“It’s annoying,” said Landen.

“What is?”

“I thought we’d seen the back of all this time-travel nonsense.”

“Even when it’s not there,” I murmured, “it still is.”

“Like forgotten dreams,” said Landen.

9.

Monday: The Madeupion

Thursday’s father was a retired ChronoGuard operative whose nebulous state of semiexistence was finally resolved when the time engines at Kemble were disabled. As part of the downstream erasure of the fact that there had ever been a time industry, his career had been replaced with something immeasurably more mundane. He was, and now had always been, a plumber. Only one with no name, which made paying by check somewhat tiffy and word-of-mouth recommendations almost impossible. But despite his new past, he also kept the old one. Few of us are so lucky as to draw experience from two lives.

Millon de Floss, Thursday Next: A Biography

As it turned out, we were eight for dinner. Landen and myself, obviously, and Friday and Tuesday, equally obviously. My brother Joffy and his partner, Miles, also made it, as did my dad. Mum and Polly, more inseparable as the years went by, were going to listen to the live studio taping of Avoid the Question Time. The Wing Commander would always sit down to talk, but he never ate as he didn’t need to, being fictional. Jenny would have been there—for the starters at any rate—but still had the flu and so was confined to her room.

But Friday was right. My father did want to talk about matters ChronoGuard.

“Get your future in the post?” he asked, sitting down next to his grandson.

“Last week.”

“Any good?”

“It’ll be . . . challenging.”

My father had also worked in the time industry, but unlike Friday, who now no longer had the future he was going to have, my father no longer had the past to which he was entitled. ChronoGuard agents who were active during the shutdown were offered a replacement past career to replace their theoretically unsustainable ones, and most chose something in the arts, sciences or politics. My father, ever the maverick, had opted for a fifty-seven-year career in plumbing. The reason, he stated, was so his new memories would have him at home as much as possible, to better reminisce about his family. This worked well for him, but not for us—we retained only those memories of his first career as a time-traveling knight-errant. As far as we were concerned, he’d turned up the day after the time engines were shut down, full of fond memories of us that we couldn’t remember but he could— sort of like having an aged parent with a bad memory, only the other way round.

“Challenging is good,” said Dad. “I used to take your mother and her brothers on long hiking holidays in Scotland. Now, that was challenging. Do you remember that time when we got lost on Ben Nevis, Thursday, and had to be rescued by several men in beards, all of whom smelled of pipe tobacco and York Peppermint Patty?”