Looking for Andrew McCarthy (20 page)

‘Jesus!’ said Big Bastard. ‘If you’re going to have
a major dose of the waterworks, can’t you do it somewhere else?’

‘I’m not crying,’ snarled Siobhan. ‘This is what a woman having an orgasm looks like. You just don’t recognize it.’

‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’ said Arthur, getting up and pushing Colin off his lap.

‘I just saw Patrick and that ballet
bint
,’ she sniffed. ‘Out choosing fucking DINNER PATTERNS together!’

‘Ohhh.’ Arthur put his arm around her.

‘I couldn’t get that man to come with me to buy his own fucking
underpants
. His own, fucking skiddy
underpants
.’

‘Do they do those with the skids already in them?’ asked Big Bastard.

‘Oh God. I’m just so … I’m never going to meet anyone again,
ever
. I had one chance and I picked a complete cunt and I’ve just blown it and I’m never going to have a baby … Arthur, please will you be the father of my baby, like in that Madonna film?’

‘No,’ said Arthur, ‘but I’ll let you play with Colin on the weekends.’

Siobhan’s sobs were growing quieter. Loxy reflected that he would get lots more attention if he burst into tears too but wisely refrained from attempting it as a practical experiment.

‘Plates are so out this year anyway,’ Arthur went
on. ‘Everyone who’s anyone is getting Bento Boxes. And not from Habitat either.’

‘How did you know I saw them in Habitat?’

‘Because Patrick is the most boring imagination-free turgid lout I ever met in my life, and they don’t let ballerinas walk further than their own postcode or they start fainting all over the place.’

Siobhan managed a wan grin.

‘Were they stupidly enormous plates like nothing you’d ever use for real food?’

‘Huge.’

‘There you go then. The man can’t even buy crockery that isn’t a penis extension. Their emotional lives are a nightmare just waiting to happen. Those plates will be smashed to fuck all over their stainless steel kitchen by Christmas.’

Siobhan sniffed loudly again.

‘Can I have a beer?’

‘You can have anything you like,’ said Arthur. ‘Except my sperm.’

‘I can give you a lift home later if you like,’ said Loxy. ‘We can drive past his house and throw things. Or maybe if you’re not feeling brave you could just make a few rude gestures.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t do it Rolf!’ shouted Big Bastard in anguish.

Ellie leaned her head against the window, staring out at the endless desert ahead. The radio had started up with ‘de der der … de der der’ and the familiar refrain of ‘The Boys of Summer’ was coasting through her head. She felt an odd misty longing.

‘Julia?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Do you ever feel … that you really want something, you just don’t know what it is?’

‘No,’ said Julia. ‘You’re implying I don’t know the difference between a chocolate cake and a handbag.’

‘You never just feel … there must be something more, I just don’t know what it is?’

‘No,’ said Julia. ‘I’m on holiday. You’re the one with the yawning existential angst. Why that makes it me that has to do all the driving I have no idea.’

Ellie slumped back and looked at the huge horizon and wondered, yet again, what she was doing.

‘What do you think it’s like being famous?’ she asked, idly.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Julia. ‘Probably you get to lie back in cars and be driven about.’

Ellie ignored this.

‘Remind me again why it is you never learned to drive?’

‘Because of the stag,’ said Ellie.

‘Oh, yes. That wasn’t a stag, was it, Hedgehog?’

‘A stag, gracefully leaping out of the bushes …’

‘It was a cat, wasn’t it Hedgehog?’

‘Prancing gracefully through the early morning mists on its way to a meeting of other great forest creatures …’

‘A big fat tabby who’d just fallen off a dustbin …’

‘… or possibly a tiger. Anyway, I didn’t like my driving instructor. On my first day he said to me, “There are two things in this life that women can’t do. One is drive and the other is …”’

‘… scratch their balls? Ejaculate semen?’

‘No, although actually now I come to think of it, perhaps he should have revised up his estimate. No, the other one was make compilation tapes.’

