two houseguests.

“You’re very old,” observed ibb.

“One hundred and eight,” announced Gran proudly. “Do you two do anything but stare?”

“Not really,” said ibb.

“Plock,” said Pickwick, who had popped her head round the door, ruffled her feathers excitedly and rushed up to greet Gran, who always seemed to have a few spare marshmallows about her.

“What’s it like being old?” asked ibb, who was peering closely at the soft, pink folds in Gran’s skin.

“Death’s adolescence,” replied Gran. “But you know the worst part?”

ibb and obb shook their heads.

“I’m going to miss my funeral by three days.”

“Gran!” I scolded. “You’ll confuse them — they tend to take things literally.”

It was too late.

“Miss your own funeral?” muttered ibb, thinking hard. “How is that possible?”

“Think about it, ibb,” said obb. “If she lived three days longer, she’d be able to
speak
at her own funeral — get it?”

“Of course,” said ibb, “stupid of me.”

And they went into the kitchen, talking about Mrs. Beeton’s book and the best way to deal with amorous liaisons between the scullery maid and the bootboy — it must have been an old edition.

“When’s supper?” asked Gran, looking disdainfully at the interior of the flying boat. “I’m absolutely famished — but nothing tougher than suet, mind. The gnashers aren’t what they were.”

I delicately helped her out of her gingham coat and sat her down at the table. Steak diane would be like eating railway sleepers to her, so I started to make an omelette.

“Now, Gran,” I said, cracking some eggs into a bowl, “I want you to tell me what you’re doing here.”

“I need to be here to remind you of things you might forget, young Thursday.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as Landen. They eradicated my husband, too, and the one thing I needed was someone to help me through it, so that’s what I’m here to do for you.”

“I’m not going to forget him, Gran!”

“Yes,” she agreed in a slightly peculiar way, “I’m here to make sure of it.”

“That’s the
why
,” I persisted, “but what about the
how
?”

“I, too, used to do the occasional job for Jurisfiction in the old days. A long time ago, mind, but it was just one of many jobs that I did in my life — and not the strangest, either.”

“What
was
?” I asked, knowing in my heart that I shouldn’t really be asking.

“Well, I was God Emperor of the Universe, once,” she answered in the same manner to which she might have admitted to going to the pictures, “and being a man for twenty-four hours was pretty weird.”

“Yes, I expect it was.”

ibb laid the table and we sat down to eat ten minutes later. As Gran sucked on her omelette I tried to make conversation with ibb and obb. The trouble was, neither of them had the requisite powers of social communication to assimilate anything from speech other than the bald facts it contained. I tried a joke I had heard from Bowden, my partner at SpecOps, about an octopus and a set of bagpipes. But when I delivered the punch line, they both stared at me.

“Why would the bagpipes be dressed in pajamas?” asked ibb.

“It wasn’t,” I replied, “it was the tartan. That’s just what the octopus
thought
they were.”

“I see,” said obb, not seeing at all. “Would you mind going over it again?”

“That’s it,” I said resolutely, “you’re going to have a personality if it kills me.”

“Kill you?” inquired ibb in all seriousness. “Why would it kill you?”

I thought carefully. There had to be
somewhere
to begin. I clicked my fingers.

“Sarcasm,” I said. “We’ll start with that.”

They both looked at me blankly.

“Well,” I began, “sarcasm is closely related to irony and implies a twofold view — a literal meaning, yet a wholly
different
intention from what is said. For instance, if you were lying to me about who ate all the anchovies I left in the cupboard, and you
had
eaten them, you might say, ‘It wasn’t me,’ and I would say, ‘
Sure
it wasn’t,’ meaning I’m sure it
was
but in an ironic or sarcastic manner.”

“What’s an anchovy?” asked ibb.

“A small and very salty fish.”

“I see,” replied ibb. “Does sarcasm work with other things or is it only fish?”

“No, the stolen anchovies was only by way of an example. Now you try.”

“An anchovy?”

“No, you try some sarcasm.”

They continued to look at me blankly.

I sighed. “Like trying to nail jelly to the wall,” I muttered under my breath.

“Plock,” said Pickwick in her sleep as she gently keeled over. “Plocketty-plock.”

“Sarcasm is better explained through humor,” put in Gran, who had been watching my efforts with interest. “You know that Pickwick isn’t too clever?”

Pickwick stirred in her sleep where she had fallen, resting on her head with her claws in the air.

“Yes, we know that,” replied ibb and obb, who were nothing if not observant.

“Well, if I were to say that it is easier to get yeast to perform tricks than Pickwick, I’m using mild sarcasm to make a joke.”

“Yeast?” queried ibb. “But yeast has no intelligence.”

“
Exactly
,” replied Gran. “So I am making a sarcastic observation that Pickwick has less brainpower than yeast. You try.”

The Generic thought long and hard.

“So,” said ibb slowly, “how about . . . Pickwick is so clever she sits on the TV and stares at the sofa?”

“It’s a start,” said Gran.

“And,” added ibb, gaining confidence by the second, “if Pickwick went on
Mastermind
, she’d do best to choose ‘dodo eggs’ as her specialist subject.”

obb was getting the hang of it, too. “If a thought crossed her mind, it would be the shortest journey on record.”

“Pickwick has a brother at Oxford. In a jar.”

