‘I kicked the door open, dislodging the Danverclone, who seemed to hang in the air for a moment before a large wave caught her and she was left behind the rapidly moving taxi.’

FIRST AMONG SEQUELS

Jasper Fforde

HODDER & STOUGHTON

Copyright © 2007 by Jasper Fforde

The right of Jasper Fforde to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A Hodder & Stoughton Book

4

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 8445 6887 1
Book ISBN 978 0 340 83575 3

Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
A division of Hodder Headline
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

For Cressida,

the bestest sister in the world.

Also by Jasper Fforde

The Thursday Next Series

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

The Nursery Crime Series

The Big Over Easy

The Fourth Bear

The year is 2002. It is fourteen years since Thursday almost pegged out at the 1988 Croquet SuperHoop, and life is beginning to get back to normal . . .

Author’s Note:

This book has been bundled with Special Features including:

The Making of . . . wordamentary, deleted scenes,

alternative endings and much more.

To access all these free bonus features,

log on to: www.jasperfforde.com/features.html

and follow the onscreen instructions.

Contents

1. Breakfast

2. Mum and Polly and Mycroft

3. Acme Carpets

4. Jurisfiction

5. Training Day

6. The Great Library and Council of Genres

7. A Probe inside Pinocchio

8. Julian Sparkle

9. Core Containment

10. The Well of Lost Plots

11. The Refit

12. Kids

13. Cross Lewis’ Number

14. The ChronoGuard

15. Home Again

16. Cheese

17. Breakfast Again

18. Aornis Hades

19. The Goliath Corporation

20. The Austen Rover

21. Holmes

22. Next

23. The Piano Problem

24. Policy Directives

25. The Paragon

26. Thursday Next

27. Bound to the Outland

28. The Discreet Charm of the Outland

29. Time out of Joint

30. Now Is the Winter

31. Spending the Surplus

32. The Austen Rover Roving

33. Somewhere Else Entirely

34. Rescue/Capture

35. The Bees, the Bees

36. Senator Jobsworth

37. The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco

38. The End of Time

39. A Woman Named

Thursday Next

1

Breakfast

————

‘The Swindon I knew in 2002 had a lot going for it. A busy financial centre coupled with excellent infrastructure and surrounded by green and peaceful countryside had made the city about as popular a place as you might find anywhere in the nation. We had our own 40,000-seater croquet stadium, the newly finished Cathedral of St Zvlkx, a concert hall, two local TV networks and the only radio station in England dedicated solely to mariachi music. Our central position in southern England also made us the hub for hi-speed overland travel from the newly appointed Clary-LaMarr travelport. It was little wonder that we called Swindon “The Jewel on the M4”.’

The dangerously high level of the Stupidity Surplus was once again the lead story in The Owl that morning. The reason for the crisis was clear: Prime Minister Redmond Van de Poste and his ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties with a reckless degree of responsibility that bordered on inspired sagacity. Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance. It was a state of affairs deplored by Mr Alfredo Traficcone, leader of the opposition ‘Prevailing Wind’ party, who wanted to lead the nation back on to the safer grounds of uninformed stupidity.

‘How could they let it get this bad?’ asked Landen as he walked into the kitchen, having just dispatched our daughters off to school. They walked themselves, naturally; Tuesday was thirteen and took great pride in looking after Jenny, who was now ten.

‘Sorry?’ I said, my mind full of other matters, foremost among them the worrying possibility that Pickwick’s plumage might never grow back, and that she would have to spend the rest of her life looking like a Tesco’s oven-ready chicken.

‘The Stupidity Surplus,’ repeated Landen as he sat down at the kitchen table. ‘I’m all for responsible government, but storing it up like this is bound to cause problems sooner or later – even by acting sensibly, the government has shown itself to be a bunch of idiots.’

‘There are a lot of idiots in this country,’ I replied absently, ‘and they deserve representation as much as the next man.’

But he was right. Unlike previous governments, which had skilfully managed to eke out our collective stupidity all year round, the current administration had decided to store it all up and then blow it on something unbelievably dopey, arguing that one major balls-up every ten years or so was less damaging than a weekly helping of mild political asininity. The problem was, the surplus had reached absurdly high levels where it had even surpassed the ‘monumentally dumb’ mark. Only a blunder of staggering proportions would remove the surplus, and the nature of this mind-numbing act of idiocy was a matter of considerable media speculation.

