Short Story: The Honeymooners

Short Story: The Honeymooners

'How much further, Laura, before we reach the turn off?'

Laura flipped over a battered AA road map, turned it through ninety degrees, turned it back again. 'Let me see...' she ran a finger north along a broken line in thick blue pen, pressed a thumb against the heavy fold that threatened to skew her calculations. 'I would say...around one and half well-proportioned, exquisitely manicured thumb nails.'

'What's the scale for a thumb nail?'

'For one of mine, about ten miles.'

Guy laughed. 'Who the hell needs Sat-Nav when they got you babe?'

By the time they pulled off the A road and had switched back south-west toward the Argyll and Bute coastline, a few miles south of Oban, to their honeymoon destination, a 17th century fort on a island in the Firth of Lorn, reachable only by a short-haul ferry, the air was cold, the light thin, Laura, all but asleep.

'Hey.' Guy nudged her. 'Miss, or should I say Mrs. Sleepy Head?'

'Are we there yet?'

'Yep,' Guy said, 'Operation Con the Paparazzi coming up.'

Laura took a last look at her reflection in the drop-down vanity mirror, adjusted her wool hat, checked her make-up. Yawned. 'I wish you hadn't let me drift off.'

Guy eased his way down through the gearbox, pulled up about fifty yards shy of a humpback bridge.

On the other side of the bridge and blocking the road, sheep.

'This could get awkward,' he said to Laura, 'if those sheep decide to completely crowd out the bridge?'

'Do sheep make those kind of decisions?'

'Guess not.'

'Guy?'

'Yes dear?'

'Do you think I ought to look afraid or just a bit stunned?'

'Try stunned,' Guy said, 'stunned seems a fair enough reaction given that right out of the blue we've run into a press pack in the middle of the Scottish countryside.'

Laura grabbed his arm. 'What did Susie say Susie would do, if it were her?'

Guy adopted the ten-to-two grip on the steering wheel, smiled for the cameras.

'Susie said you should play it natural. Smile maybe?'

'I like to pout best.'

'Then pout.' Guy told her, 'and give 'em the finger while you're at it. In fact, didn't Susie suggest two fingers?'

'No. She didn't say that. Are you trying to get me the sack or what?'

'Can you do a Spock, Laura?'

'What?'

'The thing where you separate your fingers out like this?'

Laura let go of Guy's arm, splayed her fingers, forming the iconic 'Vulcan' greeting.

'I can do a Spock,' she said, 'but what if Susie can't?'

Guy shrugged. The shoulders of his Blue Island tweed jacket fell neatly into place and he felt good about that, like he had on a second skin that looked good on him and aged with him even though he didn't really look after it or him.

'I don't think it matters, Laura. No one is going to find out'.

Laura clung to Guy, still trying for stunned.

'I'm sticking with Brett's famous enigmatic look,' Guy said to her, 'you know, the one he gives at the post-match press conference when they just conceded an equaliser in injury-time.'

The press, a little way off to their left, huddled on a low wooden footbridge that traversed a beck and that ran alongside the rough cinder road. To the right of them, boggy ground and tough moorland grasses in faded wintry greens, acres of sky, and in the far distance what looked like mountains but might have been bundles of grey-blue cloud.

Guy kept on looking straight ahead even though he sensed the mob was about to close in on them.

In front of him the two score sheep had made their way across the bridge and begun milling around the bonnet of the hired Mercedes.

'Well,' he said to Laura, in a rather unconvincing manner, 'at least the sheep should keep the paparazzi at a distance?'

It was no accident sheep had come upon this spot when they did. They had been led there. The press ambush of the decoy Susie B and Brett Bartoli, had been carefully orchestrated. All the same, the fear of being unmasked as fakes, terrified Laura.

Guy put the car into gear, edged it forward. The sheep spilt into two distinct groupings, but only for a moment. Oddly, rather than creating a permanent divide, the rising engine revs seemed to lure the sheep back into a single entity.

The road remained blocked.

No egress for 'Brett' and 'Susie'. No way for them to dodge the never-ending volley of camera lenses, shutters click-clicking fractions out of tandem with the unnatural white light they spat, which rippled out, over and beyond them; the car interior lit up like some crazy leather-bound photo-booth fit for A-Listers, the sparse heather behind them, a silvered template.

