I Seek Literary Advice

If you've read the other story I wrote; about the time when I first met the Professor, and Mister Shire and the gyptians and all that, you'll remember that I scribbled it in an exercise book and showed it to my mate Jim, who used to be an apprentice at Bigsby and Jarrett, Bookbinders, also of Shoe Lane Oxford. I reckoned that he must know a lot about writing and storytelling because he had so much to do with books as part of his trade. Whether that was true or not, he did give me some useful advice, generally over a pint or two (paid for by me) in the snug bar of the Talbot Inn. So, after I had written the chapters that (I hope) you've just read, I decided to take Sunday afternoon off and go and see him and Carrie. I thought he could give them the once-over and tell me what he thought of them.

It was a week or two after we had re-opened the shop. Business was slow, to be honest – very slow indeed. It was only to be expected, of course, what with the shop having run down so badly, but that didn't help the situation. There were still those bank payments to make and I'd not missed the anxiety on Mistress' face, dominated by sadness as it was. She sat in the office all day; sometimes writing (I could hear her quill pen scratching on the James and James letterheaded paper as I passed), sometimes just looking out of the window. 'Peter,' she said once, hearing me go by and turning round in her chair. 'Do you think we could open a stall in the Covered Market and do some more trade there?'

'I'm sorry, Mistress,' I replied. 'I couldn't look after a stall and the shop at the same time.'

'No, I suppose not.' She'd sighed and shaken her head.

'We could place some more advertisements in the papers.'

'Advertisements cost money.' She turned back to her letter-writing and I went downstairs to my silent workshop, Viola riding dejectedly on my shoulder.

The other thing you might remember from reading the other story is that I couldn't abide going to church. Now that I was no longer an apprentice I was determined not to let myself be browbeaten into attending Divine Observance all day every Sunday. I was prepared for a real fight with Mistress James over this, and I wasn't going to give way either. Back in the old days it used to be the case that your business would be condemned if any of its employees or associates were not regular churchgoers. Over the years things had moved on a little – even so an old-fashioned, long-established shop like James and James was expected to stick to tradition.

Stuff tradition. I didn't think we could afford tradition any more. What we needed were some new ideas. In the meantime I was determined to be allowed to spend Sunday as I chose and I was not about to let Mistress James deny it to me. I was ready for a fight.

Have you ever done this – I mean, gone up to somebody expecting to have a real ding-dong knock-down argument with them, only to find that all your carefully rehearsed arguments aren't needed? There're two reasons for that. The first is that the other person isn't going to listen to anything you say because they've already made up their minds and aren't going to be persuaded by you. The other reason is that they don't care.

It was a terrible shock to Viola and me to find that it made no difference to Mistress James whether I went to church or not. 'Just as you like, Mister Joyce,' she said bleakly, sitting in her cheerless, empty dining room. I stared at her.

'You don't mind?'

'It's nothing to me. You're over twenty-one. You must make your own decisions now.'

'Yes, Mistress, but…'

'Times change, Mister Joyce. We must change with them.'

I returned to the workshop quite crestfallen. How far Mistress James had been brought down – it was as if there was no fight left in her. Nothing else could have driven it home so forcibly to me what desperate straits we were in.

So it was with a worse feeling than if I had defied the wishes of my mistress that I caught the Botley autobus the following Sunday afternoon at two o'clock. I was carrying a red notebook with my new story – what you've been reading – written in it, together with Lyra's alethiometer and the black box that John Parry had given me. The old 'bus rattled and banged down Hythe Bridge Street, over the canal and past the station, going under the wrought-iron bridge that carries the tracks south-east to London. London! Where I had never been, and where Lyra had met the King and saved his life too.

Carrie and Jim were living in a ground floor flat in an old house just off the Botley Road, a mile or so beyond the railway. It was obvious to Viola and me as we stood outside the front door that Carrie had not been exaggerating when she had said that they were very poor. The house was badly in need of new paint, and new roof-tiles, and a new window-frame or two. There was a pile of old scrap metal lying in the front garden, with weeds growing through it. I was glad that I had arrived after lunchtime, so that they would not feel obliged to give me something to eat.

'Peter! You came!' Carrie wrapped her arms around me and practically dragged me into their two-room flat. 'Sit down! Chai? Are you hungry, love?'

