The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [235]
“How much bigger?”
“A lot.”
“How much of a lot?” I persisted.
“A lot of a lot. Quiet now—we’re nearly there!”
And all of a sudden we weren’t nearly there, we were there, back at breakfast in my apartment, Dad turning the pages of the newspaper and me running out from my bedroom having just got dressed. I stopped in mid-stride and sat down at the table, feeling deflated.
“Well, we tried, didn’t we?” said my father.
“Yes Dad,” I replied, staring at the floor, “we did. Thanks.”
“Don’t worry,” he said kindly. “Even the finest eradications leave something behind for us to reactualize from. There is always a way—we just have to find it. Sweetpea, we will get him back—I’m not having my grandchild without a father.”
His determination did reassure me, and I thanked him.
“Good!” he said, closing his newspaper. “By the way, did you manage to get any tickets for the Nolan Sisters concert?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Good show. Well, time waits for no man, as we say—”
He squeezed my hand and was gone. The world started up again, the TV came back on, and there was a muffled plocking from Pickwick, who had managed to lock herself in the airing cupboard again. I let her out and she ruffled her feathers in an embarrassed fashion before going off in search of her water dish.
I went in to work, but there was precious little to do. We had a call from an enraged Mrs. Hathaway34, demanding to know when we were going to arrest the unlick’d bear-whelp who had cheated her, and another from a student who wanted to know whether we thought Hamlet’s line was this too too solid flesh or this too too sullied flesh, or even perhaps this two-toed swordfish. Bowden spent the morning mouthing the lines for his routine, and by noon there had been two attempts to steal Cardenio from Vole Towers. Nothing serious; SO-14 had doubled the guard. This didn’t concern SpecOps-27 in any way, so I spent the afternoon surreptitiously reading the Jurisfiction instruction manual, which felt a little like flicking through a girls’ magazine during school. I was tempted to have a go at entering a work of fiction to try out a few of their “handy bookjumping tips” (page 28), but Havisham had roundly forbidden me from doing anything of the sort until I was more experienced. By the time I was ready to go home I had learned a few tricks about emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34) and read about the aims of the Bowdlerizers (page 62), who were a group of well-meaning yet censorious individuals hell bent on removing obscenities from fiction. I also read about Heathcliff’s unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name of Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of Wuthering Heights (page 71), the forty-six abortive attempts to illegally save Beth from dying in Little Women (page 74), details of the Character Exchange Program (page 81), using holorimic verse to flush out renegade book people, or PageRunners as they were known (page 96), and how to use spelling mistakes, misprints and double negatives to signal to other PROs in case emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34) failed (page 105). But there weren’t only pages of instructions. The last ten or so pages featured hollowed-out recesses which contained devices that were far too deep to have fitted in the book. One of the pages contained a device similar to a flare gun which had “Mk IV TextMarker” written on its side. Another page had a glass panel covering a handle like a fire alarm. A note painted on the glass read: IN UNPRECEDENTED EMERGENCY* BREAK GLASS. The asterisk, I noted somewhat chillingly, related to the footnote: *Please note: personal destruction does NOT count as an unprecedented emergency. I was just learning about writing brief descriptions of where you are by hand to enable you to get back (page 136) when it was time to clock off. I joined the general exodus and wished