First Among Sequels (Thursday Next 5)

“Mum? Does this make any sense to you?”

“Yes,” I said with a smile. “It’s somewhere the ChronoGuard can’t get to it. Back in 1985, before he used the Prose Portal to send Polly into ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,’ he tested it on himself. The jacket is right where he left it—in the teeth of an Atlantic gale inside Henry Longfellow’s poem ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’”

“Inside the BookWorld?”

“Right,” I replied, “and nothing—repeat, nothing—would compel me to return there. In two days the ChronoGuard will be gone, and the slow repair of the Now can begin. You did good, Sweetpea.”

“Thanks, Mum,” he said, “but please—don’t call me Sweetpea.”

31.

Spending the Surplus

The Commonsense Party’s first major policy reversal of perceived current wisdom was with the scrapping of performance targets, league standings and the attempt to make subtle human problems into figures on a graph that could be solved quickly and easily through “initiatives.” Arguing that important bodies such as the Health Service should have the emphasis on care and not on administration, the Commonsense Party forced through legislation that essentially argued, “If it takes us ten years to get into the shit, it will take us twenty years to get out—and that journey starts now.”

W e stayed at Mum’s for dinner, although “dinner” in this context might best be described as a loose collection of foodstuffs tossed randomly into a large saucepan and then boiled for as long as it took for all taste to vanish, never to return. Because of this we missed Redmond van de Poste’s Address to the Nation, something that didn’t really trouble us, as the last address had been, as they always were, unbelievably dreary but astute and of vital importance. It was just so good to talk to Friday again one-to-one. I’d forgotten how pleasant he actually was. He lost no time in telling me that he was going to have to stay undercover as a lazy good-for-nothing until the ChronoGuard had ceased operations—and this meant that I shouldn’t even attempt to wake him until at least midday, or two on weekends.

“How convenient,” I observed.

Tuesday had been thoughtful for some time and finally asked, “But can’t the ChronoGuard go back to the time between when Great-Uncle Mycroft wrote the recipe and when he left it on the Hesperus?”

“Don’t worry,” said Friday with a wink. “It was only twenty-eight minutes, and the older me has it covered at the other end. The only thing we have to do is make sure the recipe stays in ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’ We can win this fight with nothing more than inaction, which as a teenager suits me just fine.”

It was only as we were driving home that I suddenly thought of Jenny.

“Oh, my God!” I said in a panic. “We left Jenny at home on her own!”

Landen took hold of my arm and squeezed it, and I felt Friday rest his hand on my shoulder.

“It’s all right, darling, calm down,” Landen soothed. “We left her with Mrs. Berko-Boyler.”

I frowned. “No, we didn’t. You said she was making a camp in the attic. We came straight out. How could we have forgotten?”

“Sweetheart,” said Landen with a deep breath, “there is no Jenny.”

“What do you you mean?” I demanded, chuckling at the stupidity of his comment. “Of course there’s a Jenny!”

“Dad’s right,” said Friday soothingly. “There has never been a Jenny.”

“But I can remember her!”

“It’s Aornis, Mum,” added Tuesday. “She gave you this mindworm seven years ago, and we can’t get rid of it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said beginning to panic. “I can remember everything about her! Her laugh, the holidays, the time she fell off her bicycle and broke her arm, her birth—everything!”

“Aornis did this to you for revenge,” said Landen. “After she couldn’t wipe me from your memory, she left you with this—that’s what she’s doing her forty-year stretch for.”

“The bitch!” I yelled. “I’ll kill her for this!”

“Language, Mum,” said Tuesday. “I’m only twelve. Besides, even if you did kill her, we think Jenny would still be with you.”

“Oh, shit,” I said as reason started to replace confusion and anger. “That’s why she never turns up at mealtimes.”

“We pretend there is a Jenny to minimize the onset of an attack,” said Landen. “It’s why we keep her bedroom as it is and why you’ll find her stuff all around the house—so when you’re alone, you don’t go into a missing-daughter panic.”

“The evil little cow!” I muttered, rubbing my face. “But now that I know, we can do something about it, right?”

“It’s not as easy as that, sweetheart,” said Landen with a note of sadness in his voice. “Aornis is truly vindictive—in a few minutes you won’t remember any of this and you’ll again believe that you have a daughter named Jenny.”