ADAMS, Douglas - So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
Page 14
"Well, you did a bundle. An absolute bundle has absolutely been
done by you. Listen, do you know how much a tour operator is
paying that guy not to go to Malaga this year? I mean forget
irrigating the Sahara and boring stuff like that, this guy has a
whole new career ahead of him, just avoiding places for money.
The man's turning into a monster, Arthur, we might even have to
make him win the bingo.
"Listen, we may want to do a feature on you, Arthur, the Man Who
Made the Rain God Rain. Got a ring to it, eh?"
"A nice one, but ..."
"We may need to photograph you under a garden shower, but that'll
be OK. Where are you?"
"Er, I'm in Islington. Listen, Murray ..."
"Islington!"
"Yes ..."
"Well, what about the real weirdness of the week, the real
seriously loopy stuff. You know anything about these flying
people?"
"No."
"You must have. This is the real seethingly crazy one. This is
the real meatballs in the batter. Locals are phoning in all the
time to say there's this couple who go flying nights. We've got
guys down in our photo labs working through the night to put
together a genuine photograph. You must have heard."
"No."
"Arthur, where have you been? Oh, space, right, I got your quote.
But that was months ago. Listen, it's night after night this
week, my old cheesegrater, right on your patch. This couple just
fly around the sky and start doing all kinds of stuff. And I
don't mean looking through walls or pretending to be box girder
bridges. You don't know anything?"
"No."
"Arthur, it's been almost inexpressibly delicious conversing with
you, chumbum, but I have to go. I'll send the guy with the camera
and the hose. Give me the address, I'm ready and writing."
"Listen, Murray, I called to ask you something."
"I have a lot to do."
"I just wanted to find out something about the dolphins."
"No story. Last year's news. Forget 'em. They're gone."
"It's important."
"Listen, no one will touch it. You can't sustain a story, you
know, when the only news is the continuing absence of whatever
the story's about. Not our territory anyway, try the Sundays.
Maybe they'll run a little `Whatever Happened to "Whatever
Happened to the Dolphins"' story in a couple of years, around
August. But what's anybody going to do now? `Dolphins still
gone'? `Continuing Dolphin Absence'? `Dolphins - Further Days
Without Them'? The story dies, Arthur. It lies down and kicks its
little feet in the air and presently goes to the great golden
spike in the sky, my old fruitbat."
"Murray, I'm not interested in whether it's a story. I just want
to find out how I can get in touch with that guy in California
who claims to know something about it. I thought you might know."
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Chapter 28
"People are beginning to talk," said Fenchurch that evening,
after they had hauled her 'cello in.
"Not only talk," said Arthur, "but print, in big bold letters
under the bingo prizes. Which is why I thought I'd better get
these."
He showed her the long narrow booklets of airline tickets.
"Arthur!" she said, hugging him. "Does that mean you managed to
talk to him?"
"I have had a day," said Arthur, "of extreme telephonic
exhaustion. I have spoken to virtually every department of
virtually every paper in Fleet street, and I finally tracked his
number down."
"You've obviously been working hard, you're drenched with sweat
poor darling."
"Not with sweat," said Arthur wearily. "A photographer's just
been. I tried to argue, but - never mind, the point is, yes."
"You spoke to him."
"I spoke to his wife. She said he was too weird to come to the
phone right now and could I call back."
He sat down heavily, realized he was missing something and went
to the fridge to find it.
"Want a drink?"
"Would commit murder to get one. I always know I'm in for a tough
time when my 'cello teacher looks me up and down and says, `Ah
yes, my dear, I think a little Tchaikovsky today.'."
"I called again," said Arthur, "and she said that he was 3.2
light years from the phone and I should call back."
"Ah."
"I called again. "She said the situation had improved. He was now
a mere 2.6 light years from the phone but it was still a long way
to shout."
"You don't suppose," said Fenchurch, doubtfully, "that there's
anyone else we can talk to?"
