by Stan Arnold
‘Yeah!’ said Jim, leaning on his glass of water and spilling it all over the counter.
‘Who?’ he repeated.
He began to pat the water with the flat of his hand. This tactile therapy and the little splashes he made seemed to bring him back into the real world. He smiled and opened his mouth.
‘Who - are all those dead blokes propped up against the bar?’
His elbow skidded on the wet counter and his head hit the bar top. His eyes closed and his mouth started to blow little bubbles in the thin film of liquid.
It was at this point, Mrs Hathaway realised what she was dealing with. She picked Jim up, laid him down gently with the others, slipped the bucket back over his head and waited for a more opportune moment.
Chapter 36
While the amassed avengers of Big Dick’s Half-Way Inn were unconsciously recovering from their various excesses, Mrs Hathaway busied herself by fetching the medical kit from the yacht. With the help of a First Aid manual, she administered a little local anaesthetic and stitched up the gash in the police chief’s head.
She then strolled back along the pier and, in the cool of the yacht’s cabin, picked up her sat phone and dialled Giles’ number.
Back in the Shard, Giles grabbed his office phone with the grip of a man possessed.
‘Tallulah! Where are you? I’ve been worried sick!’
‘We’re in St Bernards and everything’s fine.’
‘What happened?’ said Giles. ‘For two weeks, everything was great, then nothing. No communication. No calls. No nothing.’
‘Ah well, I’m afraid it all went wrong when Aubrey decided to adjust the satellite television set,’ she said, helping herself to a bottle of water from the fridge.
‘He’d seen me sorting things out using manuals, and thought he’d have a go at setting his favourite channels - none of which I’d be happy to list in public - as preferred options.’
‘I was on deck when the explosion happened. As you can imagine, I went below immediately. His screwdriver was just a blob, and I had to use the extinguisher, you so kindly provided, to put him out.’
‘Virtually all the communication equipment was destroyed. There was smoke and flames everywhere. I was so worried, I mean, I knew that as soon as you lost touch with us, you’d be paying for an expensive air-sea rescue search.’
‘Cost didn’t come into it,’ said Giles. ‘I commissioned a thorough search immediately, but they found nothing. That’s why I was so worried.’
Giles of course, had never even considered commissioning an air-sea rescue. Once the international media got hold of the story, he’d lose the element of surprise. Everyone would want a piece of her - and he hadn’t invested 2 million quid, plus mind-boggling expenses, just to hand it to the wolves on a plate.
He felt guilty about leaving her and Skipper Brown to the elements - but managed to successfully assuage his guilt. He convinced himself that someone with Mrs Hathaway’s phenomenal all-round abilities would be bound to pull through.
The first two weeks of the voyage had been pretty uneventful, so Giles was anxious to know if there was going to be anything sensational for his readers.
Mrs Hathaway gave him a long, involved answer. She started by showing a creative side, which he hadn’t expected. She suggested Aubrey could feature in the story as a stowaway she discovered in a cupboard 100 miles west of the Scilly Isles. That way, she didn’t have to worry about him appearing on the automatic video cameras. She suggested the story involved her subduing Aubrey à la Enfield - then befriending him as they fought the mighty ocean together.
‘Sounds great,’ said Giles, ‘but, er, how mighty was the ocean, exactly. I seem to remember it was a bit of a millpond, up to when we lost contact.’
‘It was, but it gave me lots of time to read the Sweden Yacht 42 handbooks and check through my DVD - The Gulf Stream - tips, tricks and cheats - all of which came in very useful.
‘How?’
‘We’d picked up a Met Office warning of a violent tropical storm with hurricane-force winds and 40-foot waves, about 600 miles south of where we were. So I thought, your Daring Doozers won’t want a story about a silky smooth trip, with pictures of me happily feeding seagulls. So I set a course for the storm.’
Giles started to dribble.
‘We’d been on the new course for about an hour, when Aubrey blew the electrics - I got some great photographs of the damage, and some pictures of the burnt equipment. I took him on deck and got good video, what’s the word - footage - of me applying artificial respiration and bandaging up the more burnt bits.’
