Page 12 of Lost Souls

“Whaddaya mean ‘oh’?”

“Did I not say this? Mea culpa.” I shake my head, somewhat sadly. “Arnie, my friend, you gotta make her love youwithoutyou revealing what we might both call the ‘backstory’. Not that your particular cinematic genre goes gangbusters on backstory. Blow my cover, tell her she got your soul as a twofer with her own in some heavenly bureaucratic screw-up, and you instantly void the offer. Plus, of course, you’ll be dead.”

“Hey, pal,” insists Arnie, with a smile of total (and totally unjustified) smugness, “the only thing getting blown here will be me. You, sir, are looking at the – the Dalai Lama of erotica. I can charm any dame I meet.”

I have to smile back at him. It’s not often one of my guys leaves me to deliver the perfect exit line. Or at least not one they’re still alive to hear.

“Arnie, you haven’t met Noreen Millburn.”

Chapter Five

History is constantly teaching, but it does not find many pupils.

(Austrian proverb)

By the timeArnie Garth’s black cab finally – and I can only imagine triumphantly – enters the sleepy little Cumbrian village where this Noreen-Two-Souls is meant to hang out, I am nowhere to be seen (or to be not-seen), and Arnie’s lower back is giving him hell. So, he is quiterelieved when they pull up at the old marketplace in the very heart of Rough Fell. And even more heartened to find, right there on a corner, the Wordsworth Arms, a local pub which advertises rooms to rent.

The evening is, not unexpectedly, dark and drizzly, so the newcomer has scant opportunity to appreciate the beauty and grandeur of the landscape in which he has surprisingly found himself. He can see only the vaguest outlines of the hills, or maybe even mountains, which surround him. He can, of course, still admire, by the light of the quasi-Victorian street lamps, the dusty grey stonework of the picturesque village itself and the rustic Cumbrian charm of this historic market square, with its tiny shops and cafés and replica gibbet. But, naturally, he does no such thing, because Arnie Garth, late of LA, doesn’t give a shit about scenery. The bucolic makes him nauseous, and he just wants his bed.

When he eventually manages to extricate himself, in some considerable pain, from the steamy rear of the cab, Arnie notices that a few of the locals, who are loitering outside the pub, have chosen to stare fixedly, if slightly blearily, at him. They look as if they could have been here for centuries, in their drab rustic garb, holding dusty pint glasses and being dour and drizzled upon. He wonders for a senseless moment if they actually recognise him – he has been known to do an Alfred Hitchcock in some of his movies (if Hitch ever did a cameo stark naked). Then he realises that he is still dressed for southern California, in skimpy Hawaiian shirt, linen pants and shades. He starts to shiver.

“Right, guv,” says the cabbie, hefting Arnie’s LouisVuitton suitcase from the trunk of his cab and dumping it on the damp and cobbled street. “Arse end of nowhere. That’ll be set rate of five hundred and eighty-seven quid.”

“You are fucking kidding me!” says Arnie Garth, which causes the locals to laugh in gentle derision.

“Call it a round six hundred,” says the cabbie, as Arnie begins peeling off nearly all the notes from the serious wad in his pocket.

The cab driver grabs the money swiftly and leaps back into his vehicle, glad to see the back of his weird passenger and, indeed, of the equally mystifying North. But before he leaves, he hurls one final thought into the chill Lakeland air.

“Anyone going to Heathrow?”

Always worth a try, but sadly no takers. Yet the Cockney-eyed optimist still switches on his ‘for hire’ light, as he roars off around the square and back to southern normality.

Arnie lifts his suitcase out of a convenient puddle and trudges towards the pub, nodding to the curious customers, who simply stare in vaguely threatening silence, like assorted townsfolk in aDraculamovie.

The heavy door opens with a creak. Of course it does. The pub interior, decked out with everything from ancient wooden ploughshares on the ceiling to cracked old pharmaceutical bottles on practically every shelf, is itself like a tired film set. Indeed, some years ago, when he naively thought that his audiences gave a damn about storylines, or at least would appreciate his doing so, Arnie had constructed something not dissimilar that was meant to be set in the Highlands of Scotland. Despite the noveltyof pop-up kilts and the tossing of human cabers,Throb Royhad not been a success, and he had reverted to less atmospheric LA-style dross.

Determined not to be intimidated by the scrutiny of yet more beery villagers, Arnie drags his now sopping suitcase to the well-stocked and brightly lit bar. Local ales vie with national favourites, whilst above them, lined up like soldiers preparing for battle and imminent vanquishment, is a formidable array of spirits, some of which Arnie has actually heard of and several of which he wouldn’t touch unless his mouth was forced open. To his relief, the landlord, a huge man with a red face and equally fiery foliage, offers him a warm smile from behind his beard and bar, accompanied by something in an almost impenetrable accent.

“And a good evening to you, sir. What can I get you?”

“Huh?”

The larger man repeats his words, only slower and far louder, which usually works with foreigners. And idiots. Looking at his visitor’s attire, he senses that he might have struck the double here.

“Bourbon with a twist. And the number of the nearest Sheraton.”

“Ah,” the landlord grins from somewhere inside the hair, “you’re looking for a place to stay. Well, today’s your lucky day, sir.”

Arnie seriously doubts this but keeps his own counsel.

“It just so happens we’ve got a lovely old room available, one of our finest and most historic, with a splendid view of the hills and a spacious bathroom very nearly ensuite. First time in the Lakes, sir?”

“You mean people come back?”

The landlord gives a deep, rumbling laugh. “You’ve been learning irony on the plane coming over.”

He calls to a young woman who, as Arnie now notices with an appreciation both chemical and professional, is bending firmly over a long, low table at the far end of the room in order to collect the empty glasses. “Rosie, kindly escort our new guest to the Windermere Room.”