‘No tacos?’
Her expression instantly flipped and her face contorted in horror, as though Suzanne not taking me for Mexican food the moment I arrived was some sort of human rights violation. Which, now I thought about it, it was.
‘I only got here yesterday afternoon and she had to leave almost right away,’ I explained. My stomach grumbled loudly at the talk of tacos, reminding me I hadn’t eaten a proper meal on this continent. Crisps and wine were admittedly a small part of the food pyramid, however important. ‘We didn’t really get the chance to do anything. Or eat anything.’
‘Then I arrived at the perfect time!’ Bel exclaimed, pulling her phone out of her bag and tapping away at the screen. ‘We have to get some food in you, girlie, I’m taking you out for brunch. Let me see what’s open, we’ll do a little welcome to LA moment.’
‘Oh no, you don’t have to do that,’ I said as my stomach howled in protest. ‘I still need to shower and unpack and—’
But Bel wasn’t having any of it.
‘Little Dom’s!’ she exclaimed, cutting me off as she leapt to her dainty feet. ‘It’s the most perfect place, they have the most amazing pancakes you’ve ever tasted in your life.’
‘Pancakes?’ I whispered, my excuses fading away in an instant.
Her brown eyes glowed. ‘Blueberry ricotta pancakes. With butter and warm maple syrup and freshly brewed coffee and—’
‘I’m in,’ I replied quickly. I knew when I was beaten. ‘You had me at pancakes.’
‘You’re going to love it,’ she replied with a wink. ‘Wear something with an elasticated waist.’
I liked her more and more by the minute.
Not nearly soon enough, I was showered, dressed and sitting on a little folding chair outside the nearby restaurant. The sun shone and the sky was clear but aside from that, it didn’t feel very Hollywood. For starters, we’d been sitting down for five whole minutes and I hadn’t seen a single famous person. There were no palm trees, no fancy cars, no red carpets; just a lot of people wearing workout clothes and a surprising amount of buckled concrete. Across the road, I watched a woman, who had accessorized her neon-pink leggings with a matching Hermès Birkin, stroll into a shop called The Reckless Unicorn. If someone offered me a million dollars on the spot, I couldn’t have guessed what theysold inside. Were unicorns known to be reckless? Maybe that’s why there weren’t any. Maybe they made bad investments and crossed the street without looking.
I rocked from side to side in my chair, riding the uneven pavement and testing the integrity of the wonky wooden table. It was propped up by three cardboard coasters rammed under one of its legs. Where was the glitz? Where was the glamour? Where were the flat surfaces?
‘It’s so busy,’ I said to Bel, watching a waitress deliver several giant plates full of food to the table next to us. It was all I could do not to snatch it off the tray and stuff it in my mouth. Even after a skin-scorching shower and a change of clothes, I felt as feral as one of last night’s parrots. ‘I thought people didn’t eat in LA.’
‘That’s a very 2006 vibe.’ Bel waved a hand to dismiss the notion. ‘Eating is so in right now, everyone’s doing it.’
I looked up from my menu, expecting to see a smirk on her face, but no, she remained as earnest as ever.
‘Then this might be the first time in my life I’ve been ahead of a trend,’ I replied happily.
A waitress in a smart white shirt appeared at my elbow, pen and order pad at the ready.
‘Can I start you off with anything to drink? Mimosa, orange juice, coffee?’ She paused and gave me a knowing look. ‘Hot tea?’
There was an entire page in Suzanne’s house manual about ordering tea in and the gist of it was ‘don’t do it’. I had no idea how anyone could mess up boiling water and a teabag but the way the waitress had emphasized the word ‘hot’ was enough to make my Tetley senses tingle.
‘I’ll have a coffee,’ I said appreciatively. ‘Thank you.’
‘Make it two,’ Bel added, studying her menu like it was a map to the lost city of gold. ‘So, we have to get the blueberry ricotta pancakes for the table. The steak and eggs are great, breakfast sandwich is to die for, everyone gets breakfast pizza, it’s super popular, and I hear the yoghurt parfait is divine but I don’t eat dairy. Except for the ricotta in the pancakes. And the cheese on the pizza. Do you like baked eggs? The baked eggs are so good. What are you thinking?’
It was a very good question.
‘I have no idea. It all sounds amazing,’ I hadn’t heard a single thing after the word ‘pancakes’. ‘If the table is having the pancakes, I’ll get the super popular breakfast pizza, when in Rome and all that.’
She reached across the table to touch my hand. ‘This isn’t Rome,’ she whispered in a kind voice. ‘It’s Little Dom’s.’
‘My mistake,’ I replied, wondering how she managed to survive in this cruel, harsh world.
‘And that’s how I ended up naked in the hot-air balloon.’ Bel wrapped both hands around a sturdy stoneware coffee cup and smiled. ‘But enough about my weekend, you’ve hardly said a word since we got here. I want to know everything about you – spill.’
I didn’t have much in the world but I did have a very particular set of skills and one of the strongest of those skills was the ability to get other people to talk about themselves while sharing absolutely nothing about myself, and in the ten minutes that had passed since ordering our breakfast, I’d learned that Bel was originallyfrom Wisconsin, she was twenty-six, moved to LA four years ago to become an actress and while she’d appeared as an extra in a few different things and had one whole line in a Netflix film about a boy that turned into an Alsatian every time he ate a hot dog, she was still waiting for her big break.
‘There’s not that much to say,’ I replied, so breezy. Being breezy was a big part of throwing people off the scent. ‘Suzanne is the overachiever in our family, I’m very boring and normal. Now tell me more about the audition you did with Bradley Cooper.’
