Eunice sighed. “Do you really want to know? It’s so much worse than anything else she’s ever done.”
“I think I can cope.”
“Well, as you are already painfully aware, it goes by the intriguing title of Harriet Hotter and the Gobstopper Phone.”
Eunice paused for effect.
“Harriet, orphaned at an early age and raised by a dreadful aunt and a clinically obese and very sweaty uncle, vows to leave their home as soon as she can and make her own way in the world. After her A levels, she gets a job in a pizza and kebab shop, ‘Pizzbab,’ near King’s Cross, where she is constantly mocked for her posh voice and her bifocal spectacles. One day, an old man with a very long beard and a funny hat comes into the shop to buy a kebab and chips, and tells her that she is ‘very special.’ He hands her a business card and tells her to call him. Fast-forward six months and Harriet is earning a small fortune from phone sex. Her customers love her because she has a posh voice ‘as though her cheeks were stuffed with gobstoppers’—and so the ingenious title is explained. Our heroine, not satisfied with mere financial reward, seeks self-fulfillment and enhanced job satisfaction. In partnership with the beardy old man, aka Chester Fumblefore, she sets up a training school for aspiring phone sex workers called Snog Warts; so called because Harriet teaches her students to speak to every customer as though he were a handsome prince, even though most of them are more likely to be warty toads. Among her first pupils are Persephone Danger and Donna Sleazy, who become her best friends and training assistants. Between them, they set up a vast call center where their pupils can earn an honest living while they are training. Harriet invents a game called Quids In to increase productivity and raise morale in the workplace. The winner, who receives a cash bonus and a month’s supply of gobstoppers, is the worker who satisfies the most customers in one hour while cunningly introducing the words ‘brothel,’ ‘todger’ (twice), and ‘golden snatch’ into each phone sex liaison.”
Bomber laughed out loud.
“It’s not funny, Bomber!” exploded Eunice. “It’s an absolute bloody disgrace. How can anybody give such utter drivel shelf room? Millions of people are paying hard-earned money for this excrement! It’s not even well-written excrement. It’s execrable excrement.
“And if it’s not enough that Portia’s being interviewed on every poxy chat show that’s aired, there’s a horribly tenacious rumor doing the rounds about her being invited to speak at Hay this year.”
Bomber clapped his hands in glee.
“Now that I should gladly pay good money to see.”
Eunice shot him a warning look and he shrugged his shoulders in reply.
“How could I resist? I’m just thankful that Ma and Pa aren’t around to witness the whole ruddy circus. Especially what with Ma being the chairwoman of the local Women’s Institute.”
Bomber chuckled to himself at the thought of it, but then donned a more appropriately serious expression for his next question.
“Now, I’m almost afraid to ask, but I probably need to know. Is it terribly . . . explicit?”
Eunice let out a hoot of derision.
“Explicit?! Remember that time when Bruce was here ranting on about that Peardew chap and lecturing us on the key components of a bestseller?”
Bomber nodded.
“And he told us, and I quote, that the sex should never be too ‘outré’?”
Bomber nodded again, more slowly this time.
“Well, unless he and Brunhilde are far more adventurous in the carnal compartment of their marriage than we ever gave them credit for, and that informs his definition of ‘outré,’ I think he’s changed his mind.”
Bomber placed his hands on the small wooden box that stood next to Douglas’s on his desk and warned:
“Cover your ears and don’t listen to this, Baby Jane.”
Eunice smiled a little sadly and continued.
“One of Harriet’s customers has sex with a breadmaking machine, another lusts after women with beards, hairy backs, and ingrowing toenails, and yet another has his testicles bathed in surgical spirit and then stroked with the mane of a My Little Pony. And that’s only chapter two.”
Bomber picked up the book from its wrappings and opened the front cover to be greeted by a glossy photograph of his sister wearing a self-satisfied smile and a silk negligee. He snapped it shut again with a resounding thump.
“Well, at least she didn’t simply steal someone else’s plot wholesale this time. She did make some of it up herself.”