One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [93]
“You’re a good man.”
He smiled. “No, I’m an average man . . . with a truly extraordinary wife.”
I rubbed my temples with the frustration of it. I so wanted to be her and have all this—Landen, the kids. There was a dull throb in my head, and I felt hot and prickly. It was a lot easier being fictional—always assuming that I was, of course.
“That’s another reason I should leave,” I said in a harsher tone than I might have wished. “This morning I knew who I was and what I was doing. Now? I’ve got no idea.”
And I started to sob.
“Hey, hey,” he said, resting a hand on mine, “don’t cry. There’s four hours to go before you vanish or not, and I’m not sure I can wait that long. I’m pretty confident you’re her. You called me ‘Land,’ you saw Jenny, you’re a bit odd, you love the kids. But there’s one simple way I’ll be able to tell.”
“And what’s that?”
“Kiss me.”
I felt myself shiver with anticipation, and my heart—my real heart, that is, not the descriptive one—suddenly thumped faster. I placed my hand on his cheek, which was warm to the touch, and leaned forward. I felt his breath on my face, and our lips were just about to touch when suddenly I once more felt the hot needles and Klein-Blue Wagnerian treacle, and I was back in the arrivals lounge at JurisTech. As Plum had promised, there was a glass of water and some cookies waiting for me. I picked up the water glass and threw it at the wall.
27.
Back Early
Plot 9 (Human Drama) revolved around a protagonist returning to a dying parent to seek reconciliation for past strife and then finding new meaning to his or her life. If you lived anywhere but HumDram, “go do a Plot 9” was considered a serious insult, the Outlander equivalent of being told to “go screw yourself.”
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (3rd edition)
I found Professor Plum working on his Large Metaphor Collider. As soon as he saw me, he pressed a couple of buttons on his mobilefootnoterphone, uttered a few words and smiled at me.
“Oh!” he said in some surprise. “You’re back.”
“What happened? I wasn’t meant to come back for another four hours!”
“Transfictional travel isn’t an exact science,” he replied with a shrug. “Sometimes you’ll pop back early for no adequately explained reason.”
“Can you send me out there again? I was right in the middle of something important.”
“If Bradshaw allows it, I’ll be more than happy to.”
“Please?”
“There are safety issues,” he explained. “The more you stay out there, the less time you can spend there. Bradshaw used to travel across quite often, but these days he can barely stay out for ten minutes before popping back.”
I thought about the excitement I’d felt just as I was about to kiss Landen and the potential chain of events that might have occurred from there on in.
“I really need to get back, Professor. Lives . . . um, depend on it.”
“Whose lives?”
Commander Bradshaw had appeared in the laboratory. But he didn’t walk in, he had bookjumped in. I hadn’t seen that for a while; it was considered very common and was actively discouraged. The Ungenred Zone and Racy Novel, to name but two, even had antijump sieves set up on their borders—large sails of a fine mesh that snagged the punctuation in one’s description and brought one down to earth with a thump.
“I’m very busy,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Walk with me.”
So I walked with Bradshaw out of the labs, past the frog-footman, who followed at a discrete distance and up the stairs.
“So,” said Bradshaw, “how did you get on?”
“Not very well. Lots happened, but I’ve got no way of knowing which of the facts were significant and which weren’t.”
“The RealWorld is like that. It’s possible that nothing was significant or that everything was. It scares the bejesus out of me, I can tell you—and I don’t scare easily. Anything on Thursday’s whereabouts?”
I told him about the locked room at Acme.
“Hmm,” he said, “definitely in here somewhere. I’ll ask Professor Plum to attempt another Textual Sieve triangulation.” He thought for a moment. “How were Landen and the kids?”
“As good as