The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh II and an Apple LaserWriter II NTX.
The word processing software was FullWrite Professional from Ashton Tate. The final proofing and photosetting were done by The Last Word, London SW6. I would like to say an enormous thank you to my amazing and wonderful editor, Sue Freestone. Her help, support, criticism, encouragement, enthusiasm, and sandwiches have been beyond measure. I also owe thanks and apologies to Sophie, James, and Vivian saw so little of her during the final weeks of work.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever
produced the expression "as pretty as an airport."
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of
ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness
arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and
have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk
(Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise
infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect
this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with
brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colours, to make effortless the
business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage
or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to
point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of
Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the
plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location
of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.
Caught in the middle of a sea of hazy light and a sea of hazy noise,
Kate Schechter stood and doubted.
All the way out of London to Heathrow she had suffered from doubt.
She was not a superstitious person, or even a religious person, she was
simply someone who was not at all sure she should be flying to Norway.
But she was finding it increasingly easy to believe that God, if there
was a God, and if it was remotely possible that any godlike being who
could order the disposition of particles at the creation of the
Universe would also be interested in directing traffic on the M4, did
not want her to fly to Norway either. All the trouble with the tickets,
finding a next-door neighbour to look after the cat, then finding the
cat so it could be looked after by the next-door neighbour, the sudden
leak in the roof, the missing wallet, the weather, the unexpected death
of the next-door neighbour, the pregnancy of the cat -- it all had the
semblance of an orchestrated campaign of obstruction which had begun to
assume godlike proportions.
Even the taxi-driver -- when she had eventually found a taxi -- had
said, "Norway? What you want to go there for?" And when she hadn't
instantly said, "The aurora borealis!" or "Fjords!" but had looked
doubtful for a moment and bitten her lip, he had said, "I know, I bet
it's some bloke dragging you out there. Tell you what, tell him to
stuff it. Go to Tenerife."
There was an idea.
Tenerife.
Or even, she dared to think for a fleeting second, home.
She had stared dumbly out of the taxi window at the angry tangles of
traffic and thought that however cold and miserable the weather was
here, that was nothing to what it would be like in Norway.
Or, indeed, at home. Home would be about as icebound as Norway right
now. Icebound, and punctuated with geysers of steam bursting out of the
ground, catching in the frigid air and dissipating between the glacial
cliff faces of Sixth Avenue.
A quick glance at the itinerary Kate had pursued in the course of
her thirty years would reveal her without any doubt to be a New Yorker.
For though she had lived in the city very little, most of her life had
been spent at a constant distance from it. Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Europe, and a period of distracted wandering around South America five
years ago following the loss of her newly married husband, Luke, in a
New York taxi-hailing accident.
She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that she missed
it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was pizza. And not
just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they brought to your door if
you phoned them up and asked them to. That was the only real pizza.
Pizza that you had to go out and sit at a table staring at red paper
napkins for wasn't real pizza however much extra pepperoni and anchovy
they put on it.
London was the place she liked living in most, apart, of course,
from the pizza problem, which drove her crazy. Why would no one deliver
pizza? Why did no one understand that it was fundamental to the whole
nature of pizza that it arrived at your front door in a hot cardboard
box? That you slithered it out of greaseproof paper and ate it in
folded slices in front of the TV? What was the fundamental flaw in the
stupid, stuck-up, sluggardly English that they couldn't grasp this
simple principle? For some odd reason it was the one frustration she
could never learn simply to live with and accept, and about once a
month or so she would get very depressed, phone a pizza restaurant,
order the biggest, most lavish pizza she could describe -- pizza with
an extra pizza on it, essentially -- and then, sweetly, ask them to
deliver it.
"To what?"
"Deliver. Let me give you the address --"
"I don't understand. Aren't you going to come and pick it up?"
"No. Aren't you going to deliver? My address --"
"Er, we don't do that, miss."
"Don't do what?"
"Er, deliver..."
"You /don't deliver/? Am I /hearing you correctly/...?"
The exchange would quickly degenerate into an ugly slanging match
which would leave her feeling drained and shaky, but much, much better
the following morning. In all other respects she was one of the most
sweet-natured people you could hope to meet.
But today was testing her to the limit.
There had been terrible traffic jams on the motorway, and when the
distant flash of blue lights made it clear that the cause was an
accident somewhere ahead of them Kate had become more tense and had
stared fixedly out of the other window as eventually they had crawled
past it.
The taxi-driver had been bad-tempered when at last he had dropped
her off because she didn't have the right money, and there was a lot of
disgruntled hunting through tight trouser pockets before he was
eventually able to find change for her. The atmosphere was heavy and
thundery and now, standing in the middle of the main check-in concourse
at Terminal Two, Heathrow Airport, she could not find the check-in desk
for her flight to Oslo.
She stood very still for a moment, breathing calmly and deeply and
trying not to think of Jean-Philippe.
Jean-Philippe was, as the taxi-driver had correctly guessed, the
reason why she was going to Norway, but was also the reason why she was
convinced that Norway was not at all a good place for her to go.
