Something rotten (6 page)

“Ah!” I muttered, taking another bite of cake. “And how is my least favorite multinational?”

Joffy rolled his eyes. “Up to no good as usual. They’re attempting to switch to a faith-based corporate-management system.”

“Becoming a . . . religion?”

“Announced only last month on the suggestion of their own corporate precog, Sister Bettina of Stroud. They aim to switch the corporate hierarchy to a multideity plan with their own gods, demigods, priests, places of worship and official prayer book. In the
new
Goliath, employees will not be paid with anything as un-spiritual as money, but
faith
—in the form of coupons that can be exchanged for goods and services at any Goliath-owned store. Anyone holding Goliath shares will have these exchanged on favorable terms with these ‘foupons’ and everyone gets to worship the Goliath upper echelons.”

“And what do the ‘devotees’ get in return?”

“Well, a warm sense of belonging, protection from the world’s evils and a reward in the afterlife—oh, and I think there’s a T-shirt in it somewhere, too.”

“That sounds very Goliath-like.”

“Doesn’t it just?” Joffy smiled. “Worshipping in the hallowed halls of consumerland. The more you spend, the closer to their ‘god’ you become.”

“Hideous!” I exclaimed. “Is there any
good
news?”

“Of course! The Swindon Mallets are going to beat the Reading Whackers to win the SuperHoop this year.”

“You’ve
got
to be kidding!”

“Not at all. Swindon winning the 1988 SuperHoop is the subject of the incomplete Seventh Revealment of St. Zvlkx. It goes like this: ‘There will be a home win on the playing fields of Swindonne in nineteen hundred and eighty eight, and in consequence of . . .’ The rest is missing, but it’s pretty unequivocal.”

St. Zvlkx was Swindon’s very own saint, and no child educated here could fail to know about him, including me. His Revealments had been the subject of much conjecture over the years, for good reason—they were uncannily accurate. Even so, I was skeptical—especially if it meant the Swindon Mallets’ winning the SuperHoop. The city’s team, despite a surprise appearance at the SuperHoop finals a few years back and the undeniable talents of team captain Roger Kapok, was probably the worst side in the country.

“That’s a bit of a long shot, isn’t it? I mean, St. Zvlkx vanished in, what—1292?”

But Joffy and my mother didn’t think it very funny.

“Yes,” said Joffy, “but we can ask him to confirm it.”

“You can? How?”

“According to his Revealment the Sixth, he’s due for spontaneous resurrection at ten past nine the day after tomorrow.”

“But that’s remarkable!”

“Remarkable but
not
unprecedented,” replied Joffy. “Thirteenth-century seers have been popping up all over the place. Eighteen in the last six months. Zvlkx will be of interest to the faithful and us at the Brotherhood, but the TV networks probably won’t cover it. The ratings of Brother Velobius’ second coming last week didn’t even come close to beating
Bonzo the Wonder Hound
reruns on the other channel.”

I thought about this for a moment in silence.

“That’s enough about Swindon,” said my mother, who had a nose for gossip—especially mine. “What’s been happening to you?”

“How long have you got? What I’ve been getting up to would fill several books.”

“Then . . . let’s start with why you’re back.”

So I explained about the pressures of being the head of Jurisfiction, and just how annoying books could be sometimes, and Friday, and Landen, and Yorrick Kaine’s fictional roots. On hearing this, Joffy jumped.

“Kaine is . . . fictional?”

I nodded. “Why the interest? Last time I was here, he was a washed-up ex-member of the Whig Party.”

“He’s not now. Which book is he from?”

I shrugged. “I wish I knew. Why? What’s going on?”

Joffy and Mum exchanged nervous glances. When my mother gets interested in politics, it means things are really bad.

“Something is rotten in the state of England,” murmured my mother.

“And that something is the English
Chancellor
Yorrick Kaine,” added Joffy, “but don’t take our word for it. He’s appearing on ToadNewsNetwork’s
Evade the Question Time
here in Swindon at eight tonight. We’ll go and see him for ourselves.”

