Luckily, in amongst all the other stuff she’d brought, Ros had managed to pack a pale grey suit and by the time she was ready to leave for her 8 a.m. meeting she looked extremely convincing. Of course Bib realized she felt like a total fraud, certain she’d be denounced by the Los Angeles company as a charlatan the minute they clapped eyes on her, but apparently that was par for the course in people who’d recently been promoted. It would pass after a while.
Because of her lack of confidence, Bib decided he’d better go with her. So off they went in a taxi to Danger-Chem’s headquarters at Wilshire Boulevard, where Ros was ushered into a conference room full of orange men with big, white teeth. They all squashed Ros’s little hand in their huge, meaty, manicured ones and claimed to be, ‘trully, trully delighted,’ to meet her. Bib ‘trully, trully’ resented the time they spent pawing her and managed to trip one of them. And not just any of them, but their leader – Bib knew he was the leader because he had the orangest face.
Then Bib perked up – a couple of girls had just arrived into the meeting! Initially, he’d thought they were aliens too, although he couldn’t quite place where they might be from. With their unnaturally elongated, skeletal limbs and eyes so wide-spaced that they were almost on the sides of their heads, they had the look of the females from planet Pfeiff. But when he tried speaking to them in that language (he only knew a couple of phrases – ‘Your place or mine?’ and ‘If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?’) they remained blankly unresponsive. One of them was called Tiffany and the other was called Shannen and they both had the yellow-haired, yellow-skinned look he usually found so attractive in a girl-type. Although, perhaps not as much as he once had.
The meeting went well and the orange men and yellow girls listened to Ros as she outlined a proposal to buy products from them. When they said the price she was offering was too low she was able to stop her voice from shaking and reel off prices from many of their competitors, all of them lower. Bib was bursting with pride.
When they stopped for lunch, Bib watched with interest as Tiffany used her fork to skate a purple-red leaf of radicchio around her place. Sometimes she picked it up on her fork and let it hover in the general vicinity of her mouth, before putting it back down on her plate. She was miming, he realized. And that wasn’t right. He switched his attention to Shannen. She was putting the radicchio on her fork and sometimes she was putting some into her mouth. He decided he preferred her. So when she said, ‘Gotta use the rest-room,’ Bib was out of his seat in a flash after her.
He’d really have resented being called a peeping Tom. An opportunist, he preferred to think of himself. An alien who knew how to make the most of life’s chances. And being invisible.
But how strange. He’d followed Shannen into the cubicle and she seemed to be ill. No, no, wait – she was making herself ill. Sticking her fingers down her throat. Now she was brushing her teeth. Now she was renewing her lipstick. And she seemed happy! He’d always regarded himself as a man of the universe, but this was one of the strangest things he’d ever seen.
‘I should be nominated for an Oscar,’ Ros thought, as she shook her last hand of the day. She’d given the performance of a lifetime around that conference table. But she tried to take pride that she had done it. Between jetlag and her lead-heavy unhappiness over Michael she was surprised she’d even managed to get dressed that morning, never mind discuss fixed costs and large order discounts.
However, when she got back to her hotel, she insisted on shattering her fragile good humour by asking a not-quite-right Ralph Fiennes if anyone had phoned for her. Ralph shook his head. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, wearing her desperation like a neon sign. But unfortunately, Ralph was very sure.
Trying to stick herself back together, Ros stumbled towards her room, where no force in the universe – not even one from Planet Duch – could have stopped her from ringing Michael.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as soon as he picked up the phone. ‘Were you asleep?’
‘No,’ Michael said, and Ros’s weary spirits rallied with hope. If he was awake at two in the morning, he couldn’t be too happy, now could he?
‘I miss you,’ she said, so quietly she barely heard herself.
‘Come home, then.’
‘I’ll be back on Friday.’
‘No, come home now.’
‘I can’t,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve got meetings.’
‘Meetings,’ he said bitterly. ‘You’ve changed.’
As Ros tried to find the right words to fix things, she wondered why it was always an insult to tell someone that they’d changed.
‘When I first met you,’ he accused, ‘you were straight up. Now look at you, with your flashy promotion.’
