Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Excuse me, sir, but I don’t believe you have a personnel pass.’

  Neither of them looked more than twenty. It was the smaller one who spoke, shiny straight white teeth probably enjoying their freedom after years behind bars. He didn’t look like he’d be getting his hands dirty on any of the heavy lifting work. That – and associated tasks – seemed the remit of his high-school linebacker buddy.

  Odd thing to say, even as polite intimidation. Not ‘Can I see your personnel pass?’ or ‘Do you have a personnel pass?’, but ‘I don’t believe you have a personnel pass’. Pretty confident about who does, then. Either there weren’t too many of them or there was something about Larry’s appearance that made it unlikely he’d be carrying one. What could that be, now?

  ‘It’s okay, kids, I got access all areas,’ he said, producing his badge.

  ‘I don’t understand, has there been some kind of complaint?’

  ‘No, I’m just takin’ a look around. Wonderin’ what you’ve got in mind with all this stuff.’

  ‘What do you mean? We’ve already cleared everything with the police and the mayor’s office,’ the kid said, folding his arms. ‘We’ve got the fire department coming down tomorrow for safety checks, and we’ve got an official police liaison officer dropping by to—’

  The kid was cut off by a hand on his arm. An older man, maybe mid-thirties, had appeared behind them from a partially constructed stall nearby. He was dressed identically to his junior companions – sneakers, jeans, T-shirt, teeth – but his laminate was a loudly important red.

  ‘Who’s our guest, Bradley?’ he asked, smiling widely at Larry in practised PR mode as he spoke.

  ‘Sergeant Larry Freeman,’ Larry said, showing him his ID. ‘I’d just like a quick look around.’

  ‘Well, we weren’t expecting the police department until tomorrow afternoon, Sergeant, and yours wasn’t the name we were given, but long as you’re here, why don’t I give you the tour? I’m Gary Crane. Festival construction supervisor.’

  He put a hand on Larry’s back and began walking him away towards the stage. The welcoming committee retreated, shrugging.

  ‘What’s the party for?’

  ‘Party? Oh I see. Well, I guess you could call it that. I’m right in assuming you’re not involved with the Festival liaison?’

  ‘I’m involved with a different liaison, ‘cross the street. Just want to see what the other star attractions are in the neighbourhood this week.’

  ‘Certainly nothing as big and impressive as the AFFM, Sergeant.’

  ‘So what is this . . .’ Larry indicated the man’s T-shirt, ‘. . . Festival of Light, Mr Crane?’

  ‘It’s a celebration. A youth and family event. We’re having music, singing, speakers – hence the stage. There’s going to be bleachers that end. We’re putting them in that big space behind the sound desk, which will be in that booth there. There’ll be cooking, concession stands, face-painting,’ he continued, indicating the stalls taking shape around the lot.

  Smily Gary was being persistently vague around the point of interest. Larry listened to him describe a few more things his eyes had done a pretty good job of noticing for themselves, then interrupted. ‘Yeah, but what are we celebrating?’

  Crane stopped, looking Larry pityingly in the eye, as if he couldn’t believe he didn’t understand, then smiled again. ‘The light of Christ. What other light is there?’

  He felt relief flow through him like a flushed cistern. Terrifying visions of biker conventions and Klan rallies dispersed from his thoughts, washed away in that glib piety emanating from Crane.

  Larry looked back at the lot from the sidewalk on Pacific Drive as he waited for the WALK sign on his way to retrieving his car. One of the horizontal banners that had been laid out face down in the lot was being raised towards supports above the stage; there were similar brackets all around the concourse. The banner, folded lengthways, was being hauled up by some of the T-shirts and secured in place at either end. Then it dropped open to reveal its slogan.

  ‘Festival of Light – Santa Monica ’99.’

  Larry had a little smile to himself. In an ideal world this would still be the AFFM’s parking lot, but Happy Clappies he could live with.

  He was about to look away again when he noticed another fold of the banner doubled up behind what already faced out, with T-shirts untying the strings that would let the last section drop down. It unfurled with a slap against the frame.

  ‘American Legion of Decency’.

