Something rotten

'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.'