'—misdirection.'
'Bingo. He blames someone else.'
'But the Danish?'
'Shows how desperate he is, doesn't it? As a nation we've been blaming the Welsh and the French for far too long, and with the Russians out of the frame he's come up with Denmark as public enemy number one. He's using the Viking raids of AD 800 and the Danish Rule of England in the eleventh century as an excuse to whip up some misinformed xenophobia.'
'Ludicrous!'
'Agreed. The papers have been full of anti-Danish propaganda this past month. All Bang & Olufsen entertainment systems have been withdrawn owing to "safety" concerns and Lego has been banned pending "choking hazard" investigations. The list of outlawed Danish waters is becoming longer by the second. Kierkegaard's works have already been declared illegal under the Undesirable Danish Literature Act and will be burned. Hans Christian Andersen will be next, we're told — and after that, maybe even Karen Blixen.'
'They can pull my copy of Out of Africa from my cold dead fingers.'
'Mine too. You'd better make sure Hamlet doesn't tell anyone where he's from. Shhh. I think something's happening.'
Something was happening. The floor manager had walked out on to the set and was explaining to us exactly what we should do. After a protracted series of technical checks, the host of the show walked on to applause from the audience. This was Tudor Webastow of The Owl, who had made a career out of being just inquisitive enough to be considered a realistic political foil for the press but not so inquisitive that he would be found in the Thames wearing concrete overshoes.
He sat down at the middle of a table with two empty chairs either side of him and sorted his notes. Unusually for Evade the Question Time the show had two speakers instead of four, but tonight was special: Yorrick Kaine would be facing his political opposition, Mr Redmond van de Poste, of the Commonsense Party. Mr Webastow cleared his throat and began.
'Good evening and welcome to Evade the Question Time, the nation's premier topical talk show. Tonight, as every night, a panel of distinguished public figures generally evade answering the audience's questions and instead tow the party line.'
There was applause at this, and Webastow continued:
'The show tonight comes from Swindon in Wessex. Sometimes called the third capital of England or the "Venice on the M4", the Swindon of today is a financial and manufacturing powerhouse, its citizens a cross-section of professionals and artists who are politically indicative of the country as a whole. I'd also like to mention at this point that Evade the Question Time is brought to you by Neat-Fit® Exhaust Systems, the tailpipe of choice.'
He paused for a moment and shuffled his papers.
'We are honoured to have with us tonight two very different speakers from opposite ends of the political spectrum. First I would like to introduce a man who was politically dead two years ago but has managed to pull himself up to the second-highest political office in the nation with a devoted following of many millions, not all of whom are deranged. Ladies and gentlemen, Chancellor Yorrick Kaine!'
There was a mixed reception as Kaine walked on to the stage, and he grinned and nodded his head for the benefit of the crowd. I leaned forward in my seat. He didn't appear to have aged at all in the two years since I had last seen him, which is what I would expect from a fictioneer. Still looking to be in his late twenties with black hair swept neatly to the side, he might have been a male model from a knitting pattern. I knew he wasn't. I'd checked.
'Thank you very much,' said Kaine, sitting at the table and clasping his hands in front of him. 'May I say that I always regard Swindon as a home away from home.'
There was a brief twitter of delight from the front of the audience, mostly little old ladies who looked upon Kaine as the son they never had. Webastow went on:
'And opposing him we are also honoured to welcome Mr Redmond van de Poste of the opposition Commonsense Party.'
There was notably less applause as van de Poste walked in. He was older than Kaine by almost thirty years, looked tired and gaunt, wore round horn-rimmed spectacles and had a high-domed forehead that shone when it caught the light. He looked about furtively before sitting down stiffly. I guessed the reason. He was wearing a heavy flak vest beneath his suit — and with good reason. The last three Commonsense leaders had all met with mysterious deaths. The previous incumbent had been Mrs Fay Bentoss, who had died after being hit by a car. Not so unusual, you might think — except she had been in her front room when it happened.
'Thank you, gentlemen, and welcome. The first question comes from Miss Pupkin.'
A small woman stood up and said shyly:
'Hello. A Terrible Thing was done by Somebody this week, and I'd like to ask the panel if they condemn this.'
'A very good question,' responded Webastow. 'Mr Kaine, perhaps you'd like to start the ball rolling?'
'Thank you, Tudor. Yes, I condemn utterly and completely the Terrible Thing in the strongest possible terms. We in the Whig Party are appalled by the way in which Terrible Things are done in this great nation of ours with no retribution against the Somebody who did them. I would also like to point out that the current spate of Terrible Things being undertaken in our towns and cities is a burden we inherited from the Commonsense Party, and I would like to point out that in real terms the occurrence of Terrible Things has dropped by over twenty-eight per cent since we took office.'
There was applause at this. Webastow then asked van de Poste for his comments.
'Well,' said Redmond with a sigh, 'quite clearly my learned friend has got his facts mixed up. According to the way we massage the figures, Terrible Things are actually on the increase. But I'd like to stop playing party politics for a moment and state for the record that although this is of course a great personal tragedy for those involved, condemning out of hand these acts does not allow us to understand why they occur and more needs to be done to get to the root cause of—'
'Yet again,' interrupted Kaine, 'yet again we see the Commonsense Party shying away from its responsibilities and failing to act toughly on unspecified difficulties. I hope all the unnamed people who have suffered unclearly defined problems will understand—'
'I did say we condemned the Terrible Thing,' put in van de Poste, 'and I might add that we have been conducting a study into the entire range of Terrible Things all the way from Just Annoying to Outrageously Awful and will act on these findings — if we gain power.'
'Trust the Commonsensers to do things by half measures!' scoffed Kaine, who obviously enjoyed these sorts of discussions. 'By going only so far as "Outrageously Awful" Mr van de Poste is selling his own nation short. We in the Whig Party have been looking at the Terrible Things problem and propose a zero-tolerance attitude to offences as low as Mildly Inappropnate. Only in this way can the Somebodies who commit Terrible Things be stopped before they move on to acts that are Obscenely Perverse.'
There was another smattering of applause, presumably as the audience tried to figure out whether 'Just Annoying' was worse than 'Mildly Inappropriate'.
'Succinctly put,' announced Webastow. 'At the end of the first round I will award three points to Mr Kaine for an excellent nonspecific condemnation, plus one bonus point for blaming the previous government, and another for successfully mutating the question to promote the party line. Mr van de Poste gets a point for a firm rebuttal, but only two points for his condemnation as he tried to inject an impartial and intelligent observation. So at the end of the first round, it's Kaine leading with five points, and van de Poste on three.'
There was more applause as the numbers came up on the score-board.
'On to the next stage of the show, which we call the "not answering the question" round. We have a question from Miss Ives.'
A middle-aged woman put up her hand and asked:
'Does the panel think that sugar should be added to rhubarb pie or the sweetness deficit made up by an additive, such as custard?'
'Thank you, Miss Ives. Mr van de Poste, would you care to not answer this question first?'
'Well,' said Redmond, eyeing the audience for any possible assassins, 'this question goes straight to the heart of government, and I'd like first to point out that the Commonsense Party, when we were in power, tried more ways of doing things than any other party in living memory, and in consequence came closer to the right way of doing something, even if we didn't know it at the time.'
There was applause and Joffy and I exchanged looks.
'Does it get any better?' I whispered.
'Wait until they get on to Denmark.'
'I utterly refute,' began Kaine, 'the implication that we aren't doing things the right way. To demonstrate this I'd like to wander completely off the point and talk about the Health Service Overhaul that we will launch next year. We want to replace the outdated "preventatlve" style of healthcare this country has relentlessly pursued with a "wait until it gets really bad" system which will target those most in need of medical treatment — the sick. Yearly health screenings for all citizens will end and will be replaced by a "tertiary" diagnostic regime which will save money and resources.'
Again, there was applause.
'Okay,' announced Webastow, 'I'm going to give van de Poste three points for successfully not answering that question at all, but five points to Kaine, who not only ignored the question but instead used it as a platform for his own political agenda. So with six rounds still to go, we have Kaine with ten points, and van de Poste with six. Next question please.'
A young man with dyed red hair sitting in our row put his hand up.
'I would like to suggest that the Danish are not our enemy, and this is nothing more than a cynical move by the Whigs to blame someone else for our own economic troubles.'
'Ah!' said Webstow. 'The controversial Danish question. I'm going to let Mr van de Poste avoid this question first.'
Van de Poste looked unwell all of a sudden and glanced nervously towards where Stricknene and Gayle were glaring at him.
'I think,' he began slowly, 'that if the Danish are as Mr Kaine describes, I will offer my support to his policies.'
He dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief as Yorrick began:
'When I came to power England was a nation in the grip of economic decline and social ills. No one realised it at the time and I took it upon myself to demonstrate by any means in my power the depths to which this great nation had fallen. With the support of my followers, I have managed to demonstrate reasonably clearly that things aren't as good as we thought they were, and what we imagined was peace and coexistence with our neighbours was actually a fool's paradise of delusion and paranoia. Anyone who thinks . . .'
I leaned over to Joffy.
