9.
Eradications Anonymous
Goliath Backs Kaine and Whig Party
The Goliath Corporation yesterday renewed its
support for Chancellor Kaine at a party to honor England’s leader.
At a glittering dinner attended by over five hundred heads of
commerce and governmental departments, Goliath pledged to continue
its support of the Chancellor. In a reply speech, Mr. Kaine
gratefully acknowledged their support and announced a package of
measures designed to assist Goliath in the difficult yet highly
desirable change to its faith-based corporate status, as well as
funding for several ongoing weapons programs, details of which have
been classified.
Article in The Toad, July 13, 1988
Hamlet and I arrived home to find a TV news
crew from Swindon-5 waiting for me outside the house.
“Miss Next,” said the reporter. “Can you tell us
where you’ve been these past two years?”
“No comment.”
“You can interview me,” said Hamlet,
realizing he was something of a celebrity out here.
“And who are you?” asked the reporter,
mystified.
I stared at him and his face fell.
I’m . . . I’m . . . her cousin Eddie.”
“Well, Cousin Eddie, can you tell us where
Miss Next has been for the past two years?”
“No comment.”
And we walked up the garden path to the front
door.
“Where have you been?” demanded my mother as
we walked in the door.
“Sorry I’m late, Mum—how’s the little chap?”
“Tiring. He says that his aunt Mel is a gorilla who
can peel bananas with her feet while hanging from the light
fixtures.”
“He talked?”
Friday was using the time-honored international
child signal to be picked up—raising his arms in the air—and when I
did so, gave me a wet kiss and started to chatter away
unintelligibly.
“Well, he didn’t exactly say as much,”
admitted Mum, “but he drew me a picture of Aunt Mel, which is
pretty conclusive.”
“Aunt Mel a gorilla?” I laughed, looking at the
picture, which was unequivocally of . . . well, a gorilla. “Quite
an imagination, hasn’t he?”
“I’d say. I found him standing on the sideboard
ready to swing from the curtains. When I told him it wasn’t
allowed, he pointed to the picture of Aunt Mel, which I took to
mean that she used to let him.”
“Does she, now? I mean, did he, now?”
Pickwick walked in looking very disgruntled and
wearing a bonnet made of cardboard and held together with sticky
tape.
“Pickwick’s a very tolerant playmate,” said my
mother, who was obviously not that skilled at reading dodo
expressions.
“I really need to get him into a play group. Did
you change his nappy?”
“Three times. It just goes straight through,
doesn’t it?”
I sniffed at the leg of his dungarees. “Yup.
Straight through.”
“Well, I’ve got my auto-body work group to attend
to,” she said, putting on her hat and taking her handbag and
welding goggles from the peg, “but you’d better sort out some more
reliable child care, my dear. I can do the odd hour here and there,
but not whole days—and I certainly don’t want to do any more
nappies.”
“Do you think Lady Hamilton would look after
him?”
“It’s possible,” said my mother in the sort of
voice that means the reverse. “You could always ask.”
She opened the door and was plinked at angrily by
Alan, who was in a bit of a bad mood and was pulling up flowers in
the front garden. With unbelievable speed she grabbed him by the
neck and, with a lot of angry plinking and scrabbling, deposited
him unceremoniously inside the potting shed and locked the
door.
“Miserable bird!” said my mother, giving me and
Friday a kiss. “Have I got my purse?”
“It’s in your bag.”
“Am I wearing my hat?”
“Yes.”
She smiled, told me that Bismarck was not to be
disturbed and that I mustn’t buy anything from a door-to-door
salesman unless it was truly a bargain and was gone.
I changed Friday, then let him toddle off to find
something to do. I made a cup of tea for myself and Hamlet, who had
switched on the TV and was watching MOLE-TV ’s Shakespeare channel.
I sat on the sofa and stared out the windows into the garden. It
had been destroyed by a mammoth when I was last here, and I noted
that my mother had replanted it with plants that are not very
palatable to the Proboscidea tongue—quite wise, considering the
migrations. As I watched, Pickwick waddled past, possibly wondering
where Alan had gone. For the day’s work, I had done very little. I
was still a Literary Detective, but twenty thousand pounds in debt
and no nearer getting Landen back.
My mother returned at about eight, and the first
of her Eradications Anonymous friends began to appear at nine.
There were ten of them, and they started to chatter about what they
described as their “lost ones” as soon as they got through the
door. Emma Hamilton and I weren’t alone in having a husband with an
existence problem. But although it seemed my Landen and Emma’s
Horatio were strong in our memories, many people were not so lucky.
Some had only vague feelings about someone they felt who
should be there but wasn’t. To be honest, I really didn’t
want to be here, but I had promised my mother and I was living in
her house, so that was the end of it.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” said my mother,
clapping her hands, “and if you’d all like to take a seat, we can
allow this meeting to begin.”
Everyone sat down, tea and Battenberg cake in hand,
and looked expectant.
“Firstly I would like to welcome a new member to
the group. As you know, my daughter has been away for a couple of
years—not in prison, I’d like to make that clear!”
“Thank you, Mother,” I murmured under my breath as
there was polite laughter from the group, who instantly assumed
that’s exactly where I had been.
“And she has kindly agreed to join our group and
say a few words. Thursday?”
I took a deep breath, stood up and said quickly,
“Hello, everyone. My name’s Thursday Next, and my husband doesn’t
exist.”
