Moving Pictures

ONCE UPON A DESTINY, by Sapphire Fforde

Theirs was a forbidden love. He could eat no fat. She could eat no lean. Nature herself divided them. But they were eternal soulmates. Fated by Fate. And they would not be apart.

The story of Jack Spratt and the woman who loved him.

PB, Featherhart Press, 2001, ISBN 0-441-06543-8, UK _4.99

It was a quiet night at the Allen Street, London branch of Borders, and the woman at the front register was working herself up to a really good sigh over the latest Jean M. Auel. Those cavemen sure knew how to treat a lady. And sexy! Oh, Jondalar! Sexy didn't even begin to describe it.

Her discreet-yet-tasteful gold "Borders - Connie" badge flashed in the fluorescent light as her bosom heaved. Ayla had just invented something which was going to save her entire adopted tribe from starvation, and she and her six-foot blond Adonis were having graphic sex in celebration. They were just getting up to a really good bit when...

Giggles at three o'clock!

Her head snapped around. Her dilated pupils instantly narrowed in a gimlet stare. Sacrilege!

Three o'clock, from the front registers, was Romance. Giggling in Romance? Didn't they comprehend? Romance was beautiful, and sad, and...romantic. It was dignified. It was people who hated each other learning that it was really love all along. It was minstrels under the window. It was death rather than separation. It was sweeping family sagas of betrayal and desire.

It wasn't ever, ever funny.

Most people underestimated "Borders - Connie" at first glance. Every inch of her declared her middle-aged spinsterdom. From the tips of her flat rubber-soled black pleather lace-up shoes (for her back) to the top of her brownish wispily-curled head, she was the quintessential scary-cat-lady-in-training.

However, if they bothered to look beyond the smudged wire-rim glasses on the gold chain (to match the badge), they saw her eyes. The nineteenth-century novelists got at least one thing right; the eyes really are the "windows to the soul". "Borders - Connie" had eyes long-dulled by loneliness and grief, but they could become extraordinarily animated reading a Sapphire Fforde.

They could also express all the pent-up fury of a natural berserker at a threat to the things that she held dear. As now.

An even louder torrent of laughter from Romance made up her mind. Through a complicated system of hand-signals, gestures and grimaces, "Borders - Connie" communicated to "Borders - Sean" at the other desk that he should cover her station. Technically the floor manager should have dealt with the miscreants, but everyone knew that he hated what he called "bloody bodice rippers". He systematically discriminated against Romance. Just because he was a hard sci-fi fan.... She locked her register and strode out from behind the desk, setting her shoulders as she did so.

Ready for battle.

The laughter from Romance had subsided into guiltily sporadic giggles. On her approach through New Releases, Contemporary Fiction and Poetry, "Borders - Connie" could discern the tops of two heads. Redheads. They were often heroes and heroines in her books, but in real life she'd found they were nothing but trouble.

She turned the corner between Biography and Historical Fiction, stalking into Romance with the righteous anger of a wronged aficionado. However, what she saw there was enough to momentarily startle her into speechlessness.

First of all, the redheads were twins. Identical twins, to be precise, tall and about twenty years old. She had an impression of freckles and huge grins.

The real shock, though, was that they were holding a copy of Once Upon A Destiny - and the picture on the cover was moving. The publishers had clearly been a bit stumped by the story's requiring a thin man and a fat wife, so they had just stuck on the usual shirtless muscular man/curvy svelte woman combination, identical to almost every other cover in the section. "Borders - Connie" had seen the same thing so many times that she hardly even looked any more. But she'd never seen any cover that moved. Nor that... talked. In high squeaky voices.

"Oh, Jack Spratt, I love you! You're a big hunk of man meat! Make love to me!"

"Oh, wife! You don't have a name! I love you too! I want to bear your children! Our dietary incompatibilities will never keep us apart!"

"Borders - Connie"'s mouth was beginning to drop open in amazement, when one of the twins suddenly noticed her and swiftly tapped...a wand? Yes, he tapped a wand against the cover! He muttered something about fins, or cans, or something, and the squeaky voices stopped. Sadly, so did the figures on the cover, who appeared to have been doing something rather interestingly compromising.

The boy with the...say it, wand...swiftly shoved it up the sleeve of his green woollen jumper, as his red-jumpered mirror image presented her with the book. With a flourish!

"It fell off the shelf," he lied, outrageously. His impudent grin and barely-suppressed laughter gave him away, but "Borders - Connie" wasn't going to call him on it.

"Thank you, we were just going," added Green Jumper, elbowing Red Jumper in the ribs.

"Yes, yes we were," added Red Jumper. "So...this is us leaving. Now. Yes."

They sidled towards the doors, just managing to make it outside before hysteria overcame them. "Borders - Connie" was peripherally aware of this, but she was too engrossed in tracing over Once Upon A Destiny's cover with her fingertips to be concerned with them.

It couldn't have been her glasses, she'd cleaned them an hour ago. She wasn't hallucinating. If there was one thing she wasn't, it was mad. If that made any sense.

Who cared? It was real! It was magic! Real magic!

Considerably cheered, she returned to her register. If anyone that day noticed her air of abstraction, the wondering grin on her face or the sparkle in her eyes, they'd probably have put it down to the new Auel. They certainly never said anything.

But something fundamental had shifted at the centre of "Borders - Connie". She looked at the world slightly differently from that point on. She was quite pleasantly surprised at the singular possibilities she discovered.