An elderly lady who had been waiting patiently with her dog in the shadows beneath the streetlamp, which was now defunct, sensed, correctly, that all of the excitement was now over and proceeded quietly past them. Thor waited politely till they had passed and then approached Kate, who stood with her arms folded watching him. After all the business of the last two or three minutes he seemed suddenly not to have the faintest idea what to say and for the moment merely gazed thoughtfully into the middle distance.
Kate formed the distinct impression that thinking was, for him, a separate activity from everything else, a task that needed its own space. It could not easily be combined with other activities such as walking or talking or buying airline tickets.
“We’d better take a look at your arm,” she said, and led the way up the steps to her house. He followed, docile.
As she opened the front door she found Neil in the hall leaning his back against the wall and looking with grim pointedness at a Coca-Cola vending machine standing against the opposite wall and taking up an inordinate amount of space in the hallway.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do about this, I really don’t,” he said.
“What’s it doing there?” asked Kate.
“Well, that’s what I’m asking you, I’m afraid,” said Neil. “I don’t know how you’re going to get it up the stairs. Don’t see how it can be done, to be perfectly frank with you. And let’s face it, I don’t think you’re going to like it once you’ve got it up there. I know it’s very modern and American, but think about it, you’ve got that nice French cherrywood table, that sofa which will be very nice once you’ve taken off that dreadful Collier Campbell covering like I keep on saying you should, only you won’t listen, and I just don’t see that it’s going to fit in, not in either sense. And I’m not even sure that I should allow it, I mean it’s a very heavy object, and you know what I’ve said to you about the floors in this house. I’d think again, I really would, you know.”
“Yes, Neil, how did it get here?”
“Well, your friend here delivered it just an hour or so ago. I don’t know where he’s been working out, but I must say I wouldn’t mind paying his gym a visit. I said I thought the whole thing was very doubtful, but he would insist and in the end I even had to give him a hand. But I must say that I think we need to have a very serious think about the whole topic. I asked your friend if he liked Wagner but he didn’t respond very well. So, I don’t know, what do you want to do about it?”
Kate took a deep breath. She suggested to her huge guest that he carry on upstairs and she would see him in just a moment. Thor lumbered past, and was an absurd figure mounting the stairs.
Neil watched Kate’s eyes very closely for a clue as to what, exactly, was going on, but Kate was as blank as she knew how to be.
“I’m sorry, Neil,” she said matter-of-factly. “The Coke machine will go. It’s all a misunderstanding. I’ll get this sorted out by tomorrow.”
“Yes, that’s all very well,” said Neil, “but where does all this leave me? I mean, you see my problem.”
“No, Neil, I don’t.”
“Well. I’ve got this . . . thing out here, you’ve got that . . . person upstairs, and the whole thing is just a total disruption.”
“Is there anything I can do to make anything any better?”
“Well it’s not as easy as that, is it? I mean, I think you should just think about it a bit, that’s all. I mean, all this. You told me you were going away. I heard the bath running this afternoon. What was I to think? And after you had gone on about the cat, and you know I won’t work with cats.”
“I know, Neil. That’s why I asked Mrs. Grey next door to look after her.”
“Yes, and look what happened to her. Died of a heart attack. Mr. Grey’s very upset, you know.”
“I don’t think it had anything to do with me asking her if she would look after my cat.”
“Well, all I can say is that he’s very upset.”
“Yes, Neil. His wife’s died.”
“Well, I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying I think you should think about it. And what on earth are we going to do about all this?” he added, readdressing his attention to the Coca-Cola machine.
“I’ve said that I will make sure it’s gone in the morning, Neil,” said Kate. “I’m quite happy to stand here and scream very loudly if you think it will help in any way, but—”
“Listen, love, I’m only making the point. And I hope you’re not going to be making a lot of noise up there because I’ve got to practice my music tonight, and you know that I need quiet to concentrate.” He gave Kate a meaningful look over the top of his glasses and disappeared into his flat.
Kate stood and silently counted as much of one to ten as she could currently remember and then headed staunchly up the stairs in the wake of the God of Thunder, feeling that she was not in a mood for either weather or theology. The house began to throb and shake to the sound of the main theme of “The Ride of the Valkyries” being played on a Fender Precision bass.
17
AS DIRK EDGED his way along the Euston Road, caught in the middle of a rush hour traffic jam that had started in the late nineteen seventies and which, at a quarter to ten on this Thursday evening, still showed no signs of abating, he thought he caught sight of something he recognized.
It was his subconscious which told him this—that infuriating part of a person’s brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
“Well, of course, I’ve just seen something I recognize,” Dirk muttered mentally to his subconscious. “I drive along this benighted thoroughfare twenty times a month. I expect I recognize every single matchstick lying in the gutter. Can’t you be a little more specific?” His subconscious would not be hectored though, and was dumb. It had nothing further to add. The city was probably full of gray vans anyway. Very unremarkable.
“Where?” muttered Dirk to himself fiercely, twisting around in his seat this way and that. “Where did I see a gray van?”