There was applause at this, and someone said, “Way
to go, Thursday,” but I couldn’t think of anything to add, nor
wanted to, so sat down again. There was silence as everyone stared
at me, politely waiting for me to carry on.
“That’s it. End of story.”
“I’ll drink to that!” said Emma, gazing forlornly
at the locked drinks cabinet.
“You’re very brave,” said Mrs. Beatty, who was
sitting next to me. She patted my hand in a kindly manner. “What
was his name?”
“Landen. Landen Parke-Laine. He was murdered by the
ChronoGuard in 1947. I’m going to the Goliath Apologarium tomorrow
to try to get his eradication reversed.”
There was a murmuring.
“What’s the matter?”
“You must understand,” said a tall and painfully
thin man who up until now had remained silent, “that for you to
progress in this group, you must begin to accept that this is a
problem of the memory—there is no Landen; you just think
there is.”
“You mean to tell me, Mr. Holmes, that by a
scientific oddity we are in the wrong book?”
“It’s very dry in here, isn’t it?” muttered Emma
unsubtly, still staring at the drinks cabinet.
“I was like you once,” said Mrs. Beatty, who had
stopped patting my hand and returned to her knitting. “I had a
wonderful life with Edgar, and then one morning I wake up in a
different house with Gerald lying next to me. He didn’t believe me
when I explained the problem, and I was on medication for ten years
until I came here. It is only now, in the company of your good
selves, am I coming to the realization that it is merely a malady
of the head.”
I was horrified. “Mother?”
“It’s something that we must try and face, my
dear.”
“But Dad visits you, doesn’t he?”
“Well, I believe he does,” she said,
thinking hard, “but of course when he’s gone, it’s only a memory.
There isn’t any real proof that he ever existed.”
“What about me? And Joffy? Or even Anton? How were
we born without Dad?”
She shrugged at the impossibility of the paradox.
“Perhaps it was, after all,” sighed my mother, “youthful
indiscretions that I have expunged from my mind.”
“And Emma? And Herr Bismarck? How do you explain
them being here?”
“Well,” said my mother, thinking hard, “I’m sure
there’s a rational explanation for it . . . somewhere.”
“Is this what this group teaches you?” I replied
angrily. “To deny the memories of your loved ones?”
I looked around at the gathering, who had, it
seemed, given up in the face of the hopeless paradox that they
lived every minute of their lives. I opened my mouth to try to
describe eloquently just how I knew that Landen had once
been married to me when I realized I was wasting my time. There was
nothing, but nothing, to suggest that it was anything other
than in my mind. I sighed. To be truthful, it was in my
mind. It hadn’t happened. I just had memories of how it
might have turned out. The tall, thin man, the realist, was
beginning to convince everyone they were not victims of a timeslip,
but delusional.
“You want proof—”
I was interrupted by an excited knock at the front
door. Whoever it was didn’t waste any time; she just walked
straight into the house and into the front room. It was a
middle-aged woman in a floral dress who was holding the hand of a
confused and acutely embarrassed-looking man.
“Hello, group!” she said happily. “It’s Ralph! I
got him back!”
“Ah!” said Emma. “This calls for a celebration!”
Everyone ignored her.
“I’m sorry,” said my mother, “have you got the
right house? Or the right self-help group?”
“Yes, yes,” she reasserted. “It’s Julie, Julie
Aseizer. I’ve been coming to this group every week for the past
three years!”
There was silence in the group. All you could hear
was the quiet click of Mrs. Beatty’s knitting needles.
“Well, I haven’t seen you,” announced the tall,
thin man. He looked around at the group. “Does anyone
recognize this person?”
The group shook their heads blankly.
“I expect you think this is really funny,
don’t you?” said the thin man angrily. “This is a self-help group
for people with severe memory aberrations, and I really don’t think
it is either amusing or constructive for pranksters to make fun of
us! Now, please leave!”
She stood for a moment, biting her lip, but it was
her husband who spoke.
“Come on, darling, I’m taking you home.”
“But wait!” she said. “Now he’s back,
everything is as it was, and I wouldn’t have needed to come
to your group, so I didn’t—yet I remember . .
.”
Her voice trailed off, and her husband gave her a
hug as she started to sob. He led her out, apologizing profusely
all the while.
As soon as they had gone, the thin man sat down
indignantly. “A sorry state of affairs!” he grumbled.
“Everyone thinks it’s funny to do that old joke,”
added Mrs. Beatty. “That’s the second time this month.”
“It gave me a powerful thirst,” added Emma. “Anyone
else?”
“Maybe,” I suggested, “they should start a
self-help group for themselves—they could call it Eradications
Anonymous Anonymous.”
No one thought it was funny, and I hid a smile.
Perhaps there would be a chance for me and Landen after all.
I didn’t contribute much to the group after that,
and indeed the conversation soon threaded away from eradications
and onto more mundane matters, such as the latest crop of TV shows
that seemed to have flourished in my absence. Celebrity Name
That Fruit! hosted by Frankie Saveloy was a ratings topper
these days, as was Toasters from Hell and You’ve Been
Stapled!, a collection of England’s funniest stationery
incidents. Emma had given up all attempts at subtlety by now and
was prying the lock off the drinks cabinet with a screwdriver when
Friday wailed one of those ultrasonic cries that only parents can
hear—makes you understand how sheep can know who’s lamb is
whose—and I mercifully excused myself. He was standing up in his
cot rattling the bars, so I took him out and read to him until we
were both fast asleep.