have to be a universe where you aren’t a shallow, self-obsessed, feckless, obnoxious, arrogant, poisonous little shit. And I just can’t believe in that. Moons made of green cheese and worlds supported in the branches of giant ash trees, yes. A bearable Max, no way. It’s just not possible. So long.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get a couple of doughnuts, where d’you think?”
“Fine,” Max grunted, relighting his cigar. “Don’t be all day about it.”
Outside, the sun was skin-flayingly bright and hot, conspiring with the white sand to burn the inside of his eyelids red raw. He stomped along the beach for a while, trying to remember which way he’d come, until he came to a massive outcrop of rock jutting out almost to the edge of the sea. He walked round it, and saw a statue.
Once, he guessed, it must’ve been twice the size, but drifting sand had buried it up to its waist. It was a mouse: twenty feet tall, with circular ears and a cute button nose the size of a diving bell, its lips drawn back in a frozen, sneering grin, its long, elliptical eyes scoured blank by centuries of drifting sand and sea spray. Theo stood and gazed at it for a moment, then shrugged, gave it the finger and trudged on.
After an unspecified time, he staggered, dropped to his knees and rolled over on to his side, unable to go any further. The sea was only a yard or so away, and it looked cool and soothing; he wriggled across to it crab-fashion and plunged his aching feet into the water. The salt bit into the cracks and scratches; the pain startled him out of a vague, resigned doze he’d begun to drift into, and probably just as well. Falling asleep out in the open under a sun that hot would be one way of ending all his troubles, but there might still be a better one.
There was something bobbing in the water, a yard or so out. He watched it for a while, unable to summon up the mental energy to identify it. Then a wave lifted it a little, and he realised it was a bottle. That made him laugh out loud. It would be perfect, he decided, if there was a message in it, but of course there wouldn’t be. It was just a bottle: junk, litter, pollution. If he was home, or if he gave a damn about this rotten planet, he’d feel a spurt of moral indignation about that. Right now, though, he simply couldn’t be bothered.
But the bottle stayed roughly where it was, bobbing energetically up and down like a dog with its lead in its mouth, demanding to be taken for a walk. A bottle, he thought. Actually, a useful commodity. Fairly soon he was going to get dehydrated. If by some miracle he found a source of fresh water, a bottle would come in handy. Groaning self-indulgently (but why not? Nobody there to see) he crawled into the delightfully cool water and reached out until his fingers closed around the bottle’s neck. He lifted it up and looked through it. There was something inside.
A message in a bottle. Oh please.
On the other hand, why the hell not? He unscrewed the cap and shook the bottle; the wedge of brown paper slid forward and lodged in the neck. He looked around for something to winkle it out with, but the seashore was depressingly short on toolkits. In fact, the only artefact beside the bottle within visual range was Piglet’s nappy, secured with a safety pin…
Even then, it took him ten minutes’ worth of patient and not-so-patient fiddling, scrabbling, teasing and high-octane bad language before he was able to get his fingernails closed on a tiny corner of paper and draw the message out. He dropped the bottle and the pin and unfolded the message. It was a map.
To be precise, it was a map of the beach; because there was the Mickey Mouse statue, there was the rocky pillar, and there was a cross, correlating exactly to his present position, marked U are Hear. Proceeding from the cross was a dotted line, which sprawled and wandered around the beach in a series of long, lazy curves until it reached a crudely drawn O, above which was written donuts.
He looked back at the beach and saw the dotted line. It was composed of the footprints he’d made getting there and retrieving the bottle. The O marked the spot where he’d