The Well of Lost Plots

20 Ibb and Obb named and Heights again

It was three days later. I had just had my early morning vomit and was lying back in bed, staring at Gran's note and trying to make sense of it. One word. Remember. What was I meant to remember? She hadn't yet returned from the Medici court and, although the note may have been the product of a Granny Next 'fuzzy moment', I still felt uneasy. There was something else. Beside my bed was a sketch of an attractive man in his late thirties. I didn't know who he was — which was odd, because I had sketched it.

There was an excited knock at the door. It was Ibb. It had been looking more feminine all week and had even gone so far as to put on haughty airs all day Wednesday. Obb, on the other hand, had been insisting he was right about everything, knew everything, and had sulked when I proved it wrong, and we all knew where that was leading.

'Hello, Ibb,' I said, placing the sketch aside, 'how are you?'

Ibb replied by unzipping and opening the top of its overalls.

'Look!' she said excitedly, showing me her breasts.

'Congratulations,' I said slowly, still feeling a bit groggy. 'You're a her.'

'I know!' said Ibb, hardly able to contain her excitement. 'Do you want to see the rest?'

'No thanks,' I replied, 'I believe you.'

'Can I borrow a bra?' she asked, moving her shoulders up and down. 'These things aren't terribly comfortable.'

'I don't think mine would fit you,' I said hurriedly. 'You're a lot bigger than I am.'

'Oh,' she answered, slightly crestfallen, then added: 'How about a hair tie and a brush? I can't do a thing with this hair. Up, down — perhaps I should have it cut, and I so wish it were curly!'

'Ibb, it's fine, really.'

'Lola,' she said, correcting me, 'I want you to call me Lola from now on.'

'Very well, Lola,' I replied, 'sit on the bed.'

So Lola sat while I brushed her hair and she nattered on about a weight-loss idea she had had which seemed to revolve around weighing yourself with one foot on the scales and one on the floor. Using this idea, she told me, she could lose as much weight as she wanted and not give up cakes. Then she started talking about this great new thing she had discovered which was so much fun she thought she'd be doing it quite a lot — and she reckoned she'd have no trouble getting men to assist.

'Just be careful,' I told her. 'Think before you do what you do with who you do it.' It was advice my mother had given me.

'Oh yes,' Lola assured me, 'I'll be very careful — I'll always ask them their name first.'

When I had finished she stared at herself in the mirror for a moment, gave me a big hug and skipped out of the door. I dressed slowly and walked down to the kitchen.

Obb was sitting at the table painting a Napoleonic cavalry officer the height of a pen top. He was gazing intently at the miniature horseman and glowering with concentration. He had developed into a dark-haired and handsome man of at least six foot three over the past few days, with a deep voice and measured speech; he also looked about fifty. I suspected it was now a he but hoped he wouldn't try and demonstrate it in the same way that Lola had.

'Morning, Obb,' I said. 'Breakfast?'

He dropped the horseman on the floor.

'Now look what you've made me do!' he growled, adding: 'Toast, please, and coffee — and it's Randolph, not Obb.'

'Congratulations,' I told him, but he only grunted in reply, found the cavalry officer and carried on with his painting.

Lola bounced into the living room, saw Randolph and stopped for a moment to stare at her nails demurely, hoping he would turn to look at her. He didn't. So she stood closer and said:

'Good morning, Randolph.'

'’morning,' he grunted without looking up, 'how did you sleep?'

'Heavily.'

'Well, you would, 'wouldn't you?'

She missed the insult and carried on jabbering:

'Wouldn't yellow be prettier?'

Randolph stopped and stared at her.

'Blue is the colour of a Napoleonic cavalry officer, Lola. Yellow is the colour of custard — and bananas.'

She turned to me and pulled a face, mouthed 'Square' and then helped herself to coffee.

'Can we go shopping, then?' she asked me. 'If we are buying underwear we might as well get some make-up and some scent; we could try on clothes and generally do girl sort of things together — I could take you out to lunch and gossip a lot, we could have our hair done and then shop some more, talk about boyfriends and perhaps after that go to the gym.'