I told them more about Jurisfiction, and Joffy, in return, cheerfully reported that attendance at the Global Standard Deity church was up since he had accepted sponsorship from the Toast Marketing Board, a company that seemed to have doubled in size and influence since I was here last. They had spread their net beyond hot bread and now included jams, croissants and pastries in their portfolio of holdings. My mother, not to be outdone, told me she’d received a little bit of sponsorship money herself from Mr. Rudyard’s Cakes, although she privately admitted that the Battenberg she served up was actually her own. She then told me in great detail about her aged friends’ medical operations, which I can’t say I was overjoyed to hear about, and as she drew breath in between Mrs. Stripling’s appendectomy and Mr. Walsh’s “plumbing” problems, a tall and imposing figure walked into the room. He was dressed in a fine morning coat of eighteenth-century vintage, wore an impressive mustache that would have put Commander Bradshaw’s to shame and had an imperiousness and sense of purpose that reminded me of Emperor Zhark. “Thursday,” announced my mother in a breathless tone, “this is the Prussian Chancellor, Herr Otto Bismarck—your father and I are trying to sort out the Schleswig-Holstein question of 1863-64; he’s gone to fetch Bismarck’s opposite number from Denmark so they can talk. Otto—I mean, Herr Bismarck, this is my daughter, Thursday.”

Bismarck clicked his heels and kissed my hand in an icily polite manner.

“Fraulein Next, the pleasure is all mine,” he intoned in a heavy German accent.

My mother’s curious and usually long-dead houseguests should have surprised me, but they didn’t. Not anymore. Not since Alexander the Great turned up when I was nine. Nice enough fellow—but shocking table manners.

“So, how are you enjoying 1988, Herr Bismarck?”

“I am especially taken with the concept of dry cleaning,” replied the Prussian, “and I see big things ahead for the gasoline engine.” He turned back to my mother: “But I am most eager to speak to the Danish prime minister. Where might he be?”

“I think we’re having a teensy-weensy bit of trouble locating him,” replied my mother, waving the cake knife. “Would you care for a slice of Battenberg instead?”

“Ah!” replied Bismarck, his demeanor softening. He stepped delicately over DH-82 to sit next to my mother. “The finest Battenberg I have ever tasted!”

“Oh, Herr B,” said my flustered mother. “You do flatter me so!”

She made shooing motions at us out of vision of Bismarck and, obedient children that we were, we withdrew from the living room.

“Well!” said Joffy as we shut the door. “How about that? Mum’s after a bit of Teutonic slap and tickle!”

I raised an eyebrow and stared at him.

“I hardly think so, Joff. Dad doesn’t turn up that often and intelligent male company can be hard to find.”

Joffy chuckled.

“Just good friends, eh? Okay. Here’s the deal: I’ll bet you a tenner Mum and the Iron Chancellor are doing the wild thing by this time next week.”

“Done.”

We shook hands and with Emma, Hamlet, Bismarck and my mother thus engaged, I asked Joffy to look after Friday so I could slip out of the house to get some air.

I turned left and wandered up Marlborough Road, looking about at the changes that two years’ absence had wrought. I had walked this way to school for almost eight years, and every wall and tree and house was as familiar to me as an old friend. A new hotel had gone up on Piper’s Way, and a few shops in the Old Town had either changed hands or been updated. It all felt very familiar, and I wondered whether the feeling of wanting to belong somewhere would stay with me or fade, like my fondness for
Caversham Heights,
the book in which I had made my home these past few years.

I walked down Bath Road, took a right and found myself in the street where Landen and I had lived before he was eradicated. I had returned home one afternoon to find his mother and father in residence. Since they hadn’t known who I was and considered—not unreasonably—that I was dangerously insane, I decided to play it safe today and just walk past slowly on the other side of the street.

Nothing looked very different. A tub of withered
Tickia orologica
was still on the porch next to an old pogo stick, and the curtains in the windows were certainly his mother’s. I walked on, then retraced my steps and returned, my resolve to get him back mixed with a certain fatalism that perhaps ultimately I wouldn’t and the thought that I should prepare myself. After all, he
had
died when he was two years old, and I had no memories of how it had been, but only of how things
might
have turned out had he lived.

I shrugged my shoulders and chastised myself upon the morbidity of my own thoughts, then walked towards the Goliath Twilight Homes, where my gran was staying these days.

Granny Next was in her room watching a nature documentary called
Walking with Ducks
when I was shown in by the nurse. Gran was wearing a blue gingham nightie, had wispy gray hair and looked all of her 110 years. She had got it into her head that she couldn’t shuffle off this mortal coil until she had read the ten most boring books, but since “boring” was about as impossible to quantify as “not boring,” it was difficult to know how to help.

