Angels

by Marian Keyes

  Later that evening, Dad sidled into my room, a brown paper bag under his arm.

  ‘McDonald’s!’ he declared. ‘Your favourite.’

  When I’d been eleven, perhaps, but I welcomed the company. ‘Chicken nuggets,’ he announced proudly. ‘With two different dips.’

  ‘What’s this in aid of?’

  ‘You have to eat. And your mother…’ he paused and sighed, his expression wistful, ‘… well, she tries her best.’

  Since the night I’d left Garv, the mere thought of food had been anathema – it didn’t make me feel sick, just amazed. But this evening I was going to have to try, because as well as the chicken nuggets, Dad had also got me a large fries and a coke and, by the look of things, a Happy Meal for himself. It came with a free robot.

  ‘Eat a fry yoke,’ he tempted. (He feels silly calling them ‘fries’. The real name, he feels, is ‘chips’.)

  I’d almost have preferred to eat the robot, but because I felt sorry for him, I tried. The chip (or fry, if you prefer) sat in my mouth like a foreign body. He watched me anxiously and I attempted to choke it down my closed throat.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked. ‘Brandy, vodka, cider?’

  I was stunned. That was one of the strangest questions I’d ever been asked in my entire life, bar none. The only time my parents ever have drink with their meals is on Christmas Day, when the bottle of warm Blue Nun is wheeled out – always assuming that it hasn’t been discovered and drunk the night before. Besides, there wasn’t any – what had he suggested? – brandy, vodka or cider in the house. Then I realized Dad wasn’t offering me a drink. He was simply curious, trying to gauge how bad I was.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t want a drink.’ That would be a huge mistake. When I was depressed, alcohol never cheered me up. In fact, it probably made me worse – maudlin and self-pitying. ‘If I got drunk I’d probably kill myself.’

  ‘Good then. Marvellous.’ Suddenly he was as happy as his meal. He ate with relieved gusto, attempted to play with his robot – ‘What does this yoke do?’ – then departed.

  A few minutes later he was back. ‘Emily’s on the phone.’

  5

  Emily is my best friend. Best girlfriend, that is, and actually, since Garv and I have gone weird on each other, probably best friend.

  Gawky twelve-year-olds, we met at secondary school and instantly recognized in each other a kindred spirit. We were outsiders. Not total pariahs, but we were a long way from being the most popular girls in the class. Part of the problem was that we were both good at sport: genuinely cool girls smoked and faked letters from their parents saying they had verrucas. Another black mark against us was that we’d no interest in the usual teenage experimentation with cigarettes and alcohol. I was too terrified of getting into trouble and Emily said it was a waste of money. Together we pronounced it ‘stupid’.

  At school, Emily was small, skinny and looked like ET with a bad perm. A far cry from how she looks today. She’s still small and skinny, which we now know to be a Good Thing, right? Especially the skinny bit. But the bad perm (which wasn’t a perm at all, but the real thing) is just a distant memory. Her hair is now swishy and glossy – very, very impressive, even though she says that in its natural state she could still double for a member of the Jackson Five and that to get her hair fully frizz-free, her hairdresser sometimes has to put his foot on her chest and tug hard.

  Her look is very pulled together and confident. When a certain style is in vogue, I usually buy something from the ‘new-look’ and team it with the rest of my ‘old-look’ wardrobe and think I’m doing pretty well. But not Emily. For instance, remember when the rock-chick look was in? I bought a T-shirt that said ‘Rock Chick’ in pink, shiny letters and I thought I was it. Emily, however, appeared in bandage-tight snakeskin jeans, purple stiletto-heeled cowboy boots and a pink leather stetson. But instead of looking preposterous – and she could have done, that pink leather stetson was borderline –I wanted to applaud. She’s also a woman who knows how to accessorize. Coloured shoes (a colour other than black, that is), handbags shaped like flowerpots, kooky barettes in her hair if the occasion demands it.

