"A hedgehog?"
Russell hooted his horn fiercely at the car that came round the
corner towards them half-way on to their side of the road, making
them swerve. The anger seemed to make him feel better.
"Well, maybe not a hedgehog," he said after he'd settled down
again. "Though it would probably be simpler to deal with if she
did. If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just
give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them
to sort it out for themselves, come down again when they feel
better. At least medical science could deal with it, that's the
point. Seems that's no good enough for Fenny, though."
"Fenny ...?"
"You know what I got her for Christmas?"
"Well, no."
"Black's Medical Dictionary."
"Nice present."
"I thought so. Thousands of diseases in it, all in alphabetical
order."
"You say her name is Fenny?"
"Yeah. Take your pick, I said. Anything in here can be dealt
with. The proper drugs can be prescribed. But no, she has to have
something different. Just to make life difficult. She was like
that at school, you know."
"Was she?"
"She was. Fell over playing hockey and broke a bone nobody had
ever heard of."
"I can see how that would be irritating," said Arthur doubtfully.
He was rather disappointed to discover her name was Fenny. It was
a rather silly, dispiriting name, such as an unlovely maiden aunt
might vote herself if she couldn't sustain the name Fenella
properly.
"Not that I wasn't sympathetic," continued Russell, "but it did
get a bit irritating. She was limping for months."
He slowed down.
"This is your turning isn't it?"
"Ah, no," said Arthur, "five miles further on. If that's all
right."
"OK," said Russell after a very tiny pause to indicate that it
wasn't, and speeded up again.
It was in fact Arthur's turning, but he couldn't leave without
finding out something more about this girl who seemed to have
taken such a grip on his mind without even waking up. He could
take either of the next two turnings.
They led back to the village that had been his home, though what
he would find there he hesitated to imagine. Familiar landmarks
had been flitting by, ghostlike, in the dark, giving rise to the
shudders that only very very normal things can create, when seen
where the mind is unprepared for them, and in an unfamiliar
light.
By his own personal time scale, so far as he could estimate it,
living as he had been under the alien rotations of distant suns,
it was eight years since he had left, but what time had passed
here he could hardly guess. Indeed, what events had passed were
beyond his exhausted comprehension because this planet, his home,
should not be here.
Eight years ago, at lunchtime, this planet had been demolished,
utterly destroyed, by the huge yellow Vogon ships which had hung
in the lunchtime sky as if the law of gravity was no more than a
local regulation, and breaking it no more than a parking offence.
"Delusions," said Russell.
"What?" said Arthur, started out of his train of thought.
"She says she suffers from strange delusions that she's living in
the real world. It's no good telling her that she is living in
the real world because she just says that's why the delusions are
so strange. Don't know about you, but I find that kind of
conversation pretty exhausting. Give her the tablets and piss off
for a beer is my answer. I mean you can only muck about so much
can't you?"
Arthur frowned, not for the first time.
"Well ..."
"And all this dreams and nightmare stuff. And the doctors going
on about strange jumps in her brainwave patterns."
"Jumps?"
"This," said Fenny.
Arthur whirled round in his seat and stared into her suddenly
open but utterly vacant eyes. Whatever she was looking at wasn't
in the car. Her eyes fluttered, her head jerked once, and then
she was sleeping peacefully.
"What did she say?" he asked anxiously.
"She said `this'."
"This what?"
"This what? How the heck should I know? This hedgehog, that
chimney pot, the other pair of Don Alfonso's tweezers. She's
barking mad, I thought I'd mentioned that."
"You don't seem to care very much." Arthur tried to say it as
matter-of-factly as possible but it didn't seem to work.
"Look, buster ..."
"OK, I'm sorry. It's none of my business. I didn't mean it to
sound like that," said Arthur. "I know you care a lot,
obviously," he added, lying. "I know that you have to deal with
it somehow. You'll have to excuse me. I just hitched from the
other side of the Horsehead Nebula."
He stared furiously out of the window.
He was astonished that of all the sensations fighting for room in
his head on this night as he returned to the home that he had
thought had vanished into oblivion for ever, the one that was
compelling him was an obsession with this bizarre girl of whom he
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 stood 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
