First Among Sequels Page 2

  “Thirty grand?” echoed Landen. “Do they know she’s a bit challenged in the brain and plumage department?”

  “I honestly don’t think they care. It would pay off the mortgage.”

  Pickwick was suddenly wide awake and looking at us with the dodo equivalent of a raised eyebrow, which is indistinguishable from the dodo equivalent of sniffing a raw onion.

  “And buy one of those new diesel-molasses hybrid cars,” said Landen.

  “Or a holiday.”

  “We could send Friday off to the Swindon Home for Dreary Teenagers,” added Landen.

  “And Jenny could have a new piano.”

  It was too much for Pickwick, who fainted dead away in the middle of the table.

  “Doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, does she?” said Landen with a smile, returning to his paper.

  “Not really,” I replied, tearing up the letter from the Swindon Dodo Fanciers Society. “But, you know, for a bird of incalculably little brain, I’m sure she understands almost everything we say.”

  Landen looked at Pickwick, who had by now recovered and was staring suspiciously at her left foot, wondering if it had always been there and, if not, what it might be doing creeping up on her.

  “It’s not likely.”

  “How’s the book going?” I asked, returning to my knitting.

  “The self-help stuff?”

  “The magnum opus.”

  Landen looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “More opus than magnum. I’m trying to figure out whether the lack of progress is writer’s block, procrastination, idleness or just plain incompetence.”

  “Well, now,” I said, feigning seriousness, “with such an excellent range of choices, it’s hard to put my finger on it. Have you considered that it might be a mixture of all four?”

  “By gad!” he said, slapping his palm on his forehead. “You could be right!”

  “Seriously, though?”

  He shrugged. “It’s so-so. Although the story is toodling along, there’s no real bite to it—I think I need to inject a new plot twist or character.”

  “Which book are you working on?”

  “Bananas for Edward.”

  “You’ll think of something, sweetheart—you usually do.”

  I dropped a stitch on my knitting, rehooked it, checked the wall clock and then said, “Mum texted me earlier.”

  “Has she got the hang of it yet?”

  “She said, ‘L&Ks4DnRNXT-SNDY??’”

  “Hmm,” said Landen, “one of the most coherent yet. That’s probably code for ‘I’ve forgotten how to text.’ Why does she even bother to try to use new technology at her age?”

  “You know what she’s like. I’ll nip over and see what she wants on my way to work.”

  “Don’t forget about Friday and the ChronoGuard ‘If You’ve Got Time for Us, We’ve Got Time for You’ careers presentation this evening.”

  “How could I forget?” I replied, having tried to cajole Friday into this for weeks.

  “He’s behind with his homework,” added Landen, “and since you’re at least six times more scary than I am, would you do phase one of the teenager-waking procedure? Sometimes I think he’s actually glued to the bed.”

  “Considering his current level of personal hygiene,” I mused, “you’re probably right.”

  “If he doesn’t get up,” added Landen with a smile, “you could always threaten him with a bar of soap and some shampoo.”

  “And traumatize the poor lad? Shame on you, Mr. Parke-Laine.”

  Landen laughed, and I went up to Friday’s room.

  I knocked on his door, received no reply and opened it to a fetid smell of old socks and unwashed adolescence. Carefully bottled and distilled, it would do sterling work as a shark repellent, but I didn’t say so. Teenage sons react badly to sarcasm. The room was liberally covered with posters of Jimi Hendrix, Che Guevara and Wayne Skunk, lead guitar and vocals of Strontium Goat. The floor was covered with discarded clothes, deadline-expired schoolwork and side plates with hardened toast crusts on them. I think the room had once been carpeted, but I couldn’t be sure anymore.

  “Hiya, Friday,” I said to an inert object wrapped up in a duvet. I sat on the bed and prodded a small patch of skin I could see.

  “Grunt,” came a voice from somewhere deep within the bed-clothes.

  “Your father tells me that you’re behind with your homework.”

  “Grunt.”

  “Well, yes, you might be suspended for two weeks, but you still need to do your coursework.”

  “Grunt.”

  “The time? It’s nine right now, and I need you to be sitting up with your eyes open before I leave the room.”

