Lost in a Good Book

Pickwick’s feet on the linoleum as she meandered around the kitchen. Sleep patterns never came out quite right in re-engineered species; no one knew why. There had been no major coincidences over the past few days, although on the night of Joffy’s exhibition the two SpecOps 5 agents who had been assigned to watch Slaughter and Lamb died in their car as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. It seemed their car had a faulty exhaust. Lamb and Slaughter had been following me around very indiscreetly for the past two days. I just let them get on with it; they weren’t bothering me—or my unknown assailant. If they had, they’d as likely as not be dead.

But there was more than just SO-5 to worry about. In three days the world would be reduced to a sticky mass of sugar and proteins—or so my father said. I had seen the pink and gooey world for myself, but then I had also seen myself shot at Cricklade Skyrail station, so the future wasn’t exactly immutable—thank goodness. There had been no advance on the forensic report; the pink slime matched to no known chemical compound. Coincidentally, the following Thursday was also the day of the general election, and Yorrick Kaine looked set to make some serious political gains thanks to his ‘generous’ sharing of Cardenio. Mind you, he was still taking no chances—the first public unveiling of the text was not until the day after the election. The thing was, if the pink gunge got a hold, Yorrick Kaine could have the shortest career as a prime minister ever. Indeed, next Thursday could be the last Thursday for all of us.

I closed my eyes and thought of Landen. He was there as I best remembered him; seated in his study with his back to me, oblivious to everything, writing. The sunlight streamed in through the window and the familiar clacketty-clack of his old Underwood typewriter sounded like a fond melody to my ears. He stopped occasionally to look at what he had written, make a correction with the pencil clenched between his teeth, or just pause for pause’s sake. I leaned on the door frame for a while and smiled. He mumbled a line he had written, chuckled to himself and typed faster for a moment, hitting the carrriage return with a flourish. He typed quite animatedly in this fashion for about five minutes until he stopped, took out the pencil and slowly turned round to face me.

‘Hey, Thursday.’

‘Hey, Landen. I didn’t want to disturb you; shall I—?’

‘No, no,’ he said hurriedly, ‘this can wait. I’m just pleased to see you. How’s it going out there?’

‘Boring,’ I told him despondently. ‘After Jurisfiction, SpecOps works seems as dull as ditchwater. Flanker at SO-1 is still on my back, I can feel Goliath breathing down my neck, and this Lavoisier character is using me to get to Dad.’

‘Would sitting on my lap help?’

So I did, and hugged him tightly.

‘How’s Junior?’

‘Junior is smaller than a broad bean but making himself known. The Lucozade keeps the nausea at bay most of the time—I must have drunk a swimming pool of it by now.’

There was a pause.

‘Is it mine?’ he asked.

I held him tightly again but said nothing. He understood and patted my shoulder.

‘Let’s talk about something else. How are you getting along at Jurisfiction?’

‘Well,’ I said, blowing my nose loudly, ‘I’m not a natural at this book-jumping lark. I want you back, Land, but I’m only going to get one shot at The Raven and I need to get it right. I’ve not heard from Havisham for nearly three days—I don’t know when the next assignment will be.’

Landen shook his head slowly.

‘Sweetness, I don’t want you to go into The Raven.’

I looked up at him.

‘You heard. Leave Jack Schitt where he is. How many people would have died for him to make a packet out of that Plasma rifle scam? One thousand? Ten thousand? Listen, your memory may grow fuzzy, but I’ll still be here, the good times—’

‘But I don’t want just the good times, Land. I want all the times. The shitty ones, the arguments, that annoying habit you had of always trying to make the next filling station and running out of petrol. Picking your nose, farting in bed. But more than that, I want the times that haven’t happened yet—the future. Our future! I am getting Schitt out, Land—make no mistake about that’

‘Let’s talk about something else again,’ said Landen. ‘Listen—I’m a bit worried about someone trying to kill you with coincidences.’

‘I can look after myself.’

He looked at me solemnly.

‘I don’t doubt it for one moment. But I’m only alive in your memories—and some mewling and puking ones of my mum’s, I suppose—and without you I’m nothing at all, ever. So if whoever is juggling with entropy gets lucky next time, you and I are both for the high jump—but at least you get a memorial and a SpecOps regulation headstone.’

‘I see your point, however muddled you might make it. Did you see how I used the last entropy lapse to find Mrs Nakyima? Clever, eh?’

‘Inspired. Now, can you think of any linking factor—except the intended victim— that connects the three attacks?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. I’ve thought it through a thousand times. Nothing.’

Landen thought for a moment, tapped a finger on his temple and smiled.

‘Don’t be so sure. I’ve been having a little peek myself, and, well, I want to show you something.’

And there we were, on the platform of the Skyrail station at South Cerney. But it wasn’t a moving memory, like the other ones I had enjoyed with Landen, it was frozen like a stilled video image—and like a stilled video image, it wasn’t very good; all blurry and a bit jumpy.

‘Okay, what now?’ I asked as we walked along the platform.

‘Have a look at everyone. See if there is anyone you recognise.’

I stepped on to the shuttle and walked round the players in the fiasco, who were frozen like statues. The faces that were most distinct were the Neanderthal driver-operator, the well-heeled woman, the woman with Pixie Frou-Frou and the woman with the crossword. The rest were vague shapes, generic female human forms and little else—no mnemonic tags to make them unique. I pointed them out.

‘Good,’ said Landen, ‘but what about her?’

And there she was, the young woman sitting on the bench in the station, doing her face in a make-up mirror. We walked closer and I looked intently at the fuzzy, nondescript face that loomed murkily out of my memory.

‘I only glimpsed her for a moment, Land. Slightly built, mid-twenties, red shoes. So what?’

‘She was here when you arrived, she’s on the southbound platform, all trains go to all stops—yet she didn’t take the Skyrail. Suspicious?’

‘Not really.’

‘No,’ said Landen, slightly crestfallen. ‘Not exactly a smoking gun, is it? Unless’—he smiled—’unless you look at this.’

And in a trice we were at the Uffington White Horse on the day of the picnic. I looked up nervously. The large Hispano-Suiza automobile was hanging motionless in the air not fifty feet up.

‘Anything spring to mind?’ asked Landen.

I looked around carefully. It was another bizarre frozen vignette. Everyone and everything was there— Major Fairwelle, Sue Long, my old croquet captain, the mammoths, the gingham tablecloth—even the bootleg cheese. I looked at Landen.

‘Nothing, Land.’

‘Are you sure? Look again.’

I sighed and scanned their faces. Sue Long, an old schoolfriend whose boyfriend set his own trousers on fire for a bet, Sarah Nara, who lost her ear at Bilohirsk on a training accident and ended up marrying General