I turned to Mr. Towwel. “Sorry to have accused you unjustly, sir. If you need a job, call me anytime at Acme Carpets.”
And we walked out, bumping aside Moulting as we went. His shaking hand reached for a chair back to steady himself. He had turned pale and was sweating, trembling with the fear of the man who is condemned to eternal hellfire and knows it.
We recarpeted Major Pickles’s entire house with the finest carpet we had. We also did his shopping, his washing and bought him two dozen packets of Jaffa cakes. After that, the three of us sat down and nattered all afternoon, drinking tea and telling stories. We parted the best of friends and left our phone numbers on his fridge so he could call us if he needed anything. I even suggested he give Polly a call if he wanted some company.
“I never realized carpet laying could be so much fun,” I said as we finally drove away.
“Me neither,” replied Spike. “Do you think Bowden will be pissed off that we’ve done this one for free and it took us all day?”
“Nah,” I replied with a smile, “I’m sure he’ll be just fine about it.”
29. Time Out of Joint
I never did get my head around time’s carefree propensity to paradox. My father didn’t exist, yet I was still born, and time travel had never been invented, but they still hoped that it might. There were currently two versions of Friday, and I had met him several times in the past-or was it the future? It gave me a dull ache in the head when I thought about it.
How was work?” asked Landen when I walked in the door.
“Quite good fun,” I replied. “The floor-covering business is definitely looking up. How are things with you?”
“Good, too-lots of work done.”
“On The Mews of Doom?” I asked, still hopeful about Scampton-Tappett and remembering that I had sent a note down to Bananas for Edward for him to swap books. He’d cost me a thousand book-guineas, and I was sure as hell going to get my money’s worth.
“No. I’ve been working on Spike’s weird-shit self-help book: Collecting the Undead.”
Damn and blast again.
I recalled a news item I had overheard on the tram home.
“Hey, do you know what Redmond van de Poste’s Address to the Nation is all about?”
“Rumor says it’s going to be about the stupidity surplus. Apparently his top advisers have come up with a plan that will deal with the excess in a manner that won’t damage economic interests and might actually generate new business opportunities.”
“He’ll top the ratings with that one-I only hope he doesn’t generate more stupidity. You know how stupidity tends to breed off itself. How are the girls?”
“They’re fine. I’m just playing Scrabble with Tuesday. Is it cheating for her to use Nextian Geometry to bridge two triple-word scores with a word of only six letters?”
“I suppose. Where’s Jenny?”
“She’s made a camp in the attic.”
“Again?”
Something niggled in my head once more. Something I was meant to do. “Land?”
“Yuh?”
“Nothing. I’ll get it.”
There was someone at the door, and whoever it was had knocked, rather than rung, which is always mildly ominous. I opened the door, and it was Friday, or at least it was the clean-cut, nongrunty version. He wasn’t alone either-he had two of his ChronoGuard friends with him, and they all looked a bit serious. Despite the dapper light blue ChronoGuard uniforms, they all looked too young to get drunk or vote, let alone do something as awesomely responsible as surf the timestream. It was like letting a twelve-year-old do your epidural.
“Hello, Sweetpea!” I said. “Are these your friends?”
“They’re colleagues,” said Friday in a pointed fashion. “We’re here on official business.”
“Goodness!” I said, attempting not to patronize him with motherly pride and failing spectacularly. “Would you all like a glass of milk and a cookie or something?”
But Friday, it seemed, wasn’t in much of a mood for milk-or a cookie.
“Not now, Mum. There’s only forty-eight hours of time left, and we still haven’t invented time travel.”
“Maybe you can’t,” I replied. “Maybe it’s impossible.”
“We used the technology to get here,” said Friday with impeccable logic, “so the possibility still exists, no matter how slight. We’ve got every available agent strung out across the timestream doing a fingertip search of all potential areas of discovery. Now, where is he?”
“Your father?”
“No, him. Friday-the other me.”
“Don’t you know? Isn’t this all ancient history?”
“Time is not as it should be. If it were, we’d have solved it all by now. So where is he?”
“Are you here to replace him?”
“No, we just want to talk.”
“He’s out practicing with his band.”
“He is not. Would it surprise you to learn that there was no band called the Gobshites?”
“Oh, no!” I said with a shudder. “He didn’t call it the Wankers after all, did he?”
“No, no, Mum-there is no band.”
“He’s definitely doing his band thing,” I assured him, inviting them in and picking the telephone off the hall table. “I’ll call Toby’s dad. They use their garage for practice. It’s the perfect venue-both Toby’s parents are partially deaf.”
“Then there’s not much point in phoning them, now, is there?” said the cockier of Friday’s friends.
“What’s your name?”
“Nigel,” said the one who had spoken, a bit sheepishly.
“No one likes a smart-ass, Nigel.”
I stared at him, and he looked away, pretending to find some fluff on his uniform.
“Hi, is that Toby’s dad?” I said as the phone connected. “It’s Friday’s mum here… No, I’m not like that-it only happens in the book. My question is: Are the boys jamming in your garage?”
I looked at Friday and his friends.
“Not for at least three months? I didn’t know that. Thank you. Good night.”
I put the phone down.
“So where is he?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” replied the other Friday, “and since he’s a free radical whose movements are entirely in de pen dent of the SHE, we have no way of knowing where or when he is. The feckless, dopey, teenage act was a good one and had us all fooled-you especially.”
I narrowed my eyes. This was a surprising development. “What are you saying?”
“We’ve had some new information, and we think Friday might be actually causing the nondiscovery of the technology-conspiring with his future self to overthrow the ChronoGuard!”
“Sounds like a trumped-up bullshit charge for you to replace him,” I said, beginning to get annoyed.
“I’m serious, Mum. Friday is a dangerous historical fundamentalist who will do what ever it takes to achieve his own narrow agenda-to keep time as it was originally meant to run. If we don’t stop him, then the whole of history will roll up and there’ll be nothing left of any of us!”
“If he’s so dangerous,” I said slowly, “then why haven’t you eradicated him?”