Douglas Adams - The Salmon of Doubt - Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Don’t even ask,” she said, when she returned bearing tea. “Tell me what’s going on with you instead.”

“I did something this afternoon,” he said, stirring the pale, sickly tea and suddenly remembering that, of course, Americans had no idea how to make it, “that was incredibly stupid.”

“I thought you seemed a bit grim.”

“Probably the cause rather than the effect. I’d had an appalling week, plus I had indigestion, and I suppose it made me a bit ...”

“Don’t tell me. You met a very attractive and desirable woman and were incredibly pompous and rude to her.”

Dirk stared at her. “How did you know that?” he breathed.

“You do it all the time. You did it to me.”

“I did not!” protested Dirk.

“You certainly did!”

“No, no, no.”

“I promise you, you ...”

“Hang on,” interrupted Dirk. “I remember now. Hmm. Interesting. And you’re saying I do that all the time?”

“Maybe not all the time. Presumably you have to get some sleep occasionally.”

“But you claim that, typically, I’m rude and pompous to attractive women?” He wrestled his way up out of the armchair and fished around in his pocket for a notebook. “I didn’t mean you to get quite so serious about it, it’s not exactly a major ... well, now I come to think about it I suppose it probably is a major character flaw. What are you doing?”

“Oh, just making a note. Odd thing about being a private detective—you spend your time finding out little things about other people that nobody else knows, but then you discover that there are all sorts of things that everybody else knows about you, which you don’t. For instance, did you know that I walk in an odd way? A kind of strutting waddle, someone described it as.” “Yes, of course I do. Everybody who knows you knows that.” “Except me, you see,” said Dirk. “Now that I know I’ve been trying to catch myself at it as I walk past shop windows. Doesn’t work, of course. All I ever see is myself frozen mid-stride with one foot in the air and gaping like a fish. Anyway, I’m drawing up a little list, to which I have now added, ‘Am always extremely rude and pompous to attractive women.’ ” Dirk stood and looked at the note for a second or two.

“You know,” he said, thoughtfully, “that could explain an astonishing number of things.”

“Oh come on,” said Kate. “You’re taking this a bit literally. I just meant I’ve noticed that when you’re not feeling good, or you’re on the spot in some way, you tend to get defensive, and that’s when you ...

are you writing all this down as well?”

“Of course. It’s all useful stuff. I might end up mounting a full-scale investigation into myself. Damn all else to do at the moment.” “No work?”

“No,” said Dirk, gloomily.

Kate tried to give him a shrewd look, but he was staring out of the window. “And is the fact that you don’t have any work connected in any way to the fact that you were very rude to an attractive woman?”

“Just barging in like that,” muttered Dirk half to himself.

“Don’t tell me,” said Kate, “She wanted you to look for a lost cat.” “Oh no,” said Dirk. “Not even as grand as that. Gone are the days when I used to have entire cats to look for.”

“What do you mean?”

Dirk described the cat. “See what I have to contend with?” he added.

Kate stared at him. “You’re not serious!”

“I am,” he said.

“Half a cat?”

“Yes. Just the back half.”

“I thought you said the front half?”

“Oh no, she’s got that. That was there alright. She only wanted me to look for the back half.” Dirk stared thoughtfully at London over the raised rim of his china teacup.

Kate looked at him suspicously. “But isn’t that ... very, very, very weird?” Dirk turned and faced her.

“I would say,” he declared, “that it was the single most weird and extraordinary phenomenon I have witnessed in a lifetime of witnessing weird and extraordinary phenomena. Unfortunately,” he added, turning away again “I wasn;t in the mood for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had indigestion. I’m always bad tempered when I’ve got indigestion.”

“And just because of that you—”

“It was more than that. I’d lost the piece of paper, too.”

“What piece of paper?”

“That I wrote down her appointment on. Turned up under a pile of bank statements.”

“Which you never open or look at.”

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. 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. Thats 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.”

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.”

”

“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 ...”