I, Soddit

by A.R.R.R. Roberts

Genres: Humor & Satire; Satire; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

The hilarious autobiography of the legendary hero of The Soddit. Adam Roberts' The Soddit was a bestseller and sold 150,000 copies. But what happened to the Soddit after his adventures, and after his account of them was published. . .

Release date: December 17, 2013

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 289

Sample

One Tuesday I found the corpse of my gardener sprawled on my front lawn. Wednesday I visited my publisher.

I should say straight away: I didn’t go to my publisher in order to pitch the story of my murdered gardener. At that point I didn’t even know he had been murdered. I assumed he had died of natural causes (and indeed he had died of natural causes. But I’ll get to that in a bit). The fact is, publishing is not interested in the stories of gardeners who have been strangled with a cord. Gardening and murder, like cookery, are dead genres as far as publishing is concerned. No, it was only afterwards that I realised that the death of poor Samiam Hamgreen was going to play such a prominent role in my life.

My name is Bingo Grabbins. It’s possible you know the basics: that I live in a hole, in the ground, not a nasty wet hole like an open wound nor yet a dry sandy hole like a eczema-afflicted orifice, but a soddit hole, and that means cornfoot. In that we often suffer from corns on our feet. It’s why we don’t wear shoes.

A while ago I had an adventure with a group of twelve doughty dwarfs. Sadly they’re all dead now; but let’s look on the bright side – I’m still alive. Also on our adventure was the celebrated wizard, Gondef the Grey. Gondef was known as the Hard Man of Magic; and what he was most hard of was hearing. He’s not dead, although he has been – well, changed in certain ways. At any rate, the fourteen of us had a proper adventure. We went on a quest to the Only Mountain, far in the east, beyond the Minty Mountains, white with dentine.1 We made our way through dark forests, along majestic rivers and wine warehouses, until finally we reached the lair of Smug the Mighty Dragon. On the way we fought trolls, giant spiders, elves, hideous feathered gobblings. In a climactic moment we (those of us still alive, that is) fought in the Battle of the Famous Five Armies, which was absolutely ripping, and included lashings of ginger beards. Or, to be a little more accurate, was literally ripping and included lashings. I survived, through being only lightly ripped and lashed, and made my way home with a small quantity of dragon gold. Still, the greatest battle we fought was within ourselves – against our own prejudices.

Only kidding. The greatest battle we fought was the Battle of the Famous Five Armies. Seriously, that was a huge battle.

Since returning, I have given up adventuring as – to speak frankly – a mug’s game. Instead I’ve devoted myself to the writing of my various books, and to their promotion on the ‘chat-show’ circuit, as the touring bands of Francophone cat-display teams are called. An author’s life is amongst the most heroic modes of living available to us – for are not authors named after the awe people feel in the presence of the mighty god, Thor? I am proud to follow it. Let others slay monsters and navigate hitherto unknown subterranean oceans! My struggle is harder, my thews mightier, my task more epic. The writing of books! I don’t actually write the books, of course: my ghostwriter does that. But it’s my name that goes on the cover! Mine is the epic struggle of signing contracts, mine are the thews on the line if the book flops.

The first of my books was a simple memoir of my adventures, called The Soddit, and it was a modest success – the sort of success that wears a headscarf when out of doors, and doesn’t look you straight in the eyes when you talk to it. Since then I have written the fish-themed Lord of Herrings, the inaccurately titled The Sellamillion and, most recently, a biographical study of my wizard friend Gondef: Fifty Shades of Gondef the Grey. I was rather surprised by the commercial success of this latter title, to be honest with you. But my publishers assure me that scholarly biographies of wizards always have been popular with barbophile and lonely-middle-aged-housewife demographics, the two main book-buying constituencies nowadays. They add that they in no way rewrote my book taking out all the personal reminiscences and inserting a random clutch of soft-porn clichés. As a serious author I was, of course, glad to hear this, and naturally I have checked the finished product against my manuscript to confirm it. Or I fully intend to check it, when my complimentary author copies turn up. As my publishers have assured me they will, the last fifteen or so times I have pressed them on the matter.

At any rate, the time has now come for me to write my own autobiography. It’s been growing on me for a while, like moss – the idea, I mean, that I should jot down my family history, my life story and all that sort of thing. Mental moss. Metaphorical moss. Metaphoss. And in that sense, I must concede that the death of my gardener was the catalyst, or at least it let the catalyst out of the bag. Which is where I keep my catalysts. Mortality! Mortality, you see. It comes to us all. Death: it’s the one thing that binds us all together in a dark fellowship of finitude and ultimate nihilism.