Thinking of him therefore made her head oscillate and it seemed best
not to think about him at all but simply to go to Norway as if that was
where she happened to be going anyway. She would then be terribly
surprised to bump into him at whatever hotel it was he had written on
the card that was tucked into the side pocket of her handbag.
In fact she would be surprised to find him there anyway. What she
would be much more likely to find was a message from him saying that he
had been unexpectedly called away to Guatemala, Seoul or Tenerife and
that he would call her from there. Jean-Philippe was the most
continually absent person she had ever met. In this he was the
culmination of a series. Since she had lost Luke to the great yellow
Chevrolet she had been oddly dependent on the rather vacant emotions
that a succession of self-absorbed men had inspired in her.
She tried to shut all this out of her mind, and even shut her eyes
for a second. She wished that when she opened them again there would be
a sign in front of her saying "This way for Norway' which she could
simply follow without needing to think about it or anything else ever
again. This, she reflected, in a continuation of her earlier train of
thought, was presumably how religions got started, and must be the
reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for converts.
They know that people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed,
and ready to accept any kind of guidance.
Kate opened her eyes again and was, of course, disappointed. But
then a second or two later there was a momentary parting in a long
surging wave of cross Germans in inexplicable yellow polo shirts and
through it she had a brief glimpse of the check-in desk for Oslo.
Lugging her garment bag on to her shoulder, she made her way towards
it.
There was just one other person before her in the line at the desk
and he, it turned out, was having trouble or perhaps making it.
He was a large man, impressively large and well-built -- even
expertly built -- but he was also definitely odd-looking in a way that
Kate couldn't quite deal with. She couldn't even say what it was that
was odd about him, only that she was immediately inclined not to
include him on her list of things to think about at the moment. She
remembered reading an article which had explained that the central
processing unit of the human brain only had seven memory registers,
which meant that if you had seven things in your mind at the same time
and then thought of something else, one of the other seven would
instantly drop out.
In quick succession she thought about whether or not she was likely
to catch the plane, about whether it was just her imagination that the
day was a particularly bloody one, about airline staff who smile
charmingly and are breathtakingly rude, about Duty Free shops which are
able to charge much lower prices than ordinary shops but --
mysteriously -- don't, about whether or not she felt a magazine article
about airports coming on which might help pay for the trip, about
whether her garment bag would hurt less on her other shoulder and
finally, in spite of all her intentions to the contrary, about Jean-
Philippe, who was another set of at lest seven subtopics all to
himself.
The man standing arguing in front of her popped right out of her
mind.
It was only the announcement on the airport Tannoy of the last call
for her flight to Oslo which forced her attention back to the situation
in front of her.
The large man was making trouble about the fact that he hadn't been
given a first-class seat reservation. It had just transpired that the
reason for this was that he didn't in fact have a first-class ticket.
Kate's spirits sank to the very bottom of her being and began to
prowl around there making a low growling noise.
It now transpired that the man in front of her didn't actually have
a ticket at all, and the argument then began to range freely and
angrily over such topics as the physical appearance of the airline
check-in girl, her qualities as a person, theories about her ancestors,
speculations as to what surprises the future might have in store for
her and the airline for which she worked, and finally lit by chance on
the happy subject of the man's credit card.
He didn't have one.
Further discussions ensued, and had to do with cheques, and why the
airline did not accept them.
Kate took a long, slow, murderous look at her watch.
"Excuse me," she said, interrupting the transactions. "Is this going
to take long? I have to catch the Oslo flight."
"I'm just dealing with this gentleman," said the girl, "I'll be with
you in just one second."
Kate nodded and politely allowed just one second to go by.
"It's just that the flight's about to leave," she said then. "I have
one bag, I have my ticket, I have a reservation. It'll take about
thirty seconds. I hate to interrupt, but I'd hate even more to miss my
flight for the sake of thirty seconds. That's thirty actual seconds,
not thirty "just one" seconds, which could keep us here all night."
The check-in girl turned the full glare on her lipgloss on to Kate,
but before she could speak the large blond man looked round, and the
effect of his face was a little disconcerting.
"I, too," he said in a slow, angry Nordic voice, "wish to fly to
Oslo."
Kate stared at him. He looked thoroughly out of place in an airport,
or rather, the airport looked thoroughly out of place around him.
"Well," she said, "the way we're stacked up at the moment it looks
like neither of us is going to make it. Can we just sort this one out?
What's the hold-up?"
The check-in girl smiled her charming, dead smile and said, "The
airline does not accept cheques, as a matter of company policy."
"Well I do," said Kate, slapping down her own credit card. "Charge
the gentleman's ticket to this, and I'll take a cheque from him.
"OK?" she added to the big man, who was looking at her with slow
surprise. His eyes were large and blue and conveyed the impression that
they had looked at a lot of glaciers in their time. They were
extraordinarily arrogant and also muddled.
"OK?" she repeated briskly. "My name is Kate Schechter. Two "c"s,
two "h's, two "e's and also a "t", an "R and an "s". Provided they're
all there the bank won't be fussy about the order they come in. They
never seem to know themselves."