'It's not exactly my sort of thing,' I said slowly, trying to figure out what sort of book St Tabularasa's had thought Lola might be most suitable for. I couldn't remember the last time I had had a girl's day out — certainly not this decade. Most of my clothes came mail order when did I ever have time for shopping?

'Oh, go on!' said Lola. 'You could do with a day off. What were you doing yesterday?'

'Attending a course on bookjumping using the ISBN positioning system.'

'And the day before?'

'Practical lessons in using textual sieves as PageRunner capturing devices.'

'And before that?'

'Searching in vain for the minotaur.'

'Exactly why you need a break. We don't even have to leave the Well — the latest Grattan catalogue is still under construction. We can get in because I know someone who's got a part-time job justifying text. Please say yes. It means so much to me!'

I sighed.

'Well, all right — but after lunch. I've got to do my Mary Jones thing in Caversham Heights all morning.'

She jumped up and down and clapped her hands with joy. I had to smile at her childish exuberance.

'You might move up a size, too,' said Randolph.

She narrowed her eyes and turned to face him.

'And what do you mean by that?' she asked angrily.

'Exactly what I said.'

'That I'm fat?'

'You said it, not me,' replied Randolph, concentrating on his metal soldier.

She picked up a glass of water and poured it into his lap.

'What the hell did you do that for!' he spluttered, getting up and grabbing a tea towel.

'To teach you,' yelled Lola, wagging a finger at him, 'that you can't say whatever you want, to whoever you want!'

And she walked out.

'What did I say?' said Randolph in an exasperated tone. 'Did you see that? She did that for no reason at all!'

'I think you got off lightly,' I told him. 'I'd go and apologise if I were you.'

He thought about this for a few seconds, lowered his shoulders and went off to find Lola, who I could hear sobbing somewhere near the stern of the flying boat.

'Young love!' said a voice behind me. 'Eighteen years of emotions packed into a single week — it can't be easy, now, can it?'

'Gran!' I said, whirling round. 'When did you get back?'

'Just now,' she replied, removing her gingham hat and gloves and passing me some cash.

'What's this?'

'D-3 Generics are annoyingly literal but it can pay dividends — I asked the cabbie to drive backwards all the way here and by the end of the trip he owed me money. How are things?'

I sighed. 'Well, it's like having a couple of teenagers in the house.'

'Look upon it as training for having your own children,' said Gran, sitting down on a chair and sipping my coffee.

'Gran?'

'Yes?'

'How did you get here? I mean, you are here, aren't you? You're not just a memory, or something?'

'Oh, I'm real, all right.' She laughed. 'You just need a bit of looking after until we sort out Aornis.'

'Aornis?' I queried.

'Yes.' Gran sighed. 'Think carefully for a moment.'

I mulled the name in my mind, and, sure enough, Aornis came out of the murk like a ship in fog. But the fog was deep, and there were other things hidden within — I could feel it.

'Oh yes,' I murmured, 'her. What else was I meant to remember?'

'Landen.'

He came out of the fog, too. The man in the sketch. I sat down and put my head in my hands. I couldn't believe I'd forgotten him.

'I'd regard it a bit like measles,' said Gran, patting my back. 'We'll cure you of her, never fear.'

'But then I have to go and battle with her again, in the real world?'

'Mnemonomorphs are always easier to contain on the physical plane,' she observed. 'Once you have beaten her in your mind, the rest should be easy.'

I looked up at her.

'Tell me again about Landen.'

And she did, for the next hour — until it was time for me to stand in for Mary Jones again.

I drove into Reading in Mary's car, past red Minis, blue Morris Marinas and the ubiquitous Spongg Footcare trucks. I had visited the real Reading on many occasions in my life and although the Heights Reading was a fair impression, the town was lacking in detail. A lot of roads were missing, the library was a supermarket, the Caversham district was a lot more like Beverly Hills than I remember, and there was a very grotty downtown which was more like New York in the seventies. I think I could guess where the author got his inspiration; I suppose it was artistic licence — something to increase the drama.

