The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [313]
He smiled, shook hands with us both and departed.
“Oh, boy!” exclaimed Snell, excited as a kid with a new bicycle. “Wait until Perkins sees this! Where do you think we should find it?”
I thought in all honesty that “head in a bag” plot devices were a bit lame, but being too polite to say so, I said instead, “I liked the deep-freezer idea, myself.”
“Me, too!” Snell enthused as we passed a small shop whose painted headboard read: Backstories built to order. No job too difficult. Painful childhoods a specialty.
“Backstories?”
“Sure. Every character worth their salt has a backstory. Come on in and have a look.”
We stooped and entered the low doorway. The interior was a workshop, small and smoky. A workbench in the middle of the room was liberally piled with glass retorts, test tubes and other chemical apparatus; the walls, I noticed, were lined with shelves that held tightly stoppered bottles containing small amounts of colorful liquids, all with labels describing varying styles of backstory, from one named Idyllic childhood to another entitled Valiant war record.
“This one’s nearly empty,” I observed, pointing to a large bottle with Misguided feelings of guilt over the death of a loved one/partner ten years previously written on the label.
“Yes,” said a small man in a corduroy suit so lumpy it looked as though the tailor were still inside doing alterations, “that one’s been quite popular recently. Some are hardly used at all. Look above you.”
I looked up at the full bottles gathering dust on the shelves above. One was labeled Studied squid in Sri Lanka and another, Apprentice Welsh mole catcher.
“So what can I do for you?” inquired the backstoryist, gazing at us happily and rubbing his hands. “Something for the lady? Ill treatment at the hands of sadistic stepsisters? Traumatic incident with a wild animal? No? We’ve got a deal this week on unhappy love affairs; buy one and you get a younger brother with a drug problem at no extra charge.”
Snell showed the merchant his Jurisfiction badge.
“Business call, Mr. Grnksghty—this is apprentice Next.”
“Ah!” he said, deflating slightly. “The law.”
“Mr. Grnksghty here used to write backstories for the Brontës and Thomas Hardy,” explained Snell, placing his bag on the floor and sitting on a table edge.
“Ah, yes!” replied the man, gazing at me from over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles. “But that was a long time ago. Charlotte Brontë, now she was a writer. A lot of good work for her, some of it barely used—”
“Yes, speaking,” interrupted Snell, staring vacantly at the array of glassware on the table. “I’m with Thursday down in the Well. . . . What’s up?”
He noticed us both staring at him and explained, “Footnoterphone. It’s Miss Havisham.”
“It’s so rude,” muttered Mr. Grnksghty. “Why can’t he go outside if he wants to talk on one of those things?”
“It’s probably nothing but I’ll go and have a look,” said Snell, staring into space. He turned to look at us, saw Mr. Grnksghty glaring at him and waved absently before going outside the shop, still talking.
“Where were we, young lady?”
“You were talking about Charlotte Brontë ordering backstories and then not using them?”
“Oh, yes.” The man smiled, delicately turning a tap on the apparatus and watching a small drip of an oily colored liquid fall into a flask. “I made the most wonderful backstory for both Edward and Bertha Rochester, but do you know she only used a very small part of it?”
“That must have been very disappointing.”
“It was,” he sighed. “I am an artist, not a technician. But it didn’t matter. I sold it lock, stock and barrel a few years back to The Wide Sargasso Sea. Harry Flashman from Tom Brown’s Schooldays went the same way. I had Mr. Pickwick’s backstory for years but couldn’t make a sale—I donated it to the Jurisfiction museum.”
“What do you make a backstory out of, Mr. Grnksghty?”
“Treacle, mainly,” he replied, shaking the flask and watching the oily substance change to a gas, “and memories. Lots of memories.