'Do you think I should pull my hat down all the way over my eyebrows, Guy? You know how cute I look when I do that?'

'Yeah right...'

Guy took his foot off the accelerator, engaged the handbrake; it was obvious to him they were going nowhere fast.

'The question is,' he asked Laura, 'does Susie B do cute?'

'Isn't it time we split, Guy, pleeeeze?'

'I wish!'

Laura said, 'Can't you just, you know...?'

'What, kill a few sheep?'

'Not exactly, no.'

'Mow down a couple of paparazzi whilst I'm at it?'

'Ha-ha!'

Cries of This way Susie and Over here Brett were largely drowned out by sporadic bleating.

Guy slid his sunglasses down his nose, looked out over the top of the frame. 'This is just so bizarre!' he said.

'Don't let them get a good look at your eyes, Guy, you might give the game away!'

'You still think you're a better look-alike than me, don't you?'

Laura bit her lip. 'Yes,' she said, clinging onto Guy's arm in faux distress, 'I am. Me and Susie are like identical twins and just so sexy with it?'

‘I must say,’ Guy said, ‘Susie would look especially mint in those cool threads you're wearing.'

'Would she now?'

Laura turned to Guy, cupped his face in her hands, began kissing him.

After she had finished making a main meal out of his tongue and lips she slid back into her seat and reached for his arm again. 'You pig,' she said in a sweet voice, 'lusting after Susie B, on our 'wedding day' of all days!'

'Ha-ha,' Guy said, 'wedding day indeed. Well, flash them 'Susie's' ring and then we'll see about getting off?'

'No, husband dear,' Laura said, 'let's just get out of here right now, before our cover is blown.'

Guy put the Mercedes into gear, nudged it forward, eased his way in amongst the tight-knit amorphous fleece like thing that shimmied one way then another and when at last a tear appeared in the living wool blanketing the causeway, wove his way through and out of it, sped off into the gloom.

'Freedom is...?' Guy said.

'In the eye of the beholder?'

'I was hoping you would come up with something a little more profound?'

'Oh look!' Laura said, consulting her Blackberry. 'I just got a text from Susie B.'

'And?'

'It's thirty-two C in the Seychelles.'

'Too bad.'

'Why too bad?'

'Too hot for them to make out on the beach. Too many exotic insects. They'll just have to stick to the luxury air-conditioned honeymoon suite instead.'

'There's always the sea?'

'I...sorry, I mean, Brett, has a thing about Great Whites. You won't catch him in the water with his trunks down.'

'I'm glad our 'honeymoon' won't be ruined by sharks, Guy.'

'We got the whole of the centrally-heated west-wing all to ourselves.'

'Yep,' Laura leaned over and kissed Guy on the cheek, 'and all we have to do for the next three weeks is put in the occasional shadowy appearance on a balcony shrouded by billowing curtains.'

'Here's to a happy marriage sweetheart.'

A little after that Laura pointed out a signpost and Guy slowed the Mercedes and Laura said to him only two more miles to Skerrycliff Ferry, at which Guy tried the DAB radio and got a local station and after listening for a couple of minutes said 'love this music' even though he had never heard the unique sound of the ethereal E-bow, the other-worldly sound caught up in a rise and fall of guitar chords, a haunting pitch that made him think of wind and rain; and crashing cymbals, which made him think; like high-tide in winter, marauding waves smashing into rocks under a moonlit sky.

'That was Porrohman, folks. The play-out track on Big Country's seminal album, The Crossing, which was released in nineteen-eighty-three, which means listeners, and I cannae believe am actually saying this, but, twenty-eight years just slid by on the inside of time. Sublime. Miss you Stuart. We all do. Anyway folks, that's enough nostalgia for one day. Right up to the present now. A report just in appears to confirm this week's rumours were right all along. Newly weds, England's star striker, Brett Bartoli, and Scotland's very own ex-catwalk model turned pop star, Susie B, are honeymooning on Skerrycliff, a beautiful little island around three miles or so off the west coast of Scotland. They were photographed on the mainland, only moments ago, on their way to the Skerrycliff Ferry. Our entertainment reporter Fionnula McCormack has the story...'