The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [703]
“Yes,” I replied, “and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations.”
“I’m serious,” he said, mildly annoyed.
“Sorry!” I replied. “It’s just difficult to know what you’re thinking when I can’t see your face. I might as well converse to the side of a yak.”
He parted his hair so I could see his eyes. He looked a lot like his father did at that age. Not that I knew him then, of course, but from photographs.
“Nostalgia used to have a minimum twenty years before it kicked in,” he said in all seriousness, “but now it’s getting shorter and shorter. By the late eighties, people were doing seventies stuff, but by the mid-nineties the eighties-revival thing was in full swing. It’s now 2002, and already people are talking about the nineties—soon nostalgia will catch up with the present and we won’t have any need for it.”
“Good thing, too, if you ask me,” I said. “I got rid of all my seventies rubbish as soon as I could and never regretted it for a second.”
There was an indignant plock from Pickwick.
“Present company excepted.”
“I think the seventies are underrated,” said Landen. “Admittedly, fashion wasn’t terrific, but there’s been no better decade for sitcoms.”
“Where’s Jenny?”
“I took her dinner up to her,” said Friday. “She said she needed to do her homework.”
I frowned as I thought of something, but Landen clapped his hands together and said, “Oh, yes! Did you hear that the British bobsled team has been disqualified for using the banned force ‘gravity’ to enhance performance?”
“No.”
“Apparently so. And it transpires that the illegal use of gravity to boost speed is endemic within most downhill winter sports.”
“I wondered why they managed to go so fast,” I replied thoughtfully.
Much later that night, when the lights were out, I was staring at the glow of the streetlamps on the ceiling and thinking about Thursday1–4 and what I’d do to her when I caught her. It wasn’t terribly pleasant.
“Land?” I whispered in the darkness.
“Yes?”
“That time we…made love today.”
“What about it?”
“I was just thinking—how did you rate it? Y’know, on a one-to-ten?”
“Truthfully?”
“Truthfully.”
“You won’t be pissed off at me?”
“Promise.”
There was a pause. I held my breath.
“We’ve had better. Much better. In fact, I thought you were pretty terrible.”
I hugged him. At least there was one piece of good news today.
28.
The Discreet Charm
of the Outland
The real charm of the Outland was the richness of detail and the texture. In the BookWorld a pig is generally just pink and goes oink. Because of this, most fictional pigs are simply a uniform flesh color without any of the tough bristles and innumerable scabs and skin abrasions, shit and dirt that makes a pig a pig. And it’s not just pigs. A carrot is simply a rod of orange. Sometimes living in the BookWorld is like living in Legoland.
The stupidity surplus had been beaten into second place by the news that the militant wing of the no-choice movement had been causing trouble in Manchester. Windows were broken, cars overturned, and there were at least a dozen arrests. With a nation driven by the concept of choice, a growing faction of citizens who thought life was simpler when options were limited had banded themselves together into what they called the “no-choicers” and demanded the choice to have no choice. Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste condemned the violence but explained that the choice of choice over “just better services” was something the previous administration had chosen and was thus itself a no-choice principle for the current administration. Alfredo Traficcone, MP, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, was quick to jump on the bandwagon, proclaiming that it was the inalienable right of all citizens to have the chice over whether they have choice or not. The no-choicers had suggested that there should be a referendum to settle the matter once and for all, something that the opposition “choice” faction had no option but to agree with. More sinisterly,