"I just thought I'd let you have a look at them," said the permed
woman, "as you're down from London ..."
She was holding them out proudly for Arthur too see. He could see
that they were indeed a box of cherry brandy liqueurs and a
record of bagpipe music. That was what they were.
"I'll let you have your drink in peace now," she said, patting
Arthur lightly on his seething shoulder, "but I knew you'd like
to see."
Arthur re-engaged his eyes with Fenchurch's once again, and
suddenly was at a loss for something to say. A moment had come
and gone between the two of them, but the whole rhythm of it had
been wrecked by that stupid, blasted woman.
"Don't worry," said Fenchurch, looking at him steadily from over
the top of her glass, "we will talk again." She took a sip.
"Perhaps," she added, "it wouldn't have gone so well if it wasn't
for her." She gave a wry little smile and dropped her hair
forward over her face again.
It was perfectly true.
He had to admit it was perfectly true.
=================================================================
Chapter 13
That night, at home, as he was prancing round the house
pretending to be tripping through cornfields in slow motion and
continually exploding with sudden laughter, Arthur thought he
could even bear to listen to the album of bagpipe music he had
won. It was eight o'clock and he decided he would make himself,
force himself, to listen to the whole record before he phoned
her. Maybe he should even leave it till tomorrow. That would be
the cool thing to do. Or next week sometime.
No. No games. He wanted her and didn't care who knew it. He
definitely and absolutely wanted her, adored her, longed for her,
wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.
He actually caught himself saying thinks like "Yippee" as he
prances ridiculously round the house. Her eyes, her hair, her
voice, everything ...
He stopped.
He would put on the record of bagpipe music. Then he would call
her.
Would he, perhaps, call her first?
No. What he would do was this. He would put on the record of
bagpipe music. He would listen to it, every last banshee wail of
it. Then he would call her. That was the correct order. That was
what he would do.
He was worried about touching things in case they blew up when he
did so.
He picked up the record. It failed to blow up. He slipped it out
of its cover. He opened the record player, he turned on the amp.
They both survived. He giggled foolishly as he lowered the stylus
on to the disc.
He sat and listened solemnly to "A Scottish Soldier".
He listened to "Amazing Grace".
He listened to something about some glen or other.
He thought about his miraculous lunchtime.
They had just been on the point of leaving, when they were
distracted by an awful outbreak of "yoo-hooing". The appallingly
permed woman was waving to them across the room like some stupid
bird with a broken wing. Everyone in the pub turned to them and
seemed to be expecting some sort of response.
They hadn't listened to the bit about how pleased and happy Anjie
was going to be about the 4.30p everyone had helped to raise
towards the cost of her kidney machine, had been vaguely aware
that someone from the next table had won a box of cherry brandy
liqueurs, and took a moment or two to cotton on to the fact that
the yoo-hooing lady was trying to ask them if they had ticket
number 37.
Arthur discovered that he had. He glanced angrily at his watch.
Fenchurch gave him a push.
"Go on," she said, "go and get it. Don't be bad tempered. Give
them a nice speech about how pleased you are and you can give me
a call and tell me how it went. I'll want to hear the record. Go
on."
She flicked his arm and left.
The regulars thought his acceptance speech a little over-
effusive. It was, after all, merely an album of bagpipe music.
Arthur thought about it, and listened to the music, and kept on
breaking into laughter.
=================================================================
Chapter 14
Ring ring.
Ring ring.
Ring ring.
"Hello, yes? Yes, that's right. Yes. You'll 'ave to speak up,
there's an awful lot of noise in 'ere. What?
"No, I only do the bar in the evenings. It's Yvonne who does
lunch, and Jim, he's the landlord. No, I wasn't on. What?
"You'll have to speak up.
"What? No, don't know anything about no raffle. What?
"No, don't know nothing about it. 'Old on, I'll call Jim."
The barmaid put her hand over the receiver and called over the
noisy bar.
"'Ere, Jim, bloke on the phone says something about he's won a
raffle. He keeps on saying it's ticket 37 and he's won."
"No, there was a guy in the pub here won," shouted back the
barman.
"He says 'ave we got the ticket."
"Well how can he think he's won if he hasn't even got a ticket?"
"Jim says 'ow can you think you've won if you "aven't even got
the ticket. What?"
She put her hand over the receiver again.
"Jim, 'e keeps effing and blinding at me. Says there's a number
on the ticket."
"Course there was a number on the ticket, it was a bloody raffle
ticket wasn't it?"
"'E says 'e means its a telephone number on the ticket."
"Put the phone down and serve the bloody customers, will you?"
=================================================================
Chapter 15
Eight hours West sat a man alone on a beach mourning an
inexplicable loss. He could only think of his loss in little
packets of grief at a time, because the whole thing was too great
to be borne.
He watched the long slow Pacific waves come in along the sand,
and waited and waited for the nothing that he knew was about to
happen. As the time came for it not to happen, it duly didn't
happen and so the afternoon wore itself away and the sun dropped
beneath the long line of sea, and the day was gone.
The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private
house was there, but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along
the hundreds of miles of coastline that first runs west from Los
Angeles, which is described in the new edition of the Hitch
Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in one entry as "junky, wunky, lunky,
stunky, and what's that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff,
woo", and in another, written only hours later as "being like
several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but
without the same sense of moral depth. Plus the air is, for some
reason, yellow."
