Chapter Thirty-Three
If you do not travel, you will marry your own sister.
(Mozambican proverb)
Noreen and Arnie are fast asleep on each other’s shoulders in their second cab of the morning. When they finally arrive at the address Arnie had yelled at him, the driver wakes them up by screeching onto the kerb and smacking his horn.
Noreen, who has changed back on the plane into her old Lakeland attire (which, frankly, she finds far more comfortable, albeit a bit sweaty) is quite confused.
She has absolutely no idea where she is.
Arnie knows exactly where he is but is just as confused, because he still has barely an idea in his head as to how and whether he is ever going to survive this unholy celestial shitstorm.
“So, this isn’t your house, Arnie?” says Noreen, trying to puzzle it out as they approach the apartment block.
“No. It ain’t anyone’s house. They’re what you call apartments. But my old bachelor pad is being made over. I’m having the prayer room reconsecrated.” He can feel the scepticism like a chill Cumbrian breeze. “Little faith-based producer joke. Got a ton of them.”
“So, whose is this – apartment?”
“This place? Well… it belongs to… to my sister. Yeah. I called sis from the airport. You’ll love her,” he says, pressing the button. “She’s a nurse.”
“Hello?” barks the sisterly voice out of the entry phone.
“It’s me. Everything tidy?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Mother-visiting tidy?”
“Oh. Oh crap!”
Arnie decides that he and Noreen should ignore the elevator and walk slowly up the stairs.
Very slowly. Especially, he enthuses, as she loves hills so much.
Whilst he explains to his companion that he also needs the exercise, Arnie Garth is quite aware that the current occupant of the apartment to which they’re ascending is frantically doing what has become known in the industry as ‘pressing the ESC button’ – ESC being Erotica Spring Clean.
Posters that once boasted Schindler’s Lust, The 400 Blow-Jobs and Glad He Ate Her will now, with a quick swivel on the picture hook, hopefully feature Cleopatra Cleaves in The Life of Marie Curie, The Amelia Earhart Story and Mother of God!
When she finally opens the door to Arnie and Noreen, the aforementioned star is unsurprisingly flushed and panting. She skilfully manages to turn these features into delirious enthusiasm for whoever has just shown up at her door.
“Arnie!” she screams, a touch over-effusively. “Welcome back! We were so worried.” She hugs him affectionately and slips a sisterly tongue down his throat. At the same time, she swiftly sizes up the curiously woolly person he has brought with him but unusually finds herself completely stumped.
“Er, Cleo, this is Noreen. Noreen Millwheel. From England, somewhere. Noreen – say hi to Cleo. Short for Cleopatra. Noreen needs the bathroom.”
“No, I—”
Arnie shoves her towards a room down the hall. “There you go, baby. American plumbing.”
“Well, maybe I will just spend a penny,” says Noreen, with a shrug. “Then you must tell me – Cleopatra – if there’s anything I can do. Ironing, cleaning, blood transfusion…”
Noreen has barely closed the bathroom door when Cleo grabs Arnie by the wilting Hawaiian collar.
“You’ve got some nerve, Arnie Garth! You fire my ass, have a double coronary and a stroke, skip town, I don’t know if you’re alive or dead, then suddenly you turn up on my doorstep—”
Arnie is about to interrupt.
“Alright, technically your doorstep – expecting what? Travellers aid! And who’s that person – my replacement?”
“She’s… well, she’s… see, she…”
Arnie pauses and takes her hand, which feels so incredibly soft and smooth compared to that of his recent, hard-weathered companion.
Yet there was something so – how could he put it?
– so real and, well, honest, about the earthy Millburn extremity.
No! He can’t go there. This is too important. Here goes.
“Okay, Cleo, that weird woman in the bathroom, see, she’s the dame who’s got my soul – had it since we were born, same day, same minute, same moment; heavenly ball-up; don’t ask – and I need to make her fall in love with me ASAP to get it back, so we are ‘as one’, as the saying goes, and I can give hell a miss and just grab me a few more precious years down here.
Only, she can’t genuinely tell me she loves me or – which is just as unlikely – me tell her the same thing, if I’m already a dead guy, which could happen, because I think Melisande has hired a very scary hitman of restricted growth but excellent fashion sense and God knows who else, maybe even Satan himself, to kill me and stop her from falling for me and getting mentioned in my will.
