by Carmen Reid
She had lists and plans, of course. There were so many sights to see on her checklist. And she had the first inklings of other ideas too… she’d always wanted to be fitter but had never found the time. Surely, right here in LA with the glorious weather and all these body beautifuls, this would be the ideal place to start?
And she would go to art galleries and take the fully guided tours so that she could learn much more about modern art and try to understand what Dave and the artists he had gone to college with were all about.
She would read more.
Look at all the books bulging from every corner in this place. Clearly River never stopped reading. Surely she’d find all kinds of interesting things on the bookshelves here? And she could go to the bookshop and get an American copy of… Anna Karenina, maybe, and The Great Gatsby… and several other classics that she’d always thought she should read.
And she would think… about herself… her marriage… and what she really wanted for this next phase of life. Because she did know that she wanted to be happier than she was right now.
Way at the back of her mind was just the slightest ripple of unease about how she was going to get settled in and get around here… LA felt quite different. The drive from the airport had taken her through an alien landscape of low-rise blocks and dense motorway networks. It was much more urban and inner city than she’d expected and much more urban and inner city than Leamington Spa and the country roads to Ambleside. She tried to imagine driving a car across those six, seven-lane freeways and she felt daunted. This was a car city, there was no other way to get around to her knowledge, so somehow, she was going to have to work out how to do this. Otherwise… she’d be in River’s flat and walking round River’s neighbourhood for the whole of her holiday.
But first things first, she had to make this place nice, comfortable, liveable for her time here.
She looked around the flat again and started to make a plan. If she got big laundry bags, she could store River’s papers neatly out of sight. There was an obvious space close to the desk where another tall bookcase could stand and accommodate all the books River obviously read. Tess would get that organised for her.
Her fingers were already itching to make a list. She found a pen and paper easily, then she poked gingerly around the cupboards to see what basics were needed: toilet paper, for sure, washing-up liquid, milk… some new cleaning cloths for that balcony window. It would be so much lighter inside the apartment when that window was thoroughly clean.
And the balcony… dear God, she would have to deal with the balcony. Where did the dogs pee? Where did River walk them? Tess went to her phone and looked at Google Maps. There seemed to be some little square of greenery not too many blocks away.
She wondered about River’s state of mind. Did River like living like this, in so much chaos? Was she so busy that she couldn’t find time to do her home chores? Maybe she was so focused on her work that she didn’t even notice her surroundings… maybe you just stopped making the bed one day, and then didn’t have time to wash up the next day, until gradually, you had a problem that was going to take a lot of effort to fix.
She immediately felt sorry for her rage at the woman. But she was glad that trusty Angela would be cleaning Ambleside every week. There wasn’t any chance that her lovely home would look anything like this when she returned. But even as she made her list and her plan of attack, Tess couldn’t quite push down her horror at the balcony, the slimy vegetables in the fridge and the greyish layer of dirt over everything in the bathroom. Who could live like this?
15
It was approaching 11.30 on a sunny Saturday morning and Alex had just woken up from a dreadful night of rolling, pitching and only fitfully sleeping. He caught sight of his reflection in the room’s small mirror and stared at it. He looked so much thinner and less healthy than when he’d first left home a few years ago. He hadn’t washed for days. His eyes were lined with dark shadows. He looked like a boy, with his face that still refused to grow a beard, and his sad, confused eyes. A boy who’d somehow wandered away from home and ended up where he was never meant to be.
Suddenly his phone started ringing. Alex jumped up. Disaster!
He ran wildly around the room. His father was calling him on Skype, and if Alex answered the call with his room in the state it was in, he might give the old man a heart attack. He flung dirty clothes, discarded packaging, and empty bottles into one corner of the room. He then threw himself onto the bed and, after quickly trying to flatten down his hair, he answered the call.
His father appeared on the screen, surrounded by blindingly bright sunshine and luscious greenery. Was that really what the weather was like in Warwickshire today?
‘Hi, Dad,’ Alex began and his voice sounded rusty. This was the first time he’d used it in over twenty-four hours.
‘Hi, Alex, how are you doing? I thought you’d finally be up by now,’ said his father. The picture blurred, obscuring his dad’s face.
‘How are you? How’s the leg and everything?’ said Alex, already wondering what else he was going to talk about for the next ten or fifteen minutes and how he could make this conversation go away.
‘Well… some way to go on that front,’ his dad replied. ‘I’m hobbling about on crutches, enjoying life in the summerhouse and the Californian writer, the houseguest, seems to be settling in quite well. I’ve hardly seen her at all. I think she’s been sleeping off her jetlag. I know your mum’s arrived at the place in LA, but that’s all I’ve heard so far. She probably has jetlag too.’
Alex was aware that he also had a jetlag of sorts. The world around him was operating on a different time zone to his.
‘How’s work going?’ his dad asked.
‘Er, great,’ said Alex. Think of something to talk about, quickly… anything. He cast his mind about for some sort of corporate term, anything that he could mention.
‘We’ve been creating mission statements this week…’ he offered, ‘all about the big ideas, the operational goals.’