"It gets worse," said Arthur, "I spoke to someone on a science
magazine who actually knows him, and he said that John Watson
will not only believe, but will actually have absolute proof,
often dictated to him by angels with golden beards and green
wings and Doctor Scholl footwear, that the month's most
fashionable silly theory is true. For people who question the
validity of these visions he will triumphantly produce the clogs
in question, and that's as far as you get."
"I didn't realize it was that bad," said Fenchurch quietly. She
fiddled listlessly with the tickets.
"I phoned Mrs Watson again," said Arthur. "Her name, by the way,
and you may wish to know this, is Arcane Jill."
"I see."
"I'm glad you see. I thought you mightn't believe any of this, so
when I called her this time I used the telephone answering
machine to record the call."
He went across to the telephone machine and fiddled and fumed
with all its buttons for a while, because it was the one which
was particularly recommended by Which? magazine and is almost
impossible to use without going mad.
"Here it is," he said at last, wiping the sweat from his brow.
The voice was thin and crackly with its journey to a
geostationary satellite and back, but it was also hauntingly
calm.
"Perhaps I should explain," Arcane Jill Watson's voice said,
"that the phone is in fact in a room that he never comes into.
It's in the Asylum you see. Wonko the Sane does not like to enter
the Asylum and so he does not. I feel you should know this
because it may save you phoning. If you would like to meet him,
this is very easily arranged. All you have to do is walk in. He
will only meet people outside the Asylum."
Arthur's voice, at its most mystified: "I'm sorry, I don't
understand. Where is the asylum?"
"Where is the Asylum?" Arcane Jill Watson again. "Have you ever
read the instructions on a packet of toothpicks?"
On the tape, Arthur's voice had to admit that he had not.
"You may want to do that. You may find that it clarifies things
for you a little. You may find that it indicates to you where the
Asylum is. Thank you."
The sound of the phone line went dead. Arthur turned the machine
off.
"Well, I suppose we can regard that as an invitation," he said
with a shrug. "I a
ctually managed to get the address from the guy
on the science magazine."
Fenchurch looked up at him again with a thoughtful frown, and
looked at the tickets again.
"Do you think it's worth it?" she said.
"Well," said Arthur, "the one thing that everyone I spoke to
agrees on, apart from the fact that they all thought he was
barking mad, is that he does know more than any man living about
dolphins."
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Chapter 29
"This is an important announcement. This is flight 121 to Los
Angeles. If your travel plans today do not include Los Angeles,
now would be the perfect time to disembark."
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Chapter 30
They rented a car in Los Angeles from one of the places that
rents out cars that other people have thrown away.
"Getting it to go round corners is a bit of a problem," said the
guy behind the sunglasses as he handed them the keys, "sometimes
it's simpler just to get out and find a car that's going in that
direction."
They stayed for one night in a hotel on Sunset Boulevard which
someone had told them they would enjoy being puzzled by.
"Everyone there is either English or odd or both. They've got a
swimming pool where you can go and watch English rock stars
reading Language, Truth and Logic for the photographers."
It was true. There was one and that was exactly what he was
doing.
The garage attendant didn't think much of their car, but that was
fine because they didn't either.
Late in the evening they drove through the Hollywood hills along
Mulholland Drive and stopped to look out first over the dazzling
sea of floating light that is Los Angeles, and later stopped to
look across the dazzling sea of floating light that is the San
Fernando Valley. They agreed that the sense of dazzle stopped
immediately at the back of their eyes and didn't touch any other
part of them and came away strangely unsatisfied by the
spectacle. As dramatic seas of light went, it was fine, but light
is meant to illuminate something, and having driven through what
this particularly dramatic sea of light was illuminating they
didn't think much of it.
They slept late and restlessly and awoke at lunchtime when it was
stupidly hot.
They drove out along the freeway to Santa Monica for their first
look at the Pacific Ocean, the ocean which Wonko the Sane spent
all his days and a good deal of his nights looking at.