'Do people believe this garbage?'
'I'm afraid so. I think he's working on the "people will far more readily believe a big lie than a small one" principle. Still surprises me, though.'
'. . . whoever disturbs this mission,' rattled on Kaine, 'is an enemy of the people, whether they be Danish or Welsh sympathisers eager to overthrow our nation, or ill-informed lunatics who do not deserve the vote, or a voice.'
There was applause but a few boos, too. I saw Colonel Gayle make notes on a scrap of paper of who was shouting them, counting out the seat numbers as he did so.
'But why the Danish?' continued the man with the red hair. 'They have a notoriously fair system of parliament, an impeccable record of human rights and a deserved reputation for upstanding charitable works in Third World nations — I think these are lies, Mr Kaine!'
There were gasps and intakes of breath but a few head-noddings, too. Even, I think, from van de Poste.
'For the moment at least,' began Kaine in a conciliatory tone, 'everyone is permitted an opinion, and I thank our friend for his candour. However, I would like to bring the audience's attention to an unrelated yet emotive issue that will turn the discussion away from the embarrassing shortcomings of my administration and back into the arena of populist politics. Namely: the disgraceful record of puppy and kitten death when the Commonsense Party were in power.'
At the mention of puppies and kittens dying there were cries of alarm from the elder members of the audience. Confident that he had turned the discussion, Kaine went on:
'As things stand at the moment, over one thousand unwanted puppies and kittens are destroyed each year by lethal injection which is freely available to veterinarians in Denmark. As committed humanitarians, the Whig Party has always condemned unwanted pet extermination.'
'Mr van de Poste?' asked Webastow. 'How do you react to Mr Kaine's diversionary tactics regarding kitten death?'
'Clearly,' began van de Poste, 'kitten and puppy death is regrettable, but we in the Commonsense Party must bring it to everyone's attention that unwanted pets have to be destroyed in this manner. If people were more responsible with their pets, then this sort of thing wouldn't happen.'
'Typical of the Commonsense approach!' barked Kaine. 'Blaming the population as though they were feeble-minded fools with little personal responsibility! We in the Whig Party would never condone such an accusation, and are appalled by Mr van de Poste's outburst. I will personally pledge to you now that I will make the puppy home deficit problem my primary concern when I am made dictator.'
There were loud cheers at this and I shook my head sadly.
'Well,' said Webastow happily, 'I think I will give Mr Kaine a full five points for his masterful misdirection, plus a bonus two points for obscuring the Danish issue rather than facing up to it. Mr van de Poste, I'm sorry that I can only offer you a single point. Not only did you tacitly agree with Mr Kaine's outrageous foreign policy, but you answered the unwanted pet problem with an honest reply. So at the end of round three Kaine is galloping ahead with seventeen points, and van de Poste bringing up the rear with seven. Our next question comes from Mr Wedgwood.'
'Yes,' said a very old man in the third row, 'I should like to know if the panel supports the Goliath Corporation's change to a faith-based corporate management system.'
And so it dragged on for nearly an hour, Kaine making outrageous claims and most of the audience failing to notice or, even worse, care. I was extremely glad when the programme drew to a close with Kaine leading thirty-eight points to van de Poste's sixteen, and we filed out of the door.
'What now?' asked Joffy.
I took my Jurisfiction TravelBook from my pocket and opened it at the page that offered a paragraph of The Sword of the Zenobians, one of the many unpublished works Jurisfiction used as a prison. All I had to do was grab Kaine's hand and read.
'I'm going to take Kaine back to the BookWorld with me. He's far too dangerous to leave out here.'
'I agree,' said Joffy, leading me round to where two large limousines were waiting for the Chancellor. 'He'll want to meet his "adoring" public so you should have a chance.'
We found the crowd waiting for him and pushed our way to the front. Most of the TV audience had turned up to see Kaine but not for the same purpose as me. There was excited chatter as Kaine appeared. He smiled serenely and walked down the line, shook hands and was presented with flowers and babies to kiss. Close by his side was Colonel Gayle with a phalanx of guards who stared into the crowd to make sure no one tried anything. Behind them all I could see was Stricknene still clinging on to the red briefcase. I partially hid myself behind an enthusiastic Kaine acolyte waving a Whig Party flag so Kaine didn't see me. We had crossed swords once before and he knew what I was capable of, much as I knew what he was capable of — the last time we met he had tried to have us all eaten by the Glatisant, a sort of hell-beast from the depths of mankind's most depraved imagination. If he could conjure up fictional beasts at will, I would have to be careful.
But then, as the small group moved closer, I started to feel a curious impulse not to trap Kaine but to join in with the infectious enthusiasm. The atmosphere was electric, and being swept along with the crowd was something that just suddenly seemed right. Joffy had fallen under the spell already and was waving and whistling his support. I fought down a strong urge to stop what I was doing and perhaps give Yorrick the benefit of the doubt. He and his entourage were now upon us. His hand came out towards the crowd. I steadied myself, glanced at the opening lines of Zenobians and waited for the right moment. I would have to hold on tight as I read our way into the BookWorld but that didn't bother me as I'd done it many times before. What did worry me was the fact that my resolve was softening fast. Before the Kaine magnetism could take me over any further I took a deep breath, grabbed the outstretched hand and muttered quickly:
'It was a time of peace within the land of the Zenobians . . .'
It didn't take long for me to jump into the BookWorld. Within a few moments the bustling night-time crowd in the car park of the Toad News Network's studios had vanished from view to be replaced by a warm verdant valley where herds of unicorns grazed peacefully under the summer sun. Grammasites wheeled in the blue skies, riding the thermals that rose from the warm grassland.
'So!' I said, turning to Kaine and receiving something of a shock. Beside me was not Yorrick but a middle-aged man holding a Whig Party flag and staring at the crystal-clear waters babbling through a gap in the rocks. I must have grabbed the wrong hand.
'Where am I?' asked the man, who was understandably confused.
'It's a near death experience,' I told him hastily, 'what do you think?'
'It's beautiful!'
'Good. Don't get too fond of it, I'm taking you back.'
I grasped him again, muttered the password under my breath and jumped out of fiction, something I had a lot less trouble with. We arrived behind some dustbins just as Kaine and his entourage were driving off. I ran up to Joffy, who was still waving goodbye, and told him to snap out of it.
'Sorry,' he said, shaking his head. 'What happened to you?'
'Don't ask. C'mon, let's go home.'
We left the scene as a very excited and confused middle-aged man tried to tell anyone who would listen about his 'near death' experience.
I went to bed past midnight, my head spinning from my experience of Kaine's almost hypnotic hold on the populace. Still, I wasn't out of ideas. I could try to grab him again and, failing that, use the eraserhead I had smuggled out of the BookWorld. Destroying him didn't bother me. I'd be no more guilty of murder than an author with a delete key. But while Formby opposed him Kaine would not become dictator, so I had a bit of time to work up a strategy. I could observe, and plan. 'Time spent doing renaissance,' Mrs Malaprop used to tell me, 'is never wasted.'
4
It was the morning following Evade the Question Time and I had slept badly, waking up before Friday, which was unusual. I stared at the ceiling and thought about Kaine. I'd have to follow him to his next public engagement before he discovered that I had returned. I was just thinking about why Joffy and I had nearly been sucked into the whole Yorrick circus when Friday awoke and blinked at me in a breakfast sort of way. I dressed quickly and took him downstairs.
'Welcome to Swindon Breakfast with Toad' announced the TV presenter as we walked in, 'with myself, Warwick Fridge, and the lovely Leigh Onzolent—'
'Hello—'
'—bringing you two hours of news and views, fun and competitions to see you into the day. Breakfast with Toad is sponsored by Arkwright's Doorknobs, the finest door furniture in Wessex.'
Warwick turned to Leigh, who was looking way too glamorous for eight in the morning. She smiled and continued:
'This morning we'll be speaking to croquet captain Roger Kapok about Swindon's chances in Superhoop '88, and also to a man who claims to have seen unicorns in a near death experience. Network Toad's resident dodo whisperer will be on hand for your pet's psychiatric problems and our Othello backwards-reading competition reaches the quarter-finals. Later on we talk to Mr Joffy Next about tomorrow's potential resurrection with St Zvlkx, but first, the news. The CEO of Goliath has announced contrition targets to be attainable within—'
'Morning, daughter,' said my mother, who had just walked into the kitchen, 'I never thought of you as an early riser.'
'I wasn't until Junior turned up,' I replied, pointing at Friday, who was eyeing the porridge pot expectantly, 'but if there's one thing he knows how to do, it's eat.'
'It's what you did best when you were his age. Oh,' added my mother absently, 'I have to give you something, by the way.'
She hurried from the room and returned with a sheath of official-looking papers.
'Mr Hicks left them for you.'
Braxton Hicks was my old boss back at Swindon SpecOps. I had left abruptly, and from the look of his opening letter it didn't look as if he was very happy about it. I had been demoted to 'Literary Detective Researcher', and the letter demanded my gun and badge back. The second letter was an outstanding warrant of arrest relating to a trumped-up charge of possession of a small amount of illegally owned bootleg cheese.