‘Oh, that sounds good,’ said his dad.
Yes… like everything in corp world, it sounded pretty impressive, but in fact it was absolute horse shit that would involve mind-numbing hours in meeting rooms, writing words on flipcharts that had no actual basis in reality.
‘And how’s the social life?’ his dad asked next. ‘Were you out last night?’
‘Yeah… a few drinks with people from work. Nothing too exciting.’
‘And still all quiet on the romantic front?’ his dad asked with a smile.
‘All quiet,’ Alex repeated.
His dad shook his head to signal his disbelief. Alex had heard the ‘you’re such a handsome guy with so much going on up top, I don’t get it’ chat many times and hoped it wasn’t coming again.
‘Dating in the age of anxiety,’ his dad said finally, ‘it can’t be easy.’
After further stilted conversation, when they plucked at conversational straws like the price of beer in London, what Camden was like in his dad’s day, and live music not being what it once was, Alex made an excuse about needing to get out to buy food and they both said goodbye.
Once the call was over, Alex slumped down on the bed, until he was enveloped in the soft, musty pillows that badly needed to be cleaned. Everything was strange between him and his father. He wondered when it had become like that. When did it turn from ‘Daddy, my hero’ into Dad, the stranger I can’t reveal one single truth to? It must have developed over years from one tiny misunderstanding and disappointment into another, repeated over and over again, until they didn’t know how to begin to understand what was going on with one another.
Alex had literally no idea how to begin a conversation with his father about what was happening in his life, or more realistically, in his head. Because that was where he lived his life now, in his head, inside this tiny room. No, there was no help to be had from his dad. His dad enjoyed life. His dad was straightforward and un-tortured, and his dad just
really didn’t understand why everything was so difficult and stressful and sad for Alex. His dad remembered being young in London as one non-stop party and only wished that Alex was having as good a time as he did.
‘You’re only young once,’ his dad would tell him with a wink, ‘make the most of it!’
Alex couldn’t remember when he’d last had a really good conversation with his dad… but to be honest, he didn’t think now that there was any help to be had from anyone. He felt so alone, so lost and confused. His head ached with the pain and also with the embarrassment of his condition.
No help. No possibility of help from anywhere. What was he going to do?
He went out briefly for food and drink, then all afternoon he lay on his bed, the light coming in through the ugly brown blind became bright and hot, and then gradually faded, before turning red, and then a dark orange as the streetlights came on again.
As night fell, the noise of people talking, shouting and arguing in the street below came up to him. The giant crane loomed over the room, casting unnatural, triangular shadows on the walls, making Alex feel once again like he was trapped in a cage.
The hours of darkness were the worst, when he fretted himself into a state where it was impossible to sleep. His phone, with its stupid but cheerful little distractions from his misery, was the life raft that he clung to through those hours, until finally the sky began to light up with dawn and then, when everyone else was waking up, that was when he found he could sleep.
Hours later, he finally got up. According to the clock on the wall, it was four minutes after three in the afternoon and, according to his phone, an email had landed that had finally offered him a plan. First of all, he took his sturdy backpack out from under his bed, then he went round the room and packed into it an assortment of the things he considered important.
Then he sat down at the desk, took up the beautiful fountain pen he’d been given for his twenty-first birthday and wrote a few, short lines to his sister.
Dear Natalie,
I’m so sorry but I’m going to go away for a while. I don’t want you to worry about me. I’ll be totally fine and when I come back, I know I’ll be in a much better state.
Please tell Mum and Dad that I really do love them and I know how hard they’ve tried for me. But I just have to sort myself out.
I’ll give you my contact details as soon as I can.
I love you all very much.
Alexander
Then he realised a note was ridiculous. He couldn’t leave it here, because his family didn’t know where he lived. He couldn’t send it because he’d have to find an envelope and stamps… plus Natalie was in Spain and he didn’t even know her address. Instead, he’d have to email her with this note, which just wasn’t the same. So instead, he folded it up and tucked it into his pocket.
Then Alex shouldered his backpack, checked the room over and left, locking the door behind him. He’d been accepted to do voluntary work that came with accommodation on a farm in Devon. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to sign up for the work, but he’d decided to make the train journey to the remote, rural location to see if he liked it there.
One thing was certain – he had no intention of ever coming back here.
16
When River finally woke up from the deep, deep jetlag and melatonin-induced sleep she’d been lost to for the past ten hours, she opened her eyes and couldn’t understand why everything was so dark. And the pillow… the sheet… why was everything so smooth?
Where was she? What had happened?
Then she gradually remembered that, of course, she’d been on the plane… and she now was in England in the wonderful house! She saw the outline of bright sunshine around the thick bedroom curtains and groped for her phone, which told her that the morning had almost gone. Her first day in England and she’d already missed the morning. That thought was enough to have her throwing off the duvet and hurrying to wash.
