So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (8 page)

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 tick et."
"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 which made it home of some kind, and a person likes to keep track of his homes. Arthur Dent was such a person and so he went to Exeter to buy a computer.
That was what he really wanted, of course, a computer. But he felt he ought to have some serious purpose in mind before he simply went and lashed out a lot of readies on what people might otherwise mistake as being just a thing to play with. So that was his serious purpose. To pinpoint the exact location of a cave on prehistoric Earth. He explained this to the man in the shop.
"Why?" said the man in the shop.
This was a tricky one.
"OK, skip that," said the man in the shop. "How?"
"Well, I was hoping you could help me with that."
The man sighed and his shoulders dropped.
"Have you much experience of computers?"
Arthur wondered whether to mention Eddie the shipboard computer on the Heart of Gold, who could have done the job in a second, or Deep Thought, or - but decided he wouldn't.
"No," he said.
"Looks like a fun afternoon," said the man in the shop, but he said it only to himself.
Arthur bought the Apple anyway. Over a few days he also acquired some astronomical software, plotted the movements of stars, drew rough little diagrams of how he seemed to remember the stars to have been in the sky when he looked up out of his cave at night, and worked away busily at it for weeks, cheerfully putting off the conclusion he knew he would inevitably have to come to, which was that the whole project was completely ludicrous.
Rough drawings from memory were futile. He didn't even know how long it had been, beyond Ford Prefect's rough guess at the time that it was "a couple of million years" and he simply didn't have the maths.
Still, in the end he worked out a method which would at least produce a result. He decided not to mind the fact that with the extraordinary jumble of rules of thumb, wild approximations and arcane guesswork he was using he would be lucky to hit the right galaxy, he just went ahead and got a result.
He would call it t he right result. Who would know?
As it happened, through the myriad and unfathomable chances of fate, he got it exactly right, though he of course would never know that. He just went up to London and knocked on the appropriate door.
"Oh. I thought you were going to phone me first."
Arthur gaped in astonishment.
"You can only come in for a few minutes," said Fenchurch. "I'm just going out."
Chapter 18
A summer's day in Islington, full of the mournful wail of antique-restoring machinery.
Fenchurch was unavoidably busy for the afternoon, so Arthur wandered in a blissed-out haze and looked at all the shops which, in Islington, are quite an useful bunch, as anyone who regularly needs old woodworking tools, Boer War helmets, drag, office furniture or fish will readily confirm.
The sun beat down over the roofgardens. It beat on architects and plumbers. It beat on barristers and burglars. It beat on pizzas. It beat on estate agent's particulars.
It beat on Arthur as he went into a restored furniture shop.
"It's an interesting building," said the proprietor, cheerfully. "There's a cellar with a secret passage which connects with a nearby pub. It was built for the Prince Regent apparently, so he could make his escape when he needed to."
"You mean, in case anybody might catch him buying stripped pine furniture," said Arthur
"No," said the proprietor, "not for that reason."
"You'll have to excuse me," said Arthur. "I'm terribly happy."
"I see."
He wandered hazily on and found himself outside the offices of Greenpeace. he remembered the contents of his file marked "Things to do - urgent!", which he hadn't opened again in the meantime. He marched in with a cheery smile and said he'd come to give them some money to help free the dolphins.
"Very funny," they told him, "go away."
This wasn't quite the response he had expected, so he tried again. This time they got quite angry with him, so he just left some money anyway and went back out into the sunshine.
Just after six he returned to Fenchurch's house in the alleyway, clutching a bottle of champagne.
"Hold this," she said, shoved a stout rope in his hand and disappeared inside through the large white wooden doors from which dangled a fat padlock off a black iron bar.
The house was a small converted stable in a light industrial alleyway behind the derelict Royal Agricultural Hall of Islington. As well as its large stable doors it also had a normal-looking front door of smartly glazed panelled wood with a black dolphin door knocker. The one odd thing about this door was its doorstep, which was nine feet high, since the door was set into the upper of the two floors and presumably had been originally used to haul in hay for hungry horses.
An old pulley jutted out of the brickwork above the doorway and it was over this that the rope Arthur was holding was slung. The other end of the rope held a suspended 'cello.
The door opened above his head.
"OK," said Fenchurch, "pull on the rope, steady the 'cello. Pass it up to me."
He pulled on the rope, he steadied the 'cello.
"I can't pull on the rope again," he said, "without letting go of the 'cello."
Fenchurch leant down.
"I'm steadying the 'cello," she said. "You pull on the rope."
The 'cello eased up level with the doorway, swinging slightly, and Fenchurch manoeuvred it inside.