'I'd like some tea.'

'You've eaten?'

'Yes, thanks.' That was true, although Sunday lunch had been sparse indeed. Bread and honey is very filling, all the same.

It was immediately quite plain that Jim and Carrie were living in sin. A rumpled double bed stood in one corner of their room, giving mute witness to their misdemeanour. Only a few years before they would have been hauled up before the Ecclesiastical Court Of The Mercy Of Our Gracious Magdelena for daring to live together as man and wife outside the bounds of marriage. Now; it was still unusual, and a little shocking, but no longer a criminal offence. Nobody was going to Excommunicate them for it. Or submit them to Corporeal Agony, either.

Carrie pointed to a chair and I sat down and looked around. The room was empty yet cluttered, if you see what I mean. There were a few bits of furniture (obviously second or third hand) and the floor was bare except for a shabby piece of oilcloth in front of the cold fireplace. A faded copy of the Annunciation by Piero della Francesca hung over the mantelpiece. Jim was sitting at a deal table next to the window, bent over a pile of paper and writing furiously with a steel pen.

'Hello, Jim. How's things?'

No response.

'Jim! JIM!' Was he dead to the world?

Jim slowly replaced his pen in the inkwell and turned his seat around so that he was facing me. Carrie was bustling over a stove at the other end of the room, boiling a kettle.

'Mine is a hard and lonely path – the path of a writer. You know not of what you speak, when you speak of solitude, for mine is the greatest solitude of all. The life of the inner soul – the life of a poet, the life of the true creative artist, is a life of penury and toil, unrelieved by the succour of comradely assurance.' He threw his hands in the air.

'Behold – a spirit in bondage!'

'What the hell are you talking about?'

'Speak not to me of hell – for hell is where I must writhe in eternal torment until my muse return!' Jim's eyes rolled in their sockets. I gave up on him.

'Carrie!'

'Yes, Peter love?'

'What's Jim on about? What have you been feeding him on?' Oops. That was a silly thing to say. When did they last eat?

'Oh, pay him no attention. He's writing his book, that's all. Jim!'

'Yes, my beauteous vision?'

'Peter's here. Put that pen down.'

'As the desire of my heart commands. I am thy devoted servant always.'

'Get on with you!' Carrie chuckled and levered open the lid of the tea caddy with a teaspoon.

'So what are you doing?' I asked Jim.

'I'm writing my novel – The House of Grammerye.'

'The House of what?'

'Grammerye.'

'What's that?'

'I don't know, but it sounds good. Don't you agree, Tat?'

Jim's daemon Tattycoram nodded her head vigorously.

'What's it about? Your book, I mean.'

'It's a generation-spanning saga of high romance, adventure and rumbustious good humour. Oh, and poetry too.'

'Is that why you were talking like a prat just now?'

'That,' Jim stood up and adopted an orator's pose, 'was Cedric the Ambivalent, Poet and Jester to the Court of King Alphonso the Magnificent of Belgravia. He's lost his heart to the cruel lady Michaela, Madonna of Beloved Souls and will have to do battle with the cruel deformed dwarf Harold of Lackshee to save her from drowning in a bed of Grif.'

'A bed of Grif?' I asked, but Carrie hushed me.

'Don't let him get started. He'll never stop. Drink your tea and tell us what's been happening in Shoe Lane.'

So I told them, and I could see Carrie's round face growing ever more serious as I spoke. 'I heard of that brother of Master's. Just once. I heard them talking one night, Mistress and him.'

'I never knew a thing about it.'

We fell silent. To lighten the mood, which had grown sombre, I passed my notebook over to Jim. 'Here. Take a look at this. I've been writing it all down. Go on, I'd like your opinion on it.'

'It'd better be an improvement on that stuff your wrote last time!'

Jim and Tattycoram settled down to read, while Carrie took the cups and saucers out to the back yard to wash them up. I looked out through the grimy windows while Jim flicked through the pages. Suddenly he spluttered with laughter.

'You saw Carrie doing what?'

Oh Dust and Stars! I should have had more sense than to leave that bit in…

'Er, yes Jim. I only caught a brief glimpse of her. Nothing more. Really.'

'Carrie!'

'Yes, Jim love?' Carrie stuck her head around the door.