Showered, her dark hair blow-dried, she dressed in a carefully chosen outfit she hoped projected ‘international, creative woman of mystery and intrigue’: a light knit V-neck top with black and white stripes and wide-legged black linen cropped leg trousers. Then she headed to the kitchen where she went into battle with an unfamiliar coffeemaker, eventually finding instructions on YouTube, ate two oranges and some truly dry and appalling cereal bar called a Weetabix.
She had absolutely no doubt about what she wanted to do on her first day here. She was a Californian in a hurry. She was going to go straight to Stratford-upon-Avon to visit Shakespeare’s birthplace and Anne Hathaway’s cottage. She was also going to go and visit the famous theatre, although the plays she was going to see, including The Merchant of Venice, were later on in her holiday.
She also planned to walk along the river, and up and down those quaint little streets so that she could breathe it all in. She might even eat one of those luscious English cream teas instead of lunch – with real, full-fat, dairy cream. The kind of thing she hadn’t allowed herself to eat since 2006.
When she had imagined herself driving from Ambleside to Stratford, she had pictured narrow country lanes, dodging tractors pulling trailers loaded with hay bales, with horses and cows grazing in fields. And, in fact, there were country lanes for the first fifteen minutes or so, which was good as she got used to the borrowed SUV, much chunkier than her little girl-about-town-mobile. But then she hit what was actually quite a complex freeway situation, with her phone only advising on lane changes very, very late. Maybe her phone was directing her on a time-lag from LA.
It was further driving trauma when she arrived in Stratford and found the car parks only had spaces designed for doll-sized cars. So she narrowly avoided scraping the borrowed car. All this adrenaline needed to be dampened down with a full cream tea at the first teashop she walked into. River had never in her life seen a cake shop like it. There were walls of cakes, layers and layers, shelves of cakes… and the cream! Clearly an entire herd of cows was producing cream for this shop.
‘Please tell me you keep a defibrillator on the wall,’ she joked with the waitress who took her order. ‘I mean this has got to be cholesterol central.’
‘Yeah, we do actually,’ the waitress confirmed, a little charmlessly, but River guessed this was because the tearoom was too busy for random conversations.
She ate one scone, loaded with dense whipped cream and raspberry jam and washed it down with a full pot of tea, black no milk, because there’s only so much lactose a person can deal with at once. As she ate, instead of looking at her phone, she looked round the café, packed with tourists filming themselves, their cakes, each other, the view from the window, basically relentlessly filming everything.
When she was completely full of cream, scone, jam and tea, she set off on her first walk around the streets of Stratford. There were touches of full-on touristy cheesiness, but she also felt strangely moved by how old the houses looked and how most weren’t perfectly preserved. There were doors that needed a fresh coat of paint and the occasional untidy front garden. It was so strange to think that people really lived here in these tiny dolls’ houses with bundles of sticks on the roofs. Little houses built from wonky planks of wood and lumps of clay, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and so many of them were still here.
The queues at the front of Shakespeare’s home and Anne Hathaway’s cottage helped her to decide to come back another day. She would come early, when it was quiet and she could enjoy standing in such historic places in peace and quiet. Now, she wandered down to the riverfront and stood outside one of the major theatres enjoying the view, so peaceful with swans gliding along the surface of the water. Her eyes took in the plays and the top-billed actors. And right there, to her absolute astonishment, was a name she’d never expected to see on the front of a theatre, let alone in Stratford-upon-Avon, in England.
But there it was:
Franklyn Gregory – limited run – SOLD OUT.
Franklyn Gregory… Franklyn Gregory?
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br /> Franklyn was currently enjoying standout Hollywood success. He was forty-eight and riding a phenomenal wave of smash hit movies, and now a TV series, that had all begun eight years ago with his breakout role in a low-budget crime thriller. Franklyn had the obligatory beautiful-and-talented wife, plus a darling eight-year-old daughter.
But there was a time before the daughter, the wife, and before the major success, when there had been another very important person in Franklyn Gregory’s life… and that person was her… River Romero.
Looking at his name looming down on her from one of the major theatres, River couldn’t help pulling up the lapels of her jacket and tugging her hair over her face a little.
‘Oh boy,’ she said to herself. ‘Franklyn freaking Gregory… this I did not expect.’
17
Tess’s first full day in LA was not going to go the way she had planned. Before she arrived, she’d thought day one might involve a swim in the pool before breakfast on the balcony, followed by a trip out to an inspiring cultural institution. Day one was also supposed to involve exploring local juice bars and the nearest hiking route or beach… and maybe enjoying a cocktail out in the evening while she planned her research for her work project.
But now that day one was here, the reality of it was: get up, walk big, over-excited dogs round the block separately while accosting other dog walkers for poo bags, who all seem to have teeny chihuahuas or dachshunds. Manage to get two poo bags barely big enough for the job, plus learn essential information about location of poo bins and nearby dog-friendly parks.
Go to store on corner and buy every kind of essential: from things to eat and drink, to cleaning stuff, cleaning cloths… and bathroom supplies. Drag it all back in two enormous laundry bags, then begin the Herculean task of making River’s place the kind of home she had thought she would be spending six weeks in.