  Uh-oh.

  This wasn’t a movement or an organisation Larry had specifically heard of, but he suddenly didn’t feel quite so comfortable any more.

  Something about that last word had always scared the shit out of him.

  two

  He was committing an act of heresy. This was, in the words of that great Welsh cheeseball, not unusual. What was unusual was that this morning’s was a cultural heresy, undertaken innocently through necessity rather than in gleeful protest at the absurdity of the taboo he was supposedly breaking. There were lots of other people breaking it too, quite openly, but their standing in the local social hierarchy meant they had little respect to lose in the eyes of their fellow citizens.

  Steff Kennedy was taking a walk along Hollywood Boulevard. It was five thirty on a February morning.

  The sky was a lazy blue, like a clear afternoon sky back home in the winter, but without the attendant threat of testicular cryogesis. There was a hint of cool in the breeze, loitering, even trespassing, before the strengthening sun and the heat from cars and bodies chased it out of town. Steff reckoned the air was about as crisp and clear as it probably got around here. Last night it had been an enveloping, acrid haze that you could smell, even taste on your breath, and that you could feel precipitated on the skin of your face. The pavements, the roads, the shop doorways were engulfed by a pervading volatility, like the whole boulevard was a student party in a flat with a low ceiling, entrapping the fumes and vapours of the fast food, the sweat, the piss and, of course, the cars.

  They cruised up and down all evening (or at least until Steff crashed out, which was hardly the witching hour), the Latino boys in elevated flatbed pickups with inexplicably swollen wheels; the white girls in Beamie convertibles; and the moneyed unseen in stretch limos and blacked-out windows.

  Under neon loneliness, motorcycle emptiness, as another Welsh crooner had put it.

  The boulevard was being cruised by a different kind of vehicle at this less fashionable hour of the day. If there was a shopping-trolley dealership nearby, it had cleaned up, because everybody had one. And no wonder: low on gas consumption, four-wheel drive (each independent of its partners), and enough space to store everything the driver owns. In the world.

  Only downside was the engines looked fucked. All of them. They trundled by, glancing at Steff with no more interest than as if he was a streetlight or a mailbox. They seemed to be trudging along with the resigned automation of commuters, thinking neither of their journey nor their destination; they just did this, every day. Steff wondered where they were going, where they went when the stores opened and the Japanese teenagers erupted from the Roosevelt in search of a Hollywood that plainly didn’t exist any more, if it ever had.

  One stopped a few yards ahead of Steff, both hands gripping his trolley, a deluxe model with a brake-bar underneath the handle. He wore a browny-green coat with combat pretensions, perhaps more suited now to purposes of camouflage in an environment of cardboard and shredded polythene. His face was partially obscured by matted dark hair, which draped down as he hung his head, looking towards the floor. His skin was an irregular brown, or maybe even dark ash-grey, and it was only as Steff drew nearer and caught a glimpse of his profile behind a gap in his crusty hair that it became apparent that the man was white. He was pissing from somewhere inside the flapping coat. Just standing there and pissing, the urine splashing down around his feet, directly on to one of the stars that lined both pavements east of La
Brea, around Mann’s Chinese Theater.

  The trolley man unclasped his brake-bar and shuffled on, ignoring Steff’s inquisitive presence. Steff looked down at the centre of the puddle. Burt Lancaster. Yeah, he thought. I saw The Cassandra Crossing too.

  Ah, Hollywood. The glamour.

  Steff crouched, his back against a palm tree, and took half a dozen shots of the boulevard as it tapered into the east, those trolley-jockeys with their backs to him looking like they were on a desperate pilgrimage towards and beyond the concrete horizon. He stood up again and stepped away from the tree, looking up at it and clicking off a few frames of its flaccid and ill-coloured foliage. The tree looked like it smoked. You’re fooling no-one, he told it. You don’t belong here any more. You just hang around, making everyone feel guilty about what’s been spoiled. Get your own trolley and get out of here.

