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 just a parking offense.
“Delusions,” said Russell.
“What?” said Arthur, startled 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 brain-wave 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 …”
“Okay, 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 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 thought had vanished into oblivion forever, 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—”
“Okay, 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 “McKenna’s All-Weather Haulage.” The tension eased as the rain subsided.
“It started out 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 hitchhiked 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 café 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 the CIA experimenting with 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 leaped 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 onto 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 mustache. He turned to Arthur.
“Would you please,” he said, “let go of the handbrake?”
6
From here it was a four-mile walk to his village: a mile farther to the exit, to which the abominable Russell had now fiercely declined to take him, and from there a farther 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 to the road again, hoping that a good vigorous walk and maybe even some good painful blisters would help to reassure him of at least his own existence, if not his sanity.
It was ten-thirty 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 Guinness clock which featured a picture of an emu with a pint glass jammed rather amusingly down its throat.
This was the pub in which he had passed the fatal lunchtime during which first his house and then the entire Earth had been demolished, or rather had seemed to be demolished, no, damn it, had been demolished because if they hadn’t been then where the bloody heck had he been for the last eight years, and how had he 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 thou
ght 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 in which he had passed the fatal 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 could certainly 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 toward the door.
And stopped.
A small black wirehaired terrior ran out from behind a low wall and then, catching sight of Arthur clearly, 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 the Non-Wonder Dog because the way its hair stood up on its head reminded people of the President of the United States of America, and the dog knew Arthur, or at least should. It was a stupid dog, but it should at least have been able to recognize Arthur instead of standing there, hackles raised, as if Arthur were 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 comment 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 engine oil poured all over it.
Will would definitely be in there. Here was his dog, there was his car, a gray 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 underscrupulous 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 they might, no one was even going 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’s voice meant he had to decide what to do 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 his van, this is quite definitely the planet I remember.
7
His house was still there.
How or why, he had no idea, but 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 let himself in with a key he kept under a stone frog in the garden, hurriedly 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 nonpayment 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, onto 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 had cut him off without fail every time he paid his bill, it seemed only reasonable that they should leave him connected when he hadn’t. Sending them money obviously only drew attention to himself.
The room was much as he had left it, festeringly untidy, though the effect was muted a little by a thick layer of dust. Half-read books and magazines nestled among piles of half-used towels. Half-pairs of socks reclined in half-drunk cups of coffee. What once had been a half-eaten sandwich had now half-turned into something that Arthur didn’t entirely want to know about. Bung a fork of lightning through this lot, he thought to himself, and you’d start the evolution of life off 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 was too 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 gray box, with a kind of dull luster to it. It was a cubical gray box, just over a foot on one side. It was tied with a single gray ribbon, knotted into a neat how on the top.
He got up, walked over, and touched it in surprise. Whatever it was was clearly gift-wrapped, neatly and beautifully, and was waiting for him to open it.
Cautiously, he picked it up and carried it back to the bed. He brushed the dust off the top and loosened the ribbon. The top of the box was a lid, with a flap tucked into the body of the box.
He untucked it and looked into the box. In it was a glass globe, nestling in fine gray tissue paper. He drew it out, carefully. It wasn’t a proper globe because it was open at the bottom, or, as Arthur realized, turning it over, at the top, with a thick rim. It was a bowl. A fishbowl.
It was made of the most wonderful glass, perfectly transparent, yet with an extraordinary silver-gray quality as if crystal and slate had gone into its making.
Arthur slowly turned it over and over in his hands. It was one of the most beautiful objects he had ever seen, but he was entirely perplexed by it. He looked into the box, but other than the tissue paper there was nothing. On the outside of the box there was nothing.
He turned the bowl round again. It was wonderful. It was exquisite. But it was a fishbowl.
He tapped it with his thumbnail and it rang with a deep and glorious chime which was sustained for longer than seemed possible and when at last it faded seemed not to die away but to drift off into other worlds, as into a deep sea dream.
Volume 4 - So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish Page 4