The man very slowly inclined his head a little towards her in a
rough bow of acknowledgement. He thanked her for her kindness, courtesy
and some Norwegian word that was lost on her, said that it was a long
while since he had encountered anything of the kind, that she was a
woman of spirit and some other Norwegian word, and that he was indebted
to her. He also added, as an afterthought, that he had no cheque-book.
"Right!" said Kate, determined not to be deflected from her course.
She fished in her handbag for a piece of paper, took a pen from the
check-in counter, scribbled on the paper and thrust it at him.
"That's my address," she said, "send me the money. Hock your fur
coat if you have to. Just send it me. OK? I'm taking a flyer on
trusting you."
The big man took the scrap of paper, read the few words on it with
immense slowness, then folded it with elaborate care and put it into
the pocket of his coat. Again he bowed to her very slightly.
Kate suddenly realised that the check-in girl was silently waiting
for her pen back to fill in the credit card form. She pushed it back at
her in annoyance, handed over her own ticket and imposed on herself an
icy calm.
The airport Tannoy announced the departure of their flight.
"May I see your passports, please?" said the girl unhurriedly.
Kate handed hers over, but the big man didn't have one.
"You /what/?" exclaimed Kate. The airline girl simply stopped moving
at all and stared quietly at a random point on her desk waiting for
someone else to make a move. It wasn't her problem.
The man repeated angrily that he didn't have a passport. He shouted
it and banged his fist on the counter so hard that it was slightly
dented by the force of the blow.
Kate picked up her ticket, her passport and her credit card and
hoisted her garment bag back up on to her shoulder.
"This is when I get off," she said, and simply walked away. She felt
that she had made every effort a human being could possibly be expected
to make to catch her plane, but that it was not to be. She would send a
message to Jean-Philippe saying that she could not be there, and it
would probably sit in a slot next to his message to her saying why he
could not be there either. For once they would be equally absent.
For the time being she would go and cool off. She set off in search
of first a newspaper and then some coffee, and by dint of following the
appropriate signs was unable to locate either. She was then unable to
find a working phone from which to send a message, and decided to give
up on the airport altogether. Just get out, she told herself, find a
taxi, and go back home.
She threaded her way back across the check-in concourse, and had
almost made it to the exit when she happened to glance back at the
check-in desk that had defeated her, and was just in time to see it
shoot up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flame.
As she lay beneath a pile of rubble, in pain, darkness, and choking
dust, trying to find sensation in her limbs, she was at least relieved
to be able to think that she hadn't merely been imagining that this was
a bad day. So thinking, she passed out.
[::: CHAPTER 2 ::::::::::::]
The usual people tried to claim responsibility.
First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear
Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was
completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that
there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of
the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids
and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually
anything to do with them at all.
No cause could be found for the explosion.
It seemed to have happened spontaneously and of its own free will.
Explanations were advanced, but most of these were simply phrases which
restated the problem in different words, along the same principles
which had given the world "metal fatigue". In fact, a very similar
phrase was invented to account for the sudden transition of wood,
metal, plastic and concrete into an explosive condition, which was
"non-linear catastrophic structural exasperation", or to put it another
way -- as a junior cabinet minister did on television the following
night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his career -- the
check-in desk had just got "fundamentally fed up with being where it
was".
As in all such disastrous events, estimates of the casualties varied
wildly. They started at forty-seven dead, eighty-nine seriously
injured, went up to sixty-three dead, a hundred and thirty injured, and
rose as high as one hundred and seventeen dead before the figures
started to be revised downwards once more. The final figures revealed
that once all the people who could be accounted for had been accounted
for, in fact no one had been killed at all. A small number of people
were in hospital suffering from cuts and bruises and varying degrees of
traumatised shock, but that, unless anyone had any information about
anybody actually being missing, was that.
This was yet another inexplicable aspect to the whole affair. The
the force of the explosion had been enough to reduce a large part of the
front of Terminal Two to rubble, and yet everyone inside the building
had somehow either fallen very luckily, or been shielded from one piece
of falling masonry by another, or had the shock of the explosion
absorbed by their luggage. All in all, very little luggage had survived
at all. There were questions asked in Parliament about this, but not
very interesting ones.
It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of
these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world.
She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was
surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of
past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes
bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full
of vivid, and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life;
the other nine-tenths were full of penguins, which surprised her.
Insofar as she recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised
that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it
said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their
brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths were
for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used
for storing penguins.
Gradually the trunks, the memories and the penguins began to grow
indistinct, to become all white and swimmy, then to become like walls
that was all white and swimmy, and finally to become walls that were
merely white, or rather a yellowish, greenish kind of off-white, and to
enclose her in a small room.
The room was in semi-darkness. A bedside light was on but turned
down low, and the light from a street lamp found its way between the
grey curtains and threw sodium patterns on the opposite wall. She
became dimly aware of the shadowed shape of her own body lying under
the white, turned-down sheet and the pale, neat blankets. She stared at
it for a nervous while, checking that it looked right before she tried,
tentatively, to move any part of it. She tried her right hand, and that
seemed to be fine. A little stiff and aching, but the fingers all
responded, and all seemed to be of the right length and thickness, and
to bend in the right places and in the right directions.
