“Hello, Sweetpea.”
I turned. My father was sitting at a table behind me and rose to hug me affectionately.
“Hi, Dad.”
“You’re looking good,” he told me.
“You, too,” I replied. “You’re looking younger every time I see you.”
“I am. How’s your history?”
“Not bad.”
“Do you know how the Duke of Wellington died?”
“Sure,” I answered. “He was shot by a French sniper early on during the Battle of Waterloo—why?”
“Oh, no reason,” muttered my father with feigned innocence, scribbling in a small notebook. Once done, he paused for a moment.
“So Napoléon won at Waterloo, did he?” he asked slowly and with great intensity.
“Of course not,” I replied. “Field Marshal Blücher’s timely intervention saved the day. This is all high school history, Dad. What are you up to?”
“Well, it’s a bit of—hang on,” said Dad, or rather the character playing my book-father. “I think they’ve gone.”
I tasted the air. He was right. Our lone reader had stopped and left us dangling in a narrative dead zone. It’s an odd sensation: a combination of treading on a step that isn’t there, someone hanging up the telephone midspeech without explanation and the feeling you get when you’ve gone upstairs for some reason but can’t think why. Scientists have proved that spaniels spend their entire lives like this.
“I was marvelous,” intoned my book-father haughtily, the inference being that it was somehow my fault the reader didn’t last until even the end of the first page. “You need to engage the readers more, darling. Project yourself. Make the character come alive.”
I didn’t agree that I was at fault but wasn’t going to argue. He had played my father longer in the series than I had played Thursday, so he had a kind of seniority, even if I was the protagonist, and first-person player to boot.
“Sometimes I yearn for the old days,” he said to Hector, his dresser, but obviously intending for me to hear.
“What do you mean by that?”
He stared at me for a moment. “This: It was a lot better when we had the previous Thursday play Thursday.”
“She was violent and immoral, Dad. How could that possibly be better?”
“She might have been a shit of the highest order, darling, but she brought in the readers. I’ll be in my dressing room. Come, Hector.”
And so saying, he swept from the café setting with his ever-present dresser, who pouted rudely at me as they left. My book-father had a point, of course, but I was committed to promoting the type of Thursday the real Thursday wanted to see in the series. The series had originally been written to feature a violent and disorderly Thursday Next, who slept her way around the BookWorld and caused no end of murder, misery and despair. I was trying to change all that but had met with stiff resistance from the rest of the cast. They saw my attempt to depict reality as damaging to the overall readability—and for a character, the only thing worse than being read badly is to be badly unread.
I sighed. Keeping everyone within my series happy and fulfilled and focused was about as hard a job as acting in the book itself. Some books had a page manager to do all that boring stuff, but for financial reasons I had to do it myself with only a defective Mrs. Malaprop for assistance. Making us all readable was the least of my worries.
I walked slowly home through my book-version of Swindon, which was forty times more compact than the real one. Due to the limited number of locations mentioned in my series, I could go easily from the café to my mother’s house to the GSD church and then on to the SpecOps Building in the space of a few minutes, something that would take the best part of an hour in the real Swindon. There were a few handy shortcuts, too. By opening a door at the back of Our Blessed Lady of the Lobster, I could find myself in the mockup of Thornfield Hall, and by taking the first door on the right past Jane’s bedroom, I could be in the Penderyn Hotel in Wales. All told, the series covered about five acres on six levels and would have been larger if we hadn’t doubled up the East facade of Thornfield with the front of Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, and the Gad’s Hill Museum with the redressed lobby of the SpecOps Building. Economies like this were commonplace in remaindered books and helped us keep the cast at almost full strength. Doubling up characters was possible, but it caused problems when they were in scenes with themselves. Some characters could handle it, others could not. On one memorable occasion, Vronsky played all the parts in an abridged version of Anna Karenina whilst the rest of the cast were on strike for more blinis. When asked what it was like, he described it as “like, totally awesome, dude.”
“Good morning, Pickwick,” I said as I walked into the kitchen, which not only served as the command center of my series but also as the place where tea and toast could be made and eaten. “Good morning, Mrs. Malaprop.”
“Cod Moaning, Miss Next,” said the defective Mrs. Malaprop, bobbing politely.
“May I have a word?” asked Pickwick, in a not very subtle aside.
“Is it important?”
“It is vitally crucial,” said Pickwick, rolling her eyes oddly.
We moved out to the hallway.
“Okay, what’s the problem?” I asked, since Pickwick always had a grievance of some sort—whether it was the cold or the heat or the color of the walls or a hundred and one other things that weren’t quite right. Whitby and I referred to her as “Goldilocks without the manners”—but never to her beak.
“It’s Mrs. Malaprop,” said the dodo in an affronted tone. “She’s becoming increasingly unintelligible. It would be okay if it were faintly amusing, but it isn’t, and . . . well, quite frankly, there is the risk of infection, and it frightens me.”
To a text-based life-form, unpredictable syntax and poor grammar is a source of huge discomfort. Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can’t walk to the bathroom. Poor syntax is even worse. Change word order and a sentence useless for anyone Yoda except you have.
“Now, then,” I said, using an oxymoron for scolding effect, “it is totally unproven that malapropism is inflectious, and what did we say about tolerating those less fortunate than ourselves?”
“Even so,” said Pickwick, “I want you to tell her to stop it. And her shoes squeak. And while we’re on the subject, Bowden referred to me as ‘that bird’ again, the baobab in the back garden is cutting out the light from my bedroom, and I’m taking next Wednesday off to have my beak oiled, so you’ll need to get a replacement—and not the penguin like last time. She didn’t do justice to my dynamic personalty and poetic sensibilities. Played it all a bit . . . fishcentric, if you know what I mean.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, making a mental note to definitely rebook the penguin.
“Good,” said Pickwick. “Have you the paper?”
We returned to the kitchen, and I found The Word for her.
“Hmm,” she said thoughtfully, staring at the City pages. “Metaphor has risen by seventeen pounds a barrel. I should dump some metonym and buy into synecdoche futures.”
“How are things going with Racy Novel?” I asked, since the political problems up in the North had been much in the news recently. A long-running dispute between Racy Novel, Women’s Fiction and Dogma had been getting worse and was threatening to erupt into a genre war at the drop of a hat.
“Peace talks still on schedule for Friday,” replied Pickwick, “as if that will do any good. Sometimes I think that Muffler nutjob wants nothing but a good scrap. By the way,” she added, “did you hear about Raphael’s Walrus?”