The Woman Who Died a Lot Read online

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Many times. I can read my way across, or at least I could before the accident. My mentor was Miss Havisham, who was terrific so long as you didn’t mention the wedding, and Emperor Zhark, who is a barrel of laughs when he’s not subjugating entire star systems in his tyrannical and inadequately explained quest for galactic domination.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Remember how two weeks went missing out of Samuel Pepys’s diary a few years back? That was me having an off day.”

  I continued in this vein for a while, outlining various adventures I’d had in the BookWorld. I talked about the ongoing metaphor shortage, Speedy Muffler, the witheringly tiresome internal politics at the Council of Genres, about imaginotransference engines, UltraWord, Commander Bradshaw’s gorilla wife, Melanie, and the first time I was attacked by grammasites. I ended with an account of the reason for my current physical state during an assassination attempt in a quiet corner of the Thriller genre and how Red Herring had been responsible.

  “Was Red Herring a red herring?” asked Chumley in some confusion.

  “No,” I replied reflectively, “but his name was. By calling Red Herring Red Herring, it made people think that he couldn’t be a red herring as it was too obvious, so his name—Red Herring— then became the red herring when we found out he wasn’t a red herring. Simple, yes?”

  “No.”

  “I agree it’s complicated,” I said with a shrug. “Working in fiction does gives one a somewhat tenuous hold on reality, but it’s not the hold that’s tenuous—it’s the reality: Which reality? Whose reality? Does it matter anyway? And will there be cake?” “And was there?”

  “Was there what?”

  “Cake.”

  “Generally speaking, yes.”

  Dr. Chumley rubbed his temples. “I think I preferred Spike’s sharpened spade earlier. At least that had a sort of uncomplicated creeping menace about it. The BookWorld? It’s all very confusing.”

  “I’ve spent most of my life confused,” I replied. “You get used to it after a while. There’s a lot to be said about merely having a hazy idea of what’s going on but generally reaching the right outcome by following broad policy outlines. In fact, I’ve a sneaky suspicion that it’s the only way of getting things done. Once the horror and unpredictability of unintended consequences gets a hold, even the best-intentioned and noblest of plans generally descend to mayhem, confusion and despair.”

  “I see,” said Dr. Chumley, tearing off another certificate and scrunching it up. “I’m going to lower you to a NUT-3: ‘mildly aberrant behavior with occasional long stretches of lucidity.’”

  It still wasn’t enough.

  “So the whole BookWorld thing doesn’t make me nuts?” I asked, semisarcastically.

  “We do try to avoid that particular word when making a diagnosis in our profession,” said Dr. Chumley with a sigh, “but sometimes I wonder if the human race isn’t collectively as mad as a sack of doorknobs. Where does that put me and my profession? Trying to sort out the real nutjobs from the partial nutjobs? Or just in a state of muddled damage limitation?”

  He took another deep breath and slumped facedown on the table.

  “Don’t tell anyone I told you that. We’re really just meant to nod and say things like ‘Aha’ and ‘Go on’ and ‘How does that make you feel?’ It would have helped me a lot more if Spike had told me he baked novelty cakes rather than killed the undead. And no, it doesn’t make you nuts—as you suggest, it might actually be true.”

  Damn. He partially believed me.

  “Before I worked here,” he said with another sigh, “I would certainly have thought you dangerously delusional, but the SpecOps standards of reality are pretty broad. Here’s an example: I had Captain Henshaw of the Odd Squad in here yesterday. But it wasn’t our Captain Henshaw, it was Captain HenshawF76+, apparently on an important trade delegation from Reality-F76+, where everything is pretty much identical to here—only everyone has two heads.”

  “That’s a bigger and more bizarre claim than the BookWorld?”

  “Not really, because HenshawF76+ actually had two heads.”

  “Did he argue with himself? I always wondered about that.”

  “Quite a lot actually— that’s why he came to see me. But there they were. Two heads. So, you see, what you say might actually be true. Might not be. But might. There you have it. NUT-3.”