Which is why I can’t go home right now. You see? ”
Cleo stares at him for a moment. “You’re pathetic,” she says and stomps back into the kitchen.
Arnie slumps down in Cleo’s easiest chair. He can hear the tap running, so Noreen will be back again very soon and this whole dizzying, mad charade will continue and undoubtedly conclude. But, unlike his movies, more with a whimper than a bang.
What he can’t see from his chair, of course, is Noreen scrabbling around in the fascinatingly well-equipped bathroom for some carbolic soap.
But when he catches her sudden yelp, followed by the sounds of objects cascading and clattering into the washbasin, he realises that the amenity’s current occupant must have discovered the cupboard where Cleo keeps her dildos, vibrators, love beads and, very graciously, Viagra.
Sometimes Arnie Garth feels that if there is a God, he must be tuning in to the Arnie channel right now just to give himself a good laugh.
As soon as the bathroom noises tail off, Arnie hears Cleo in the kitchen banging cupboard doors and generally slamming around. He leaps up to mollify her.
“Cleo? Cleo, sweetie, please! You’ve got to help me!”
She begins to make herself a health drink with too many vegetables and unwarranted vigour, as Arnie looks back in concern towards the bathroom.
“Please! It – it’s too screwy to explain, but I got nowhere else to go. I need you to help me look after Noreen and – and she mustn’t know anything about what you do for a living. Or what I do for that matter. Oh – or the little fact that I’m married. Okay? She… wouldn’t approve.”
The clattering only gets worse.
“Oh, well I’m so sorry your new girlfriend wouldn’t approve of me.
Like I should be ashamed of having sex on camera with multiple partners and simulating incredible orgasms, just so that sad lonely guys all over the USA and elsewhere can…
” She pauses here, because she doesn’t immediately feel that she has made the killer argument.
From down the hall, we hear the bathroom door open.
“Please! Please! Cleo!” whispers Arnie, even more frantically. “Trust me. Hey, who turned your life around when you turned up at my little office, barely more than a kid, selling whatdyamacallits?”
“Bibles.”
Noreen arrives in the doorway of the kitchen and halts, as if she can sense some vestigial weirdness between the pair of them. Arnie looks nervously from one woman to the other and back again, twice, on tenterhooks.
“Hey, Noreen.” Cleo smiles. “You look like you could use a nice cool radish and lettuce and carrot and eggplant smoothie.”
Arnie shoots Cleo a look of supreme gratitude but then simply can’t help himself. “Lettuce? Radishes? Shit, Cleo – don’t tell me you’ve turned into a friggin’ vegan! Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”
“I’m on a diet!” protests Cleo. “I’ve got to lose two inches off my ass. According to my prod—”
“Proctologist!” explains Arnie swiftly. “Okay. Okay. So, tell you what, I’ll go get food. Real food. My treat. You guys sit tight. Noreen, whatever you want, name it.”
“Oohh, anything I want.” She closes her eyes.
“Anything. You name it.”
“Well, Arnie, my most favourite thing in the whole world, which I’m missing so much more than anything right now – except maybe my sheep, of course – is Kendal Mint Cake.”
“Uh huh. Whatever else you want, name it.”
Noreen’s face sags into a look of utter disappointment.
“Okay. Fine.” Arnie sighs. “There’s a British shop in Santa Monica that sells crappy English food. It’s only an hour. Each way.”
He turns to go, waiting for a ‘don’t be silly; pizza will do’. Instead, he feels a strong hand on his arm.
“Arnie… thank you.” Noreen kisses him on the cheek. “You’ve turned out to be a real friend.”
Noreen Millburn is surprised to watch Arnie’s face fall.
“Friend?” he moans. “What is with this friend shit? I don’t wanna be your friggin’ friend! Who has time for friends?”
He storms out of the apartment, seething with frustration. The angry bang from the door segues into an embarrassed silence.
Cleo smiles a bit uneasily at her new guest, feeling that it is all on her now to be a good hostess and lighten the mood.
“So, Noreen. Do they do hot-tub three-ways in England?”