by Jenny Colgan
‘Look after yourself, Hedgehog. Lots of bad people in America.’
‘I know. Well, the president for starters. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. I’ll just pop by a supermarket and buy an assault rifle.’
‘Hedge. I’m not joking. Look, I know you’re thirty …’
‘Da-ad.’
‘Sweetheart, you know you’re all I’ve got. And you’re still my little girl.’
‘I know.’ Ellie pulled herself away.
‘Don’t worry. If I learn to live like an American, by the time I get back I’ll be your quite remarkably big girl.’
Colin looked tiny with his bags around him.
‘I’ve never lived away from home before.’
Big Bastard was hovering nervously in the background.
‘You’ll be fine,’ said Ellie encouragingly. ‘Just remember; in other people’s houses, you pee in the pan.’
Arthur hoisted the last of Colin’s stuff up the steps.
‘Here you are, chicken,’ he said. ‘Your Sweet Valley High books.’
‘Now remember,’ said Ellie. ‘If you’re cooking, Big Bastard only eats food beginning with B.’
From the hall, Big Bastard grunted.
‘Baked beans, biryani, beer and Big Macs. Okay?’
Colin nodded solemnly.
‘But don’t let him have any chocolate buttons. His fingers are too stubby to get in the packet, and he gets all frustrated.’
‘Tell him I eat Bird’s Eye stuff too,’ said Big Bastard anxiously.
‘Oh yes. Fish fingers are fine. But brown sauce, not ketchup.’
‘Okay,’ said Colin, looking down.
‘And bed by ten,’ said Ellie.
‘Hedge!’ complained Arthur.
‘Oh, you know I can’t help it,’ said Ellie. The taxi started honking outside.
Arthur slung an arm around her.
‘Where are we meeting again?’
‘Um … San Diego?’
‘Where are we meeting again?’
‘Um … San Taclaus?’
‘You’re very funny.’
He fished out her diary and opened it up. On every page it said, ‘San Francisco minus-eight days, seven days,’ etc.
‘I’ll see you there. In TEN DAYS.’
Ellie nodded feverishly.
‘Honk honk,’ said the taxi.
‘Hooray! I’m off!’ she said.
‘Thanks for the room and everything,’ said Colin shyly.
‘Not at all. I’m just glad you remembered your Action Man pyjamas.’
‘Thank fuck for a bit of peace and quiet,’ said Big Bastard. ‘Now I can watch porn in peace, without certain people talking deliberately loudly over it all the time.’
‘It was only that one time,’ said Ellie. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t me who invited your parents over in the first place.’
The cab honked again.
‘Please go,’ said Arthur. ‘Partings make me teary, and if you miss this cab, you’ll never fit that rucksack on Big Bastard’s scooter.’
‘And you won’t get the chance to try, neither,’ said Big Bastard. ‘Come on Colin, let’s watch the football. You’ll like it. It’s like ballet, right, only it’s for blokes.’
‘I am going to miss you all so much,’ sighed Ellie, hoisting her ratty old pink and grey Bunac rucksack onto her back. She looked back at the shabby room, the worn curtains and the view of the bins with a fat arsed tabby sitting on the top.
‘When I get back,’ she vowed to herself, seeing the P60 sitting lonesomely on the sideboard, ‘everything is going to be better than this.’
‘And I’ll show you how to make a Bovril. The spoon just stands up in the jar, then you never have to wash it.’
‘Everything is going to be better than this.’
Julia sat alone in her small, immaculate flat, waiting for Ellie and the taxi and staring at her ring finger. Loxy wasn’t returning her calls. Part of her knew that all she had to do to stop this, to make everything better, was to call him up and say … what, exactly? Let’s get married because one in two marriages fail, and that’s across the general population including arranged marriages and strict Catholics, and in fact amongst late marrying metropolitan middle class spoilt independent thirty-year-olds it’s probably two out of three and if you add in that mixed race marriages also have a high failure rate, they probably had a five out of four chance of getting divorced and when her parents had got divorced she’d fallen in love with a pony and tried to run away from home to live in a field?
