Murray had his own special kind of conversation language which he had invented for his own use, and which no one else was able to speak or even to follow. Hardly any of it meant anything at all. The bits which did mean anything were often so wonderfully buried that no one could ever spot them slipping past in the avalance of nonsense. The time when you did find out, later, which bits he did mean, was often a bad time for all concerned.
"What?" said Arthur.
"Just a rumour my old elephant tusk, my little green baize card table, just a rumour. Probably means nothing at all, but I may need a quote from you."
"Nothing to say, just pub talk."
"We thrive on it, my old prosthetic limb, we thrive on it. Plus it would fit like a whatsit in one of those other things with the other stories of the week, so it could be just to have you denying it. Excuse me, something has just fallen out of my ear."
There was a slight pause, at the end of which Murray Bost Henson came back on the line sounding genuinely shaken.
"Just remembered," he said, "what an odd evening I had last night. Anyway my old, I won't say what, how do you feel about having ridden on Halley's Comet?"
"I haven't," said Arthur with a suppressed sigh, "ridden on Halley's Comet."
"OK, How do you feel about not having ridden on Halley's Comet?"
"Pretty relaxed, Murray."
There was a pause while Murray wrote this down.
"Good enough for me, Arthur, good enough for Ethel and me and the chickens. Fits in with the general weirdness of the week. Week of the Weirdos, we're thinking of calling it. Good, eh?"
"Very good."
"Got a ring to it. First we have this man it always rains on."
"What?"
"It's the absolute stocking top truth. All documented in his little black book, it all checks out at every single funloving level. The Met Office is going ice cold thick banana whips, and funny little men in white coats are flying in from all over the world with their little rulers and boxes and drip feeds. This man is the bee's knees, Arthur, he is the wasp's nipples. He is, I would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous zones of every major flying insect of the Western world. We're calling him the Rain God. Nice, eh?"
"I think I've met him."
"Good ring to it. What did you say?"
"I may have met him. Complains all the time, yes?"
"Incredible! You met the Rain God?"
"If it's the same guy. I told him to stop complaining and show someone his book."
There was an impressed pause from Murray Bost Henson's end of the phone.
"Well, you did a bundle. An absolute bundle has absolutely been done by you. Listen, do you know how much a tour operator is paying that guy not to go to Malaga this year? I mean forget irrigating the Sahara and boring stuff like that, this guy has a whole new career ahead of him, just avoiding places for money. The man's turning into a monster, Arthur, we might even have to make him win the bingo.
"Listen, we may want to do a feature on you, Arthur, the Man Who Made the Rain God Rain. Got a ring to it, eh?"
"A nice one, but..."
"We may need to photograph you under a garden shower, but that'll be OK. Where are you?"
"Er, I'm in Islington. Listen, Murray..."
"Islington!"
"Yes..."
"Well, what about the real weirdness of the week, the real seriously loopy stuff. You know anything about these flying people?"
"No."
"You must have. This is the real seethingly crazy one. This is the real meatballs in the batter. Locals are phoning in all the time to say there's this couple who go flying nights. We've got guys down in our photo labs working through the night to put together a genuine photograph. You must have heard."
"No."
"Arthur, where have you been? Oh, space, right, I got your quote. But that was months ago. Listen, it's night after night this week, my old cheesegrater, right on your patch. This couple just fly around the sky and start doing all kinds of stuff. And I don't mean looking through walls or pretending to be box girder bridges. You don't know anything?"
"No."
"Arthur, it's been almost inexpressibly delicious conversing with you, chumbum, but I have to go. I'll send the guy with the camera and the hose. Give me the address, I'm ready and writing."
"Listen, Murray, I called to ask you something."
"I have a lot to do."
"I just wanted to find out something about the dolphins."
"No story. Last year's news. Forget 'em. They're gone."
"It's important."
"Listen, no one will touch it. You can't sustain a story, you know, when the only news is the continuing absence of whatever the story's about. Not our territory anyway, try the Sundays. Maybe they'll run a little 'Whatever Happened to "Whatever Happened to the Dolphins"' story in a couple of years, around August. But what's anybody going to do now? 'Dolphins still gone'? 'Continuing Dolphin Absence'? 'Dolphins - Further Days Without Them'? The story dies, Arthur. It lies down and kicks its little feet in the air and presently goes to the great golden spike in the sky, my old fruitbat."
"Murray, I'm not interested in whether it's a story. I just want to find out how I can get in touch with that guy in California who claims to know something about it. I thought you might know."
Chapter 28
"People are beginning to talk," said Fenchurch that evening, after they had hauled her 'cello in.
"Not only talk," said Arthur, "but print, in big bold letters under the bingo prizes. Which is why I thought I'd better get these."
He showed her the long narrow booklets of airline tickets.
