Page 43 of Lost Souls

“Ye-es, sweetheart?” he responds, fearfully.

“What kind of filmsdoyou make?”

“What kind…? Well, they’re kind of… y’know, as I said, educational. For people who find life hard. No, scrap the hard. Difficult. Lonely. Lonely guys. Y’know, like me! They’re sorta public service movies! Yeah.”

“You shoulda been at the awards!” coos one of the pretty public servants. “There was like this major retrospective of Arnie’s oeuvre. You rememberThe Best Rears of our Wives? It was so classy.”

Very slowly, Noreen Millburn rises from the table, wrapping her new American cardigan tightly around her sturdy but shaking Cumbrian frame, as if for protection.

“You lied to me, Mr Garth,” she says, in quiet but angry sadness. “You are no longer my friend.Ormy cousin!”

Attempting, with some considerable difficulty, to hold back the tears, the desolate woman squeezes a frantic path through the glitzy gang around the table. With a muttered ‘excuse me’, Noreen stumbles brokenly off towards the exit and the great unknown.

“Noreen! Wait!” cries Arnie. “You’re killing me here!”

He scrambles through the confused yet strangely fascinated group and rushes out after his fleeing lifeline in utter desperation.

The colleagues from his industry appear quite perturbed. They look at each other in genuine concern. Finally, one of the actresses voices what they are all secretly thinking.

“Homely is the next big thing. You heard it here first.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

If you are ready to believe, you are easy to deceive.

(Darkovan proverb)

Arnie Garth doesn’tnotice the gleaming-white stretch limousine that has just pulled up outside Caesar’s Palace Hotel. Why should he? The city is full of stretch limos. A visiting alien would get scared off because they’d assume earthlings round here all had massive legs.

The benighted man is far too busy chasing after his very soul, any sight of which – let alone hope – he appears to have lost in the bustling, jostling, excitable, night-time crowd. The passenger alighting from this particular white limo does, however, see Arnie.

It is the voice that stops her first. A voice screaming into the air yet almost lost in the hubbub around it. But when you have lived with a voice for so many irritating years, you tend to be able to pick it out from the crowd, like a mother in a busy maternity ward lactating at the sound of her newborn’s cries (although this particular person has never lactated for anyone, on or off camera).

“NOREEN!”yelps the voice, in clear and plaintive desperation. “Come back! I need you so bad – my life will be hell without you. And that ain’t hyperbole.Noreen!I’ll give you anything! Bigger cans – for charity that is, not, y’know… a gigantic farm in the ass-end of nowhere. A prosthetic leg for your sheep.Anything!”

Let’s be honest, Las Vegas was truly a bit of a no-brainer. It is the very first place Mrs Melisande Garth might have expected her devious rat of a still-breathing husband to make for, especially on awards night. He has never been known to miss an opportunity to be recognised and lauded by his peers. When, however, her investigators had first informed her that Arnie Garth had bolted directly from his LA hospital bed to somewhere in a bleak godforsaken north-western corner of England –England, for Chrissakes! –she had been totally mystified.

Yet, at the same time, she had found herself feeling curiously ecstatic and, on this occasion, no faking was involved. Ecstatic because the evidence presented to her,at great personal expense, was clearly a major indicator of mental derangement. She wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that ‘flight to Cumbria’ is actually on the accepted dementia checklist for doctors and psychiatrists, along with being unable to recall the current year or the name of the sitting president.

Stopping her errant husband’s credit cards had been a serious weapon in her arsenal, but by no means the only one. She had intended simply to use it as a tool to restrict his spending before his clearly imminent death – and hopefully even to hasten it. Yet this serendipitous sighting of the swine-in-question, as he cries out the name of another woman in the very thoroughfare on which Melisande is alighting, in words that suggest this is not merely another of his mid-life flings with a none-too-choosy porn starlet, is a potential game changer. It is an accepted fact in the adult entertainment industry that no porn starlet is ever called Noreen or owns a sheep farm. That is one perversion too far.

A new and desperate sense of urgency has just been brought to the proceedings. Mrs Garth is now obliged to regroup and ponder swiftly on what deeply Machiavellian change of strategy this fortunate glimpsing might entail. The ageing icon tells herself that what has just been revealed to her was no accident. It must have been a sign from God. (And perhaps, in this, she is not wholly mistaken.)

“Oh, my shit! It’s Melisande!”

The Botoxed face, formerly like thunder, immediately converts to one of total disdain as she confronts the sorry huddle of fans who have recognised her. They areuniformly male, balding, chubby, wearing heavy metal T-shirts and clutching DVD covers and magazines.

Instinctively, she starts to unbutton. They all get their cameras out. Sometimes she really does wish that she was still plain Doris Armstretter from Bowling Green, Kentucky.

***

The Penthouse Suite at the Dime After Dime is empty when Arnie steams back in. He can’t imagine where else Noreen might have gone. To the best of his knowledge, there aren’t any sheep in Las Vegas.

The night reception guy isn’t particularly helpful.

“I’m looking for a big homely British chick,” says Arnie, in some considerable panic. “Wearing a diamanté cardigan.”

Without even looking up from the register, the clerk reaches down under his desk and pulls up a thick, spiral-bound volume. He slides it over to Arnie.