Early Riser

by Jasper Fforde

  It took a moment or two for me to digest this fact. I looked at my alarm clock, which had stopped not long after I’d gone to sleep. Without it, I’d inadvertently tumbled down the slope into hibernation. It was embarrassing. Falling asleep on your first overwintering gig was strictly for amateurs.

  ‘So,’ said Jonesy, ‘let’s start again: what are you doing here?’

  I explained about as quickly and truthfully as I could. That Aurora had saved me from Logan; that I’d spoken to Laura and Fodder in the Consulate; that I’d been marooned; had met up again with Aurora; was going to drive myself out; was allocated this room.

  ‘The next thing I know, you’re waking me up.’

  ‘Oversleep, did you?’ she said with a smile. ‘That’s not a good start.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed, ‘not a good start at all. But why wake me now,’ I added, ‘why not four weeks ago?’

  ‘Your office in Cardiff,’ she said, ‘they called several times asking where you were as they need confirmation of Aurora’s account of what happened to Logan. We’d told them you’d departed on the last train, but when they insisted we look further four weeks later, that dope Treacle said he’d walked with you and Aurora in this direction. We did a sweep of the Domitoria, and there you were. You were lucky.’

  She was right. If I’d only been carrying two weeks’ contingency instead of four I’d likely be dead right now.

  ‘Now,’ said Jonesy, ‘you need to explain everything to Toccata. She’s busy until one o’clock. Do you want breakfast?’

  I nodded. She told me to keep stretching and then went back into the kitchen area. I moved to the end of the bed, grasped the bedstead and heaved myself to my feet. I paused, took a few steps, stumbled, regained my balance then walked unsteadily to the bathroom, where I relieved myself of something that smelled of overripe silage, looked like yacht varnish and felt as though it were burning a new way out.

  This done, I stepped into the shower to wash the gammy night-crust from my wintercoat, and while I did so, I thought about the painter. Oddly, the dream had not been a faint jumble of broken images softened into broad ambiguity by the fog of sleep, but as strong and as real as anything that actually had happened: the trip up here, Logan’s death, Foulnap – even the flailing nightwalker on the operating table at HiberTech and the shiny wetness of the cobbles where Hooke had whacked Moody.

  Once I’d soaped and scrubbed twice I ran a number-two clipper through my felted hair and dumped the tangled mass in the bin. I stopped frequently to stretch the gnawing stiffness from my limbs, and once I’d combed all over to remove the lice eggs, eight night-worms and a half-dozen hook-daddies, I stood under the gloriously hot water* and tried to push down a sense of rising panic and failure. After ten minutes and with no positive thoughts about my current predicament, I stepped out, gazed at my scrawny body in the mirror, then clipped my nails short, felt my teeth for any telltale signs of decay or looseness, and slipped on a pair of Suzy’s jogging trousers and a T-shirt. I then went to the window to peer at the Winter, something I’d never witnessed before.

  The landscape was utterly without colour. A grey overcast stretched to the mountains, the town and country draped in white, the hard edges of the buildings rounded and softened by the heaps of accreted snow. There was barely any movement; the only sign of life was half a dozen dog-head buzzards wheeling tightly over some waste ground behind the Siddons.

  ‘They’ll be circling the landfill,’ said Jonesy, who had arrived by my side. ‘We dumped a couple of winsomniacs up there a few days ago; things aren’t freezing as quickly so the scent carries.’

  ‘The thaw?’ I asked.

  ‘No, just the end of a milder spell. There’s worse weather on the way – a pretty big one in a couple of days: fifty below freezing, they say. The porters will be pulling the rods in preparation. We’ll want to be inside when it hits. Breakfast is ready.’

  We sat down at the table. There was everything: bacon, beans, two kippers, buttered toast, mushrooms, sausage and sauté potatoes. Despite the joyous bounty of the spread, everything was either long-life, tinned or dry-packed. Nothing is fresh in the Winter, they say – except the wind.

  We tucked in; Jonesy had made almost the same size for herself.

