“When do hedgehogs stop hibernating?”
“Sometime in spring I think.”
“I’ll be in shortly after that.”
“Rightyho.”
He flipped through the Yellow Pages and made a short list of numbers to try.
“Oh hello, is that the Old Elms Hospital? Yes, I was just phoning to see if I could have a word with Fenella, er … Fenella – Good Lord, silly me, I’ll forget my own name next, er, Fenella – isn’t this ridiculous? Patient of yours, dark haired girl, came in last night …”
“I’m afraid we don’t have any patients called Fenella.”
“Oh, don’t you? I mean Fiona of course, we just call her Fen …”
“I’m sorry, goodbye.”
Click.
Six conversations along these lines began to take their toll on his mood of vigorous, dynamic optimism, and he decided that before it deserted him entirely he would take it down to the pub and parade it a little.
He had had the perfect idea for explaining away every inexplicable weirdness about himself at a stroke, and he whistled to himself as he pushed open the door which had so daunted him last night.
“Arthur!!!!”
He grinned cheerfully at the boggling eyes that stared at him from all corners of the pub, and told them all what a wonderful time he’d had in Southern California.
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Chapter 9
He accepted another pint and took a pull at it.
“Of course, I had my own personal alchemist too.”
“You what?”
He was getting silly and he knew it. Exuberance and Hall and Woodhouse best bitter was a mixture to be wary of, but one of the first effects it had is to stop you being wary of things, and the point at which Arthur should have stopped and explained no more was the point at which he started instead to get inventive.
“Oh yes,” he insisted with a happy glazed smile. “It’s why I’ve lost so much weight.”
“What?” said his audience.
“Oh yes,” he said again. “The Californians have rediscovered alchemy. Oh yes.”
He smiled again.
“Only,” he said, “it’s in a much more useful form than that which in …” He paused thoughtfully to let a little grammar assemble in his head. “In which the ancients used to practise it. Or at least,” he added, “failed to practise it. They couldn’t get it to work you know. Nostradamus and that lot. Couldn’t cut it.”
“Nostradamus?” said one of his audience.
“I didn’t think he was an alchemist,” said another.
“I thought,” said a third, “he was a seer.”
“He became a seer,” said Arthur to his audience, the component parts of which were beginning to bob and blur a little, “because he was such a lousy alchemist. You should know that.”
He took another pull at his beer. It was something he had not tasted for eight years. He tasted it and tasted it.
“What has alchemy got to do,” asked a bit of the audience, “with losing weight?”
“I’m glad you asked that,” said Arthur. “Very glad. And I will now tell you what the connection is between …” He paused. “Between those two things. The things you mentioned. I’ll tell you.”
He paused and manoeuvred his thoughts. It was like watching oil tankers doing three-point turns in the English Channel.
“They’ve discovered how to turn excess body fat into gold,” he said, in a sudden blur of coherence.
“You’re kidding.”
“Oh yes,” he said, “no,” he corrected himself, “they have.”
He rounded on the doubting part of his audience, which was all of it, and so it took a little while to round on it completely.
“Have you been to California?” he demanded. “Do you know the sort of stuff they do there?”
Three members of his audience said they had and that he was talking nonsense.
“You haven’t seen anything,” insisted Arthur. “Oh yes,” he added, because someone was offering to buy another round.
“The evidence,” he said, pointing at himself, and not missing by more than a couple of inches, “is before your eyes. Fourteen hours in a trance,” he said, “in a tank. In a trance. I was in a tank. I think,” he added after a thoughtful pause, “I already said that.”