“She might have been a shit of the highest order, darling, but she brought in the readers. I’ll be in my dressing room. Come, Hector.”
And so saying, he swept from the café setting with his ever-present dresser, who pouted rudely at me as they left. My book-father had a point, of course, but I was committed to promoting the type of Thursday the real Thursday wanted to see in the series. The series had originally been written to feature a violent and disorderly Thursday Next, who slept her way around the BookWorld and caused no end of murder, misery and despair. I was trying to change all that but had met with stiff resistance from the rest of the cast. They saw my attempt to depict reality as damaging to the overall readability—and for a character, the only thing worse than being read badly is to be badly unread.
I sighed. Keeping everyone within my series happy and fulfilled and focused was about as hard a job as acting in the book itself. Some books had a page manager to do all that boring stuff, but for financial reasons I had to do it myself with only a defective Mrs. Malaprop for assistance. Making us all readable was the least of my worries.
I walked slowly home through my book-version of Swindon, which was forty times more compact than the real one. Due to the limited number of locations mentioned in my series, I could go easily from the café to my mother’s house to the GSD church and then on to the SpecOps Building in the space of a few minutes, something that would take the best part of an hour in the real Swindon. There were a few handy shortcuts, too. By opening a door at the back of Our Blessed Lady of the Lobster, I could find myself in the mockup of Thornfield Hall, and by taking the first door on the right past Jane’s bedroom, I could be in the Penderyn Hotel in Wales. All told, the series covered about five acres on six levels and would have been larger if we hadn’t doubled up the East facade of Thornfield with the front of Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, and the Gad’s Hill Museum with the redressed lobby of the SpecOps Building. Economies like this were commonplace in remaindered books and helped us keep the cast at almost full strength. Doubling up characters was possible, but it caused problems when they were in scenes with themselves. Some characters could handle it, others could not. On one memorable occasion, Vronsky played all the parts in an abridged version of Anna Karenina whilst the rest of the cast were on strike for more blinis. When asked what it was like, he described it as “like, totally awesome, dude.”
“Good morning, Pickwick,” I said as I walked into the kitchen, which not only served as the command center of my series but also as the place where tea and toast could be made and eaten. “Good morning, Mrs. Malaprop.”
“Cod Moaning, Miss Next,” said the defective Mrs. Malaprop, bobbing politely.
“May I have a word?” asked Pickwick, in a not very subtle aside.
“Is it important?”
“It is vitally crucial,” said Pickwick, rolling her eyes oddly.
We moved out to the hallway.
“Okay, what’s the problem?” I asked, since Pickwick always had a grievance of some sort—whether it was the cold or the heat or the color of the walls or a hundred and one other things that weren’t quite right. Whitby and I referred to her as “Goldilocks without the manners”—but never to her beak.
“It’s Mrs. Malaprop,” said the dodo in an affronted tone. “She’s becoming increasingly unintelligible. It would be okay if it were faintly amusing, but it isn’t, and . . . well, quite frankly, there is the risk of infection, and it frightens me.”
To a text-based life-form, unpredictable syntax and poor grammar is a source of huge discomfort. Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can’t walk to the bathroom. Poor syntax is even worse. Change word order and a sentence usel
ess for anyone Yoda except you have.
“Now, then,” I said, using an oxymoron for scolding effect, “it is totally unproven that malapropism is inflectious, and what did we say about tolerating those less fortunate than ourselves?”
“Even so,” said Pickwick, “I want you to tell her to stop it. And her shoes squeak. And while we’re on the subject, Bowden referred to me as ‘that bird’ again, the baobab in the back garden is cutting out the light from my bedroom, and I’m taking next Wednesday off to have my beak oiled, so you’ll need to get a replacement—and not the penguin like last time. She didn’t do justice to my dynamic personalty and poetic sensibilities. Played it all a bit . . . fishcentric, if you know what I mean.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, making a mental note to definitely rebook the penguin.
“Good,” said Pickwick. “Have you the paper?”
We returned to the kitchen, and I found The Word for her.
“Hmm,” she said thoughtfully, staring at the City pages. “Metaphor has risen by seventeen pounds a barrel. I should dump some metonym and buy into synecdoche futures.”
“How are things going with Racy Novel?” I asked, since the political problems up in the North had been much in the news recently. A long-running dispute between Racy Novel, Women’s Fiction and Dogma had been getting worse and was threatening to erupt into a genre war at the drop of a hat.
“Peace talks still on schedule for Friday,” replied Pickwick, “as if that will do any good. Sometimes I think that Muffler nutjob wants nothing but a good scrap. By the way,” she added, “did you hear about Raphael’s Walrus?”
“No.”
“Got their eviction papers this morning.”
This wasn’t surprising. Raphael’s Walrus was a book six doors down that hadn’t been read for a while. I didn’t know them well, but since we were located at the Speculative end of Fantasy, the real estate was valuable. We’d have a new neighbor almost the moment they left.
“I hope it’s not Sword and Sorcery,” said Pickwick with a shudder. “Goblins really drag down the neighborhood.”
“Goblins might say the same about dodos.”
“Impossible!” she retorted. “Dodos are cute and cuddly and lovable and . . . don’t steal stuff and spread disease.”
People often wondered why my written dodo was such a pain in the ass when the real Pickwick was so cute. The reason was simple: lack of choice. There are only three dodos in fiction. One was dangerously psychotic, the second was something big over in Natural History, which left only one: The dodo from Alice is the same bespectacled know-it-all in my series. Her name wasn’t actually Pickwick—it was Lorina Peabody III, but we called her Pickwick, and she didn’t much mind either way. She put down the paper, announced to the room that she would be taking her siesta and waddled off.
“Mrs. Malaprop,” I said once Pickwick had left, “are you still attending your therapy sessions?”