“No,” he said.
“That was the moment she cracked up. She was in a cafe somewhere. Rickmansworth. Don’t know what she was doing there, but that was where she cracked up. Apparently she stood up, calmly announced that she had undergone some extraordinary revelation or something, wobbled a bit, looked confused, and finally collapsed screaming into an egg sandwich.”
Arthur winced. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said a little stiffly.
Russell made a sort of grumping noise.
“So what,” said Arthur in an attempt to piece things together, “was the CIA agent doing in the reservoir?”
“Bobbing up and down of course. He was dead.”
“But what …”
“Come on, you remember all that stuff. The hallucinations. Everyone said it was a cock up, the CIA trying experiments into drug warfare or something. Some crackpot theory that instead of invading a country it would be much cheaper and more effective to make everyone think they’d been invaded.”
“What hallucinations were those exactly …?” said Arthur in a rather quiet voice.
“What do you mean, what hallucinations? I’m talking about all that stuff with the big yellow ships, everyone going crazy and saying we’re going to die, and then pop, they vanished as the effect wore off. The CIA denied it which meant it must be true.”
Arthur’s head went a little swimmy. His hand grabbed at something to steady himself, and gripped it tightly. His mouth made little opening and closing movements as if it was on his mind to say something, but nothing emerged.
“Anyway,” continued Russell, “whatever drug it was it didn’t seem to wear off so fast with Fenny. I was all for suing the CIA, but a lawyer friend of mine said it would be like trying to attack a lunatic asylum with a banana, so …” He shrugged.
“The Vogon …” squeaked Arthur. “The yellow ships … vanished?”
“Well, of course they did, they were hallucinations,” said Russell, and looked at Arthur oddly. “You trying to say you don’t remember any of this? Where have you been for heaven’s sake?”
This was, to Arthur, such an astonishingly good question that he half-leapt out of his seat with shock.
“Christ!!!” yelled Russell, fighting to control the car which was suddenly trying to skid. He pulled it out of the path of an oncoming lorry and swerved up on to a grass bank. As the car lurched to a halt, the girl in the back was thrown against Russell’s seat and collapsed awkwardly.
Arthur twisted round in horror.
“Is she all right?” he blurted out.
Russell swept his hands angrily back through his blow-dried hair. He tugged at his blond moustache. He turned to Arthur.
“Would you please,” he said, “let go of the handbrake?”
=================================================================
Chapter 6
From here it was a four-mile walk to his village: a further mile to the turning, to which the abominable Russell had now fiercely declined to take him, and from there a further three miles of winding country lane.
The Saab seethed off into the night. Arthur watched it go, as stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for five years, suddenly discovers that he had merely been wearing too large a hat.
He shook his head sharply in the hope that it might dislodge some salient fact which would fall into place and make sense of an otherwise utterly bewildering Universe, but since the salient fact, if there was one, entirely failed to do this, he set off up the road again, hoping that a good vigorous walk, and maybe even some good painful blisters, would help to reassure him of his own existence at least, if not his sanity.
It was 10.30 when he arrived, a fact he discovered from the steamed and greasy window of the Horse and Groom pub, in which there had hung for many years a battered old Guiness clock which featured a picture of an emu with a pint glass jammed rather amusingly down its throat.
This was the pub at which he had passed the fateful lunchtime during which first his house and then the entire planet Earth had been demolished, or rather had seemed to be demolished. No, damn it, had been demolished, because if it hadn’t then where the bloody heck had he been for the last eight years, and how he had got there if not in one of the big yellow Vogon ships which the appalling Russell had just been telling him were merely drug- induced hallucinations, and yet if it had been demolished, what was he currently standing on …?