by So Long
knew nothing other than that she had said "this" to him, and that
he wouldn't wish her brother on a Vogon.
"So, er, what were the jumps, these jumps you mentioned?" he went
on to say as quickly as he could.
"Look, this is my sister, I don't even know why I'm talking to
you about ..."
"OK, I'm sorry. Perhaps you'd better let me out. This is ..."
At the moment he said it, it became impossible, because the storm
which had passed them by suddenly erupted again. Lightning belted
through the sky, and someone seemed to be pouring something which
closely resembled the Atlantic Ocean over them through a sieve.
Russell swore and steered intently for a few seconds as the sky
blattered at them. He worked out his anger by rashly accelerating
to pass a lorry marked "McKeena's All-Weather Haulage". The
tension eased as the rain subsided.
"It started with all that business of the CIA agent they found in
the reservoir, when everybody had all the hallucinations and
everything, you remember?"
Arthur wondered for a moment whether to mention again that he had
just hitch-hiked back from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula
and was for this and various other related and astounding reasons
a little out of touch with recent events, but he decided it would
only confuse matters further.
"No," he said.
"That was the moment she cracked up. She was in a cafe somewhere.
Rickmansworth. Don't know what she was doing there, but that was
where she cracked up. Apparently she stood up, calmly announced
that she had undergone some extraordinary revelation or
something, wobbled a bit, looked confused, and finally collapsed
screaming into an egg sandwich."
Arthur winced. "I'm very sorry to hear that," he said a little
stiffly.
Russell made a sort of grumping noise.
"So what," said Arthur in an attempt to piece things together,
"was the CIA agent doing in the reservoir?"
"Bobbing up and down of course. He was dead."
"But what ..."
"Come on, you remember all that stuff. The hallucinations.
Everyone said it was a cock up, the CIA trying experiments into
drug warfare or something. Some crackpot theory that instead of
invading a country it would be much cheaper and more effective to
make everyone think they'd been invaded."
"What hallucinations were those exactly ...?" said Arthur in a
rather quiet voice.
"What do you mean, what hallucinations? I'm talking about all
that stuff with the big yellow ships, everyone going crazy and
saying we're going to die, and then pop, they vanished as the
effect wore off. The CIA denied it which meant it must be true."
Arthur's head went a little swimmy. His hand grabbed at something
to steady himself, and gripped it tightly. His mouth made little
opening and closing movements as if it was on his mind to say
something, but nothing emerged.
"Anyway," continued Russell, "whatever drug it was it didn't seem
to wear off so fast with Fenny. I was all for suing the CIA, but
a lawyer friend of mine said it would be like trying to attack a
lunatic asylum with a banana, so ..." He shrugged.
"The Vogon ..." squeaked Arthur. "The yellow ships ... vanished?"
"Well, of course they did, they were hallucinations," said
Russell, and looked at Arthur oddly. "You trying to say you don't
remember any of this? Where have you been for heaven's sake?"
This was, to Arthur, such an astonishingly good question that he
half-leapt out of his seat with shock.
"Christ!!!" yelled Russell, fighting to control the car which was
suddenly trying to skid. He pulled it out of the path of an
oncoming lorry and swerved up on to a grass bank. As the car
lurched to a halt, the girl in the back was thrown against
Russell's seat and collapsed awkwardly.
Arthur twisted round in horror.
"Is she all right?" he blurted out.
Russell swept his hands angrily back through his blow-dried hair.
He tugged at his blond moustache. He turned to Arthur.
"Would you please," he said, "let go of the handbrake?"
=================================================================
Chapter 6
From here it was a four-mile walk to his village: a further mile
to the turning, to which the abominable Russell had now fiercely
declined to take him, and from there a further three miles of
winding country lane.
The Saab seethed off into the night. Arthur watched it go, as
stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be
totally blind for five years, suddenly discovers that he had
merely been wearing too large a hat.
He shook his head sharply in the hope that it might dislodge some
salient fact which would fall into place and make sense of an
otherwise utterly bewildering Universe, but since the salient
fact, if there was one, entirely failed to do this, he set off up
the road again, hoping that a good vigorous walk, and maybe even
some good painful blisters, would help to reassure him of his own
existence at least, if not his sanity.