  It wasn’t going well. I had lose that extra ranking. NUT-4 or nothing.

  “I have something else I need to share,” I said.

  “Yes?” replied Dr. Chumley from where he was still resting facedown on the table.

  “Yes. I . . . think I’m pregnant with an elephant.”

  “An elephant?” he asked, lifting his face from the table to stare at me.

  “Yes—foisted on me by an overamorous server at Greggs.”

  He shook his head sadly. “Now I know you’re trying to pull a fast one. Everyone uses the ‘pregnant with an elephant’ gambit to be downranked. I think Victor Analogy used it first.”

  He smiled triumphantly and pulled the pad of certificates toward him again.

  “You’re a NUT-3, my girl, and nothing you can say will change my mind.”

  “What about the fact that I think my mother was a snail named Andrew?”

  “ NUT-3,” he said firmly, and continued to write.

  “That I have a dodo named Pickwick, who is the oldest in existence?”

  “Perfectly plausible,” he replied.

  “How about the fact that my son would have been given the job of ChronoGuard director general due to his expert handling of Asteroid HR-6984 that hasn’t happened?”

  Dr. Chumley looked up at me and smiled. “Listen,” he said, “if you give me any more of that ‘pretending to be mad’ act, I’ll disregard all that BookWorld stuff and you’ll be upgraded back to a NUT-2.”

  Blast. Foiled.

  “Okay then,” I said, and sat quietly while Dr. Chumley filled out the form. I was just wondering—in vain—what else I could to lessen the fact that I might not be mad enough to run SpecOps when I noticed that the previous certificate had Detective Smalls’s name on it, and by expertly reading upside down—a skill I’d advise to anyone working in a wheezing bureaucracy—I saw that she had indeed been listed as NUT-4. She must have thought up something really wacky. Smart, young, driven, insane— the SpecOps job was almost hers. I was just thinking about whether I could function under Smalls’s leadership when Dr. Chumley stopped and stared at me.

  “Why do you have ‘Jenny is a mindworm’ written on the back of your hand?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do.”

  I looked down, and he was right—there it was. I frowned for a moment as I tried to remember who had written it and when. I licked my fingers and rubbed pointlessly at the writing—it was a tattoo, but one I couldn’t remember getting. I felt confused, angry, and my eyes moistened as I realized what was going on. The daughter Jenny I remembered—the twelve-year-old with the infectious laugh and freckled nose who had taken twenty-two hours of labor to push out wasn’t real at all. She didn’t fall off a wall when she was eight years old and didn’t have nightmares about foxes in her bedroom. Never had. Never would. As the realization dawned, I felt a sudden and overwhelming stab of grief—loss and bereavement that gave way to anger, then a sense of sad awareness that I went through this many times a day and that Landen, the kids and I had agreed that the tattoo was for the best. I knew, too, with a falling heart that this moment of clarity would be fleeting, and my eyes filled with tears.

  “Acheron Hades’ little sister,” I told him as reason momentarily filtered into my head. “She gave me a mindworm before going down for life. We’re making inquiries at TJ-Maxx as to what happened to her. We’re hoping the tattoo will remind me often enough to break it. As it stands at the moment, I can forget I have the mindworm almost midsentence.”

  “Does it affect your work?�
�

  “Does what effect my work?”

  “The mindworm.”

  “What mindworm?” I asked, unsure of whom he was referring to. “Has Aornis been up to her tricks again?”

  “You’re joking, right?” he asked.

  “What would I joke about?” I asked, truthfully enough. “You’re here to rate me at Braxton’s request—hardly the time to piss about.”

  Dr. Chumley took a deep breath, scrunched up the certificate for the third time and started to fill it in again. “NUT-4,” he said resignedly.

  “I’m grateful,” I said, “but what made you change your mind?”

  “Any more from you, my girl,” he said through gritted teeth, “and you’ll be a NUT-5 so fast it will make your head spin.”

  ***

  “Remember to remember me to your son,” said Shazza as I walked back through Dr. Chumley’s waiting room.

