“Your wife,” said Arthur, looking around, “mentioned some toothpicks.” He said it with a hunted look, as if he was worried that she might suddenly leap out from behind the door and mention them again.
Wonko the Sane laughed. It was a light easy laugh, and sounded like one he had used a lot before and was happy with.
“Ah yes,” he said, “that’s to so with the day I finally realized that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better.”
This was the point at which Arthur began to feel a little nervous again.
“Here,” said Wonko the Sane, “we are outside the Asylum.” He pointed again at the rough brickwork, the pointing and the guttering. “Go through that door,” he pointed at the first door through which they had originally entered, “and you go into the Asylum. I’ve tried to decorate it nicely to keep the inmates happy, but there’s very little one can do. I never go in there now myself. If ever I am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I simply look at the sign written over the door and shy away.”
“That one?” said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at a blue plaque with some instructions written on it.
“Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do.”
The sign said:
Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.
“It seemed to me,” said Wonko the sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”
He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the sandpipers.
“And in case it crossed your mind to wonder, as I can see how it possibly might, I am completely sane. Which is why I call myself Wonko the Sane, just to reassure people on this point. Wonko is what my mother called me when I was a kid and clumsy and knocked things over, and sane is what I am, and how,” he added, with one of his smiles that made you feel, “Oh. Well that’s all right then.” “I intend to remain. Shall we go on to the beach and see what we have to talk about?”
They went out on to the beach, which was where he started talking about angels with golden beards and green wings and Dr Scholl sandals.
“About the dolphins …” said Fenchurch gently, hopefully.
“I can show you the sandals,” said Wonko the Sane.
“I wonder, do you know …”
“Would you like me to show you,” said Wonko the Sane, “the sandals? I have them. I’ll get them. They are made by the Dr Scholl company, and the angels say that they particularly suit the terrain they have to work in. They say they run a concession stand by the message. When I say I don’t know what that means they say no, you don’t, and laugh. Well, I’ll get them anyway.”
As he walked back towards the inside, or the outside depending on how you looked at it, Arthur and Fenchurch looked at each other in a wondering and slightly desperate sort of way, then each shrugged and idly drew figures in the sand.
“How are the feet today?” said Arthur quietly.
“OK. It doesn’t feel so odd in the sand. Or in the water. The water touches them perfectly. I just think this isn’t our world.”
She shrugged.
“What do you think he meant,” she said, “by the message?”
“I don’t know,” said Arthur, though the memory of a man called Prak who laughed at him continuously kept nagging at him.
When Wonko returned he was carrying something that stunned Arthur. Not the sandals, they were perfectly ordinary wooden- bottomed sandals.