Page 13 of Lost Souls

When the young woman slowly slides herself back over the table and turns to stare at Arnie, the visitor’s first wish is that she could have been named Noreen. For this is a person with whom Arnie Garth could quite easily imagine falling in love, and of course she with him. Not that he has ever fallen in love with anyone, if he is being honest, except possibly himself. Nor, to his knowledge, has anyone actually uttered those simple, somewhat helpless, all too profoundly exposing words in his vicinity. At least not with any earnestness. Or whilst entirely sober.

This actually doesn’t upset him in the least. He has no need for these crass and humiliating outpourings of affection – well, at least, he hadn’t until this life-or-death week – and he would in fact have been quite embarrassed, indeed nonplussed, should they ever have been aimed in his direction. When he thinks about it, he does believe that on a couple of occasions Cleo herself might have come pretty close, but he could be mistaking this for something she once said in a movie.

Arnie ponders on this but knows in his heart – if, indeed, he has one and this hasn’t also gone to someone less deserving down the line – that really, he doesn’t much care. In a curious way, Arnie Garth can now almostjustify to himself the relentlessly appalling behaviour, in thought, word and deed, that he is well aware causes so many others to think so very badly of him. To detest him, in fact. It was simply an accident of birth. A snafu in the system. Not his fault and nothing he can do about it. Except, of course…

But she’s tomorrow’s problem.

“This way, sir,” says Rosie. “Mind your head,” she adds, just a fraction too late to stop him from banging his baldness really hard on a dimly lit and unnecessarily low Tudor beam.

“Owwww!”

He can hear the unmuffled laughter from the locals as he follows the young woman’s appealingly nimble frame up the narrow staircase. He doesn’t catch the landlord happily chalking another tick onto a slate behind the bar.

“Ayyyy – ooohhh – owwww!” continues Arnie’s Elizabethan serenade.

“You really want to watch out for those beams,” says Rosie, pertly manoeuvring herself around another hairpin stair-bend.

“Ya think?” grumbles Arnie in the darkness, once again knocking his suitcase into the historic structure’soppressively tight and deceptively curving walls. It’s like being on an antique version of Space Mountain.

“Elizabethan folk, they were smaller than we are,” explains Rosie. She turns to him with a mischievous grin as they appear to reach their destination. “Smaller all over, probly.” Before he can fully appreciate this attempt at some form of local hospitality or – dare he think it – flirting, she adds, “So, you in from the coast?”

“Excuse me?” says Arnie in surprise, letting his suitcase drop so that he can rub his dented and bruising head with both sweaty hands.

Rosie opens the door to the aforementioned Windermere Room, whose dominant attribute could indeed be age. This would seem to apply not simply to the bed and the period furniture but to the linen, the paintwork, the curtains, the crockery, the television and the dust. In addition to what could well be the original oaken beams and stupidly inadequate windows, the room appears to have retained the original cobwebs and quite possibly odour. There is a large fireplace beside the bed, complete with fully filled brass coal scuttle, neither of which Arnie has the first idea how to use.

Sensing her new guest’s unfettered distaste, intercut with a less anticipated sense of mortal terror, whose origins she has no way of guessing, Rosie immediately opens all the windows and starts to plump up the pillows with enviable vigour. Despite all that is going on for him, including his imminent death or worse, Arnie Garth finds that he can’t take his eyes off this alluring little domestic as she busily skitters around the room, straightening and nudging things with solid shoulders, pointy elbowsand tiny feet, in an exercise redolent less of Cumbrian welcome than of pure damage limitation.

“You think we’ve never seen an American before?” she says in a curiously appealing if not wholly decipherable accent, flicking away what could be biscuit crumbs from a previous guest or century. “You’re all over the bloody place round here – like McDonald’s. You come up from London, on your way to do Scotland in an afternoon, and you’ll fit in some snapping and pottering and a bit of fell-walking for good luck. Some of you even have a go at tracing your ancestors, like they’re not all dead and buried. Is that why you’re here?”

Arnie, whose current mission is trying not to be an ancestor just yet, shakes his battered head. But Rosie is clearly on a roll.

“We had a film crew in a while back. Took over the whole sodding village and drank everything going. That movie about Wordsworth and Coleridge – did you see it?”

She points to a framed still on the wall, just above a battered kettle and a jug of milk on the turn. It shows a very young and fairly solemn Tom Cruise and an equally stern Denzel Washington wearing frilly shirts and long, curly wigs. Underneath is the logo of the movie, done like two scratchily quilled signatures:WILL & SAM.

“That art-house crap?” sneers Arnie. “It only did $10 million domestic. And that wasdespitethe Oscar nod for best hair.”

Rosie’s wide hazel eyes suddenly flame up like those bonfires the Brits light every year to celebrate their Parliament not being blown to smithereens, although some apparently regret it now. She turns to her guest withrenewed interest.

“Are you in the industry?”

Arnie gives a falsely modest shrug. “You just blew my cover. Why do you ask, Rosie?”

“Because I… I’m an actress!”

“Oh, shit.No shit?”He dumps his suitcase on the bed, which appears to sink visibly. “So, you appear in the movie?”

The smile instantly vanishes from the young woman’s winsomely freckled face. “No!I didn’t even know they were shooting a poxy movie, did I? I was working in a bar over in Ibiza, wasn’t I? Just ’cos I was on holiday, I’d missed every sodding thing, hadn’t I? And it issounfair, ’cos Iaman actress, aren’t I? The best one in the whole village!I was Annie!”

“Yeah?” says the weary guest, who is losing interest fast.

To Arnie’s surprise and instant upturn in interest, the pretty barmaid now gets down on her knees directly in front of him. Before he can fully begin to marvel at the unanticipated but far from unwelcome level of hospitality accorded to people in his industry by young English womanhood – and just as he is wondering if this is in fact a test from heaven – Rosie begins to sing “Maybe” from her musical triumph.

“Unbelievable!” proclaims a somewhat thrown Arnie, attempting to maintain enthusiasm. “And so unexpected.”

“You like it?” she says, continuing to belt out the famous opening song at an even greater volume.

“‘Like’ isn’t the word, kid. Please stop.” He smiles at her in gratitude for the sudden silence. “Hey, maybe I canfind a part for you inWill and Sam – Reloaded!”