Chapter Fourteen
Listen to the sound of the river and you will get a trout.
(Irish proverb)
“Owwww! Ow! Shit! Fuck! OY!”
By the time Arnie has once more braved staircase-hell and sourced his table for breakfast, Rosie is right there beside him, holding a steaming pot of coffee. She pours a healthy amount into his awaiting cup and an equal amount onto his lap.
“Breakfast bar’s over there. I’ll take your order for cooked items when your nuts dry.” With this, she walks back towards the kitchen.
Arnie, confused as to where one pain starts and another ends, rises gingerly from the table and pursues her as best he can.
He wonders briefly whether insanity actually runs in Rough Fell (or more likely gallops), perhaps as a result of centuries of local inbreeding or simply as a side effect of being British.
“Still mad about the other night?” he hazards.
“The other night?” puzzles Rosie. “Did something happen? Things tend to blur.”
She turns away from him and rearranges the individual cereal boxes so that the already opened ones are at the front.
Arnie offers her his most contrite look, although contrition isn’t high on his CV.
“Hey, look, kid, you caught me at a bad time, okay?” He shakes his head ruefully. “I… well, truth is, Rosie, I can’t afford to get involved right now. It’s complicated.”
“I’ll bet,” says the young waitress/barmaid/chambermaid/testicle-scalder, as she buries a browning piece of sliced apple under a just-turning tinned pineapple ring.
“However,” says Arnie, in a spasm of inspiration, “I would like to hire you in a professional capacity!”
A ring of pineapple with the flat of a dainty but powerful hand behind it hits him square on the cheek.
The guest stares at her, hurt in so many ways. “Why do you people keep doing that? I need your help, Rosie! That’s all I meant. Your wisdom. Advice. I need it badly. And now would be good.”
Naturally, the young woman is sceptical. Wouldn’t you be? “And what’s in it for me?” she demands, narrowing her fetching but shrewd hazel eyes.
Arnie snaps his fingers. Which, in reality, is the action he employs when he needs time to think, although more usually the thought process relates to the optimum camera angle for something unspeakable.
“Er… well, I decided to get the rights to make Will she’s okay. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Men are from Mars, women… aren’t.” She suddenly begins to sing, “Tomorrow…”
Despite her voice being of the type that could make a walrus miscarry, Arnie feels strangely elated.
“Yeah! I’m gonna do it, Rosie! Gonna do it today. And all I have to do is listen, right? Yeah. Listen.”
He goes very quiet and cocks his ear to show Rosie and the world, in a visual way – after all, this a man for whom, in life and work, actions are the loudest speakers – what a real good listener he is.
Which is exactly when he hears a familiar sound.
A distinctive purr that he knows so well from LA and was hearing again only yesterday in this godforsaken place.
A car engine – that of a particular and rather exclusive vehicle, especially in these parts – being started up.
Arnie runs round the corner with a speed that only fear and mounting panic can induce. He discovers a young man in a leather jacket sitting in the newly rented Ferrari. Not merely sitting in it but, with some visible pleasure, starting it up.
“Hey! That’s my Ferrari!” protests Arnie.
“Not anymore it isn’t,” responds the younger man, with a polite but no-nonsense smile. “The company wants it back. Your credit card’s been cancelled.”
For a moment, Arnie can’t process the words, although this time it is not simply the bizarre accent impeding their journey to his befuddled brain.
“Say WHAT?”
Whilst the person in the driver’s seat is debating whether this is an order or merely an odd exclamation, Arnie compounds the confusion with another arcane muttering.
“Melisande!”
“Melisande! Indeed,” repeats the young man, who has been trained to believe that the customer is always right, even when you are repossessing their car.
“Look, kid. Mister. Sir. Gimme an hour! Yeah? What’s an hour?
There’s this girl. Well, woman. I’ve got to go see her, now that…
” He looks back to his recent relationship coach, who is watching the exchange with interest from the street corner.
Still tapping. “Now that I know the secret, y’know, the key – to really ‘communicating’ with a person. ”
“Well, I’ll be very happy to explain exactly why we—”
“Was I talking, shmuck? I need this fucking car back now!”
“Have a nice day.” The driver waves as the Ferrari takes off down the road.
Arnie stands there for a second, just watching it and his future – possibly his entire earthly existence, not to mention afterlife in a temperate climate – disappear pretty swiftly down a foreign hill that is forever England.
He feels a drop of water on his cheek and curses this green and unpleasant land once again for its inexplicable attraction to rain. Until he realises that this time – and possibly for the first time in his life – the unwelcome moisture is coming not from the heavens but from his own bleary eyes.
Arnie turns to Rosie, whose own already wide eyes have opened so much wider that it looks like she just developed a thyroid problem.
“Arnie?”
“I gotta… I have to… what the—? Rosie, I’ll see ya!”
With this, he pelts, in his now pain-inducing Gucci moccasins, swiftly along the same insanely cobbled street down which he has only just watched his last hope roar away.
Arnie Garth has no idea where he is going or what he is doing, but at least, he tells himself, he is doing something.
He is being proactive. And God will show him the way.
Yeah, right, Arnie. When did you and he last pass the time of day?
“What about my two numbers?” yells Rosie, but the strange man has gone.