They drove on in silence for a hundred miles.

‘Actually, I make terrible compilation tapes,’ confessed Julia. ‘I can never work out when to press the pause button, and it always runs over and …’

‘… exactly,’ said Ellie. ‘He’d already got it so right that I didn’t see much point in continuing, really.’

‘Okay, well you control the radio then.’ Don Henley had finished. Ellie fidgeted for a second.

‘Do you want country country or Christian country?’

‘Hmm,’ Julia looked at the dial. ‘Don’t they do that one – “Drop-kick me Jesus Through the Goal Posts of Life”?’

‘They surely does. But if you stick to country country you get “I’ve Never Been to Bed With an Ugly Woman But I’ve Sure Woken Up With a Few”.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Okay, hang on,’ Ellie twiddled the radio some more. Suddenly, the booming power chords of Glenn Frey’s ‘The Heat Is On’ came booming out.

‘Now THIS is more like it,’ said Julia, and they turned it up ear-splittingly loud and yelled along.

Ellie remembered how excited she’d been about driving. Her mother had never driven, so this was going to be her and her dad’s big project together, without her; something she would never even know about.

‘They don’t have cars in Plockton,’ her dad had said. ‘Just big horses that shit everywhere.’ She had giggled and then jerked the car off down the road. Two screaming hours of pain and terror later they had resolved never to sit in a car together again. When you only have one person in the whole world, don’t try and teach them to drive.

‘Oh my God, a man in a cowboy hat!’ shouted Ellie, pointing and gathering astonished stares from the other punters in the dusty and over-heavily air conditioned diner at the side of the road.

‘Oh,’ she said, coming into the room fully and realizing it was in fact packed with massive men in cowboy hats.

‘How y’all doing?’ said a short, friendly-looking man, coming over with two menus.

‘Oh my
Go
–’

Julia clapped her hand over her friend’s mouth.

‘Two please. Non-smoking.’

‘As opposed to what?’ he said, without comprehension.

Julia led a stuttering Ellie to the seat.

‘But he’s a … he’s a …’

‘Native American, yes. Good God, Ellie, when you were a kid did you used to point out Down’s Syndrome kids on the street and old ladies with wigs on?’

‘No! Just that old lady with Down’s Syndrome
and
a wig …’

‘That’d better not be true.’

‘But he’s … !’

The man came back up with glasses of icy water. The girls were in South East Nevada and were just coming down from an enormous fight about the two potential two-hundred-mile detours possible at this point – one to Vegas, one to the Grand Canyon. No prizes for guessing who was arguing which case, but it had come down to some very frosty exchanges focusing on the amount of watches worn by one of the occupants of the car and the moral standards, or otherwise, of the other. The result was that they had bypassed both places and gone straight on up route 15, ploughing on and
on through the dust, and Julia was now eyeing up any coffee-related products with a ravenous half-open eye.

‘So where are you guys from? Poland?’ asked the waiter chummily.

‘England,’ said Ellie eagerly, looking at his fine forehead and large brown eyes.

‘England, yeah? So, that’s like, near Britain?’

‘It’s in Britain,’ said Ellie, less eagerly. ‘It’s kind of the biggest part of Britain.’

‘You’re shitting me! I thought that was London.’

‘Well, we’re from London.’

He looked confused.

‘Okay. So – where you headed? The Grand Canyon or Vegas?’

‘Neither,’ said Julia. ‘We’re going to Kansas City. Can I have some Jolt cola please? And a double expresso?’

‘Gee, you foreigners sure are weird,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘So you are really a Red Indian?’ asked Ellie through a mouthful of bacon and sunny side up eggs. Julia tutted loudly.

‘Yes ma’am. I’m a Havasupai.’

‘I’ve never met a real … umm, Native American before.’

‘Well, I’ve never met a real London person before.’

‘Really? There’s tons of us.’

‘There’s a few of us too.’