‘Five hours later, we hit the storm, and I’ve got lots of really nice footage of black clouds, sheet lightning, big waves breaking over the yacht. I just set the storm sail and let her run. We took a real battering and several times I thought we’d capsize. Aubrey spent the whole time sat on the toilet, trying to remember some prayers. The automatic video cameras worked perfectly, and I got some nice footage. Of the storm that is, not of Aubrey in the lavatory.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Well, there was a lightning strike on the mast, which blew out what was left of the radar. I had to climb up in the storm to check the damage. Fortunately, with the sheet lightning, it was easy to see what I was doing. Then I remembered your lovely present of the polka dot bikini, so I went up again wearing just the bikini, because you mentioned how your readers like that sort of thing.’
Giles was discovering new depths to this lady. She was turning from a rather old-fashioned cleaning lady into a media-savvy diva.
‘Er and...’
‘Yes?’
‘Er, when you were up the mast, did your bikini, er, you know - er - get wet?’
‘Giles Montagu-Scott,’ said Mrs Hathaway in disbelief. ‘There was a force 9 gale blowing. Of course it got wet!’
Then the penny dropped and it didn’t make a nice sound as it hit the bottom of a very rusty bucket.
‘Giles Montagu-Scott, I’m ashamed of you! This story is about a dangerous assignment to check sophisticated radar equipment on top of a 50-foot mast in the teeth of a hurricane. It is not a wet underwear competition at a seafront hotel in Benidorm.’
Giles shelved the media savvy diva thoughts, but still wondered why she had done the second take. He decided to move on quickly.
‘Anything else - you know, that didn’t involve bikinis,’ he added ingratiatingly.
‘Yes,’ she replied somewhat curtly, ‘Aubrey fell overboard.’
‘He didn’t?’
‘He did. The silly boy came up on deck to be sick, and plop, next thing I knew he was over the side. Forgot to clip on his lifeline, as usual. Fortunately, he was wearing his Stingray inflatable plastic ring. I grabbed a rope, tied it round my waist, jumped overboard, swam over, grabbed him and hauled him back.’
Giles’ throat went dry and he could just manage to squeak out the vital question.
‘And the video cameras worked?’
‘Oh yes, when things calmed down, I checked, and it’s all there.’
‘But you jumped overboard!’ said Giles, in admiration.
‘It was straightforward, really. It was just like a scene in that Crossing the Atlantic with useless drunk video, so I did the same. It was easy, apart from the shark.’
‘The shark!’
‘Just as I was manoeuvring Aubrey up to the stern, a large shark popped its head up right next to us. I could see right into its innards - it was most off-putting. I was forced to use Aubrey as a weapon to beat it off.’
‘All on video?’
‘Of course.’
Giles was on his knees banging the carpet with his fist, mouthing Yes! Yes! Yes!
But there was more. Apparently, she’d completed the rest of the journey using a freebie sky chart from some retro girls’ magazine. Giles was obviously unaware of the impeccable standards and attention to detail consistently displayed by the research staff and graphic artists at Girl and Eagle. The Girl sk
y navigation sheet would have been at least as accurate, if not more so, than information available at the time, from the Admiralty.
Giles had recorded the call, and Mrs Hathaway said she’d email over her log, photographs and video as soon as she could set up an internet connection.
‘Cool,’ said Giles, though he had never felt so hot in his life.
He picked up the phone and ordered a couple of bottles of Krug Clos Du Mesnil 1995, from a girl who said ‘Certainly, Mr Montagu-Scott.’ That was one of the nice things about being filthy rich. You could order two £750 bottles of champagne, and not worry about drinking it.
*
That night, Giles swirled off to sleep thinking about headlines. What should he call Mrs Hathaway? She needed branding, so little girls could say ‘Mummy, I want a something-something dress, swimsuit, shorts and t-shirt’ or whatever. He snuggled down and names swam before his eyes - Nanny Noble, Granny Goforit, Tallulah Tornado, Typhoon Tallulah, Nanny Nonparail - bit posh that - the Enfield Enigma...
Everything could be sorted out in the morning. All he knew was that as far as he could see, the first issue - the first real Daring Dooz ever - was well and truly in the bag.