I stopped in a traffic jam and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. Our investigation of Perkins' death had not made much progress. Bradshaw had found the partially molten padlock and key in the remnants of the castle keep, but they didn't tell us any more. Havisham and I were not having much better luck ourselves: after three days of discreet investigation, only two pieces of information had come to light. First, that only eight members of Jurisfiction had access to The Sword of the Zenobians, and one of them was Vernham Deane. I mention this because he was posted as missing following an excursion into Ulysses to try to figure out what had happened to the stolen punctuation in the final chapter. No one had seen him since. Successive sweeps of Ulysses had failed to show that he had been there at all. In the absence of any more information, Havisham and I had started to discuss the possibility that Perkins might have removed the padlock himself — to clean out the cage or something, although this seemed doubtful. And what about my sabotaged Eject-O-Hat? Neither Havisham nor I had any more idea why I should be considered a threat; as Havisham delighted in pointing out, I was 'completely unimportant'.

But the big news that had emerged in the past few days was that the time of the UltraWord™ upgrade had been set. Text Grand Central had brought the date forward a fortnight to coincide with the 923rd Annual BookWorld Awards. During the ceremony Libris would inaugurate the new system before an audience of seven million invited characters. The Bellman told us he had been up to Text Grand Central and seen the new UltraWord™ engines for himself. Sparkling new, each engine could process about a thousand simultaneous readings of each book — the old V8.3 engines were lucky to top a hundred.

I wound down the window and looked out. Traffic jams in Reading weren't uncommon but they usually moved a little bit, and this one had been solid for twenty minutes. Exasperated, I got out of the car and went to have a look. Strangely, there appeared to have been an accident. I say strangely because all the drivers and pedestrians inside Caversham Heights were only Generic D-2 to D-9s and anything as dramatic as an accident was quite outside their brief. As I walked past the eight blue Morris Marinas in front of me, I noticed that each one had an identically damaged front wing and shattered windscreen. By the time I reached the head of the queue I could see that the incident involved one of the white Spongg Footcare trucks. But this truck was different from the others. Usually, they were unwashed Luton-bodied Fords with petrol streaks near the filler cap and a scratched roller shutter at the rear. This truck had none of these — it was pure white, very boxy and without a streak of dirt on it anywhere. The wheels, I noticed, weren't strictly round, either — they were more like a fifty-sided polygon which gave an impression of a circle. I looked closer. The tyres had no surface detail or texture. They were just flat black, without depth. The driver was no more detailed than the truck; he — or she or it — was pink and cubist with simple features and a pale blue boiler suit. The truck had been turning left and had hit one of the blue Morris Marinas, damaging all of them identically. The driver, a grey-haired man wearing herringbone tweed, was trying to remonstrate with the cubist driver but without much luck. The truck driver turned to face him, tried to speak but then gave up and looked straight ahead, going through the motions of driving the truck even though he was stationary.

'What's going on?' I asked the small crowd that had gathered.

'This idiot turned left when he shouldn't have,' explained the grey-haired Morris Marina driver while his identical grey-haired Generic D-4 clones nodded their heads vigorously. 'We could all have been killed!'

'Are you okay?' I said to the cubist driver, who looked blankly at me and attempted to change gear.

'I ve been driving in Caversham Heights since the book was written and never had an accident,' the Morris Marina driver carried on indignantly. 'This will play hell with my no-claims bonus — and what's more, I can't get any sense out of him at all!'

'I saw it all,' said another Spongg truck driver — a proper one this time. 'Whoever he is he needs to go back to driving school and take a few lessons.'

'Well, the show's over,' I told them. 'Mr Morris Marina Driver, is your car drivable?'

'I think so,' replied the eight identical middle-aged drivers in unison.

'Then get it out of here. Generic Truck Driver?'

'Yes?'

'Find a tow rope and get this heap of junk off the road.'

