Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

‘Yeah, in television. And nearly twenty years ago. What happened to Nemo?’

‘Massive stroke.’

‘Oh, Christ.’

‘You know we fell out in the sixties. Then five years ago I got this manuscript from him through a Cuban guy living in Florida. We started working together again, on this post-utopian thing. We kept talking about meeting up. In Mexico. Well, we left it too late.’

Larry took a long swig from his glass.

‘Hey,’ said Mary-Lou. ‘Go easy on the limeade.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s not a problem for me any more. I hardly drink at all these days.’

‘All the more reason to go steady.’

‘Sure.’ He rattled the ice in his mojito and settled it on the table. ‘All those people we knew from the film. Gone. Sharleen, Nemo.’

‘Come on, Larry, let’s not get maudlin.’

‘Jack.’

‘What?’ Mary-Lou frowned.

‘Jack Parsons. Well, he did the special effects, remember?’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ She stared off into the distance.

‘You never got over him, did you?’

She looked back at Larry.

‘Let’s not talk about Jack.’

‘Okay, okay.’

Larry drained his glass and handed it to a passing waiter.

‘Can I have another of these?’ he asked. ‘Mary-Lou?’

‘Sure. A glass of champagne, please. How’s Martin?’

‘He’s good. He’s living up in Seattle. Working as a sound technician. I don’t see so much of him these days.’

‘And you? Still writing?’

‘Yeah. Another novel. Not sure where it’s going. I’m calling it The House of God .’

‘Good title.’

‘Yeah. Could be the best thing about it. But, you know, there is something I want you to see. Something I wrote a while back.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. Something I wrote for you.’

Their drinks arrived and Larry chinked his glass against hers once more.

‘This is like being back at Clifton’s,’ he said. ‘Me trying to impress you. You know, that’s what my writing career was really based on.’

‘Zagorski, the limeade is making you sentimental.’

‘In mojito veritas. You were my inspiration.’

‘Okay, okay. Let’s change the subject.’

‘Okay. Well, you know, this film is really dumb, but Danny’s quite an interesting guy.’

‘Who?’

‘Danny Osiris. Yeah, quite an interesting guy. He believes in all this UFO nonsense, just like Sharleen used to. But he gave me this strange manuscript. Sort of a story but it refers to some crazy stuff that happened in the war.’

Larry was trying to focus but the rum was fuzzing his mind.

‘Mary-Lou, wasn’t there a woman called Astrid at your commune in Pasadena?’

‘Now you’re losing me, Zagorski. You’re talking about Astrid?’

‘Yeah. German woman. Fortune-teller.’

‘Astrid, yeah. What about her?’

At that moment a production assistant from Multiversal Pictures came up to the table and told Mary-Lou that the director would really like to meet her.

‘Sure,’ she replied. ‘I’ll come over. But look, the writer of the original is here too. Why don’t I bring him with me?’

‘Er, yeah,’ the assistant replied with a doubtful shrug. ‘Sure.’

The director of the Fugitive Alien remake was earnest and full of respect for Mary-Lou. He was barely in his thirties yet astonishingly cognisant of 1950s pop culture. And he knew all about her television work on shows like The Scanner . Mary-Lou struggled to include Larry in the conversation, but she knew that people rarely want to talk to the writer.

Larry hovered and continued drinking. At one o’clock Mary-Lou said she wanted to go.

‘Are you staying, Larry?’

‘No, no.’

‘Then, come on. I’ll get them to order us cars.’

They went down to the foyer, arm in arm, for support as much as anything else.

‘So good to see you,’ Larry said once more.

‘Yeah.’

‘Come and have lunch with me.’

‘Sure.’

‘You promise?’

‘Larry, of course I’ll have lunch with you.’

‘Soon then.’

His car arrived first and she walked out to it with him. He put his arm around her. At first she thought he’d lost his balance as she felt his hand catch hold of her shoulder and pull her closer. Then he kissed her. At first he simply meant to brush his lips against her cheek but instead his mouth found hers. It was clumsy but passionate. She tasted rum and mint and lime juice.

‘Hey.’ She gave a little laugh as she pulled away from him.

‘Oh.’ The shocked look on his face, just like the teenager she had known. ‘Hey, I’m sorry, Mary-Lou.’

‘Get outta here, Zagorski,’ she said and pushed him into his car.

A week later they met at a restaurant by the broadwalk in Venice Beach. Larry chose the spaghetti alle vongole; Mary-Lou ordered a cheese omelette and a salad with no tomatoes.

‘No tomatoes?’ Larry asked. ‘You allergic?’

‘No, well, it’s this diet I’m trying. The blood-type diet.’

‘Blood type?’

‘Sure. It’s based on the theory that blood types evolved at different eras of human development. Type O is the earliest, hunter-gatherers, so if you’re that blood group you get the proteins: meat, nuts. A comes next, which is the type that evolved when humans started cultivating so As should eat vegetables and cereals. I’m a B and us Bs were nomads, pastoral people who lived with their herds. We’re pretty omnivorous and we get to eat dairy.’

‘Nice. But no tomatoes.’

‘No. No shellfish neither, so I won’t be picking at yours.’

‘A diet based on blood type. That’s insane. You believe in it?’

‘I don’t know, Larry. It seems to work for me, that’s all.’

‘It’s just some mad idea.’

‘So?’

She gave him a cold stare. He ducked his head a little.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be so dismissive. What do I know? And look, I’m sorry about the other night. My behaviour. Too much free limeade.’

‘I hope you didn’t kiss me like that just because you were drunk.’

Her mouth widened a little into an arch smile. Larry grinned and shook his head.

‘No. But I shouldn’t have been drunk. I’ve put all that behind me. That time we met in the late seventies, God knows what I must have been like. I was clean for fifteen years. I did the meetings and everything.’

‘AA?’

‘AA, NA, the lot.’

‘And they got you through it, right? The Higher Power stuff?’

‘Yeah. I know what you’re thinking. I didn’t really believe in it.’

‘But it worked for you. For a while.’

‘Yeah. Point taken.’

Their food arrived. Larry looked over at Mary-Lou’s plate as it was set down in front of her.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That is a lot of dairy.’

‘The thing is,’ he went on after a few mouthfuls of pasta, ‘what we believe in just seems to get smaller and smaller. Diets, therapy, exercise regimes, support groups. Little superstitions. We worship household gods.’

‘Nothing wrong with that.’

‘But there used to be so much more. You know what really bugs me? People going on about “the planet”.’

‘You’re not saying global warming’s unimportant?’

‘No, no, just that phrase. When did it become the planet? Singular. Definite. Like there aren’t any other planets or something. It’s like an admission of defeat. We used to dream of going to other planets. Now?’

‘Jack used to dream of going to the stars,’ Mary-Lou murmured.

‘Yeah. And you know the last time people went out into space? I mean, going properly out of orbit. Apollo 17, 1972. We’ve got all these satellites whizzing about up there but most of them are just looking back down on us. It isn’t space exploration, it’s a sophisticated surveillance system. The planet. It’s positively pre-Copernican.’