Lost in a Good Book

  'You mean the spine?' I asked, not quite up to speed yet.

  The cat lashed its tail.

  'No, stupid, the idea, the notion, the spark. Once you've laid your eyes on the raw concept of a book, everything you've ever seen or felt will seem about as interesting as a stair carpet. Try and imagine this: you are sitting on soft grass on a warm summer's evening in front of a dazzling sunset; the air is full of truly inspiring music and you have in your hands a wonderful book. Are you there?'

  'I think so.'

  'Okay, now imagine a simply vast saucer of warm cream in front of you and consider lapping it really slowly until your whiskers are completely drenched.'

  The Cheshire cat shivered deliriously.

  'If you do all of that and multiply it by a thousand, then perhaps, just perhaps, you will have some idea of what I'm talking about.'

  'Can I pass on the cream?'

  'Whatever you want. It's your daydream, after all.'

  And with a flick of his tail, the cat vanished again. I turned to explore my surroundings and was surprised to find that the Cheshire cat was sitting on another shelf on the other side of the corridor.

  'You seem a bit old to be an apprentice,' continued the cat, folding its paws and staring at me so intensely I felt unnerved. 'We've been expecting you for almost twenty years. Where on earth have you been?'

  'I … I … didn't know I could do this.'

  'What you mean is that you did know that you couldn't – it's quite a different thing. The point is, do you think you have what it takes to help us here at Jurisfiction?'

  'I really don't know,' I replied, truthfully enough, adding 'What do you do?' as I didn't see why he should be asking all the questions.

  'I,' said the cat proudly, 'am the librarian.'

  'You look after all these books?'

  'Certainly,' replied the cat proudly. 'Ask me any question you want.'

  'Jane Eyre,' I said, intending only to ask its location but realising when the cat answered that a librarian here was far removed from the sort I knew at home.

  'Ranked the 728th favourite fictional book ever written,' the cat replied parrot-fashion. 'Total readings to date: 82,581,430. Current reading figure 829,321 – 1,421 of whom are reading it as we speak. It's a good figure; quite possibly because it has been in the news recently.'

  'So what's the most read book?'

  'Up until now or for ever and all time?'

  'For all time.'

  The cat thought for a moment.

  'In fiction, the most read book ever is To Kill a Mocking Bird. Not just because it is a cracking good read for us, but of all the vertebrate überclassics it was the only one that really translated well into Arthropod. And if you can crack the lobster market – if you'll pardon the pun – a billion years from now, you're really going to flog some copies. The Arthropod title is: tlkîltlîlkîxlkilkïxlklï or, literally translated, The past non-existent state of the angel fish. Atticus Finch is a lobster called Tklîkï, and he defends a horseshoe crab named Klikïflik.'

  'How does it compare?'

  'Not too bad, although the scene with the prawns is a little harrowing. It's the crustacean readership that makes Daphne Farquitt such a major player, too.'

  'Daphne Farquitt?' I echoed with some surprise. 'But her books are frightfull!'

  'Only to us. To the highly evolved Arthropods, Farquitt's work is considered sacred and religious to the point of lunacy. Listen, I'm no fan of Farquitt's but her bodice-ripping pot-boiler The Squire of High Potternews sparked one of the biggest, bloodiest, shellbrokenist wars the planet has ever witnessed.'

  I was getting off the point.

  'So all these books are your responsibility?'

  'Indeed,' replied the cat ainly.

  'If I wanted to go into a book I could just pick it up and read it?'

  'It's not quite that easy,' replied the cat. 'You can only get into a book if someone has already found a way in and then exited through the library. Every book, you will observe, is bound in either red or green. Green for go, red for no-go. It's quite easy, really – you're not colour blind, are you?'

  'No. So if I wanted to go into – oh, I don't know, let's pull a title out of the air – The Raven, then—'

  But the cat flinched as I said the title.

