The Woman Who Died a Lot: A Thursday Next Novel (6 page)

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 son?” 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’s
insane.
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.”

The problem was this: Prime Minister Redmond Van de Poste and the ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties in such a dangerously competent fashion over the past decade that the nation’s stupidity—usually discharged on a harmless drip feed of minor bungling—had now risen far beyond the capacity of the nation to dispose of in it a safe and sensible fashion. The stupidity surplus was so high, in fact, that three years ago Van de Poste had sanctioned the hideously expensive Anti-Smite Shields, in order to guard against the damaging—yet unlikely—wrath of an angry God, eager to cleanse mankind of sin. It was hoped that building a chain of Anti-Smite Shields at massive expense would lower the stupidity surplus and bring the country back toward the safer realms of woolly-headed complacency.

Unfortunately for Van de Poste, and to many people’s surprise, the Almighty had decided to reveal Himself and, in a spate of Old Testamentism not seen for over two millennia, began to punish mankind for its many transgressions. Damage to people and property aside, this had the unintended consequence of making the Anti-Smite Shield de facto sensible, a state of affairs that required a new and increasingly expensive outlet for the nation’s increasing stupidity surplus.

The opposition Prevailingwind Party led by Alfredo Traficcone was calling for a needlessly expensive and wholly unnecessary foreign war to mop up the surplus, an act that Van de Poste declaimed as “one mind-numbingly idiotic step too far.” To appease voters and parliament Van de Poste was pouring millions into a doomed plan to rustproof the Menai Bridge by boiling it in wine, then spending an equally large amount in a vain attempt to fill St. Paul’s Cathedral with Ping-Pong balls, on the rather vague premise that it might be “fun.” While these were indeed dumb, they did not properly address the issue nor size of the burgeoning stupidity surplus, so Van de Poste must have looked around for an expensive decision to reverse—and decided to reinstate SpecOps.

“We have a new mission statement,” said Braxton. “Before, SpecOps was meant to help the police deal with ‘situations outside normal duties.’ Now we have to do the same but to generally overspend, change our minds about expensive technical upgrades, commission a plan to regionalize SpecOps with expensive state-of-the-art control rooms that we will never use and inflate the workforce far beyond the realm of prudent management. And it is from within this new culture of waste and mismanagement that we think Van de Poste hopes to achieve his stupidity surplus reduction target.”

“Does that sit okay with you?” I asked, knowing that Braxton and his tight budgeting had been part of the fabric here in Swindon for longer than anyone could remember.

“I am simply a servant of the state,” he said simply. “If they want me to save money, I save money. If they want me to waste it, I waste it. But it’s not that easy, because to discharge the stupidity surplus most transparently, I have to think up
insanely
moronic ways of frittering money away—simply pouring cash into a pit and setting fire to it doesn’t work. The SEC would see through that sort of scam night off.”

The SEC was the Stupid Events Commission, the government department created to oversee the safe discharge of the stupidity surplus. Some would argue that it was the SEC’s good management and unimpeachably honest adherence to sound business practices that had gotten us into this mess, but anyone can attribute blame with the benefit of hindsight.

“How’s the reinstatement of the service going for you so far?” I asked.

“Not too bad,” replied Braxton thoughtfully. “We decided to rebrand SpecOps at great expense to bring it all up to date. We designed new logos, uniforms, notepaper and stuff with SpecOps’ new name: EnSquidnia.”

“I don’t like it.”

“No, it’s a stupid name, and the focus group hated it, so we changed it back to SpecOps. That small debacle alone wasted almost three million pounds of taxpayers’ money.”

“I can see you’re taking the Stupidity Surplus Reduction Program with the seriousness it deserves.”

“I do my best. Now, how did things go with Dr. Chumley?”

“He gave me a NUT-4.”

“That’s awkward,” said Braxton. “The position I had in mind would require a NUT-2, but we could probably make an exception.”

“Ah,” I replied, surprised yet somewhat relieved that Phoebe Smalls had also overcooked the goose in the insanity department. “Has the entry requirement been changed since Victor was heading up the department?”