One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

2. A Woman Named Thursday Next

My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don’t mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase that the Chrono-Guard used to describe someone who had the power to arrest time to an ultraslow trickle—and that’s exactly what happened one morning as I was having a late breakfast in a small café quite near where I worked. The world flickered, shuddered and stopped. The barman of the café froze to a halt in midsentence, and the picture on the television stopped dead. Outside, birds hung motionless in the sky. The sound halted, too, replaced by a dull snapshot of a hum, the world’s noise at that moment in time paused indefinitely at the same pitch and volume.

“Hello, Sweetpea.”

I turned. My father was sitting at a table behind me and rose to hug me affectionately.

“Hi, Dad.”

“You’re looking good,” he told me.

“You, too,” I replied. “You’re looking younger every time I see you.”

“I am. How’s your history?”

“Not bad.”

“Do you know how the Duke of Wellington died?”

“Sure,” I answered. “He was shot by a French sniper early on during the Battle of Waterloo—why?”

“Oh, no reason,” muttered my father with feigned innocence, scribbling in a small notebook. Once done, he paused for a moment.

“So Napoléon won at Waterloo, did he?” he asked slowly and with great intensity.

“Of course not,” I replied. “Field Marshal Blücher’s timely intervention saved the day. This is all high school history, Dad. What are you up to?”

“Well, it’s a bit of—hang on,” said Dad, or rather the character playing my book-father. “I think they’ve gone.”

I tasted the air. He was right. Our lone reader had stopped and left us dangling in a narrative dead zone. It’s an odd sensation: a combination of treading on a step that isn’t there, someone hanging up the telephone midspeech without explanation and the feeling you get when you’ve gone upstairs for some reason but can’t think why. Scientists have proved that spaniels spend their entire lives like this.

“I was marvelous,” intoned my book-father haughtily, the inference being that it was somehow my fault the reader didn’t last until even the end of the first page. “You need to engage the readers more, darling. Project yourself. Make the character come alive.”

I didn’t agree that I was at fault but wasn’t going to argue. He had played my father longer in the series than I had played Thursday, so he had a kind of seniority, even if I was the protagonist, and first-person player to boot.

“Sometimes I yearn for the old days,” he said to Hector, his dresser, but obviously intending for me to hear.

“What do you mean by that?”

He stared at me for a moment. “This: It was a lot better when we had the previous Thursday play Thursday.”

“She was violent and immoral, Dad. How could that possibly be better?”

“She might have been a shit of the highest order, darling, but she brought in the readers. I’ll be in my dressing room. Come, Hector.”

And so saying, he swept from the café setting with his ever-present dresser, who pouted rudely at me as they left. My book-father had a point, of course, but I was committed to promoting the type of Thursday the real Thursday wanted to see in the series. The series had originally been written to feature a violent and disorderly Thursday Next, who slept her way around the BookWorld and caused no end of murder, misery and despair. I was trying to change all that but had met with stiff resistance from the rest of the cast. They saw my attempt to depict reality as damaging to the overall readability—and for a character, the only thing worse than being read badly is to be badly unread.

I sighed. Keeping everyone within my series happy and fulfilled and focused was about as hard a job as acting in the book itself. Some books had a page manager to do all that boring stuff, but for financial reasons I had to do it myself with only a defective Mrs. Malaprop for assistance. Making us all readable was the least of my worries.

I walked slowly home through my book-version of Swindon, which was forty times more compact than the real one. Due to the limited number of locations mentioned in my series, I could go easily from the café to my mother’s house to the GSD church and then on to the SpecOps Building in the space of a few minutes, something that would take the best part of an hour in the real Swindon. There were a few handy shortcuts, too. By opening a door at the back of Our Blessed Lady of the Lobster, I could find myself in the mockup of Thornfield Hall, and by taking the first door on the right past Jane’s bedroom, I could be in the Penderyn Hotel in Wales. All told, the series covered about five acres on six levels and would have been larger if we hadn’t doubled up the East facade of Thornfield with the front of Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, and the Gad’s Hill Museum with the redressed lobby of the SpecOps Building. Economies like this were commonplace in remaindered books and helped us keep the cast at almost full strength. Doubling up characters was possible, but it caused problems when they were in scenes with themselves. Some characters could handle it, others could not. On one memorable occasion, Vronsky played all the parts in an abridged version of Anna Karenina whilst the rest of the cast were on strike for more blinis. When asked what it was like, he described it as “like, totally awesome, dude.”