  ‘This is nice,’ she said.

  She looked at me and smiled, then patted my hand in an oddly affectionate manner, and left hers resting on mine. It was her tattered hand, all livid scar tissue and string-sized stitch marks. I didn’t move my hand away through not wanting to offend, so waited until she moved her hand to pass me the salt, and then elected to keep my hands off the table in future.

  ‘It’s sort of like being long-partnered,’ she added.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Sort of like being long-partnered,’ she repeated, ‘sitting here together, enjoying our retirement and sharing a sense of past histories together, a warm and cosy sense of familiarity.’

  The alarm bells started ringing.

  ‘I’m . . . not sure I follow you. Retirement sounds nice, but hardly realistic.’

  ‘That’s the whole idea. Since Consuls rarely die of old age, I thought we could have our fond dotage now, while we still can. We could meet up after work, and just kind of sit together in companionable silence. You might darn a sock and make comments from time to time while I read, and you could say “Yes, dear”, or “That’s interesting” when I say something intelligent you don’t understand. We could even play Cluedo, but only if I can be Miss Scarlett and not the murderers.’

  ‘That’s not quite how Cluedo works,’ I said, and she frowned, so I gave her a quick run-down on the rules while we ate.

  ‘You seem very expert,’ she said, which was hardly a word I’d use – Cluedo isn’t that complex.

  ‘Sister Zygotia used to play it with us at the Pool,’ I said.

  Not many people talked about the Pool. But now that we were, Jonesy was curious.

  ‘Were you there long?’

  ‘Last one out.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  Pools, like meals, terriers and promises, all varied in quality – there were Pools barely suitable for livestock and there was the highly desirable Wackford & Co. with branches in Paris, London and New York.

  ‘Any institution has room for improvement,’ I said, ‘but on the whole I think it was okay – I just stayed there too long. Look,’ I added, ‘I don’t want to appear ungrateful or anything, but I’d be a lot happier just heading off home, straight back to Cardiff.’

  ‘No can do, Wonky. Toccata wants to see you, so that’s what’s going to happen. Pass the ketchup.’

  ‘There isn’t any.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with a mournful expression, ‘we watered it down and told the winsomniacs it was tomato soup.’

  We fell silent for a moment, but Jonesy, I realised, was never quiet for long. She liked to chatter in order, I think, to fill the dead air, and the Winter was full of dead air. I learned that she was a first-generation settled Guestworker, an outsider of mixed-hemisphere parents. Her mother had been an Argentinian maid who had fallen in love and slept over. Scandalous at the time, but little thought of today.

  ‘I joined the Service after several tours in the Ottoman,’ she said, then fell silent for a moment. ‘Lost some people out there under my command,’ she said, ‘lost some good people.’

  ‘Is that why you’re in Sector Twelve?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s all about payback, I think,’ she said, as if not fully sure herself. ‘Could have retired, but working under Toccata is never dull. Besides, I may actually do some good. It’s not risk-free, but honourable conduct rarely is.’

  Once breakfast was done, Jonesy said she had some errands to run and she’d meet me at midday to go and see Toccata.

  ‘You could make up some really good “Do you remember whens”,’ she said, ‘reminiscences
of our early life together, y’know?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I could.’

  ‘Try now.’

  ‘I’m not good at off-the-cuff invent—’

  ‘Did you like your breakfast? The one I made for you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then let’s hear the story of how we met.’

  She stared at me in a dangerous fashion. The breezy, chatty Jonesy was really only one part of her – the saner part.

  ‘Okay, then,’ I said, trying to think of something original and failing, ‘we were – um – cast as . . . the front and back halves of a pantomime horse.’

  ‘Trippy,’ said Jonesy, more intrigued than I’d hoped, ‘and why would that have happened?’

  ‘Part of a . . . Winter talent show?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘We don’t get along at first—’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because you insisted I was the back half?’

  ‘Totally plausible. Carry on.’