Or that the thought of never seeing him again felt like the onset of a convulsive illness?
For the billionth time she cursed him for putting her in such an all or nothing state of affairs and throwing her calm, well organized life so entirely out of whack.
She looked at the phone, which declined to ring. She stared at her neatly arranged suitcase and wondered whether to add a packet of three.
Footloose
‘Any chance of getting upgraded?’
The stewardess stared straight through them, as if nothing had been said. Julia punched Ellie on the arm.
‘Did you pack these bags yourself?’
‘Excuse me,’ said Ellie, again. ‘But we’re on our way to America to … uhm … get married …’
‘Umm … or not,’ muttered Julia,
‘… and we wondered if there was any possibility of an upgr …’
‘No,’ said the stewardess. ‘I didn’t answer you earlier because I thought it would be less embarrassing for you that way.’
Ellie took stock of the situation.
‘Okay then,’ she said. ‘New lives here we come! Cattlestyle!’
‘It’s gate 354. The final call just rang so I’d get along now, little dogies.’
‘No, it’s okay, we want to hang around and see if they call our names out.’
Julia pulled desperately at Ellie’s rucksack. ‘Come onnn …’
‘They won’t, necessarily,’ said the stewardess, smiling sweetly. ‘It’s up to me, you see.’
‘Bye!’ yelled Ellie as the two girls took off at full speed for departures.
‘We won’t be able to go to duty free now,’ grumbled Julia as they ran from one end of the concourse to the other, desperately searching for the fifteen-foot sign that announced ‘International Departures’.
‘So what? So you can carry around a big sticky clanking bottle of Baileys for three thousand miles? Anyway, we’re going to the land of the cheap EVERYTHING. God, I think I’m going to start smoking. And using petrol.’
‘I just can’t believe we’re so late.’ They thudded down the heavy metal corridors, running like the Bionic Man along the moving walkways and trying not to knock down more old ladies than strictly necessary.
‘I just can’t believe Big Bastard wouldn’t give us a lift.’
Julia hit her with her prepacked bag of magazines.
‘Have you never heard of the repetitive banality of evil?’
They could see a huge queue at passport control, and the TV screens were flashing ‘final call’. Ellie fumbled for her ticket. Julia flapped frantically.
‘Come on! Come on!’
‘Okay, okay. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. Andrew will be waiting.’
‘They won’t hold the plane for us, you know,’ said Julia. ‘They’ll chuck the bags out on the tarmac.’
‘For God’s sake will you stop panicking? Okay, here it is. RUN!’
‘Shit! Shit, hang on!’ screamed Julia, stopping suddenly.
‘Hold on! Stop!’ Julia shouted again. She dropped her hand luggage and spun around.
‘I cannot believe this,’ said Ellie, unfurling herself. ‘Are we late or not? Do they change the time zone as soon as we get in the airport?’
‘Shut up. And look!’
Hanging over the departures barrier, waving desperately, was Loxy.
‘Would the last remaining passengers for flight BA1273 to Los Angeles please go to Departures immediately
. This flight is closing. The last remaining passengers for this flight please go to Gate 354 immediately. Thank you.’
‘Oh my God, he did it!’ said Ellie, her panic momentarily lifted by the sheer movie emotion of the moment. ‘He did a Ferris!’
‘Lox!’ squealed Julia, racing over and hugging him over the barrier. Some elderly people looked on, smiling and nodding encouragingly.
‘I didn’t say goodbye properly,’ said Loxy, breathing in her hair. ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘I’m sorry too!’ said Julia. They clutched one another.
‘Would passengers Eversholt and Denford please go to Gate 354 immediately where this plane is ready to depart.’
Ellie looked round for everyone applauding. Nobody was.
‘Just …’ He pulled her tighter. ‘I love you. You love me. Come on. Let’s just go get married. Let’s get a plane somewhere else. There’s a chapel here. Let’s just get married RIGHT NOW on the CONCOURSE.’
As he yelled this, people were gradually starting to clear a space around them. A couple of Americans whooped and cheered.