It was the postman who alerted me to Samiam’s death. I opened the door to his knock, he nipped the peak of his cap between thumb and forefinger in the usual fashion, and handed me my mail. ‘One parcel, to be signed for,’ he said, passing me a small, heavy object wrapped in brown paper. I knew what this was without opening it – a handkerchief-sized piece of rusted, woven chain-links, presumably from a long-defunct suit of armour. I get more than my fair share of junk mail. At any rate, I signed the postman’s clipboarded chit, and he turned to go before having second thoughts. He turned back. ‘Usually dogs,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I asked. My hearing is not what it was before I rounded the corner of 111.

‘Dogs,’ the postman repeated, ‘is more usual.’

‘More usual than what?’

‘Than corpses.’ he said.

I considered this. ‘No,’ I said, shortly. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Guard dogs,’ explained the postman. ‘Better’n guard corpses. Corpses aren’t going to guard your house. Except maybe the sort that move about. You know. The ones that go zoom.’

‘Zoom?’

‘Yer know. Zoom boys.’

I am in my centeens, but my postman is old enough to be my grandfather, and is due all the courtesies that go with a respected old age. On the other hand, so am I, and this nonsense was starting to get on my soddtits. ‘What are you babbling about, you trudging old fool?’

He swung his arm very slowly, and gestured back along my front-garden path. There, three feet to the right of my path (a series of artfully positioned stepping-stone-style paving slates) lying on the middle of the close-cropped grass, was old Hamgreen, face down. I hurried over to him but it was clear before I got to the body that he was dead. There was the fact that Samiam’s normally healthy yellow-brown complexion was a pale blue. Then there was the fact that he was not breathing. An empty bottle of Strongbilbo, the soddit cider, was clutched in his rigorously mortised right hand.

‘Good gracious,’ I said. ‘He’s dead!’

‘At head office there’s Brandyrussel. He’s scared of dead bodies. Necrophobe, he is. It would work for him.’ The postman squinted down at me. ‘By way of keeping him off of your front lawn, I mean.’

‘You foolish old man,’ I said, angered by his heartlessness. ‘I didn’t place this dead body here to keep postmen away from my front door! The very idea!’

‘The what idea?’

‘The very idea.’

Postman nodded, slowly. ‘Thought you said hairy idea,’ he said, in a low tone.

I was kneeling beside the body. ‘It looks like Hamgreen was pottering about my garden, as was his wont, and indeed his job, when he keeled over. Heart attack, I suppose. Or stroke.’

Postman began stroking my head. ‘Get off me,’ I snapped, slapping his hand away. I rose creakingly to my feet. ‘The poor fellow! I daresay the amount he drank didn’t help. He did drink a lot. And he was old – over 150, I believe. Still, it’s very sad! My dear fellow, can you hurry down to the village and inform the constable?’

The postman sucked his gums for a while. ‘Did you say,’ he asked finally, ‘hurry? Or hobble?’

‘Either!’

‘The latter,’ said the postman, with decision, and away he went.

For the next hour there was an unusual degree of flurry and scurry about my pleasantly removed property. The constable came and had a look. Then he fetched the doctor, who confirmed what was obvious to everyone, that poor Hamgreen was dead. The doctor paid two young soddits a groat each to wrap Samiam’s body in a sheet and take it down into the village. Finally, I had peace and quiet once again. Or quiet, at any rate.

I shut the door, put the kettle on to boil, and settled into my favourite comfy chair. Ponderingly, I stared into my roaring fire – the fire that never goes out. There was something soothing in its endless flickering, and I needed a bit of soothing. Hearing about a death is always liable to discombobulate a person; and when one gets to my age one’s combobulant threshold is much lower than it used to be. I sipped my tea, and thought about my life. How many more years did I have in front of me? Fewer than I had behind me, certainly. And those years behind me – who knew what they were getting up to, back there, out of sight? Pulling all manner of faces, doing ‘bunny-years’ shapes with their fingers over my head, generally misbehaving.

Perhaps it was time to sort them out, all those behind-me years. Perhaps it was time to write the autobiography of my personal life-story, not anybody else’s? Despite being currently peaceful, I’ve had an eventful life. Not in the sense that I have lived through many exciting events, really. More that I have known a larger than average number of different people who all happened to be called ‘Evan’. But that’s something!