'Have a look at this!' Jim passed the exercise book over to her. 'Top of the page. Look, there where he says…'

'Oh yes!' Carrie had the grace to blush slightly. She read out aloud, '"I was also aroused by the sight of her naked form." Were you now, you dirty devil!'

'It was a very nice naked form,' I said, wondering if was making things better, or worse.

'I'm sure it was,' Jim remarked and gave me a sideways look. Carrie slipped next to him and ran an arm around his shoulder. Their daemons rubbed their noses together.

'But it was a time-ghost,' I added, suspecting that this might not be quite enough to get me out of trouble. 'I've been seeing more and more of them recently. They don't mean anything'

But they did.

'Look,' I said, to force a change of subject. 'I've brought the Sony! What shall we watch?'

'The Larks of Ambridge,' said Carrie quickly. Jim and I groaned. We couldn't face watching another of her favourite soap operas.

'How about The Silver Bird? Or Daughters of the Sith?' I said.

'No. Too much fighting and swearing.'

'Or Dumber Than That,' said Jim. 'You like that one. It's really funny.'

'Really disgusting, more like,' said Carrie. 'How people can find that sort of thing amusing – it's beyond me.'

'Return to Numenor?' suggested Viola. 'It's got Orlando Bloom in it.'

'Oh yes! Put that one on!' Jim and I looked at each other and grinned. Sly daemon!

So I set the box that John Parry had given me – one of my precious twonkies – on the table and asked it to show Return to Numenor. I'd seen quite a few moving photograms at the Oxford Kinetorium but that didn't seem to be anything like this. The Sony seemed to project its picture into open space instead of a white wall or screen. It hovered over the middle of the room like a magic window into another world. Ah, but I had heard about them! The picture was in brilliant colour, unlike the dingy monochrome, or occasionally tinted, view you got at the Kinetorium and there was sound – clear powerful sound that, by some magic, nobody could hear if they were more than ten feet away from the picture. I've no idea how the box worked, nor how it stored all those films inside it, as well as all the music that lived in there as well. It was from John's world, you see, where the cars talk, and can drive themselves, and the houses look after you (instead of your having to look after them) and you can buy magic in little black boxes (but only if you've got a phone with your money in it).

The first time I'd shown the Lifestation's films to Jim he'd thought they were morally dubious, because none of the people in them had any daemons. He'd found it profoundly disturbing, in fact, and it was only after I'd explained that the daemons were inside the people on the screen, and he'd accepted what I'd told him, that he'd been able to watch and understand the stories on the imaginary screen. Lyra had told me about it – how she'd seen films in an Oxford cinema (as they called it) when she first went to Will's world. Of course, she'd seen lots of people whose daemons weren't visible by then, so it wasn't quite so much of a shock for her as it was for Jim or Carrie. Neither of the films she saw with Will that day were stored in the Sony, which had been a sadness for her, I know. But again, how would she have felt watching them again without him sitting by her side? Perhaps it was a small kindness, after all.

Carrie gave us more tea and cakes after the film finished. She said she got the cakes from the Rose Teashop in the High Street, where she was working as a waitress. Then it was time to go, so I picked my things up and went to the front door. Jim and Carrie followed me.

'You ought to get this taken away, or sell it to the scrap merchant,' I said pointing to the rusty pile outside the door. 'What is it – an old boiler or something?'

'That,' said Jim with a flourish, 'is a Ridgeworth Steamer.'

'A what?' I said. I noticed that I'd been saying that kind of thing all afternoon.

'It's a car,' said Carrie. 'Jim's restoring it.'

'A car?' I moved one of the pieces of metal with my foot. It fell against another piece, equally old and rusty, with a muffled clank.

'Yes, a car,' mimicked Jim. 'It's steam-powered – it runs on coal-spirit. Or naphtha, if you like. See, there's the burner. I'm going to start rebuilding it soon. Do you want to help?'

'Yes, all right. Starting next Sunday?' It would be a welcome break from the shop.

'Cheers! You're on, mate!' Jim had been watching too many films, I could tell. Still recovering from the generous hug that Carrie had given me, Viola and I returned to Shoe Lane. We chose to walk this time, as it was a pleasant evening. In fact it had been a very pleasant day, and I was already looking forward to going back to Jim and Carrie's again next Sunday.

The following Monday was very far from being a pleasant day. That Monday was one of the worst days of my life.