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"Can't exceed the speed of light? Maybe you can't exceed the speed of light, pal, but where I'm from it's the only way to get any amusement on a Saturday night. 'Cos Betelgeusean girls are fast, if you know what I mean, but then you look like you've never slept with a girl in your life, so you probably don't know what I mean. Have you? Slept with a girl? A boy? A slightly puzzled sheep? No? That's because physics is deeply, deeply unsexy -"
Oh, God, Arthur thought. He hunched down a little and tried to sidle away from the scene. Nobody had warned him that Ford bloody Prefect - and a more ridiculous stage name he'd never heard, especially as Ford never seemed actually to be on stage - was going to be at the party. He hadn't even realised that Ford knew Martin, let alone had gone to college for long enough to be on Martin's contact list. He must have been on a different course, Arthur thought. He certainly hadn't shown up at any of the lectures he and Martin had slept though. The trouble with Ford, Arthur decided, was that he had become ubiquitous at the events that made up Arthur's life, turning up at parties, funerals and even one memorable work function that remained memorable no matter how much Arthur drank in an effort to make it recede into an alcoholic haze.
"I mean, even my mate Arthur gets more girls than a physicist ever could and he's the weather girl for some local radio station the incestuous locals listen to because the BBC is afraid to broadcast that far outside London. Hello, Arthur!"
Arthur sighed and turned around. "Hello, Ford," he said resignedly. "I host a current affairs programme, or at least I will once the current host retires, and the West Country isn't exactly filled with incestuous natives."
"Then why does everyone look the same?" Ford said with the air of a man winning an argument. "Look, just back me up here, would you? You've had sex, right?"
"Right," Arthur said wearily. He'd found out the hard way that telling Ford to mind his own business was as useful as sending off his five hundredth letter of application to Broadcasting House.
"See?" Ford crowed. "Even a monumentally sad creature like Arthur has managed the act of love with -"
"-girls," Arthur interjected.
"-girls," Ford said, only slightly disbelievingly. "Which is because he bloody well didn't waste his time studying physics."
At that point David McIntyre - whom Arthur remembered not at all from the academic side of college life, as both Arthur and Martin had chosen a course whose reading material contained rather more direct speech and rather fewer equations, but whom Arthur had seen more than once on the rugby pitch annihilating equally hulking undergraduates from the Natural Sciences and Engineering - punched Ford squarely on the nose. Arthur took advantage of the confusion to slip through the crowd and back up to the bar.
"A pint of lager," he said quickly. "Ford Prefect did not go to college with us," he added as Martin watched the fracas with concern.
"He says he did," Martin said, wincing as David flung Ford across the room. Ford bounded back, shrieking something about the average size of physicists' genitalia. "He was in Drama Studies."
"I don't think we had Drama Studies," Arthur said morosely into his pint. That was the trouble with Martin, he thought, one brief, alcohol-ridden stint as Entertainments Officer in the Student Union and he thought he knew everything about everyone. Arthur wished the Vice President of the Union had been the one to take it upon herself to organise a ten-year reunion. He couldn't remember her name any more, but had a clear mental image of the way her breasts had moved in her t-shirt when she spoke at union meetings and yelled stridently about them all being comrades. Communism needed more 40DDs, Arthur thought.
"What did you say about communism?" Martin yelled.
Arthur decided that discretion was the better part of political analysis. Why couldn't he have stayed home? He'd thought the idea of a reunion was a ridiculous, overly-American piece of nonsense when he'd first got the letter and he'd hated everyone in college, especially his dearest friends who'd gone on to lucrative careers in advertising. He wasn't even very fond of Martin, for God's sake. Most of his fellow students were just a blur of misremembered faces and rather better remembered chest sizes. If Martin hadn't begged for ten days straight and promised that all the girls would be there, desperate to regain their lost youth, Arthur could have stayed home with a nice Indian takeaway. As it was, the few girls who had showed up looked far out of his league, although they'd been the pale, swotty sort of girls he'd used to disdain in his student days.
"I've done her," Ford said behind him, making Arthur jump and spill what was left of his pint.
"What? Who? When?" Arthur spluttered.
"That girl you were just looking at, the one with the peculiar spectacles," Ford said.
"Weren't you in Drama Studies?" Martin said. "I thought you were a bit - you know . . ."
"What does that hand gesture mean?" Ford said. "Is it a secret code for something?"
"Just ignore him," Arthur said. "You can't have been with that girl, you were busy getting flattened by David McIntyre."
"Hey," Ford grinned. "I don't waste time, baby. When she saw my physical prowess she was overcome with admiration - she dragged me clear away from the fight to have her wicked way with me under the table."
"You were probably crawling under there to escape further injury," Arthur said dismissively.
"Well, yes," Ford said. "But she joined me fast enough." He waved over at the girls and Arthur was horrified to see the one Ford had pointed out giggle and go pink. He put his glass down carefully.
"Her? She did Latin. That's not the sort of girl who bloody well . . . conquers your standing army." Ford looked at him like he was speaking Esperanto. Arthur had once joined the Esperanto Society in college but had left after discovering that the only girls who joined had no interest in speaking to him in any language whatsoever. "So you're seriously telling me she came, she saw, she conquered?" he said sarcastically.
"I wouldn't have put it in quite that order," Ford said cheerfully. "Buy me a celebratory pint?"
Martin whistled. "Well done, mate," he said. "Get me one too, Arthur?"
"Oh, for God's sake," Arthur muttered, signalling to the barman. "Were you really in college with us, Ford?" he said as Ford seized upon the pint of lager in much the manner of a member of an ambulance crew who'd been imagining a refreshing beer while doing their best to evade the Afrika Korps in a dash across the desert. "No one remembers you and you don't behave like anyone I've ever met. You might as well be a bloody alien."
Ford's glass froze halfway to his mouth.
"I took drugs," he said slowly. "Lot of drugs. They made me only fit for acting. I'm an object lesson, really. But not an alien. Definitely an Earthling, here." He smiled brightly at both of them and held the grin till Arthur's hindbrain felt vaguely worried and decided he should think about something else instead, and maybe back up a few steps cautiously like Martin was doing.
"Why do you have to be so irritating?" Arthur muttered, wondering why Ford never blinked and why he couldn't have taken more drugs while he still could have persuaded himself it was cool and interesting? It was probably better he hadn't, Arthur thought, remembering one embarrassing night when he had sneezed for seven hours in a row. And he might have turned out like Ford, which didn't bear thinking about.
"I saw that a local theatre near me is going to put on A Streetcar Named Desire," he said as a peace offering. "Why don't you audition for it?"
"A streetcar named desire," Ford said, as if Arthur were speaking Esperanto again. He brightened. "I did it with the conductress on the upper deck of the bus home last week," he said. "Do you think that'd help me get in character?"
Arthur paused. Ford was perhaps some sort of retribution the universe had wished on him for having not explored life to its fullest while a student, or an embodiment of anarchy to remind him how tame his life had become since he had realised how irritably nervous London made him and had finally moved to the country. Here he was, sensible and responsible and eternally, irrevocably single and here was Ford, sliding through life with his stupid name and his success with girls and his ability, it seemed, to get regularly drunk at Arthur's expense. It was one of those thoughts that, if Arthur hadn't had it while actually standing at at a bar, would have been sobering. As it was, there was only one possible response. Arthur turned back to the barman.
"Keep them coming," he said grimly.
He was never going to another college reunion as long as he lived.