Looking for Andrew McCarthy (28 page)

‘What about work?’

‘I haven’t been going to work. I’d already booked this time off to go away with Julia. I’ve been keeping myself busy by moping around.’

‘Okay. What about you, little guy?’

‘I’ll get my mum to write me a note,’ said Colin. Everyone started getting up and bustling around. The news was terribly sad, but the urge for action was strangely exciting.

‘Okay. Colin, are you alright for money?’

‘You know, seeing you being so bossy and assertive is turning me on,’ said Big Bastard. ‘When are they leaving?’

The room fell silent as everyone tried to avoid looking at Big Bastard’s towel.

‘Yes,’ said Colin finally. ‘I don’t have any.’

Siobhan sighed, paused, then reached for her wallet and took out a gold company credit card. She closed her eyes briefly, then handed it to Colin, along with the PIN number scribbled on a scrap of paper.

‘He doesn’t know I’ve still got this one,’ she said.

‘Jesus,’ said Big Bastard. ‘Excuse me everyone.’ He disappeared into the bedroom. ‘Hurry up,’ he shouted.

Siobhan ignored him. ‘And remember, when you get there, you give it to
Julia
, okay? Not the Hedgehog.’

‘Not the Hedgehog,’ Colin repeated dutifully, staring at the card as if it was made of real gold. Loxy touched Siobhan on the arm in gratitude.

‘Nice to have something good come of it,’ said Siobhan, looking down.

‘Did someone say something about good come?’ shouted Big Bastard loudly from the other side of the wall.

Ellie stared out of the window as they passed into Ohio the day after the fair. When Andrew put his arm around her shoulders, she gently shrugged it away. He looked at her with concern.

Ellie’s heart was heavy. Suddenly, what had started out as her great idea felt completely stupid. She had been right – everyone did feel like she did, at least to a certain extent. But what was looking increasingly the case was that emptiness was a by-product; the balance on the scales that allowed her to upgrade her computer every six months. In the eighties, when people got rich for the first time, this had felt like fun. But now they were too jaded, too spoilt. They’d been there, done that, picked up the Phillip Starck toaster and were so busy looking for the next thing to ram in their maws they couldn’t even settle down and look after their own families. She thought of her dad suddenly, and a tear ran down her cheek. Any other age, any other culture wouldn’t leave him at the other end of town to eat pies and drink whisky. He needed looking after. He needed her.

That was what she was going to have to do. Quest over. Everything important couldn’t be found. Rather, it was all around her, all the time, like straw around Frosty. She made a decision. They would have a wonderful time in New York. She would explain to Julia what had – hadn’t – happened, and they could sort that out and everyone would be happy again.
Then she would go home and move back in with her dad. Back to her old bedroom, with the faded postcards and the Strawberry Shortbread doll; the little red mini hi-fi; the Howard Jones twelve inches and her pink and black stripy duvet.

After all, it would be cheaper too if she was job-hunting. And it would be right, even if she did wake up in the cold mornings dreaming of golden hair reflecting the late autumn sun as they drove through plains as big as the world.

‘Are you okay?’ Andrew asked her gently.

‘I’m fine,’ she said quietly, but sadly.

‘She’s dead,’ Julia was saying. ‘She
knew
what the gameplan was. So she just ignores it completely …’

‘Calm down,’ said Arthur. ‘She spoke to me about him. She does like him, but she’s not going near him for you.’

‘WHAT!’Julia was white. ‘That’s WORSE. How noble of her. Fuck it.’

‘I don’t think it’s Ellie you’re cross about,’ said Arthur.

‘It is,’ said Julia, sticking out her bottom lip.

Andrew looked at Ellie, unsure as to why he was getting such mixed signals. Although of course she
was a woman, however unusual. He took a deep breath.

‘I really like you, you know,’ he said quietly.

Ellie was shaken out of her self-pitying reverie.

‘Really?’ she said with a slightly wicked grin. ‘Enough to let me drive the car?’

‘So, with Arthur, right …’

Loxy and Colin made an awkward-looking couple sitting on the Heathrow Express, particularly with Colin’s Bart Simpson rucksack.