Behind me, the curtains flapped. Plates rattled and shook on the sideboard, and one fell to the ground. An eerie ‘woo-oo’ noise filled the space. I felt the hairs on my forearms and feet prickle and tingle. It grew unseasonably and suddenly cold. ‘Ghost!’ I called out. ‘I think I ought to write my autobiography.’

The plates settled themselves; the temperature returned to the summer norm.

‘Be like that, then,’ I snapped.

My biography of Gondef the Grey had done very well, commercially, I reminded myself. Perhaps my talents as a writer lay in the direction of true-life storytelling? ‘I’ve decided,’ I announced to the air of the sitting room. ‘Autobiography it is.’

The ghost, if it had ever been there, did not reply.

The next day I caught the Soddlesex Express to Larndarntarn to see my publisher. I was up with the lark, for the Soddlesex Express leaves early. This is the large spherical cart that delivers fresh Soddlesex milk to the metropolis – called ‘the express’ because, due to an ill-fitting lid, a quantity of the milk always seems to leak out of the top of it. My early start meant I was in the big city with plenty of time to spare. I strolled down the Toll Kient Road – having paid the toll, of course – and made my way up the rackety stairs to the office of Unwin’s. ‘Hello!’ I said, putting my head round the door.

‘Oh,’ said F.T., my editor. For The Unwin has been my editor for as long as I have been a writer. He is the grandson of the company’s founder, Stanley.2 ‘You. Ah. Ah!’

‘Thought I’d pop round,’ I said, stepping inside.

‘Keeping?’ he asked, glancing nervously at each of the corners of his office in turn.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Excellent!’ said F.T., fidgeting with his pipe.

‘Obviously, I’m old, and my body is full of the pains of age.’

‘Excellent!’

‘And my gardener died yesterday.’

‘Oh that is excellent!’ I don’t believe he was paying me his full attention.

His small office was, as ever, crowded and crammed with books. It contained so many books that it barely left enough room for any furniture. Indeed, I couldn’t help noticing, as I looked about me, that they all seemed to be the same book. My book, in fact. Naturally this pleased me. ‘My wizard biography seems to be doing well!’ I observed. F.T. made a sort of ‘mmMmm’ noise, which sounded to me like assent. ‘Can I sit down?’ I asked.

‘No chair,’ said Stanley. ‘No room for one, with all these books! Can you come back next week?’

‘Can’t I sit on this stack of Fifty Shades?’

‘Oh,’ said F.T. ‘Is it stable, though? Will it support your weight?’

‘You’re sitting on a stack of exactly the same books,’ I pointed out.

‘I am? I am!’ said F.T., looking down. ‘No room for my chair, you see. Too many copies of the Grey Book of Bingo!’ His unlit pipe wagged in his mouth. He appeared to play thumb-wrestling with himself whilst opening the box of matches and so spilled its contents all over his desk.

I sat down. ‘I’m here to talk,’ I said, sitting down on the stack of books, ‘about maybe writing my autobiography.’

‘Fine,’ said F.T. scrabbling around on his desk for his loose matches, but seemingly only chasing them, one after the other, to the edge of the desk and pushing them over. ‘Good! Excellent. Damnation.’ I assumed this last utterance was addressed to his matches.

‘Good job I popped by,’ I said.

‘Got you, my little one-legged wooden beauty!’ F.T. cried, joyfully. He held a match in his hand. ‘What were you – what?’

‘I was only saying,’ I explained, ‘I’m glad I popped by. Actually, my author copies of Fifty Shades of Gondef the Grey never arrived. I daresay there was some mix-up with the postage.’

‘Daresay,’ agreed F.T., stem in mouth as he lit his pipe. Sucking hard, he made the flame on the end of his lit match bow down, as if in obeisance, into the bowl of his pipe.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, brightly. ‘Now that I’m here, perhaps I could just have one of these?’ I reached over to one of the many copies of my book sitting on the shelf.

‘NO!’ F.T. barked. His pipe fell from his mouth, and he dropped his match. There followed a period of frantic patting to stop the flames spreading around the eminently flammable paperwork that was scattered over his desktop. ‘No – don’t, ah! Don’t take one of those old chap. They’re, eh, review copies. Yes. That’s it. Review copies. That’s what they are.’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘All of them? But there must be a thousand copies on these shelves.’

‘All,’ he said, fumbling his pipe back up to his mouth and looking around for a new match, ‘all already bagsied for reviews, supplements, newspapers and the like. All!’

‘Well, I must say I’m pleased that the book is getting such extraordinarily extensive coverage in the reviews sections!’ I beamed. ‘Very well. Might I take one from the pile you’re sitting on?’