  I’m not a total klutz. I read magazines, I’m an enthusiastic shopper and I take a keen interest in skirt lengths, heel shapes and the light-diffusing qualities of foundation. But you only have to look at my single friends to see that they’re all thinner and more glamorous than me and their make-up bags are cornucopias of breaking-news wondrousness. While I’m still reading about something, they’re already wearing it. (Do you know how long it took me to realize that blue shimmer shadow was back in? Honestly, I’d be too ashamed to tell you, and even though it’s a cliché, it is something to do with having a man and not being ‘out there’.)

  Despite our divergent lifestyles and living several thousand miles apart, my friendship with Emily has endured. We’d e-mail each other twice or three times a week. She’d tell me about all her disastrous relationships, then she’d debrief me on my dull, married life, then we’d both go home happy.

  It was a great source of sadness to me that we couldn’t seem to manage to live on the same continent. Garv and I had only been married a few months before we moved to Chicago for five years. Then less than four weeks before we returned to Ireland, Emily departed for Los Angeles.

  What happened was, Emily had always wanted to be a writer. She’d tried her hand at short stories and novels and got nowhere. Her stuff always seemed good to me, but what would I know? Like Helen says, I’ve no imagination.

  Then, five or so years ago, Emily wrote a short film called A Perfect Day which was picked up by an Irish production company and got shown on RTE. It was whimsical and charming, but what normally happens with a ‘short’ is that it gets shown once, then disappears. It’s regarded as a type of practice run for wannabe film-makers. But something unprecedented happened with A Perfect Day, because it was a very odd length: fourteen and a half minutes. Whenever Ireland had some sort of corruption scandal (every other week), the nine o’clock news would run over and a ‘filler’ item would be needed to occupy the airwaves until ten o’clock, when things could get back on schedule. Three times over a four-month period A Perfect Day was that filler, and it began to work its way beneath the skin of the nation. Suddenly at water-coolers and photocopying machines and bus-stops throughout the land people were asking each other, ‘Did you see that lovely thing that was on after the news last night?’

  Overnight, in Ireland at least, Emily became a householdish name – people didn’t exactly know who she was, but they knew that they’d heard of her, and they had definitely heard of her film. She could have made a decent enough living in Ireland, if she’d been prepared to be flexible, and do sit-coms, plays, ads – apparently they pay very handsomely – as well as films. But she decided to go for broke, left her dreary day-job and departed for Los Angeles.

  Time passed, then news came back that she’d been taken on by one of the big Hollywood agencies. Not long after that came the announcement that she’d sold a full-length script to Dreamworks. Or was it Miramax? One of the big ones, anyway. The film was called Hostage (or it might be Hostage!), and was about a tiny, honeymooners’ island in the South Pacific, which is invaded by terrorists who kill the few locals and take several of the honeymooners hostage. Others escape into the undergrowth, survive castaway-style on twigs etc., and plot a rescue mission. It was described as ‘an action movie, with a love story and comic overtones’.

  The Sunday Independent did a feature about the deal, RTE ran A Perfect Day again, and Emily’s mother bought a long, navy, spangledy dress for the première. (She got it in the sales, at 40 per cent off, but it was still fairly pricey.)

  More time passed, and not much happened. No one got cast and whenever I asked what stage they were at, Emily said tersely, ‘We’re still fine-tuning the script.’ I stopped asking about it.

  Eventually, Emily’s mother rang and asked Emily would she mind if she wore the long, nav
y, spangledy dress to Mr Emily’s Christmas work do? Only it was nearly a year since she’d bought it, and though it had been in the sales, at 40 per cent off, it had still been fairly pricey. She’d like to get some use out of it.

  Work away, Emily advised.

  Then, lo and behold, a rival studio brought out a film. It was about a group of eight couples who go on a golfing holiday on a tiny island off Fiji. The island is invaded by terrorists, who kill the few locals and take several of the golfers hostage. Some escape into the undergrowth, survive castaway-style on twigs etc., and plot a rescue mission. It was an action movie, with –you’ll never guess – a love story. And even, would you believe, one or two laughs. I’d worked on the fringes of the film business long enough not to be surprised when news filtered back that the studio had decided to ‘pass’ on making Emily’s movie. ‘Pass’ was Hollywood-speak for ‘turn down’, ‘reject’ or ‘want nothing further to do with’. I rang Emily to tell her how sorry I was. She was crying. ‘But I’m working on a new script,’ she told me. ‘You win some, you lose some, right?’