  ‘But because the show must go on and the “equestrian gavotte” requires synchronised footsteps, we sort of forget our differences, practise together in private and then emerge victorious . . . and in love.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ she said, beaming all over.

  ‘Really? I thought it sounded particularly corny.’

  ‘The best relationships always begin like a bad rom-com in my experience. I’ll find a tartan travel rug and a picnic set for the Sno-Trac,’ she added, now quite enthused by the whole idea. ‘You’re washing up breakfast, but you can argue with me about it if you want – sort of like “I did it last time”.’

  ‘You made breakfast,’ I said, ‘it would only be fair.’

  ‘Well, okay,’ she said, mildly disappointed.

  Jonesy got up, pulled on her coat and opened the front door.

  ‘I’ve left a basket of food on the kitchen counter. I’ll meet you outside at midday.’

  She then wished me a pleasant day, told me to not force my first shit out as I’d definitely regret it, and that there was a package outside in the corridor.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to her retreating form as she moved along the curved corridor, and she waved a hand without looking back.

  The parcel was large and flat and wrapped in brown paper and string. I brought it inside, cut the string with my pocket knife to find it was a painting, a portrait, of me. I rested the painting on the bookcase, then stepped back.

  It was the picture I had commissioned from the painter. But it wasn’t wholly original. It was the same painting I had seen in her studio four weeks before, the one of her faceless husband. But it was no longer her husband and no longer naked. It was me, with my features and a black one-piece swimsuit painted over. She’d even added white pumps over his previously naked feet, and a blue-and-white striped towel for me to sit on.

  There was something very disturbing about the painting. It wasn’t because she had recycled a canvas of her obviously-missed husband for a stranger she barely knew, but this: she’d painted me on the Gower, as in my dream, and, more bizarrely, it looked for all the world as though she had painted me from her viewpoint, there on the beach. In the dream she had said she loved me, and this was a painting of me, hearing her say it. Which sort of defied logic: it should have been the other way round. Reality, then dream. I stared at the painting for a good ten minutes, trying to figure it out, but getting nowhere. In any event, I thought the likeness was good. I now owed her five hundred euros, which on reflection was money I could ill afford, but at least it would give me an opportunity to talk to her again.

  I walked around the room several times, managed two press-ups and sat for a while on the bed feeling fatigued and itchy, then fetched the portrait of me and placed it next to Clytemnestra, in order to soften her psychopathic glare. I then went and made myself some tea, had another shower, and stared out of the window.

  After an hour of this I grew bored and restless so decided to go and see Porter Lloyd. I pulled on my uniform, threw my bag around my shoulder and departed, but stopped at the painter’s door as I walked around the corridor. I scribbled a note of thanks and my address so she could invoice me come Springrise, and was going to pop it through the letterbox when I stopped. The name under the bell was Birgitta, and I felt a sudden pang of confusion. I hadn’t known her name. She’d not told me. I’d heard it in the dream. I took a deep breath, supposed that I must have seen it without registering it, and, still confused, walked downstairs.

  Starving in the basement

  ‘ . . . The 1815 “Victoire” calendar was the one followed by all members of the Northern Fed, and listed the 118 days of Winter as a single month centred around the Winter solstice. The remaining 252 days were grouped into an efficient nine months of 28 days each, with a leap year every nineteen to make up for orbital discrepancy . . . ’

  – The History of Celestial Timekeeping, by Brian Gnomon

  ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ said Porter Lloyd when I found him at reception, ‘I had no idea you were still up there.’

  ‘I hadn’t taken the Sno-Trac,’ I said, ‘so you must have known I was still here.’

  ‘I don’t like to go in the basement much,’ he said, ‘so wouldn’t know if it was here or not. How late for work were you?’

  ‘Four weeks,’ I said, ‘probably some kind of record.’

  He gave a short laugh, and I joined in, feeling stupid. I then asked about the night I thought Clytemnestra had peeled herself out of the painting.

  ‘That was the first night,’ said Lloyd, ‘I didn’t see you after that. I can only apologise again. I work with the information I’m given.’