He couldn’t help it, Ros thought. Too much had changed too quickly. In just over eighteen months she’d worked her way up from answering phones, to being a supervisor, to assisting the production manager, to assisting the chairman, to becoming vice-production manager. None of it was her fault – she’d always thought she was as thick as two short planks. She’d been happy to think that. How was she to know that she had a natural grasp of figures and an innate sense of management? She had bloody Lenny to thank for ‘discovering’ her, and she could have done without it. Everything had been fine – better than fine – with Michael until she’d started her career ascent.
‘Why is my job such a problem?’ she asked, for the umpteenth time.
‘My job!’ Michael said hotly. ‘My job, my job – you love saying it, don’t you?’
‘I don’t! You have a job too.’
‘Mending photocopiers isn’t quite the same as being a vice-production manager.’ Michael fell into tense silence.
‘I can’t do it,’ he finally said. ‘I can’t be with a woman who earns more than me.’
‘But it’ll be our money.’
‘What if we have kids? You expect me to be a stay-at-home househusband sap? I won’t do it, babes,’ he said, tightly. ‘I’m not that kind of bloke.’ She heard anger in his voice and terrible stubbornness.
But I’m good at my job, she thought, and felt a panicky desperation. She didn’t want to give it up. But more than her job, she wanted Michael to accept her. Fully.
‘Why can’t you be proud of me?’ She squeezed the words out.
‘Because it’s not right. And you want to come to your senses, you’re no good on your own, you need me. Think about it!’
With that, he crashed the phone down. Instantly she picked it up to ring him back, then found herself slowly putting it back down. There was nothing to be gained by ringing him because he wasn’t going to change his mind. They’d had so many fights, and he hadn’t budged an inch. So what was the choice? She loved him. Since she’d met him three years ago, she’d been convinced he was The One and that her time in the wilderness was over. They’d planned to get married next year, they’d even set up a ‘Meringue Frock’ account – how could she say goodbye to all that? The obvious thing was to give up her job. But that felt so wrong. Oughtn’t Michael to love her as she was? Shouldn’t he be proud of her talents and skills, instead of being threatened by them? And if she gave in now what would the rest of their lives together be like?
But if she didn’t give in … ? She’d be alone. All alone. How was she going to cope? Because Michael was right, she had very little confidence.
For some minutes she sat abjectly by the phone, turning a biro over and over, as she pondered the lonely existence that awaited her. All she could see ahead of her was a life where she jumped on hotel beds by herself. The bleakness almost overwhelmed her. But just a minute, she found herself thinking, her hand stopping its incessant rotation of the biro – she’d managed to get all the way from Hounslow to Los Angeles without Michael’s help. And she’d managed to get a taxi to and from work. Had even held her own in a meeting.
To her great surprise she found that she didn’t feel so bad. Obviously, she felt awful. Frightened, heartbroken, sick
and lonely. But she didn’t feel completely suicidal, and that came as something of a shock. She was so used to hearing Michael telling her that she was a disaster area without him that she hadn’t questioned it lately …
How about that? She remained on the bed, and her gaze was drawn to the window. In all the trauma, she’d forgotten about her ‘toadally awesome’ ocean view and it couldn’t have been more beautiful – Santa Monica beach, the evening sun turning the sea into a silver-pink sheet, the sand rose-coloured and powdery. Along the boardwalk, gorgeous Angelenos skated and cycled. A sleek couple whizzed by on a tandem, their no-doubt perfect baby in a yellow buggy attached to the back of the bike. He looked like a little emperor. Another tall, slender couple roller-bladed by, both sunglassed and disc-manned to the max. Hand-in-hand, they glided past gracefully, their movements a ballet of perfect synchronization.
‘Fall,’ Bib wished fiercely. ‘Go on, trip. Skin your evenly-tanned knees. Fall flat on your remodelled faces.’ He had hoped it might cheer Ros up. But, alas, it was not to be, and on the couple glided.
Ros watched them go, gripped by a bittersweet melancholy. And then to her astonishment, she found herself deciding that she was going to try roller-blading herself. Why not? It was only six-thirty and there was a place right next to the hotel that rented out roller-blades.
