Something rotten (10 page)

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 demeanor 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 box room. It has pretty pink wallpaper and a bedside light shaped like Tweety 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 accompanied by 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, amongst 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’d developed some four-dimensional paper, the idea being that you could print on the same sheet of paper again and again, isolating the different overprintings 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 8½-by-11—and it had been a long contentious family argument that my mother had 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, and there, next to my stuff that she had rescued from my apartment, was the unmistakable shape of my Porsche 356 Speedster hidden beneath a dust sheet.

“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 booger 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 swordfight 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 showing them 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 Brunel 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 floodlit towers standing tall amongst 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 insists on body armor and Plexiglas barriers for the spectators.”

I turned left into Manchester Road and parked up 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 recognize 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 and 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 had 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 grocery 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 corner 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 WillSpeak machine,” I said, passing him a shopping 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
WillSpeak 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 his 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?”

For it was, of course, a
Hamlet
WillSpeak machine, and the mannequin Hamlet sat looking blankly out at the flesh-and-blood Hamlet standing next to me.

“—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 sometime?”

“I . . .
suppose,
” I answered uneasily. “Do you really want to?”

“—from whose bourn no traveler 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 does 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. Same as the
Road Warrior
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 WillSpeak Hamlet stopped clicking and whirring and sat silent once more, waiting for the next florin.