‘God, isn’t travelling weird?’ said Ellie to Julia. Julia raised her eyes to the ceiling and downed another black coffee.

‘We came from Los Angeles,’ added Ellie.

‘Really? I used to live there. In the eighties.’

That caught Ellie’s attention. ‘Yeah? Oh my God, what did you do?’

‘I ran a restaurant there too. Course, this was in the days when restaurants weren’t much about food.’

‘Yeah?’ The girls were agog.

‘Aw, jeez, Jimmy, are you startin,’ wit that Hollywood shit again?’ said the man in the next booth, good-naturedly.

‘Yeh, you shut your mouth,’ said Jimmy, waving the water jug alarmingly.

He schooshed them over and sat down. Ellie put her chin on her hands, all ready to listen.

‘It was just off Rodeo, real nice spot. We used to get everyone in there.’

‘What was it called?’ said Julia.

‘“Flash”. We got it all done out in pink neon and black leather and served portions that wouldn’t feed a rat. It was pretty cool.’

‘Sounds it,’ said Ellie. ‘Come on! Who used to come in?’

‘We had to widen the doors to let the shoulderpads
through. On a good night you could choke on the hairspray and Giorgio perfume. And great big cell phones like bricks.’ His voice went misty.

‘Did the Brat Pack come in?’ said Ellie anxiously, unable to hold back for another second.

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

Ellie’s face lit up. She imagined them, at their peak, in their glitter, laughing and chatting and raising glasses to their youth and success and joy. She imagined walking through the widened doors; sitting down at the black leather banquette; sweeping up her (now miraculously straight) hair.

‘More bitching bunch of ingrates I never met in my whole life.’

‘Do you mean “bitching” in the good sense?’ asked Julia, shocked. Ellie was suddenly rigid.

‘Maybe you just caught them on a bad night,’ she said desperately.

‘Neh, they were in there all the time. Getting drunk. Falling over. Complaining about Tom Cruise getting all the good roles.’

‘Well, they were right there,’ said Julia. Ellie was still looking deeply unhappy.

‘Was … was Andrew McCarthy there?’

‘Who?’ He thought for a second and scratched his head. ‘No, he really didn’t hang out with those guys. Not really a party animal.’

Ellie’s grin was back instantly. ‘So. Not him then.’

He shook his head.

‘Have you any idea where he might hang out now?’ asked Julia.

‘Just not in restaurants, I guess.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Oh, but they were great days,’ he went on. ‘The tips. I can’t even explain it to you. Thousands of dollars, flying all over the place.’

‘What happened?’ asked Julia. Then, gathering herself, ‘Not that this place isn’t really nice and everything.’

The man grinned at her and nodded over at the swing doors into the kitchen. A beautiful and filthy little boy was sticking fries in his ears.

‘Oh, you know …’ he shrugged. ‘Times changed. Fashions changed. People started turning up in jeans and mucky old Nirvana t-shirts and asking for mineral water. It wasn’t as fun any more. The glitter starts to fade, you know.’

Julia nodded.

A woman scooped up the child and came in from the back of the restaurant. She had long dark hair and large dark eyes, and had obviously once been extremely attractive, but was now insanely overweight.

‘And this is my wife, Sharalees.’

The woman smiled a warm smile. Ellie gave the child a piece of toast to stick in his ear.

‘I just been talkin’ to these fine young ladies from Iyerland …’

‘Hi there y’all. Has he been boring you with his old war stories again?’

‘He certainly has Sharalees,’ said the man in the cowboy hat.

‘It sounds great,’ said Ellie.

‘It was horrible, actually.’

‘Sharalees was going to be an actress,’ said the restaurant owner. ‘She was in an erotic thriller with Mark Hamill.’

‘Wow, that’s amazing.’

‘Yeah, but mostly I was his favourite waitress.’

‘Yes you were,’ said the man.

‘And let me tell you, it was pretty horrible in there. Lots of shouting nobodies who are all now either miserable or dead. Tips were good though.’