"Arthur!" she said, hugging him. "Does that mean you managed to talk to him?"
"I have had a day," said Arthur, "of extreme telephonic exhaustion. I have spoken to virtually every department of virtually every paper in Fleet street, and I finally tracked his number down."
"You've obviously been working hard, you're drenched with sweat poor darling."
"Not with sweat," said Arthur wearily. "A photographer's just been. I tried to argue, but - never mind, the point is, yes."
"You spoke to him."
"I spoke to his wife. She said he was too weird to come to the phone right now and could I call back."
He sat down heavily, realized he was missing something and went to the fridge to find it.
"Want a drink?"
"Would commit murder to get one. I always know I'm in for a tough time when my 'cello teacher looks me up and down and says, 'Ah yes, my dear, I think a little Tchaikovsky today.'."
"I called again," said Arthur, "and she said that he was 3.2 light years from the phone and I should call back."
"Ah."
"I called again. She said the situation had improved. He was now a mere 2.6 light years from the phone but it was still a long way to shout."
"You don't suppose," said Fenchurch, doubtfully, "that there's anyone else we can talk to?"
"It gets worse," said Arthur, "I spoke to someone on a science magazine who actually knows him, and he said that John Watson will not only believe, but will actually have absolute proof, often dictated to him by angels with golden beards and green wings and Doctor Scholl footwear, that the month's most fashionable silly theory is true. For people who question the validity of these visions he will triumphantly produce the clogs in question, and that's as far as you get."
"I didn't realize it was that bad," said Fenchurch quietly. She fiddled listlessly with the tickets.
"I phoned Mrs. Watson again," said Arthur. "Her name, by the way, and you may wish to know this, is Arcane Jill."
"I see."
"I'm glad you see. I thought you mightn't believe any of this, so when I called her this time I used the telephone answering machine to record the call."
He went across to the telephone machine and fiddled and fumed with all its buttons for a while, because it was the one which was particularly recommended by Which? magazine and is almost
impossible to use without going mad.
"Here it is," he said at last, wiping the sweat from his brow.
The voice was thin and crackly with its journey to a geostationary satellite and back, but it was also hauntingly calm.
"Perhaps I should explain," Arcane Jill Watson's voice said, "that the phone is in fact in a room that he never comes into. It's in the Asylum you see. Wonko the Sane does not like to enter the Asylum and so he does not. I feel you should know this because it may save you phoning. If you would like to meet him, this is very easily arranged. All you have to do is walk in. He will only meet people outside the Asylum."
Arthur's voice, at its most mystified: "I'm sorry, I don't understand. Where is the asylum?"
"Where is the Asylum?" Arcane Jill Watson again. "Have you ever read the instructions on a packet of toothpicks?"
On the tape, Arthur's voice had to admit that he had not.
"You may want to do that. You may find that it clarifies things for you a little. You may find that it indicates to you where the Asylum is. Thank you."
The sound of the phone line went dead. Arthur turned the machine off.
"Well, I suppose we can regard that as an invitation," he said with a shrug. "I actually managed to get the address from the guy on the science magazine."
Fenchurch looked up at him again with a thoughtful frown, and looked at the tickets again.
"Do you think it's worth it?" she said.
"Well," said Arthur, "the one thing that everyone I spoke to agrees on, apart from the fact that they all thought he was barking mad, is that he does know more than any man living about dolphins."
Chapter 29
"This is an important announcement. This is flight 121 to Los Angeles. If your travel plans today do not include Los Angeles, now would be the perfect time to disembark."
Chapter 30
They rented a car in Los Angeles from one of the places that rents out cars that other people have thrown away.
"Getting it to go round corners is a bit of a problem," said the guy behind the sunglasses as he handed them the keys, "sometimes it's simpler just to get out and find a car that's going in that direction."
They stayed for one night in a hotel on Sunset Boulevard which someone had told them they would enjoy being puzzled by.
"Everyone there is either English or odd or both. They've got a swimming pool where you can go and watch English rock stars reading Language, Truth and Logic for the photographers."
It was true. There was one and that was exactly what he was doing.
The garage attendant didn't think much of their car, but that was fine because they didn't either.
Late in the evening they drove through the Hollywood hills along Mulholland Drive and stopped to look out first over the dazzling sea of floating light that is Los Angeles, and later stopped to look across the dazzling sea of floating light that is the San Fernando Valley. They agreed that the sense of dazzle stopped immediately at the back of their eyes and didn't touch any other part of them and came away strangely unsatisfied by the spectacle. As dramatic seas of light went, it was fine, but light is meant to illuminate something, and having driven through what this particularly dramatic sea of light was illuminating they didn't think much of it.
They slept late and restlessly and awoke at lunchtime when it was stupidly hot.
They drove out along the freeway to Santa Monica for their first look at the Pacific Ocean, the ocean which Wonko the Sane spent all his days and a good deal of his nights looking at.
