Chapter Seventeen
Watch out for the unexpected mushroom.
(Sicilian proverb)
He can already sense the woolly head of the passenger beside him whirring around like something out of a horror movie.
Which, of course, reminds him of his first and now classic award winner The Sexorcist. Happy days that now seem so very long ago.
He wonders if he will ever produce another erotic masterpiece and go to bed just one more glorious time with a new and golden dick in his hands.
It doesn’t bear thinking about. And, of course, he has far more pressing concerns.
“Arnie,” yelps Noreen, “this is an airport!”
“Hey, you been around, kid.”
“No,” admits Noreen. “I’ve never even been out of Rough Fell. I’ve never even seen Manchester!”
“Well, today’s your lucky day. You’re not going to. C’mon.”
He parks the car in the first bay he finds. Let Mrs Whatever-Her-Name-Is get a ticket.
“But, Arnie…”
“Noreen, get out of the friggin’ car!” He sees her face and softens. “Hey, you said you wanted out.”
He starts to walk towards the terminal, pretty sure that Noreen will follow. Which she does.
“But I can’t just leave the country!”
“Sure you can! I’ll break this to you gently, kid, but back in Wuthering Heights, everyone hates your guts.”
Everything about Noreen Millburn suddenly sinks. Her spirit, her eyes, her cardigans. Even the ragged bobble on top of today’s particularly unfortunate choice of headgear appears to wilt in sadness.
“I know that, Arnie,” she sighs, “I do realise that everyone hates me. I think I’ve always known it.”
Arnie suddenly pauses in his single-minded airport dash. Despite himself, he turns back to listen.
“But ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had this… well, this overwhelming compulsion to help people. Even if they don’t want to be helped. I have absolutely no idea where it comes from, but sometimes it’s almost like – well, like a curse. A real curse. You can understand this, can’t you?”
“No.”
Noreen concedes this, with a sigh of genuine hopelessness. “Where are you taking me, Arnie Garth?”
“Er… well, Noreen Millstream, it’s kind of like, well, like a surprise.” When her look becomes sceptical, he throws open his arms in supplication. “Hey, have I ever let you down?”
“Well, there was last night in the hotel…”
“It was a rhetorical question! Jee-sus!”
***
Several fraught minutes later, Arnie Garth of Los Angeles finds himself standing rigidly at the airport information desk, not quite believing what he is seeing.
Noreen hovers some distance away, doing much the same thing, but for hugely different reasons.
But whilst her head is still turning around every which way in abject wonder and amazement, Arnie’s has begun to shake in sheer terror.
With a healthy amount of fury mixed in. All of it aimed at the envelope he has just picked up, the universe in general and, whilst I don’t like to boast, more than possibly at me in particular.
Although most people in the airport – indeed, in the Stockport and Greater Manchester area – can probably hear poor Arnie as his recently dumbfounded mouth begins to break through its dumbness and foundness, Noreen Millburn, late of the middle-of-nowhere, is still too busy attempting to take in the overwhelmingly alien bustle and noise.
Beneath the cardigans and the vests, she can feel her whole body trembling.
It can’t be excitement, at least not so far as she is aware, because she rarely becomes excited or indeed has anything to be excited about.
But it is most definitely shock. Suddenly, her whole vista has changed.
Converted, as if by sorcery, to a dizzying panorama of lights, escalators, people and suitcases on the move, fast food outlets, public toilets, mewling infants, uniformed officials, men holding up surnames.
Yet it is what’s absent that is equally disturbing.
Not a hill, lake, field, cottage or sheep in sight.
Sheep! Noreen suddenly gasps in panic. “Oh my Lord – Geoffrey!”
“LAS FUCKING VEGAS? NO! There has gotta be a mistake!”
Now she hears him and moves towards the desk, from which he has instructed her to maintain a respectable distance.
“Is everything alright, Arnie?” she asks.
Arnie gives her one of the smarmiest and least genuine beams in a long history of profound insincerity. “The gods are smiling, Noreen!”
He hands her the passport that came with the ticket envelope. Inside the latter he had also discovered a paltry amount of United States cash.
“I’ve never had a passport,” says Noreen, flicking through it. “How did you…?”
“I know people,” says Arnie, with a clumsy wink.
He digs back into the envelope just in case there’s another goodie or, with luck, a cyanide capsule buried between the low-value dollar bills.
Instead of which he finds a slip of paper.
It is a receipt for the Lakeland Home for Limping Sheep. He hands it to Noreen.
“I think of everything,” he says.
No, Arnie. You don’t. But I do. Because in times of crisis, well, you have to.
Yet I have to be honest with you, dear readers, this is truly a very fraught and highly critical stage in our celestial game of souls.
As you know, this whole sorry situation, this heavenly cock-up, this shit and fan ragout, it’s all virgin territory for me.
As guys say where I come from, we’re winging it here.