“Shhh!” she muttered as soon as I walked in. “This program’s
fascinating!
” She was staring at the TV screen earnestly. “Just think,” she went on, “by analyzing the bones of the extinct duck
Anas platyrhynchos,
they can actually figure out how it walked.”

I stared at the small screen where an odd animated bird waddled strangely in a backwards direction as the narrator explained just how they had managed to deduce such a thing.

“How could they know that just by looking at a few old bones?” I asked doubtfully, having learned my lesson long ago that an “expert” was usually anything but.

“Scoff not, young Thursday,” replied Gran. “A panel of expert avian paleontologists have even deduced that a duck’s call might have sounded something like this: ‘Quock, quock.’ ”

“ ‘Quock’? Hardly seems likely.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” she replied, switching off the TV and tossing the remote aside. “What do experts know?”

Like me, Gran was able to jump inside fiction. I wasn’t sure how either of us did it, but I was very glad that she could—it was she who helped me not to forget my husband, something at one time I was in a clear and real danger of doing thanks to Aornis, the mnemonomorph, of course. But Gran had left me about a year ago, announcing that I could fend for myself and she wouldn’t waste any more time laboring for me hand and foot, which was a bit of cheek really, as I generally looked after
her.
But no matter. She was my gran, and I loved her a great deal.

“Goodness!” I said, looking at her soft and wrinkled skin, which put me oddly in mind of a baby echidna I had once seen in
National Geographic
.

“What?” she asked sharply.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You were thinking of how old I was looking, weren’t you?”

It was hard to deny it. Every time I saw her, I felt she couldn’t look any older, but the next time, with startling regularity, she did.

“When did you get back?”

“This morning.”

“And how are you finding things?”

I brought her up to date with current events. She made “tuttutting” noises when I told her about Hamlet and Lady Hamilton, then even louder “tut-tut” noises when I mentioned my mother and Bismarck.

“Risky business, that.”

“Mum and Bismarck?”

“Emma and Hamlet.”

“He’s fictional and she’s historical—what could be wrong about that?”

“I was thinking,” she said slowly, raising an eyebrow, “about what would happen if Ophelia found out.”

I hadn’t thought of that, and she was right. Hamlet could be difficult, but Ophelia was impossible.

“I always thought the reason Sir John Falstaff retired from policing Elizabethan drama was to get away from Ophelia’s sometimes unreasonable demands,” I mused, “such as having petting animals and a goodly supply of mineral water and fresh sushi on hand at Elsinore whenever she was working. Do you think I should insist Hamlet return to
Hamlet
?”

“Perhaps not right away,” said Gran, coughing into her hanky. “Let him see what the real world is like. Might do him good to realize it needn’t take five acts to make up one’s mind.”

She started coughing again, so I called the nurse, who told me I should probably leave her. I kissed her good-bye and walked out of the rest home deep in thought, trying to work up a strategy for the next few days. I dreaded to think what my overdraft was like, and if I was to catch Kaine I’d be better off inside SpecOps than outside. There were no two ways about it: I needed my old job back. I’d attempt that tomorrow and take it from there. Kaine certainly needed dealing with, and I’d play it by ear at the TV studios tonight. I’d probably have to find a speech therapist for Friday to try to wean him off the Lorem Ipsum, and then, of course, there was Landen. How do I even begin to get someone returned to the here-and-now after they were deleted from the there-and-then by a chronupt official from the supposedly incorruptible ChronoGuard.

I was jolted from my thoughts as I approached Mum’s house. There appeared to be someone partially hidden from view in the alleyway opposite. I nipped into the nearest front garden, ran between the houses, across two back gardens and then stood on a dustbin to peak cautiously over a high wall. I was right. There
was
someone watching my mother’s house. He was dressed too warmly for summer and was half hidden in the buddleia. My foot slipped on the dustbin, and I made a noise. The lurker looked around, saw me and took flight. I jumped over the wall and gave chase. It was easier than I thought. He wasn’t terribly fit, and I caught up with him as he tried rather pathetically to climb a wall. Pulling the man down, I upset his small duffel bag, and out poured an array of battered notebooks, a camera, a small pair of binoculars and several copies of the
SpecOps-27 Gazette,
much annotated in red pen.