She panicked briefly when she couldn't immediately locate her left
hand, but then she found it lying across her stomach and nagging at her
in some odd way. It took her a second or two of concentration to put
together a number of rather disturbing feelings and realise that there
was a needle bandaged into her arm. This shook her quite badly. From
the needle there snaked a long thin transparent pipe that glistened
yellowly in the light from the street lamp and hung in a gentle curl
from a thick plastic bag suspended from a tall metal stand. An array of
horrors briefly assailed her in respect of this apparatus, but she
peered dimly at the bag and saw the words "Dextro-Saline". She made
herself calm down again and lay quietly for a few moments before
continuing her exploration.
Her ribcage seemed undamaged. Bruised and tender, but there was no
sharper pain anywhere to suggest that anything was broken. Her hips and
thighs ached and were stiff, but revealed no serious hurt. She flexed
the muscles down her right leg and then her left. She rather fancied
that her left ankle was sprained.
In other words, she told herself, she was perfectly all right. So
what was she doing here in what she could tell from the septic colour
of the paint was clearly a hospital?
She sat up impatiently, and immediately rejoined the pen guins for
an entertaining few minutes.
The next time she came round she treated herself with a little more
care, and lay quietly, feeling gently nauseous.
She poked gingerly at her memory of what had happened. It was dark
and blotchy and came at her in sick, greasy waves like the North Sea.
Lumpy things jumbled themselves out of it and slowly arranged
themselves into a heaving airport. The airport was sour and ached in
her head, and in the middle of it, pulsing like a migraine, was the
memory of a moment's whirling splurge of light.
It became suddenly very clear to her that the check-in concourse of
Terminal Two at Heathrow Airport had been hit by a meteorite.
Silhouetted in the flare was the fur-coated figure of a big man who
must have caught the full force of it and been reduced instantly to a
cloud of atoms that were free to go as they pleased. The thought caused
a deep and horrid shudder to go through her. He had been infuriating
and arrogant, but she had liked him in an odd way. There had been
something oddly noble in his perverse bloody-mindedness. Or maybe, she
realised, she liked to think that such perverse bloody-mindedness was
noble because it reminded her of herself trying to order pizza to be
delivered in an alien, hostile and non-pizza-delivering world.
Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial
inevitabilities of life, but there were others.
She felt a sudden surge of fear and loneliness, but it quickly ebbed
away and left her feeling much more composed, relaxed, and wanting to
go to the lavatory.
According to her watch it was shortly after three o'clock, and
according to everything else it was night-time. She should probably
call a nurse and let the world know she had come round. There was a
window in the side wall of the room through which she could see a dim
corridor in which stood a stretcher trolley and a tall black oxygen
bottle, but which was otherwise empty. Things were very quiet out
there.
Peering around her in the small room she saw a white-painted plywood
cupboard, a couple of tubular steel and vinyl chairs lurking quietly in
the shadows, and a white-painted plywood bedside cabinet which
supported a small bowl with a single banana in it. On the other side of
the bed stood her drip stand. Set into the wall on that side of the bed
was a metal plate with a couple of black knobs and a set of old
bakelite headphones hanging from it and wound around the tubular side
pillar of the bedhead was a cable with a bell push attached to it,
which she fingered, and then decided not to push.
She was fine. She could find her own way about.
Slowly, a little woozily, she pushed herself up on to her elbows,
and slid her legs out from under the sheets and on to the floor, which
was cold to her feet. She could tell almost immediately that she
shouldn't be doing this because every part of her feet was sending back
streams of messages telling her exactly what every tiniest bit of the
floor that they touched felt like, as if it was a strange and worrying
thing the like of which they had never encountered before. Nevertheless
she sat on the edge of the bed and made her feet accept the floor as
something they were just going to have to get used to.
The hospital had put her into a large, baggy, striped thing. It
wasn't merely baggy, she decided on examining it more closely, it
actually was a bag. A bag of loose blue and white striped cotton. It
opened up the back and let in chilly night draughts. Perfunctory
sleeves flopped half-way down her arms. She moved her arms around in
the light, examining the skin, rubbing it and pinching it, especially
around the bandage which held her drip needle in place. Normally her
arms were lithe and the skin was firm and supple. Tonight, however,
they looked like bits of chickens. Briefly she smoothed each forearm
with her other hand, and then looked up again, purposefully.
She reached out and gripped the drip stand and, because it wobbled
slightly less than she did, she was able to use it to pull herself
slowly to her feet. She stood there, her tall slim figure trembling,
and after a few seconds she held the drip stand away at a bent arm's
length, like a shepherd holding a crook.
She had not made it to Norway, but she was at least standing up.
The drip stand rolled on four small and independently perverse
wheels which behaved like four screaming children in a supermarket, but
nevertheless Kate was able to propel it to the door ahead of her.
Walking increased her sense of wooziness, but also increased her
resolve not to give in to it. She reached the door, opened it, and
pushing the drip stand out ahead of her, looked out into the corridor.
To her left the corridor ended in a couple of swing-doors with
circular porthole windows, which seemed to lead into a larger area, an
open ward perhaps. To her right a number of smaller doors opened off
the corridor as it continued on for a short distance before turning a
sharp corner. One of those doors would probably be the lavatory. The
others? Well, she would find out as she looked for the lavatory.
