So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [44]
They are big things, terrifyingly big. You know when one is in the air with you. There is a thunderous attack of air, a moving wall of screaming wind, and you get tossed aside, if you are foolish enough to be doing anything remotely like what Arthur and Fenchurch were doing in its close vicinity, like butterflies in the Blitz.
This time, however, there was no heart-sickening fall or loss of nerve, just a regrouping moments later and a wonderful new idea enthusiastically signaled through the buffeting noise.
Mrs. E. Kapelsen of Boston, Massachusetts, was an elderly lady; indeed, she felt her life was nearly at an end. She had seen a lot of it, been puzzled by some but, she was a little uneasy to feel at this late stage, bored by too much. It had all been very pleasant, but perhaps a little too explicable, a little too routine.
With a sigh she flipped up the little plastic window shade and looked over the wing.
At first she thought she ought to call the stewardess, but then she thought, no, damn it, definitely not, this was for her, and her alone.
By the time her two inexplicable people finally slipped back off the wing and tumbled into the slipstream she had cheered up an awful lot.
She was mostly immensely relieved to think that virtually everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong.
The following morning Arthur and Fenchurch slept very late in the alley despite the continual wail of furniture being restored.
The following night they did it all over again, only this time with Sony Walkmen.
Chapter 27
his is all very wonderful,” said Fenchurch a few days later, “but I do need to know what has happened to me. You see, there’s this difference between us. That you lost something and found it again, and I found something and lost it. I need to find it again.”
She had to go out for the day, so Arthur settled down for a day of telephoning.
Murray Bost Henson was a journalist on one of the papers with small pages and big print. It would be pleasant to be able to say that he was none the worse for this but, sadly, this was not the case. He happened to be the only journalist that Arthur knew, so Arthur phoned him anyway.
“Arthur, my old soup spoon, my old silver tureen, how particularly stunning to hear from you! Someone told me you’d gone off into space or something.”
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 avalanche 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 rumor, my old elephant tusk, my little green baize card table, just a rumor. 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 good 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.”
“Okay. 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.”