‘It says here,’ he said, getting into full rant mode by adjusting his spectacles and tapping at the newspaper with his index finger, ‘that even the government is having to admit that the Stupidity Surplus is a far, far bigger problem than they had first imagined.’

I held the striped dodo-cosy I was knitting for Pickwick against her pink and blotchy body to check the size and she puffed herself up to look more alluring, but to no avail. She then made an indignant plocking noise which was the only sound she ever uttered.

‘Do you think I should knit her a party one as well? Y’know, black, off the shoulder and with sparkly bits in it?’

‘But,’ Landen went on in a lather of outrage,‘the prime minister has poured scorn on Traficcone’s suggestion to offload our unwanted stupidity on Third World nations, who would be only too happy to have it in exchange for several sacks of cash and a Mercedes or two.’

‘He’s right,’ I replied with a sigh, ‘Idiocy Offsets are bullshit; stupidity is our own problem and has to be dealt with on an individual “stupidity footprint” basis – and landfill certainly doesn’t work.’

I was thinking of the debacle in Cornwall, where 40,000 tons of half-wittedness was buried in the sixties, only for it to percolate to the surface two decades later, when the residents started to do inexplicably dumb things, such as using an electric hand whisk in the bath, and parting their hair in the centre.

‘What if,’ Landen continued thoughtfully, ‘the thirty million or so inhabitants of the British Archipelago were to all simultaneously fall for one of those e-mail “tell us all your bank details” phishing scams or – I don’t know – fall down a manhole or something?’

‘They tried the mass “walking-into-lamp-post” experiment in France to try and alleviate La Dette Idiote,’ I pointed out, ‘but the seriousness under which the plan was undertaken made it de facto sensible, and all that was damaged was the proud Gallic forehead.’

Landen took a sip of coffee, unfolded the paper and scanned the rest of the front page before remarking absently:

‘I took up your idea and sent my publisher a few outlines for self-help books last week.’

‘Who do they think you should be helping?’

‘Well . . . me . . . and them, I suppose – isn’t that how it’s meant to work? It looks really easy. How about this for a title: Men Are from Earth, Women Are from Earth – Just Deal with It.’

He looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back. I didn’t just love him because he had a nice knee, was tall and made me laugh, but because we were two parts of one whole, and neither of us could imagine life without the other. I wish I had a better way to describe it, but I’m not a poet. Privately he was a husband and father to our three mostly wonderful kids, but professionally he was a writer. Unfortunately, despite winning the 1988 Armitage Shanks fiction award for Bad Sofa, a string of flops had left the relationship with his publisher a bit strained. So strained, in fact, that he was reduced to penning point-of-sale non-fiction classics such as: The Little Book of Cute Pets that You Really Like to Hug and The Darnedest Things Kids Say. When he wasn’t working on these he was looking after our children and attempting to rekindle his career with a seriously good blockbuster – his Magnum Opus. It wasn’t easy, but it was what he loved and I loved him, so we lived off my salary, which was about the size of Pickwick’s brain – not that big, and unlikely to become so.

‘This is for you,’ said Landen, pushing a small parcel wrapped in pink paper across the table.

‘Sweetheart,’ I said, really annoyed and really pleased all at the same time, ‘I don’t do birthdays.’

‘I know,’he said without looking up,‘so you’ll just have to humour me.’

I unwrapped the package to find a small silver locket and chain. I’m not a jewellery person but I am a Landen person, so held my hair out of the way while he fitted the clasp, then thanked him and gave him a kiss, which he returned. And then, since he knew all about my abhorrence of birthdays, he dropped the matter entirely.

‘Is Friday up?’

‘At this hour?’

Friday, it should be noted, was the eldest of our three children and the only boy. He was now sixteen and instead of gearing himself up for a successful career with the Time Industry’s elite operatives known as the ChronoGuard, he was instead a tedious teenage cliché– grunting, sighing at any request no matter how small and staying in bed until past midday, then mooching around the house in a state of semi-consciousness that would do credit to a career zombie. We might not have known he was living with us if it wasn’t for the grubby cereal bowls that mysteriously appeared in the vague vicinity of the sink, a muffled heavy-metal beat from his bedroom that Landen was convinced kept the slugs from the garden, and a succession of equally languid no-hopers who called at the door to mumble: ‘Is Friday at home?’, something that I couldn’t resist answering with: ‘It’s a matter of some conjecture.’

‘When does he go back to school?’ asked Landen, who did most of the day-to-day kid work but, like many men, had trouble remembering specific dates.