'Is cheese still overpriced?' I asked my mother.
'Criminal!' she muttered. 'Over five hundred per cent duty. And it's not just cheese, either. They've extended the duty to cover all dairy products — even yogurt.'
I sighed. I would probably have to go into SpecOps and explain myself. I could beg forgiveness, go to the stressperts and plead post-traumatic stress disorder or Xplkqulkiccasia or something and ask for my old job back. Perhaps if I were to get handy with a nine iron it might swing things with my golf-mad boss. Outside SpecOps was not a good place to be if I wanted to hunt Yorrick Kaine or lobby the ChronoGuard for my husband back; it would help to have access to all the SpecOps and police databases.
I looked through the papers. I had apparently been found guilty of the cheese transgression and fined £5,000 plus costs.
'Did you pay this?' I asked my mother, showing her the court demand.
'Yes.'
'Then I should pay you back.'
'No need,' she replied, adding before I could thank her: 'I paid it out of your overdraft — which is quite big, now.'
'How . . . thoughtful of you.'
'Don't mention it. Bacon and eggs?'
'Please.'
'Coming up. Would you get the milk?'
I went to the front door to fetch the milk and as I bent down to pick it up there was a whang-thop noise as a bullet zipped past my ear and thudded into the door frame next to me. I was about to slam the door and grab my automatic when an unaccountable stillness took hold, like a sudden becalming. Above me a pigeon hung frozen in the air, its wingtip feathers splayed as it reached the bottom of a downstroke. A motorcyclist on the road was balancing, impossibly still, and passers-by were now as stiff and unmoving as statues — even Pickwick had stopped in mid-waddle. Time, for the moment at least, had frozen. I knew only one person who had a face that could stop the clock like this — my father. The question was — where was he?
I looked up and down the road. Nothing. Since I was about to be assassinated I thought it might help to know who was doing the assassinating, so I walked down the garden path and across the road to the alley where de Floss had hidden himself so badly the previous day. It was here that I found my father looking at a small and very pretty blonde woman no more than five foot high who was time-frozen halfway through the process of disassembling a sniper's rifle. She was probably in her late twenties and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail held tight with a flower hair tie. I noted with a certain detached amusement that there was a lucky gonk attached to the trigger guard and that the stock was covered with pink fur. Dad looked younger than me but he was instantly recognisable. The odd nature of the time business tended to make operatives live nonlinear lives — every time I met him he was a different age.
'Hello, Dad.'
'You were correct,' he said, comparing the woman's frozen features with those on a series of photographs, 'it's an assassin all right.'
'Never mind that for the moment!' I cried happily. 'How are you? I haven't seen you for years!'
He turned and stared at me.
'My dear girl, we spoke only a few hours ago!'
'No we didn't.'
'We did, actually.'
'We did not.'
He stared at me for a moment and looked at his watch, shook it and listened to it, then shook it again.
'Here,' I said, handing him the chronograph I was wearing, 'take mine.'
'Very nice — thank you. Ah! I stand corrected. Three hours from now. It's an easy mistake to make. Did you have any thoughts about that matter we discussed?'
'No, Dad,' I said in an exasperated tone, 'it hasn't happened yet, remember?'
'You're always so linear,' he muttered, returning to comparing the pictures with the assassin. 'I think you ought to try and expand your horizons a bit — bingo!'
He had found a picture that matched my assassin and read the label on the back.
'Expensive hit-woman working in the Wiltshire—Oxford area. Looks petite and bijou but is as deadly as the best of them. She trades under the name the Windowmaker.' He paused. 'Should be Widowmaker, shouldn't it?'
'But I heard the Windowmaker was lethal,' I pointed out. 'A contract with her and you're deader than corduroy.'
'I heard that too,' replied my father thoughtfully. 'Sixty-seven victims; sixty-eight if she was the one that did Samuel Pring. She must have meant to miss. It's the only explanation. In any event, her real name is Cindy Stoker.'
This was unexpected. Cindy was married to Spike Stoker, an operative over at SO-17 whom I had worked with a couple of times. I had even given him advice on how best to tell Cindy that he hunted down werewolves for a living — not the choicest profession for a potential husband.
'Cindy is my assassin? Cindy is the Windowmaker?'
'You know her?'
'Of her. Wife of a good friend.'
'Well, don't get too chummy. She tries and fails to kill you three times. The second time with a bomb under your car on Monday, then next Friday at eleven in the morning — but she fails and you, ultimately, choose for her to die. I shouldn't really be telling you this, but as we discussed, we've got bigger fish to fry.'
'What bigger fish to fry?'
'Sweetpea,' he said, giving me his stern 'father knows best' voice, 'I'm really not going to go through it all again. Now I have to get back to work — there's a TimePhoon brewing in the Dark Ages and if we don't sort it out we'll be picking anachronisms out of the timeline for a century.'
'Wait — you're working at the ChronoGuard?'
'I've told you all about this already! Do try and keep up — you're going to need all your wits about you over the next week. Now, get back to the house and I'll start the world up again.'
He wasn't in a very chatty mood, but since I would be seeing him later and would find out then what we had just discussed, there didn't seem a lot of point in talking anyway, so I bade him goodbye, and as I walked up the garden path time returned to normal with a snap. The pigeon flew on, the traffic continued to move and everything carried on as usual. Time had stopped so completely that everything my father and I had talked about occupied no time at all. Still, at least this meant I wouldn't have to be constantly looking over my shoulder as I knew when she would try to get rid of me. Mind you, I wasn't looking forward to her death at my hands. Spike would be severely pissed off.
I returned to the kitchen, where Mum was still hard at work cooking my bacon and eggs. To her and Friday I had been gone less than twenty seconds.
'What was that noise when you were at the door, Thursday?'
'Probably a car backfiring.'
'Funny,' she said, 'I could have sworn it was a high-velocity bullet striking wood. Two eggs or one?'
'Two, please.'
1 picked up the newspaper, which was running a five-page expose revealing that 'Danish pastries' were actually brought to Denmark by displaced Viennese bakers in the sixteenth century. 'In what other ways,' thundered the article, 'have the dishonest Danes made fools of us?' I shook my head sadly and turned to another page.
Mum said she could look after Friday until teatime, something I got her to promise before she had fully realised the implications of nappy changing and saw just how bad his manners were at breakfast. He yelled, 'Ut enim ad veniam!', which might have meant: 'Look how far I can throw my porridge!' as a spoonful of oatmeal flew across the kitchen, much to the delight of DH82, who had learned pretty quickly that hanging around messy toddlers at mealtimes was an extremely productive pastime.
Hamlet came down to breakfast, followed, after a prudent gap, by Emma. They bade each other good morning in such an obvious way that only their serious demeanour kept me from laughing out loud.
'Did you sleep well, Lady Hamilton?' asked Hamlet.
'I did, thank you. My room faces east for the morning light, you know.'
'Ah!' replied Hamlet. 'Mine doesn't. I believe it was once the boxroom. It has pretty pink wallpaper and a bedside light shaped like Tweetie-pie. Not that I noticed much, of course, being fast asleep — on my own.'
'Of course.'
'Let me show you something,' said Mum after breakfast.
I followed her down to Mycroft's workshop. Alan had kept Mum's dodos trapped in the potting shed all night and even now threatened to peck anyone who so much as looked at him 'in a funny way'.
'Pickwick!' I said sternly. 'Are you going to let your son bully those dodos?'
Pickwick looked the other way and pretended to have an itchy foot. To be honest she couldn't control Alan any more than I could. Only half an hour previously he had chased the postman out of the garden with an angry plink-plink-plink noise, something even the postman had to admit 'was a first'.
Mum opened the side door to the large workshop and we entered. This was where my Uncle Mycroft did all his inventing. It was here that he had demonstrated, among many other things, translating carbon paper, a sarcasm early warning device, Nextian geometry and, most important to me, the Prose Portal — the method by which I first entered fiction. Mother was always nervous in Mycroft's lab. Many years ago he had developed some four-dimensional paper, the idea being that you could print on the same sheet of paper again and again, isolating the different over-printings in marginally different time zones that could be read by the use of temporal spectacles. By going to the nanosecond level, a million sheets of text or pictures could be stored on one sheet of paper in a single second. Brilliant — but the paper looked identical to a standard sheet of A4, and it had been a long, contentious family argument that my mother used the irreplaceable prototype to line the compost bucket. It was no wonder she was careful near his inventions.
'What did you want to show me?'
She smiled and led me to the end of the workshop. There, next to my stuff, which she had rescued from my apartment, was the unmistakable shape of my Porsche 356 Speedster hidden beneath a dustsheet.
'I've run the engine every month and kept it MOTed for you. I even took it for a spin a couple of times.'
She pulled the sheet off with a flourish. The car still looked slightly shabby after our various encounters, but just the way I liked it. I gently touched the bullet holes that had been made by Hades all those years ago, and the bent front wing where I had slid it into the River Severn. I opened the garage doors.
'Thanks, Mum. Sure you're all right with the boy Friday?'
'Until four this afternoon. But you have to promise me something.'
'What's that?'