I reached round his desk, but he smacked my hand away. ‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘You don’t expect me to sit on the floor, do you?’

‘Just one…?’

‘It’s carefully balanced! The whole pile would topple!’

‘What if I took one from the pile I’m sitting on?’ I suggested.

‘And fall on the floor yourself? Think of the health and safety implications. Tell you what: I’ll personally make sure that we send you author copies from the new impression.’

‘Well, all right,’ I said. ‘Although,’ I added, picking up one of the copies from his desk, ‘I suppose there’s no harm in just having a brief look through…’

He snatched it from my hand. ‘No time! No time! Very important meeting about c-books coming up!3 Must hurry you out! Lovely to see you, Bingo! Let’s do lunch!’ He hustled me up and out of his office before I knew what was happening. I found myself back in the hallway.

‘What about me writing my autobiography?’ I pressed.

‘Good idea!’ F.T. said, scurrying back into his office. ‘Knock yourself out. Figuratively, not literally.’

‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘Well, I can see you’re—’ The door slammed with a hefty thwunk. ‘Busy,’ I said, in a smaller voice. Behind the wood panelled door I heard varied sounds: the rasp of a match, sucking sounds and one large contented sigh. I turned and began to walk away, when the door suddenly burst open, and F.T. emerged. His office, behind him, looked like a smoke sauna.

‘Wait! I almost forgot! We sold the movie rights to The Soddit!’

‘Oh!’ I said, pleased.

‘Yes – very exciting. You’ll need to sign the paperwork; I think Boris has it, in the front office. And the director will want to meet you. And can we set up an interview?’

‘Can we?’ I returned. ‘Can’t we?’

‘Every time we send a reporter round to your place, they get frightened away. You know the rumour, old boy. Don’t you know the rumour?’

‘What rumour?’

‘That your home is—’ F.T. made his eyes round and made the internationally-recognised ‘woo!-ooh!’ gesture with his left hand, a sort of waggling of the fingers, ‘—haunted!’

‘Well, that’s true,’ I said.

‘It is?’

I took a deep breath. ‘Yes. I do share my soddit hole with a ghost. I thought that was common knowledge.’

‘No,’ said F.T. looking momentarily discombobulated. ‘No. That’s uncommon knowledge, really. An actual poltergeist?’

‘An Indiantergeist, actually. Amitav’s the name. But yes. You could say that we two get on… very well.’

‘Oh!’ F.T.’s expression was not shock so much as his habitual bewilderment. ‘Well, can you ask… him? Her?’

‘It prefers it.’

‘Well,’ said F.T. ‘Can you ask it to keep the racket down when journalists visit? They get started on interviewing you and then there’s all these ghostly shenanigans—’

‘Itnanigans,’ I corrected.

‘’Xactly. And off they run! PR has arranged for you to be interviewed by Vogre. The ogre Vogue. They’re very excited by The Soddit film, you see, on account of it having ogres in it. No publicity is good publicity! Wait. Strike that, reverse it. Good publicity is no publicity. No. Hang on. All publicity is good publicity – that’s it. Bye-bye!’ And he darted back inside his office.

I went down to the front desk, and it was as F.T. had said: a prominent production company were keen to make a motion play out of my book, The Soddit. Naturally, I signed the paperwork. Then, through the long carriage-ride back out to Soddlesex, I pondered the strange synchronicity of this news.

I was, I confess, buoyed up by the news that the rights had been sold. That won’t surprise you.

Here’s the thing: I had recently come to the conclusion that I was no longer prepared to live the lie. I was who I was, the prejudices of soddit society notwithstanding. And what better way to let the world know the true me than my autobiography? I would do more than simply regale the world with celebrity trivia. I would make a grand statement. I was going to tell the world about the truth about myself.

Well. No time like the present, I suppose.

I’m known throughout the middle world as the plucky soddit who went on an adventure with a wizard and a number of, sadly, doomed dwarfs. And that’s who I am. But since those halcyon days1 I have lived out my life quietly, enjoying my privacy. I never married. I don’t doubt that some tongues have wagged over this fact. ‘No wife for Bingo?’ the busybodies say. ‘No pitter-patter of tiny infant-darling feet?’ And when it became apparent that I’m not sexually attracted to females they changed their question. ‘No husband for Bingo?’ they said. ‘No pot-pourri and tasteful interior-décor features?’ But eventually it became clear that I was not sexually attracted to males either. Then they were puzzled. ‘That Bingo’s an odd fish.’ Ah, if only it were fish! Th. . .