Page 16 of Lost Souls

“Andyour long-lost cousin.”

He reckons that this is quite inspired. Even though, on looking hard at this Noreen person, whom he seriously doubts has any relatives on two legs, Arnie is already beginning to fear that the whole encounter is an emotional lost cause. A total non-starter in the redemption stakes. A death sentence. If it’s true about the Grim Reaper, he could well be staring at her.

“I don’t have any cousins,” says Noreen Millburn.

“That’s because I’m long lost, you stupid b—” He stops just in time and ratchets down his anger. Especially as he senses some of the fiercer animals in the room, especially the goats, just preparing to rear. “I mean – I brought flowers!” He holds up a bunch of pale-green stalks. The more flowery heads are now, thanks to the recent canine assault, strewn all over the floor.

“That’s very nice, Mr Garth,” says Noreen, never wishing to be impolite. “But I’ve got flowers, thank you. This is the countryside.”

“No kidding.” He looks around the dingy, squalid, clearly poverty-ridden old cottage, where strange plastic box things on strings and mounds of knitted woolly objects vie to be the main source of decoration, along with discarded blue wrappers from something unrecognisable. What could pass as admiration, or at least slightly diminished repugnance, colours his face.

“Hey, Ilovewhat you done with this place.”

“I haven’t done anything with it.”

“Exactly!” He gestures around the pathetic little parlour. “So many people, they’re into… y’know, taste. Cleanliness. Self-respect. But you, Ms Noreen Millburn, you’re earthy.” He gives her his best, dentally enhancedsmile. “I like that in a woman.”

For some reason, perhaps nudged by his recent trek and the incessant, gusty rain beating at and through the cottage window, an idea for a movie involving naked and deeply energetic mud-wrestling slithers like a silty rivulet into his mind.SomewhereinSlime? Flesh and Mud?He never ceases to marvel how the fertile creative mind simply refuses to take a break.

Soiling the moment, Noreen thumps his small be-ringed hand with her own heavy fist. As he recoils, she makes a suggestion that takes him completely by surprise.

“Would you like to see something really beautiful, Mr Garth?”

Chapter Eight

A pig used to dirt turns up his nose at rice.

(Japanese proverb)

By the timethey reach the small lake, barely a pond by local standards but ravishing nonetheless in the summer moonlight, the rain has miraculously taken a breather. Perhaps it has popped over one of the many adjacent and still stunning mountains to give the folks on that other side a torrentially hard time.

Arnie Garth, his once fine caramel-and-cream buffalo-leather shoes now encrusted with genuine Cumbrian mud, can at least glimpse the moon now, whose best side dominates the newly cleared sky. If quizzed, not that heis a moon expert, he would be forced to admit that it is indeed larger and possibly even brighter than any moon he has set eyes upon in the past. There are some pretty brilliant stars up there too, in the impressively unpolluted firmament. It is as if someone has poked pinholes in the night then aimed the biggest Klieg light in the world directly at it.

Arnie turns to Noreen, who is staring at the familiar vista with an intensity so rapt she has almost forgotten that her newly arrived and slightly toad-like cousin, long lost and now re-emerged from somewhere or other, is standing right beside her.

“So, where’s the beautiful bit?” asks the visitor, just starting to shiver.

Noreen gives a start, which swiftly turns into a throaty chuckle, until she realises that this curious stranger, to whom she hasn’t as yet found herself in any way warming but knows in all charity that she must, is completely and utterly serious.

“Just look around you, Mr Garth,” she says.

“It’s Arnie, and I’m lookin’. I been lookin’ forever. All I see is scenery and night.”

“Well, if Apex Holdings has its way, you won’t even seethat!”

The woman now looks infinitely sad, her wind-hardened face almost caving in with the pain. A block of volcanic Skiddaw slate would be moved to tears.

“No? That is awful!” says an unmoved Arnie Garth, staring into her moistening eyes. “Tell me more, Noreen.” He gives her his best smile, tilting his head in the hope that his expensive teeth will glint in the moonlight. “Icould listen to you all night.”

In movies, even the ones Arnie makes, there are such structural and editing techniques as dissolves or fades which enable the storyteller to denote the passage of time and hopefully cut out what, for the audience, might be the less involving elements. Such as, for example, the bit between the hunky young plumber parking his van on the posh driveway and the time, perhaps a half hour later, when he leaps upon the delighted and equally posh lady of the house. This omission might conceivably involve his carrying out the repair of the washing machine that this subsequently over-grateful lady had actually booked him in to do, but it would afford little stimulation other than possibly to white-good fetishists.

Arnie finds himself wishing that life itself could be as susceptible to an editor’s touch. And that he wouldn’t still be sitting on a dumb rock beside this apology for a lake, shivering in his cool and now ruined LA clothing, whilst listening to the unintelligible ramblings of a madwoman with whom he has to fall sincerely and genuinely in love within five days, or hellishly die. And, equally impossibly, must induce this sexless swamp creature to fall madly – or at least sufficiently – in love with him.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” he asks in a final burst of inspiration, hoping that the heat of a good cigar might ward off almost inevitable hypothermia, if only for a few, warming minutes.

“Of course not, Mr Garth,” says Noreen, kindly. “But as a supporter of several lung cancer charities, daily hospice visitor and regular participant in the Pulmonary Pullover Knitathon, I would be remiss if I didn’t tellyou that you might well die in agonising discomfort as a result.”

“Right now, sister, that’s the least of my worries,” says Arnie Garth as he gets out one of his precious Romeo y Julietas. “So, tell me about Ajax.”