"Someone told me," said Fenchurch, "that they once overheard two old ladies on this beach, doing what we're doing, looking at the Pacific Ocean for the first time in their lives. And apparently, after a long pause, one of them said to the other, 'You know, it's not as big as I expected.'"
Their mood lifted further as the sun began to move down the western half of the sky, and by the time they were back in their rattling car and driving towards a sunset that no one of any sensibility would dream of building a city like Los Angeles on front of, they were suddenly feeling astonishingly and irrationally happy and didn't even mind that the terrible old car radio would only play two stations, and those simultaneously. So what, they were both playing good rock and roll.
"I know he will be able to help us," said Fenchurch determinedly. "I know he will. What's his name again, that he likes to be called?"
"Wonko the Sane."
"I know that he will be able to help us."
Arthur wondered if he would and hoped that he would, and hoped that what Fenchurch had lost could be found here, on this Earth, whatever this Earth might prove to be.
He hoped, as he had hoped continually and fervently since the time they had talked together on the banks of the Serpentine, that he would not be called upon to try to remember something that he had very firmly and deliberately buried in the furthest recesses of his memory, where he hoped it would cease to nag at him.
In Santa Barbara they stopped at a fish restaurant in what seemed to be a converted warehouse.
Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious.
Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry.
He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her.
"Why's this fish so bloody good?" he demanded, angrily.
"Please excuse my friend," said Fenchurch to the startled waitress. "I think he's having a nice day at last."
Chapter 31
If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn't exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar.
He was tall and he gangled.
When he sat in his deckchair gazing at the Pacific, not so much with any kind of wild surmise any longer as with a peaceful deep dejection, it was a little difficult to tell exactly where the deckchair ended and he began, and you would hesitate to put your hand on, say, his forearm in case the whole structure suddenly collapsed with a snap and took your thumb off.
But his smile when he turned it on you was quite remarkable. It seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to you, but which, when he briefly reassembled them in that particular order on his face, made you suddenly fee, "Oh. Well that's all right then."
When he spoke, you were glad that he used the smile that made you feel like that pretty often.
"Oh yes," he said, "they come and see me. They sit right here. They sit right where you're sitting."
He was talking of the angels with the golden beards and green wings and Dr. Scholl sandals.
"They eat nachos which they say they can't get where they come from. They do a lot of coke and are very wonderful about a whole range of things."
"Do they?" said Arthur. "Are they? So, er... when is this then? When do they come?"
He gazed out at the Pacific as well. There were little sandpipers running along the margin of the shore which seemed to have this problem: they needed to find their food in the sand which a wave had just washed over, but they couldn't bear to get their feet wet. To deal with this problem they ran with an odd kind of movement as if they'd been constructed by somebody very clever in Switzerland.
Fenchurch was sitting on the sand, idly drawing patterns in it with her fingers.
"Weekends, mostly," said Wonko the Sane, "on little scooters. They are great machines." He smiled.
"I see," said Arthur. "I see."
A tiny cough from Fenchurch attracted his attention and he looked round at her. She had scratched a little stick figure drawing in the sand of the two of them in the clouds. For a moment he thought she was trying to get him excited, then he realized that she was rebuking him. "Who are we," she was saying, "to say he's mad?"
His house was certainly peculiar, and since this was the
first thing that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered it would help to know what it was like.
What it was like was this:
It was inside out.
Actually inside out, to the extent that they had to park on the carpet.
All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves, also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures which were clearly designed to soothe.
Where it got really odd was the roof.
It folded back on itself like something that Maurits C. Escher, had he been given to hard nights on the town, which is no part of this narrative's purpose to suggest was the case, though it is sometimes hard, looking at his pictures, particularly the one with the awkward steps, not to wonder, might have dreamed up after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up.
Confusing.
The sign above the front door said, "Come Outside", and so, nervously, they had.
Inside, of course, was where the Outside was. Rough brickwork, nicely done painting, guttering in good repair, a garden path, a couple of small trees, some rooms leading off.
And the inner walls stretched down, folded curiously, and opened at the end as if, by an optical illusion which would have had Maurits C. Escher frowning and wondering how it was done, to enclose the Pacific Ocean itself.
"Hello," said John Watson, Wonko the Sane.
Good, they thought to themselves, "Hello" is something we can cope with.
"Hello," they said, and all surprisingly was smiles.
For quite a while he seemed curiously reluctant to talk about the dolphins, looking oddly distracted and saying, "I forget..." whenever they were mentioned, and had shown them quite proudly round the eccentricities of his house.
"It gives me pleasure," he said, "in a curious kind of way, and does nobody any harm," he continued, "that a competent optician couldn't correct."
They liked him. He had an open, engaging quality and seemed able to mock himself before anybody else did.