The first two were cupboards. The third was slightly bigger and had
a chair in it and therefore probably counted as a room since most
people don't like to sit in cupboards, even nurses, who have to do a
lot of things that most people wouldn't like to. It also had a stack of
styro beakers, a lot of semi-congealed coffee creamer and an elderly
coffee maker, all sitting on top of a small table together and seeping
grimly over a copy of the /Evening Standard/.
Kate picked up the dark, damp paper and tried to reconstruct some of
her missing days from it. However, what with her own wobbly condition
making it difficult to read, and the droopily stuck-together condition
of the newspaper, she was able to glean little more than the fact that
no one could really say for certain what had happened. It seemed that
no one had been seriously hurt, but that an employee of one of the
airlines was still unaccounted for. The incident had now been
officially classified as an "Act of God".
"Nice one, God," thought Kate. She put down the remains of the paper
and closed the door behind her.
The next door she tried was another small side ward like her own.
There was a bedside table and a single banana in the fruit bowl.
The bed was clearly occupied. She pulled the door to quickly, but
she did not pull it quickly enough. Unfortunately something odd had
caught her attention, but although she had noticed it, she could not
immediately say what it was. She stood there with the door half closed,
staring at the door, knowing that she should not look again, and
knowing that she would.
Carefully she eased the door back open again.
The room was darkly shadowed and chilly. The chilliness did not give
her a good feeling about the occupant of the bed. She listened. The
silence didn't sound too good either. It wasn't the silence of healthy
deep sleep, it was the silence of nothing but a little distant traffic
noise.
She hesitated for a long while, silhouetted in the doorway, looking
and listening. She wondered about the sheer bulk of the occupant of the
bed and how cold he was with just a thin blanket pulled over him. Next
to the bed was a small tubular-legged vinyl bucket chair which was
rather overwhelmed by the huge and heavy fur coat draped over it, and
Kate thought that the coat should more properly be draped over the bed
and its cold occupant.
At last, walking as softly and cautiously as she could, she moved
into the room and over to the bed. She stood looking down at the face
of the big, Nordic man. Though cold, and though his eyes were shut, his
face was frowning slightly as if he was still rather worried about
something. This struck Kate as being almost infinitely sad. In life the
man had had the air of someone who was beset by huge, if somewhat
puzzling, difficulties, and the appearance that he had almost
immediately found things beyond this life that were a bother to him as
well was miserable to contemplate.
She was astonished that he appeared to be so unscathed. His skin was
totally unmarked. It was rugged and healthy -- or rather had been
healthy until very recently. Closer inspection showed a network of fine
lines which suggested that he was older than the mid-thirties she had
originally assumed. He could even have been a very fit and healthy man
in his late forties.
Standing against the wall, by the door, was something unexpected. It
was a large Coca-Cola vending machine. It didn't look as if it had been
installed there: it wasn't plugged in and it had a small neat sticker
on it explaining that it was temporarily out of order. It looked as if
it had simply been left there inadvertently by someone who was probably
even now walking around wondering which room he had left it in. Its
large red and white wavy panel stared glassily into the room and did
not explain itself. The only thing the machine communicated to the
outside world was that there was a slot into which coins of a variety
of denominations might be inserted, and an aperture to which a variety
of different cans would be delivered if the machine was working, which
it was not. There was also an old sledge-hammer leaning against it
which was, in its own way, odd.
Faintness began to creep over Kate, the room began to develop a
slight spin, and there was some restless rustling in the cabin trunks
of her mind.
Then she realised that the rustling wasn't simply her imagination.
There was a distinct noise in the room -- a heavy, beating, scratching
noise, a muffled fluttering. The noise rose and fell like the wind, but
in her dazed and woozy state, Kate could not at first tell where the
noise was coming from. At last her gaze fell on the curtains. She
stared at them with the worried frown of a drunk trying to work out why
the door is dancing. The sound was coming from the curtains. She walked
uncertainly towards them and pulled them apart. A huge eagle with
circles tattooed on its wings was clattering and beating against the
window, staring in with great yellow eyes and pecking wildly at the
glass.
Kate staggered back, turned and tried to heave herself out of the
room. At the end of the corridor the porthole doors swung open and two
figures came through them. Hands rushed towards her as she became
hopelessly entangled in the drip stand and began slowly to spin towards
the floor.
She was unconscious as they carefully laid her back in her bed. She
was unconscious half an hour later when a disturbingly short figure in
a worryingly long white doctor's coat arrived, wheeled the big man away
on a stretcher trolley and then returned after a few minutes for the
Coca-Cola machine.
She woke a few hours later with a wintry sun seeping through the
window. The day looked very quiet and ordinary, but Kate was still
shaking.
[::: CHAPTER 3 ::::::::::::]
The same sun later broke in through the upper windows of a house in
North London and struck the peacefully sleeping figure of a man.
