The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [510]
16.
That Evening
Toast May Be Injurious to Health
That was the shock statement put out by a joint Kaine-Goliath research project undertaken last Tuesday morning. “In our research we have found that in certain circumstances eating toast may make the consumer writhe around in unspeakable agony, foaming at the mouth before death mercifully overcomes them.” The scientists went on to report that although these findings were by no means complete, more work needed to be done before toast had a clean bill of health. The Toast Marketing Board reacted angrily and pointed out that the “at risk” slice of toast in the experiment had been spread with the deadly poison strychnine and these “scientific” trials were just another attempt to besmirch the board’s good name and that of their sponsee, opposition leader Redmond van de Poste.
Report in Goliath Today!, July 17, 1988
How was your day?” asked Mum, handing me a large cup of tea. Friday had been tuckered out by all the activity and had fallen asleep into his cheesy bean dips. I had bathed him and put him to bed before having something to eat myself. Hamlet and Emma were out at the movies or something, Bismarck was listening to Wagner on his Walkman, so Mum and I had a moment to ourselves.
“Not good,” I replied slowly. “I can’t dissuade an assassin from trying to kill me; Hamlet isn’t safe here, but I can’t send him back; and if I don’t get Swindon to win the SuperHoop, then the world will end. Goliath somehow duped me into forgiving them, I have my own stalker, and also have to figure out how to get the banned books I should be hunting for SO-14 out of the country. And Landen’s still not back.”
“Really?” she said, not having listened to me at all. “I think I’ve got a plan how we can deal with that annoying offspring of Pickwick’s.”
“Lethal injection?”
“Not funny. No, my friend Mrs. Beatty knows a dodo whisperer who can work wonders with unruly dodos.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“Not at all.”
“I’ll try anything, I suppose. I can’t understand why he’s so difficult—Pickers is a real sweetheart.”
We fell silent for a moment.
“Mum?” I said at last.
“Yes?”
“What do you think of Herr Bismarck?”
“Otto? Well, most people remember him for his ‘blood and iron’ rhetoric, unification arguments, and the wars—but few give him credit for devising the first social security system in Europe.”
“No, I mean . . . that is to say . . . you wouldn’t—”
At that moment we heard some oaths and a slammed door. After a few thumps and bumps, Hamlet burst into the living room, stopped, composed himself, rubbed his forehead, looked heavenwards, sighed deeply and then said:
“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew!”1
“Is everything all right?” I asked
“Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d his canon ’gainst self-slaughter!” 2
“I’ll make a cup of tea,” said my mother, who had an instinct for these sorts of things. “Would you like a slice of Battenberg, Mr. Hamlet?”
“O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable—yes, please—seem to me all the uses of this world!”3
She nodded and moved off.
“What’s up?” I asked Emma, who had entered with Hamlet, as he strutted around the living room, beating his head in frustration and grief.
“Well, we went to see Hamlet at the Alhambra.”
“Crumbs!” I muttered. “It . . . er . . . didn’t go down too well, I take it?”
“Well,” reflected Emma, as Hamlet continued his histrionics around the living room, “the play was okay apart from Hamlet shouting out a couple of times that Polonius wasn’t meant to be funny and Laertes wasn’t remotely handsome. The management weren’t particularly