‘Eh,’ she said, finally pulling herself upright. ‘I’ve done worse.’
The waitress cleared her throat as she put down the pancakes.
‘Can I get you anything else?’ she asked in a strained voice.
I shook my head and made a mental note to leave her a huge tip.
‘Ren is like my fairy-tale prince. I really think we’re soulmates,’ Bel said, resting her chin in her hands as the waitress made a hasty retreat. ‘I’m serious, he’s all I can think about. His Instagram is the first thing I look at when I wake up and the last thing I check before I go to sleep.’
‘Well, we don’t want to scare him off so let’s keep that little nugget of information between us,’ I suggested as I tucked into the heavenly pancakes. ‘But I will make you a promise. By the time my holiday is over, you and Ren will be well on your way to your happily ever after.’
CHAPTER FOUR
The light was different in LA.
Even though I knew it was the exact same sun in the exact same sky, everything was more magical here. Someone had turned the brightness up and the contrast down then added a 10 per cent fade across the whole city, tinkering with reality just enough to make me question whether or not the waitress had slipped a light psychedelic into my coffee. According to Bel, weed was legal in LA and mushrooms were ‘totally having a moment’ so it wasn’t completely beyond the realms of possibility.
After Bel drove off to one of her many jobs, I left Little Dom’s and strolled up a leafy street, wandering in the general direction of Suzanne’s house. I was too curious and too stuffed full of pancakes and pizza to go straight home, I needed to keep moving. So I walked aimlessly, taking in the neighbourhood and bathing myself in the beautiful light.
Los Angeles didn’t feel like any kind of city I’d ever visited before. There was a mountain right in the middle,for a start. Well, Suzanne’s manual said it was a mountain but as I strode onwards and upwards, I reclassified it as a very big hill. Admittedly, a great big, massive people-come-from-miles-around-to-see-it sort of a hill, but not the kind of thing that required dedicated footwear. If you could climb it in Converse, it wasn’t a mountain.
The roads weren’t the kind of city roads I was used to either. Wide, leafy streets led away from the restaurant before twisting themselves into a narrow ribbon of a road with slivers of pavement disappearing and reappearing at will. I picked my way carefully around the blind bends, sticking close to the parked cars that lined the streets bumper to bumper whenever the pavement ran out, wondering why anyone would choose to drive one of the ubiquitous Range Rovers I saw everywhere when I wouldn’t have trusted myself with anything bigger than a pushbike.
I’d been wondering a lot of things since brunch. Like, how come so many people had time to hang out at a restaurant on a Tuesday morning when they should be at work? Did anyone in LA wear anything other than jeans or leggings? And how could someone like Bel genuinely believe there was a single person alive who wouldn’t fall in love with her as soon as they met her? It simply didn’t make sense;Love Islandwould have turned her down for being too hot, and if being gorgeous wasn’t enough, she also had the audacity to be a lovely human. I mean, who gave her the right? If I hadn’t seen her go to pieces in front of Ren, I wouldn’t have believed it was possible for someone so perfectly put together to fall apart so spectacularly over a boy. It would be like watching Jennifer Aniston have a meltdown at theself-checkout because she didn’t know how to scan a banana. It simply did not make sense.
What did make sense were her feelings for Ren. He was perfect crush material: handsome, great hair and a set of shoulders so strong and broad he could probably carry an injured sheep several miles for help, and as far as I could tell he was a decent enough man. Admittedly the bar for ‘decent enough man’ dropped lower every day but he was polite, funny and had yet to start a single sentence with the words ‘well actually’, which put him ahead of at least half the male population of the planet. The birdwatching thing was a bit leftfield but I definitely preferred the thought of a man standing half-naked in his back garden, looking at hawks, to the idea of a man sitting half-naked on the settee, swearing at a teenager in Slough, playingCall of Duty. It would be a pleasure to help him see how wonderful Bel was. I would be performing a service for the good of humanity, bringing together two of the finest examples of the species. I would probably be awarded some sort of Nobel prize.
At the intersection of three winding roads, I pulled up my Maps app to check I was still heading in vaguely the right direction and, since my phone was already in my hand, skipped through a quick tour of the apps. It wasn’t that I wanted to check them but I physically couldn’t stop myself. It was a statistical impossibility for anyone under the age of fifty to do one and one thing only on their phone without checking at least two other apps immediately after. Anyone with that kind of mental fortitude should be made president of the universe. It would not be me.
There were no texts, no emails, zero action on the DMs; according to the Weather app, it was pissing it down with rain back home. Standard. None of these houses in Suzanne’s neighbourhood looked as though they could withstand so much as a shower; one huff, one puff and I could blow them all down. My thumb skipped across the screen to the Facebook icon, summoning my newsfeed with a single tap and searching for Samantha Evans with another. I knew it was stupid, masochistic even, but since when did that stop anyone from doing anything? The feminine urge to self-sabotage, I was powerless against it. Samantha’s profile appeared on my screen with a gentle pop and right away, I felt the entire weight of my breakfast in my stomach. You couldn’t blame her for making her profile public – she was getting married soon, she was well within her rights to want to celebrate. But there was an argument to be made against posting a soft-focus photo of her and my ex dressed in cheap, knock-off Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming costumes alongside the caption ‘Twelve more sleeps until my dream comes true’.