'That you'll come to my Eradications Anonymous group this evening.'
'Mum—!'
'It will do you good. You might enjoy it. Might meet someone. Might make you forget Linden.'
'Landen. His name's Landen. And I don't need or want to forget him.'
'Then the group will support you. Besides, you might learn something. Oh, and would you take Hamlet with you? Mr Bismarck has a bee in his bonnet about Danes because of that whole silly Schleswig-Holstein thingummy.'
I narrowed my eyes. Could Joffy be right?
'What about Emma? Do you want me to take her, too?'
'No. Why?'
'Er, no reason.'
I picked up Friday and gave him a kiss.
'Be good, Friday. You're staying with Nana for the day.'
Friday looked at me, looked at Mum, stuck his finger up his nose and said: 'Sunt in culpa qui officia id est laborum?'
I ruffled his hair and he showed me a bogey he had found. I declined the present, wiped his hand with a hanky, then went to look for Hamlet. I found him in the front garden demonstrating a thrust-and-parry sword fight to Emma and Pickwick. Even Alan had left off bullying the other dodos and was watching in silence. I called out to Hamlet and he came running.
'Sorry,' said the prince as I opened the garage doors, just demonstrating how that damn fool Laertes gets his comeuppance.'
I showed him how to get into the Porsche, dropped in myself, started the engine and drove off down the hill towards the Brunei Centre.
'You seem to be getting on very well with Emma.'
'Who?' asked Hamlet, unconvincingly vague.
'Lady Hamilton.'
'Oh, her. Nice girl. We have a lot in common.'
'Such as—?'
'Well,' said Hamlet, thinking hard, 'we both have a good friend called Horatio.'
We motored on down past the magic roundabout and I pointed out the new stadium with its four floodlighting towers standing tall among the low housing.
'That's our croquet stadium,' I said, 'thirty thousand seats. Home of the Swindon Mallets croquet team.'
'Croquet is a national sport out here?'
'Oh yes,' I replied, knowing a thing or two about it since I used to play myself. 'It has evolved a lot since the early days. For a start the teams are bigger — ten a side in World Croquet League. The players have to get their balls through the hoops in the quickest possible time, so it can be quite rough. A stray ball can pack a wallop and a flailing mallet is potentially lethal. The WCL insist on body armour and perspex barriers for the spectators.'
I turned left into Manchester Road and parked behind a Griffin-6 Lowrider.
'What now?'
'Haircut. You don't think I'm going to spend the next few weeks looking like Joan of Arc, do you?'
'Ah!' said Hamlet. 'You hadn't mentioned it for a while so I'd stopped noticing. If it's all right with you, I'll just stay here and write a letter to Horatio. Does "pirate" have one "t" or two?'
'One.'
I walked into Mum's hairdresser. The stylists looked at my hair with a sort of shocked numbness until Lady Volescamper, who along with her increasingly eccentric mayoral husband constituted Swindon's most visible aristocracy, suddenly pointed at me and said in a strident tone that could shatter glass:
'That's the style I want. Something new. Something retro — something to cause a sensation at the Swindon Mansion House Ball!'
Mrs Barnet, who was both the chief stylist and official gossip laureate of Swindon, kept her look of horror to herself and then said diplomatically:
'Of course. And may I say that Her Grace's boldness matches her sense of style.'
Lady Volescamper returned to her Femole magazine, appearing not to recognise me, which was just as well — the last time I went to Vole Towers a hell beast from the darkest depths of the human imagination trashed the entrance lobby.
'Hello, Thursday,' said Mrs Barnet, wrapping a sheet around me with an expert flourish, 'haven't seen you for a while.'
'I've been away.'
'In prison?'
'No — just away.'
'Ah. How would you like it? I have it on good authority that the "Joan of Arc" look is set to be quite popular this summer.'
'You know I'm not a fashion person, Gladys. Just get rid of the dopey haircut, would you?'
'As madame wishes.' She hummed to herself for a moment, then asked: 'Been on holiday this year?'
I got back to the car a half-hour later to find Hamlet talking to a traffic warden, who seemed so engrossed in whatever he was telling her that she wasn't writing me a ticket.
'And that,' said Hamlet as soon as I came within earshot, making a thrusting motion with his hand, 'was when I cried: "A rat, a rat!" and killed the unseen old man. Hello, Thursday — goodness, that's short, isn't it?'
'It's better than it was. C'mon, I've got to go and get my job back.'
'Job?' asked Hamlet as we drove off, leaving a very indignant traffic warden, who wanted to know what happened next.
'Yes. Out here you need money to live.'
'I've got lots,' said Hamlet generously. 'You should have some of mine.'
'Somehow I don't think fictional kroner from an unspecified century will cut the mustard down at the First Goliath — and put the skull away. They aren't generally considered a fashion accessory here in the Outland.'
'They're all the rage where I come from.'
'Well, not here. Put it in this Tesco's bag.'
'STOP!'
I screeched to a halt.
'What?'
'That, over there. It's me!'
Before I could say anything Hamlet had jumped out of the car and run across the road to a coin-operated machine on the comer of the street. I parked the Speedster and walked over to join him. He was staring with delight at the simple box, the top half of which was glazed; inside was a suitably attired mannequin visible from the waist up.
'It's called a Will-Speak machine,' I said, passing him a carrier bag. 'Here — put the skull in the bag like I asked.'
'What does it do?'
'Officially it's called a Shakespeare Soliloquy Vending Automaton,' I explained. 'You put in two shillings and get a short snippet from Shakespeare.'
'Of me?'
'Yes,' I said, 'of you.'
For it was, of course, a Hamlet Will-Speak machine, and the mannequin Hamlet sat looking blankly out at the flesh-and-blood Hamlet standing next to me.
'Can we hear a bit?' asked Hamlet excitedly.
'If you want. Here.'
I dug out a coin and placed it in the machine. There was a whirring and clicking as the dummy came to life.
'To be, or not to be,' began the mannequin in a hollow metallic voice. The machine had been built in the thirties and was now pretty much worn out. 'That is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind—'
Hamlet was fascinated, like a child listening to a tape recording of their own voice for the first time.
'Is that really me?' he asked.
'The words are yours — but actors do it a lot better.'
'—or to take arms against a sea of troubles—'
'Actors?'
'Yes. Actors, playing Hamlet.'
He looked confused.
'—That flesh is heir to—'
'I don't understand.'
'Well,' I began, looking around to check that no one was listening, 'you know that you are Hamlet, from Shakespeare's Hamlet?
'Yes?'
'—To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream—'
'Well, that's a play, and out here in the Outland, people act out that play.'
'With me?'
'Of you. Pretending to be you.'
'But I'm the real me?'
'—Who would fardels bear—'
'In a manner of speaking.'
'Ahhh,' he said after a few moments of deep thought, 'I see. Like the whole Murder of Gonzago thing. I wondered how it all worked. Can we go and see me some time?'
'I . . . suppose,' I answered uneasily. 'Do you really want to?'
'—from whose bourn No traveller returns—'
'Of course. I've heard that some people in the Outland think I am a dithering twit unable to make up his mind rather than a dynamic leader of men, and these "play" things you describe will prove it to me one way or the other.'
I tried to think of the movie in which he prevaricates the least.
'We could get the Zeffirelli version out on video for you to look at.'
'Who plays me?'
'Mel Gibson.'
'—Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all—'
Hamlet stared at me, mouth open.
'But that's incredible!' he said ecstatically. 'I'm Mel's biggest fan!' He thought for a moment. 'So. . . Horatio must be played by Danny Glover, yes?'
'—sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought—'
'No, no. Listen: the Lethal Weapon series is nothing like Hamlet.'
'Well,' replied the prince reflectively, 'in that I think you might be mistaken. The Martin Riggs character begins with self-doubt and contemplates suicide over the loss of a loved one, but eventually turns into a decisive man of action and kills all the bad guys.' He paused for a moment. 'Same as the Mad Max series, really. Is Ophelia played by Patsy Kensit?'
'No,' I replied, trying to be patient, 'Helena Bonham Carter.'
He perked up when he heard this.
'This gets better and better! When I tell Ophelia, she'll flip — if she hasn't already.'
'Perhaps,' I said thoughtfully, 'you'd better see the Olivier version instead. Come on, we've work to do.'
'—their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.'
The Will-Speak Hamlet stopped clicking and whirring and sat silent once more, waiting for the next florin.
5
'Bingo. He blames someone else.'
'But the Danish?'
'Shows how desperate he is, doesn't it? As a nation we've been blaming the Welsh and the French for far too long, and with the Russians out of the frame he's come up with Denmark as public enemy number one. He's using the Viking raids of AD 800 and the Danish Rule of England in the eleventh century as an excuse to whip up some misinformed xenophobia.'
'Ludicrous!'
'Agreed. The papers have been full of anti-Danish propaganda this past month. All Bang & Olufsen entertainment systems have been withdrawn owing to "safety" concerns and Lego has been banned pending "choking hazard" investigations. The list of outlawed Danish waters is becoming longer by the second. Kierkegaard's works have already been declared illegal under the Undesirable Danish Literature Act and will be burned. Hans Christian Andersen will be next, we're told — and after that, maybe even Karen Blixen.'
