I smiled when she smiled, expertly pretending the jibe didn’t bother me. I was used to it.
‘Everything’s going well though?’ she asked as she fiddled with the air conditioning, setting it somewhere close to sub-zero. ‘Ilovedthat set of National Pet Day cards you sent me. Your best yet, I reckon.’
‘Thanks,’ I replied, shivering in my jeans and T-shirt and gazing longingly at the sunshine outside. ‘They did really well.’
Head copywriter at the UK’s third largest independent greetings card company was far from the worst job in the world but it didn’t exactly inspire wonder and awe in people when they heard about it either. I couldn’t quite remember her exact title, but Suzanne was head of something strategic for an app I refused to download for fear of never accomplishing anything meaningful ever again. Was she partially responsible for the downfall of civilization? Yes. Was she incredibly rich and seemingly happy? Also yes, so, did she care about the first bit? No, she did not.
‘What else have you been up to?’ Suzanne asked, steering the car and the subject in a different direction as she merged onto another motorway. ‘Anything interesting?’
Nothing I wanted to tell her about, I thought.
‘You know, the usual,’ I said through a yawn. ‘Working, reading, cooking. I’m halfway through aVampire Diariesrewatch which is taking up a fair bit of my time.’
‘The Originalsas well?’
‘You’ve got to doThe Originals,’ I replied, nodding emphatically. ‘But I’m leavingLegaciesalone for now. What about you? Anything you’d like to share with the class?’
‘You’ll love the new house, it’ll be like staying in a hotel, only better,’ she replied, shifting topics once again with alarming ease. ‘The fridge is fully stocked, your bed is made and I’ve got every television channel on God’s green earth. I can’t think of a single thing you might want that I don’t have.’
‘A Cadbury Spira, Ryan Reynold’s phone number and the Tamagotchi you dropped off the side of the ferry on that school trip to France.’
‘Well the important thing is you’re not holding a grudge,’ she replied. ‘Knobhead.’
With a tired smile, I squinted at the sun-bleached shades of blue and beige outside the car. The area around an airport was rarely glamorous but this was not how I’d imagined Los Angeles. There was plenty of sun but no sea, no sand, no seductive anything. Just small, squat houses, run-down warehouses and giant billboard after giant billboard, all of them promising the very best traffic accident attorney money could buy. Only the towering palm trees that shot up into the sky at oddly irregular intervals clued me into the fact I was truly in California, as though someone from the tourist board had taken this exact same journey, panicked that it looked a bit shit and done the best that they could with a very limited budget. Where were the mansions? The celebrities? The allure? Definitely not on the bumper sticker of the car in front that read ‘If you’re going to ride my ass, at least pull my hair’.
‘Oh, look, look!’ Suzanne yelled out. ‘Can you see it?’
‘See what?’ I asked, blinking out the window. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘Obviously not the dead possum on the hard shoulder.’ She reached over and physically turned my chin to the left before pointing out of her window. ‘Great big bloody sign on the top of a hill. Can you see?’
And there it was.
Jumping out from the side of a far-off hill, nine bold white letters announcing I had arrived.
‘Welcome to Hollywood, everybody comes here! Land of dreams,’ Suzanne crowed in her best-worst American accent. ‘What’syourdream, Phoebe Chapman?’
‘For you not to quotePretty Womanat me right before you leave me in a strange house for three to four days,’ I replied, eyes fixed on the Hollywood sign. Somehow it managed to be bigger and smaller than I’d thought it would be, closer and further away at the same time. But it was still thrilling, I could hardly believe it was real.
‘That film is not a fairy tale, it’s a nightmare. Please tell me Richard Gere isn’t going to try to climb up the trellis to my bedroom in the middle of the night?’
‘He’s a bit old for it now, can’t imagine his hips would take it,’ she reasoned. ‘And if he does, you can push him into the pool.’
My head whipped around so fast, I slapped myself in the face with my ponytail. ‘You’ve got a pool? Why didn’t you say you’ve got a pool?’
‘Because I wanted to see the look on your face when I told you,’ Suzanne said as she steered us confidently across three lanes of traffic, several smaller cars scattering out of our way. ‘There’s a hot tub as well.’
‘Stay in Seattle as long as you like, I’m never leaving.’
My sister grinned, pressing down on the accelerator, the car vaulting forward as though we were on a roller-coaster. ‘I’ve got a feeling you’re going to love LA.’
‘I’ve got a feeling I’m going to love your pool,’ I countered, gaze lingering on the iconic white letters. ‘As for the rest of it, we’ll see.’
Forty minutes, fifteen honks of the horn and one wind-the-window-down-to-call-someone-a-wanker later, Suzanne pulled onto a curving driveway and turned off the engine.
‘Here we are,’ she declared. ‘Home sweet home.’
I was thrilled to be off the road – Suzanne was a menace – and I unclipped my seatbelt with white knuckles as she opened the passenger side door for me.
