Wish You Were Here Read Free Page A

pleasurable he would encourage others to try it.) He was thrilled to learn that his state-of-the-art cell phone would work there, so he stood clutching his high-tech gizmo in thigh-deep water in a cove on a tiny island, and rang Sophie Astin, his assistant in The Digital Village. With a certain edge to her voice, she reminded a contrite Douglas that the world was round even for him. In London it was darkest night; she had been fast asleep. Later Douglas discovered that the coverage was so good because they were only twenty minutes away from Castaway Island where Tom Hanks had starred in the movie of the same name. Apparently, he had arranged for a local satellite relay to be installed so he could ring his agent. “What a pity,” Douglas said afterwards, with his writer’s magpie instinct for an anecdote, “that Tom Hanks had never made a road movie on the Pacific Coast Highway.” Mobile coverage is notoriously patchy along that route.
    Above all, by 2001 the long pause between books had topped up Douglas’s creative batteries. Writing had always been difficult, but now he had a treasure store of new ideas and was buckling down to the long-awaited book with extraordinary application.
    Douglas liked cars, and, following a disastrous young-man’s flirtation with Porsches, he developed a fondness for solidly engineered, luxury saloons like the Lexus or Mercedes. It amused him that they could look so respectable, but deliver an unnecessary quantity of horsepower if the driver were feeling daft enough. That final Friday, 11 May, he glided down to the gym in his Mercedes 500 as usual, in order to take some exercise and return home in good time for the arrival from England of his mother, Janet. She was already in the air, on a British Airways 747.
    In the gym, Peter, his personal trainer, put him through a routine that had been especially devised for him—twenty minutes on an aerobic stair machine to be followed by stomach crunches. If you have tried a stair machine, you will know that pretty soon rivulets of sweat run like molten lead down your back; the thighs seem on the point of spontaneous combustion. But although the regimen was hard work, it was not dangerously excessive for a chap of Douglas’s age and general state of health. He wore a heart monitor and Peter was there to keep an eye on him.
    It was Douglas’s habit to stop by after his exercise sessions at the Ogles’ house, handily just opposite Platinum Fitness. They’d have a coffee, boast about their children and shoot the breeze.
    Chris Ogle relished Douglas’s appearances, looking righteously exercised, at his home. With the anguished clarity of retrospect he suspects that Douglas may have suffered a minor heart attack shortly before 11 May. After his session in the gym the week before he died, Douglas had as usual called by, but in an uncharacteristically distressed state. He was pale and very tired. He had to lie down, and he slept for hours while Chris busied himself preparing for a business trip to South Africa. Waking much revived, Douglas was still concerned about a slight tingling in his arm. However, his local hospital did some tests and could not detect anything serious. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut, an author much admired by Douglas, so aptly observed. So it goes . . .
    But the health scare the previous week hadn’t put Douglas off his regime. So on this day, as usual, he had finished with the torture of the step machine, and was ready for the stomach crunches. The very term sounds mediaeval.
    Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
fans will recall that Douglas attributed to the humble towel a miraculous potential for reassurance and utility. “There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is,”*  5 the Narrator observes with admiration. The role of the towel traces its lineage back to the summer of 1978 when Douglas and various pals were on holiday in Corfu. Douglas was supposed to be writing, but a certain amount of hedonism and frolicking