'They can pull my copy of Out of Africa from my cold dead fingers.'
'Mine too. You'd better make sure Hamlet doesn't tell anyone where he's from. Shhh. I think something's happening.'
Something was happening. The floor manager had walked out on to the set and was explaining to us exactly what we should do. After a protracted series of technical checks, the host of the show walked on to applause from the audience. This was Tudor Webastow of The Owl, who had made a career out of being just inquisitive enough to be considered a realistic political foil for the press but not so inquisitive that he would be found in the Thames wearing concrete overshoes.
He sat down at the middle of a table with two empty chairs either side of him and sorted his notes. Unusually for Evade the Question Time the show had two speakers instead of four, but tonight was special: Yorrick Kaine would be facing his political opposition, Mr Redmond van de Poste, of the Commonsense Party. Mr Webastow cleared his throat and began.
'Good evening and welcome to Evade the Question Time, the nation's premier topical talk show. Tonight, as every night, a panel of distinguished public figures generally evade answering the audience's questions and instead tow the party line.'
There was applause at this, and Webastow continued:
'The show tonight comes from Swindon in Wessex. Sometimes called the third capital of England or the "Venice on the M4", the Swindon of today is a financial and manufacturing powerhouse, its citizens a cross-section of professionals and artists who are politically indicative of the country as a whole. I'd also like to mention at this point that Evade the Question Time is brought to you by Neat-Fit® Exhaust Systems, the tailpipe of choice.'
He paused for a moment and shuffled his papers.
'We are honoured to have with us tonight two very different speakers from opposite ends of the political spectrum. First I would like to introduce a man who was politically dead two years ago but has managed to pull himself up to the second-highest political office in the nation with a devoted following of many millions, not all of whom are deranged. Ladies and gentlemen, Chancellor Yorrick Kaine!'
There was a mixed reception as Kaine walked on to the stage, and he grinned and nodded his head for the benefit of the crowd. I leaned forward in my seat. He didn't appear to have aged at all in the two years since I had last seen him, which is what I would expect from a fictioneer. Still looking to be in his late twenties with black hair swept neatly to the side, he might have been a male model from a knitting pattern. I knew he wasn't. I'd checked.
'Thank you very much,' said Kaine, sitting at the table and clasping his hands in front of him. 'May I say that I always regard Swindon as a home away from home.'
There was a brief twitter of delight from the front of the audience, mostly little old ladies who looked upon Kaine as the son they never had. Webastow went on:
'And opposing him we are also honoured to welcome Mr Redmond van de Poste of the opposition Commonsense Party.'
There was notably less applause as van de Poste walked in. He was older than Kaine by almost thirty years, looked tired and gaunt, wore round horn-rimmed spectacles and had a high-domed forehead that shone when it caught the light. He looked about furtively before sitting down stiffly. I guessed the reason. He was wearing a heavy flak vest beneath his suit — and with good reason. The last three Commonsense leaders had all met with mysterious deaths. The previous incumbent had been Mrs Fay Bentoss, who had died after being hit by a car. Not so unusual, you might think — except she had been in her front room when it happened.
'Thank you, gentlemen, and welcome. The first question comes from Miss Pupkin.'
A small woman stood up and said shyly:
'Hello. A Terrible Thing was done by Somebody this week, and I'd like to ask the panel if they condemn this.'
'A very good question,' responded Webastow. 'Mr Kaine, perhaps you'd like to start the ball rolling?'
'Thank you, Tudor. Yes, I condemn utterly and completely the Terrible Thing in the strongest possible terms. We in the Whig Party are appalled by the way in which Terrible Things are done in this great nation of ours with no retribution against the Somebody who did them. I would also like to point out that the current spate of Terrible Things being undertaken in our towns and cities is a burden we inherited from the Commonsense Party, and I would like to point out that in real terms the occurrence of Terrible Things has dropped by over twenty-eight per cent since we took office.'
There was applause at this. Webastow then asked van de Poste for his comments.
'Well,' said Redmond with a sigh, 'quite clearly my learned friend has got his facts mixed up. According to the way we massage the figures, Terrible Things are actually on the increase. But I'd like to stop playing party politics for a moment and state for the record that although this is of course a great personal tragedy for those involved, condemning out of hand these acts does not allow us to understand why they occur and more needs to be done to get to the root cause of—'
'Yet again,' interrupted Kaine, 'yet again we see the Commonsense Party shying away from its responsibilities and failing to act toughly on unspecified difficulties. I hope all the unnamed people who have suffered unclearly defined problems will understand—'
'I did say we condemned the Terrible Thing,' put in van de Poste, 'and I might add that we have been conducting a study into the entire range of Terrible Things all the way from Just Annoying to Outrageously Awful and will act on these findings — if we gain power.'
'Trust the Commonsensers to do things by half measures!' scoffed Kaine, who obviously enjoyed these sorts of discussions. 'By going only so far as "Outrageously Awful" Mr van de Poste is selling his own nation short. We in the Whig Party have been looking at the Terrible Things problem and propose a zero-tolerance attitude to offences as low as Mildly Inappropnate. Only in this way can the Somebodies who commit Terrible Things be stopped before they move on to acts that are Obscenely Perverse.'
There was another smattering of applause, presumably as the audience tried to figure out whether 'Just Annoying' was worse than 'Mildly Inappropriate'.
'Succinctly put,' announced Webastow. 'At the end of the first round I will award three points to Mr Kaine for an excellent nonspecific condemnation, plus one bonus point for blaming the previous government, and another for successfully mutating the question to promote the party line. Mr van de Poste gets a point for a firm rebuttal, but only two points for his condemnation as he tried to inject an impartial and intelligent observation. So at the end of the first round, it's Kaine leading with five points, and van de Poste on three.'
There was more applause as the numbers came up on the score-board.
'On to the next stage of the show, which we call the "not answering the question" round. We have a question from Miss Ives.'
A middle-aged woman put up her hand and asked:
'Does the panel think that sugar should be added to rhubarb pie or the sweetness deficit made up by an additive, such as custard?'
'Thank you, Miss Ives. Mr van de Poste, would you care to not answer this question first?'
'Well,' said Redmond, eyeing the audience for any possible assassins, 'this question goes straight to the heart of government, and I'd like first to point out that the Commonsense Party, when we were in power, tried more ways of doing things than any other party in living memory, and in consequence came closer to the right way of doing something, even if we didn't know it at the time.'
There was applause and Joffy and I exchanged looks.
'Does it get any better?' I whispered.
'Wait until they get on to Denmark.'
'I utterly refute,' began Kaine, 'the implication that we aren't doing things the right way. To demonstrate this I'd like to wander completely off the point and talk about the Health Service Overhaul that we will launch next year. We want to replace the outdated "preventatlve" style of healthcare this country has relentlessly pursued with a "wait until it gets really bad" system which will target those most in need of medical treatment — the sick. Yearly health screenings for all citizens will end and will be replaced by a "tertiary" diagnostic regime which will save money and resources.'
Again, there was applause.
'Okay,' announced Webastow, 'I'm going to give van de Poste three points for successfully not answering that question at all, but five points to Kaine, who not only ignored the question but instead used it as a platform for his own political agenda. So with six rounds still to go, we have Kaine with ten points, and van de Poste with six. Next question please.'
A young man with dyed red hair sitting in our row put his hand up.
'I would like to suggest that the Danish are not our enemy, and this is nothing more than a cynical move by the Whigs to blame someone else for our own economic troubles.'
'Ah!' said Webstow. 'The controversial Danish question. I'm going to let Mr van de Poste avoid this question first.'
Van de Poste looked unwell all of a sudden and glanced nervously towards where Stricknene and Gayle were glaring at him.
'I think,' he began slowly, 'that if the Danish are as Mr Kaine describes, I will offer my support to his policies.'
He dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief as Yorrick began:
'When I came to power England was a nation in the grip of economic decline and social ills. No one realised it at the time and I took it upon myself to demonstrate by any means in my power the depths to which this great nation had fallen. With the support of my followers, I have managed to demonstrate reasonably clearly that things aren't as good as we thought they were, and what we imagined was peace and coexistence with our neighbours was actually a fool's paradise of delusion and paranoia. Anyone who thinks . . .'
I leaned over to Joffy.
'Do people believe this garbage?'
'I'm afraid so. I think he's working on the "people will far more readily believe a big lie than a small one" principle. Still surprises me, though.'
'. . . whoever disturbs this mission,' rattled on Kaine, 'is an enemy of the people, whether they be Danish or Welsh sympathisers eager to overthrow our nation, or ill-informed lunatics who do not deserve the vote, or a voice.'
There was applause but a few boos, too. I saw Colonel Gayle make notes on a scrap of paper of who was shouting them, counting out the seat numbers as he did so.
'But why the Danish?' continued the man with the red hair. 'They have a notoriously fair system of parliament, an impeccable record of human rights and a deserved reputation for upstanding charitable works in Third World nations — I think these are lies, Mr Kaine!'
