The Woman Who Died a Lot (Thursday Next 7)

Friday shook his head sadly. To most of his and Tuesday’s friends, I was considered about the coolest parent one could have, but to Tuesday and Friday I was simply embarrassing.

“So . . . how many are we for supper?” he asked, counting out the cutlery.

“Joffy and Miles are in town and want to speak to your sister about the defense shield. All of us, of course, but maybe not Polly or Gran. Granddad will be coming.”

“Do you think he will want to talk endlessly about the good old never-happened days at the ChronoGuard?”

“Probably. Try to steer him onto plumbing. Which reminds me, Jimmy-G and Shazza both wanted to be remembered to you. Shazza said, ‘It would have been seriously good.’ And she raised her eyebrows in that sort of way when she said ‘seriously.’”

“Sharon ‘Steggo’ deWitt,” he murmured with a smile. “She would have been known as the ‘Scourge of the Upper Jurassic.’”

“Curiosity insists that I inquire why.”

“It was a popular place for timejackers to hang out. The Epochal Badlands, we would have called them. A jump into the Upper Jurassic was usually a safe escape. Not for deWitt. Twenty million years, and she knew each hour like the back of her hand. She was the one who tracked down ‘Fingers’ Lomax, hiding out after the Helium Heist of ’09. Or at least she would have.”

“She said you were going to have a weekend retreat in the Late Pleistocene.”

“I was going to have a lot of things. She and I would have been very close, so I got some of her potential future in my own Letter of Destiny. How will she turn out now?”

“Not grea

t,” I replied, handing him the forks. “Two unremarkable kids, a husband she doesn’t like—and then she gets hit by a car in 2041.”

“Same year as me,” mused Friday.

I stopped folding the napkins. “You never told me you only make it to fifty-five.”

“Bummer, isn’t it?” said Friday with a shrug. “Thirty-seven years to go and counting.”

I stared at him for a while and felt a heavy feeling of grief in my heart. It was over three decades away, so I didn’t feel the loss quite yet, just the notion that I was going to outlive him. And that wasn’t how it was meant to happen.

“But there’s an upside,” he added.

“There is?”

“Sure. I miss HR-6984 slamming into the earth by three days.”

“That might not happen.”

“I’ll never know whether it does or it doesn’t.”

“What else happens to you?”

“My future’s my own, Mum.”

“Okay, okay,” I said quickly, since we’d covered this ground before, “forget I asked. Have you thought any more about university or a career?”

“No.”

I pondered for a moment.

“You know, your sister needs a lab assistant she can trust,” I said, “and she’ll pay you well. There’s a career there ready and waiting.”

“Mum, Tuesday’s work is Tuesday’s work. My life lies along a different path. I was going to be important—I was going to do wonderful things. I would have been head of the ChronoGuard and saved an aggregate seventy-six billion lives. Shazza and I would have made love on the veranda of my place in the Pleistocene while the mastodons bellowed at one another across the valley. I would have been there at Mahatma Winston Smith Al-Wazeed’s historic speech to the citizens of the world state at Europolis in 3419, and listened to his last words as he lay dying in my arms, and then implemented them. But now I don’t. All gone. Not going to happen. Mum, I don’t have any function. No kids, no wife, no achievements, nothing. I die aged fifty-five, my life essentially . . . wasted.”

There was silence for a moment. We stopped setting the table, and I gave him a hug. One of those strong Mum hugs that always do some good, no matter how bad things happen to be.

“Listen,” I said, “you don’t know for certain there are no good times. They didn’t give you a full view of the future, did they?”