No. What he would do was this. He would put on the record of bagpipe music. He would listen to it, every last banshee wail of it. Then he would call her. That was the correct order. That was what he would do.

He was worried about touching things in case they blew up when he did so.

He picked up the record. It failed to blow up. He slipped it out of its cover. He opened the record player, he turned on the amp. They both survived. He giggled foolishly as he lowered the stylus onto the disk.

He sat and listened solemnly to “A Scottish Soldier.”

He listened to “Amazing Grace.”

He listened to something about some glen or other.

He thought about his miraculous lunchtime.

They had just been on the point of leaving when they were distracted by an awful outbreak of “yoo-hooing.” The appallingly permed woman was waving to them across the room like some stupid bird with a broken wing. Everyone in the pub turned to them and seemed to be expecting some sort of response.

They hadn’t listened to the bit about how pleased and happy Anjie was going to be about the £4.30 everyone had helped to raise toward the cost of her kidney machine, had been vaguely aware that someone from the next table had won a box of cherry brandy liqueurs, and took a moment or two to cotton on to the fact that the yoo-hooing lady was trying to ask them if they had ticket number 37.

Arthur discovered that he had. He glanced angrily at his watch.

Fenchurch gave him a push.

“Go on,” she said, “go and get it. Don’t be bad-tempered. Give them a nice speech about how pleased you are and you can give me a call and tell me how it went. I’ll want to hear the record. Go on.”

She flicked his arm and left.

The regulars thought his acceptance speech a little overeffusive. It was, after all, merely an album of bagpipe music.

Arthur thought about it, and listened to the music, and kept on breaking into laughter.

Chapter 14

Ring-ring.

Ring-ring.

Ring-ring.

“Hello, yes? Yes, that’s right. Yes. You’ll ’ave to speak up, there’s an awful lot of noise in ’ere. What?

“No, I only do the bar in the evenings. It’s Yvonne who does lunch, and Jim he’s the landlord. No, I wasn’t on. What?

“You’ll have to speak up.

“What? No, don’t know nothing about no raffle. What?

“No, don’t know nothing about it. ’Old on, I’ll call Jim.”

The barmaid put her hand over the receiver and called over the noisy bar.

“’ere, Jim, bloke on the phone says something about he’s won a raffle. He keeps on saying it’s ticket 37 and he’s won.”

“No, there was a guy in the pub here won,” shouted back the barman.

“He says ’ave we got the ticket.”

“Well, how can he think he’s won if he hasn’t even got a ticket?”

“Jim says ’ow can you think you’ve won if you ’aven’t even got the ticket. What?”

She put her hand over the receiver again.

“Jim, ’e keeps effing at me. Says there’s a number on the ticket.”

“’Course there was a number on the ticket, it was a bloody raffle ticket, wasn’t it?”

“’e says ’e means it’s a telephone number on the ticket.”

“Put the phone down and serve the bloody customers, will you?”

Chapter 15

Eight hours west sat a man alone on a beach mourning an inexplicable loss. He could only think of his loss in little packets of grief at a time, because the whole thing was too great to be borne.

He watched the long slow Pacific waves come in along the sand, and waited and waited for the nothing that he knew was about to happen. As the time came for it not to happen, it duly didn’t happen and so the afternoon wore itself away and the sun dropped beneath the long line of the sea, and the day was gone.

The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private house was there, but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds of miles of coastline that runs west from Los Angeles, which is described in the new edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one entry as “junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what’s that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo,” and in another, written only hours later as “being like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth. Plus the air is, for some reason, yellow.”

The coastline runs west, and then turns north up to the misty bay of San Francisco, which the Guide describes as a “good place to go. It’s very easy to believe that everyone you meet there also is a space traveler. Starting a new religion for you is just their way of saying ‘hi.’ Until you’ve settled in and got the hang of the place it is best to say ‘no’ to three questions out of any given four that anyone may ask you, because there are some very strange things going on there, some of which an unsuspecting alien could die of.” The hundreds of curling miles of cliffs and sand, palm trees, breakers, and sunsets are described in the Guide as “boffo. A good one.”

And somewhere on this good boffo stretch of coastline lay the house of this inconsolable man, a man whom many regarded as being insane. But this was only, as he would tell people, because he was.

One of the many many reasons why people thought him insane was the peculiarness of his house which, even in a land where most people’s houses were peculiar in one way or another, was quite extreme in its peculiarness.

His house was called The Outside of the Asylum.

His name was simply John Watson, though he preferred to be called — and some of his friends had now reluctantly agreed to do this — Wonko the Sane.

In his house were a number of strange things, including a gray glass bowl with eight words engraved upon it.

We can talk of him much later on. This is just an interlude to watch the sun go down and to say that he was there watching it.

He had lost everything he cared for, and was now simply waiting for the end of the world — little realizing that it had already been and gone.

Chapter 16

After a disgusting Sunday spent emptying rubbish bins behind a pub in Taunton, and finding nothing, no raffle ticket, no telephone number, Arthur tried everything he could to find Fenchurch, and the more things he tried, the more weeks passed.

He raged and railed against himself, against fate, against the world and its weather. He even, in his sorrow and his fury, went and sat in the motorway service station cafeteria where he’d been just before he met her.

“It’s the drizzle that makes me particularly morose.”

“Please shut up about the drizzle,” snapped Arthur.

“I would shut up if it would shut up drizzling.”

“Look—”

“But I’ll tell you what it will do when it shuts up drizzling, shall I?”

“No.”

“Blatter.”

“What?”

“It will blatter.”

Arthur stared over the rim of his coffee cup at the grisly outside world. It was a completely pointless place to be, he realized, and he had been driven there by superstition rather than logic. However, as if to bait him with the knowledge that such coincidences could in fact happen, fate had chosen to reunite him with the lorry driver he had encountered there last time.

The more he tried to ignore him, the more he found himself being dragged back into the whirlpool of the man’s exasperating conversation.

“I think,” said Arthur vaguely, cursing himself for even bothering to say this, “that it’s easing off.”

“Ha!”

Arthur just shrugged. He should go. That’s what he should do. He should just go.

“It never stops raining!” ranted the lorry driver. He thumped the table, spilled his tea, and actually, for a moment, appeared to be steaming.