by Alison Bond
She was only five minutes late.
Riley was right. It was much better inside. The Blue Lounge turned out to be a long deck set just above the waves, where ornately carved benches scattered with navy-blue cushions overlooked the surf and white wooden booths lined up along one side like changing huts.
Melanie was waiting for her.
Lynsey had spoken to Melanie three times in the last fortnight and had been relieved to note that when Melanie made a decision she stuck with it. It was just the preamble that she had a problem with. Now she had committed it seemed that she was frighteningly organized. Melanie had arrived in Los Angeles a week earlier and was already happily installed in a studio-owned motel complex close to the lot where her new show, Justice, would shoot.
‘It’s crazy,’ said Melanie. ‘The vending machine in the lobby has three buttons for decaff and only one for the real stuff. That’s worrying.’
‘Try not to lose any sleep over it,’ cracked Lynsey and got a wry smile for her trouble.
They both ate steak. Lynsey liked hers well done but Melanie’s was bloody. It was an easy, peaceful lunch. Melanie felt starved of English company after only a week and Lynsey just felt starved. She ate her steak with such zeal that she had to explain where she’d been for the last few days.
‘Did you have a good time?’ asked Melanie.
‘Fair,’ said Lynsey. ‘It wasn’t as glamorous as I thought it would be. It doesn’t really matter whether the bus station is in Memphis or Phoenix, the bathrooms all smell dodgy and the cafeterias all look the same.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘No. It was good. I’m glad I did it. I’ll never forget it.’
Looking out onto the beach and the sea that were picture-postcard California both women felt relaxed.
Everything’s going to be okay, thought Melanie.
Lynsey thought, everything’s going to be fantastic.
As Melanie savoured the last drops of her freshly roasted espresso Lynsey touched her hand across the table.
‘See who just came in?’ she said. ‘Don’t look! Okay, look now. That’s Mary Ann Simpson.’
Mary Ann was with a handful of beautiful women; Melanie guessed they were models, but even so Mary Ann stood out like an orchid in a bunch of daisies, a clingy Ghost dress making the most of her sparse curves and her curtain of golden hair softening the harsh angles of her face. She was laughing and smiling with her companions and looked like a different girl to the sullen, gaunt shadow Melanie remembered from Indonesia.
‘I’ve met her. She’s married to Davey Black. I’m sure she won’t remember me.’
What’s she like?’
‘I don’t really know her.’
‘Do you want to say hello?’
‘No way. It will only be embarrassing when she doesn’t know who I am.’
‘Probably think you’re a fan,’ said Lynsey.
‘Well, I’m not,’ said Melanie and was so firm about it that Lynsey thought maybe she did know Mary Ann a little bit after all.
‘Hey, Melanie!’ Mary Ann had spotted her and was bounding across the room with unexpected enthusiasm. ‘How are you? God, it’s so nice to see you out of that jungle. Honestly, two days made me wilt, I don’t know how you did it.’ She kissed Melanie on both cheeks and turned to Lynsey. ‘Hi. ‘I’m Mary Ann Simpson.’
‘This is a friend of mine, Lynsey Dixon.’
Lynsey was unaccountably pleased to hear her relationship with Melanie described as friendship. Maybe she was reluctant to acknowledge this wild-haired, rambling creature on a professional basis.
‘Davey will be so pleased I ran into you,’ said Mary Ann. ‘I have to tell you, he’s unbelievably impressed with your performance in the movie. He’s in town, you should stop by for drinks.’ Her head turned to case the restaurant, lifting golden hair that settled back effortlessly against her milky skin.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘would I be interrupting anything if I invited myself to join you for coffee? I’m with a bunch of colleagues and they’re sweet, but you know, they’re models.’
Melanie couldn’t help it. She raised her eyebrow in a quizzical arch.
‘I know, I know, it’s a shameful profession and maybe I should be more loyal, but there’s only so much you can say about next season’s lines or last night’s lay. In New York it’s not so bad, but here! It’s survival of the dumbest.’ Mary Ann pulled up a chair and summoned the waiter with a casual glance.