There were gasps and intakes of breath but a few head-noddings, too. Even, I think, from van de Poste.
'For the moment at least,' began Kaine in a conciliatory tone, 'everyone is permitted an opinion, and I thank our friend for his candour. However, I would like to bring the audience's attention to an unrelated yet emotive issue that will turn the discussion away from the embarrassing shortcomings of my administration and back into the arena of populist politics. Namely: the disgraceful record of puppy and kitten death when the Commonsense Party were in power.'
At the mention of puppies and kittens dying there were cries of alarm from the elder members of the audience. Confident that he had turned the discussion, Kaine went on:
'As things stand at the moment, over one thousand unwanted puppies and kittens are destroyed each year by lethal injection which is freely available to veterinarians in Denmark. As committed humanitarians, the Whig Party has always condemned unwanted pet extermination.'
'Mr van de Poste?' asked Webastow. 'How do you react to Mr Kaine's diversionary tactics regarding kitten death?'
'Clearly,' began van de Poste, 'kitten and puppy death is regrettable, but we in the Commonsense Party must bring it to everyone's attention that unwanted pets have to be destroyed in this manner. If people were more responsible with their pets, then this sort of thing wouldn't happen.'
'Typical of the Commonsense approach!' barked Kaine. 'Blaming the population as though they were feeble-minded fools with little personal responsibility! We in the Whig Party would never condone such an accusation, and are appalled by Mr van de Poste's outburst. I will personally pledge to you now that I will make the puppy home deficit problem my primary concern when I am made dictator.'
There were loud cheers at this and I shook my head sadly.
'Well,' said Webastow happily, 'I think I will give Mr Kaine a full five points for his masterful misdirection, plus a bonus two points for obscuring the Danish issue rather than facing up to it. Mr van de Poste, I'm sorry that I can only offer you a single point. Not only did you tacitly agree with Mr Kaine's outrageous foreign policy, but you answered the unwanted pet problem with an honest reply. So at the end of round three Kaine is galloping ahead with seventeen points, and van de Poste bringing up the rear with seven. Our next question comes from Mr Wedgwood.'
'Yes,' said a very old man in the third row, 'I should like to know if the panel supports the Goliath Corporation's change to a faith-based corporate management system.'
And so it dragged on for nearly an hour, Kaine making outrageous claims and most of the audience failing to notice or, even worse, care. I was extremely glad when the programme drew to a close with Kaine leading thirty-eight points to van de Poste's sixteen, and we filed out of the door.
'What now?' asked Joffy.
I took my Jurisfiction TravelBook from my pocket and opened it at the page that offered a paragraph of The Sword of the Zenobians, one of the many unpublished works Jurisfiction used as a prison. All I had to do was grab Kaine's hand and read.
'I'm going to take Kaine back to the BookWorld with me. He's far too dangerous to leave out here.'
'I agree,' said Joffy, leading me round to where two large limousines were waiting for the Chancellor. 'He'll want to meet his "adoring" public so you should have a chance.'
We found the crowd waiting for him and pushed our way to the front. Most of the TV audience had turned up to see Kaine but not for the same purpose as me. There was excited chatter as Kaine appeared. He smiled serenely and walked down the line, shook hands and was presented with flowers and babies to kiss. Close by his side was Colonel Gayle with a phalanx of guards who stared into the crowd to make sure no one tried anything. Behind them all I could see was Stricknene still clinging on to the red briefcase. I partially hid myself behind an enthusiastic Kaine acolyte waving a Whig Party flag so Kaine didn't see me. We had crossed swords once before and he knew what I was capable of, much as I knew what he was capable of — the last time we met he had tried to have us all eaten by the Glatisant, a sort of hell-beast from the depths of mankind's most depraved imagination. If he could conjure up fictional beasts at will, I would have to be careful.
But then, as the small group moved closer, I started to feel a curious impulse not to trap Kaine but to join in with the infectious enthusiasm. The atmosphere was electric, and being swept along with the crowd was something that just suddenly seemed right. Joffy had fallen under the spell already and was waving and whistling his support. I fought down a strong urge to stop what I was doing and perhaps give Yorrick the benefit of the doubt. He and his entourage were now upon us. His hand came out towards the crowd. I steadied myself, glanced at the opening lines of Zenobians and waited for the right moment. I would have to hold on tight as I read our way into the BookWorld but that didn't bother me as I'd done it many times before. What did worry me was the fact that my resolve was softening fast. Before the Kaine magnetism could take me over any further I took a deep breath, grabbed the outstretched hand and muttered quickly:
'It was a time of peace within the land of the Zenobians . . .'
It didn't take long for me to jump into the BookWorld. Within a few moments the bustling night-time crowd in the car park of the Toad News Network's studios had vanished from view to be replaced by a warm verdant valley where herds of unicorns grazed peacefully under the summer sun. Grammasites wheeled in the blue skies, riding the thermals that rose from the warm grassland.
'So!' I said, turning to Kaine and receiving something of a shock. Beside me was not Yorrick but a middle-aged man holding a Whig Party flag and staring at the crystal-clear waters babbling through a gap in the rocks. I must have grabbed the wrong hand.
'Where am I?' asked the man, who was understandably confused.
'It's a near death experience,' I told him hastily, 'what do you think?'
'It's beautiful!'
'Good. Don't get too fond of it, I'm taking you back.'
I grasped him again, muttered the password under my breath and jumped out of fiction, something I had a lot less trouble with. We arrived behind some dustbins just as Kaine and his entourage were driving off. I ran up to Joffy, who was still waving goodbye, and told him to snap out of it.
'Sorry,' he said, shaking his head. 'What happened to you?'
'Don't ask. C'mon, let's go home.'
We left the scene as a very excited and confused middle-aged man tried to tell anyone who would listen about his 'near death' experience.
I went to bed past midnight, my head spinning from my experience of Kaine's almost hypnotic hold on the populace. Still, I wasn't out of ideas. I could try to grab him again and, failing that, use the eraserhead I had smuggled out of the BookWorld. Destroying him didn't bother me. I'd be no more guilty of murder than an author with a delete key. But while Formby opposed him Kaine would not become dictator, so I had a bit of time to work up a strategy. I could observe, and plan. 'Time spent doing renaissance,' Mrs Malaprop used to tell me, 'is never wasted.'
4
A Town Like Swindon
FORMBY DENIES KAINE
President-for-life George Formby vetoed Chancellor Kaine's attempts to make himself dictator of England yesterday during one of the most heated exchanges this nation has ever seen. Kaine's Ultimate Executive Power Bill, already passed by Parliament, requires only the presidential signature to become law. President Formby, speaking from the presidental palace in Wigan, told reporters: 'Eeee, I wouldn't have a ***** like that run a grocer's, let alone a country!' Chancellor Kaine. angered by the President's remark, declared Formby 'too old to have a say in this nation's future', 'out of touch' and 'a poor singer', the last of which he was forced to retract after a public outcry.'
Article in The Toad, 13 July 1988
It was the morning following Evade the Question Time and I had slept badly, waking up before Friday, which was unusual. I stared at the ceiling and thought about Kaine. I'd have to follow him to his next public engagement before he discovered that I had returned. I was just thinking about why Joffy and I had nearly been sucked into the whole Yorrick circus when Friday awoke and blinked at me in a breakfast sort of way. I dressed quickly and took him downstairs.
'Welcome to Swindon Breakfast with Toad' announced the TV presenter as we walked in, 'with myself, Warwick Fridge, and the lovely Leigh Onzolent—'
'Hello—'
'—bringing you two hours of news and views, fun and competitions to see you into the day. Breakfast with Toad is sponsored by Arkwright's Doorknobs, the finest door furniture in Wessex.'
Warwick turned to Leigh, who was looking way too glamorous for eight in the morning. She smiled and continued:
'This morning we'll be speaking to croquet captain Roger Kapok about Swindon's chances in Superhoop '88, and also to a man who claims to have seen unicorns in a near death experience. Network Toad's resident dodo whisperer will be on hand for your pet's psychiatric problems and our Othello backwards-reading competition reaches the quarter-finals. Later on we talk to Mr Joffy Next about tomorrow's potential resurrection with St Zvlkx, but first, the news. The CEO of Goliath has announced contrition targets to be attainable within—'
'Morning, daughter,' said my mother, who had just walked into the kitchen, 'I never thought of you as an early riser.'
'I wasn't until Junior turned up,' I replied, pointing at Friday, who was eyeing the porridge pot expectantly, 'but if there's one thing he knows how to do, it's eat.'
'It's what you did best when you were his age. Oh,' added my mother absently, 'I have to give you something, by the way.'
She hurried from the room and returned with a sheath of official-looking papers.
'Mr Hicks left them for you.'
Braxton Hicks was my old boss back at Swindon SpecOps. I had left abruptly, and from the look of his opening letter it didn't look as if he was very happy about it. I had been demoted to 'Literary Detective Researcher', and the letter demanded my gun and badge back. The second letter was an outstanding warrant of arrest relating to a trumped-up charge of possession of a small amount of illegally owned bootleg cheese.