  'There are some places you should not go!' he muttered in an aggrieved tone. 'Edgar Allan Poe is one of them. His books are not fixed; there is a certain oddness that goes with them. Most macabre Gothic fiction tends to be like that – Sade is the same; also Webster, Wheatley and King. Go into those and you may never come out – they have a way of weaving you into the story and before you know it you're stuck there. Let me show you something.'

  And all of a sudden we were in a large and hollow-sounding vestibule where huge Doric columns rose to support a vast vaulted ceiling. The floor and walls were all dark red marble and reminded me of the entrance lobby of an old hotel – only about forty times as big. You could have parked an airship in here and still had room to hold an air race. There was a red carpet leading up from the tall front doors, and all the brasswork shone like gold.

  'This is where we honour the boojummed,' said the cat in a quiet voice. He waved a paw in the direction of a large granite memorial about the size of two upended cars. The edifice was shaped like a large book, open in the centre and splayed wide, with a depiction of a person walking into the left-hand page, his form covered by text as he entered. On the opposite page was row upon row of names. A mason was delicately working on a new name with a mallet and chisel. He tipped his hat respectfully and resumed his work.

  'Prose Resource Operatives deleted or lost in the line of duty,' explained the cat from where he was perched on top of the statue. 'We call it the Boojumorial.'

  I pointed to a name on the memorial.

  'Ambrose Bierce was a Jurisfiction agent?'

  'One of the best. Dear, sweet Ambrose! A master of prose but quite impetuous. He went – alone – into The Literary Life of Thingum Bob — a Poe short story that one would've thought held no terrors.'

  The cat sighed before continuing.

  'He was trying to find a back door into Poe's poems. We know you can get from Thingum Bob into The Black Cat by way of an unstable verb in the third paragraph, and from Black Cat into The Fall of the House of Usher by the simple expedient of hiring a horse from the Nicaean stables, from there he was hoping to use the poem within Usher, The Haunted Palace, to springboard him into the rest of the Poe poetical canon.'

  'What happened?'

  'Never heard from him again. Two fellow booksplorers went in after him – one lost his breath and the other … well, poor Ahab went completely bonkers – thought he was being chased by a white whale. We suspect that Ambrose was either walled up with a cask of amontillado or burried alive or some other unspeakable fate. It was decided that Poe was out of bounds.'

  'So Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, he disappeared on assignment too?'

  'Not at all; he crashed on a reconnaissance sortie.'

  'It was tragic.'

  'It certainly was,' replied the cat. 'He owed me forty francs and promised to teach me to play Debussy on the piano using only oranges.'

  'Oranges?'

  'Oranges. Well, I'm off now. Miss Havisham will explain everything. Go through those doors into the library, take the elevator to the fourth floor, first right and the books are about a hundred yards on your left. Great Expectations is green bound so you should have no trouble.'

  'Thanks.'

  'Oh, it's nothing,' said the cat, and with a wave of his paw he started to fade, very slowly, from the tip of his tail. He just had time to ask me to get some tuna-flavoured Moggilicious for him the next time I was home – before he vanished completely and I was alone in front of the granite Boojumorial, the quiet tapping of the mason's hammer echoing around the lofty heights of the library vestibule.

  I took the marble stairs into the library, ascended by one of the wrought-iron lifts, and walked down the c
orridor until I came across several shelves of Dickens novels. There were, I noted, twenty-nine different editions of Great Expectations from early drafts to the last of Dickens's own revised editions. I picked up the newest tome, opened it at the first chapter and heard the gentle sound of wind in the trees. I nipped through the pages, the sounds changing as I moved from scene to scene, page to page. I located the first mention of Miss Havisham, found a good place to start and then read loudly to myself, willing the words to live. And live they did.

  17

  Miss Havisham

  * * *

  'Great Expectations was written in 1860-61 to reverse flagging sales of All the Year Round, the weekly periodical founded by Dickens himself. The novel was regarded as a great success. The tale of Pip the blacksmith's apprentice and his rise to the position of young gentleman through an anonymous benefactor introduced readers to many new and varied characters: Joe Gargery, the simple and honourable blacksmith, Abel Magwitch, the convict Pip helps in the first chapter, Jaggers, the lawyer, Herbert Pocket, who befriends him and teaches him how to behave in London society. But it is Miss Havisham, abandoned at the altar and living her life in dreary isolation dressed in her tattered wedding robes, that steals the show. She remains one of the book's most memorable fixtures.'

