The Great Biscotti Standoff is my first full novel, written over the last 7-8 years. While I sometimes get inspired to write bursts at home, it’s while I’m away travelling that most of it seems to flow out of me, and many times when I’m writing it I’ve found that even I don’t know where a scene or a sentence is going to go, until the characters tell me.
It’s a quirky and slightly whimsical sci-fi story, probably inspired by my love of authors like Douglas Adams, Jasper Fforde and Malcolm Pryce – who weave together subtly clever humour, dramatic characters and just barely plausible narratives into thoroughly enjoyable stories. I guess only time will tell if my efforts stand up against that type of comparison, but it’s been a heck of a lot of fun writing it so far.
It has been significantly re-written and edited, but you can read the original version of first chapter here. While the version it is up to now is much-improved I think, I have fondness for this very first thing that I wrote for what has since become an enduring project of mine.
Feel free to leave some comments or thoughts. I have now printed up some Beta Reader versions, and with a dash of good fortune on my side I’m still optimistic that it might one day get properly published.
CHAPTER 1
An oddly-shaped three storey building called Johannes’ winked at rest of the world.
No one living knew why it was called Johannes’, and despite what it looked like from outside, it wasn’t actually a three-storey building. It also didn’t really wink of course, buildings tend not to do that sort of thing. The effect was caused by a single blind on the top floor that had been carelessly left closed one day, but which had been so well received it was now a permanent feature. High above the building’s grey slate roof a mid-Spring sun flared from the pale British sky, doing its level best to hold off the approaching chill of evening. Ultimately it was always going to be a losing battle, but as each day lengthened and warmed a fraction, it held the cold at bay for just a little longer, almost like it really was gamely fighting that imaginary war.
Up on the first floor two casually dressed men sat at a small table in the furthest corner of the coffee shop. It was their favourite table, squeezed in an alcove contrived from the full height window and a rough-finished but now neatly painted wall. The high ceilings of the old building and the slightly distorted glass in the windows gave it a gloriously detached feel and a sense of privacy that wasn’t in any way reflected in how the corner echoed most of their conversation to the surrounding tables.
Tim Black suddenly leaned forward and banged his coffee down on the table so hard a small globe of liquid burst from the cup. The back-lighting from the window behind him drew out a hint of orange highlights in his short-cut light brown hair, and even more in the carefully manicured stubble he liked to call a beard. Letting go of the cup he took off a pair of slender glasses and hung them from the low neckline of his pale blue t-shirt.
For a moment Tim let himself be distracted by what was by now not much more than a low contrast Rorschach blot on the tablecloth near his hand. Across the table his long-standing friend Adam Stanley watched on with a gentle amusement in his half-raised eyebrow. In his late 30s, Adam was three years older and six inches taller than Tim, though it was only his dishevelled dark hair that gave him an appearance of being tall. He had fine eyebrows and thin eyes that also gave him a steely look, but one that was more often than not broken by a playful crooked grin.
Metaphorically, Adam had watched Tim go through this a thousand times, so he was in no hurry. He was pretty sure that regardless of whether Tim decided to pursue some obscure meaning he saw in the coffee blot or to get back to whatever it was that had made him bang the cup down in the first place, it would almost certainly be worth listening to. Long ago Adam had tried to help focus Tim’s thinking at times like this, but he’d long given it up as pointless. In truth it probably wasn’t actually pointless, but it was generally impossible to tell whether or not it had worked, and so it certainly felt that way.
Adam’s patience was well rewarded on this occasion anyway. By letting the pause hang, after a few seconds he could almost physically see Tim’s mind switch back onto its original line of what he, though possibly he alone, would call reasoning.
“What I want you to do … ” Tim began, “is to look both ways around a corner – at the same time.”
Adam grinned. This was exactly the sort of thing that he liked about Tim. You could walk around town – probably around just about any town really – and almost never get asked to look both ways around a corner at the same time. He slid his own coffee to one side of the well-worn and slightly unbalanced table and carefully leaned on one elbow. A few questions sprung immediately to mind. He was tossing around whether to start with ‘how’, ‘why’ or possibly even the overly practical ‘which one’, when he saw Tim’s eyes flick over his left shoulder and then back to him.
Experience told him that Sue would be standing there, pen poised above the old notebook she used to record customers’ orders, and he took a slightly deeper breath, mentally holding that thought. Sue was the main waitress on the coffee shop level, on deck so much Adam had at times wondered whether she slept there somewhere – while true to his preference to see complexity where none existed, Tim had periodically wondered if she was a lifeform that even needed sleep. She was a good-looking woman, quite tall, and from a distance might even be called statuesque. Up close though, there was an unnatural vacantness about her eyes that diminished her physical presence.