He left to do my bidding as the eight Morris Marina drivers drove off in their identically spluttering cars.

I was waving the cars around the stranded truck when there was a crackle in the air. The cubist truck vanished from the roadside leaving nothing but the faint smell of cantaloupes. I stared at the space left by the truck. The drivers were more than happy that this obstacle to their ordered lives had been removed, and they sounded their horns at me to get out of the way. I examined the area of the road carefully but found nothing except a single bolt made in the same style as the truck — no texture, just the same cubic shape. I walked back to my car, placed it in my bag, and drove on.

Jack was waiting for me outside Mickey Finn's Gym, situated above a couple of shops in Coley Avenue. We were there to question a boxing promoter about allegations of fight fixing. It was the best scene in Caversham Heights — gritty, realistic, and with good characterisation and dialogue. I met Jack slightly earlier while the story was off on a sub-plot regarding a missing consignment of ketamine, so there was time for a brief word together. Caversham Heights wasn't first-person — which was just as well, really, as I didn't think Jack had the depth of character to support it.

'Good morning, Jack,' I said as I walked up, 'how are things?'

He looked a lot happier than the last time I saw him and smiled agreeably, handing me coffee in a paper cup.

'Excellent, Mary — I should call you Mary, shouldn't I, just in case I have a slip of the tongue when we're being read? Listen, I went to see my wife Madeleine last night, and after a heated exchange of opinions we came to some sort of agreement.'

'You're going back to her?'

'Not quite,' replied Jack, taking a sip of coffee, 'but we agreed that if I stopped drinking and never saw Agatha Diesel again, she would consider it!'

'Well, that's a start, isn't it?'

'Yes,' replied Jack, 'but it might not be as simple as you think. I received this in the post this morning.'

He handed me a letter. I unfolded it and read:

'Hmm,' I muttered, 'it's signed Poi—'

'I know who it's signed by,' replied Jack sadly, retrieving the letter. 'The union is very powerful. They have influence that goes all the up to the Great Panjandrum. This could hasten the demolition of Caversham Heights, not delay it. Father Brown wanted to renounce the priesthood umpteen times, but, well, the union—'

'Jack,' I said, 'what do you want?'

'Me?'

'Yes, you.'

He sighed.

'It's not as simple as that. I have a responsibility for the seven hundred and eighty-six other characters in this book. Think of it — all those Generics sold off like post-Christmas turkeys or reduced to text. It makes me shudder just to think about it!'

'That might happen anyway, Jack. At least this way we have a fighting chance. Do your own thing. Break away from the norm.'

He sighed again and ran his fingers through his hair.

'But what about the conflicts'? Isn't that the point of being a loner detective? The appalling self-destruction, the inner battles within ourselves that add spice to the proceedings and enable the story to advance more interestingly? We can't just have murder-interview-interview-second murder-conjecture-interview-conjecture-false ending-dramatic twist-resolution, can we? Where's the interest if a detective doesn't get romantically involved with someone who has something to do with the first murder? Why, I might never have to make a choice between justice and my own personal feelings ever again!'

'And what if you don't?' I persisted. 'It needn't be like that. There's more than one way to make a story interesting.'

'Okay,' he said, 'let's say I do live happily with Madeleine and the kids — what am I going to do for sub-plots? In a story like this conflict, for want of a better word, is good. Conflict is right. Conflict works.'

He gazed at me angrily, but I knew he still believed in himself — the fact that we were even having this conversation proved that.

'It doesn't have to be marital conflicts,' I told him. 'We could get a few sub-plots from the Well and sew them in — I agree the action can't always stay with you, but if we— Hello, I think we've got company.'

A pink Triumph Herald had pulled up with a middle-aged woman in it. She got out, walked straight up to Jack and slapped him hard in the face.

'How dare you!' she screamed. 'I waited three hours for you at the Sad & Single wine bar — what happened?'

'I told you, Agatha. I was with my wife.'