The room in which he slept was large and bedraggled and did not much
benefit from the sudden intrusion of light. The sun crept slowly across
the bedclothes, as if nervous of what it might find amongst them, slunk
down the side of the bed, moved in a rather startled way across some
objects it encountered on the floor, toyed nervously with a couple of
motes of dust, lit briefly on a stuffed fruitbat hanging in the corner,
and fled.
This was about as big an appearance as the sun ever put in here, and
it lasted for about an hour or so, during which time the sleeping
figure scarcely stirred.
At eleven o'clock the phone rang, and still the figure did not
respond, any more than it had responded when the phone had rung at
twenty-five to seven in the morning, again at twenty to seven, again at
ten to seven, and again for ten minutes continuously starting at five
to seven, after which it has settled into a long and significant
silence, disturbed only by the braying of police sirens in a nearby
street at around nine o'clock, the delivery of a large eighteenth-
century dual manual harpsichord at around nine-fifteen, and the
collection of same by bailiffs at a little after ten. This was a not
uncommon sort of occurrence -- the people concerned were accustomed to
finding the key under the doormat, and the man in the bed was
accustomed to sleeping through it. You would probably not say that he
was sleeping the sleep of the just, unless you meant the just asleep,
but it was certainly the sleep of someone who was not fooling about
when he climbed into bed of a night and turned off the light.
The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a
name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny
enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired
someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the
place down. Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proportions,
which were neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or
symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much
equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of
which were now sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were
painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Raffaello Sanzio
would have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use,
and Hercules, on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an
hour later armed with a navigable river. It was, in short, a dump, and
was likely to remain so for as long as it remained in the custody of Mr
Svlad, or "Dirk", Gently, né Cjelli.
At last Gently stirred.
The sheets and blankets were pulled up tightly around his head, but
from somewhere half way down the length of the bed a hand slowly
emerged from under the bedclothes and its fingers felt their way in
little tapping movements along the floor. Working from experience, they
neatly circumvented a bowl of something very nasty that had been
sitting there since Michaelmas, and eventually happened upon a half-
empty pack of untipped Gauloises and a box of matches. The fingers
shook a crumpled white tube free of the pack, seized it and the box of
matches, and then started to poke a way through the sheets tangled
together at the top of the bed, like a magician prodding at a
handkerchief from which he intends to release a flock of doves.
The cigarette was at last inserted into the hole. The cigarette was
lit. For a while the bed itself appeared to be smoking the cigarette in
great heaving drags. It coughed long, loud and shudderingly and then
began at last to breathe in a more measured rhythm. In this way, Dirk
Gently achieved consciousness.
He lay there for a while feeling a terrible sense of worry and guilt
about something weighing on his shoulders. He wished he could forget
about it, and promptly did. He levered himself out of bed and a few
minutes later padded downstairs.
The mail on the doormat consisted of the usual things: a rude letter
threatening to take away his American Express card, an invitation to
apply for an American Express card, and a few bills of the more
hysterical and unrealistic type. He couldn't understand why they kept
sending them. The cost of the postage seemed merely to be good money
thrown after bad. He shook his head in wonderment at the malevolent
incompetence of the world, threw the mail away, entered the kitchen and
approached the fridge with caution.
It stood in the corner.
The kitchen was large and shrouded in a deep gloom that was not
relieved, only turned yellow, by the action of switching on the light.
Dirk squatted down in front of the fridge and carefully examined the
edge of the door. He found what he was looking for. In fact he found
more than he was looking for.
Near the bottom of the door, across the narrow gap which separated
the door from the main body of the fridge, which held the strip of grey
insulating rubber, lay a single human hair. It was stuck there with
dried saliva. That he had expected. He had stuck it there himself three
days earlier and had checked it on several occasions since then. What
he had not expected to find was a second hair.
He frowned at it in alarm. A /second/ hair?
It was stuck across the gap in the same way as the first one, only
this hair was near the top of the fridge door, and he had not put it
there. He peered at it closely, and even went so far as to go and open
the old shutters on the kitchen windows to let some extra light in upon
the scene.
The daylight shouldered its way in like a squad of policemen, and
did a lot of /what's-all-this/ing around the room which, like the
bedroom, would have presented anyone of an aesthetic disposition with
difficulties. Like most of the rooms in Dirk's house it was large,
looming and utterly dishevelled. It simply sneered at anyone's attempts
to tidy it, sneered at them and brushed them aside like one of the
small pile of dead and disheartened flies that lay beneath the window,
on top of a pile of old pizza boxes.
The light revealed the second hair for what it was -- a grey hair at
root, dyed a vivid metallic orange. Dirk pursed his lips and thought
very deeply. He didn't need to think hard in order to realise who the
hair belonged to -- there was only one person who regularly entered the
kitchen looking as if her head had been used for extracting metal
oxides from industrial waste -- but he did have seriously to consider
the implications of the discovery that she had been plastering her hair
across the door of his fridge.
It meant that the silently waged conflict between himself and his
cleaning lady had escalated to a new and more frightening level. It was
now, Dirk reckoned, fully three months since this fridge door had been
opened, and each of them was grimly determined not to be the one to
open it first. The fridge no longer merely stood there in the corner of
the kitchen, it actually lurked. Dirk could quite clearly remember the
day on which the thing had started lurking. It was about a week ago,
when Dirk had tried a simple subterfuge to trick Elena -- the old bat's
name was Elena, pronounced to rhyme with cleaner, which was an irony
that Dirk now no longer relished -- into opening the fridge door. The
subterfuge had been deftly deflected and had nearly rebounded horribly
on Dirk.