The next thing was to sit back, relax and enjoy Daring Dooz Challenge Two.
Or so he fondly thought.
Chapter 37
When Mrs Hathaway returned from her telephone call, the four men had recovered consciousness to varying degrees and were doing what men do best, sitting around a table drinking lager and moaning about how bad things were.
By the time she joined them, the lager seemed to have cured Aubrey’s seasickness, and he had filled everyone in with his version of the Daring Dooz venture and how dangerous and uncomfortable it had been. He’d also apologised to Mick and Jim for the ‘Vlad and Vic in 10 minutes’ episode, and, as he had kick-started the adventure that resulted in them being £400,000 better off, the apology had been accepted.
Mrs Hathaway sat down and continued the story, without the hiccups, burps, general inaccuracies and wild exaggeration that typified Aubrey’s new conversational style. But she was very careful to stop the tale at their arrival on St Bernard. Future plans were for the future.
Jim said how delighted he was to see Mrs Hathaway. This was mainly because, first, he was brought up properly, and second, because the fact that she and Aubrey had turned out to be real, confirmed he hadn’t descended to a new and frightening level of the DTs.
Despite the noise in his head - a random combination of amplified steam hammers, drop forges and badly adjusted pile drivers - Mick had a go at being effusive.
‘My dear lady, what an unexpected delight. Here we are in the tropical version of Hernando’s Hideaway, when in you glide, smooth as silk to brighten our day, our week, who knows, our month or even...’
Aubrey joined in the conversation. ‘I was sick as a pig, all the way over.’
‘... our year,’ continued Mick. ‘And of course, we’re more than in a position to reimburse you the £500 we owed you in back cleaning fees.’
Aubrey and the police chief looked up.
Mick corrected the sentence, in a second. This was particularly impressive as he was in the flattery-autopilot mode he used back in Soho when policemen were asking why he was sitting in the middle of the street at 3am.
‘By “back cleaning fees”, I am, of course, gentlemen, referring to the money owed to Mrs Hathaway for office sprucing, not for the nefarious soaping, massaging and scrubbing of my bodily parts.’
Mick decided it was time for him to stop talking, and everyone agreed.
Jim had somehow dragged himself back from the precipice, and was prepared to give a resumé of their story. How Charlie had lured them to Las Vegas with the express purpose of bumping them off. How they’d escaped certain death by promising to have regular weekly satellite calls to discuss Charlie’s obsession with Ealing Comedies. How the pop video they’d made for Vlad and Vic back in Southsea had resulted in the V-Twins signing a lucrative contract in Charlie’s Las Vegas hotel. He also hinted that Vlad and Vic had handed over a very generous ‘thank you’ pay-off, which they were using to support their gratuitous, dangerously decadent lifestyle on St Bernards.
The amazing stories had all been told, and most of the group had understood something about what had been said. It was now the turn of Roberto Velazquez, the island’s Chief of Police. How did he get to be at the beach bar that morning?
Roberto stared directly into the eyes of each person sitting at the table, then, after a dramatic pause, revealed all.
‘I fell off my bike.’
So that was it. Everyone knew how everyone had arrived. And Mrs Hathaway liked that - it was extremely neat and tidy.
But, despite the fact she’d just nailed the Daring Dooz initial challenge, had outrode hurricanes, fought off sharks, put up with Aubrey’s eating habits and navigated the last 1500 miles using a ripped bit of a comic, even Mrs Hathaway had no idea what was going to happen next - or how tidy, or untidy, it would turn out to be.
Chapter 38
Roberto ordered the island’s only cab and, a few minutes later, Mrs Hathaway and Aubrey had checked into the island’s only hotel. In fact, the reservations had been made by Giles’ organisation in advance. They’d arranged separate rooms with full board, so everything continued to be very tidy.
Later that evening, things became less tidy when Mrs Hathaway and Aubrey arranged to meet Mick and Jim for drinks in the cocktail suite. In fact, as far as Mrs Hathaway was concerned, things became disgustingly un-tidy - even filth-infused, pig-penningly squalid.
