Chapter Eleven
Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper.
(Latin proverb)
We’re back in the lovely but distinctly chillier Lake District and on to the following morning.
Which, as I’m still utilising the powerfully immediate present tense (as employed by some of my favourite, not so present authors), is actually right this minute.
And isn’t staying in this actual moment – the very now of things – what all the therapists these days are swearing is the key to a longer, happier life? At least, the ones I meet are.
Mind you…
Anyway. Onwards. Avanti!
Arnie Garth, cleansed, shaved and clad in a freshly inappropriate outfit, is making his painful way down the stairs to a much-needed English breakfast. Before he can even grab a rustic chair, he hears a commotion in the normally quiet, and by all accounts quaint, village street.
Suddenly, the pub door flies open and locals of all sorts, male and female, old and young, drab and – well, drab – start piling into the pub. They appear in some sort of a panic, and within seconds the small, fusty room is full.
“What’s up?” asks the bemused guest. “They playin’ a Romanian movie in the street?”
The villagers all stare at him, blank-faced, as well they might. With a sigh, he strolls over to the pub door and starts to pull it open.
“What are you doing, man?” yelps one of the older villagers.
“Are you mad?” calls another.
“Don’t go out there!” warn almost all the rest.
Arnie gives them a look of contemptuous pity – he’s seen that movie – and exits onto the newly vacated pavement (or ‘sidewalk’, as Arnie would call it).
Normally the high street of Rough Fell, which is pretty much its only street, would be bustling with people going about their daily business.
Arnie can’t imagine what such business might be, in this godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere, but he assumes that the locals know and are happy to bustle at it.
This morning, however, the drizzly street is completely empty.
He thinks that he does catch one stray person, in the distance, hammering frantically at a closed door, which opens just a fraction to allow the desperate soul a full-bodied launch inside.
Cars and vans travelling down the road appear suddenly to pick up speed, as if fleeing a major disaster.
And a horse can be spotted galloping off, leaving an inordinate amount of fresh manure on the cobbles.
It is the noise that first alerts a bemused Arnie Garth as to the whereabouts and identity of Rough Fell’s keenest and most dire threat.
He turns to see a strange figure in the distance.
A strange, bulky, clanking, chinking figure, lumbering down the high street like an automaton out of a vintage science-fiction movie, newly landed from a mechanically advanced but merciless planet, come to take over the world without removing a single cardigan.
It is pulling a limping and vaguely disgruntled sheep on a rope tied to the waist.
Arnie, who tells himself that he was more than half expecting this, watches as Noreen Millburn makes her laboriously jangly approach.
The woman is almost completely swathed in collection tins and cans and boxes of all colours and causes.
They dangle round her neck, hang over her shoulder, droop under her woolly armpits and swing threateningly whilst clamped to a thick leather belt.
In fact, it appears as if every square inch of her body is given over to good causes.
One collecting can, supporting the oft-ignored plight of distressed Cumbrian donkeys, even hangs from the sturdy bobble on her hat.
The lady gives a whole new meaning to charity case.
“Jesus Christ!” mutters Arnie Garth. And this is not a religious man. “Good morning, Noreen.”
“I’m not talking to you, Mr Garth,” says the rattling woman. “Long-lost cousin or not, you’re creepy and very odd.” Despite her personal antipathy, with a well-practised bob and lunge, she shakes a can right in his face. “Spare a little something for some charity or another?”
Arnie is utterly baffled by the entire concept of surrendering money to someone without even the slightest likelihood of profitable return, at least in this life, but naturally puts it down to the sad weirdo having two souls, one of them rightfully his, so maybe it isn’t her fault entirely.
Although he seriously doubts that he would be into a whole lot of giving or collecting were he himself to retrieve the precious missing item.
“Charity? What charity?”
“I know,” the despairing collector sighs, “it’s so hard to choose, isn’t it? The sadness and deprivation in the world. So much suffering. So many poor people. I could weep for—”
“Yeah, yeah. Enough already. I ain’t even had breakfast.”
“Well, how about…?” She appears lost in thought but then notices the freshly deposited horse manure on the road just ahead of her. “Ooh, look!” she says, in some excitement.
“You gonna wipe its ass?”
Noreen ignores him and rattles off to pick up the recent droppings with her large-mittened hands. She then distributes it all with a brisk flourish into a nearby window box.
“Wonderful for geraniums! Mrs Godber will be thrilled.” She smiles, smacking her woolly palms together.
“Good for Mrs Godber,” says Arnie, dodging the fallout. “But where does that leave you, Lady Shit-For-Free? Pair of ruined, not very nice gloves. Stinky fingers. Charity is for suckers!”
Arnie Garth can tell by the horrified look on the woman’s rosy-cheeked, cosmetic-free face that he might perhaps have said the wrong thing.
Again. Especially if he wants Noreen Millburn to warm to him pretty fast – Sunday at the latest – which even he recognises isn’t looking hugely probable right now.
He stares into her open mouth, trying to ignore the jagged teeth that he puts down to English dentistry and too many raw vegetables.
“Hey, joking. I’m joking, Noreen! You know me, lady. Well, you will. I am such a loveable kidder. Here…”
He reaches into his pocket, produces a nickel and drops it into her tin. She just stares at him in disgust. He finally takes the message on board and laughs.
“What did I tell you? Such a tease! Ask anyone in the porn— Portland, Oregon area.”
He reaches into his pocket again, produces a roll of bills and shoves them into a random tin so that half of them are still proudly sticking out.
“Buy an orphanage or something.”
Noreen Millburn’s mouth remains open, this time not from horror but in awe.
“Mr Garth… Arnie… that’s really generous! No one has ever… if I’m lucky, I get 50p. Usually it’s buttons or tiddlywinks. I’m, well, I’m overwhelmed.”
“You are?” Arnie smiles in some relief. “Well, that’s what I came here to tell you, kiddo. The reason I’m so friggin’ attracted to you is that I’m a philanthropist too! I – help the lonely and unattractive.”
“That’s… interesting.”
“I give back. Okay, our styles are different – maybe I’m just a tiny bit too brash, too American.
You, you’re seriously weird and dress like a bag lady.
But deep down, where it counts, in the kishkes, we’re kindred spirits, Noreen!
With an emphasis on the kin. Hey, enough of the foreplay. You wanna eat dinner tonight?”
“I eat dinner every night,” she says in confusion.
In a cage, hanging outside a pretty little cottage, is a solitary budgie. Casually, Noreen undoes the metal latch and sets the little bird free.
“I meant with me, you dumb… I mean, I’d like to take you for dinner. Like you was a normal person. Pick you up at seven.”
“Oh! Well… alright, Arnie. Thank you. But I’m normally in bed by eight.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” says a hopeful Arnie Garth, sauntering back towards the Wordsworth Arms for a well-earned breakfast. He doesn’t notice Rosie watching him grumpily from an upstairs window, feather duster in her hand, illusions of stardom slowly draining from her heart.
At the little home with the now reeking window box, a door opens. Into the damp morning air wafts a plaintive but all-too-familiar lament.
“The bugger’s done it again!”