‘Next Monday,’ I replied, having gone to retrieve the mail that had just fallen through the door.‘Exclusion from school was better than he deserved – it’s a good job the cops didn’t get involved.’

‘All he did was throw Barney Plotz’s cap in a muddy puddle,’ said Landen reflectively, ‘and then stomp on it.’

‘Yes, but Barney Plotz was wearing it at the time,’ I pointed out, thinking privately that the entire Plotz family stomped on in a muddy puddle might be a very good idea indeed.‘Friday shouldn’t have done what he did. Violence never solved anything.’

Landen raised an eyebrow and looked at me.

‘Okay, sometimes it solves things – but not for him, at least not yet.’

‘I wonder,’mused Landen,‘if we could get the nation’s teenagers to go on a serious binge of alcohol-inspired dopiness to use up the excess stupidity?’

‘It’s a surplus of stupidity we have, not stereotypical dreariness,’ I replied, picking up an envelope at random and staring at the postmark. I still received at least half a dozen fan letters every day, even though the march of time had thankfully reduced my celebrity to what the Entertainments Facilitation Department termed ‘Z-4’, which is the kind who appear in ‘Whatever happened to . . .?’ articles and only ever get column inches if arrested, divorced, in rehab or, if the editor’s luck is really in, all three at the same time – and with some tenuous connection to Miss Corby Starlet, or whoever else happens to be the célébrité du jour.

The fan mail was mostly from diehard fans who didn’t care I was Z-4, bless them. They usually asked obscure questions about my many adventures that were now in print, or something about how crap the movie was, or why I’d given up professional croquet. But for the most part it was from fans of Jane Eyre who wanted to know how Mrs Fairfax could have been a ninja assassin, whether I had to shoot Bertha Rochester and if it was true I had slept with Edward Rochester – three of the more persistent and untrue rumours surrounding the factually dubious first novel of my adventures, The Eyre Affair.

‘What’s it about?’ Landen grinned. ‘Someone wanting to know whether Lola Vavoom will play you in the next Thursday film?’

‘There won’t be one. Not after the disaster of the first. No, it’s from the World Croquet Federation. They want me to present a video entitled The Fifty Greatest Croquet Sporting Moments.’

‘Is your Superhoop fifty-yard peg-out in the top ten?’

I scanned the list.

‘They have me at twenty-six.’

‘Tell them bollocks.’

‘They’ll pay me five hundred guineas.’

‘Cancel the bollocks thing – tell them you’ll be honoured and overjoyed.’

‘It’s a sell-out. I don’t do sell-outs. Not for that price, anyway.’

I opened a small parcel that contained a copy of the third book in my series: The Well of Lost Plots. I showed it to Landen, who pulled a face.

‘Are they still selling?’

‘Unfortunately.’

‘Am I in that one?’

‘No, sweetheart – you’re only in number five.’

I looked at the covering letter.

‘They want me to sign it.’

I had a stack of standard letters in the office that explained why I wouldn’t sign it – the first four Thursday Next books were about as true to real life as a donkey is to a turnip, and my signature somehow gave a credibility that I didn’t want to encourage. The only book I would sign was the fifth in the series, The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco, which unlike the first four had my seal of approval. The Thursday Next in The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco was much more of a caring and diplomatic heroine – unlike the Thursday in the previous four, who blasted away at everything in sight, drank, swore, slept around and generally kicked butt all over the BookWorld. I wanted the series to be a thought-provoking romp around literature; books for people who like stories or stories for people who like books. It wasn’t to be. The first four in the series had been less light-hearted chroniclings of my adventures and more ‘Dirty Harry meets Fanny Hill’, but with a good deal more sex and violence. The publishers not only managed to be factually inaccurate but dangerously slanderous as well. By the time I had regained control of the series for The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco, the damage to my reputation had been done.

‘Oh-ho!’ said Landen, reading a letter. ‘A rejection from my publishers. They didn’t think Fatal Parachuting Mistakes and How to Avoid Making Them Again was what they had in mind for self-help.’

‘I guess their target audience doesn’t include dead people.’

‘You could be right.’

I opened another letter.

‘Hang on,’ I said, scanning the lines thoughtfully, ‘the Swindon Dodo Fanciers’ Society are offering us thirty grand for Pickers.’