'Sure you were,' she spat, her voice rising. 'Don't patronise me with your pathetic little lies — who are you screwing this time? One of those little tarts down at the station?'

'It's true,' he replied in an even voice, more shocked than outraged. 'I told you last night — it's all over, Agatha.'

'Oh yes? I suppose you put him up to this?' she said, looking at me, scorn and anger in her eyes. 'You come down here on a character exchange with your Outlander airs and self-determination bullshit and think you can improve the storyline? The supreme arrogance of you people!'

She stopped for a moment and looked at the pair of us.

'You're sleeping together, aren't you?'

'No,' I told her firmly, 'and if there aren't some improvements round here soon, there won't be a book. If you want a transfer out of here, I'm sure I can arrange something—'

'It's all so easy for you, isn't it?' she said, her face convulsing with anger and then fear as her voice rose. 'Think you can just make a few footnoterphone calls and everything will be just dandy?'

She pointed a long bony finger at me. 'Well, I'll tell you, Miss Outlander, I will not take this lying down!'

She glared at us both, marched back to her car and drove off with a squeal of tyres.

'How about that for a conflictual sub-plot?' I asked, but Jack wasn't amused.

'Let's see what else you can dream up — I'm not sure I like that one. Did you find out when the Book Inspectorate are due to read us?'

'Not yet,' I told him.

Jack looked at his watch. 'Come on, we've got the fight-rigging scene to do. You'll like this one. Mary was sometimes a little late with the "If you don't know we can't help you" line when we did the old good cop/bad cop routine, but just stay on your toes and you'll be fine.'

He seemed a lot happier having stood up to Agatha, and we walked across the road to where some rusty iron stairs led up to the gym.

Reading, Tuesday. It had been raining all night and the rain-washed streets reflected the dour sky. Mary and Jack walked up the steel steps that led to Mickey Finn's. A lugubrious gym that smelt of sweat and dreams, where hopefuls tried to spar their way out of Reading's underclass. Mickey Finn was an ex-boxer himself, with scarred eyes and a tremor to prove it. In latter days he was a trainer, then a manager. Today he just ran the gym and dabbled in drug-dealing on the side.

'Who are we here to see?' asked Mary as their feet rang out on the iron treads.

'Mickey Finn,' replied Jack. 'He got caught up in some trouble a few years ago and I put in a good word. He owes me.'

They reached the top and opened the doo—

It was a good job the door opened outwards. If it had opened inwards I would not be here to tell the tale. Jack teetered on the edge and I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back. The only part of Mickey Finn's that remained were short floorboards that changed to descriptive prose less than a foot out, the ragged ends whipping and fluttering like pennants in the wind. Beyond these remnants was nothing but a dizzying drop to a bleak and windswept sea, whipped up into a frenzy by a typhoon. The waves rose and fell, carrying with them small ships that looked like trawlers, the sailors on board covered in oilskins. But the sea wasn't water as I knew it; the waves here were made of letters, some of which had coalesced into words and on occasion short sentences. Every now and then a word or sentence would burst enthusiastically from the surface, where it would be caught by the sailors, who held nets on long poles.

'Blast!' said Jack. 'Damn and blast!'

'What is it?' I asked as letters that spelt 'saxophone' came barrelling towards us, changing to a real saxophone as they crossed the threshold and hit the ironwork of the staircase with a crash. The clouds of individual letters in the sky above the wave-tossed sea contained punctuation marks that swirled in ugly patterns. Now and then a bolt of lightning struck the sea and the letters swirled near the point of discharge, spontaneously creating words.

'The Text Sea!' yelled Jack against the rush of wind. We attempted to close the door against the gale as a grammasite flew past with a loud 'Gark!' and expertly speared a verb that had jumped from the sea at a badly chosen moment.

We pressed our weight against the door and it closed. The wind abated, the thunder now merely a distant rumble behind the half-glazed door. I picked up the bent saxophone.

'I had no idea the Text Sea looked like anything at all,' I said, panting. 'I thought it was just an abstract notion.'