Nothing.
He was thoroughly hemmed in by the traffic and could not maneuver in any direction, least of all forward. He erupted from his car and started to jostle his way back through the jammed cars bobbing up and down to try and see where, if anywhere, he might have caught a glimpse of a gray van. If he had seen one, it eluded him now. His subconscious sat and said nothing.
The traffic was still not moving, so he tried to thread his way farther back, but was obstructed by a large motorcycle courier edging his way forward on a huge grimy Kawasaki. Dirk engaged in a brief altercation with the courier, but lost it because the courier was unable to hear Dirk’s side of the altercation; eventually Dirk retreated through the tide of traffic which now was beginning slowly to move in all lanes other than the one in which his car sat, driverless, immobile and hooted at.
He felt suddenly elated by the braying of the motor horns, and as he swayed and bobbed his way back through the snarled-up columns of cars, he suddenly found that he reminded himself of the crazies he had seen on the streets of New York, who would career out into the road to explain to the oncoming traffic about the Day of Judgement, imminent alien invasions and incompetence and corruption in the Pentagon. He put his hands above his head and started to shout out, “The Gods are walking the Earth! The Gods are walking the Earth!”
This further inflamed the feelings of those who were beeping their horns at his stationary car, and quickly the whole rose through a crescendo of majestic cacophony, with Dirk’s voice ringing out above it.
“The Gods are walking the Earth! The Gods are walking the Earth!” he hollered. “The Gods are walking the Earth! Thank you!” he added, and ducked down into his car, put it into drive and pulled away, allowing the whole jammed mass at last to seethe easily forward.
He wondered why he was so sure. An “act of God.” Merely a chance, careless phrase by which people were able t
o dispose conveniently of awkward phenomena that would admit of no more rational explanation. But it was the chance carelessness of it which particularly appealed to Dirk because words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.
An inexplicable disappearance. Oslo and a hammer: a tiny, tiny coincidence which struck a tiny, tiny note. However, it was a note which sang in the midst of the daily hubbub of white noise, and other tiny notes were singing at the same pitch. An act of God, Oslo, and a hammer. A man with a hammer, trying to go to Norway, is prevented, loses his temper, and as a result there is an “act of God.”
If, thought Dirk, if a being were immortal he would still be alive today. That, quite simply, was what “immortal” meant.
How would an immortal being have a passport?
Quite simply, how? Dirk tried to imagine what might happen if—to pick a name quite at random—the God Thor, he of the Norwegian ancestry and the great hammer, were to arrive at the passport office and try to explain who he was and how come he had no birth certificate. There would be no shock, no horror, no loud exclamations of astonishment, just blank, bureaucratic impossibility. It wouldn’t be a matter of whether anybody believed him or not, it would simply be a question of producing a valid birth certificate. He could stand there wreaking miracles all day if he liked but at close of business, if he didn’t have a valid birth certificate, he would simply be asked to leave.
And credit cards.
If, to sustain for a moment the same arbitrary hypothesis, the God Thor were alive and for some reason at large in England, then he would probably be the only person in the country who did not receive the constant barrage of invitations to apply for an American Express card, crude threats by the same post to take their American Express cards away, and gift catalogues full of sumptuously unpleasant things, lavishly tooled in naff brown plastic.
Dirk found the idea quite breathtaking.
That is, if he were the only god at large—which, once you were to accept the first extravagant hypothesis, was hardly likely to be the case.
But imagine for a moment such a person attempting to leave the country, armed with no passport, no credit cards, merely the power to throw thunderbolts and who knew what else. You would probably have to imagine a scene very similar to the one that did in fact occur at Terminal Two, Heathrow.
But why, if you were a Norse god, would you be needing to leave the country by means of a scheduled airline? Surely there were other means? Dirk rather thought that one of the perks of being an immortal divine might be the ability to fly under your own power. From what he remembered of his reading of the Norse legends many years ago, the gods were continually flying all over the place, and there was never any mention of them hanging around in departure lounges eating crummy buns. Admittedly, the world was not, in those days, bristling with air-traffic controllers, radar, missile-warning systems and such like. Still, a quick hop across the North Sea shouldn’t be that much of a problem for a god, particularly if the weather was in your favor, which, if you were the God of Thunder, you would pretty much expect it to be, or want to know the reason why. Should it?
Another tiny note sang in the back of Dirk’s mind and then was lost in the hubbub.
He wondered for a moment what it was like to be a whale. Physically, he thought, he was probably well placed to get some good insights, though whales were better adapted for their lives of gliding about in the vast pelagic blueness than he was for his of struggling up through the Pentonville Road traffic in a weary old Jaguar—but what he was thinking of, in fact, was the whales’ songs. In the past the whales had been able to sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another because sound travels such huge distances underwater. But now, again because of the way in which sound travels, there is no part of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of ships’ motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for the whales to hear each other’s songs or messages.
So fucking what, is pretty much the way that people tend to view this problem, and understandably so, thought Dirk. After all, who wants to hear a bunch of fat fish, oh, all right, mammals, burping at each other?
