Chapter Eight
A pig used to dirt turns up his nose at rice.
(Japanese proverb)
By the time they 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 he is 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 see that!”
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. “I could 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 tell you 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.”
“Apex! I just told you. They want to build it right here – well, just off the road over there.” She points into the near distance. “Most of it on my poor late mum’s land! In fact, you’re sitting just where she’s buried.”
Arnie begins to squirm. “Must be a first for her. So, what’s the problem with a fourteen-screen leisure complex for Chrissakes? With gyms and shops and bowling alleys and restaurants. You could make a bundle!”
“You would say that. They’d probably be showing your films.”
“I wish.”
“Nobody seems to understand. I don’t want money.
I’m happy here. This is where I belong. Where I’m wanted.
Where I’m needed. This is where I can really do good.
All day and every day. And night. Including Christmas and Bank Holidays.
” She pauses for a moment. “On second thoughts…” She rips the cigar out of the bewildered man’s mouth before he can even light it and stuffs it in a woolly pocket.
“I’m sorry, Arnie, but all life is precious. Even yours.”
“Excuse me asking, Noreen, but are you on medication?”
“No.”
“You should consider it.” Even in the darkness, he can feel her staring at him. “Hey, this Latex thing – or whatever – it’s your choice. Big deal. Not my problem.”
On reflection, he decides that he might be better off finding a more seductive point of entry, which, if you think about it, has been his stock-in-trade for years.
“What I mean is, sweetheart – kinfolk – cuz – you should get out more. Schmoozing, networking. Pressing the flesh. Y’know, meeting people.”
In the darkness, Arnie can sense his curious companion of the evening flinch. As if somewhere inside all that raw wool and knitted vests, a nerve has been exposed and prodded.
“I’ve met – ‘people’!”
Arnie has no idea what to make of this, as it sounded like it was charged with depth and resonance. Our guy doesn’t do depth and resonance. So, he is quite relieved when she changes the subject.
“How exactly are we related?”
Arnie hadn’t fully thought this one through, but a name she is seriously unlikely to know springs instantly – and thankfully – to mind.
“Er… exactly through my great-uncle, Harry. Harry… Reems.”
“Never heard of him.”
“No. You wouldn’t have. He was kind of… a black sheep.”
At this point, with what even Arnie has to concede is impeccable timing, they hear the bleat of a Herdwick coming from right beside them. Arnie had totally forgotten that Geoffrey had joined them for their walk on the wild side.
“Go back to sleep, Geoffrey,” coos his foster mum. “So, this Mr Reems…?”
Arnie has no intention of venturing into the lineage and history of the revered Harry Reems, star of Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones, a man included in the XRCO Hall of Fame (look him up; it’ll make your hair curl).
But the late, great, ridiculously well-endowed star is going to be a stand-up guy again tonight.
“‘Arnie,’ he’d say, ‘if you’re ever in’ – wherever the hell we are – ‘go see Noreen.’” He pauses, remembering those plastic stringy things cluttering up the cottage. “‘Maybe she can help you… with your leprosy.’”
Noreen is immediately on the case. In the moonlight, Arnie can observe her large eyes, just visible beneath that ridiculous hat, suddenly fill with tears. How does she do that? he thinks, wondering, with one eye as ever on niche markets, whether she has other neat tricks.
“You’ve got leprosy, Arnie?”
“It comes and goes,” he explains. “Especially… when I’m hungry.”
Noreen immediately segues from riven with compassion into wracked with guilt. “Oh, Arnie. I wasn’t thinking. I am just so sorry. Can you ever forgive me?”
He can see the bobble on top of her hat quiver with shame.
“I don’t get many visitors,” she explains. “Well, not human ones – or Americans. Actually, I don’t get any. Ever. I’ve a sort of feeling I know why. I’m not stupid. Oh, just listen to me going on! Would you like something to eat? Yes, of course you would!”
Arnie immediately leaps up from the late Mrs Millburn’s makeshift grave, shocking Geoffrey and indeed his equally woolly but slightly more human companion.
“Thought you’d never ask, Senora M! Grab your coat – a little make-up wouldn’t hurt – and point me to the nearest hibachi grill and then we’ll—”
He is halted by a massive carrot, as it is deftly withdrawn, like a rabbit from a magician’s hat, out of the none-too-pristine top pocket of Noreen’s second-most uppermost cardigan.
“Here,” she offers.
Arnie stares down at it in disgust. “Hey, sister, now Arnie Garth enjoys a good carrot as much as the next man – if the next man is a friggin’ vegan nut job!
But I was thinking that maybe we’d go someplace fancy.
Y’know, with chairs and stuff. And electricity.
Then we could kinda get to know each other. ”
“I really don’t think so,” says Noreen. “You see, Mr Garth, I have to be up bright and early in the morning to clean out the bedpans at the local old peoples’ home.”
“Boy, you musta done something really bad to get that,” says the appalled producer. “How many hours did they sentence you to? You have to wear a tunic or—”
“You do talk such rubbish! It’s voluntary, Arnie. I do it out of love. And then in the afternoon I’m giving blood at two, plasma at three and bone marrow at four. Now come on. Chop chop. I shall give you a lift back to your hotel.”
“You drive a car?” says Arnie Garth.
“Not exactly,” says Noreen Millburn.
Bouncing up from her rock, as if all the damp and saturated knitting encasing her muscular body weighs nothing, Noreen starts back towards the house at a brisk, no-nonsense pace, leaving Arnie with his carrot.
And Geoffrey. When he stares after her, Noreen Millburn is backlit by that huge, unblemished moon.
For a moment, his two-souled Lady of the Lakes appears to emit an unearthly glow.
It reminds him, to his horror, of a halo.
He suddenly recalls one of his more spiritual movies, Thong of Bernadette.
“Jesus Christ!” he says. Turning to follow her, he sees a sleepy sheep looking up at him. Arnie chucks him the unbitten carrot. “Wanna put in a good word for me?” At which old Geoffrey, barely continent at the best of times, simply adds his toxic contribution to the Cumbrian wind.