They only even knew she was called Sue because she had a name badge. In the months they’d been coming here she’d never once engaged them in any sort of conversation beyond the bare necessities of the customer-waitress relationship. Her particular speciality seemed to be delivering exactly the right combination of food and drinks to a table, but never giving them to the right people, something Adam thought must be even harder than occasionally just getting it basically right.
“More coffee?” she asked, in a dead flat monotone that both men tried and perfectly failed to mimic any time they needed to use that line outside of the shop.
Tim’s eyes never left Adam’s. “No thanks. We’re about to make a sort of major scientific breakthrough here, and we still have coffee.” He did then glance momentarily at Sue, but flicked back so fast Adam thought maybe he’d imagined it. Tim’s comment intrigued Adam immediately, but he tried not to let it show. Too much at least. He held his tongue a moment longer, knowing the waitress ritual still had some way to run.
Sue half turned away, then glanced back. “Water?” she asked, in a tone that suggested she was doing no more than checking off a list of prescribed offerings embedded in some deep recess of her brain.
Tim and Adam were used to the routine, and both started saying “No thanks” before she got up to the ‘t’.
“You want to see the specials?”
“No thanks.”
“Biscotti?” she asked.
“No.” This was a recent addition to the list, but the negative habit kicked in before either man could actively consider the relative merits of biscotti.
“OK, your loss.” This time she did turn away, moving off with a languid indifference to serve a group of elderly ladies seated at a table stuck almost right in the entry door, as though that was as far as they had been willing to walk.
Tim watched her go, speculatively Adam thought. “I sometimes wonder what the specials are” Tim mused. This definitely wasn’t a line of thinking Adam wanted him to pursue. He was pretty sure that whatever the looking around corners idea was, it was going to be a lot more interesting than whatever the cook had decided to stick between two pieces of toast today. He sat silently, giving Tim nothing to reward this comment.
A moment passed, during which nothing continued to happen and Adam simply gave his friend the space to get back on track.
Soon enough Tim rubbed his stubbly beard, and to Adam’s satisfaction got that quizzical look back as he carelessly drew a parallelogram on the table around the spilt coffee with one finger. “I do rather like biscotti actually … ” he said innocently, and then gave it away with a sly glance at Adam, as if knowing this would be as annoying as hell. “Really, I do. Used to love it as a kid. Seems to be everywhere all of a sudden, but I haven’t had a decent piece for years.”
Adam was having none of that. “Biscotti hey? No worries. I’ll make you some one day – my grandfather was a prize-winning baker in Italy and his biscotti recipe is just about the only valuable thing my family still has from those days as far as I know. Best biscotti in the world I’ve heard it said!” He took a sip of his own coffee, trying to hide a grin at the hyperbole of his own throwaway line, which he felt was always a bad look. “I’ll make it for you some day, you’ll love it I’m sure. So how do you look both ways around a corner at the same time?”
“How do you? Yes, that is the problem isn’t it?” said Tim. “For a long time I wasn’t really sure how to do it, or at least how to do it deliberately – but it turns out to be the key to a rather exciting idea I’ve been working on.” Tim was talking as much to himself as he was to Adam now, his eyes only half-focussed in the coffee shop, and half in some other and distant place. For a few moments he gave the impression he was trying to talk himself into telling Adam what he was thinking, probably because that was exactly what he was doing.
Quickly though his eyes once again snapped back to Adam’s, suddenly intense and very much in the here and now. “I had a rather unusual experience the other night,” he started confidently, but then broke off again as quickly as he started. He fiddled with his coffee some more, swirling the liquid in his half empty cup and trying to make the pattern as regular as possible. He looked up at Adam again.
“Biscotti? Really? Your family is famous for it?”
“Yes, yes” said Adam quickly, “Biscotti. It’s great I’m sure, but it’s not that important. I’m curious what happened to you. Normally when you say something like you’ve had an unusual experience it means you’ve done something any other sane person run a mile from.”
“Mmmm. Maybe. Maybe not. Depends how good it is I guess.”
“How good what is?” asked Adam. It wasn’t unusual to lose track of the subject in a conversation with Tim Black, and the trick was to keep checking that you were talking about the same thing that he was.
“The biscotti of course!”
Exactly as Adam suspected, and he shook his head involuntarily. “So tell me what you did the other night. Did you meet someone? Do something? Come up with a workable plan for world domination? What? What?” Getting enthusiastic was a good way to get Tim going – he seemed to almost physically absorb other people’s energy at times.
“Ah that! Well, I met someone … you might say …” Again Tim tailed off, but then he seemed to make up his mind once and for all, because suddenly he looked dead into Adam’s eyes. “I met me” he said, in the most surprised voice Adam had ever heard from one of the premier theoretical psuedo-physicists on the planet.
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