Something Rotten (Thursday Next 4)

'What bigger fish to fry?'

'Sweetpea,' he said, giving me his stern 'father knows best' voice, 'I'm really not going to go through it all again. Now I have to get back to work – there's a TimePhoon brewing in the Dark Ages and if we don't sort it out we'll be picking anachronisms out of the timeline for a century.'

'Wait – you're working at the ChronoGuard?'

'I've told you all about this already! Do try and keep up – you're going to need all your wits about you over the next week. Now, get back to the house and I'll start the world up again.'

He wasn't in a very chatty mood, but since I would be seeing him later and would find out then what we had just discussed, there didn't seem a lot of point in talking anyway, so I bade him goodbye, and as I walked up the garden path time returned to normal with a snap. The pigeon flew on, the traffic continued to move and everything carried on as usual. Time had stopped so completely that everything my father and I had talked about occupied no time at all. Still, at least this meant I wouldn't have to be constantly looking over my shoulder as I knew when she would try to get rid of me. Mind you, I wasn't looking forward to her death at my hands. Spike would be severely pissed off.

I returned to the kitchen, where Mum was still hard at work cooking my bacon and eggs. To her and Friday I had been gone less than twenty seconds.

'What was that noise when you were at the door, Thursday?'

'Probably a car backfiring.'

'Funny,' she said, 'I could have sworn it was a high-velocity bullet striking wood. Two eggs or one?'

'Two, please.'

1 picked up the newspaper, which was running a five-page expose revealing that 'Danish pastries' were actually brought to Denmark by displaced Viennese bakers in the sixteenth century. 'In what other ways,' thundered the article, 'have the dishonest Danes made fools of us?' I shook my head sadly and turned to another page.

Mum said she could look after Friday until teatime, something I got her to promise before she had fully realised the implications of nappy changing and saw just how bad his manners were at breakfast. He yelled, 'Ut enim ad veniam!', which might have meant: 'Look how far I can throw my porridge!' as a spoonful of oatmeal flew across the kitchen, much to the delight of DH82, who had learned pretty quickly that hanging around messy toddlers at mealtimes was an extremely productive pastime.

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 demeanour 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 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?'