‘I’m not going to let her go!’ shouted Loxy, galvanized by the scene. ‘We’re getting MARRIED.’
People started to clap and sigh.
‘Ah,’ said Julia.
‘Passengers Eversholt and Denford – your luggage will be removed from this flight if you don’t present yourselves at Gate 354 immediately …’
Julia shot a desperate look at Ellie, who flagged down one of the small carts.
‘Well?’ said Ellie. ‘Are you coming or not?’
‘Loxy,’ said Julia. ‘I already told you. I just … I just don’t know.’
His face turned to stone. The cart came over and Ellie jumped on it. Loxy lowered his arms very, very slowly.
The crowd started to boo.
‘What!’ yelled Julia crossly. ‘This is the noughties, for fuck’s sake. A woman has the right to … oh, fuck it.’
‘Miss, you’re going to have to go NOW,’ said the man on the cart.
‘Passengers Eversholt and Denford …’ said the speaker.
‘JULIA!’ said Ellie and Loxy, in simultaneous anguish. Julia looked desperately from one to the other. Then, suddenly she jumped onto the cart.
‘Okay, okay. GO!’
The cart started to move off at top speed – i.e. about five miles an hour – leaving Loxy standing desolate in its wake, holding the ring box and being patted on the back by bystanders.
About a hundred feet on, however, Ellie had the misfortune to take a glance back, and spied a familiar figure barrelling its way through the crowd behind them.
‘Jesus,’ she said.
‘Hedgehog!’ the voice cried.
‘Aw, Jesus,’ said Ellie again.
And then, drowning out the tannoy and the hubbub of the entire airport, from a figure standing outlined against the departure lounge, came a very bad, very out-of-tune version of something that might have been, but wasn’t quite ‘Baker Street’ played by a skinny man with a mullet.
Filing onto a plane late, Ellie reflected, couldn’t be entirely unlike filing into a dock when everyone knows you’ve done it. In fact, judging from some of the looks they were getting, people would be happier if she’d chopped up her father with an axe and eaten the bits, rather than be making BA flight 1273 miss its time slot from terminal four and have to join the very long queue for naughty jumbo jets.
‘Can I have a gin and tonic?’
‘No,’ said the tight faced stewardess. ‘Not until we leave the ground. If that ever happens.’
‘No,’ Ellie repeated sarkily to herself when the stewardess has gone, ‘Not until you get promoted from your job as Wobbly Waitress – if that ever happens.’
Ellie studied the film menu. ‘Oh look,’ she said, pointing it out to Julia. ‘They’ve got Runaway Bride.’
‘Ha ha ha. You’re very funny.’ Julia took the menu off her. ‘Oh God! Look at them all! They’ve got Love Story, The English Patient, Titanic and Terms of Endearment. Don’t they have any films called The Two People Who Had Doubts About Getting Married But Then Everything Worked Out Just Fine?’
‘It’s in the Science Fiction and Fantasy section,’ said Ellie.
Julia tried to stare out of the window, but it was miles away. All there was to stare at was a small child trying to catch her attention by kicking the side of her chair. He seemed to be conserving quite a lot of energy in his kicks, though, and looked like he was heading for a long distance endurance record.
‘I think these people hate us,’ said Ellie, watching a grim stewardess performing a safety demonstration.
‘Look at the expression on her face. I think she wants us all to die.’
‘What do you expect during the safety demonstration – a cabaret? I just want her to get it over with, so we can get on with the true fun of air travel – being allowed to drink at absurd times of the day. And I really think I need one NOW.’
Julia had already reset her watch.
‘It’s four o’clock in the morning in Los Angeles,’ she said. ‘That seems to me a perfectly reasonable time to be out drinking.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Ellie.
They eventually managed to clink the first of their plastic glasses of double gin and tonic together.
‘We’re on holiday!’
‘To holidays!’
‘To Andrew!’
‘To finding … things …’
‘Do you think I’ll get back that twenty-inch waist I had at sixteen?’ said Ellie.
‘Only if you start wearing braces again. It’s a mysterious power trade-off.’
‘Huh, you can talk, Mrs Pimple Head.’
