Chapter Nine
Faint heart never won fair lady.
(English proverb)
Our benighted passenger has no illusions that Noreen Millburn, in her World War Two helmet and goggles, can even hear his screams over the engine’s angry yet oddly asthmatic roar as the rusty contraption bumps and rattles over what apparently pass as roads in the wilder reaches of England’s celebrated Lake District.
Arnie sees absolutely nothing to celebrate, as the same black, blue and balding American head that had struck every low-slung Tudor beam just hours before is yet again finding something brain-damagingly unyielding with which to connect.
So, it comes as no surprise to the beery regulars of the Wordsworth Arms to be witnessing their village’s (and indeed the entire region’s) most eccentric resident enter its local hostelry with a scrunched-up fellow traveller cradled like an oversized infant in her burly arms. But they still keep their distance.
(And ‘eccentric’ is my word, not theirs.)
Arnie is in too much pain to notice the communal recoil on his and Noreen’s arrival.
But he just catches a muttered, “It’s alright, lad – no cans,” a remark he misinterprets on first hearing as being mysteriously sexual, until he realises that the crowd is simply expressing its relief that for once in a millennium, Noreen Millburn is not collecting.
She is, in fact, doing quite the reverse. The laden woman is clearly delivering.
The universal sigh follows them up the stairs as they hear Noreen’s helmet crash into every beam going, alongside Arnie’s yelps as one after another rarely used muscle goes into spasm.
“How’s the stiffness?” asks Noreen as they reach the top of the stairs, where she has been informed that Arnie’s room awaits.
“I’m working on it,” says Arnie instinctively, employing lines from his old movies to centre and calm him, much in the manner decent people use mantras or affirmations.
She sets him down on the worn carpet outside his room, although his posture remains much the same as when he was in the sidecar. To an observer, he would resemble an oversized foetus with a tan.
Noreen gives the heavy but low wooden door a tiny push. It creaks open.
“I musta forgot to lock it.” He smiles in what he considers a charming manner. “In my excitement at meeting you after all these years, cousin.” A thought suddenly strikes him. “But not such a close relative that we can’t…”
“Can’t what?” asks a genuinely mystified Noreen, at the doorway.
“Y’know.” His mind is racing. “Obviously, the way I am now, the pain I’m in, I’ll need your help, Noreen, sweetheart. Undressing. Getting into bed. Ordering breakfast…”
Arnie leads the way, managing to straighten up slightly into what he might consider, were he in a classical frame of mind, a sort of Richard III configuration.
Moving round the door, in this summer of his discontent, he can’t help but notice, in the dusty, moonlit room, that there is a person already in his bed.
Waving.
He has a pretty good idea who it is. And what she isn’t wearing.
Instantly, he straightens up and cracks his head on the doorframe. Ignoring the shock and the dizziness, he backs out of the room – right into his deliverer, almost knocking her down the stairs.
“Mr Garth!” exclaims Noreen. “What is it?”
“Nothing! It’s nothing, my sweet!” He is thinking impressively fast for someone with possibly permanent brain damage.
And talking surprisingly quietly. “Y’know, it has been just so great, Noreen,” he whispers.
“You, me, the stars, the carrot. Funny, I feel like I’ve known you all my life.
Longer, even. And I feel like we’re truly bonded.
You know. Soulmates, in fact. Please, call me Arnie. Now go away.”
Noreen has no idea whether to feel flattered, valued or dismissed.
But she has a lifetime’s experience of knowing where she isn’t wanted.
Which round here is practically everywhere.
Except perhaps where she is doing her good work, and even then she senses that the people who value her contribution immensely and are totally overawed by her self-sacrifice (she has even volunteered to catch salmonella in place of someone more vulnerable) still can’t help feeling that she is a royal pain in the arse.
So, despite being somewhat taken aback, she graciously shrugs and retreats, with her helmeted head bowed low, down the precarious stairs.
