Free Lost in a good book by Jasper Fforde Page B

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4a.
Five Coincidences, Seven Irma Cohens and One Confused Thursday Next
    The neanderthal experiment was simultaneously the high and low point of the genetic revolution. Successful in that a long-dead cousin of Homo sapien was brought back from extinction, yet a failure in that the scientists, so happy to gaze upon their experiments from their ever lofty ivory towers, had not seen so far as to consider the social implications that a new species of man might command in a world unvisited by their like for over thirty millennia. It was little surprise that so many neanderthals felt confused and unprepared for the pressures of modern life. It was Homo sapien at his least sapient.
    GERHARD VON SQUID ,
Neanderthals: Back After a Short Absence
    C OINCIDENCES ARE strange things. I like the one about the poker player named Fallon, shot dead for cheating in San Francisco in 1858. It was considered unlucky to split the dead man’s $600 winnings, so they gave the money to a passerby, hoping to win it back. The stranger converted the $600 to $2,200 and when the police arrived, was asked to hand over the original $600, as it was to be given to the dead gambler’s next of kin. After a brief investigation, the money was returned to the passerby, as he turned out to be Fallon’s son, who hadn’t seen his father for seven years.
    My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored. “It would be much more remarkable,” he would say, “if there weren’t any coincidences.”
    I stepped into the Skyrail car and pulled the emergency lever. The neanderthal operator looked at me curiously as I jammed a foot in the open door of his driver’s cubicle. I hauled him out and thumped him on the jaw before handcuffing him. A few days in the cooler and he would be back to Mrs. Kaylieu. The group of women in the Skyrail sat silent and shocked as I searched him and found—nothing. I looked in the cab and his sandwich box but the carved-soap gun wasn’t there either.
    The well-heeled woman who had earlier been so keen to jab the driver with her umbrella was now full of self-righteous indignation:
    “Disgraceful! Attacking a poor defenseless neanderthal in this manner! I shall speak to my husband about this!”
    One of the other women had called SpecOps-21 and a third had given the neanderthal a handkerchief to dab his bleeding mouth. I uncuffed Kaylieu and apologized, then sat down and put my head in my hands, wondering what had gone wrong. All the women were called Irma Cohen, but none of them would ever know it; Dad said this sort of thing happens all the time.

    “You did what? ” asked Victor, a few hours later at the Litera Tec office.
    “I punched a neanderthal.”
    “Why?”
    “I thought he had a gun on him.”
    “A neanderthal? With a gun? Don’t be ridiculous!”
    I was in Victor’s office with the door closed—a rarity for him. I had been arrested, charged, processed—and delivered under guard to Victor, who vouched for me before I was released. I would have been indignant had I not been so confused. And I was sorry for Kaylieu, too—I had knocked out one of his teeth.
    “If the gun had been there it would have been carved from soap,” I continued. “He wanted SO-14 to kill him. But that’s not the half of it. The intended victim was me. If I had journeyed on the Skyrail it would have been Thursday in the body bag, not Kaylieu. I was set up, Victor. Someone manipulated events to try and bump me off with a stray SpecOps bullet—maybe that was their idea of a joke. If it hadn’t been for Dad taking me out I’d be playing a harp by now.”
    Victor had been staring out of the window, his back to me.
    “And there were the crossword clues—!”
    Victor turned and walked back to his desk, picked up the paper and read the answers outlined in green.
    “Meddlesome, Thursday, Goodbye.”
    He shrugged.
    “Coincidence. I could make any sentence I wanted from any other clues just as easily. Look