  That was a year and a half ago. Soon afterwards, she came home to Ireland for Christmas and persuaded me to go out on the town with her, just the two of us.

  Garv begged to be allowed to come, but sorrowfully Emily told him it was a girls’ night out and he wouldn’t be able for it. And she was right – at the best of times, she was a dangerous person to go out with, and when she was feeling raw, humiliated and disinclined to talk about it, she was even worse.

  It was the pink stetson night: the rock-chick look was reaching critical mass and was about to collapse under the weight of its own silliness. But it hadn’t yet happened and she looked sensational.

  I jumped all over her, so happy to see her, but despite our delight in each other’s company, it was a strange night. At the time I thought I was having the time of my life, but in retrospect I’m not so sure. Emily drank an awful lot at high speed – since she’d started drinking she’d become very good at it. Normally I didn’t even attempt to keep up, but on this particular night I did. Obviously I got very drunk, but strangely I didn’t realize it. I felt perfectly sober. The only indication that anything was amiss was the fact that everyone I came into contact with seemed to do something to insult or annoy me. It never occurred to me that the fault might be mine.

  We were in a bar in the Hayman, a new fancy-dan hotel, where everything from the roof tiles right down to the ashtrays had been ‘created’ by some celebrated New York designer. I’d heard about the place – it had been all over the papers, not least because most of its objets were for sale – but had never been there, whereas Emily had only been home three days and had already been there twice.

  We settled down at a corner table, ordered a bottle of wine, and Emily launched into the story of her life since we’d last seen each other. She refused to talk about her writing – ‘Don’t mention the war,’ she’d groaned, and instead told me about her love life. The dates she’d gone on with the gay man who insisted he wasn’t and the straight man who insisted he was gay. She was a great raconteur, with impeccable attention to detail. No broad brushstrokes. Gripping stuff.

  She always seemed to do a lot more talking than me. But then again she had a lot more to talk about. By the time we were finally up to speed on her life we’d almost finished our second bottle of wine.

  ‘Now you,’ she ordered. ‘What’s the story with the rabbits?’ She frowned. ‘And what does a girl have to do to get a drink around here?’

  I sighed and began my sorry tale, then through the throng spotted my sister Claire.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she exclaimed. Then she saw Emily and understood. She spent a bit of time chatting to us, then noticed the people she was meant to be meeting, so off she went. No sooner was she out of earshot than Emily muttered darkly, ‘Oh yeah? You go on off and have a nice time with the people at the BIGGER table.’

  She looked at me levelly – or so I thought at the time, but clearly we were just swaying in time with each other. ‘I’ve taken agin your sister… And,’ she appended grandly, ‘her friends.’

  I looked over at the table that Claire had just joined. At her arrival it had blown up with laughter and talk. I was pierced with a peculiar sense of exclusion. ‘I’ve taken against them too!’

  ‘You haven’t taken against them.’

  Hadn’t I?

  Emily leant her head back and tipped the last of her wine down her throat. ‘You’ve taken agin them.’

  Fair enough. I’d taken agin them.

  We managed to procure another bottle of wine, then decided to go somewhere else, where the people weren’t quite so annoying. As we beat our way out, we passed Claire and her friends.

  ‘We’re leaving now,’ Emily said haughtily. ‘No thanks to you.’

  Cryptic, I know, but at the time it made perfect sense.

  In the hotel lobby, by the front door, we decided to have a little dance before we left. I’m not sure whose idea it was, but we were both agreed that it was a good one. We actually put our handbags down and had a brief dance around them before cackling off into the night. To this day I can still see the astonished expressions of the three considerably more sober men standing near us.

  Outside, we hailed a taxi and asked – demanded, more likely – to be taken to Grafton Street. Within seconds we’d taken agin the driver, paranoid that he was taking the long and lucrative way round.

