One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [15]
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (4th edition)
I stepped out of the front door and walked the eight blocks to the corner of Adams and Colfer. A bus arrived in a couple of minutes—they always do—and after showing my pass to the driver, who looked suspiciously like a Dr. Seuss character on furlough, I took a seat between a Viking and a nun.
“I’m on my way to a pillage,” said the Viking as he attempted to find some common ground on which to converse, “and we’re a bit lean in the ‘beating people to death with large hammers’ department. Would you like to join us?”
“That’s most kind, but it’s really not my thing.”
“Oh, go on, you might rather like it.”
“No thank you.”
“I see,” said the Viking in a huffy tone. “Please yourself, then.” And he lapsed into silence.
It was the nun’s turn to speak.
“I’m collecting,” she said with a warm smile, “for the St. Nancy’s Home for Fallen Women.”
“Fallen in what respect?”
“Fallen readership. Those poor unfortunate wretches who, through no fault of their own, now find themselves in the ignominious status of the less well read. Are you interested?”
“Not really.”
“Well,” said the nun, “how completely selfish of you. How would you like to be hardly read at all?”
“I am hardly read at all,” I told her, mustering as much dignity as I could. There was an unfair stigma attached to those characters who weren’t read, and making us into victims in need of saving didn’t really help, to be honest.
The Viking looked at me scornfully, then got up and went to the front of the bus to pretend to talk to someone. The nun joined him without another word, and I saw them glance in my direction and shake their heads sadly.
I took the bus across the Fantasy/Human Drama border, then changed to a tram at Hemingway Central. In the six months since the BookWorld had been remade, its citizens had learned much about their new surroundings. It was easier to understand; we had usable maps, a chain of outrageously expensive coffee shops in which to be seen, known as Stubbs, and most important, a network of road, rail and river to get from one place to another. We now had buses, trams, taxis, cars and even paddlewheel steamers. Bicycles might have been useful, but for some reason they didn’t work inside the BookWorld—no matter what anyone did, they just wouldn’t stay up. Jumping directly from book to book had rapidly become unfashionable and was looked upon as hopelessly Pulp. If you really wanted to be taken seriously and display a sense of cool unhurried insouciance, you walked.
“So what do you think?” asked a red-haired, jowly gentleman who had sat next to me. He was dressed in a double-breasted blue suit with a dark tie secured by a pearl tiepin. His hair was long but combed straight, and there seemed rather a lot of it. So much, in fact, that he had gathered the bright red locks that grew from his cheeks into fine plaits, each bound with a blue ribbon. Aside from that, his deep-set eyes had a kindly look, and I felt immediately at ease in his company.
“What do I think about what?”
“This,” he said, waving a hairy hand in the direction of the new BookWorld.
“Not enough pianos,” I said after a moment’s reflection, “and we could do with some more ducks—and fewer baobabs.”
“I’d prefer it to be more like the RealWorld,” said the red-haired gentleman with a sigh. “Our existence in here is very much life at second hand. I’d love to know what a mistral felt like, how the swing and drift of fabric might look and what precisely it is about a sunset or the Humming Chorus that makes them so astonishing.”
This was a sentiment I could agree with.
“For me it would be to hear the rattle of rain on a tin roof or see the vapor rise from a warm lake in the chill morning air.”
We fell silent for a moment as the tram rumbled on. I didn’t tell him what I yearned for above all, the most underappreciated luxury of the human race: free will. My life was by definition preordained. I had to do what