Dirk frowned and opened his notebook again.
“‘Never ... open ... bank ... statements,’” he wrote thoughtfully. “So, when she arrived,” he continued after he put the book back in his pocket, “I wasn’t expecting her, so I wasn’t in command of the situation. Which meant that ...”
he fished out his notebook and wrote in it again.
“Now what are you putting?” asked Kate.
“Control freak,” said Dirk. “My first instinct was to make her sit down, then pretend to get on with something while I composed myself.”
“So?”
“I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair—God knows where it had gone—which meant that she had to stand over me, which I also hate. That’s when I turned really ratty.” He peered at his notebook again and flipped through it. “Strange convergence and tiny little events, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, here was a case of the most extraordinary kind. A beautiful, intelligent, and obviously well-off woman arrives and offers to pay me to investigate a phenomenon that challenges the very foundation of everything that we know of physics and biology, and I ... turn it down. Astonishing. Normally, you’d have to nail me to the floor to keep me away from a case like that. Unless—” he added thoughtfully, waving his notebook slowly in the air, “unless you knew me this well.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Well, I don’t know. The whole sequence of little obstacles would have been completely invisible except for one thing. When I eventually found the piece of paper I’d written her details on, the phone number was missing. The bottom of the sheet of paper had been torn off. So I have no easy way of finding her.”
“Well, you could try calling directory information. What’s her name?”
“Smith. Hopeless. But don’t you think it odd that the number had been torn off?”
“No, not really, if you want an honest answer. People tear off scraps of paper all the time. I can see you’re probably in the mood to construct some massive space/time bending conspiracy theory out of it, but I suspect you just tore off a strip of paper to clean your ears out with.”
“You’d worry about space/time if you’d seen that cat.”
“Maybe you just need to get your contact lenses cleaned.”
“I don’t wear contact lenses.”
“Maybe it’s time you did.”
Dirk sighed. “I suppose there are times when my imaginings do get a little overwrought,” he said. “I’ve just had too little to do recently. Business has been so slow, I’ve even been reduced to looking up to see if they’d got my number right in the Yellow Pages and then calling it myself just to check that it was working. Kate ... ?”
“Yes, Dirk?”
“You would tell me if you thought I was going mad or anything, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s what friends are for.”
“Are they?” mused Dirk. “Are they? You know, I’ve often wondered. The reason I ask is that when I phoned myself up ...”
“Yes?”
“I answered.”
“Dirk, old friend,” said Kate, “you need a rest.”
“I’ve had nothing but rest,” grumbled Dirk.
“In which case you need something to do.”
“Yes,” said Dirk. “But what?”
Kate sighed. “I can’t tell you what to do, Dirk. No one can ever tell you anything. You never believe anything unless you’ve worked it out for yourself.”
“Hmmm,” said Dirk, opening his notebook again. “Now that is an interesting one.”
Chapter 4
“Josh,” said a voice in a kind-of Swedish-Irish accent.
Dirk ignored it. He unloaded his small bag of shopping into bits of his badly disfigured kitchen. It was mostly frozen pizza, so it mostly went into his small freezer cabinet, which mostly filled with old, white, clenched things that he was now too frightened to try to identify.
“Jude,” said the Swedish-Irish voice.
“Don’t make it bad,” hummed Dirk to himself. He turned on the radio for the six-o’clock news. It featured mostly gloomy stuff. Pollution, disaster, civil war, famine, etc., and, just as an added bonus, speculation as to whether the Earth was going to be hit by a giant comet or not.
“Julian,” said the Swedish-Irish voice, tinnily. Dirk shook his head. Surely not.
More on the comet story: there was a wide range of views about precisely what was going to happen. Some authorities said that it was going to hit Sheridan, Wyoming, on the seventeenth of June. NASA scientists said that it would burn up in the upper atmosphere and not reach the surface. A team of Indian astronomers said that it would miss the Earth altogether by several million miles before going on to plunge into the sun. The British authorities said it would do whatever the Americans said it would do.
“Julio,” said the voice. No response.
Dirk missed the next thing the radio said because of the noise of his front wall flapping. His front wall was made of large, thick sheets of polythene these days, because of an incident a few weeks earlier when, in a radical departure from the sort of behaviour that Dirk’s neighbours liked to see, a Tornado jet fighter had exploded out of the front of Dirk’s house and then plunged screaming into Finsbury.
There was, of course, a perfectly logical explanation for this, and Dirk was tired of giving it. The reason that Dirk had had a Tornado jet fighter in his hallway was that he hadn’t known it was a Tornado jet fighter. Of course he hadn’t known it was a Tornado jet fighter. As far as he was concerned, it was merely a large and bad-tempered eagle that he had trapped in his hallway the same way anybody would to stop it dive-bombing him the whole time. That a large Tornado jet fighter had, for a brief while, taken on the shape of an eagle was on account of an unfortunate airborne encounter with the Thunder God, Thor, of legend, and ...
This was the part of the story where Dirk usually had to struggle a little to sustain his audience’s patient attention, which he would, if successful, further strain by explaining that the Thunder God, Thor, had then thought better of his fit of temper and decided to put things right by returning the Tornado to its proper shape. Unfortunately, Thor, being a god, had had his mind on higher or at least other things, and hadn’t called up, as any mere mortal might have done, to check if this was a convenient moment. He had just decreed it done and it was done, bang.
Devastation.
And also the insurance problem from hell. The insurance companies involved had all claimed that this was, by any reasonable standards, an act of God. But, Dirk had argued, which god? Britain was constitutionally a Christian monotheistic state, and therefore any “act of God” defined in a legal document must refer to the Anglican chap in the stained glass and not to some polytheistic thug from Norway. And so on.
Meanwhile, Dirk’s house—not an especially grand place to start with—was propped up with scaffolding and tented with polythene, and Dirk had no idea when he was going to be able to get it repaired. If the insurance company failed to pay up—which seemed increasingly likely in light of the strategy that insurance companies had adopted in recent years, of merely advertising their services rather than actually providing them—Dirk was going to have to ... well, he didn’t quite know what. He had no money. None of his own, at least. He had some of the bank’s money, but how much he had no idea.
“Justin,” intoned the little voice. There was no answering response.
Dirk tipped his unopened bank statements on to the kitchen table, and stared at them with loathing. It seemed to him for a moment that the envelopes were vibrating slightly, and even that the whole of space and time was beginning to revolve slowly around them and get sucked into their event horizon, but he was probably imagining it.