He had resorted to the strategy of going to the local mini-market to
buy a few simple groceries. Nothing contentious -- a little milk, some
eggs, some bacon, a carton or two of chocolate custard and a simple
half-pound of butter. He had left them, innocently, on top of the
fridge as if to say, "Oh, when you have a moment, perhaps you could pop
these inside..."
When he had returned that evening his heart bounded to see that they
were no longer on top of the fridge. They were gone! They had not been
merely moved aside or put on a shelf, they were nowhere to be seen. She
must finally have capitulated and put them away. In the fridge. And she
would surely have cleaned it out once it was actually open. For the
first and only time his heart swelled with warmth and gratitude towards
her, and he was about to fling open the door of the thing in relief and
triumph when an eighth sense (at the last count, Dirk reckoned he had
eleven) warned him to be very, very careful, and to consider first
where Elena might have put the cleared out contents of the fridge.
A nameless doubt gnawed at his mind as he moved noiselessly towards
the garbage bin beneath the sink. Holding his breath, he opened the lid
and looked.
There, nestling in the folds of the fresh black bin liner, were his
eggs, his bacon, his chocolate custard and his simple half-pound of
butter. Two milk bottles stood rinsed and neatly lined up by the sink
into which their contents had presumably been poured.
She had thrown it away.
Rather than open the fridge door, she had thrown his food away. He
looked round slowly at the grimy, squat, white monolith, and that was
the exact moment at which he realised without a shadow of a doubt that
his fridge had now begun seriously to lurk.
He made himself a stiff black coffee and sat, slightly trembling. He
had not even looked directly at the sink, but he knew that he must
unconsciously have noticed the two clean milk bottles there, and some
busy part of his mind had been alarmed by them.
The next day he had explained all this away to himself. He was
becoming needlessly paranoiac. It had surely been an innocent or
careless mistake on Elena's part. She had probably been brooding
distractedly on her son's attack of bronchitis, peevishness or
homosexuality or whatever it was that regularly prevented her from
either turning up, or from having noticeable effect when she did. She
was Italian and probably had absent-mindedly mistaken his food for
garbage.
But the business with the hair changed all that. It established
beyond all possible doubt that she knew exactly what she was doing. She
was under no circumstances going to open the fridge door until he had
opened it first, and he was under no circumstances going to open the
fridge until she had.
Obviously she had not noticed his hair, otherwise it would have been
her most effective course simply to pull it off, thus tricking him into
thinking she had opened the fridge. He should presumably now remove her
hair in the hope of pulling that same trick on her, but even as he sat
there he knew that somehow that wouldn't work, and that they were
locked into a tightening spiral of non-fridge-opening that would lead
them both to madness or perdition.
He wondered if he could hire someone to come and open the fridge.
No. He was not in a position to hire anybody to do anything. He was
not even in a position to pay Elena for the last three weeks. The only
reason he didn't ask her to leave was that sacking somebody inevitably
involved paying them off, and this he was in no position to do. His
secretary had finally left him on her own initiative and gone off to do
something reprehensible in the travel business. Dirk had attempted to
cast scorn on her preferring monotony of pay over --
"/Regularity/ of pay," she had calmly corrected him.
-- over job satisfaction.
She had nearly said, "Over /what/?", but at that moment she realised
that if she said that she would have to listen to his reply, which
would be bound to infuriate her into arguing back. It occurred to her
for the first time that the only way of escaping was just not to get
drawn into these arguments. If she simply did not respond this time,
then she was free to leave. She tried it. She felt a sudden freedom.
She left. A week later, in much the same mood, she married an airline
cabin steward called Smith.
Dirk had kicked her desk over, and then had to pick it up himself
later when she didn't come back.
The detective business was currently as brisk as the tomb. Nobody,
it seemed, wished to have anything detected. He had recently, to make
ends meet, taken up doing palmistry in drag on Thursday evenings, but
he wasn't comfortable with it. He could have withstood it -- the
hateful, abject humiliation of it all was something to which he had, in
different ways, now become accustomed, and he was quite anonymous in
his little tent in the back garden of the pub -- he could have
withstood it all if he hadn't been so horribly, excruciatingly good at
it. It made him break out in a sweat of self-loathing. He tried by
every means to cheat, to fake, to be deliberately and cynically bad,
but whatever fakery he tried to introduce always failed and he
invariably ended up being right.
His worst moment had come about as a result of the poor woman from
Oxfordshire who had come in to see him one evening. Being in something
of a waggish mood, he had suggested that she should keep an eye on her
husband, who, judging by her marriage line, looked to be a bit of a
flighty type. It transpired that her husband was in fact a fighter
pilot, and that his plane had been lost in an exercise over the North
Sea only a fortnight earlier.