“Good morning, Pickwick,” I said as I walked into the kitchen, which not only served as the command center of my series but also as the place where tea and toast could be made and eaten. “Good morning, Mrs. Malaprop.”

“Cod Moaning, Miss Next,” said the defective Mrs. Malaprop, bobbing politely.

“May I have a word?” asked Pickwick, in a not very subtle aside.

“Is it important?”

“It is vitally crucial,” said Pickwick, rolling her eyes oddly.

We moved out to the hallway.

“Okay, what’s the problem?” I asked, since Pickwick always had a grievance of some sort—whether it was the cold or the heat or the color of the walls or a hundred and one other things that weren’t quite right. Whitby and I referred to her as “Goldilocks without the manners”—but never to her beak.

“It’s Mrs. Malaprop,” said the dodo in an affronted tone. “She’s becoming increasingly unintelligible. It would be okay if it were faintly amusing, but it isn’t, and . . . well, quite frankly, there is the risk of infection, and it frightens me.”

To a text-based life-form, unpredictable syntax and poor grammar is a source of huge discomfort. Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can’t walk to the bathroom. Poor syntax is even worse. Change word order and a sentence useless for anyone Yoda except you have.

“Now, then,” I said, using an oxymoron for scolding effect, “it is totally unproven that malapropism is inflectious, and what did we say about tolerating those less fortunate than ourselves?”

“Even so,” said Pickwick, “I want you to tell her to stop it. And her shoes squeak. And while we’re on the subject, Bowden referred to me as ‘that bird’ again, the baobab in the back garden is cutting out the light from my bedroom, and I’m taking next Wednesday off to have my beak oiled, so you’ll need to get a replacement—and not the penguin like last time. She didn’t do justice to my dynamic personalty and poetic sensibilities. Played it all a bit . . . fishcentric, if you know what I mean.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, making a mental note to definitely rebook the penguin.

“Good,” said Pickwick. “Have you the paper?”

We returned to the kitchen, and I found The Word for her.

“Hmm,” she said thoughtfully, staring at the City pages. “Metaphor has risen by seventeen pounds a barrel. I should dump some metonym and buy into synecdoche futures.”

“How are things going with Racy Novel?” I asked, since the political problems up in the North had been much in the news recently. A long-running dispute between Racy Novel, Women’s Fiction and Dogma had been getting worse and was threatening to erupt into a genre war at the drop of a hat.

“Peace talks still on schedule for Friday,” replied Pickwick, “as if that will do any good. Sometimes I think that Muffler nutjob wants nothing but a good scrap. By the way,” she added, “did you hear about Raphael’s Walrus?”

“No.”

“Got their eviction papers this morning.”

This wasn’t surprising. Raphael’s Walrus was a book six doors down that hadn’t been read for a while. I didn’t know them well, but since we were located at the Speculative end of Fantasy, the real estate was valuable. We’d have a new neighbor almost the moment they left.

“I hope it’s not Sword and Sorcery,” said Pickwick with a shudder. “Goblins really drag down the neighborhood.”

“Goblins might say the same about dodos.”

“Impossible!” she retorted. “Dodos are cute and cuddly and lovable and . . . don’t steal stuff and spread disease.”

People often wondered why my written dodo was such a pain in the ass when the real Pickwick was so cute. The reason was simple: lack of choice. There are only three dodos in fiction. One was dangerously psychotic, the second was something big over in Natural History, which left only one: The dodo from Alice is the same bespectacled know-it-all in my series. Her name wasn’t actually Pickwick—it was Lorina Peabody III, but we called her Pickwick, and she didn’t much mind either way. She put down the paper, announced to the room that she would be taking her siesta and waddled off.

