The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [704]
It was eight-thirty, and the girls had already gone to school.
“Jenny didn’t eat her toast again,” I said, setting the plate with its uneaten contents next to the sink. “That girl hardly eats a thing.”
“Leave it outside Friday’s door,” said Landen. “He can have it for lunch when he gets up—if he gets up.”
The front doorbell had rung, and I checked on who it might be through the front-room windows before opening the door to reveal…Friday. The other Friday.
“Hello!” I said cheerily. “Would you like to come in?”
“I’m in a bit of a hurry,” he replied. “I just wondered whether you’d thought about my offer of replacement yesterday. Hi, Dad!”
Landen had joined us at the door. “Hello, son.”
“This,” I said by way of introduction, “is the Friday I was telling you about—the one we were supposed to have.”
“At your ser vice,” said Friday politely. “And your answer? I’m sorry to push you on this, but time travel has still to be invented and we have to look very carefully at our options.”
Landen and I glanced at each other. We’d already made up our mind.
“The answer’s no, Sweetpea. We’re going to keep our Friday.”
Friday’s face fell, and he glared at us. “This is so typical of you. Here I am a respected member of the ChronoGuard, and you’re still treating me like I’m a kid!”
“Friday!”
“How stupid can you both be? The history of the world hangs in the balance, and all you can do is worry about your lazy shitbag of a son.”
“You talk like that to your mother and you can go to your room.”
“He is in his room, Land.”
“Right. Well…you know what I mean.”
Friday snorted, glared at us both, told me that I really shouldn’t call him “Sweetpea” anymore and walked off, slamming the garden gate behind him.
I turned to Landen. “Are we doing the right thing?”
“Friday told us to dissuade him from joining the ChronoGuard, and that’s what we’re doing.”
I narrowed my eyes, trying to remember.
“He did? When?”
“At our wedding bash? When Lavoisier turned up looking for your father?”
“Shit,” I said, suddenly remembering. Lavoisier was my least favorite ChronoGuard operative, and on that occasion he had a partner with him—a lad of about twenty-five who’d looked vaguely familiar. We figured it out several years later. It was Friday himself, and his advice to us was unequivocal: “If you ever have a son who wants to be in the ChronoGuard, try to dissuade him.” Perhaps it wasn’t just a complaint—perhaps it had been…a warning.
Landen placed a hand on my waist and said, “I think we should follow his best advice and see where it leaves us.”
“And the End of Time?”
“Didn’t your father say that the world was always five minutes from total annihilation? Besides, it’s not until Friday evening. It’ll work itself out.”
I took the tram into work and was so deep in thought I missed my stop and had to walk back from MycroTech. Without my TravelBook I was effectively stuck in the real world, but instead of feeling a sense of profound loss as I had expected, I felt something more akin to relief. In my final day as the LBOCS, I had scotched any chance of book interactivity or the preemptive strike on Speedy Muffler and the ramshackle Racy Novel, and the only worrying loose end was dealing with slutty bitchface Thursday1–4. That was if she hadn’t been erased on sight for making an unauthorized trip to the Outland. Well, I could always hope. Jurisfiction had gotten on without me for centuries and would doubtless continue to do so. There was another big plus point, too: I wasn’t lying to Landen quite as much. Okay, I still did a bit of SpecOps work, but at least this way I could downgrade my fibs from “outrageous” to a more manageable “whopping.” All of a sudden, I felt really quite happy—and I didn’t often feel that way. If there hadn’t been a major problem with Acme’s overdraft and the potential for a devastating chronoclasm in two and a half days, everything might be just perfect.
“You look happy,” said