The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [632]
“I’d so love not to have to,” I told her, and with the taxi still nowhere in sight, I passed the volume across to her. “Here,” I said, “let’s see how good you are at taking a passenger into a book.”
She accepted the novel without demur, opened it and started to read. She had a good speaking voice, fruity and expressive, and she quickly began to fade from view. I grabbed hold of her cuff so as not to be left behind, and she instantly regained her solidity; it was the library that was now faded and indistinct. Within a few more words, we had traveled into our chosen book. The first thing I noticed as we arrived was that the chief protagonist’s feet were on fire. Worse still, he hadn’t noticed.
7.
A Probe Inside Pinocchio
Although the idea of using footnotes as a communication medium was suggested by Dr. Faustus as far back as 1622, it wasn’t until 1856 that the first practical footnoterphone was demonstrated. The first transgenre trunk line between Human Drama and Crime was opened in 1915, and the network has been expanded and improved ever since. Although the system is far from complete, with many books still having only a single payfootnoterpayphone, on the outer reaches of the known BookWorld many books are without any coverage at all.
It was Pinocchio, of course, I’d know that nose anywhere. As we jumped into the toy workshop on page 26, the wooden puppet—Geppetto’s or Collodi’s creation, depending on which way you looked at it—was asleep with his feet on a brazier. The workbench was clean and tidy. Half-finished wooden toys filled every available space, and all the woodworking tools were hung up neatly upon the wall. There was a cot in one corner, a sideboard in another, and the floor was covered with curly wood shavings, but there was no sawdust or dirt. The fictional world was like that, a sort of narrative shorthand that precluded any of the shabby grottiness and texture that gives the real world its richness.
Pinocchio was snoring loudly. Comically, almost. His feet were smoldering, and within a few lines it would be morning and he would have nothing left but charred stumps. He wasn’t the only person in the room. On the sideboard were two crickets watching the one-day test match on a portable TV. One was wearing a smoking jacket and a pillbox hat and held a cigarette in a silver holder, and the other had a broken antennae, a black eye and one leg in a sling.
“The name’s Thursday Next,” I announced to them both, holding up my Jurisfiction badge, and this is…Thursday Next.”
“Which is the real one?” asked the cricket in the pillbox hat—somewhat tactlessly, I thought.
“I am,” I replied through gritted teeth. “Can’t you tell?”
“Frankly, no,” replied the cricket, looking at the pair of us in turn. “So…which is the one that does naked yoga?”
“That would be me,” said Thursday5 brightly.
I groaned audibly.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, amused by my prudishness. “You should try it someday. It’s relaxing and very empowering.”
“I don’t do yoga,” I told her.
“Take it up and drop the bacon sandwiches and it will put ten years on your life.”
The cricket, who spoke in a clipped accent reminiscent of Noël Coward’s, folded up his paper and said, “We don’t often get visitors, you know—the last lot to pass through this way was the Italian Translation Inspectorate making sure we were keeping to the spirit of the original.”
The cricket had a sudden thought and indicated the damaged cricket sitting next to him. “How rude could I be? This is Jim ‘Bruises’ McDowell, my stunt double.”
Bruises looked as though the stunt sequence with the mallet hadn’t gone quite as planned.
“Hello,” said the stunt cricket with an embarrassed shrug. “I had an accident during training. Some damn fool went and moved the crash mat.” As he said it, he looked at the other cricket, who did nothing but puff on his cigarette and preen his antennae in a nonchalant fashion.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said by way of conversation—a good relationship with the characters