I looked across at Pickwick, who had started to do that ‘almost falling over’ thing she does when she goes to sleep standing up. I had built her myself when home-cloning kits were all the rage. At almost twenty-nine and with the serial number D-009 she was the oldest Dodo in existence. Because she was an early version 1.2 she didn’t have any wings as the sequence wasn’t complete at that time, but then she didn’t have built-in cell redundancy either. It was likely she’d outlive . . . well, everything. In any event, her value had grown considerably as interest in the seventies home-cloning unextincting revolution had suddenly become fashionable. A 1978 V1.5.6 mammoth recently changed hands for sixty thousand, Great Auks in any condition could be worth up to five grand each and if you had a pre-1972 trilobite of any order you could pretty much name your price.

‘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 looked 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.’

‘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 centre of the table.

‘Doesn’t have much of a sense of humour, 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 recovered and was staring suspiciously at her left foot, wondering whether 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 choice, 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 really 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 and 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 cajoled Friday about 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 traumatise 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 was once carpeted, but I couldn’t be sure any more.

‘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 bedclothes.

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

‘Grunt.’

‘Well, yes, you might be excluded 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 with 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 towards before leaving them to get up on their own. Fall even a few degrees below the critical threshold and they would 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.

‘Alrightmum,’ 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 tranquillisers.’

‘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 less than seven hundred and fifty-six 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 were 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 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 were 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 out 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 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 fit for a new company in the financial centre– 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 Palaeocene 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 any more 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 cosy 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 realised that cake wasn’t meant to be 87 per cent carbon, and that chicken actually tasted of something. Despite all this, or perhaps even because of it, we all loved her a great deal.’

My 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 a hare-brained 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 which 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 childcare 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 me popping round 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 key – it all came out as nonsense.’

‘L&Ks4DnRNXT-SNDY??’ she repeated, showing me her mobile.‘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 scrapheap 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&Ks4DnRNXTSNDY??” what would you think I meant?’

Polly frowned and thought for a moment, her prune-like 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 specs.

‘Happy birthday, by the way,’ said my mother. ‘I got you something – look.’

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

‘I don’t know what to say, Mum, and I really mean that – a short-sleeved lime-green jumper 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 straight away?’

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

‘Ooh!’ said Polly. ‘I’ve just remembered.’

She handed me a CD in a plain slip.

‘This is a pre-production copy of Hosing the Dolly.’

‘It’s what?’

‘Please try and keep 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 trapped 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 currency.

‘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 of 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 and 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 judgemental, 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 outhouse 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 dustsheet. 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 bonnet. It was here that I kept a holdall containing twenty thousand Welsh Tocyns. On this side of the border pretty worthless, but enough to buy a three-bedroomed 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 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, his keen mind 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 it was impossible to guess. As I watched him in silence and with a growing sense of wonder, he suddenly noticed me.

‘Ah!’ he said with a smile. ‘Thursday! Haven’t seen you for a while – all well?’

‘Yes,’ I replied a bit uncertainly, ‘I think so.’

‘Splendid! I just had an idea for a cheap form of power: by bringing pasta and anti-pasta together we could be looking at the utter annihilation of ravioli and the liberation of vast quantities of energy. I safely predict an average-sized cannelloni would be able to power Swindon for over a year. Mind you, I could be wrong.’

‘You’re not often wrong,’ I said quietly.

‘I think I was wrong to start inventing in the first place,’ he replied after a moment’s reflection.‘Just because I can do it, it doesn’t follow that I should. If scientists stopped to think about their creations more, the world might be a better—’

He broke off talking and looked at me in a quizzical manner.

‘You’re staring at me in a strange way,’ he said, with uncharacteristic astuteness.

‘Well, yes,’ I replied, trying to frame my words carefully,‘you see– I think – that is to say – I’m very surprised to see you.’

‘Really?’ he said, putting down the device he was working on. ‘Why?’

‘Well,’ I replied with greater firmness, ‘I’m surprised to see you because . . . you died six years ago!’

‘I did?’ enquired Mycroft with genuine concern. ‘Why does no one tell me these things?’

I shrugged as there was really no good answer to this.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked, patting himself on the chest and stomach and then taking his pulse to try to convince himself I might be mistaken. ‘I know I’m a bit forgetful but I’m sure I would have remembered that.’

‘Yes, quite sure,’ I replied, ‘I was there.’

‘Well, goodness,’ murmured Mycroft thoughtfully, ‘if what you say is correct and I am dead, it’s entirely possible that this isn’t me at all, but a variable-response holographic recording of some sort– let’s have a look for a projector.’