'Oh, it's real, all right,' replied Jack, picking up his hat, 'as real as anything is down here. The LiteraSea is the basis for all prose written in roman script. It's connected to the Searyllic Ocean somewhere but I don't know the details. You know what this means, don't you?'

'That scene-stealers have been at work?'

'It looks more like a deletion to me,' replied Jack grimly, 'excised. The whole kerfuffle. Characters, setting, dialogue, sub-plot and the narrative-turning device regarding the fight-fixing that the writer had pinched from On the Waterfront.'

'Where to?' I asked.

'Probably to another book by the same author.'Jack sighed. 'Kind of proves we won't be long for the Well. It's the next nail in the coffin.'

'Can't we just jump into the next chapter and the discovery of the drug dealer shot dead when the undercover buy goes wrong?'

It would never work,' said Jack, shaking his head. 'Let me see — I wouldn't have known about Hawkins' involvement with Davison's master plan. More importantly, Mickey Finn would have no reason to be killed if he didn't talk to me, so he would have been there to stop the fight before Johnson placed his three-hundred-thousand-pound bet — and the heart-warming scene in the last two pages of the book with the young lad will make no sense unless I meet him here first. Shit. There isn't a holesmith anywhere in the Well who can fill this one. We're finished, Thursday. As soon as the book figures the gym scene has gone the plot will start to spontaneously unravel. We'll have to declare literary insolvency. If we do it quick we might be able to get most of the major parts reassigned to another book.'

'There must be something we can do!'

Jack thought for a moment.

'No, Thursday. It's over. I'm calling it.'

'Hang on,' I said. 'What if we come in again but instead of us both walking up the stairs you start at the top, meet me coming up and explain what you have just found out. We jump straight from there to chapter eight and … you're looking at me a bit oddly.'

'Mary—'

'Thursday.'

'Thursday. That would make chapter seven only a paragraph long!'

'Better than nothing.'

'It won't work.'

'Vonnegut does it all the time.' -

He sighed.

'Okay. Lead on, maestro.'

I smiled and we jumped back three pages.

Reading, Tuesday. It had been raining all night and the rain-washed streets reflected the dour sky. Mary was late and she met Jack walking down the stairway from an upstairs gymnasium, his feet ringing on the iron treads.

'Sorry I'm late,' said Mary, 'I had a puncture. Did you meet up with your contact?'

'Y-es,' replied Jack. 'Had you visited the gym — which you haven't, of course — you would have found it a lugubrious place that smells of sweat and dreams, where hopefuls try to spar their way out of Reading's underclass.'

'Who were you seeing?' asked Mary as they walked back to her car.

'Mickey Finn,' replied Jack, 'ex-boxer with scarred eyes and a tremor to match. He told me that Hawkins was involved with Davison's master plan. There is talk of a big shipment coming in on the fifth and he also let slip that he was going to see Jethro — the importance of which I won't understand until later.'

'Anything else?' asked Mary, looking thoughtful.

'No.'

'Are you sure?' 'Yes.'

'Are you SURE you're sure?'

'Er … No, wait. I've just remembered. There was this young kid there up for his first fight. It could make him. Mickey said he was the best he'd ever seen — he could be a contender.'

'Sounds like you had a busy morning,' said Mary, looking up at the grey sky.

'The busiest,' answered Jack, pulling his jacket around his shoulders. 'Come on, I'll buy you lunch.'

The chapter ended and Jack covered his face with his hands and groaned.

'I can't believe I said "the importance of which I won't understand until later". They'll never buy it. It's rubbish!'

'Listen,' I said, 'stop fretting. It'll be fine. We just have to hold the book together long enough to figure out a rescue plan.'

'What have we to lose?' replied Jack with a good measure of stoicism. 'You get up to Jurisfiction and see what you can find out about the Book Inspectorate. I'll hold a few auditions and try to rebuild the scene from memory.'

He paused.

'And Thursday?' 'Yes?'

'Thanks.'

