CHAPTER 11

39

“What I want to know is this,” he said, “if it’s going to be nice weather, why,” he almost spat, “can’t it be nice without bloody raining?”

Arthur gave up. He decided to leave his coffee, which was too hot to drink quickly and too nasty to drink cold.

“Well, there you go,” he said and instead got up himself. “Bye.”

He stopped off at the service station shop, then walked back through the car park, making a point of enjoying the fine play of rain on his face. There was even, he noticed, a faint rainbow glistening over the Devon hills. He enjoyed that too.

He climbed into his battered but adored old black Golf Gti, squealed the tyres, and headed out past the islands of petrol pumps and on to the slip road back towards the motorway.

He was wrong in thinking that the atmosphere of the Earth had closed finally and for ever above his head.

He was wrong to think that it would ever be possible to put behind him the tangled web of irresolutions into which his galactic travels had dragged him.

He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe. He drove on, humming, being wrong about all these things. The reason he was wrong was standing by the slip road under a small umbrella.

His jaw sagged. He sprained his ankle against the brake pedal and skidded so hard he very nearly turned the car over.

“Fenny!” he shouted.

Having narrowly avoided hitting her with the actual car, he hit her instead with the car door as he leant across and flung it open at her. It caught her hand and knocked away her umbrella, which then bowled wildly away across the road.

“Shit!” yelled Arthur as helpfully as he cold, leapt out of his own door, narrowly avoided being run down by McKeena’s All-Weather Haulage, and watched in horror as it ran down Fenny’s umbrella instead. The lorry swept along the motorway and away.

The umbrella lay like a recently swatted daddy-long-legs, expiring sadly on the ground. Tiny gusts of wind made it twitch a little. He picked it up.

“Er,” he said. There didn’t seem to be a lot of point in offering the thing back to her.

“How did you know my name?” she said.

“Er, well,” he said. “Look, I’ll get you another one. . . ”

He looked at her and tailed off.

She was tallish with dark hair which fell in waves around a pale and serious face. Standing still, alone, she seemed almost sombre, like a statue 39