And so saying, he began to ferret through the piles of dusty machinery in his lab, and with nothing better to do and faintly curious, I joined in.

We searched for a good five minutes, but after finding nothing even vaguely resembling a holographic projector Mycroft and I sat down on a packing case and didn’t speak for some moments.

‘Dead,’ muttered Mycroft with a resigned air, ‘never been that before. Not even once. Are you quite sure?’

‘Quite sure,’ I replied. ‘You were eighty-seven. It was expected.’

‘Oh yes,’he said, as though some dim memory was stirring.‘And Polly?’ he added, suddenly remembering his wife. ‘How is she?’

‘She’s very well,’ I told him. ‘She and Mum are up to their old tricks as usual.’

‘Annoying market researchers?’

‘Among other things. But she’s missing you dreadfully.’

‘And I her.’ He looked nervous for a moment. ‘Has she got a boyfriend yet?’

‘At ninety-two?’

‘Damn good-looking woman – smart, too.’

‘Well, she hasn’t.’

‘Hmm. Well, if you see someone suitable, oh favourite niece, push them her way, won’t you? I don’t want her to be lonely.’

‘I’ll do that, Uncle, I promise.’

We sat in silence for a few seconds more and I shivered.

‘Mycroft,’ I said, suddenly thinking that perhaps there wasn’t a scientific explanation for his appearance after all, ‘I’m going to try something.’

I put out my fingertips to touch him but where they should have met the firm resistance of his shirtsleeve there was none – my fingers just melted into him. He wasn’t there; or if he was, he was something insubstantial – a phantom.

‘Ooooh!’ he said as I withdrew my hand. ‘That felt odd.’

‘Mycroft . . . you’re a ghost.’

‘Nonsense! Scientifically proven to be completely impossible.’ He paused for thought. ‘Why would I be one of those?’

I shrugged.

‘I don’t know – perhaps there’s something you hadn’t finished at your death and it’s been bothering you.’

‘Great Scott! You’re right. I never did finish the final chapter of Love among the Begonias.’

In retirement Mycroft had spent his time writing romantic novels, all of which sold surprisingly well. So well, in fact, that he had attracted the lasting enmity of Daphne Farquitt, the indisputable leader in the field. She fired off an accusatory letter accusing him of ‘wanton’ plagiarism. A barrage of claims and counter-claims followed, which only ended when Mycroft died. It was so venomous, in fact, that conspiracy theorists claimed he was poisoned by crazed Farquitt fans. We had to publish his death certificate to quell the rumours.

‘Polly finished Love among the Begonias for you,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ he replied,‘maybe I’ve come back to haunt that loathsome cow Farquitt.’

‘If that was the case you’d be over at her place doing the wooo wooo thing and clanking chains.’

‘Hmm,’ he said disdainfully, ‘that doesn’t sound very dignified.’

‘How about some last-minute inventing? Some idea you never got round to researching?’

Mycroft thought long and hard, and pulled several bizarre faces as he did so.

‘Fascinating!’ he said at last, panting with the effort. ‘I can’t do original thought any more – as soon as my brain stopped functioning, that was the end of Mycroft the inventor. You’re right: I must be dead. It’s most depressing.’

‘But no idea why you’re here?’

‘None,’ he said despondently.

‘Well,’ I said as I got up,‘I’ll make a few enquiries. Do you want Polly to know you’ve reappeared in spirit form?’

‘I’ll leave it to your judgement,’ he said, ‘but if you do tell her, you might mention something about how she was the finest partner any man could have. Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.’

I snapped my fingers. That was how I wanted to describe Landen and me.

‘That was good – can I use it?’

‘Of course. Have you any idea how much I miss Polly?’

I thought of the two years Landen had been eradicated.

‘I do. And she misses you, Uncle, every second of every day.’

He looked up at me and I saw his eyes glisten.

I tried to put my hand on his arm but it went through his phantom limb and instead landed on the hard surface of the workbench.

‘I’ll have a think about why I might be here,’ said Mycroft in a quiet voice. ‘Will you look in on me from time to time?’

He smiled to himself and began to tinker with the device on the workbench again.

‘Of course. Goodbye, Uncle.’

‘Goodbye, Thursday.’

And he slowly began to fade. I noticed as he did so that the room grew warmer again, and within a few more seconds he had vanished entirely. I retrieved the bag of Welsh cash and walked thoughtfully to the door, turning to have one last look. The workshop was empty, dusty and forgotten. Abandoned as it was when Mycroft died, six years before.