  He looked at his watch again and swore. He had known this would happen. He’d flown in from Heathrow yesterday: eleven-hour flight, eight-hour time difference. The trick is to stay up as late as you can, so that you crash out at close to the local equivalent of your regular bedtime, even though back home it’s already the next morning. The obstacle is your digestive system. He had gone out for a walk around half six, and found the surrounding neighbourhood far too disturbing to explore in his current jet-weary state. Mann’s was just opposite the hotel, but the only picture starting around the time he was passing was a Merchant-Ivory number, and he decided this would constitute a foolish and unnecessary element of challenge in his quest to stay awake. He settled for a take-out pizza, a six-pack and an in-house movie. He was asleep in his clothes by seven thirty, and hopelessly awake at four a.m.

  Someone called Joe Mooney was picking him up at the Roosevelt, for breakfast and then to take him to collect his hire car. But that was at ten.

  He had leaned across the double bed and reached for his bag, remembering even as he thrust his hand inside that the book he was half-way through was now probably somewhere above the Atlantic, jammed firmly into seat-pocket 22D, between the lifejacket instructions and the beak-poke. Still, if he fancied a read there was always the Bible, as one had been considerately left in his room (as it explained on the cover) by the Gideons.

  The Gideons, whoever they were, had Steff baffled. An organisation dedicating time, money and resources to leaving Bibles in hotel rooms all over the world. What the fuck for, he wondered. Who ever actually sat down and flicked through one at home? Probably the same kind of person who would also carry one around with them anyway. Sure, if one of those people arrived to find they had forgotten their precious tome, they’d be hugely grateful to find one in a drawer by the bed, but what were the odds, pitched against the number of wee brown books they had secreted round the globe?

  These guys had seriously miscalculated the demographics, too. The majority of hotel rooms on this planet – outside of stand-up obvious tourist destinations – tended to be used by businessmen travelling to meetings, conferences or whatever, sleeping one to a room. They get there after maybe a ten-hour flight or a long drive in the pouring rain. Steff would put real money on the first thing they said to themselves not being, ‘God, I need a prayer. If I don’t have a wee prayer to myself soon I’m going to go crazy. Oh, a Bible! Thank Christ! Acts of the Apostles here I come!’

  He figured it would be a kinder service to mankind to go round the world removing Bibles from hotel rooms and replacing them with wank mags. It seemed a safe bet which one the average businessman would rather find by the bed when he came in alone, tired and stressed out after a long trip or a boring seminar. Just snuggling up against the headboard, all on his own, miles from home, crick in his neck, hasn’t seen the wife for four days . . . Only one of the two aforementioned publications would ensure he was fast asleep with a smile on his face ten minutes later, having shouted hallelujah and heartily thanked God for his good fortune.

  Steff’s tilt at breaking the record for the world’s longest bath was thwarted by the hotel’s having installed the world’s shortest. He had settled for pulling the curtain inside and having a shower instead, but even the duration of that was truncated, partly by the water’s intermittent switching between cold and mutilatingly hot, and partly by his having to get on his knees to get his hair below the fixed shower-head.

  Kneeling was a problem for Steff. Kind of a psychological thing, one might say.

  So, having dried off, got dressed and familiarised himself thoroughly with the hotel’s fire regulations, room-service menu, laundry arrangements and international dialling literature, and having flicked through the vacuous TV channels and satisfied himself that the BBC were wrong not to market the test-card as a format overseas, he had opted for the heretical pursuit of taking a (very) early-morning stroll in LA.

  His subversiveness was confirmed by the time he had made it as far as the Pantages Egyptian Theater, another archaeological remnant of the fabled lost city of Hollywood. Steff had seen the place in old movies and in documentaries about old movies, once a palatial showcase for the local product, site of legendary premières where the gods of a black-and-white pantheon gathered before crowd and camera. Now it was a second-run cinema, showing last season’s hits for two bucks, like an ageing and ruined society beauty turning tricks to pay the rent, wearing the torn and faded dress that wowed ’em three decades ago. From red carpet to sticky carpet.

  Steff had clicked off a whole roll in front of the place, and was moving on again when the patrol car pulled alongside. The window slid down and a uniformed white cop in uniform shades looked up at him.