  There was another grunt and a fart. I sighed, prodded him again, and eventually something with unwashed dark hair sat up and stared at me beneath heavy lids.

  “Grunt,” it said. “Grunt-grunt.”

  I thought of making some sarcastic remark about how it helps to open your mouth when talking but didn’t, as I desperately needed his compliance, and although I couldn’t actually speak teenage Mumblegrunt, I could certainly understand it.

  “How’s the music going?” I asked, as there is a certain degree of consciousness that you have to bring teenagers toward before leaving them to get up on their own. Fall even a few degrees below the critical threshold and they go back to sleep for eight hours—sometimes more.

  “Mumble,” he said slowly. “I’ve grunt-mumble formed a band grunty-mutter.”

  “A band? What’s it called?”

  He took a deep breath and rubbed his face. He knew he wouldn’t get rid of me until he’d answered at least three questions. He looked at me with his bright, intelligent eyes and sniffed before announcing in a rebellious tone, “It’s called the Gobshites.”

  “You can’t call it that!”

  Friday shrugged. “All right,” he grumbled in a slovenly manner, “we’ll go back to the original name.”

  “Which is?”

  “The Wankers.”

  “Actually, I think Gobshites is a terrific name for a band. Pithy and degenerate all at the same time. Now, listen, I know you’re not keen on this whole ‘career in the time industry’ stuff, but you did promise. I’ll expect you to be all bright-eyed, alert and bushy-tailed, washed, showered, scrubbed and all homework finished by the time I get back.”

  I stared at the picture of slovenly teenagerhood in front of me. I’d have settled for “awake and/or coherent”—but I always aim high.

  “Allrightmum,” he said in a long slur.

  As soon as I had closed the door behind me I heard him flop back. It didn’t matter. He was awake, and his father could do the rest.

  “I expect he’s raring to go?” suggested Landen when I came downstairs. “Had to lock him in his room to curb his enthusiasm?”

  “Champing at the bit,” I replied wearily. “We’d get a more dynamic response from a vapid slug on tranquilizers.”

  “I wasn’t so dreary when I was a kid,” said Landen thoughtfully, handing me my tea. “I wonder where he gets it from?”

  “Modern living, but don’t worry. He’s only sixteen—he’ll snap out of it.”

  “I hope so.”

  And that was the problem. This wasn’t just the usual worries of concerned parents with grunty and unintelligible teenagers; he had to snap out of it. I’d met the future Friday several times in the past, and he’d risen to the lofty heights of ChronoGuard director-general with absolute power over the Standard History Eventline, a job of awesome responsibilities. He was instrumental in saving my life, his own—and the planet from destruction no fewer than 756 times. By his fortieth birthday, he would be known as “Apocalypse” Next. But that hadn’t happened yet. And with Friday’s chief interest in life at present being Strontium Goat, sleeping, Che Guevara, Hendrix and more sleeping, we were beginning to wonder how it ever would.

  Landen looked at his watch.

  “Isn’t it time you wer
e off to work, wifey darling? The good folk of Swindon would be utterly lost and confused without you to take the burden of floor-covering decision making from them.”

  He was right. I was already ten minutes late, and I kissed him several times, just in case something unexpected occurred that might separate us for longer than planned. By “unexpected” I was thinking of the time he was eradicated for two years by the Goliath Corporation. Although the vast multinational was back in business after many years in the financial and political doldrums, they had not yet attempted any of the monkey business that had marked our relationship in the past. I hoped they’d learned their lesson, but I’d never quite freed myself of the idea that a further fracas with them might be just around the corner, so I always made quite sure that I’d told Landen everything I needed to tell him.

  “Busy day ahead?” he asked as he saw me to the garden gate.

  “A large carpet to install for a new company in the financial center—bespoke executive pile, plus the usual quotes. I think Spike and I have a stair carpet to do in an old Tudor house with uneven treads, so one of those nightmare jobs.”

  He paused and sucked his lower lip for a moment.

  “Good, so…no…no…SpecOps stuff or anything?”

  “Sweetheart!” I said, giving him a hug. “That’s all past history. I do carpets these days—it’s a lot less stressful, believe me. Why?”

