One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

“Gatsby.”

This was unexpected.

“The Mediocre Gatsby?”

“No, the Loser Gatsby, the youngest of the three Gatsbys. I haven’t seen Great for a while. How did it turn out with crazy Daisy? She looked like trouble to me.”

“Not . . . terrific, as I recall.”

“Did they let Mia Farrow play her in the movie?”

“I’m not sure. Is Mediocre here?”

“I’ve not seen the miserable fart for three days,” she sniffed, picking her nose. “How did you know he was missing? I didn’t call you.”

“May we come in?”

“I guess,” said Loser Gatsby with a shrug, and we walked into the apartment. Sprawled in the front room were a half dozen men and women who looked as though life had not been kind to them. One of the women had been crying recently, and two of the men still were.

“This is our Siblings of More Famous BookWorld Personalities self-help group,” explained Loser. “That’s Sharon Eyre, the younger and wholly disreputable sister of Jane; Roger Yossarian, the draft dodger and coward; Brian Heep, who despite admonishments from his family continues to wash daily; Rupert Bond, still a virgin and can’t keep a secret; Tracy Capulet, who has slept her way round Verona twice; and Nancy Potter, who is . . . well, let’s just say she’s a term that is subject to several international trademark agreements.”

“She’s a Muggle?”

“Pretty much.”

They all nodded a greeting.

“We meet twice daily to try to iron out the feelings of low self-worth we experience, given our more famous family members. It’s quite hard, I assure you, being a nobody when an elder sister or brother is iconic for all time. Tracy Capulet was telling us what it was like living in Verona.”

“It’s ‘Juliet this, Juliet that’ all day long,” said Tracy petulantly. “Juliet’s on the balcony, Juliet’s shagging a Montague, Juliet’s pretending to be dead—blah, blah, blah. I tell you, I’m totally sick of it.”

Sprockett moved to the window and peered out. The Men in Plaid would be here soon.

“This is a matter of some urgency,” I said. “Does Mediocre have a room?”

Loser pointed to a door, and before she could explain that it was locked, Sprockett had wrenched it off its hinges.

The room was grubby and the floor scattered with discarded pizza containers and empty hyphen cans. The TV was still on and was tuned to a shopping channel, and his record collection contained Hooked on Classics and Footloose. Mediocre lived up to his name.

“What do you make of this?” asked Sprockett, who had come across a large model of the Forth Rail Bridge. It had large spans that in reality would have thrust boldly across the Forth Estuary, not just to connect two landmasses separated by a barrier that was also an arterial trade route but to demonstrate man’s technological prowess in the face of natural obstacles.

“It’s not a bridge,” I whispered, “it’s metaphor.”

We started opening boxes and found three more bridges, two rivers and a distant mountain range, swathed in mist with a road leading to unknown valleys beyond. Loser Gatsby was at the door, mouth open.

“Tell me,” I said, “where did your brother get all this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Truthfully?”

“I’m a loser,” she said. “If I’d known about this little lot, I would have sold it all, gone on a bender and had a dolphin tattooed on my left boob.”

Her logic was impeccable. I questioned her further, but she knew nothing.

“In two minutes the Men in Plaid will be coming through that door,” I told her. “Believe me, you don’t want to be here when they do.”

I didn’t need to say it twice, and she and the rest of the loser literary siblings made a hasty exit down the stairs.