‘Keep dreaming,’ I muttered, flipping through her other photos as though I hadn’t already studied them closely enough to make her myMastermindspecialist subject. She looked so happy. Grinning from ear to ear at her sister’s wedding, making a heart with her hands against the sunset in Mallorca, weeping at Thomas down on one knee at Disneyland Paris, engagement ring in hand. Imagine proposing marriage with Goofy in the background. Dearest Samantha, love of my life, keeper of my heart, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife and does anyone know whether or not this thing hovering behind me is a cow or a dog?
Swiping out of the app, I threw my phone into the bottom of my bag and marched on up the hill until my calves burned, mad at Mark Zuckerberg, mad at Steve Jobs, mad at Thomas and Samantha and Goofy and most of all, mad at myself.
Everyone looks happy on Facebook, I reminded myself. Hadn’t I posted joy-filled footage of me and Thomas on every platform from Twitter to TikTok? No one knew what went on behind closed doors. How many other women spent their evenings uploading smiling photos while tears streamed down their faces? How many other women thought putting pictures of the good times out in the world would bring them back around again? Was it manifestation or self-delusion? I could practically feel Therese’s eyebrow raising at my train of thought from halfway around the world. Magical thinking, don’t do it.
‘She’s made her choice and I’m better off without him,’ I declared to a small, pink-breasted bird when it alighted on a tree branch in front of me. Even the sparrows were cuter in LA. It hopped down to the ground beside me before fluttering up to rest on the root of a tree that had broken through the pavement. I wondered what kind of bird it was.
‘Meets a hot birdwatcher once, turns into Bill Oddie,’ I muttered as my feathered friend flitted up the tree, disappearing into the leaves and out of sight. ‘Where are you going? Do you have a movie premiere to get to?’
Shockingly, it did not reply.
‘Rude,’ I muttered, resting one hand on the trunk of the tree. It was huge, like something out of a fairy tale, all twisting branches and deeply ridged brown barkwith roots breaking out of the pavement all the way up the street. In the land of palm trees and cacti, I wasn’t expecting something so ancient looking. It felt as though this tree had been and would be here forever.
Behind the tree was a gate and beyond the gate was a driveway, curving around lush green lawns, passing under towering oaks. The driveway, predictably, led to a house, only the word house felt deeply insufficient to describe this dwelling; this was a mansion, a castle even. Its creamy, yellow-tinted walls, half obscured by trailing ivy, rose up out of the trees, and white wooden shutters covered the windows like a parent hiding their child’s eyes. I could see the house but the house couldn’t see me. Holding my breath, I followed the fence down to an imposing wrought-iron gate to get a better look. Just like Ren, just like Bel, just like my blueberry ricotta pancakes and everything else I’d encountered so far in LA, it was gorgeous. The mansard roof was covered with dove-grey tiles and on the far side of the house there was a rounded tower topped by an actual turret. If a singing candelabra had waved at me from the one window that wasn’t shuttered, I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit surprised.
Right as I was about to pull out my phone to take a photo, I saw something move inside. Not an enchanted candlestick but a person. A slash of scarlet lipstick and a curtain of steel-coloured hair appeared at a window. It was a woman. I gave her an awkward wave as our eyes met, adding the kind of half-smile we rolled out when we’d been caught doing something we shouldn’t be doing, but rather than reply with a wave of her own or, even better, ignoring me completely, she raised her hand and gave me the finger.
I laughed, barking with surprise, as she disappeared from the window, leaving me red-faced and smiling, hoping Suzanne could help put a name to my new hero. As someone who didn’t open the door to anyone who didn’t callandtext to confirm their visit at least an hour before their arrival, I couldn’t begin to imagine how annoying it must be to have people hanging off your gate and taking photos of your house every day. Like I was doing at that exact second. But it was such a beautiful house, how could anyone walk past it without falling into dreamy romantic fantasies about its residents? I could practically see Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy walking up the front steps in time for cocktail hour.
With an unspoken apology to the coolest senior citizen on the planet, I tore myself away and marched back out onto the road. The long, winding, uphill road. All at once, my legs turned into lead weights, loaded down with pancakes and jet lag, and the choice between dragging myself up the hill or rolling back down to wallow in Suzanne’s pool like a sloppy hippo was almost no choice at all. But even as I turned and walked down the hill, away from the mysterious Hollywood chateau, I knew I’d be back sooner rather than later.
‘Suze, I completely understand. Work is work, you don’t need to apologize.’
Stretched out on a sunlounger by the pool, I put on my best sympathetic face and heroically refrained from yelling ‘I KNEW IT’ into my phone as my sister remorsefully explained she would in fact not be coming home in two or three or even four days.
‘It’s such a mess up here,’ she said with a grunt, rubbing the delicate skin under her eyes and doing nothing to improve the dark circles I’d watched get steadily worse for the last fifteen years. ‘Things in the LA office are completely under control but these idiots don’t know their arse from their elbow. This is Seattle, they’re all supposed to be geniuses. I wouldn’t trust them to make my bed.’
