Page 20 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
I beat them to my little black Mini with inches to spare. It was unlocked as usual – you’d have to be desperate to steal it – but as soon as I was in it I slammed down the door locks.
I was just in time: they streamed aroundthe car, baying, then lifted it up bodily only to set it down again sideways in the road facing the hedge.
It took me something like a sixteen-point turn to get free, weaving between huge, drunken bodies while they leered through the windows and banged on the roof. But at least that was better than them bangingme, which seemed to be what they assumed came with the package.
I tell you, it wasseriously scary.
‘Come back and strip!’ they howled, among other more unrepeatable things. ‘Call yourself a Strippagram?’
Well no, actually I didn’t. And Micheline Brown, the unfortunate fiancée of one of these louts, had hired me to sing the ‘Monster Mash’, nothing more.
She might have warned me: though when I came to think about it, on the phone she’d sounded like the sort of girl who couldsort even this lot out, so she had probably assumed I could, too.
I drove off at speed in the wrong direction, and promptly got lost in the small lanes trying to get back to Westery.
It took me ages, and I stopped for a tearful interlude in the first lay-by I came to, though whether the tears were from humiliation, fear, frustration, or the Max situation, I really couldn’t say: maybe all ofthem.
After some time I wiped my face with a wad of tissues, and decided that what I needed was a drink and something solid in the food line, which was fortunate since Something Solid in the Food Line was the only sort of catering the King’s Arms did. Not for them the nouvelle cuisine offerings of a teaspoon of cat vomit decorated with a trickle of vivid sauce and two leaves. (And while I amforeverseeing pubs calledthe King’s Head, or King’s Arms, where is the rest of him? Why no King’s Leg, or King’s Torso, or even King’s Knob?)
It wasn’t by any means the first time I’d appeared in the pub in full vampire gear, eliciting no more attention than when I’d appeared at more or less fortnightly intervals with a suave, increasingly silver-haired lover.
Mind you, I’d have taken out myfangs had they not by now been well and truly rammed down on to the adhesive gum by having those grubby masculine fingers testing the points for sharpness – and I think I bit down pretty hard, too, which wouldn’t have helped. I’d have to work them loose later.
It was quiet in the back room, although the rattle of the slot machine and a low moaning from the juke box gave evidence of the regularsin the bar. Or it could be the moaning of the regulars and the rattling of the juke box, assomething uncoiled itself from a nest of old Elvis 45s and started to slither—I shook the image firmly away and looked around.
It being Friday, the vicar was sitting at his usual table, where he holds an impromptu counselling clinic for all-comers, while imbibing dry sherry and putting the parish magazinetogether.
‘Evening, Charles,’ I said, and he glanced up with a preoccupied smile.
‘Cass, my dear,’ he said absently. ‘Terrible, terrible stuff!’
I didn’t take it personally. Poor Charles was something of a poet, and found the reams of religious verse that flowed in by every post almost too bad to bear. But he stoically read them, and even printed one or two in every edition.
Seeing he wasabsorbed I carried on over to the corner where Orla was sitting in Marilyn Monroe mode.
Well, I say sitting, but actually she was slumped in a heap, shoes kicked off, with her gold dress looking a little the worse for wear.
‘Hi, Orla,’ I said, and she opened mascaraed eyelashes and looked at me. ‘You look like I feel. Bad one?’
‘You’re not kidding.’
‘Where’s Jason? He said he’d be here.’
She indicated the limp figure propping up the bar like a wonky gremlin bookend. ‘Celebrating selling that hideous screen he’s had in the shop for years – to my American guest, too.’
‘Did he? No wonder he’s celebrating, then. Well, I need to eat, and boy do I need a drink! Do you want anything?’
‘Large dark rum and Coke. Chicken and chips.’
‘OK.’
Jason had looked right out of it, but as I approachedhe straightened slowly upright and smiled at me, his brown eyes lighting up: ‘Cass? Thought you were a figment of my overheated imagination.’
‘Drunken imagination,’ I corrected, leaning past him to order food. ‘Are you going to get something to eat and come and sit down? Or just carry on drinking until you slide down the bar like last time?’
‘You’ve got your teeth in,’ he said sapiently.
‘Iknow. I’d better have curry, it’ll be easier to eat.’
