The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [202]
“And don’t tell me,” I added, “there’s a Diatryma living in the New Forest.”
“How did you know?”
I ignored him, and only thirty-eight minutes after leaving London we came in for a delicate dock in Sydney, the faintest click being heard as the magnetic locks held on to the shuttle to stop it falling back down again. After the safety light had extinguished and the airlock had been pressurized we made our way to the exit, avoiding the technobore, who was trying to tell anyone who would listen that the Goliath Corporation were responsible for smallpox.
Snell, who genuinely seemed to enjoy the DeepDrop, walked with me until baggage retrieval, looked at his watch and announced: “Well, that’s me. Thanks for the chat. I’ve got to go and defend Tess for the umpteenth time. As Hardy originally wrote it she gets off. Listen, try and figure some extenuating circumstances as to your actions. If you can’t, then try and think up some stonking great lies. The bigger the better.”
“That’s your best advice? Perjure myself?”
Snell coughed politely.
“The astute lawyer has many strings to his bow, Miss Next. They’ve got Mrs. Fairfax and Grace Poole to testify against you. It doesn’t look great, but no case is lost until it’s lost. They said I couldn’t get Henry V off the war crimes rap when he ordered the French POWs murdered, but I managed it—the same as Max de Winter’s murder charge. No one figured he’d get off that in a million years. By the by, can you give this letter to that gorgeous Flakky girl? I’d be eternally grateful.”
He handed me a crumpled letter from his pocket and made to move off.
“Wait!” I said. “Where and when is the hearing?”
“Didn’t I say? Sorry. The prosecution has chosen the Examining Magistrate from Kafka’s The Trial. Not my choice, believe me. Tomorrow at 9:25. Do you speak German?”
“No.”
“Then we’ll make sure it’s an English translation—drop in at the end of Chapter Two; we’re on after Herr K. Remember what I said. So long!”
And before I could ask him how I might even begin to enter Kafka’s masterpiece of frustrating circuitous bureaucracy, he was gone.
I caught the overmantle to Tokyo a half hour later. It was almost deserted, and I hopped on board a Skyrail to Osaka and alighted in the business district at one in the morning, four hours after leaving Saknussum. I took a hotel room and sat up all night, staring out at the blinking lights and thinking about Landen.
15.
Curiouser & Curiouser in Osaka
I first learned of my strange bookjumping skills as a little girl in the English school where my father taught in Osaka. I had been instructed to stand up and read to the class a passage from Winnie-the-Pooh. I began with Chapter Nine—“It rained and it rained and it rained . . . ”—but then had to stop abruptly as I felt the hundred-acre wood move rapidly in all around me. I snapped the book shut and returned, damp and bewildered, to my classroom. Later on I visited the hundred-acre wood from the safety of my own bedroom and enjoyed wonderful adventures there. But I was always careful, even at that tender age, never to alter the visible story lines. Except, that is, to teach Christopher Robin how to read and write.
O. NAKAJIMA,
Adventures in the Book Trade
OSAKA WAS LESS FLASHY than Tokyo but no less industrious. In the morning I took breakfast at the hotel, bought a copy of the Far Eastern Toad and read the home news but from a Far Eastern viewpoint—which makes for a good take on the whole Russian thing. During breakfast I pondered just how I might find one woman in a city of a million. Apart from her surname and perfect English, there was little to go on. As a first step I asked the concierge to photocopy all the Nakajima entries from the telephone directory. I was dismayed to discover that Nakajima was quite a common name—there were 2,729 of them. I called one at random and a very pleasant Mrs. Nakajima spoke to me for about ten minutes.