The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [503]
She handed me several long forms and a numbered ticket, then indicated a door to one side. I opened the door of the Apologarium and walked in. It was a large hall with floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a serene view of the Irish Sea. On one side was a row of perhaps twenty cubicles containing suited apologists, all listening intently to what they were being told with the same sad and contrite expression. On the other side were rows upon rows of wooden seating that held eager and once bullied citizens, anxiously clasping their numbered tickets and patiently waiting their turn. I looked at my ticket. It was number 6,174. I glanced up at the board, which told me that number 836 was now being interviewed.
“Dear, sweet people!” said a voice through a tannoy. “Goliath is deeply sorry for all the harm it might inadvertently have caused you in the past. Here at the Goliath Apologarium we are only too happy to assist in your problem, no matter how small—”
“You!” I said to a man who was hobbling past me towards the exit. “Has Goliath repented to your satisfaction?”
“Well, they didn’t really need to,” he replied blandly. “It was I who was at fault—in fact, I apologized for wasting their valuable time!”
“What did they do?”
“They bathed my neighborhood with ionizing radiation, then denied it for seventeen years, even after people’s teeth fell out and I grew a third foot.”
“And you forgave them?”
“Of course. I can see now that it was a genuine accident and the public has to accept equal risks if we are to have abundant clean energy, limitless food and household electrodefragmentizers.”
He was carrying a sheaf of papers, not the application form that I had to fill out but leaflets on how to join New Goliath. Not as a consumer but as a worshipper. I had always been deeply distrustful of Goliath, but this whole “repentance” thing smelt worse than anything I had so far witnessed. I turned, tore up my numbered ticket and headed for the exit.
“Miss Next!” called out a familiar voice. “I say, Miss Next!”
A short man with pinched features and a rounded head covered with the fuzz of an aggresively short crew cut was facing me. He was wearing a dark suit and heavy gold jewelry and was arguably the person I liked least—this was Jack Schitt, once Goliath’s top advanced-weapons guru and ex-convict of “The Raven.” This was the man who had tried to prolong the Crimean War so he could make a fortune out of Goliath’s latest superweapon, the Plasma Rifle.
Anger rose quickly within me. I turned Friday in the other direction so as not to give his young mind any wrong ideas about the use of violence and then grasped Schitt by the throat. He took a step back, stumbled and collapsed beneath me with a yelp. Sensing I had been in this position before, I released him and placed my hand on the butt of my automatic, expecting to be attacked by a host of Jack’s minders. But there was nothing. Just sad citizens looking on sorrowfully.
“There is no one here to help me,” said Jack Schitt, slowly getting to his feet. “I have been assaulted eight times today—I count myself fortunate. Yesterday it was twenty-three.”
I looked at him and noticed, for the first time, that he had a black eye and a cut on his lip.
“No minders?” I echoed. “Why?”
“It is my absolution to face those I have bullied and harangued in the past, Miss Next. When we last met, I was head of Goliath’s Advanced Weapons Division and corporate laddernumber 329.” He sighed. “Now, thanks to your well-publicized denouncement of the failings of our Plasma Rifle, the corporation decided to demote me. I am an Apology Facilitation Operative Second Class, laddernumber 12,398,219. The mighty has fallen, Miss Next.”
“On the contrary,” I replied, “you have merely been