Chapter Four
Learn a new language and get a new soul.
(Czech proverb)
We’re not quite on location yet – but we are on our way. Get your umbrellas out!
Of course, the hospital in LA was beyond delighted to see the broad Hawaiian back of Arnie Garth departing through their electronic sliding doors into the unrelenting California sunshine, but no more so than their irascible patient was to be doing the exit vertically, on his own two well-shod feet and in an even more vivid shirt than the one in which he first so dramatically and horizontally arrived.
I can’t say for certain that the staff were amazed at his remarkable recovery – courtesy of yours truly – but the expression ‘the Devil looks after his own’ was heard on more than one occasion in corridors and cafeterias, which is hardly a medical supposition but is most certainly a human one (and almost definitely misguided; if I know anything about the downstairs people – and, unfortunately, I know a fair bit – they would have been only too delighted to claim my little turd for eternity and beyond).
I almost wanted to reassure the good but beleaguered hospital folks that this could well be a temporary arrangement and that a more probable scenario would be to see the soulless little homunculus, who gave them such a hard time, well and truly expired by the following weekend, but they would think I was only trying to cheer them up.
So, I kept my own counsel and didn’t reveal myself to them, or even indeed to Arnie Garth himself, until we were in one of those iconic London taxis on our way out of Heathrow Airport after taking an exhausting red-eye from LAX (well, exhausting for him; I sleep like a dead person).
Notice the abrupt change of scene? And it cost me nothing.
Bupkis. The magic of the written word. Mind you, it cost Arnie Garth a fortune.
Serves the horny little snob right for only travelling first class.
I really wanted to tell this seriously fraught man, whilst he was arranging his mercy-mission at breakneck speed, that the United Kingdom, on which he had never previously set Gucci moccasin, was bigger than he might have assumed in his narrow LA mind.
And that Heathrow Airport to the Lake District by black cab would be a major expense.
But I had to concur that time was indeed of the essence and that Arnie Garth, one of the nation’s wealthiest eroticrats, was not a huge fan of public transport.
The trouble with suddenly manifesting right next to someone who has just had a major heart attack or two is that you could make their heart stop majorly all over again.
But it seemed like there was nothing else for it, as I still didn’t think that Arnie had quite grasped the challenges of his particular journey. And we are not just talking jet lag.
So here I am, in the back seat of one of London’s famous black hansom cabs – a first for me, too – making sure that my ‘client’, if this is what I may prematurely call him, is up to speed.
“Okay, so I meet this Brit woman, this Lady friggin’ Two-Souls,” he says, when he has recovered from the inevitable shock and adjusted to my presence, “then what, Ambien?”
“Then you cut off her head with a mystic sword. And it’s Ambrose.”
I can see the cab driver in his mirror, a middle-aged Cockney gentleman who clearly thought Christmas and Rosh Hashanah had come all at once when a loud American in the wrong clothes for this time, or indeed any time, hired him from the taxi rank to travel the length of the country, rather than just to make another familiar traffic-laden slog to some plush hotel in the West End.
He has no idea who his passenger is talking to – he can see no sign of a phone or an earpiece – and is just beginning to fret that he is going to be several hours on the road with a mad person.
“Say WHAT?” says Arnie Garth.
“I’m kidding, Arnie. That’s Highlander.”
I lower my voice now because this is the serious bit. The part of the plan that I’m not sure this Arnie guy is totally on top of. The big slug of plot I want to reduce down to a manageable size by keeping my cool.
“You just have to get her to fall in love with you. Body and soul would be good.”
This is when he really starts to stare at me. And the cabbie really starts to stare in his mirror at the space where I would be, if he could only see me.
“Get her to fall in love…?” repeats Arnie, looking stunned.
“You got it. By George!”
“Hey, I’ve always been pretty good getting women in the sack.”
“That’s nice,” says the driver. “I’m a married man myself.”
“Fall in love, Arnie, not bed,” I explain. And, as if this isn’t shock enough, quite casually I add the clincher. What this guy I’m (invisibly) with might call the deal-breaker. “Oh – and Arnie, you have got to fall in love with her, too.”
Now he is frozen. Now I’ve caught his full attention.
“I fall in love,” says Arnie, robotically.
“Lots of visitors fall in love with England,” chirps the cabbie, with a friendly Cockney smile and a sudden yearning for normality. “But they usually wait till we get out of the airport.”
“And it has to be true love, my friend. Accept no substitutes. You get me? True love on both sides. Or – well, it just won’t take.”
“True love,” repeats Arnie, like it’s an expression he’s never heard before. “What? Like sharing feelings? Sacrificing my needs for hers? Bargaining when she says no to kinky stuff?”
“See? You got two out of three, so I know you can do this.”
“Look,” he says, raising his voice, “you just keep your part of the deal. Capisce? I don’t die.”
“Listen, guv,” says the cabbie, “I’ve been driving twenty-five years. Ain’t lost a passenger yet.”
“Was I talking to you?”
“Then who…? My luck – another fruitcake!” The driver turns his attention back to the road. It’s going to be a long journey.
Knowing that at least one of us can’t be heard, I continue the mission statement and wonder whimsically if I will self-destruct after delivery.
“And you both gotta mean it, Arnie. No faking it, this time, you hear what I’m saying?
You have both to utter those three little words for real and out loud. ”
“For… real?” whispers Arnie.
“Uh huh. Out loud.”
“I – LOVE – YOU?”
The cabbie reaches an arm out behind him and deftly slides closed the glass divider. He is aware that Yanks can be a lot freer with their emotions than the buttoned-up natives of this island, but not on his watch, thank you very much.
“See, once you feel it and say it for real – say it like you mean it, Arnie – you’re, like the expression goes, ‘as one’. Two souls, one housing. You see? Sorta like Siamese soulmates. And you all live happily ever after. Music. Roll credits. Aaahhh.”
To my surprise, at this point Arnie Garth actually smiles. His first for a while.
“That’s it? So basically, it’s what I just said; I gotta score with some babe. No one says nix to the Arnster. Bring it on, Soul Man.”
My day just got a lot more difficult.
“No, Arnie,” I say gently, as if talking to a three-year old. Not that I get to chat to too many of those, thank the Lord. “You have to make her love you. L-O-V-E, as the late Nat King Cole used to sing – and still does; try and stop him – but that’s another story.”
Oh, okay, thinks Arnie, his brows making those ridges like deep thinking is something pretty new to him, which I very much suspect it is.
“Well, once she knows that if she doesn’t start lovin’ me pretty damn quick, she’ll be sending me to an early death and straight down to hell, she’d have to be a seriously mean broad not to go the extra mile.”
“Oh.”
“Whaddaya mean ‘oh’?”
“Did I not say this? Mea culpa.” I shake my head, somewhat sadly.
“Arnie, my friend, you gotta make her love you without you 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.”