"Someone told me," said Fenchurch, "that they once overheard two
old ladies on this beach, doing what we're doing, looking at the
Pacific Ocean for the first time in their lives. And apparently,
after a long pause, one of them said to the other, `You know,
it's not as big as I expected.'"
Their mood lifted further as the sun began to move down the
western half of the sky, and by the time they were back in their
rattling car and driving towards a sunset that no one of any
sensibility would dream of building a city like Los Angeles on
front of, they were suddenly feeling astonishingly and
irrationally happy and didn't even mind that the terrible old car
radio would only play two stations, and those simultaneously. So
what, they were both playing good rock and roll.
"I know he will be able to help us," said Fenchurch determinedly.
"I know he will. What's his name again, that he likes to be
called?"
"Wonko the Sane."
"I know that he will be able to help us."
Arthur wondered if he would and hoped that he would, and hoped
that what Fenchurch had lost could be found here, on this Earth,
whatever this Earth might prove to be.
He hoped, as he had hoped continually and fervently since the
time they had talked together on the banks of the Serpentine,
that he would not be called upon to try to remember something
that he had very firmly and deliberately buried in the furthest
recesses of his memory, where he hoped it would cease to nag at
him.
In Santa Barbara they stopped at a fish restaurant in what seemed
to be a converted warehouse.
Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious.
Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry.
He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her.
"Why's this fish so bloody good?" he demanded, angrily.
"Please excuse my friend," said Fenchurch to the startled
waitress. "I think he's having a nice day at last."
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Chapter 31
If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David
Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another
David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the
first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a
dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn't
exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would
find hauntingly familiar.
He was tall and he gangled.
When he sat in his deckchair gazing at the Pacific, not so much
with any kind of wild surmise any longer as with a peaceful deep
dejection, it was a little difficult to tell exactly where the
deckchair ended and he began, and you would hesitate to put your
hand on, say, his forearm in case the whole structure suddenly
collapsed with a snap and took your thumb off.
But his smile when he turned it on you was quite remarkable. It
seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to
you, but which, when he briefly reassembled them in that
particular order on his face, made you suddenly fee, "Oh. Well
that's all right then."
When he spoke, you were glad that he used the smile that made you
feel like that pretty often.
"Oh yes," he said, "they come and see me. They sit right here.
They sit right where you're sitting."
He was talking of the angels with the golden beards and green
wings and Dr Scholl sandals.
"They eat nachos which they say they can't get where they come
from. They do a lot of coke and are very wonderful about a whole
range of things."
"Do they?" said Arthur. "Are they? So, er ... when is this then?
When do they come?"
He gazed out at the Pacific as well. There were little sandpipers
running along the margin of the shore which seemed to have this
problem: they needed to find their food in the sand which a wave
had just washed over, but they couldn't bear to get their feet
wet. To deal with this problem they ran with an odd kind of
movement as if they'd been constructed by somebody very clever in
Switzerland.
Fenchurch was sitting on the sand, idly drawing patterns in it
with her fingers.
"Weekends, mostly," said Wonko the Sane, "on little scooters.
They are great machines." He smiled.
"I see," said Arthur. "I see."
A tiny c
ough from Fenchurch attracted his attention and he looked
round at her. She had scratched a little stick figure drawing in
the sand of the two of them in the clouds. For a moment he
thought she was trying to get him excited, then he realized that
she was rebuking him. "Who are we," she was saying, "to say he's
mad?"
His house was certainly peculiar, and since this was the first
thing that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered it would help to
know what it was like.
What it was like was this:
It was inside out.
Actually inside out, to the extent that they had to park on the
carpet.
All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was
decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves,
also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular
tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just
dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures which were
clearly designed to soothe.
Where it got really odd was the roof.
It folded back on itself like something that Maurits C. Escher,
had he been given to hard nights on the town, which is no part of