  MILLON DE FLOSS – Great Expectations, a Study

  I found myself in a large and dark hall which smelt of musty decay. The windows were tightly shuttered, the only light from a few candles scattered around the room; they added little to the room except to heighten the gloominess. In the centre a long table was covered with what had once been a wedding banquet but was now a sad arrangement of tarnished silver and dusty crockery. In the bowls and meat platters dried remnants of food were visible, and in the middle of the table a large wedding cake bedecked with cobwebs had begun to collapse like a dilapidated building. I had read the scene many times, but it was somehow different when you saw it for real. I was on the other side of the room from Miss Havisham, Estella and Pip. I stood silently and watched.

  A game of cards had just ended between Pip and Estella, and Miss Havisham, resplendently shabby in her rotting wedding dress and veil, seemed to be trying to come to a decision.

  'When shall I have you here again?' she said in a low growl. 'Let me think.'

  'Today is Wednesday, ma'am—' began Pip, but he was silenced by Miss Havisham.

  'There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?'

  'Yes, ma'am.'

  Miss Havisham sighed deeply and addressed the young woman, who seemed to spend most of her time glaring at Pip, his discomfort in the strange surroundings seemed to fill her with inner mirth.

  'Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him roam and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip.'

  They left the darkened room and I watched as Miss Havisham stared at the floor, then at the half-filled trunks of old and yellowed clothes that might have accompanied her on her honeymoon. I watched her as she pulled off her veil, ran her fingers through her greying hair and kicked off her shoes. She looked about her, checked the door was closed and then opened a bureau which I could see was full, not of the trappings of her wretched life, but of small luxuries that must, I presumed, make her existence here that much more bearable. Amongst other things I saw a Sony Walkman, a stack of National Geographics, a few Daphne Farquitt novels, and one of those bats that has a rubber ball attached to a piece of elastic. She rummaged some more and took out a pair of trainers and pulled them on with a great deal of relief. She was just about to tie the laces when I shifted my weight and knocked against a small table. Havisham, her senses heightened by her long incarceration in silent introspection, gazed in my direction, her sharp eyes piercing the gloom.

  'Who is there'' she asked sharply. 'Estella, is that you?'

  Hiding didn't seem to be a worthwhile option, so I stepped from the shadows. She looked me up and down with a critical eye.

  'What is your name, child?' she asked sternly.

  'Thursday Next, ma'am.'

  'Ah!' she said again. 'The Next girl. Took you long enough to find your way in here, didn't it?'

  'Sorry?'

  'Never be sorry, girl – it's a waste of time, believe me. If only you had seriously attempted to come to Jurisfiction after Mrs Nakajima showed you how up at Haworth … well, I'm wasting my breath, I can see.'

  'I had no idea!'

  'I don't often take apprentices,' she carried on, disregarding me completely, 'but they were going to allocate you to the Red Queen. The Red Queen and I don't get along. I suppose you've heard that?'

  'No, I've—'

  'Half of all she says is nonsense and the other half is irrelevant. Mrs Nakajima recommended you most highly but she has been wrong before; cause any trouble and I'll bounce you out of Jurisfiction quicker than you can say ketchup. How are you at tying shoelaces?'

  So I tied Miss Havisham's trainers for her, there in Satis House among the rotted trappings of her abandoned marriage. If you had told me I would be doing this even an hour previously I would have considered you insane.

  'There are three simple rules if you want to stay with me,' began Miss Havisham in the sort of voice that brooks no argument. 'Rule One – you do exactly as I tell you. Rule Two – you don't patronise me with your pity. I have no desire to be helped in any way. What I do to myself and others is my business and my business alone. Do you understand?'

  'Yes, ma'am. What about Rule Three?'

