Gabriela glances over. Not a movie she’d watch. “Good God, retro seventies.” She shudders with distaste. “Bell-bottom jumpsuits weren’t a good idea then, and they’re really not a good idea now. And look at her hair! She looks like she’s got a dog on her head.”
Jayne and Esmeralda aren’t interested enough to look, but Delila is trying to remember if she saw the man in the white suit at breakfast. He seems kind of familiar. And he’s good-looking, in an old-fashioned, European way. And it’s not just the hat he’s holding in his hand, or the James Joyce sunglasses. He looks as if he speaks several languages; as if he’s spent a lot of time sitting in cafés, but not here – where there’s a man at the bus stop holding an iguana and a woman who looks like Marilyn Monroe skating through the traffic – in much older cities of narrow streets and buildings that were built long before any white man put his foot down here. But though it’s only been a second or two, when Delila turns back for another look, there’s no one there.
Crossed paths
They’re running late, of course.
“Where do you think you’re going?” says Esmeralda as Gabriela heads towards another display of beauty products. “We have to leave.
“But it’ll only take a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute,” says Aricely.
Jayne holds out her arm. “Do you know what time it is?”
Gabriela groans inwardly. She made a mistake; she should have left them in the restaurant with their faces in plates of cake. Two mistakes: they’re not the Bad, the Boring and the Real Pain in the Neck; they’re the Grump, the Nag and the Talking Clock. “I just have to get one more thing and I’m done. I swear it.”
“That’s what you said ten minutes ago.” Jayne is still holding out her arm. “What is it now?”
“Eye-shadow foundation.”
“Eye-shadow foundation?” repeats Jayne. She wears the expression a medieval serf might wear if she were told that, one day, men would fly through the air and walk on the moon. “Are you serious?”
“I completely forgot. You’ve been rushing me so much…”
“You know, this sounds like something you can live without,” says Aricely. “I’ve never even heard of such a thing before.”
“Just because you’ve never heard of it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” says Gabriela.
“And who, disguised as a plain-Jane, serious fiction writer is really Super Shopper, able to leap whole counters at a single bound…” intones Delila, but she intones with a smile. Unlike some people, Delila is having a good time. If she’d wanted to spend the weekend in a museum, she could have stayed in Brooklyn.
The “some people” who aren’t enjoying themselves are, of course, Jayne, Aricely and Esmeralda. They’d much rather be reading a thousand-page novel. Gabriela’s “a couple of things I forgot” encompassed much more than those few words suggested. They thought she meant a lipstick and maybe an eyeliner. The basics most girls can’t leave the house without. They wear make-up; they understand that much. But they all put on make-up the way they put on gloves and a scarf in winter – because they feel they have to. There’s no art to it. No method. No plan. Which means that it isn’t a subject Jayne, Aricely and Esmeralda know much about – and they are girls who like to be the experts in any situation. But in this instance, it’s Gabriela who’s the authority. She doesn’t put a barrette in her hair without considering the effect. She has to test each pot, tube, brush, compact, palette and pencil; each skin, lip and eye colour, and balance them out against each other. Everything has to match.
“Well, if you want to be late for Professor Gryck, that’s fine with me,” says Esmeralda. She pushes on the door. “But we don’t. We’re going.”
Delila gives Gabriela a nudge. “They’re right,” she whispers. “We’re running on empty here when it comes to time. We better get moving.”
Gabriela sighs. With resignation. She hasn’t put up with all their moaning and griping to be the only one to get into trouble; she has no choice but to go with them. She hugs Beth’s backpack and, despite the fact that she doesn’t like to sweat, gamely trots up the street after them. Delila, built for endurance rather than speed, brings up the rear.
It seems to be a longer way back than it was coming, but at last they see the rest of the group, hovering on a not-too-distant corner.
“Well, I’ll be danged,” grunts Delila. “We really do have guardian angels. I think we’re actually going to make it.”
“Oh, my God!” Gabriela stops dead, her eyes wide and her mouth open in shock, staring through the river of traffic at something across the road. From her expression, it might be a UFO or a Hollywood star.
“What’s wrong?” Delila only just manages not to plough into her. “What is it?”
You couldn’t say that Gabriela’s forgotten about Beth. How could she when every time she looks at her hands she sees Beth’s savaged nails, when every time she glances in a window she sees her plain, pinched face? But, having other things to occupy her mind, she has managed to put Beth out of her conscious thoughts for most of the morning. Until now. For what she sees across the street is not, of course, a UFO or a Hollywood star. It is herself, Lucinda, Hattie, Nicki, Isla and Paulette, standing near a bus stop with bags of shopping in their arms.
“Oh, my God!” Gabriela repeats as a bus pulls up to the kerb, obscuring her view. They must be waiting for the car to pick them up. Delila’s right – they do have guardian angels. This is her chance to talk to Beth, just put down in front of her like a present. She can take her aside, have a quick word. Suddenly, for some inexplicable and illogical reason, she thinks that everything will be OK if she can just get to Beth before the car arrives and takes her away.
“What is it?” Delila asks yet again. “Is it somebody you know?”
As a general rule of life, it isn’t advisable to cross Sunset Boulevard in between lights. A chicken could cross the Autobahn as safely. Anyone will tell you that. Unless, of course, traffic is bumper-to-bumper and not moving. But it isn’t bumper-to-bumper now, and it’s moving very quickly.
Gabriela, however, isn’t thinking. All she knows is that she has to get to the other side. She hurls herself into the traffic, and, rather miraculously, for only a few seconds that no one will remember, every car, bus, bike, skateboarder and skater on the boulevard freezes and she runs through them unscathed. Esmeralda, Aricely and Jayne, who are almost where they want to be, don’t know there’s no one behind them any more. Delila runs after her.
But when Gabriela reaches the sidewalk, Beth and Lucinda are no longer waiting at the kerb; they’re walking up a side street towards the hills.
And after them goes Gabriela, like a bloodhound that’s caught the scent.
It’s a well established fact that things can always get worse. We tell ourselves that it’s always darkest before the dawn, but sometimes it’s darkest before it gets really, really dark. This is something Beth has always known. Yet, today – a day that got off to such a phenomenally bad start – as they wait to be picked up by the limo, it seems it’s something she’s chosen to forget. She’s been put into somebody else’s body. She’s been harangued and hassled by the Lady Macbeth of the fashion world. She’s been frightened out of her mind by a Hollywood sleazeball who seems to be able to disappear at will. She can’t even think about her mother or she’ll start to hyperventilate. But now, she’s convinced herself, everything’s going to be all right. Tea at The City of Angels College of Fashion and Design to meet the rest of the staff. The big party tonight to meet everybody who’s anybody in the LA scene. Nothing else can go wrong. It can’t. How could it?
The six of them are waiting near the hotel as instructed – as, indeed, they’ve been waiting for the last fifteen minutes – when, from Gabriela’s bag, an instrumental version of the song “Hotel California” suddenly starts playing. Beth’s been surreptitiously texting the same message to Gabriela and checking for messages and missed calls all morning – every time she’s alone for a minute or goes to the bathroom. Her heartbeat stumbles. It must be Gabriela. She fishes the pink cell phone from the bag and holds it in front of her. It’s not her number, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t Gabriela. Beth was way too tired to charge her phone last night, Gabriela could be using Delila’s phone. Beth can feel the others looking at her. But she can’t talk to Gabriela with Lucinda, Nicki, Hattie, Paulette and Isla surrounding her, listening to every word. She glances over at them.