'Is cheese still overpriced?' I asked my mother.
'Criminal!' she muttered. 'Over five hundred per cent duty. And it's not just cheese, either. They've extended the duty to cover all dairy products — even yogurt.'
I sighed. I would probably have to go into SpecOps and explain myself. I could beg forgiveness, go to the stressperts and plead post-traumatic stress disorder or Xplkqulkiccasia or something and ask for my old job back. Perhaps if I were to get handy with a nine iron it might swing things with my golf-mad boss. Outside SpecOps was not a good place to be if I wanted to hunt Yorrick Kaine or lobby the ChronoGuard for my husband back; it would help to have access to all the SpecOps and police databases.
I looked through the papers. I had apparently been found guilty of the cheese transgression and fined £5,000 plus costs.
'Did you pay this?' I asked my mother, showing her the court demand.
'Yes.'
'Then I should pay you back.'
'No need,' she replied, adding before I could thank her: 'I paid it out of your overdraft — which is quite big, now.'
'How . . . thoughtful of you.'
'Don't mention it. Bacon and eggs?'
'Please.'
'Coming up. Would you get the milk?'
I went to the front door to fetch the milk and as I bent down to pick it up there was a whang-thop noise as a bullet zipped past my ear and thudded into the door frame next to me. I was about to slam the door and grab my automatic when an unaccountable stillness took hold, like a sudden becalming. Above me a pigeon hung frozen in the air, its wingtip feathers splayed as it reached the bottom of a downstroke. A motorcyclist on the road was balancing, impossibly still, and passers-by were now as stiff and unmoving as statues — even Pickwick had stopped in mid-waddle. Time, for the moment at least, had frozen. I knew only one person who had a face that could stop the clock like this — my father. The question was — where was he?
I looked up and down the road. Nothing. Since I was about to be assassinated I thought it might help to know who was doing the assassinating, so I walked down the garden path and across the road to the alley where de Floss had hidden himself so badly the previous day. It was here that I found my father looking at a small and very pretty blonde woman no more than five foot high who was time-frozen halfway through the process of disassembling a sniper's rifle. She was probably in her late twenties and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail held tight with a flower hair tie. I noted with a certain detached amusement that there was a lucky gonk attached to the trigger guard and that the stock was covered with pink fur. Dad looked younger than me but he was instantly recognisable. The odd nature of the time business tended to make operatives live nonlinear lives — every time I met him he was a different age.
'Hello, Dad.'
'You were correct,' he said, comparing the woman's frozen features with those on a series of photographs, 'it's an assassin all right.'
'Never mind that for the moment!' I cried happily. 'How are you? I haven't seen you for years!'
He turned and stared at me.
'My dear girl, we spoke only a few hours ago!'
'No we didn't.'
'We did, actually.'
'We did not.'
He stared at me for a moment and looked at his watch, shook it and listened to it, then shook it again.
'Here,' I said, handing him the chronograph I was wearing, 'take mine.'
'Very nice — thank you. Ah! I stand corrected. Three hours from now. It's an easy mistake to make. Did you have any thoughts about that matter we discussed?'
'No, Dad,' I said in an exasperated tone, 'it hasn't happened yet, remember?'
'You're always so linear,' he muttered, returning to comparing the pictures with the assassin. 'I think you ought to try and expand your horizons a bit — bingo!'
He had found a picture that matched my assassin and read the label on the back.
'Expensive hit-woman working in the Wiltshire—Oxford area. Looks petite and bijou but is as deadly as the best of them. She trades under the name the Windowmaker.' He paused. 'Should be Widowmaker, shouldn't it?'
'But I heard the Windowmaker was lethal,' I pointed out. 'A contract with her and you're deader than corduroy.'
'I heard that too,' replied my father thoughtfully. 'Sixty-seven victims; sixty-eight if she was the one that did Samuel Pring. She must have meant to miss. It's the only explanation. In any event, her real name is Cindy Stoker.'
This was unexpected. Cindy was married to Spike Stoker, an operative over at SO-17 whom I had worked with a couple of times. I had even given him advice on how best to tell Cindy that he hunted down werewolves for a living — not the choicest profession for a potential husband.
'Cindy is my assassin? Cindy is the Windowmaker?'
'You know her?'
'Of her. Wife of a good friend.'
'Well, don't get too chummy. She tries and fails to kill you three times. The second time with a bomb under your car on Monday, then next Friday at eleven in the morning — but she fails and you, ultimately, choose for her to die. I shouldn't really be telling you this, but as we discussed, we've got bigger fish to fry.'
'What bigger fish to fry?'
'Sweetpea,' he said, giving me his stern 'father knows best' voice, 'I'm really not going to go through it all again. Now I have to get back to work — there's a TimePhoon brewing in the Dark Ages and if we don't sort it out we'll be picking anachronisms out of the timeline for a century.'
'Wait — you're working at the ChronoGuard?'
'I've told you all about this already! Do try and keep up — you're going to need all your wits about you over the next week. Now, get back to the house and I'll start the world up again.'
He wasn't in a very chatty mood, but since I would be seeing him later and would find out then what we had just discussed, there didn't seem a lot of point in talking anyway, so I bade him goodbye, and as I walked up the garden path time returned to normal with a snap. The pigeon flew on, the traffic continued to move and everything carried on as usual. Time had stopped so completely that everything my father and I had talked about occupied no time at all. Still, at least this meant I wouldn't have to be constantly looking over my shoulder as I knew when she would try to get rid of me. Mind you, I wasn't looking forward to her death at my hands. Spike would be severely pissed off.
I returned to the kitchen, where Mum was still hard at work cooking my bacon and eggs. To her and Friday I had been gone less than twenty seconds.
'What was that noise when you were at the door, Thursday?'
'Probably a car backfiring.'
'Funny,' she said, 'I could have sworn it was a high-velocity bullet striking wood. Two eggs or one?'
'Two, please.'
1 picked up the newspaper, which was running a five-page expose revealing that 'Danish pastries' were actually brought to Denmark by displaced Viennese bakers in the sixteenth century. 'In what other ways,' thundered the article, 'have the dishonest Danes made fools of us?' I shook my head sadly and turned to another page.
Mum said she could look after Friday until teatime, something I got her to promise before she had fully realised the implications of nappy changing and saw just how bad his manners were at breakfast. He yelled, 'Ut enim ad veniam!', which might have meant: 'Look how far I can throw my porridge!' as a spoonful of oatmeal flew across the kitchen, much to the delight of DH82, who had learned pretty quickly that hanging around messy toddlers at mealtimes was an extremely productive pastime.
Hamlet came down to breakfast, followed, after a prudent gap, by Emma. They bade each other good morning in such an obvious way that only their serious demeanour kept me from laughing out loud.
'Did you sleep well, Lady Hamilton?' asked Hamlet.
'I did, thank you. My room faces east for the morning light, you know.'
'Ah!' replied Hamlet. 'Mine doesn't. I believe it was once the boxroom. It has pretty pink wallpaper and a bedside light shaped like Tweetie-pie. Not that I noticed much, of course, being fast asleep — on my own.'
'Of course.'
'Let me show you something,' said Mum after breakfast.
I followed her down to Mycroft's workshop. Alan had kept Mum's dodos trapped in the potting shed all night and even now threatened to peck anyone who so much as looked at him 'in a funny way'.
'Pickwick!' I said sternly. 'Are you going to let your son bully those dodos?'
Pickwick looked the other way and pretended to have an itchy foot. To be honest she couldn't control Alan any more than I could. Only half an hour previously he had chased the postman out of the garden with an angry plink-plink-plink noise, something even the postman had to admit 'was a first'.
Mum opened the side door to the large workshop and we entered. This was where my Uncle Mycroft did all his inventing. It was here that he had demonstrated, among many other things, translating carbon paper, a sarcasm early warning device, Nextian geometry and, most important to me, the Prose Portal — the method by which I first entered fiction. Mother was always nervous in Mycroft's lab. Many years ago he had developed some four-dimensional paper, the idea being that you could print on the same sheet of paper again and again, isolating the different over-printings in marginally different time zones that could be read by the use of temporal spectacles. By going to the nanosecond level, a million sheets of text or pictures could be stored on one sheet of paper in a single second. Brilliant — but the paper looked identical to a standard sheet of A4, and it had been a long, contentious family argument that my mother used the irreplaceable prototype to line the compost bucket. It was no wonder she was careful near his inventions.
'What did you want to show me?'
She smiled and led me to the end of the workshop. There, next to my stuff, which she had rescued from my apartment, was the unmistakable shape of my Porsche 356 Speedster hidden beneath a dustsheet.
'I've run the engine every month and kept it MOTed for you. I even took it for a spin a couple of times.'
She pulled the sheet off with a flourish. The car still looked slightly shabby after our various encounters, but just the way I liked it. I gently touched the bullet holes that had been made by Hades all those years ago, and the bent front wing where I had slid it into the River Severn. I opened the garage doors.
'Thanks, Mum. Sure you're all right with the boy Friday?'
'Until four this afternoon. But you have to promise me something.'
'What's that?'
'That you'll come to my Eradications Anonymous group this evening.'
