Annoyed, she used one of the red-for-danger fingernails to stab the button that terminated the call.
‘I take it you got the school kid on the work-experience programme?’
‘No.’ Zita stared at the telephone in something that was a blend of wonder and disbelief. ‘You’re not going to believe this, Sam.’ She looked at him. ‘But, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear I’ve just had a conversation with myself.’
6
Sam Baker gave Zita a reassuring smile as they walked back in the direction of the car. Zita was looking at the phone as if it was a loaded gun that had inexplicably gone off in her hand and blown a hole in some guy’s face. For a moment Sam was startled by the look of shock in her eyes.
‘That was weird. Big, big-time weird,’ she said in disbelief. ‘I could have sworn that was me on the phone.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, being deliberately light-hearted. ‘Someone will have been passing your office, heard the phone ring, picked it up—’
‘And they just happened to sound like me? With this Pontypridd accent?’
‘Sure.’
‘Perhaps I’ve been out in this sun too long. Or maybe I’m really sitting in a room with rubber walls and no inside handle on the door.’
At first she’d looked troubled as they’d walked away from the amphitheatre, but now he saw she was making a joke of it.
He smiled. ‘Or this is all a dream. Any second you’ll wake up.’
‘Mmm, could be,’ she said, smiling broadly now. ‘You best pinch me.’
He couldn’t help but look down at the way those tiger-pattern leggings hugged her legs and oh-so-sassy hips. He wondered just where he should plant that pinch. Only it wasn’t PC to pinch a woman’s butt. Besides, he never was the pinching sort. Instead, he grinned at her. ‘Well, if you’re not crazy and you’re not dreaming then it must be low blood-sugar levels through lack of food. Come on, let’s find some lunch.’
Sam paused to look back at the amphitheatre one last time before he climbed into the car. He pictured where the OB trailers would be sited. Already he could imagine the cables snaking through the grass like a plague of black cobras. The satellite dish angled at 45 degrees, beaming the TV signals out to the satellite in its geostationary orbit 25 thousand miles in space, from where they’d be bounced back to the receiving dish in New York before being pumped out to 50 million homes or more. The sun burned hard. The shadows it cast were dark, sharply defined. The river shone like liquid silver.
At that moment he had a feeling that something in the landscape had changed. It was as if something was there now that hadn’t been there before. Only he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Inexplicably the sensation made him uneasy and, despite the heat, a shiver ran up his spine.
Then Sam’s stomach rumbled again, impatient for food. Perhaps Zita and he were both in need of lunch. He climbed into the front passenger seat beside her and within seconds they were driving away from the amphitheatre in the direction of town.
Lee Burton stood in the coach doorway, where he watched Laurel and Hardy and the gorilla (headless again) talking on the pavement outside the hotel. Smoking the dope on an empty stomach had made him queasy. Wearing this stupid Dracula costume didn’t help much either in the heat of a summer’s day.
The black cape and his white-painted face complete with bright red blood-trickles running down from each side of his mouth attracted the stares of York shoppers, and prompted one youth to quip, ‘Transylvania’s the next stop down, mate.’
So this is being a travel rep, he told himself for the tenth time that day. For three years he’d worked as a teller at a building society until they’d merged with a rival, then promptly downsized, as the phrase had it – meaning they’d slashed their workforce by almost half. He’d been one of those slashed, and found himself moping around his bachelor flat with a redundancy payment that was dwindling fast and no other prospects. After a boozy lunch over the Situations Vacant section of the newspaper, he and a couple of similarly jobless friends had applied for the tour rep positions as a joke.
Gobsmackingly, he’d been hired.
Palm-fringed lagoons beckoned. Or so he’d imagined. He’d anticipated that the company would send him to Barbados, or at least to Spain or Greece. Instead he found himself guiding tourists around the sunnier aspects of Yorkshire. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but some bright spark at the company had decided it would be more fun for their clients if the reps wore fancy dress and enlivened the coach rides with party games. So there he was as some lanky version of Dracula, complete with cloak and deathly-white make-up.
‘What’s keeping them?’ the driver grumbled. ‘I’m picking up another batch from the airport at six.’
‘I’ll go and ask.’ Lee stepped down from the coach, the long black cloak swishing behind him.
Drivers tooted their horns and waved at him. Maintaining the tour rep smile (thankfully, he’d lost the Dracula fangs in Whitby on a previous trip), he crossed the road to the front of the hotel. There Sue Royston, dressed as Stan Laurel, was extravagantly waving her arms as she talked at, rather than to, the gorilla. The girl in the gorilla suit was Nicole Wagner, a stunning blonde with blue eyes and what seemed like miles of white shining teeth.
Naturally, the most burning ambition of nearly all the tour reps was to be an actor. This was the next best thing. You performed to a coach of 40 or so tourists. A captive audience who were ready to let their hair down anyway. Lee had met no end of reps who were either applying for theatre auditions or waiting for calls from agents. Nicole Wagner, Lee had learnt, was a rare exception. She was working her way through university. Her burning ambition was to be a barrister. At rest-stops she could be seen writing furiously on notepads, fashioning five-thousand-word essays with titles like The Law of Torts – Evolution, Codification and Future Ramification, or she’d sit hunched in her gorilla suit poring over law journals with (so it seemed to Lee) shriekingly tiny print, no pictures, and titles that were dry as dead Law Lords’ bones; typical examples were Downyweather v Hoggatt Mineral & Aggregates Limited (1904) – Reflections of Ratio Decidendi or The Local Government Act 1971: Clause 4 (ii) Re-examined.
‘Strewth…’
Standing close by on the pavement was Oliver Hardy, real name Ryan Keith, a plump 20-year-old who fiddled with his spotty tie, plastered a wide grin on his chubby face and repeated ad nauseum, ‘This is another fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.’
Nicole tossed back her breathtaking blonde hair. ‘If he says that again, I’ll kill him,’ she said savagely.
The aura of mellow happiness engendered by the dope had clearly worn off, Lee saw.
‘The shit’s hit the fan,’ Sue told him. ‘Bloody gone and hit it and splattered all over the fucking place.’
A passer-by shot her a startled look. That’s the first time anyone’s heard Stan Laurel use the f-word, thought Lee, as he sweated inside his Dracula cape. ‘Is anyone going to tell me what’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘The receptionist in there…’ Nicole pointed at the hotel, the gorilla head still clutched in her fist, ‘…has just told me that our party on the coach aren’t booked in until tomorrow afternoon.’ Her eyes blazed with fury.
Sue added, ‘The booking office have got their dates mixed up. They’ve sent 40 people to York and there isn’t a hotel for them.’
‘What are we going to do?’ Nicole asked. ‘We can’t send them back to the hotel in Whitby, because that will have been taken by another party.’