Page 32 of Lost Souls

“Oh, Arnie, I-I just want to go home.”

Arnie says nothing once again. He simply nods. And cocks his head.

“No,” she decides on impulse, “I want to get right out of Rough Fell altogether!”

Arnie repeats the nothing. And simply smiles.

“And I don’tbloodycare where – oh, excuse my French! Arnie?” asks Noreen Millburn, beginning to stare at her driver in some bemusement. “Are you okay?”

He nods again and continues to drive on what he still considers the stupid side of the road.

“Aren’t you talking to me?” she enquires in some concern. “Is it because of what happened in the hotel bedroom? When that terrible film was playing. Did I hit you too hard?”

He just shakes his head.

A voice from behind him butts in, if indeed a person can butt in on a head shake. “You can overdo the listeningshtick, you know,” I tell the idiot. “Talk to her!”

Arnie nods again, this time in understanding, and turns to his bemused passenger. “So, Noreen, you got any hobbies?”

“Jesus!” I say, then offer a silent apology skywards (you can’t be too careful these days). “For pity’s sake, Garth, tell the poor lady something she wants to hear! ‘You got any hobbies!’Tell her you’ll take her away from all this. Somewhere nice! Somewhere romantic!”

“Yeah, right,” scoffs Arnie, turning to talk to the back seat. “I’m outta cash, my credit cards have all been nixed, the bank thinks I’m a personnon gratisand I’m driving a hot delivery van! Literally!”

“You’re talking to food trays, Arnie,” observes Noreen Millburn.

I have to think for a moment.

Yes, me. I. Your narrator. Ambrose.

Hey, even Collectors of Immortal Souls, Upper Level, Grade 27 – 06 – D, we gotta pause for rumination once in a blue moon.

“I got it!” I cry, in some elation. Okay, okay, I know it’s not like Izzy Newton and the falling Golden Delicious thing or old Alby Einstein with his famous theory, but inits own way it has moment. “Go to Manchester Airport right now. The information desk. There’ll be a passport for Noreen and two tickets to a super-romantic destination, with swanky hotel reservations in your name.”

I can do this sort of thing. When absolutely essential for the plot. Don’t ask.

“Business Class?” says Arnie, to which a stare is the only word I can think of. “Whatever. You’re an angel.”

“Working on it!” I josh, and then disappear from his view before he can ask any more leading, or just plain irritating, questions.

Noreen is gawping at the empty rear of the car and then at Arnie, hoping without huge hope for some sort of an explanation. “Er… Arnie?”

“Eh. Oh, I… have conversations with my poor, dead, departed mother.”

Noreen beams at this – her first of the day. “I do too!My mum, I mean,not yours.The very same thing, Arnie – every night without fail!”

“What are you–nuts?”

They say little more until they approach the airport. Or maybe Noreen still talks but Arnie has simply stopped listening.

Chapter Seventeen

Watch out for the unexpected mushroom.

(Sicilian proverb)

Mrs Angela Wainwright’sMeals on Wheels van, rarely seen in these environs or, indeed, anywhere outside Rough Fell, is rapidly approaching Terminal 2 of Manchester Airport. Arnie finds himself really concentrating, reckoning that if the people round here are only too ready to make big mistakes with their cars and their roads, they’re bound to have cooked up something equally screwy with their car parks.

He can already sense the woolly head of the passenger beside him whirring around like something out of a horror movie. Which, of course, reminds him of his first and now classic award winnerThe Sexorcist. Happy days that now seem so very long ago. He wonders if he will ever produce another erotic masterpiece and go to bed just one more glorious time with a new and golden dick in his hands. It doesn’t bear thinking about. And, of course, he has far more pressing concerns.