While Lynsey made small talk, all the time thinking what her mum would say if she knew that she was having coffee with the girl from the shampoo adverts, Melanie tried not to stare at her rival.
The bill appeared on their table as if by magic.
‘I’ll get this,’ said Melanie.
Lynsey pulled out her wallet as a form of mild protest. But it wasn’t her wallet. It belonged to Riley.
Riley Daniels was driving back to his office thinking how stories often came from the most unusual places. Riley was a mild-mannered entertainment journalist who could be mean when he had to be. He felt slightly guilty about not telling Lynsey Dixon what he did for a living. That would come under his mean side. He’d make it up to her. Lynsey Dixon was a good talker. By the time they’d reached the coast road Riley had known enough about a new primetime drama series to go to print, if he could get a couple of substantiates. He noticed that she was more discreet about Melanie Chaplin.
He wrote for Junket, a monthly entertainment magazine which, though vaguely trashy, was on news-stands bang up front next to Variety and Screen International. Riley was largely responsible for Junket’s credibility. He had joined the magazine after a stint of investigative journalism in New York City and brought with him his sharp analytical mind and ever-watching eyes. Riley liked the Coen Brothers, 24 and Harvey Weinstein; he disliked the Wayan brothers, Will and Grace and stars that complained about lack of privacy.
Riley’s byline started to appear among the usual who’s-fucking-who features and before too long people started to sit up and take notice. He wrote dangerously, about celebrities certainly, but also about the powerful men behind the scenes. Riley Daniels saw Hollywood producers as the politicians of the day, appointed by a constitution of film fans, and he held them accountable.
Last year the vice-president of a leading studio had found out that his four-year tenure was coming to an end because of substantiated allegations made by Riley in Junket about his business practices. The fallen executive called the magazine demanding to know Riley’s sources. He would never tell the poor guy that he’d simply overheard a conversation he shouldn’t have, listening in on a very private meeting in the breakfast room of Chateau Marmont, and then patiently collected the evidence.
Riley spent a lot of time cultivating relationships with his contacts. He could rarely get close to the real power, but a long-serving PA always had a weak spot, usually money, sometimes boredom and often years of brewing resentment. Sooner or later they talked and then, after seeing that there were no repercussions, they would talk again. If everyone on his list were fired, Hollywood would be a ghost town.
Riley kept a low profile, if people knew his face they would tighten their lips around him, his picture never appeared next to his byline and he refused all personal publicity. There were many who would like to see Riley run out of town, though he noticed they all adored the magazine until they appeared in its pages. Riley had striking blond good looks that might get him noticed in any other city in the world. But here he was just another Californian pretty boy.
He thought that he knew all the good places to pick up stories. Who would have thought that the downtown bus station would provide such rich hunting?
After Lynsey left the Blue Lounge at Moonshadows she found a payphone and dialled the number on Riley’s business card. There was no reply and no point in leaving a message because she had nowhere for him to return the call. Tucking the wallet in her bag she decided to deal with it when she had found somewhere to live.
&n
bsp; She caught a bus to Santa Monica pier and with a freshly squeezed Californian orange juice and a copy of the local free-ads paper she addressed the matter in hand.
There were a few possibilities but as she pushed quarters into the phone box on the promenade she was told repeatedly that the rooms she liked the look of had gone. Finally she made an appointment to see a place she couldn’t really afford in Venice.
She liked the area. Even several blocks from the beach you could still smell the tang of the ocean.
She rang the doorbell of a three-storey building and heard footsteps thundering down the stairs.
The man that answered the door was broader than he was tall. Lynsey had never seen such a round person before and hadn’t expected to see one in California.
As they walked up two flights of stairs together he huffed and puffed and had to stop on the landing for a coughing fit. The room for rent was windowless and had the sour smell of a teenage boy. The kitchen was a hotplate in the hallway and the bathroom had a grey-green shower curtain that looked as if it might once have been white.
‘And this,’ he said, pushing open the last door, ‘is my room.’
Posters of half-naked women covered every inch of the walls and as a final deal breaker a drum kit stood in one corner.
‘I don’t think this is quite what I was looking for,’ she said.
‘I’ll make it seven hundred,’ he said.