‘You were always one for the snappy nicknames, weren’t you?’
‘Snappy nicknames, snappy knicker-elastic,’ said Ellie. ‘Can’t beat either of them.’
‘I hope they caught that flight,’ said Siobhan, moodily sipping her Cosmopolitan at Elms that evening. ‘Although Patrick paying for tickets that nobody used would also have its appeal.’
Loxy winced and explained what had happened at the airport.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Siobhan, patting him.
Loxy shrugged. ‘Forget it. How have you been today?’
Siobhan shrugged in return. ‘I think I’ve come through the white hot revenge mode, unfortunately. I’m kind of getting into the hours of insane crying. They BETTER have a good time, that’s all I can say.’
‘Hmm,’ said Loxy, staring into space. ‘Not too good.’
‘Well, obviously,’ said Siobhan. Then she tapped Loxy on the arm. ‘Don’t worry about Julia. You know she’ll be incredibly sensible.’
‘Wha’ time is it?’ slurred Julia fifteen hours later, staggering across the concourse.
‘Dunno. You’ve got … bags …’
‘Lossa bags. An … still gaw this.’
Julia held up two full plastic miniatures of gin.
Ellie rubbed her gritty eyes and clumsily reached for one. Julia punched her on the shoulder.
‘You shouldn’t; you shouldn’t have said communist, to nice man, no, shouldn’t.’
‘People should … take … a bloody joke …’
‘Look! Nother man!’
A gigantic guy wearing a yellow jacket was ushering people into cabs. They staggered up to him and he bundled them into one speedily.
‘Where you goin’, pliz?’ said the cab driver without looking at them.
Ellie looked at Julia, whose head had flopped to one side. With effort, she straightened up again.
‘79a Balham Park Road,’ said Julia in her best posh voice, enunciating every syllable.
‘Huh?’ said the driver, turning round.
‘No!’ said Ellie. ‘No! Los Angeles!’
‘Yes pliz. Where in Los Angeles, pliz?’
Julia took one look out of the window, her head flopped again and she fell asleep instantly, and all Ellie’s shunting, or the frantic honking of the cabs behind them,
couldn’t wake her.
Ellie fumbled through her handbag, but couldn’t see anything that looked like a hotel address, even with one hand held over her eye. And she knew, even in her fuddled state, that the chances of getting into Julia’s password-protected Palm Pilot were infinitesimal.
She sat up and stared at the lights in the distance for a second trying to think of somewhere she knew in Los Angeles.
‘Take me back to the Hotel California,’ she said woozily.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know that address, ma’am.’
Ellie blinked heavily and forced herself to try and think of a hotel.
‘The Ritz, please,’ she said finally, and sank back into unconsciousness.
Pitch dark it may have been, but Ellie awoke anyway on the stroke of 6am, staring at the ceiling and trying to identify where the hell in the universe she was and what on earth she might have been doing. Perhaps, she speculated, she’d been in a car accident and was now in hospital. That would explain the headache and exonerate her from having done anything embarrassing. Still, she was fully clothed at least. With intense effort she stretched out her arm and managed to turn on the bedside light.
‘Fuck!’
The ornate and overdone surroundings gradually filtered into view under the warm lighting. On another double bed, Julia was snoring soundly, tucked up in crisp white sheets. Their bags were very carefully lined up against the wall.
‘Arse!’ said Ellie, and decided to wish for death. In a hideous flashback sequence reminiscent of Altered States, she recalled various choice scenes from the night before, which included somebody falling up some steps (the presence of a rather large bloodied scab on her knee seemed to indicate that it might have been her), the desperate waving of a credit card; some overtly solicitous room staff. And, oh God, oh God, she was wearing a crisp pair of cotton pyjamas. Ellie had never owned a crisp pair of cotton pyjamas in her entire life. Either these were magic pyjamas, or the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
She pondered whether to wake Julia or not. Get the agony over with quickly, or give her a happy hour or two more of oblivion. The problem was solved by a desperate need to go to the bathroom and the rather sudden rediscovery of the scarred knee and what felt suspiciously like a twisted ankle.