  'All in good time. I shall call you Thursday and you may call me Miss Havisham when we are together; in company I shall expect you to call me "ma'am". I may summon you at any time and you will come running. Only funerals, childbirth or Vivaldi concerts take precedence. Is that clear?'

  'Yes, Miss Havisham.'

  I stood up and she thrust a candle up to my face and regarded me closely. It allowed me a close look at her too. Despite her pallid demeanour, her eyes sparkled brightly and she was not nearly as old as I supposed – all she needed was a fortnight of good meals and some fresh air. I was tempted to say something to enliven the dismal surroundings but her iron personality stopped me, I felt as though I were facing my teacher at school for the first time.

  'Intelligent eyes,' muttered Havisham, 'committed and honest. Quite, quite sickeningly self-righteous. Are you married?'

  'Yes,' I mumbled, 'that is to say – no.'

  'Come, come!' said Havisham angrily. 'It is a simple enough question.'

  'I was married,' I answered.

  'Died?'

  'No,' I mumbled, 'that is to say – yes.'

  'I'll try harder questions in future,' announced Havisham, 'for you are obviously not adept at the easy ones. Have you met the Jurisfiction staff?'

  'I've met Mr Snell – and the Cheshire cat.'

  'As useless as each other,' she announced shortly. 'Everyone at Jurisfiction is either a charlatan or an imbecile – except the Red Queen, who is both. We'll go to Norland Park and meet them all, I suppose.'

  'Norland? Jane Austen? The house of the Dashwoods? Sense and Sensibility?'

  But Havisham had moved on. She held my wrist to look at my watch, took me by the elbow and, before I knew what had happened, we had joggled out of Satis House to the library. Before I could recover from this sudden change of surroundings, Miss Havisham was reading from a book she had drawn from a shelf. There was another strange joggle and we were in a small kitchen parlour somewhere.

  'What was that?' I asked in slight alarm, I wasn't yet used to the sudden move from book to book but Havisham, well accustomed to such manoeuvres, thought little of it.

  'That,' replied Miss Havisham, 'was a standard book-to-book transfer. When you're jumping solo you can sometimes make it through without going to the library – so much the better; the cat's banal musings can make one's head ache. But since I am taking you with me, a short visit is sadly necessary. We're now in the back-story of Kafka's The Trial
. Next door is Josef K's hearing, you're up after him.'

  'Oh,' I remarked, 'is that all.'

  Miss Havisham missed the sarcasm, which was probably just as well, and I looked around. The room was sparsely furnished, a washing tub sat in the middle and next door, from the sound of it at least, a political meeting seemed to be in progress. A woman entered from the courtroom, smoothed her skirts, curtsied and returned to her washing.

  'Good morning, Miss Havisham,' she said politely.

  'Good morning, Esther,' replied Miss Havisham. 'I brought you something.' She handed her a box of Pontefract cakes and then asked: 'Are we on time?'

  There was a roar of laughter from behind the door, which quickly subsided into excited talking.

  'Won't be long,' replied the washerwoman. 'Snell and Hopkins have already gone in. Would you like to take a seat?'

  Miss Havisham sat, but I remained standing.

  'I hope Snell knows what he's doing,' muttered Havisham darkly. 'The examining magistrate is something of an unknown quantity.'

  The applause and laughter suddenly dropped to silence in the room next door, and we heard the door handle grasped. Behind the door a deep voice said:

  'I only wanted to point out to you, since you may not have realised it yet, that today you have thrown away all the advantage that a hearing affords an arrested man in every case.'

  I looked at Havisham with some consternation but she shook her head, as though to tell me not to worry.

  'You scoundrels!' shouted a second voice, still from behind the door. 'You can keep all your hearings!'

  The door opened and a young man with a red face, dressed in a dark suit, ran out, fairly shaking with rage. As he left the man who had spoken – I assumed this to be the examining magistrate – shook his head sadly and the courtroom started to chatter about Josef K's outburst. The magistrate, a small, fat man who breathed heavily, looked at me and said.