‘Thanks, but no.’
*
Half a block from the apartment she came across a launderette. She piled her clothes out of her bag and watched them rotate in the oversized machine while she checked her newspaper for anything she might have missed, but there was nothing. The day was darkening as she walked back towards the beach. It was time to start thinking about a motel unless she wanted to sleep on the beach or stay up all night. Even though the latter option was tempting in a new-town-new-challenge kind of way it had been a long week and she was ready for bed.
The Flamingo Park was hard to miss. A neon sign shaped like the eponymous pink bird flashed at her like a winking friend. Vacancies.
She loved it. She loved the kidney-shaped pool surrounded by tatty plastic sun loungers, she loved the patch of blue ocean she could see from the roof where cotton sheets dried in the sea breeze. She loved the scowling manager who asked her to pay in advance and she loved that her poky room was tucked away at the back so that she couldn’t hear the traffic on the street but had a great view of the pool.
She unpacked. She took out the little things that made her room her home – a hot-pink sheet to cover the nasty bedspread, music from her old walkman with two tiny speakers, only one of which worked, a photograph of her parents to remind her where she came from. She took a while to unhook the oppressive curtains and then pinned up a bright orange sarong that let the fresh air and sunlight flood through the window but would still preserve her dignity should she choose to dance around naked first thing in the morning.
She called her mum. ‘It’s fantastic,’ she said. ‘The bus journey was terrific. I have a great place, I had a lovely lunch with Melanie, I start work on Monday and I can’t wait.’
Her mum said, ‘Have you met any nice men?’
She called Riley’s office and got the address. She left a message to say that she would return his wallet in the morning.
12
When Serena arrived in Los Angeles she knew exactly what she was doing. The internet at school had told her that a bus went hourly to the Bungalow, a cheap youth hostel on Hollywood Boulevard, where she had reserved a bed in a shared room for ten nights. Hopefully by then something else would turn up.
The last stage of her journey should have been the most exciting, but crammed into a tiny minibus she could hardly make out the view as they crawled through the streets. Serena was tired to the core and in desperate need of a shower, her head itched and her clothes were almost indelibly creased from days and nights squeezed into the small seats. The premiere was tomorrow and she had to look her best if the next stage of her plan was to work out.
Years ago, when she had first decided to leave, she had quickly realized that saving her lunch money was going to take far too long. She started entering magazine competitions as a way of funding her escape plan. Anything that paid cash was her first choice, but after a while she started winning household appliances and toys, anything she could sell. She wrote endless letters to magazines who paid five dollars for publishing them. Three times she borrowed a camera with a timer that allowed her to take dirty pictures of herself to send to the readers’ wives section of a magazine that she found in her father’s closet. Her face was obscured and the pictures made her a lot of money.
The idea of winning tickets to a premiere had come to her about a year ago. Flicking through a magazine looking for the big money puzzle, she realized how perfect it would be to spend her first night in Los Angeles mingling with the people of her future, and she began buying teenage magazines and entering everything that promised a night out where the stars were likely to be. After about a hundred attempts she got lucky and the escape plan was operational.
Finally her shuttle bus arrived outside the Bungalow, a brightly painted building with window boxes decorating the balconies on the second and third floors. She followed the crowd inside and as soon as she was assigned a narrow bunk in a sunny room she collapsed gratefully on the bed and was asleep before anyone could ask her any questions.
Later that evening when she awoke, the place was deserted and the sun had slipped from the sky. She padded barefoot across the cool white tiles and out into the corridor where she found a leaky but clean shower with plenty of hot water. Gratefully, she scrubbed the dirt from her body and the dust of twelve states from her hair before returning to her bed and sleeping through until morning.
Warm sunlight flooded the tiny room and Serena couldn’t immediately remember where she had woken up.
‘I’m in Hollywood.
She felt fantastic. Refreshed from her sleep and enlivened with excitement, she climbed out of her bunk and made her way downstairs following the sound of voices.
Serena made quite a stir in the communal kitchen. The men split like a parting sea to let her through. Her face was creased with sleep and her eyes were puffy but they all mentally undressed her. The women sucked in their stomachs and hated themselves for it.