‘Uh huh?’ said Colin. His eyes were wide with excitement; he’d never been further than High Wycombe in his life.

‘When you’re off fixing telephone kiosks and things and you don’t see Arthur for a bit, do you ever think about other people?’

‘Oh no,’ said Colin. ‘But then, I love Arthur very much.’

‘Uh huh,’ said Loxy, staring out the window. ‘So where should we start looking for them.’

‘If I know them,’ said Colin, ‘they’ll be in Disneyland.’

‘How much driving experience have you had in America?’ said Andrew, looking at the dashboard of the Thunderbird worriedly.

‘Oh, loads,’ said Ellie. ‘Come on, pull over.’

‘
What
are they up to now?’ said Julia behind them. ‘They’re pulling in. To have sex, presumably.’

Arthur looked up from his copy of
On the Road
, which he was finding impossible to finish. (He didn’t know that no-one in the history of the world has actually finished it and the last one hundred pages of most editions are left blank to save on printer’s ink. Nobody has ever seen the end of the film either.) ‘You’re obsessed.’

Nonetheless the car was definitely pulling over. They drew up behind it, just in time to see Ellie jump out at the speed of light and dash around to the other side.

‘WHAT!?’ said Julia. They stared at the vehicle in front. Then Julia started honking the horn.

‘What are they honking the horn at us for?’ said Ellie innocently, examining the dashboard and trying to work out where the stop/go buttons were. She’d heard American driving was a piece of piss.

‘Okay,’ she said, spotting the keys. ‘You’re about to experience a
real
driver.’

‘You’re sure your definition of “
real
” doesn’t mean “profoundly nasty”?’ said Andrew II. ‘Like “realpolitik”.’

‘Now, let’s see … mirror, signal, manoeuvre …’

‘Oh Christ,’ said Julia, continuing to honk madly.

‘I can’t believe this. How can he be letting her do this? She’s going to kill them both!’

Ellie moved relatively smoothly into the left hand lane.

‘Nothing to it!’ she breezed. ‘No wonder you can pass your test here just by remembering what colour your car is.’

‘Hedgehog, why don’t you get out of the passing lane?’ said Andrew.

‘The what?’

‘The fast lane. Let’s just get out of this particular lane.’

‘Okey dokey,’ said Ellie, squealing over to the right. ‘Oh, look. Thirty miles an hour!’

‘You can probably go a little bit faster than this.’

‘I’ve never been this fast before.’

He looked at her then.

‘You do … you do have your driver’s licence don’t you?’

‘Ish,’ said Ellie.

Andrew closed his eyes.

‘Don’t shut your eyes! I’m relying on you to tell me where we’re going.’

‘Oh God,’ he said.

‘Kids in American movies drive all the time,’ said Ellie. ‘It’s clearly easy.’ The car jumped a couple of times, but continued lurching on.

‘Fuck,’ said Andrew, putting his head in his hands.

‘Okay. Keep calm. And KEEP IN A STRAIGHT LINE! Okay. Between those two lines. You know, you only have to constantly move your hands on the steering wheel like that if you’re a cartoon character. Right.’ He took a deep breath. ‘We’re going to come slowly into the side of the road. SLOWLY!’

‘I’m doing fine!’ said Ellie.

‘SLOWER!’

The Toyota veered beside them on the narrow lane.

‘SHE CAN’T DRIVE,’ screamed Julia out of the open window.

‘I KNOW!’ said Andrew. ‘I’M TRYING TO GET HER TO STOP.’

‘I’m fine!’ said Ellie.

The massed hysterical shouting from the other three convinced her that perhaps she wasn’t. Not only that, but there was a nasty big hill coming up ahead and her hand was flailing around, looking for a gearstick.

‘Okay, maybe I will stop!’ said Ellie. She inadvertently hit the accelerator.

‘Oh Shit!’ she yelled as the two cars veered dangerously close together.