  I looked out of the window at the weather, which was overcast but clear. I suddenly had a daring thought: I didn’t have to hang around to see Toccata at all. Technically I didn’t take orders from her – I was based out of Cardiff.

  ‘I think I’d better be leaving,’ I said. ‘Sno-Trac in the basement, you say?’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you.’

  Lloyd took a long dog-catcher’s stick and a press photographer’s flashgun from under the desk, the kind that accepts flashbulbs the size of ping-pong balls. We crossed the lobby and passed through a small door, then took the stairwell into the bowels of the Dormitorium. It was noticeably warmer when we reached the second sub-basement as we were closer to the HotPot, and the copper heat-exchanger pipes made odd gurgling noises as valves automatically opened and closed. The iron stair rail, I noted, was warm to the touch.

  ‘Quite hot down here,’ I said.

  ‘Cold snap on its way,’ explained Lloyd, ‘the rods are out in anticipation.’

  ‘Expecting trouble?’ I asked, indicating the flashgun and dog-catcher’s pole he was carrying.

  ‘The Sarah Siddons is only at sixty per cent occupancy,’ he confessed, ‘so I take on “basement lodgers” for a fee.’

  ‘Basement lodgers?’

  ‘Nightwalkers from the Dormitoria this end of town. Other Porters find them and park them with me until HiberTech or the Consuls get involved. I’ve got six, all told. Unusually high, I know. Morphenox isn’t totally without faults, is it?’

  He was making comment on the fact that only those on the drug ever walked. For every three thousand or so who felt the Spring sunshine on their faces, one would be a nightwalker, and no one considered those odds anything less than acceptable.

  ‘I’ve been feeding them a turnip and three Weetabix a day, so – fingers crossed – they haven’t yet resorted to eating one another.’

  I hadn’t thought for one moment I was going to have to run the gauntlet of potentially cannibalistic nightwalkers, and told him so.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘even a child could outrun them. Just make sure you’ve no chocolate or Oxo cubes in your pockets. They can smell them a mile off; drives them nuts.’
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br />   We arrived at a steel door which had six names chalked upon it, along with the dates they were locked in. Lloyd dug a flashbulb from his jacket pocket and pushed it into the reflector bowl.

  ‘I trigger it manually,’ he explained. ‘The bright light scrambles the remnants of their brain long enough to get away if needed.’

  He rapped his knuckles against the last name on the door.

  ‘Watch out for Eddie Tangiers. Big guy, strong as an ox – I lured him in here only a week ago. Used a trail of fruit gums, if you’re interested. Not quite as effective as marshmallows, but less bulky to carry – and more economic.’

  ‘Good tip. Thanks. How will I know him?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll know him: kind of big, kind of dead, kind of needs to be avoided. Good luck. The Sno-Trac will be on your left, fifty yards in.’

  After pausing to listen at the door, Lloyd pulled back the spring-loaded door bolt, opened the door and then fired the flashgun. There was a bright flash in which happily a nightwalker was not revealed, and a waft of warm air greeted us from the semi-gloom, and with it the smell of decomposition. Lloyd hurriedly ejected the spent bulb and pushed in another from his pocket.

  ‘One or two are definitely greeners,’ he said, wrinkling his nose. ‘Maybe I didn’t feed them enough Weetabix. ’

  I stepped in and snapped on my flashlight. A meagre light filtered down the light-wells by which I could see the general layout of the basement: doughnut-shaped around the central core, with sturdy brick vaulting to support the building above. Serried ranks of cars, motorbikes, trucks, haywains and agricultural equipment, most covered by dustsheets, were parked in two rows with access along the inside radius. I paused for a moment, but Lloyd didn’t; I heard the door clang shut and his footsteps retreated rapidly back up the stairs.

  I found the Sno-Trac with ease, but it wouldn’t be going anywhere. Someone had left the compressed air tank open and the air had leaked out – there was nothing to start the engine. I paused for thought and then decided to exit by way of the ramp and then have a scout around outside whilst I figured out my options.