What if she gets off at the wrong stop? Is waylaid by some tanned lothario and never seen again? Drowns in the Pacific? When it comes to imagining worst-case scenarios, Lillian Beeby could take lessons from Otto.
“Don’t worry, Beth!” he calls after her. “I’m on my way!” Then bangs his head on the steering wheel again as another car hits him from behind.
City of more than angels
“It’s called pay and ride, sister.” The driver, well aware of the dangers of making eye contact with strangers in Los Angeles, isn’t looking at Beth. “No pay, no ride. I don’t give change.”
Lucinda tugs on her arm. “Maybe we should just get off,” she whispers.
In Beth’s normal life, she would already be gone. All the driver would have had to do is clear his throat and Beth would have turned as red as sunset over the Gulf of Mexico, stammered an apology and backed down the steps (probably into someone trying to get on). But Beth is not in her normal life, and so she doesn’t feel guilty about not having the exact fare; nor does she feel that she has no option but to obey the rules. What she does feel is an overwhelming desire to get somewhere she considers safe as quickly as possible, and right now that somewhere is The City of Angels College of Fashion and Design, where Taffeta Mackenzie awaits them in a diabolically bad mood. There’s nothing like being hounded by some crazy creep to make Taffeta MacKenzie look like the soft option.
In her normal life, Beth never tries to argue or make excuses because it never really works for her. There is something about her face – the serious line of her thin lips and the fairly permanent look of worry in her eyes – that makes her look insincere and uncomfortable when what she wants to look is vulnerable and sweet. But today Beth’s face belongs to Gabriela Menz, a girl who’s been getting her way with a smile and a flutter of eyelashes since the day she was born, which gives Beth all the confidence she needs to try.
“Please,” says Beth, wheedling but not begging. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but we do have money. We just don’t have the exact fare.” She holds up a crumpled bill. “If you let us on, maybe somebody can give us change.”
Perhaps because this is such an extraordinary request, the driver finally looks over at her. This is a man whose job keeps him in an almost constant bad mood, but for some reason that bad mood is momentarily replaced by a feeling of warmth and kindness, as if an angel is whispering in his ear,
“Forget it.” He winks. “I won’t tell, if you don’t tell.” He waves them on and closes the door.
The bus lurches back into the traffic, which is now moving like a river in flood.
Beth stops abruptly only a few steps down the aisle. She has never been on a city bus before, and, like a desert nomad seeing snow for the first time, she is both intrigued and a little alarmed. She stares down the aisle. Narrow seats filled with weary-looking people, dingy windows and a floor that’s been trodden on by hundreds of filthy feet. There are probably enough germs on this bus to bring down the entire west coast. Music leaks from iPods and MP3 players; someone shouts – to whom exactly isn’t clear – “Yeah, well I care more about what my parrot thinks than your opinion!” The air conditioning isn’t working, and the heat combines with the smells of sweat, pollution, chemical fragrances and things that probably shouldn’t be named to create an aroma that is fairly unique to the public transport system of LA. Many of the passengers have their heads bent over newspapers, books or phones, but, with the exception of the blind man with the dog, the ones who aren’t absorbed in some activity stare back at her. Unblinking. Many of them give the impression of being fairly unstable. The guy with the beaded necklace and the tattoos. The old lady with a bag of light bulbs on her lap. The man in the tuxedo. The woman in the shower cap who’s talking to herself. The woman all in black saying the rosary. The youngish man rocking back and forth in his seat at the back.
And yet Beth realizes that for once in her life she isn’t afraid. Now that she’s over her initial surprise, she feels almost excited. She, Beth Beeby, is on an LA bus, without her mother, and the world hasn’t come to a horrible end. The spectre of Lillian Beeby in rubber gloves with a bottle of disinfectant under her arm, muttering about epidemics, may not be far away, but the actual flesh-and-blood person is. It’s as if she’s been released from a cage.
Lucinda, however, is nervous. “Gab?” she hisses in Beth’s ear. “Gab? What the hell are we doing here?” Lucinda followed Beth onto the bus without thinking, indeed without actually being aware of what she was doing, pulled along by some strange compulsion. And now she finds herself on a crowded city bus without being able to say how she got here or why. She’s never been on a city bus before, either. Indeed, the only city she’s ever visited is Portland, Maine, and Portland, Maine is not LA. Up until this point, that fact has been in Los Angeles’ favour; but now she’s not so sure. LA’s supposed to be all about glamour and glitz – beautiful people wearing fabulous clothes – but all that stopped dead at the door of the Metro. In here it’s just regular people with the glamour and glitz of dollar-store flip-flops. It is safe to say that had Lucinda heard Lillian Beeby’s warnings about public transport, she wouldn’t have ignored them the way some people have.
Beth turns around. Lucinda looks the way Beth has always felt until now. Insecure. Anxious. “We’re just taking a bus, Lucinda. Like millions of people do every day all over the world. It’s no big deal.”
“Yeah, but why?” The way Lucinda remembers it, one minute they were standing on a street frequented by celebrities, and the next here they are in a place where no celebrity would be caught dead – unless they were making a movie.
There’s no point Beth mentioning the stalker again; even Lucinda thinks she’s making him up – making him up or losing her mind. She’ll have to lie. “Because I got tired of waiting for a cab, Luce, that’s all. We don’t want to be late for the reception, do we?”
“But what about the others?” Though Hattie, Paulette, Nicki and Isla are now far behind them, Lucinda looks towards the rear window as though they might still be in sight. “I mean, they’re getting a cab. If we’d waited —”
“They could’ve come with us. Nobody stopped them.”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“Trust me, we’re better off on a bus. Look at the traffic. Even if Moses is their cab driver, it’s going to take them ages to get through this. It’s more like a parking lot than a road. I guarantee you we’ll get there before they do.”
“You mean,
And yet, this realization doesn’t upset Beth any more than the bus itself. Yesterday it would have been so traumatic that by now she’d be nauseous, weeping and probably breaking out in a rash. Today it doesn’t really seem like much of a problem. They’ll just stay on here till she’s certain they’ve lost the guy in the red sports car – and then they’ll take a cab.
“Come on,” says Beth, in her new role as the voice of reason and calm. “Let’s sit down. If it is the wrong bus we can get off.”
They find two seats near the middle, behind the woman in the white kimono and the old lady carrying every light bulb from her apartment in a 7-Eleven bag.
“I think you should call Taffeta and tell her what happened,” says Lucinda. Sitting down has not made her feel any less nervous.
But Gabriela’s phone is no longer working. “There’s something wrong,” says Beth, giving it a shake. It’s lit up like a Christmas tree, but less use in transmitting sound than a tin can. “I can’t get a signal. We’ll have to use yours.”
The frown Lucinda has been wearing since they got on the Metro deepens. “But I thought Taffeta said mine wasn’t working.”
“Well, maybe it is now. It’s worth a try.”