  ‘You can’t turn right on that bridge,’ he defended himself.

  ‘Sure,’ Emily scorned. ‘You can’t swizz me, I live here,’ she lied aggressively. ‘I’m not a tourist.’

  Then she poked me with her small, sharp elbow and giggled hoarsely, ‘Maggie, look.’ She opened wide her handbag – like a dentist trying to reach the furthest molars – where, in amongst her LV wallet (fake) and Prada make-up bag (real), nestled one of the ashtrays from the hotel. If I remembered correctly it had carried a price tag of thirty pounds.

  ‘Where did you get that?!’

  A rhetorical question. When Emily is under stress she nicks things and I hate it. Why can’t she be more like me? My way of dealing with stress is to get an outbreak of eczema on my right arm. I’m not saying it’s pleasant but at least you can’t get arrested for it.

  ‘Stop stealing things,’ I scowled, low and fierce. ‘Sometime you’ll get caught and you’ll be in terrible trouble!’

  But answer came there none, because she was berating the driver again.

  We went to a nightclub that we were really far too old for and had a great time taking agin more people – the doorman, who didn’t summon us to the top of the queue quickly enough for Emily’s liking, barmen who didn’t serve us instantly, sundry merry-makers who didn’t leap to their feet and give us their seats as soon as they saw us.

  Basically, we had a blast, and the following day Garv was not unsympathetic. He speedily vacated the bathroom when I had to vomit, and stood patiently on the landing, his face covered in shaving cream, his razor in his hand.

  By six that evening I was well enough to talk, so I rang Emily. I was quite giddy – almost proud of our wild behaviour the night before, but Emily sounded subdued.

  ‘Did we dance around our handbags in the Hayman?’ she asked.

  ‘We did.’

  ‘Do you know?’ she said fake-casually. ‘I have a horrible feeling there was no dance-floor.’

  ‘Never mind no dance-floor,’ I exclaimed. ‘There was no music. And wasn’t it great the way we took agin all those people?’

  Emily made a funny noise. A whimper crossed with a groan. ‘Don’t tell me I was taking against people.’

  ‘Agin,’ I corrected. ‘We took agin people. It was great.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  I picked up the phone. ‘Emily?’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I croaked. ‘I just think I’ve a touch of the flu.’

  ‘Your mum says you’ve split up with Garv.’

&nbs
p; ‘Oh… yeah.’

  ‘And that you’ve lost your job.’

  ‘Yes,’ I sighed, ‘I have.’

  ‘But… ‘She sounded both astonished and helpless, ‘I’ve been e-mailing you at work. Whoever has taken over from you will have got the finer details of Brett and his penis enlargement.’

  I managed to say, ‘Sorry. I haven’t really been in touch with anyone.’

  A silence while static hopped and blew on the line. I knew she was dying to ask questions, but she satisfied herself with, ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  More static. ‘Look,’ she said slowly, ‘if you’re not working and… stuff, why don’t you just hop on a plane and come out here for a while?’

  ‘What’s out there?’

  ‘Sunshine,’ she cajoled. ‘Fat-free Pringles, me!

  It was a measure of how far gone I was that I suspected she didn’t mean it. That she was only saying it because she felt she had to, that it was what a good friend should say. But all the same, something sparked in my deadness. Los Angeles. City of Angels. I wanted to go.

  6

  We were spending an alarming amount of time flying over the suburbs of Los Angeles. They just kept unscrolling beneath me, grid after grid of dusty, single-level houses, the neat squares occasionally interrupted by a huge concrete freeway snaking violently through them. From far away in the distance came the diamond glint of the ocean.

  It was barely a week since the phone call from Emily and I could hardly believe I was here. Almost here – were we ever going to land?

  There had been strong opposition to me making the journey. Especially from my mother. ‘Los Angeles? What Los Angeles?’ she had demanded. ‘Didn’t Rachel say you could stay with her in New York? And didn’t Claire say you could go to London and live with her for as long as you wanted? And what if there’s an earthquake in that Los Angeles place?’ She turned on Dad. ‘Say something!’