  “I haven’t forgotten I’m to remember,” I said with a smile, and departed, clutching my prized NUT-4 certificate. I was now officially “prone to strange and sustained delusional outbursts but otherwise normal in all respects,” and it felt good.

  5.

  Monday: Braxton Hicks

  The Toast Marketing Board is a wholly owned subsidiary of Goliath Foodstuffs, Inc., and was an attempt by the corporation to raise sales in its jam, butter, toaster and bread divisions by promoting the consumption of toast. One of Goliath’s more resounding successes, the worldwide consumption has risen by almost 3,200 percent, partially in response to an aggressive advertising campaign and numerous celebrity endorsements.

  Fiona Pipette, A Brief History of Toast

  I returned my visitor’s pass, then walked the short distance to the Brunel Centre and the nearest Yo! Toast outlet. Braxton hadn’t yet arrived, so I took a seat at the counter and ordered a mocha and a marmalade on white from a very intense waitress who had clearly been thoroughly indoctrinated by the hyperefficient Yo! Toast training.

  “Butter or margarine?” she demanded.

  “Butter.”

  “Thin or thick cut?”

  “Thick.”

  “Orange or lime?”

  “Orange.”

  “Right,” she said, and hurried off.

  I sat for a moment in silence, contemplating the morning’s events. I wanted the SO-27 headship badly. It wasn’t for the prestige, and it certainly wasn’t for the cash, and it probably wasn’t totally because I didn’t want Phoebe Smalls to get it. Landen had suggested that it was so I would have something to positively define myself, and although family was great and good and wonderful, I needed something more. He was probably right. For many years Jurisfiction had been life’s marker, but since I’d discovered that due to my injuries I could no longer make the transfictional jump, my career in the BookWorld was at least temporarily curtailed.

  Landen had suggested some sort of retirement, but I wasn’t ready for that. Pruning and gardening and stamp collecting and taking dodos for long rambling walks weren’t really my thing. Dealing with bad guys—now, that was my thing.

  My toast arrived, and I took a bite. It was excellent. Perfectly toasted, a hint of al dente about the crust and a tangy blast of marmalade on an aftertaste of melted butter. It wasn’t difficult to see why toast had become the faddy buzz food of the noughties, with TV chefs falling over themselves to write entire books dripping with pretentious toast recipes—and a legion of critics who claimed that food chains like Yo! Toast were paying their staff too much and criticized the lack of unsaturated fat and salt on the menu.

  “Next?”

  I looked up. It was Regional Commander Braxton Hicks, long-serving head of the SpecOps departments in Wessex and also on the board of at least five other Swindon-based organizations. He had a nonexecutive post on the City Council, had been involved in the awarding of contracts to build St. Zvlkx’s new cathedral, was a director of the Wessex All-You-Can-Eat-at-Fatso’s Drinks Not Included Library Service and held posts at Cheesaholics Anonymous and the Campaign for Less Ludicrously Dressed Teenagers.

  I knew him best regarding SpecOps. He’d been working there years before the service was partially disbanded and had been my boss during the whole Eyre Affair gig almost nineteen years before. The fact that he had survived so long was a mixture of affability, the ability to delegate and efficiency—mostly the last. He loved his budgets. It was why he was so much in demand. Despite his penny-pinching ways and often odd ideas, I had grown to like him enormously, and he tended to look upon me as the daughter he’d wished he had and not the one he did have, who was a bit of a tramp. In fact, Braxton wasn’t having much luck with his son, Herbert, either—he was currently in prison for armed robbery.

  “Don’t get up, old girl,” he said as he sat at the counter next to me. “How’s the leg? Smarts a bit, I shouldn’t wonder. Once had a spiral fracture of the femur m’self. Skydiving for my seventieth, courtesy of Mrs. Hicks, who never tires of attempting to cash in on my life-insurance policy. Didn’t stop me running a half marathon afterward, which was odd, since I never could before.”

  Despite being now well into his seventies, Braxton had lost none of his vigor, from either his tall and somewhat gangly frame nor his mustache, which was still a luxuriant red.