Hardly believing what she was doing she changed into leggings, ran from her room and in five minutes was strapping herself into a pair of blades. Tentatively, she pushed herself a short distance along the boardwalk. ‘Gosh, I’m quite good at this,’ she realized in amazement.
Bib held onto Ros’s hand as she awkwardly skidded back and forth. It had been a huge struggle to convince her to get out here. And she was hopeless. If he hadn’t been holding on to her hand, she’d be flat on her bum. Yet, her ungainly vulnerability made her even more endearing to him.
Bib had followed the evening’s events with avid interest. He’d been appalled by Michael’s macho attitude, the cheek of the bloke! He’d longed to snatch the phone from Ros and tell Michael in no uncertain terms how fabulous Ros was, how she’d terrified a roomful of powerful orange men. Then when Michael hung up on Ros, Bib used every ounce of will he could muster to stop Ros from ringing him back. He worked desperately hard at reminding Ros how wonderfully she’d coped since she’d arrived in this strange threatening city, even though it was so obvious, she should know it herself –
‘Careful, careful!’ he silently urged, squeezing his eyes shut in alarm, as Ros nearly went flying into a woman who was holding on to a small boy on a bike.
‘Sorry,’ Ros gasped. ‘I’m just learning.’
“S’OK,’ the little boy said. ‘Me too. My name’s Tod and that’s my mom, Bethany. She’s teaching me to ride my bike.’
Bethany was in the unfortunate position of having to hold tightly on to the back of Tod’s bike and run as fast as Tod cycled. Bib eyed Bethany with sympathetic understanding because he was in the unfortunate position of having to run as fast as Ros was roller-blading. Which got faster and faster as her confidence grew.
‘Wheeeeeh!’ Ros shrieked, as she sped a good four yards, before losing Bib and coming a cropper.
When she returned the skates to the hire office, her knees were bruised but her eyes were a-sparkle. ‘I had a lovely time,’ she laughingly announced. Then she sprinted joyously across the sand to the hotel, Bib puffing anxiously behind her, tangling himself in his six legs as he tried to keep up.
She woke in the middle of the night, the exhilaration and joy of the night before dissipated and gone. She felt cold, old, afraid, lonely. She wouldn’t be able to cope without Michael, she didn’t want a life without him.
But then she remembered the roller-blading. She wasn’t normally adventurous, usually needing Michael with her before trying new things. Yet she’d done that all on her own and it was a comfort of sorts.
‘I am a woman who roller-blades alone,’ she repeated to herself until she managed to get back to sleep.
Then she woke up, got dressed and went to work, vaguely aware that there was a new steadiness about her, a growing strength.
When she returned from her day’s work, exhausted but proud from holding her own as they inched their way tortuously towards a deal, she bumped into Brad Pitt in the hotel lobby. From the look of things he was just knocking off work.
‘Did you have a good day?’ he enquired.
Ros nodded politely.
‘So, what kind of business are you in?’ Brad asked.
Ros considered. She always found this awkward. How exactly did you explain that you worked for a company that made portaloos? A very successful company that made portaloos, mind.
‘We, um, take care of people,’ she said. Well, why shouldn’t she be coy? Americans were the ones who called loos rest-rooms, for goodness sakes!
‘D’ya take care of people on a movie set?’ Brad never missed an opportunity. The door to his career could open absolutely anywhere – there was the time he’d seen the director of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in his chiropodist’s waiting room, or the occasion he’d crashed into the back of Aaron Spelling’s Beemer – so he was always prepared.
‘Actually, we have,’ Ros said with confidence.
Quick as a flash, Brad’s lightbulb smile burst on to his face and he swooped closer. ‘Hey, I’m Bryce,’ he murmured. ‘Would you do me the honour of having a drink with me this evening?’
A good-looking man had invited her for a drink! What a shame that nothing would cheer her up ever again. Because if anything would do the trick, this would. But even as a refusal was forming in her mouth, Ros found herself pausing. Wouldn’t it be better than sitting alone in her room waiting for the phone to ring?
