Read The Frumious Bandersnatch for Free Online Page A

500,000 copies of Tamar’s single before they could turn a profit. In their wildest hopes, the “Bandersnatch” single would hit the Top 10 before the album was even shipped. But not too many records achieved that goal. Of the close to 6,500 albums shipped by the major labels the year before, less than two percent of them turned a profit. A lot of time and energy and talent and money— especially money—was riding on Tamar Valparaiso’s first outing. So where the hell was Honey Blair?
    Higgins sidled up beside him, leaned into him.
    â€œWhere’s the blond cooze?” he whispered.
    â€œShe’ll be here, don’t worry,” Binkie said.
    But he was worried.
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    IN THE MAIN stateroom of the River Princess, Tamar was starting to get nervous herself. Too many things were bothering her. Would the dance floor be too small or too slippery for her and Jonah to perform the strenuous dance routines that simulated a young girl struggling in the clutches of an animal intent on raping her? Would the audience be sitting too close for Jonah’s mask changes to be effective? They’d morphed twelve masks for the video, but tonight they’d be depending solely on a few masks and some dramatic light changes to enhance the effect of increasing menace. Would her tunic, admittedly skimpy to begin with, but certainly intact and pristine, break away strategically when and where it was supposed to, gradually revealing her long shapely legs and firm boobs, but not too much more than that, not with Channel Four’s cameras taping her performance.
    So many things could go wrong.
    Would she be able to hear the lyrics clearly enough through the pickup tucked in her hair? Were the Channel Four sound people any good, and where the hell were they, anyway? She’d hate to be rap-ping “One-two, one-two, and through and through, the vorpal blade went snicker-snack!” and instead have the sound from the video telling the cameras and later tonight the world, “ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.” Well, she’d got her start in karaoke clubs, she supposed she could lip-synch her way through tonight, which would be sort of karaoke in reverse, she supposed.
    But what if somebody had spilled a drink or something squishy and sloppy on the floor? All Jonah had to do was lose his footing and his grip on her—his grip on himself, for that matter—for this whole thing to go out the window in three seconds flat, Tamar Valparaiso and the rapacious beast doing a comic pratfall in front of millions of viewers when they aired the tape on the Eleven O’Clock News. Goodbye dreams of rock stardom, goodbye little Russa-Mexicana-American girl making it huge in the big bad city and the wide wicked world.
    â€œHow do I look?” she asked Jonah.
    â€œHot,” he said, the friggin faggot.
    Tamar’s father used to go to church in Mexico every Sunday morning and pray for something to eat the next day. Tamar’s mother was born in a Communist country and didn’t know from religion or from praying.
    Tamar wasn’t praying now, either.
    But she was wishing with all her might that after tonight she would be the biggest fucking diva who ever came down the pike. “So don’t let anything go wrong,” she whispered to Whomever. Tamar’s ambition was to bury J. Lo, bury Britney, bury Brandy, bury Shakira, bury Ashanti, bury Pink, bury Sheryl Crowe and Christina Aguilera and Michelle Branch, bury each and every one of them, bury them all.
    Was that such a crime?
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    THE SUBJECT MATTER had finally got around to ambition and crime.
    Ollie and Patricia were sitting out on the restaurant’s wide verandah, looking out over the River Harb and the twinkling lights of the next state. Further uptown, they could see the warmer, somehow cozier lights of the exclusive community, Smoke Rise, and yet further uptown the lights of the