  “No reason. It’s just that what with Diatrymas being seen as far north as Salisbury, people are saying that the old SpecOps personnel might be recalled into service.”

  “Six-foot-tall carnivorous birds from the late Paleocene would be SO-13 business if they were real, which I doubt,” I pointed out. “I was SO-27. The Literary Detectives. When copies of Tristram Shandy are threatening old ladies in dark alleys, I just might be asked for my opinion. Besides, no one’s reading books much anymore, so I’m fairly redundant.”

  “That’s true,” said Landen. “Perhaps being an author isn’t such a great move after all.”

  “Then write your magnum opus for me,” I told him tenderly. “I’ll be your audience, wife, fan club, sex kitten and critic all rolled into one. It’s me picking up Tuesday from school, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you’ll pick up Jenny?”

  “I won’t forget. What shall I do if Pickwick starts shivering in that hopelessly pathetic way that she does?”

  “Pop her in the airing cupboard—I’ll try and get her cozy finished at work.”

  “Not so busy, then?”

  I kissed him again and departed.

  2.

  Mum and Polly and Mycroft

  My mother’s main aim in life was to get from the cradle to the grave with the minimum of fuss and bother and the maximum of tea and Battenberg. Along the way she brought up three children, attended a lot of Women’s Federation meetings and managed to squeeze a few severely burned meals somewhere in between. It wasn’t until I was six that I realized that cake wasn’t meant to be 87 percent carbon and that chicken actually tasted of something. Despite all this, or perhaps even because of it, we all loved her a great deal.

  M y mother lived less than a mile away and actually on the route to work, so I often dropped in just to make sure she was okay and wasn’t about to embark on some harebrained scheme, as was her habit. A few years ago she had hoarded tinned pears on the principle that once she’d cornered the market, she could “name her price,” a flagrant misunderstanding of the rules of supply and demand that did no damage to the tinned-fruit producers of the world but condemned her immediate family and friends to pears at every meal for almost three years.

  She was the sort of parent you would want to have living close by, but only on the grounds that she would then never come to stay. I loved her dearly, but in small doses. A cup of tea here, a dinner there—and as much child care as I could squeeze out of her. The text excuse I gave Landen was actually something of a mild fib, as the real reason for my popping around was to pick something up from Mycroft’s workshop.

  “Hello, darling!” said Mum as soon as she opened the door. “Did you get my text?”

  “Yes. But you must learn how to use the backspace and delete keys—it all came out as nonsense.”

  “‘L&Ks4DnRNXT-SNDY??’” she repeated, showing me her cell phone. “What else could that mean but ‘Landen and kids for dinner next Sunday?’ Really, darling, how you even begin to communicate with your children, I have no idea.”

  “That wasn’t real text shorthand,” I said, narrowing my eyes suspiciously. “You just made it up.”

  “I’m barely eighty-two,” she said indignantly. “I’m not on the scrap heap yet. Made up the text indeed! Do you want to come back for lunch?” she added, without seeming to draw breath. “I’ve got a few friends coming around, and after we’ve discussed who is the most unwell, we’ll agree volubly with one another about the sorry state of the nation and then put it all to rights with poorly thought-out and totally impractical ideas. And if there’s time after that, we might even play cribbage.”

  “Hello, Auntie,” I said to Polly, who hobbled out of the front room with the aid of a stick, “If I texted you ‘L&Ks4DnRNXT-SNDY??’ what would you think I meant?”

  Polly frowned and thought for a moment, her prunelike forehead rising in a folding ripple like a festoon curtain. She was over ninety and looked so unwell that she was often mistaken for dead when asleep on the bus. Despite this she was totally sound upstairs, with only three or four fair-to-serious medical ailments, unlike my mother, who had the full dozen—or so she claimed.

  “Well, do you know I’d be a bit confused—”

  “Hah!” I said to Mum. “You see?”

  “—because,” Polly carried on, “if you texted me asking for Landen and the kids to come over for Sunday dinner, I’d not know why you hadn’t asked him yourself.”