Police Constable Saria Millstone was feeling stupid. She wasn’t used to feeling stupid, she was used to
feeling pretty damn cool as long as she had her uniform on, but this was just dumb. She had tried phoning Andrew McCarthy’s agents in Los Angeles several times, only to be constantly put on hold and made to feel pretty foolish, particularly when she attempted to describe who she was looking for.

‘We don’t represent a Miss Eversholt,’ she had already heard several times.

‘I know that,’ she had patiently tried to explain. ‘I need to speak to Andrew McCarthy.’

‘What would that be in connection with?’

‘I need to know if he’s come in contact with a Ellie Eversholt.’

‘We don’t represent a Miss Eversholt, ma’am.’

She knew she should let Interpol or the consulate deal with this, but there was a little teenaged foolish part of her which couldn’t help hoping against hope that she’d be put through to him and he wouldn’t be able to resist an English accent and … she sighed at her own stupidity and looked at her dumpy figure in the mirror.

‘Stop being such an idiot,’ she said to herself.

She was going to hand this over immediately. Just as soon as … she suddenly thought of something, and took herself off to the reference library.

A huge lorry appeared over the brow of the hill. It was
taller than a double-decker bus. Julia was still leaning halfway out the window, with one hand on the wheel, trying to flag Ellie and Andrew over. Andrew started screaming at her to get back in – they were taking up both sides of the road – but with all the shouting, the general cacophony was too loud to let individual voices be heard.

When it happened, it happened very quickly. Ellie saw the truck and lost all power of movement.

‘Shit! Groundhog day,’ she thought, staring at the massive load bearing down on them and instinctively letting go of the steering wheel.

Arthur flailed over and grabbed Julia back from the window, in time for her to see the danger and brake back down behind the Thunderbird.

Andrew II leaned across Ellie in the rapidly drifting car and tried to seize the steering wheel. There was suddenly a deadly silence, then an almighty crump.

‘Hello there,’ said the stewardess. ‘Would you like a colouring-in pack?’

‘No,’ said Colin seriously. ‘We’re going to find some very sad friends of ours.’

‘He’s fine,’ said Loxy anxiously. ‘Just coffee will be fine. Decaff for him if you’ve got it.’

‘No problem,’ said the stewardess. ‘Is this your first time flying?’

‘Yes!’ said Colin. ‘I think it’s great.’

‘Well, maybe later on you’d like to come up to the cockpit and meet the captain?’

Colin turned to Loxy, his eyes shining. Given the gravity of their mission, Loxy was inclined to say no, but he had always longed to see it anyway.

‘You never know, we might be able to see them on the ground from up here,’ said Colin.

‘You never know,’ said Loxy.

‘HHOOONNNNNKKKKKKKKK!’ The truck let out an almighty blow of its steam horn and passed on its way without stopping.

‘Bloody hell!’ Julia said. The Toyota had come to a stop ahead of the Thunderbird. She was white and shaking.

‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God,’ Arthur was muttering under his breath. They instinctively gripped hands, then very slowly got out of the car to see what was waiting for them on the road behind them.

The Thunderbird had crumpled some of its gleaming front bonnet into a tree by the side of the road, but it was still upright. Inside, belted in but wild-eyed were Ellie and Andrew, seemingly all in one piece.

‘Christ!’Julia flew over to them. ‘Is everyone okay?’

‘Uh huh,’ said Ellie very slowly. ‘Uh oh.’

‘Uh oh is right,’ said Julia, glaring at her.

Arthur put his arm around Julia. ‘Umm, also, I think you should get out of the car before it explodes.’

Ellie and Andrew fumbled with the buttons on the doors for a nightmare few seconds until they could throw themselves out onto the grass verge.

‘Is it going to explode?’ said Ellie, scrambling down the bank.

‘I don’t know,’ said Arthur. ‘They always do in films.’

From a vantage point of twenty feet away they all crouched, watching the car, which appeared disinclined to burst into flame.

Ellie stared at the ground, white and shaking. Nobody put an arm around her.

‘Congratulations,’ said Julia, her voice cold and furious. ‘I thought you’d fucked this trip up before. But now you’ve managed it properly.’