Serena had always known she was unusually beautiful, ever since the first time a boy was shy and awkward around her, probably ever since the first time someone cooed over her as a baby in her crib. Over the years she had tried to isolate the reason why men fell at her feet. It was only after her father told her to stop looking at him with those goddamn eyes that she realized it was all there, in the smoky depths of her toffee-coloured eyes.
She never wore sunglasses again.
She walked past the staring strangers, went back upstairs and opened the door onto an empty section of the roof that had been turned into a haphazard sun terrace. She stretched to loosen her muscles, feeling satisfying creaks as she extended her grateful legs and heard little pops in her shoulders as she circled her arms in windmills over her head. A quick warm-up before her first run in five days.
Serena loved to run. She pounded the school track in Wheeler in the morning sometimes, but mostly she ran in the late afternoon, when the low sun span golden cobwebs over the familiar sights of her childhood, casting everything in a more forgiving light. She would run down the back roads and farm roads, one foot in front of the other, the rhythm of her footsteps and her own breath taking her to a meditative state where all the thoughts entering her head could be calmly assessed and rationalized. She never felt more herself than when she ran, and she never felt fourteen.
She wasn’t sure what being fourteen was supposed to feel like, but she was certain that this relentless drive, this determination to escape, this wasn’t the way her friends were feeling. And this cool practicality she was blessed with seemed at odds with their constant neurosis. Does he like
me? Should I call him? Should I kiss him? Would he like me better if…? Serena hated those conversations most of all.
She would run until the familiar joy of feeling she could run for miles washed over her and her mind was clear of debris. Without her daily run, she often thought she would go insane.
She walked fast along the half empty sidewalks and once she hit Brandall Park her stride lengthened and soon her feet were pounding out a steady rhythm. Serena mentally went through her plans for the rest of the day making sure she had everything covered.
Her four-hundred-dollar dress had been stolen from the window of the only department store in Manley, the nearest big town, where it had been on display for months looking as if it had walked straight off the catwalk at a John Galliano show. The dress was a slip of white material encrusted with rhinestones and revealing an almost indecent amount of her honeyed skin.
Serena had a friend who worked in the department store. She promised him a blow job if he sneaked the dress out for her, she also promised to give it back the next day. Serena had no intention of keeping either of these promises. She took the dress to a dry-cleaner in Manley and within an hour it sparkled again. It fitted as if it were made for her.
It was hanging off the end of her bunk, protected by tissue paper she had spritzed with Tommy Girl. She had begged the perfume tester from the same Manley department store that would by now be missing the dress. The fresh, subtle fragrance should faintly impart its scent onto her outfit.
Deciding what to do with her hair had been difficult; she didn’t want to waste money and get it styled professionally and had no blow-dryer or products to do it herself. Eventually she had decided that after her shower she would let her hair dry naturally and would pile it on top of her head without combing it through. Tonight it should fall to her shoulders in shaggy waves, a beach-babe look in honour of her arrival in California. She had fine gold glitter which she would dust faintly through the strands with her fingers, as well as on her shoulders and collarbone. Not too much, she didn’t want to look like a teenager, but her hair would sparkle when it moved. Not much make-up, she didn’t need it and hadn’t got it. A little vaseline on her lips and cheekbones and perhaps a tiny amount of gold on her brow bone to draw the attention. Brown mascara to emphasize the captivating depth of her eyes. Her shoes were a real find – a thin strap of silver and a medium heel that she had bought for five dollars from a girl at school. Serena was pretty sure the girl stole them from her sister and would use the money to buy her fix of the drug of choice that did it for bored adolescents these days. Serena never took drugs, but she had seen girls as young as twelve hooked on the contents of their parents’ medicine cabinets, while at the same time mouthing off about how they wanted to get out of Hicksville and not turn out like their parents. Maybe picking up their mom’s bad habits was not a good start. Drugs weren’t an escape route, they were a life sentence. Shoes, dress, make-up, hair – her feet seemed to drum the words out. Each satisfying thump reminding her how much preparation she had put into tonight. Shoes, dress, makeup, hair. Shoes, dress, make-up, hair.