“All right, that’s enough sarcasm,” I said quickly. “I know Pickwick won’t win ‘Brain of BookWorld’ but she’s a loyal companion.”

I looked across at Pickwick, who slid off the sofa and landed with a thump on the floor. She woke up and started plocking loudly at the sofa, coffee table, rug — in fact, anything close by — before calming down, climbing on top of her egg and falling asleep again.

“You did well, guys,” I said. “Another time we’ll tackle subtext.”

ibb and obb went to their room soon afterwards, discussing how sarcasm was related to irony, and whether irony itself could be generated in laboratory conditions. Gran and I chatted about home. Mother was very well, it seemed, and Joffy and Wilbur and Orville were as mad as ever. Gran, conscious of my dealings with Yorrick Kaine in the past, reported that Kaine had returned soon after the episode with the Glatisant at Volescamper Towers, lost his seat in the House and been back at the helm of his newspaper and publishing company soon after. I knew he was fictional and a danger to my world but couldn’t see what to do about it from here. We talked into the night about the BookWorld, Landen, eradications and having children. Gran had had three herself so gleefully told me all the stuff they don’t tell you when you sign on the dotted line.

“Think of swollen ankles as trophies,” she said, somewhat unhelpfully.

That night I put Gran in my room and slept in the bedroom under the flight deck. I washed, undressed and climbed into bed, weary after the day’s work. I lay there, staring at the pattern of reflected light dancing on the ceiling and thought of my father, Emma Hamilton, Jack Spratt, Dream Topping and babies. I was meant to be here resting but the demolition problem of
Caversham Heights
, my adopted home, couldn’t be ignored — I could have moved but I liked it here, and besides, I had done enough running away already. The arrival of Gran had been strange, but since much was odd here in the Well, weird had become commonplace. If things carried on like this, the dull and meaningless would become items of spectacular interest.

They say that no one really dies until you forget them, and in Landen’s case it was especially true. Since Landen had been eradicated, I had discovered that I could bring him back to life in my memories and my dreams, and I had begun to look forward to falling asleep and returning to treasured moments that we could share, albeit only fleetingly.

Landen had lost a leg to a land mine and his best friend to a military blunder. The friend had been my brother Anton — and Landen had testified against him at the hearing that followed the disastrous “Charge of the Light Armored Brigade” in 1973. My brother was blamed for the debacle, Landen was honorably discharged and I was awarded the Crimea Star for gallantry. We didn’t speak for ten years, and we were married two months ago. Some people say it was an unorthodox romance — but I never noticed myself.

THURSDAY NEXT,
The Jurisfiction Chronicles

THAT NIGHT, I went to the Crimea again. Not, you might think, the most obvious port of call in my sleep. The peninsula had been a constant source of anguish in my waking hours: a time of stress, of pain, and violent death. But the Crimea was where I’d met Landen, and where we’d fallen in love. The memories were more dear to me now because they had never happened, and for this reason the Crimea’s sometimes painful recollections came back to me. I relaxed and was transported in the arms of Morpheus to the Black Sea peninsula, twelve years before.

No shots had been fired for ten years when I arrived on the peninsula in the May of 1973, although the conflict had been going for 120 years. I was attached to the Third Wessex Tank Light Armored Brigade as a driver — I was twenty-three years old and drove thirteen tons of armored vehicle under the command of Major Phelps, who was later to lose his lower arm and his mind during a badly timed charge into the massed Russian artillery. In my youthful naïveté, I had thought the Crimea was fun — a notion that was soon to change.

“Report to the vehicle pool at fourteen hundred hours,” I was told one morning by our sergeant, a kindly yet brusque man by the name of Tozer. He would survive the charge but be lost in a training accident eight years later. I was at his funeral. He was a good man.

“Any idea what I’ll be doing, Sarge?” I asked.

Sergeant Tozer shrugged. “Special duties. I was told to allocate someone intelligent — but they weren’t available, so you’ll have to do.”

I laughed. “Thanks, Sarge.”

I dreamed this scene more often these days and the reason was clear — it was the first time Landen and I spent any time together. My brother Anton was also serving out here and he had introduced us a few weeks before — but Anton did that a lot. Today I was to drive Landen in an armored scout car to an observation post overlooking a valley in which a buildup of Imperial Russian artillery had been reported. We referred to the incident as “our first date.”

I arrived for duty and was told to sign for a Dingo scout car, a small, two-person armored vehicle with enough power to get out of trouble quickly — or into it, depending on one’s level of competency. I duly picked up the scout car and waited for nearly an hour, standing in a tent with a lot of other drivers, talking and laughing, drinking tea and telling unlikely stories. It was a chilly day but I was glad I was doing this instead of daily orders, which generally meant cleaning up the camp and other tedious tasks.

“Corporal Next?” said an officer who poked his head into the tent. “Drop the tea — we’re off!”

He wasn’t handsome but he was
intriguing
, and unlike many of the officers, he seemed to have a certain relaxed manner about him.

I jumped to my feet. “Good morning, sir,” I said, unsure of whether he remembered me. I needn’t have worried. I didn’t know it yet, but he had specifically asked Sergeant Tozer for me. He was intrigued, too, but fraternizing on active duty was a subtle art. The penalties could be severe.

I led him to where the Dingo was parked and climbed in. I pressed the starter and the engine rumbled to life. Landen lowered himself into the commander’s seat.