But for a moment Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and sadness that somewhere among the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.
As he turned north into Islington and began the long haul up past the pizza restaurants and estate agents, he felt almost frantic at the idea of what their lives must now be like.
18
THIN FINGERS OF lightning spread out across the heavy underside of the great clouds which hung from the sky like a sagging stomach. A small crack of fretful thunder nagged at it and dragged from it a few mean drops of greasy drizzle.
Beneath the sky ranged a vast assortment of wild turrets, gnarled spires and pinnacles, which prodded at it, goaded and inflamed it till it seemed it would burst and drown them in a flood of festering horrors.
High in the flickering darkness, silent figures stood guard behind long shields, dragons crouched gaping at the foul sky as Odin, father of the Gods of Asgard, approached the great iron portals through which led to his domain and on into the vaulted halls of Valhalla. The air was full of the noiseless howls of great winged dogs, welcoming their master to the seat of his rule. Lightning searched among the towers and turrets.
The great, ancient and immortal God of Asgard was returning to the current site of his domain in a manner that would have surprised even him centuries ago in the years of the prime of his life—for even the immortal gods have their primes, when their powers are rampant and they both nourish and hold sway over the world of men, the world whose needs give them birth—he was returning in a large, unmarked gray Mercedes van.
The van drew to a halt in a secluded area.
The cab door opened and there climbed down from it a dull, slow-faced man in an unmarked gray uniform. He was a man who was charged with the work he did in life because he was not one to ask questions—not so much on account of any natural quality of discretion as because he simply could never think of any questions to ask. Moving with a slow, rolling gait, like a paddle being pulled through porridge, he made his way to the rear of the van and opened the rear doors—an elaborate procedure involving the coordinated manipulation of many sliders and levers.
At length the doors swung open, and if Kate had been present she might for a moment have been jolted by the thought that perhaps the van was carrying Albanian electricity after all. A haze of light greeted Hillow—the man’s name was Hillow—but nothing about this struck him as odd. A haze of light was simply what he expected to see whenever he opened this door. The first time ever he had opened it he had simply thought to himself, “Oh. A haze of light. Oh well,” and more or less left it at that, on the strength of which he had guaranteed himself regular employment for as long as he cared to live.
The haze of light subsided and coalesced into the shape of an old, old man in a trolley bed attended by a short little figure whom Hillow would probably have thought was the most evil-looking person he had ever seen if he had had a mind to recall the other people he had seen in his life and run through them all one by one, making the comparison. That, however, was harder than Hillow wished to work. His only concern at present was to assist the small figure with the decanting of the old man’s bed onto ground level.
This was fluently achieved. The legs and wheels of the bed were a miracle of smoothly operating stainless-steel technology. They unlocked, rolled, swiveled, in elaborately interlocked movements which made the negotiating of steps or bumps all part of the same fluid, gliding motion.
To the right of this area lay a large antechamber paneled in finely carved wood, with great marble torch holders standing proudly from the walls. This in turn led into the great vaulted hall itself. To the left, however, lay the entrance to the majestic inner chambers wh
ere Odin would go to prepare himself for the encounters of the night.
He hated all this. Hounded from his bed, he muttered to himself, though in truth he was bringing his bed with him. Made to listen once again to all kinds of self-indulgent claptrap from his boneheaded thunderous son who would not accept, could not accept, simply did not have the intelligence to accept, the new realities of life. If he would not accept them, then he must be extinguished, and tonight Asgard would see the extinction of an immortal god. It was all, thought Odin fractiously, too much for someone at his time of life, which was extremely advanced, but not in any particular direction.
He wanted merely to stay in his hospital, which he loved. The arrangement which had brought him to that place was of the sweetest kind, and though it was not without its cost, it was a cost that simply had to be borne and that was all there was to it. There were new realities, and he had learned to embrace them. Those who did not would simply have to suffer the consequences. Nothing came of nothing, even for a god.
After tonight he could return to his life in the Woodshead indefinitely, and that would be good. He said as much to Hillow.
“Clean white sheets,” he said to Hillow, who merely nodded blankly. “Linen sheets. Every day, clean sheets.”
Hillow maneuvered the bed around and up a step.
“Being a god, Hillow,” continued Odin, “being a god, well, it was unclean, you hear what I’m saying? There was no one who took care of the sheets. I mean really took care of them. Would you think that? In a situation like mine? Father of the Gods? There was no one, absolutely no one, who came in and said, ‘Mr. Odwin’ ”—he chuckled to himself—“they call me Mr. Odwin there, you know. They don’t quite know who they’re dealing with. I don’t think they could handle it, do you, Hillow? But there was no one in all that time who came in and said, ‘Mr. Odwin, I have changed your bed and you have clean sheets.’ No one. There was constant talk about hewing things and ravaging things and splitting things asunder. Lots of big talk of things being mighty, and of things being riven, and of things being in thrall to other things, but very little attention given, as I now realize, to the laundry. Let me give you an example . . .”
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set Page 39
