The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul (Dirk Gently, #2)

by Douglas Adams

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “as pretty as an airport”.

The usual people tried to claim responsibility. First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn’t actually anything to do with them at all.

The mail on the doormat consisted of the usual things: a rude letter threatening to take away his American Express card, an invitation to apply for an American Express card, and a few bills of the more hysterical and unrealistic type. He couldn’t understand why they kept sending them. The cost of the postage seemed merely to be good money thrown after bad.

She didn’t like him. She couldn’t say exactly what it was she didn’t like about him, because she was a nurse, not a taxi-driver, and she wouldn’t let her personal feelings show for an instant.

She had only just emerged from a minor coma and she needed care, she needed – “Pizza – ” insisted Kate. – rest, she needed – “– my own home, and fresh air. The air in here is horrible. It smells like a vacuum cleaner’s armpit.”

There were ten messages on her answering machine, which she simply erased without listening to.

Somebody after my own heart!

She threw open the window in her bedroom and for a moment or two leaned out of it at the rather dangerous and awkward angle which allowed her to see a patch of the park. It was a small corner patch, with just a couple of plane trees standing in it. The backs of some of the intervening houses framed it, or rather, just failed totally to obscure it, and made it very personal and private to Kate in a way which a vast, sweeping vista would not have been. On one occasion she had gone to this corner of the park and walked around the invisible perimeter that marked out the limits of what she could see, and had come very close to feeling that this was her own domain. She had even patted the plane trees in a proprietorial sort of way, and had then sat beneath them watching the sun going down over London – over its badly spoiled skyline and its non-delivering pizza restaurants – and had come away with a profound sense of something or other, though she wasn’t quite certain what.

The waiter asked Dirk if he knew that he had broken his nose and Dirk said that yedth, dthagg you berry budge, he did.

There wasn’t a red button, but there was a blue button marked “Red”, and this Dirk took to be the one.

Now, do you expect to be paying for this or shall I just get you kneecapped straight off, save everybody time and aggravation all round?” It was never one hundred percent clear to Dirk exactly when Nobby was joking and he was not keen to put it to the test.

“I’m not going to hurt you. Now close them.” With a puzzled frown, Dirk closed his eyes just for a moment. In that moment the girl reached over and gripped him firmly by the nose, giving it a sharp twist. Dirk nearly exploded with pain and howled so loudly that he almost attracted the attention of a waiter.

“No private detective looks like a private detective. That’s one of the first rules of private detection.”

A door flopped open, wobbling perilously on its one remaining hinge, and there emerged from the car a pair of the sort of legs which soundtrack editors are unable to see without needing to slap a smoky saxophone solo all over,

“Yes, it is true,” he was saying, “that sometimes unusually intelligent and sensitive children can appear to be stupid. But, Mrs Benson, stupid children can sometimes appear to be stupid as well.

He had warned her that Standish, though brilliant, was also peculiar, even by the high standards set by his profession.

It was odd, Kate reflected, that people who needed to bully you were the easiest to push around.

“Mrs May is, or so she claims, taking dictation from some of the greatest physicists. From Einstein and from Heisenberg and Planck. And it is very hard to dispute her claims, because the information being produced here, by automatic writing, by this.. .untutored lady, is in fact physics of a very profound order. “From the late Einstein we are getting more and more refinements to our picture of how time and space work at a macroscopic level, and from the late Heisenberg and Planck we are increasing our understanding of the fundamental structures of matter at a quantum level. And there is absolutely no doubt that this information is edging us closer and closer towards the elusive goal of a Grand Unified Field Theory of Everything. “Now this produces a very interesting, not to say somewhat embarrassing situation for scientists because the means by which the information is reaching us seems to be completely contrary to the meaning of the information.”

When he looked at you you stayed looked at.

He had recommended to them a small local pub where he would come and look for them when he had made his diagnosis on the Citroën. Since Dirk’s Jaguar had only lost its front right indicator light, and Dirk insisted that he hardly ever turned right anyway, they drove the short distance there.

Less famous than the Pope, I grant you, but – you know of the Pope I take it?” “Yes, yes,” said Dirk impatiently, “white-haired chap.” “That’s him.

Confuse your enemy, he thought. It was a little like phoning somebody up, and saying “Yes? Hello?” in a testy voice when they answered, which was one of Dirk’s favourite methods of whiling away long, hot summer afternoons.

He could sell up. The ratio of estate agents to actual houses in the area was rapidly approaching parity.

Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila.

Roderick Mercer, the world’s greatest publisher of the world’s sleaziest newspapers.

Why does that name look familiar?

Thor once more drew out his hammer, and held it before him in the thoughtful and abstracted manner she had seen a few minutes before in her flat. He frowned, and seemed to be picking tiny invisible pieces of dust off it. It was a little like a chimpanzee grooming its mate, or – that was it! – the comparison was extraordinary, but it explained why she had tensed herself so watchfully when last he had done it. It was like Jimmy Connors minutely adjusting the strings of his racquet before preparing to serve.

Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn’t know exactly what it was that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that it was the sort of experience that her mother would not have approved of on a first date.

You could have a cheap car radio fitted while you waited, and if you turned your back for a couple of minutes, it would be removed while you waited as well. Other things you could have removed while you waited were your wallet, your stomach lining, your mind and your will to live. The muggers and pushers and pimps and hamburger salesmen, in no particular order, could arrange all these things for you.

As he ran, feeling himself to be virtually invisible by reason of being completely sober and, by his own lights, normally dressed, he seemed to pass examples of every form of bodily function imaginable, other than actual teeth-cleaning.