The coastline runs west, and then turns north up to the misty bay
of San Francisco, which the Guide describes as a "good place to
go. It's very easy to believe that everyone you meet there is
also a space traveller. Starting a new religion for you is just
their way of saying `hi'. Until you've settled in and got the
hang of the place it is best to say `no' to three questions out
of any given four that anyone may ask you, because there are some
very strange things going on there, some of which an unsuspecting
alien could die of." The hundreds of curling miles of cliffs and
sand, palm trees, breakers and sunsets are described in the Guide
as "Boffo. A good one."
And somewhere on this good boffo stretch of coastline lay the
house of this inconsolable man, a man whom many regarded as being
insane. But this was only, as he would tell people, because he
was.
One of the many many reasons why people thought him insane was
because of the peculiarity of his house which, even in a land
where most people's houses were peculiar in one way or another,
was quite extreme in his peculiarness.
His house was called The Outside of the Asylum.
His name was simply John Watson, though he preferred to be called
- and some of his friends had now reluctantly agreed to this -
Wonko the Sane.
In his house were a number of strange things, including a grey
glass bowl with eight words engraved upon it.
We can talk of him much later on - this is just an interlude to
watch the sun go down and to say that he was there watching it.
He had lost everything he cared for, and was now simply waiting
for the end of the world - little realizing that it had already
been and gone.
=================================================================
Chapter 16
After a disgusting Sunday spent emptying rubbish bins behind a
pub in Taunton, and finding nothing, no raffle ticket, no
telephone number, Arthur tried everything he could to find
Fenchurch, and the more things he tried, the more weeks passed.
He raged and railed against himself, against fate, against the
world and its weather. He even, in his sorrow and his fury, went
and sat in the motorway service station cafeteria where he'd been
just before he met her.
"It's the drizzle that makes me particularly morose."
"Please shut up about the drizzle," snapped Arthur.
"I would shut up if it would shut up drizzling."
"Look ..."
"But I'll tell you what it will do when it shuts up drizzling,
shall I?"
"No."
"Blatter."
"What?"
"It will blatter."
Arthur stared over the rim of his coffee cup at the grisly
outside world. It was a completely pointless place to be, he
realized, and he had been driven there by superstition rather
than logic. However, as if to bait him with the knowledge that
such coincidences could in fact happen, fate had chosen to
reunite him with the lorry driver he had encountered there last
time.
The more he tried to ignore him, the more he found himself being
dragged back into the gravitic whirlpool of the man's
exasperating conversation.
"I think," said Arthur vaguely, cursing himself for even
bothering to say this, "that it's easing off."
"Ha!"
Arthur just shrugged. He should go. That's what he should do. He
should just go.
"It never stops raining!" ranted the lorry driver. He thumped the
table, spilt his tea, and actually, for a moment, appeared to be
steaming.
You can't just walk off without responding to a remark like that.
"Of course it stops raining," said Arthur. It was hardly an
elegant refutation, but it had to be said.
"It rains ... all ... the time," raved the man, thumping the
table again, in time to the words.
Arthur shook his head.
"Stupid to say it rains all the time ..." he said.
The man's eyebrows shot up, affronted.
"Stupid? Why's it stupid? Why's it stupid to say it rains all the
time if it rains the whole time?"
"Didn't rain yesterday."
"Did in Darlington."
Arthur paused, warily.
"You going to ask me where I was yesterday?" asked the man. "Eh?"
"No," said Arthur.
"But I expect you can guess."
"Do you."
"Begins with a D."
"Does it."
"And it was pissing down there, I can tell you."
"You don't want to sit there, mate," said a passing stranger in
overalls to Arthur cheerily. "That's Thundercloud Corner that is.
Reserved special for old Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head here.
There's one reserved in every motorway caff between here and
sunny Denmark. Steer clear is my advice. 'Swhat we all do. How's
it going, Rob? Keeping busy? Got your wet-weather tyres on? Har
har."
He breezed by and went to tell a joke about Britt Ekland to
someone at a nearby table.
"See, none of them bastards take me seriously," said Rob McKeena.
"But," he added darkly, leaning forward and screwing up his eyes,
"they all know it's true!"
Arthur frowned.
"Like my wife," hissed the sole owner and driver of McKeena's
All-Weather Haulage. "She says it's nonsense and I make a fuss
and complain about nothing, but," he paused dramatically and
darted out dangerous looks from his eyes, "she always brings the
washing in when I phone to say I'm on me way home!" He brandished
his coffee spoon. "What do you make of that?"
"Well ..."
"I have a book," he went on, "I have a book. A diary. Kept it for
fifteen years. Shows every single place I've ever been. Every
day. And also what the weather was like. And it was uniformly,"
he snarled, "'orrible. All over England, Scotland, Wales I been.
All round the Continent, Italy, Germany, back and forth to
Denmark, been to Yugoslavia. It's all marked in and charted. Even
when I went to visit my brother," he added, "in Seattle."
"Well," said Arthur, getting up to leave at last, "perhaps you'd
better show it to someone."
"I will," said Rob McKeena.
And he did.
=================================================================
Chapter 17
Misery, dejection. More misery and more dejection. He needed a
project and he gave himself one.
He would find where his cave had been.
On prehistoric Earth he had lived in a cave, not a nice cave, a
lousy cave, but ... There was no but. It had been a totally lousy
cave and he had hated it. But he had lived in it for five years