‘OK,’ she said wanly.
Bryce looked surprised, women were usually delighted to spend time with him. Then he clicked his fingers. ‘Oh, I get it. You’re English, right? You kinda got that Merchant-Ivory repressed thing going on. Love it! Meet me in the lobby at six-thirty.’ And smoothing his hair, he was gone.
In her room, Ros checked the phone, picked it up, trembled with the effort of not dialling Michael’s number and frogmarched herself into the shower. America, the land of opportunity. She should at least try, after all Bryce really was gorgeous.
From the jumble of clothes thrown on the bed she managed to make herself presentable. A short – but not too short – black dress, a pair of high – but not too high – black sandals. But as she watched herself in the mirror, it was like seeing a stranger. Who was this single girl who was going out on a date with a man who wasn’t Michael?
When the lift doors parted, Bryce was loitering in the lobby, sunbleached hair gleaming on to his golden forehead, white teeth exploding into a flashgun smile. Ros’s spirits inched upwards. Maybe things weren’t so bad. On the way to his car, she noticed Bryce patting his hair in the window as he passed by, then pretended she hadn’t.
The bar was low-lit and quiet. ‘So as we can really, like, talk,’ Bryce said with a smile that promised good things, and the mercury level of Ros’s mood began its upward climb again. As soon as they’d ordered their drinks, Bryce started the promised talk.
‘… and then I got the part as the shop clerk in Clueless. They toadally cut it, right, but the director said I was great, really great. It was a truly great performance, I gave and gave until it hurt, but the goddamn editor was, like, toadally on my case …’
Ros nodded sympathetically.
‘… of course, I should have got the Joseph Fiennes part in Shakespeare in Love. It was mine, they even toadally told my agent, but on-set politics, it’s a toadal bitch, right?’
Ros nodded again. Despite Bryce’s many tales of woe, his smile glittered and flashed. But as his litany of bad-luck continued, Ros began to notice that he didn’t ever make eye-contact with her. Yet the intimate smiles continued anyway. Eventually, wondering if he was coming on to some girl behind her, Ros looked over her shoulder. And saw a mirror. Ah, that explained
everything. Bryce was flirting with his favorite person. Himself.
On and on he droned. Great performances he nearly gave. Evil directors, cruel editors, leading men who had it in for him because they were threatened by his talent and looks.
‘Hey, I’ve done enough talking about me.’ He finally paused for breath. ‘What do you think of me?’
Ros could hardly speak for depression. With Bryce she felt more alone than she had on her own.
‘Would you mind terribly if I left? Only I’m ever so sleepy. Must be jetlag.’
‘We’ve hardly been here thirty minutes,’ Bryce objected. ‘I’m just warming up.’
To her dismay, Bryce offered to see her back to the hotel. And up to her room. At her bedroom door she realized he was about to try and kiss her. She braced herself – she didn’t have the the energy to resist him. He looked deep into her eyes and trailed a gentle finger along her cheek. Despite him being the world’s most boring man, Ros couldn’t help a leap of interest. After all, he was so handsome. Slowly Bryce lowered his perfect lips to hers, then paused.
‘What are you doing?’ Ros whispered.
‘Close-up,’ Bryce whispered back. ‘A three second close-up of my face before the camera cuts to the clinch.’
‘Oh for goodness sake!’ Ros shoved the key in the lock, twirled into her room and slammed the door.
‘Hey,’ Bryce was muffled but unbowed. ‘You ballsy English girls, toadally like a Judi Dench thing! Y’ever met her? I just thought with you both being English …’
‘Go away,’ she said, her voice trembling from unshed tears. This was the worst that Ros had felt. Wretched. Absolutely wretched. Was this all she had to look forward to? Boring, self-obsessed narcissists?
Bib had been against the idea of a drink with Bryce from the word go. He just hated those men that thought they could fell women with one devastating smile. He’d tried to warn Ros that Bryce was nothing but a big, pink girl’s blouse, but she wouldn’t listen and – now what was going on? Someone was outside their room, pounding and demanding to be let in. It was a man’s voice – perhaps it was Bryce back to try his luck again?
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