“Goodnight, Mr Garth,” she mumbles.
As she arrives at the first semi-lethal turn of the staircase, Noreen Millburn reaches deep into the over-generous pocket of her most intimate home-knitted cardigan and produces a small, white ferret.
“That is a very odd person, Stanley,” she informs the bemused rodent.
***
Rosie gives the room’s paying guest a massive beam – but not a Tudor one – as he gently closes the door.
“Thank you for winning the war,” she smiles, allowing the bed linen to fall where it may.
Arnie smiles at this lovely and incredibly hospitable young woman. He had heard that the Brits could be a bit frosty, but this is a standard of room service for which even Fodor’s would award five stars.
“Is this just because I’m a major Hollywood producer looking to cast his next big movie with local talent?” he asks.
To which she simply grins.
“Hey, it works overseas too!”
Despite the near-concussion, Arnie Garth moves towards Rosie, instinctively unbuttoning his mud-splattered shirt. Remember, this is a guy who found his way here without any moral compass.
Yet a sudden sound from outside in the street makes him pause at the foot of the bed.
It is the sputtering of Noreen’s ancient motorbike, with its empty sidecar.
He immediately drops the button business and offers the expectant young woman an apologetic smile, tinged with more than a hint of genuine, lust-sodden regret.
“Y’know, Annie—”
“Rosie.”
“Whatever. Y’know, maybe this ain’t such a good idea. Tell you the truth, sweetheart, it’s a weird old time for me and… I need to concentrate all my energies on… er, well…”
Rosie slinks out of the bed and glides towards him, draped in a very thin and not entirely pristine sheet.
“Don’t tell me you’re saving yourself for batty Noreen?”
Now she is standing right next to him. Arnie, who has never refused a good thing – or, indeed, a mediocre thing – is in a mental agony almost the equal of his musculoskeletal one.
“N-n-no way. I-I-I’m married, Rosie! That’s it! I’m a married guy!”
She runs a delicate Cumbrian finger down his unshaven face.
“Oh – and I’m gay! I’m a gay, married guy! A gay, married, fundamentalist Christian guy.” Now he’s imploring. “‘Y.M.C.A’… ‘Chapel of Love’… ‘Amazing Grace’.”
Rosie, who is no stranger to the classics, appears to regard this as catnip and begins to blow in Arnie’s ear.
“Rosie!” he begs. “Please, baby – you’re putting my weak heart at risk. Not to mention my immortal soul.”
“You’re a big Hollywood producer. You probably don’t have a soul.”
“I’m frigging working on it!”
Our soulless Hollywood producer watches with something approaching terror as the young woman’s luscious lower lip begins to tremble and her soft hazel eyes go frighteningly moist. This whole business, it should be stressed, is not Rosie’s customary MO.
Far from it. The inferno of her own ambition has actually begun to terrify even her.
But opportunities don’t grow on trees, not even in the fertile Lakes, and she is just too damn big for Rough Fell.
“So, you don’t want me? Is that what you’re saying?” She rustles the sheet.
Arnie immediately bites his knuckles, until the skin begins to crack. But he knows without looking that he is more than a little aroused.
“Er… yeah. Right. You got it. How freaky is that? Oh – and I have a prostate problem. PSA up the kazoo!”
The young, rejected wannabe star is clearly offended. Wrapping the sheet back firmly and semi-modestly around her, she turns away.
“Fine. Fine. I have no idea what that is, probably something American, but I’ll go then. Oh, Arnie…”
“Yeah?”
She leans into him again, and he can smell the intoxicatingly cheap, mass-produced scent in which she appears to have drenched herself. “If you change your mind…?”
“Yeah?”
Rosie, a woman and artiste scorned, deftly picks up the heavy brass coal scuttle from the olde English fireplace and hangs it where his designer-pants are tightest. He winces in pain.
“Light your own fire.”
“Good line!” he manages to grunt, before collapsing at the side of the newly vacated bed.