  “Ah…I see,” I mumbled, suspicious that the two of them had been colluding in some way—as they generally did. Still, I never knew why they made me feel as though I were an eighteen-year-old when I was now fifty-two and myself in the sort of respectable time of life that I thought they should be. That’s the thing about hitting fifty. All your life you think the half century is death’s adolescence, but actually it’s really not that bad, as long as you can remember where you left your glasses.

  “Happy birthday, by the way,” said my mother. “I got you something—look.”

  She handed me the most hideous sweater you could possibly imagine.

  “I don’t know what to say, Mum, and I really mean that—a short-sleeved lime green sweater with a hood and mock-antler buttons.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “One’s attention is drawn to it instantly.”

  “Good! Then you’ll wear it straightaway?”

  “I wouldn’t want to ruin it,” I replied hastily. “I’m just off to work.”

  “Ooh!” said Polly. “I’ve only now remembered.” She handed me a CD in a plain sleeve. “This is a preproduction copy of Hosing the Dolly.”

  “It’s what?”

  “Please try to keep up with the times, darling. Hosing the Dolly. The new album by Strontium Goat. It won’t be out until November. I thought Friday might like it.”

  “It’s really totally out there, man,” put in my mother. “Whatever that means. There’s a solo guitar riff on the second track that reminded me of Friday’s playing and was so good it made my toes tingle—although that might just have been a pinched nerve. Wayne Skunk’s granny is Mrs. Arbuthnot—you know, the funny old lady with the large wart on her nose and the elbows that bend both ways. He sent it to her.”

  I looked at the CD. Friday would like it, I was certain of that.

  “And,” added Polly, leaning closer and with a conspiratorial wink, “you don’t have to tell him it was from us—I know what teenagers are like, and a bit of parental kudos counts for a lot.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and meant it. It was more than a CD—it was currenc
y.

  “Good!” said my mother. “Have you got time for a cup of tea and a slice of Battenberg?”

  “No, thank you—I’m going to pick something up from Mycroft’s workshop, and then I’ll be on my way.”

  “How about some Battenberg to go, then?”

  “I’ve just had breakfast.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Ooooh!” said Polly, peering furtively out the window. “What fun. It looks like a market researcher!”

  “Right,” said my mother in a very military tone. “Let’s see how long we can keep him before he runs out screaming. I’ll pretend to have mild dementia, and you can complain about your sciatica in German. We’ll try to beat our personal Market-Researcher Containment record of two hours and twelve minutes.”

  I shook my head sadly. “I wish you two would grow up.”

  “You are so judgmental, daughter dear,” scolded my mother. “When you reach our age and level of physical decrepitude, you’ll take your entertainment wherever you can find it. Now, be off with you.”

  And they shooed me into the kitchen while I mumbled something about how remedial basket weaving, whist drives or daytime soaps would probably suit them better. Mind you, inflicting mental torture on market researchers kept them busy, I suppose.

  I walked out the back door, crossed the back garden and quietly entered the wooden out house that was my uncle Mycroft’s laboratory. I switched on the light and walked to my Porsche, which was looking a little forlorn under a dust sheet. It was still unrepaired from the accident five years before. The damage hadn’t been that severe, but 356 parts were getting pricey these days, and we couldn’t spare the cash. I reached into the cockpit, pulled the release and opened the hood. It was here that I kept a tote bag containing twenty thousand Welsh tocyns. On this side of the border pretty worthless, but enough to buy a three-bedroom house in Merthyr. I wasn’t planning to move to the Welsh Socialist Republic, of course—I needed the cash for a Welsh cheese deal I had cooking that evening. I checked that the cash was all still there and was just replacing the sheet on the car when a noise made me turn. Standing at the workbench in the half-light was my uncle Mycroft. An undeniable genius, with his keen mind he had pushed the frontiers in a range of disciplines that included genetics, fusion power, abstract geometry, perpetual motion and romantic fiction. It was he who had ushered in the home-cloning revolution, he who may have developed a memory-erasure machine and he who had invented the Prose Portal that had catapulted me into fiction. He was dressed in his trademark wool three-piece suit but without the jacket, his shirtsleeves were rolled up, and he was in what we all called his “inventing mode.” He seemed to be concentrating on a delicate mechanism, the function of which was impossible to guess. As I watched him in silence and with a growing sense of wonder, he suddenly noticed me.