So long, and thanks for all the fish [47]
"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.