  “I’m okay, sir—a bit busted up, but I’ll get over it. Physio helps enormously.”

  He stared at me for a moment. “They nearly succeeded, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Never been the victim of an assassination attempt myself, y’know. Never upset enough people.”

  “You upset a lot of people, sir.”

  “Agreed, but usually only SpecOps agents when in defense of my budget. Now, how does this work? I’ve never been in to Yo! Toast before.”

  I explained that you could either have the highly skilled toasti-chef make you something special or just simply choose something as it came around on the conveyor.

  “Hmm,” he said, helping himself to a couple of slices of white with peanut butter as the belt moved past, “never thought toast would catch on—not as a restaurant anyway. Did you hear that a topless toast bar is about to open in the Old Town?”

  “Tooters, it’s going to be called. My daughter Tuesday is picketing the opening night.”

  “Good for her. How’s she getting on with the shield?”

  “Coming along . . . okay.”

  “In time for Swindon’s scheduled smiting at the end of the week?”

  “We’re hoping so, but Anti-Smite Defense Shields aren’t exactly standard physics. And besides, Tuesday only guaranteed a solution in eight years and thirty billion pounds—it’s been barely three, and she’s only twenty-seven percent over budget.”

  Braxton nodded sagely.

  “May I ask a question, sir?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you know anything about the plan for evacuation on Friday? It’s not like anyone in the city council seems that troubled.”

  “They are, believe me. With the whole of the financial district and the cathedral up for destruction, they’ve been hunting about for another plan. The price of cathedrals is simply shocking these days, and insurance is impossible, as you know.”

  “The ‘act of God’ clause?”

  “Right. You know Councilor Bunty Fairweather?”

  “Very well.”

  “She’s in charge of smite avoidance as well as fiscal planning, so you should talk to her. I hear whispers of a ‘grand plan’ to save Swindon from His wrath.”

  “Any idea what? Just in case Tuesday doesn’t manage to get the defense shield working?”

  “I’m afraid not. All a bit hush-hush. I can make inquiries, though.”

  I thanked him for this. From past experience I knew that a smiting could take out an area half a mile in diameter right in the middle of the city—easily evacuated. But if that was the case, something would surely be planned by now. Perhaps the council had more confidence in Tuesday than I did.

  “And your s
on?” asked Braxton, who was big on family. We rarely met without comparing our relative fortunes. “Is he coming to terms with his non–career move at SO-12?”

  “Slowly. Knowing that you were once going to save the planet seven hundred and fifty-six times but now won’t do it even once takes some adjusting. He’ll be okay when he discovers a new function for himself.”

  “What about house, car, wife and babies? Not strikingly original, but as functions go, it has the benefit of long tradition.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “My daughter could do with a stable hand on her tiller,” said Braxton. “High-spirited lass, is Imogen. Perhaps we should get them on a date or something. Coffee, please.”

  He was talking to the waitress.

  “And let me try a sardine and moon-dried banana on caraway seed closed with reduced butter and coleslaw and shredded trumpet on the side.”

  “You do know the shredded trumpet is only for decoration?” said the waitress.

  “I’d assumed it was,” said Braxton with a smile.

  The waitress nodded and departed.

  “So,” I said, “we all want to know why SpecOps is being reinstated.”

  Braxton looked at me for some moments. “No one will confirm this,” he said at last, “but what we think is this: It was an act of supreme folly to disband the SpecOps divisions, and arguably an even bigger act of folly to reinstate them.”

  “I’m not sure I agree,” I replied. “It seems rather sensible to me.”

  “Financially speaking,” said Braxton, “it’sinsane. It’s like building a cathedral, then tearing it down so you can build another just like it.

  “Reinstatement of the service so recently after disbandment,” he went on, “is not just an act of folly but a hugely expensive one. And the more wasteful of public funds it can become, the better.”

  “This is linked to the stupidity surplus?”

  “So it seems,” said Braxton in a grim tone. “It looks like SpecOps is expected to help make up the shortfall.”