“Mrs. Malaprop,” I said once Pickwick had left, “are you still attending your therapy sessions?”

Mrs. Malaprop arched a highbrow. She knew well enough who had complained about her.

“Eggs tincture is too good for that burred,” she said in a crabby tone, “but isle do as Uri quest.”

The average working life of a Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals was barely fifty readings. The unrelenting comedic misuse of words eventually caused them to suffer postsyntax stress disorder, and once their speech became irreversibly abstruse, they were simply replaced. Most “retired” Mrs. Malaprops were released into the BookWorld, where they turned ferrule, but just recently rehoming charities were taking note of their plight. After they’d undergone intensive Holorime Bombardment Therapy to enable them to at least sound right even if they didn’t read right, people like me offered them a home and a job. Our Malaprop was an early model—Number 862, to be precise—and she was generally quite helpful if a little tricky to understand. There was talk of using Dogberry stem cells to cure her, but we didn’t hold our broth.

I stared at the diagnostics board that covered one wall of the kitchen. The number of readers on the Read-O-Meter was stuck firmly at zero, with thirty-two copies of my novels listed “bookmarked and pending.” Of these, eighteen were active/ resting between reads. The rest were probably lying under a stack of other unfinished books. I checked the RealWorld clock. It was 0842. Years ago I was read on the train, but that hadn’t happened for a while. Unreadfulness was a double-edged sword. More leisure time, but a distinct loss of purpose. I turned to Mrs. Malaprop.

“How are things looking in the series?”

She stared at her clipboard.

“Toll rubble. Twenty-six care actors Aaron leaf or training courses; all can be covered by eggs Hastings characters. Of the settings, only Hayworth House is clothes bee coarse of an invest station of grammasites.”

“Has Jurisfiction been informed?”

“We’re low prior Tory, so they said a towers.”

“How close is our nearest reader?”

“Nine teas heaven minutes’ read time away.”

It wasn’t going to be a problem. He or she wouldn’t pickup the book again until this evening, by which time the problem would have resolved itself.

“If the reading starts early for any reason,” I said, “we’ll use the front room of Thornfield Hall as a stand-in. Oh, and my father has a flea in his ear about something, so keep an eye on him in case he tries to do his own lines. I got a letter last week from Text Grand Central about illegal dialogue flexations.”

Mrs. Malaprop nodded and made a note. “Come harder hearing cold,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“Comma DeHare ring cooled.”

“I’m . . . still not getting this.”

Mrs. Malaprop thought hard, trying to place the correct words in the correct place to enable me to understand. It was painfully difficult for her, and if Sheridan had known the misery that using acyrologia in a comedic situation would bring, he would possibly have thought butter of it.

“Come hander hair-in culled!” she said again in an exasperated tone, sweating profusely and starting to shake with the effort.

“Commander Herring called?” I said, suddenly getting it. “What about?”

“A naval antecedent,” she said urgently, “in evasion.”

She meant that a novel had met with an accident in Aviation.

“Why would he be calling me after I blew it so badly last time?”

“It sea reprised me, too. Here.”

She handed me a scrap of paper. Commander James “Red” Herring was overall leader of the BookWorld Policing Agency. He was in command not only of the Fiction Police known as Jurisfiction but also of Text Grand Central’s Metaphor Squad and at least eighteen other agencies. One of these was Book Traffic Control—and part of that was the Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department, or JAID, a department I occasionally worked for. The overhead book traffic, despite its usefulness, was not without problems. Fiction alone could see up to two thousand book-movements a day, and the constant transportation of the novels across the fictional skies was not without mishap. I spent at least a day a week identifying sections that had fallen off books passing overhead, trying to get them returned—and, if possible, find out why they’d come unglued. Despite safety assurances, improved adhesives and updated safety procedures, books would keep on shedding bits. The loss of a pig out of Animal Farm was the most celebrated incident. It fell several thousand feet and landed inside a book of short stories by Graham Greene. Disaster was averted by a quick-thinking Jurisfiction agent who expertly sewed the pig into the narrative. It was Jurisfiction at its very best.