Dirk had been flustered by this and had soothed meaninglessly at
her. He was certain, he said, that her husband would be restored to her
in the fullness of time, that all would be well, and that all manner of
things would be well and so on. The woman said that she thought this
was not very likely seeing as the world record for staying alive in the
North Sea was rather less than an hour, and since no trace of her
husband had been found in two weeks it seemed fanciful to imagine that
he was anything other than stone dead, and she was trying to get used
to the idea, thank you very much. She said it rather tartly.
Dirk had lost all control at this point and started to babble.
He said that it was very clear from reading her hands that the great
sum of money she had coming to her would be no consolation to her for
the loss of her dear, dear husband, but that at least it might comfort
her to know that he had gone on to that great something or other in the
sky, that he was floating on the fleeciest of white clouds, looking
very handsome in his new set of wings, and that he was terribly sorry
to be talking such appalling drivel but she had caught him rather by
surprise. Would she care for some tea, or some vodka, or some soup?
The woman demurred. She said she had only wandered into the tent by
accident, she had been looking for the lavatories, and what was that
about the money?
"Complete gibberish," Dirk had explained. He was in great
difficulties, what with having the falsetto to keep up. "I was making
it up as I went along," he said. "Please allow me to tender my most
profound apologies for intruding so clumsily on your private grief, and
to escort you to, er, or rather, direct you to the, well, what I can
only in the circumstances call the lavatory, which is out of the tent
and on the left."
Dirk had been cast down by this encounter, but was then utterly
horrified a few days later when he discovered that the very following
morning the unfortunate woman had learnt that she had won £250,000 on
the Premium Bonds. He spent several hours that night standing on the
roof of his house, shaking his fist at the dark sky and shouting, "Stop
it!" until a neighbour complained to the police that he couldn't sleep.
The police had come round in a screaming squad car and woken up the
rest of the neighbourhood as well.
Today, this morning, Dirk sat in his kitchen and stared dejectedly
at his fridge. The bloody-minded ebullience which he usually relied on
to carry him through the day had been knocked out of him in its very
opening moments by the business with the fridge. His will sat
imprisoned in it, locked up by a single hair.
What he needed, he thought, was a client. Please, God, he thought,
if there is a god, any god, bring me a client. Just a simple client,
the simpler the better. Credulous and rich. Someone like that chap
yesterday. He tapped his fingers on the table.
The problem was that the more credulous the client, the more Dirk
fell foul at the end of his own better nature, which was constantly
rearing up and embarrassing him at the most inopportune moments. Dirk
frequently threatened to hurl his better nature to the ground and kneel
on its windpipe, but it usually managed to get the better of him by
dressing itself up as guilt and self-loathing, in which guise it could
throw him right out of the ring.
Credulous and rich. Just so that he could pay off some, perhaps even
just one, of the more prominent and sensational bills. He lit a
cigarette. The smoke curled upwards in the morning light and attached
itself to the ceiling.
Like that chap yesterday...
He paused.
The chap yesterday...
The world held its breath.
Quietly and gently there settled on him the knowledge that
something, somewhere, was ghastly. Something was terribly wrong.
There was a disaster hanging silently in the air around him waiting
for him to notice it. His knees tingled.
What he needed, he had been thinking, was a client. He had been
thinking that as a matter of habit. It was what he always thought at
this time of the morning. What he had forgotten was that he had one.
He stared wildly at his watch. Nearly eleven-thirty. He shook his
head to try and clear the silent ringing between his ears, then made a
hysterical lunge for his hat and his great leather coat that hung
behind the door.
Fifteen seconds later he left the house, five hours late but moving
fast.
[::: CHAPTER 4 ::::::::::::]
A minute or two later Dirk paused to consider his best strategy.
Rather than arrive five hours late and flustered it would be better all
round if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but
triumphantly in command.
"Pray God I am not too soon!" would be a good opening line as he
swept in, but it needed a good follow-through as well, and he wasn't
sure what it should be.
Perhaps it would save time if he went back to get his car, but then
again it was only a short distance, and he had a tremendous propensity
for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his method
of "Zen' navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if
it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often
surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of
the few occasions when it was both.
Furthermore he was not at all certain that his car was working.
It was an elderly Jaguar, built at that very special time in the
company's history when they were making cars which had to stop for
repairs more often than they needed to stop for petrol, and frequently
needed to rest for months between outings. He was, however, certain,
now that he came to think about it, that the car didn't have any petrol
and furthermore he did not have any cash or valid plastic to enable him
to fill it up.
He abandoned that line of thought as wholly fruitless.
He stopped to buy a newspaper while he thought things over. The
clock in the newsagent's said eleven thirty-five. Damn, damn, damn. He
toyed with the idea of simply dropping the case. Just walking away and
forgetting about it. Having some lunch. The whole thing was fraught
with difficulties in any event. Or rather it was fraught with one
particular difficulty which was that of keeping a straight face. The
whole thing was complete and utter nonsense. The client was clearly
loopy and Dirk would not have considered taking the case except for one
very important thing.
Three hundred pounds a day plus expenses.
The client had agreed to it just like that. And when Dirk had
started his usual speech to the effect that his methods, involving as
they did the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, often led to
expenses that might appear to the untutored eye to be som
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