It was 10.30 when he arrived, a fact he discovered from the
steamed and greasy window of the Horse and Groom pub, in which
there had hung for many years a battered old Guiness clock which
featured a picture of an emu with a pint glass jammed rather
amusingly down its throat.
This was the pub at which he had passed the fateful lunchtime
during which first his house and then the entire planet Earth had
been demolished, or rather had seemed to be demolished. No, damn
it, had been demolished, because if it hadn't then where the
bloody heck had he been for the last eight years, and how he had
got there if not in one of the big yellow Vogon ships which the
appalling Russell had just been telling him were merely drug-
induced hallucinations, and yet if it had been demolished, what
was he currently standing on ...?
He jammed the brake on this line of thought because it wasn't
going to get him any further than it had the last twenty times
he'd been over it.
He started again.
This was the pub at which he had passed the fateful lunchtime
during which whatever it was had happened that he was going to
sort out later had happened, and ...
It still didn't make sense.
He started again.
This was the pub in which ...
This was a pub.
Pubs served drinks and he couldn't half do with one.
Satisfied that his jumbled thought processes had at last arrived
at a conclusion, and a conclusion he was happy with, even if it
wasn't the one he had set out to achieve, he strode towards the
door.
And stopped.
A small black wire-haired terrier ran out from behind a low wall
and then, catching sight of Arthur, began to snarl.
Now Arthur knew this dog, and he knew it well. It belonged to an
advertising friend of his, and was called Know-Nothing-Bozo
because the way its hair stoo
d up on its head it reminded people
of the President of the United States, and the dog knew Arthur,
or at least should do. It was a stupid dog, could not even read
an autocue, which way why some people had protested about its
name, but it should at least have been able to recognize Arthur
instead of standing there, hackles raised, as if Arthur was the
most fearful apparition ever to intrude upon its feeble-witted
life.
This prompted Arthur to go and peer at the window again, this
time with an eye not for the asphyxiating emu but for himself.
Seeing himself for the first time suddenly in a familiar context,
he had to admit that the dog had a point.
He looked a lot like something a farmer would use to scare birds
with, and there was no doubt but that to go into the pub in his
present condition would excite comments of a raucous kind, and
worse still, there would doubtless be several people in there at
the moment whom he knew, all of whom would be bound to bombard
him with questions which, at the moment, he felt ill-equipped to
deal with.
Will Smithers, for instance, the owner of Know-Nothing-Bozo the
Non-Wonder Dog, an animal so stupid that it had been sacked from
one of Will's own commercials for being incapable of knowing
which dog food it was supposed to prefer, despite the fact that
the meat in all the other bowls had had engine oil poured over
it.
Will would definitely be in there. Here was his dog, here was his
car, a grey Porsche 928S with a sign in the back window which
read, "My other car is also a Porsche." Damn him.
He stared at it and realized that he had just learned something
he hadn't known before.
Will Smithers, like most of the overpaid and under-scrupulous
bastards Arthur knew in advertising made a point of changing his
car every August so that he could tell people his accountant made
him do it, though the truth was that his accountant was trying
like hell to stop him, what with all the alimony he had to pay,
and so on - and this was the same car Arthur remembered him
having before. The number plate proclaimed its year.
Given that it was now winter, and that the event which had caused
Arthur so much trouble eight of his personal years ago had
occurred at the beginning of September, less than six or seven
months could have passed here.
He stood terribly still for a moment and let Know-Nothing-Bozo
jump up and down yapping at him. He was suddenly stunned by a
realization he could no longer avoid, which was this: he was now
an alien on his own world. Try as he might, no one was even to be
able to believe his story. Not only did it sound perfectly potty,
but it was flatly contradicted by the simplest observable facts.
Was this really the Earth? Was there the slightest possibility
that he had made some extraordinary mistake?
The pub in front of him was unbearably familiar to him in every
detail - every brick, every piece of peeling paint; and inside he
could sense its familiar stuffy, noisy warmth, its exposed beams,
its unauthentic cast-iron light fittings, its bar sticky with
beer that people he knew had put their elbows in, overlooked by
cardboard cutouts of girls with packets of peanuts stapled all
over their breasts. It was all the stuff of his home, his world.