'Mum—!'
'It will do you good. You might enjoy it. Might meet someone. Might make you forget Linden.'
'Landen. His name's Landen. And I don't need or want to forget him.'
'Then the group will support you. Besides, you might learn something. Oh, and would you take Hamlet with you? Mr Bismarck has a bee in his bonnet about Danes because of that whole silly Schleswig-Holstein thingummy.'
I narrowed my eyes. Could Joffy be right?
'What about Emma? Do you want me to take her, too?'
'No. Why?'
'Er, no reason.'
I picked up Friday and gave him a kiss.
'Be good, Friday. You're staying with Nana for the day.'
Friday looked at me, looked at Mum, stuck his finger up his nose and said: 'Sunt in culpa qui officia id est laborum?'
I ruffled his hair and he showed me a bogey he had found. I declined the present, wiped his hand with a hanky, then went to look for Hamlet. I found him in the front garden demonstrating a thrust-and-parry sword fight to Emma and Pickwick. Even Alan had left off bullying the other dodos and was watching in silence. I called out to Hamlet and he came running.
'Sorry,' said the prince as I opened the garage doors, just demonstrating how that damn fool Laertes gets his comeuppance.'
I showed him how to get into the Porsche, dropped in myself, started the engine and drove off down the hill towards the Brunei Centre.
'You seem to be getting on very well with Emma.'
'Who?' asked Hamlet, unconvincingly vague.
'Lady Hamilton.'
'Oh, her. Nice girl. We have a lot in common.'
'Such as—?'
'Well,' said Hamlet, thinking hard, 'we both have a good friend called Horatio.'
We motored on down past the magic roundabout and I pointed out the new stadium with its four floodlighting towers standing tall among the low housing.
'That's our croquet stadium,' I said, 'thirty thousand seats. Home of the Swindon Mallets croquet team.'
'Croquet is a national sport out here?'
'Oh yes,' I replied, knowing a thing or two about it since I used to play myself. 'It has evolved a lot since the early days. For a start the teams are bigger — ten a side in World Croquet League. The players have to get their balls through the hoops in the quickest possible time, so it can be quite rough. A stray ball can pack a wallop and a flailing mallet is potentially lethal. The WCL insist on body armour and perspex barriers for the spectators.'
I turned left into Manchester Road and parked behind a Griffin-6 Lowrider.
'What now?'
'Haircut. You don't think I'm going to spend the next few weeks looking like Joan of Arc, do you?'
'Ah!' said Hamlet. 'You hadn't mentioned it for a while so I'd stopped noticing. If it's all right with you, I'll just stay here and write a letter to Horatio. Does "pirate" have one "t" or two?'
'One.'
I walked into Mum's hairdresser. The stylists looked at my hair with a sort of shocked numbness until Lady Volescamper, who along with her increasingly eccentric mayoral husband constituted Swindon's most visible aristocracy, suddenly pointed at me and said in a strident tone that could shatter glass:
'That's the style I want. Something new. Something retro — something to cause a sensation at the Swindon Mansion House Ball!'
Mrs Barnet, who was both the chief stylist and official gossip laureate of Swindon, kept her look of horror to herself and then said diplomatically:
'Of course. And may I say that Her Grace's boldness matches her sense of style.'
Lady Volescamper returned to her Femole magazine, appearing not to recognise me, which was just as well — the last time I went to Vole Towers a hell beast from the darkest depths of the human imagination trashed the entrance lobby.
'Hello, Thursday,' said Mrs Barnet, wrapping a sheet around me with an expert flourish, 'haven't seen you for a while.'
'I've been away.'
'In prison?'
'No — just away.'
'Ah. How would you like it? I have it on good authority that the "Joan of Arc" look is set to be quite popular this summer.'
'You know I'm not a fashion person, Gladys. Just get rid of the dopey haircut, would you?'
'As madame wishes.' She hummed to herself for a moment, then asked: 'Been on holiday this year?'
I got back to the car a half-hour later to find Hamlet talking to a traffic warden, who seemed so engrossed in whatever he was telling her that she wasn't writing me a ticket.
'And that,' said Hamlet as soon as I came within earshot, making a thrusting motion with his hand, 'was when I cried: "A rat, a rat!" and killed the unseen old man. Hello, Thursday — goodness, that's short, isn't it?'
'It's better than it was. C'mon, I've got to go and get my job back.'
'Job?' asked Hamlet as we drove off, leaving a very indignant traffic warden, who wanted to know what happened next.
'Yes. Out here you need money to live.'
'I've got lots,' said Hamlet generously. 'You should have some of mine.'
'Somehow I don't think fictional kroner from an unspecified century will cut the mustard down at the First Goliath — and put the skull away. They aren't generally considered a fashion accessory here in the Outland.'
'They're all the rage where I come from.'
'Well, not here. Put it in this Tesco's bag.'
'STOP!'
I screeched to a halt.
'What?'
'That, over there. It's me!'
Before I could say anything Hamlet had jumped out of the car and run across the road to a coin-operated machine on the comer of the street. I parked the Speedster and walked over to join him. He was staring with delight at the simple box, the top half of which was glazed; inside was a suitably attired mannequin visible from the waist up.
'It's called a Will-Speak machine,' I said, passing him a carrier bag. 'Here — put the skull in the bag like I asked.'
'What does it do?'
'Officially it's called a Shakespeare Soliloquy Vending Automaton,' I explained. 'You put in two shillings and get a short snippet from Shakespeare.'
'Of me?'
'Yes,' I said, 'of you.'
For it was, of course, a Hamlet Will-Speak machine, and the mannequin Hamlet sat looking blankly out at the flesh-and-blood Hamlet standing next to me.
'Can we hear a bit?' asked Hamlet excitedly.
'If you want. Here.'
I dug out a coin and placed it in the machine. There was a whirring and clicking as the dummy came to life.
'To be, or not to be,' began the mannequin in a hollow metallic voice. The machine had been built in the thirties and was now pretty much worn out. 'That is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind—'
Hamlet was fascinated, like a child listening to a tape recording of their own voice for the first time.
'Is that really me?' he asked.
'The words are yours — but actors do it a lot better.'
'—or to take arms against a sea of troubles—'
'Actors?'
'Yes. Actors, playing Hamlet.'
He looked confused.
'—That flesh is heir to—'
'I don't understand.'
'Well,' I began, looking around to check that no one was listening, 'you know that you are Hamlet, from Shakespeare's Hamlet?
'Yes?'
'—To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream—'
'Well, that's a play, and out here in the Outland, people act out that play.'
'With me?'
'Of you. Pretending to be you.'
'But I'm the real me?'
'—Who would fardels bear—'
'In a manner of speaking.'
'Ahhh,' he said after a few moments of deep thought, 'I see. Like the whole Murder of Gonzago thing. I wondered how it all worked. Can we go and see me some time?'
'I . . . suppose,' I answered uneasily. 'Do you really want to?'
'—from whose bourn No traveller returns—'
'Of course. I've heard that some people in the Outland think I am a dithering twit unable to make up his mind rather than a dynamic leader of men, and these "play" things you describe will prove it to me one way or the other.'
I tried to think of the movie in which he prevaricates the least.
'We could get the Zeffirelli version out on video for you to look at.'
'Who plays me?'
'Mel Gibson.'
'—Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all—'
Hamlet stared at me, mouth open.
'But that's incredible!' he said ecstatically. 'I'm Mel's biggest fan!' He thought for a moment. 'So. . . Horatio must be played by Danny Glover, yes?'
'—sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought—'
'No, no. Listen: the Lethal Weapon series is nothing like Hamlet.'
'Well,' replied the prince reflectively, 'in that I think you might be mistaken. The Martin Riggs character begins with self-doubt and contemplates suicide over the loss of a loved one, but eventually turns into a decisive man of action and kills all the bad guys.' He paused for a moment. 'Same as the Mad Max series, really. Is Ophelia played by Patsy Kensit?'
'No,' I replied, trying to be patient, 'Helena Bonham Carter.'
He perked up when he heard this.
'This gets better and better! When I tell Ophelia, she'll flip — if she hasn't already.'
'Perhaps,' I said thoughtfully, 'you'd better see the Olivier version instead. Come on, we've work to do.'
'—their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.'
The Will-Speak Hamlet stopped clicking and whirring and sat silent once more, waiting for the next florin.
5
Ham(let) and Cheese
'SEVEN WONDERS OF SWINDON' NAMING BUREAUCRACY UNVEILED
After five years of careful consideration, Swindon City Council has unveiled the naming procedure for the city's much-vaunted 'Seven Wonders' tourism plan. The twenty-seven-point procedure is the most costly and complicated piece of bureaucracy the city has ever devised and might even be included is one of the wonders itself. The plan will be undertaken by the Swindon Special Committee for Wonders which will consider applications prepared by the Seven Wonders Working Party from MX separate name selection subcommittees. Once chosen, the Wonders will be further scrutinized by eight different oversight committees, before being adopted. The byzantine and needlessly expensive system is already tipped to win the coveted 'Red Tape' award from Bureaucracy Today.