  ‘Excuse me, would you mind stopping there a minute, sir?’ he said.

  Being stopped didn’t surprise Steff. He didn’t necessarily cut a suspicious figure, but he did cut a conspicuous one. He was six foot seven, broad-shouldered but not muscular, and had straight blond hair swept away from each side of his face like curtains, running down to between his shoulder blades at the back. What didn’t help was that his default expression tended unintentionally to convey anything between bored disrespect and flippant scorn, depending on the observer’s particular insecurities. His imposing size had the delicately balanced dual effect of both aggravating those insecurities and diminishing the desire to take the subsequent disgruntlement too far. The real problems arose when the first effect outweighed the second, because that usually meant Steff was facing someone who was a lunatic, armed, or backed up by reinforcements. LA cops scored at least two out of three. For this reason, more than climate, he had listened to a friend’s advice about not bringing the long black coat he wore back home, ‘because it always looks like you’re concealing a shotgun inside it’.

  Steff stopped and held out his hands to gesticulate his co-operation.

  ‘Mind telling us where you’re going, sir?’

  ‘Eh, nowhere, really. Just taking a wee walk.’

  ‘Along Hollywood Boulevard at this time in the morning?’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, with a please-don’t-shoot-me smile. ‘I couldn’t sleep. Just flew in yesterday and the time difference has kind of messed up my body clock, you know?’

  The cop looked confused. The weakness in Steff’s tactic was that he had forgotten how few Americans ever travel beyond the place. Jet-lag empathy was a long-odds gambit. However, his main intention was to give them a taste of his accent and play the no-threat dumb-foreigner card. His information was that the average LA cop’s ‘you ain’t from round here’ reflex was an amusedly benevolent one. Long as you were white, anyway.

  The cop nodded, his stem expression lightening.

  ‘It’s my first time in Los Angeles and I thought I might as well take a look around while the streets are empty, seeing as I was awake,’ Steff elaborated, trying to capitalise on the breakthrough.

  ‘You don’t sound English. Where you from, Australia?’

  Success.

  ‘No.’ He laughed, shaking his head. ‘Scotland.’

  ‘Hey, I was close,’ the cop replied, not, apparently,
joking.

  ‘Yeah,’ Steff agreed. Right planet, anyway.

  ‘Well, sir, if I was you, I’d get myself a rental car. You’ll see a lot more of the city that way.’

  And if I was you, I’d lose the shades before Tom of Finland gets his sketchpad out, Steff wanted to say, but wisely settled for ‘Picking one up later this very day.’ This declared intention of reassuring conformity seemed to do the trick. The cop was putting his patrol car back into gear.

  ‘Well, I hope you enjoy your stay. Thank you for your time, sir.’

  Hey, call me Ray, he thought. Ray fucking Bradbury.

  Steff had been sitting in the Roosevelt’s impressive lobby for a hopeful half-hour before Joe Mooney appeared bang on ten as arranged. He had taken a walk around the overlooking mezzanine level with its Hollywood Golden Age memorabilia, including a photograph of the Pantages in its splendid monochrome prime. Perhaps the most fitting reminder of the area’s heritage, however, was in the closer view the mezzanine afforded of the lobby’s ornate ceiling, whose wooden crossbeams and elaborate cornice-carvings were betrayed as merely shaped and painted polystyrene. Steff smiled. Fair enough, he thought. This town was selling illusion, and no-one in it was pretending otherwise.

  ‘Stephen Kennedy?’ asked a voice beside him. Steff had been scanning the entrances for his contact, willing him desperately to show up and relieve the monotony. He was also ravenously hungry, as his body, eight hours ahead of the clock, was largely under the impression that it should have already had at least two meals and be gearing up for a third. Such distractions caused him to start visibly when he heard his name spoken just above his left shoulder, in what was unquestionably a female voice. He looked up to see a petite black woman standing before him, attractive in a ‘forget it, you’ll just upset yourself’ kind of way, and exuding a business-like smiling calm that was probably quake-proof. Her face looked like it had built-in air-conditioning, and she wore a blue trouser suit that an industrial steam-hammer couldn’t put a crease in.