He even knew this blasted dog.
"Hey, Know-Nothing!"
The sound of Will Smithers' voice meant he had to decide what do
to quickly. If he stood his ground he would be discovered and the
whole circus would begin. To hide would only postpone the moment,
and it was bitterly cold now.
The fact that it was Will made the choice easier. It wasn't that
Arthur disliked him as such - Will was quite fun. It was just
that he was fun in such an exhausting way because, being in
advertising, he always wanted you to know how much fun he was
having and where he had got his jacket from.
Mindful of this, Arthur hid behind a van.
"Hey, Know-Nothing, what's up?"
The door opened and Will came out, wearing a leather flying
jacket that he'd got a mate of his at the Road Research
Laboratory to crash a car into specially, in order to get that
battered look. Know-Nothing yelped with delight and, having got
the attention it wanted, was happy to forget Arthur.
Will was with some friends, and they had a game they played with
the dog.
"Commies!" they all shouted at the dog in chorus. "Commies,
commies, commies!!!"
The dog went berserk with barking, prancing up and down, yapping
its little heart out, beside itself in transports of ecstatic
rage. They all laughed and cheered it on, then gradually
dispersed to their various cars and disappeared into the night.
Well that clears one thing up, thought Arthur from behind the
van, this is quite definitely the planet I remember.
=================================================================
Chapter 7
His house was still there.
How or why, he had no idea. He had decided to go and have a look
while he was waiting for the pub to empty, so that he could go
and ask the landlord for a bed for the night when everyone else
had gone. And there it was.
He hurriedly let himself in with the key he kept under a stone
frog in the garden, because, astoundingly, the phone was ringing.
He had heard it faintly all the way up the lane and had started
to run as soon as he realized where the sound was coming from.
The door had to be forced open because of the astonishing
accumulation of junk mail on the doormat. It jammed itself stuck
on what he would later discover were fourteen identical,
personally addressed invitations to apply for a credit card he
already had, seventeen identical threatening letters for non-
payment of bills on a credit card he didn't have, thirty-three
identical letters saying that he personally had been specially
selected as a man of taste and discrimination who knew what he
wanted and where he was going in today's sophisticated jet-
setting world and would he therefore like to buy some grotty
wallet, and also a dead tabby kitten.
He rammed himself through the relatively narrow opening afforded
by all this, stumbled through a pile of wine offers that no
discriminating connoisseur would want to miss, slithered over a
heap of beach villa holidays, blundered up the dark stairs to his
bedroom and got to the phone just as it stopped ringing.
He collapsed, panting, on to his cold, musty-smelling bed and for
a few minutes stopped trying to prevent the world from spinning
round his head in the way it obviously wanted to.
When it had enjoyed its little spin and had calmed down a bit,
Arthur reached out for the bedside light, not expecting it to
come on. To his surprise it did. This appealed to Arthur's sense
of logic. Since the Electricity Board cut him off without fail
every time he paid his bill, it seemed only reasonable that they
should leave him connected when he didn't. Sending them money
obviously only drew attention to yourself.
The room was much as he had left it, i.e. festeringly untidy,
though the effect was muted a little by a thick layer of dust.
Half-read books and magazines nestled amongst piles of half-used
towels. Half pairs of socks reclined in half-drunk cups of
coffee. What was once a half-eaten sandwich had now half-turned
into something that Arthur entirely didn't want to know about.
Bung a fork of lightning through this lot, he thought to himself,
and you'd start the evolution of life all over again.
There was only one thing in the room that was different.
For a moment or so he couldn't see what the one thing that was
different was, because it too was covered in a film of disgusting
dust. Then his eyes caught it and stopped.
It was next to a battered old television on which it was only
possible to watch Open University Study Courses, because if it
tried to show anything more exciting it would break down.
It was a box.
Arthur pushed himself up on his elbows and peered at it.
It was a grey box, with a kind of dull lustre to it. It was a
cubic grey box, just over a foot on a side. It was tied with a
single grey ribbon, knotted into a neat bow on the top.
He got up, walked over and touched it in surprise. Whatever it