Before Mrs Hathaway arrived, there was small talk. Aubrey asked Mick if his bow tie was a clip on. And Mick asked Aubrey if the power for his flashing trainers came from batteries shoved up his bum.
Then Mrs Hathaway arrived, and immediately popped the question.
‘You know all about these Daring Dooz challenges? Well, I have a considerable budget available for two experienced professionals to accompany me, taking videos, sound and photographs. And I’d like to offer you the job. The idea is that they will be dangerous for me, but I can assure you - your safety will always come first.’
Mick and Jim glanced at each other, and Mick drew the telepathic short straw.
‘My dear Mrs Hathaway, that’s such a thoughtful offer, and, of course, we’re very flattered, but I’m afraid I have to tell you we must pass on this one. You see, without putting too finer point on it, we are committed for the foreseeable future, here on St Bernards.’
‘But I thought you were just pissing it up against the wall,’ said Aubrey.
Mrs Hathaway couldn't have put it better herself. This was a terrible blow to her plans. She was sure they’d jump at the chance. Whatever cash they got from Vlad and Vic couldn't last for ever.
‘You see,’ said Mick. ‘We have just invested a considerable amount of our V-Twins pay-off into a commercial venture right here on the north side of the island.’
‘Investments can be risky.’
‘Not this one. My Uncle Jocelyn is developing a marina right here on St Bernards. He’s always handled family financial things. I had to speak to him about the final details of my divorce settlement. I told him where we were, and that we’d had a cash windfall, so he needn’t worry about us on the financial front. He’s such a nice old buffer, and I knew he’d be concerned about our welfare.’
‘Yeah,’ said Jim ‘And the big coincidence was that he was actually involved in a project to build a marina right here in little old St Bernards - easy reach of the Florida Quays, nothing like it for 100 miles, just the right base for the millionaire cruising classes.’
‘Anyway,’ continued Mick, ‘it just happened he had a visit planned for last week. So we met up and he showed us the plans. They looked very impressive, very professional - even showed the water depths and channels. It was so perfect, my old ticker nearly stopped with excitement. He even had spreadsheets showing some spectacular financial returns. And that
was when he mentioned he was looking for investors, and did we know anyone?’
‘Well of course we did,’ said Jim. ‘Us! He’s been a trusted friend of Mick’s family for years - and we had £400,000 cash just hanging around. There’s only so much champagne you can whack down in a week, and, of course, we had to think about our future incomes.’
‘Old Uncle Jossers told us once we’d invested, we’d be directors with a 50 per cent stake, including voting rights, a steady income stream and annual bonuses,’ said Mick.
‘All we’d have to do is manage the early development stages - liaising with the architects and local planning authorities - that sort of thing. Now, as you’ve seen for yourself, we’ve been hitting the Bolly a bit strong, so we thought it would be good to have another interest.’
‘In short, we’ve invested in the scheme and, consequently, we couldn't possibly take up your offer - we’ll be up to our eyes right here, managing the St Bernards International Marina. Maybe you’d like to book a berth for your lovely yacht, we could do you a discount, if you get in quick.’
Mrs Hathaway was devastated. Daring Dooz Challenge Two was about to loom large, and she was now faced with making frantic phone calls around Florida to get a cameraman and photographer who she didn't know, and who probably chewed gum and talked with American accents.
Her bright blue eyes sparkled. A little tear ran down her suntanned cheek. She looked directly at Mick and Jim.
‘Can't I do anything to persuade you?’
She gently brushed the tear away with the back of her hand.
Under this level of persuasion, most men would have collapsed in a delicious, nervous wreck, but Mick and Jim’s abrasive lifestyle meant their nerve ends had been completely anaesthetised.
‘Nothing, I’m afraid,’ said Mick. ‘Sorry, but absolutely nothing. We are totally committed.’
At exactly the same time Mick was stating his commitment to the marina, Uncle Jocelyn was doing some commitment of his own. Having just checked that nearly £400,000 had arrived in his secret Swiss bank account, he stood at the entrance to Miami International Airport, fully committed to using the first-class, one-way ticket to Buenos Aires which was tucked safely inside the silk-lined pocket of his new, outrageously expensive cashmere blazer.
