Unseen Academicals

She looked around the tiny bedroom by candlelight and met the gaze, which was quite difficult, of Mr Wobble, the three-eyed transcendental teddy bear. It would have been nice to have a bit of cosmic explanation at this point, but the universe never gave you explanations, it just gave you more questions.

She reached down surreptitiously, even though there was only a three-eyed teddy bear watching her, and picked up the latest Iradne Comb-Buttworthy from the cache unsuccessfully hidden below. After ten minutes of reading, which took her some way into the book (Ms Comb-Buttworthy producing volumes that were even slimmer than her heroines), she experienced déjà vu. Moreover, the déjà vu was squared, because she had the feeling of having had the déjà vu before.

‘They’re really all the same, aren’t they?’ she said to the three-eyed teddy bear. ‘You know it’s going to be Mary the Maid, or someone like her, and there’s got to be two men and she will end up with the nice one, and there has to be misunderstandings, and they never do anything more than kiss and it’s absolutely guaranteed that, for example, an exciting civil war or an invasion by trolls or even a scene with any cooking in it is not going to happen. The best you can expect is a thunderstorm.’ It really had nothing to do with real life at all, which, although short on civil wars and invasions by trolls, at least had the decency to have lots of cooking.

The book dropped out of her fingers and thirty seconds later she was sound asleep.

Surprisingly, no neighbour needed her in the night so she got up, dressed and breakfasted in what was an almost unfamiliar world. She opened her door to take breakfast to widow Crowdy and found Juliet on the doorstep.

The girl took a step back. ‘Are you goin’ out, Glendy? It’s early!’

‘Well, you’re up,’ said Glenda. ‘And with a newspaper, I’m pleased to see.’

‘Isn’t it exciting?’ said Juliet, and thrust the paper at her.

Glenda took one look at the picture on the front page, took a second, closer look, and then grabbed Juliet and pulled her inside.

‘You can see their tonkers,’ Juliet observed, in a voice that was much too matter-of-fact for Glenda’s liking.

‘You shouldn’t know what they look like!’ she said, smacking the paper down on her kitchen table.

‘What? I’ve got three brothers, ain’t I? Everyone bathes in a tub in front of the fire, don’t they? It’s not like they’re anything special. Anyway, it’s culture, all right? Remember when you took me to that place full of people in the nuddy. You stayed in there hours.’

‘It was the Royal Art Museum,’ said Glenda, thanking her stars that they were indoors. ‘That’s different!’

She tried to read the story, but it was very difficult with that amazing picture beside it, just where an eye might stray again and again.

Glenda enjoyed her job. She didn’t have a career; they were for people who could not hold down jobs. She was very good at what she did, so she did it all the time, without paying much attention to the world. But now her eyes were opened. In fact, it was time to blink.

Under the headline ‘New Light on Ancient Game’ was a picture of a vase or, rather more grandly, an urn, in orange and black. It showed some very tall and skinny men — their masculinity was beyond doubt, but possibly beyond belief. They were apparently struggling for possession of a ball; one of them was lying on the ground, and looked as if he was in some pain. The translation of the name of the urn was, said the caption, THE TACKLE.

According to the accompanying story, someone at the Royal Art Museum had found the urn in an old storeroom, and it contained scrolls which, it said here, had the original rules of foot-the-ball laid down in the early years of the century of the Summer Weevil, a thousand years ago, when the game was played in honour of the goddess Pedestriana …

Glenda skimmed through the rest of it, because there was a lot of rest to skim. An artist’s impression of the aforesaid goddess adorned page three. She was, of course, beautiful. You seldom saw a goddess portrayed as ugly. This probably had something to do with their ability to strike people down instantly. In Pedestriana’s case, she would probably have gone for the feet.

Glenda put the paper down, seething with anger, and as a cook she knew how to seethe. This wasn’t football — except that the Guild of Historians said that it was, and could prove it not only with old parchments but also with an urn, and she could see that you were on the wrong end of an argument if you were up against an urn.