I drove back to the flying boat. Having said I wasn't going to get involved with any internal politics, I was surprised by how much of a kinship with Caversham Heights I was feeling. Admittedly, the book was pretty dreadful, but it was no worse than the average Farquitt — perhaps I felt this way because it was my home.

'Are we going shopping now?' asked Lola, who had been waiting for me. 'I need something to wear for the BookWorld Awards the week after next.'

'Are you invited?'

'We all are,' she breathed excitedly. 'Apparently the organisers are borrowing a displacement field technology from SF. The long and short of it is that we will all be able to fit in the Starlight Room — it's going to be quite an event!'

'It certainly will,' I said, going upstairs. Lola followed me and watched from my bed as I changed out of Mary's clothes.

'You're quite important at Jurisfiction, aren't you?'

'Not really,' I replied, trying to do up my trouser button and realising that it was tighter than normal.

'Blast!' I said.

'What?'

'My trousers are too small.'

'Shrunk?'

'No …' I replied, staring into the mirror. There was no doubt about it. I was starting to put on a small amount of girth. I stared at it this way and that and Lola did the same, trying to figure out what I was looking at.

Catalogue shopping from the inside was a lot more fun than I had thought. Lola squeaked with delight at all the clothes on offer and tried about thirty different types of perfume before deciding not to buy any at all — she, in common with nearly all bookpeople, had no sense of smell. Watching her was like letting a child loose in a toy store — and her energy for shopping was almost unbelievable. It was while we were on the lingerie page that she asked me about Randolph.

'What do you think of him?'

'Oh, he's fine,' I replied non-committally, sitting on a chair and thinking of babies while Lola tried on one bra after another, each of which she seemed to love to bits until the next one. 'Why do you ask?'

'Well, I rather like him in a funny kind of way.'

'Does he like you?'

'I'm not sure. I think that's why he ignores me and makes jokes about my weight. Men always do that when they're interested. It's called subtext, Thursday — I'll tell you all about it some day.'

'Okay,' I said slowly, 'so what's the problem?'

'He doesn't really have a lot of, well, charisma.'

'There are lots of men out there, Lola,' I told her. 'Don't hurry. When I was seventeen I had the hots for this complete and utter flake named Darren. My mother disapproved, which made him into something of a magnet.'

'Ah!' said Lola. 'What about this bra?'

'I thought the pink suited you better.'

'Which pink? There were twelve.'

'The sixth pink, just after the tenth black and nineteenth lacy.'

'Okay, let's look at that one again.'

She rummaged through the pile, found what she wanted and said:

'Thursday?'

'Yes?'

'Randolph calls me a tart because I like boys. Do you think that's fair?'

'It's one of the great injustices of life,' I told her. 'If he did the same he'd be toasted as a "ladies' man". But Lola, have you met anyone who you really liked, someone with whom you'd like to spend more exclusive time?'

'You mean — a boyfriend?'

'Yes.'

She paused and looked at herself in the mirror.

'I don't think I'm written that way, Thurs. But you know, sometimes, just afterwards, you know, when there is that really nice moment and I'm in his big strong arms and feeling sleepy and warm and contented, I can feel there is something that I need just outside my grasp — something I want but can't have.'

'You mean love?'

'No — a Mercedes.'

She wasn't joking.[16]

It was my footnoterphone.

'Hang on, Lola — Thursday speaking.'[17]

I looked at Lola, who was trying on a basque.

'Yes,' I replied, 'why?'[18]

'The safe side of what?'[19]

'I see. What can I do for you apart from answering questions about pianos?'[20]

I wasn't busy. Apart from a Jurisfiction session tomorrow at midday, I was clear.

'Sure. Where and when?'[21]

'Okay.'

Lola was looking at me mournfully.

'Does this mean we'll have to miss out on the gym? We have to go to the gym — if I don't I'll feel guilty about eating all those cakes.'

'What cakes?'

'The ones I'm going to eat on the way to the gym.'

'I think you get enough exercise, Lola. But we've got half an hour yet — c'mon, I'll buy you a coffee.'