One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

“Well, then,” said Landen, clapping his hands together, “you’d better meet Tuesday.”

So I sat down at the kitchen table and felt all goose-bumpy and hot. I’d been less nervous facing down Potblack, but this was different. Landen and the children were everything I’d ever wanted. Potblack was just a jumped-up cheesemonger.

Tuesday wandered shyly into the room and stared at me intently.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m not your mother.”

“You look like her. Dad says that you might be Mum but you don’t know it.”

“That’s possible, too,” I said, “and I’d like to be.”

“Could she be?” asked Tuesday of Landen.

“It’s possible, but we won’t know until later.”

“Oh, well,” said Tuesday, sitting next to me at the kitchen table. “Do you want to see what I’m working on?”

“Sure.”

So she opened her exercise book and showed me a sketch of an idea she’d been having.

“This is a sundial that works in the overcast—or even indoors. This is a method of sending power wirelessly using music, and what do you make of this?” She showed me several pages of complex mathematical notation.

“Looks important.”

“It’s an algorithm that can predict the movement of cats with ninety-seven percent accuracy,” she explained with a smile. “I’m presenting it to Nuffield College the day after tomorrow. Do you want to come?”

Over the next few minutes, she explained her work, which was far-ranging in its originality and depth. My inventor uncle Mycroft was dead now, and his intellect had crossed to Tuesday. If at age twelve she was working out the complex mathematics required to accurately predict random events, her work when she was an adult would be awe inspiring. She spoke to me of her latest project: a plausible method to crack one of the most intractable problems in modern physics, that of attempting to instill a sense of urgency in teenagers. After that she explained how she was designing daylight fireworks, which would sparkle darkness in the light, and then finally mentioned the possibility of using beamed electron fields as a kind of impermeable barrier with such diverse applications as enabling people to go underwater without need for an Aqua Lung or to protect one from rockfalls or even for use as an umbrella. “Especially useful” remarked Tuesday, “for an electron-field umbrella wouldn’t poke anyone in the eye and never needs shaking.”

After Tuesday had gone off to fetch a photograph album, I turned to Landen. “She’s the secret plans, isn’t she?”

He looked at me but said nothing, which I took to mean she was. Tuesday’s intellect would be the driving force behind the government’s Anti-Smite Strategic Defense Shield.

“I guess we’re just about to find out if you’re the Goliath Thursday,” said Landen. “If you are, you’ll be contacting them straightaway.”

I wouldn’t, of course. “How long do you think before they figure it out?”

“I don’t know,” replied Landen, scraping the carrots he’d been chopping into a saucepan, “but know this: I’ll die to protect my daughter.”

“Me, too.”

Landen smile

d. “Are you sure you’re not her?”

“I’m sure.”

Tuesday came back with the photograph album, and I joined her as she leafed through the family holidays of which I had no knowledge. I stared at the Thursday in the pictures and tried to figure her out. She never looked totally relaxed—not as much as Landen and the kids anyway, but clearly loved them all, even if she seemed to be glancing around her as though on the lookout for anyone wishing to do them or her harm. There were very few pictures in which she was smiling. She took life seriously, but her family kept her anchored, and probably as sane as she could ever hope to be. Tuesday reached for my hand and held it tightly without really thinking, and as we chatted, it crossed my mind that I could become Thursday, if the real one never showed up. I could go Blue Fairy, and all this would be mine. For a fleeting moment, it seemed like a good, worthy and attainable idea, but reality quickly returned. I was fooling myself. The longer I listened to Tuesday, the more I realized just how much she needed her mother. Not any mother, but her mother. I would never be anything more than a pale reflection.

“Landen,” I said when Tuesday had gone off to watch Bonzo the Wonder Hound, Series Twelve, “I shouldn’t have come.”

“Nonsense.”

“No, really. It was a huge mistake. I can’t be her, no matter how much I want to.”

“You sell yourself short—I’m more convinced by the minute. The way you sat with Tuesday.”

“Yes?”