Something Rotten (Thursday Next 4)

'Fräulein Next, the pleasure is all mine,' he intoned in a heavy German accent.

My mother's curious and usually long-dead house guests should have surprised me, but they didn't. Not any more. Not since Alexander the Great turned up when I was nine. Nice enough fellow – but shocking table manners.

'So, how are you enjoying 1988, Herr Bismarck?'

'I am especially taken with the concept of dry cleaning,' replied the Prussian, 'and I see big things ahead for the gasoline engine.' He turned back to my mother. 'But I am most eager to speak to the Danish prime minister. Where might he be?'

'I think we're having a teensy-weensy bit of trouble locating him,' replied my mother, waving the cake knife. 'Would you care for a slice of Battenberg instead?'

'Ah!' replied Bismarck, his demeanour softening. He stepped delicately over DH82 to sit next to my mother. 'The finest Battenberg I have ever tasted!'

'Oh, Herr B,' flustered my mother, 'you do flatter me so!'

She made 'shooing' motions at us out of vision of Bismarck and, obedient children that we are, we withdrew from the living room.

'Well!' said Joffy as we shut the door. 'How about that? Mum's after a bit of Teutonic slap and tickle!'

I raised an eyebrow and stared at him.

'I hardly think so, Joff. Dad doesn't turn up that often and intelligent male company can be hard to find.'

Joffy chuckled.

'Just good friends, eh? Okay. Here's the deal: I'll bet you a tenner Mum and the Iron Chancellor are doing the wild thing by this time next week.'

'Done.'

We shook hands and, with Emma, Hamlet, Bismarck and my mother thus engaged, I asked Joffy to look after Friday so I could slip out of the house to get some air.

I turned left and wandered up Marlborough Road, looking about at the changes that two years' absence had wrought. I had walked this way to school for almost eight years, and every wall and tree and house was as familiar to me as an old friend. A new hotel had gone up on Piper's Way and a few shops in the Old Town had either changed hands or been updated. It all felt very familiar, and I wondered whether the feeling of wanting to belong somewhere would stay with me, or fade, like my fondness for Caversham Heights, the book in which I had made my home these past few years.

I walked down Bath Road, took a right and found myself in the street where Landen and I had lived, before he was eradicated. I had returned home one afternoon to find his mother and father in residence. Since they hadn't known who I was and considered – not unreasonably – that I was dangerously insane, I decided to play it safe today and just walk past slowly on the other side of the street.

Nothing looked very different. A tub of withered Tickia orologica was still on the porch next to an old pogo stick and the curtains in the windows were certainly his mother's. I walked on, then retraced my steps, my resolve to get him back mixed with a certain fatalism, a feeling that perhaps ultimately I wouldn't and I should prepare myself. After all, he had died when he was two years old, and I had no memories of how it had been, only of how things might have turned out had he lived.

I shrugged my shoulders and chastised myself on the morbidity of my own thoughts, then walked towards the Goliath Twilight Homes where my gran was staying these days.

Granny Next was in her room watching a nature documentar

y called Walking with Ducks when I was shown in by the nurse. Gran was wearing a blue gingham nightie, had wispy grey hair and looked all of her no years. She had got it into her head that she couldn't shuffle off this mortal coil until she had read the ten most boring books, but since 'boring' was about as impossible to quantify as 'not boring' it was difficult to know how to help.

'Shhh!' she muttered as soon as I walked in. 'This programme's fascinating!' She was staring at the TV screen earnestly. 'Just think,' she went on, 'by analysing the bones of the extinct duck Anas platyrhynchos they can actually figure out how it walked.'

I stared at the small screen, where an odd animated bird waddled strangely in a backward direction as the narrator explained just how they had managed to deduce such a thing.

'How could they know that just by looking at a few old bones?' I asked doubtfully, having learned long ago that an 'expert' was usually anything but.

'Scoff not, young Thursday,' replied Gran, 'a panel of expert avian palaeontologists have even deduced that a duck's call might have sounded something like this: "Quock, quock".'

'"Quock?" Hardly seems likely.'

'Perhaps you're right,' she replied, switching off the TV and tossing the remote aside. 'What do experts know?'

Like me, Gran was able to jump inside fiction. I wasn't sure how either of us did it but I was very glad that she could – it was she who helped me to not forget my husband, something at one time I was in clear and real danger of doing thanks to Aornis, the mnemonomorph, of course. But Gran had left me about a year ago, announcing that I could fend for myself and she wouldn't waste any more time labouring for me hand and foot, which was a bit of cheek really, as I generally looked after her. But no matter. She was my gran and I loved her a great deal.

'Goodness!' I said, looking at her soft and wrinkled skin, which put me oddly in mind of a baby echidna I had once seen in National Geographic.

'What?' she asked sharply.