“Did Commander Herring say which book or why he was calling me?”

“A very spurious accident, Walsall he said. You’re to to me, Tim, at this address.”

I took the address and stared at it. Commander Herring’s calling me personally was something of a big deal. “Anything else?”

“Your new-ender study is waiting to be interviewed in the front room.”

This was good news. My book was first-person narrative, and if I wanted to have any sort of life outside my occasional readings—such as a date with Whitby or to have a secondary career—I needed someone to stand in for me.

I walked through to the front room. My potential understudy looked pleasant enough and had troubled to integrate herself into my body type and vague looks. She had a Thursday Next outfit on, too. She wanted this job badly.

“The written Thursday Next,” I said, shaking her hand.

“Carmine O’Kipper,” she replied with a nervous smile. “ID A4-5619-23. Pleased to be here.”

“You’re an A-4, Miss O’Kipper?”

“Call me Carmine. Is that a problem?”

“Not at all.”

An A-4 character was theoretically only three steps down from the Jane Eyres and Scout Finches. To be able to handle first person, you had to be an A-grade, but none of the other understudies had been higher than an A-9.

“You must be at least an A-2, yes?” she asked.

“Something like that,” I replied as we sat. “Do you know of the series?”

“I used to keep a scrapbook of the real Thursday Next.”

“If you’re here to catch a glimpse of her, it’s unlikely. She dropped in once soon after the remaking, but not since then.”

“I’m really just after the work, Miss Next.”

She handed me her CV. It wasn’t long, nor particularly impressive. She was from an original manuscript sitting abandoned in a drawer somewhere in the Outland. She would have handled loss, love, uncertainty and a corkingly good betrayal. It looked like it might have been a good gig. But after fifteen years and not a single reader, it was time to move on.

“So . . . why do you want to work in my series?”

“I’m eager to enter a new and stimulating phase of my career,” she said brightly, “and I need a challenging and engaging book in which I can learn from a true professional.”

It was the usual bullshit, and it didn’t wash.

“You could get a read anywhere,” I said, handing back the CV, “so why come to the speculative end of Fantasy?”

She bit her lip and stared at me.

“I’ve only ever been read by one person at a time,” she confessed. “I took a short third-person locum inside a Reader’s Digest version of Don Quixote as Dulcinea two weeks ago. I had a panic attack when the read levels went over twenty-six and went for the Snooze.”

I heard Mrs. Malaprop drop a teacup in the kitchen. I was shocked, too. The Snooze Button was reserved only for dire emergencies. Once it was utilized, a reverse throughput capacitor on the imaginotransference engines would cause the reader instantaneous yawning, drowsiness and then sleep. Quick, simple—and the readers suspected nothing.

“You hit Snooze?”

“I was stopped before I did.”

“I’m very relieved.”

“Me, too. Rocinante had to take over my part—played her rather well, actually.”

“Did the Don notice? Rocinante playing you, I mean?”

“No.”

Carmine was just what I was looking for. Overqualified understudies rarely stayed long, but what with her being severely readerphobic, the low ReadRates would suit her down to the ground. I was mildly concerned over her eagerness to hit Snooze. To discourage misuse, every time the button was pressed, one or more kittens were put to death somewhere in the BookWorld. It was rarely used.

“Okay,” I said, “you’re hired. One caveat: You don’t get the Snooze Button access codes. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Excellent. How much reading time do you have?”

“Aside from my own book, I’ve got eighty-seven pages.”

It was a lamentably small amount. A single quizzical reader hunting for obscure hidden meanings would have her in a stammering flat spin in a second.

“Get your coat and a notebook,” I said. “We’re going to go greet our new neighbors—and have a chat.”