Looking for Andrew McCarthy (14 page)

‘No, I didn’t think so. You said “excuse me”.’

‘Um,’ said Julia, self-consciously. ‘Where do the movie stars hang out?’

The waitress barked with laughter. ‘Planet Hollywood, where d’ya think? Or at my place, of course. Why, who are you after?’

They explained.

‘That’s the dumbest idea I ever heard.’

‘Yeah? You’re the one who took a job as a waitress,’ said Ellie.

‘Have you thought about trying the phone book?’

‘Yes, yes we have.’

‘Okay. Well, you could try The Sky Bar I suppose. On Sunset. Although I’m telling you, you’re going to need to wear a bit less clothing than that to have a hope of getting in.’

‘How much less?’

‘I’d say eighty, eighty-five percent.’

‘That only leaves my swimming costume,’ said Ellie.

‘You haven’t got a bikini?’

‘Ever seen a sand dune collapse? That’s what I look like in a bikini.’

‘Better make it the bathing suit. And put some make-up on. You both look like ghosts.’

‘Don’t they go for “pale and interesting”, out here?’

‘No, they go for “slutty and obvious”.’

‘Interesting,’ said Ellie. ‘Let’s phone up Caroline “Snotface” Lafayette.’

‘Thanks for your help,’ said Julia.

‘Not at all,’ said the waitress. ‘If you were looking for Rob Lowe I’d come with you.’

‘
See
?’ said Julia to Ellie. ‘
Everyone
says that.’

‘Yes, well, if that’s what we were doing it would just turn into a sad little fan hunt,’ said Ellie. There was a silence.

‘Well, have a good day y’all!’ said the waitress.

The hotel receptionist looked at them sniffily, even though Ellie was loudly declaiming their plan to ‘just drop by the SKY BAR’.

‘I’m sure he’s really nice inside, like in
Pretty Woman
,’ she whispered to Julia, who was trying to quietly check them out without drawing any attention to themselves.

‘I must ask that
if
you come here again you book in advance,’ said the receptionist.

‘… or Norman Bates, perhaps.’

Julia had on her best ‘I check out of five-star hotel receptions all the time’ face on as she handed over her credit card, crossing her fingers tightly behind her back.

‘Thank you ma’am.’ Relieved, they headed for the waiting cab.

‘Oh, and ma’am … you left these.’

And he held up the two half-empty gin miniatures.

‘Well, this is nice,’ said Julia, looking around their new tiny dark hotel room tentatively. They’d already seen one gigantic cockroach skitter across the floor.

‘Jules, I can hear gunfire.’

‘That’s not gunfire, it’s … well, I’m sure it’s fine. Let’s just get changed and go …’

But Ellie was passed out on the bed, snoring rather more like a warthog than a Hedgehog.

They stood outside the roped-back entrance feeling entirely stupid. After waking up at stupid o’clock again that morning, starving hungry, they had wandered out of the grotty hotel and finally made it to the car hire centre after waiting two hours for a cab.

‘They have cab companies here?’ the reception guy had said.

‘I thought you were meant to be the most advanced nation on earth,’ sneered Ellie.

‘We are, ma’am. That’s why we all drive our own cars.’

Then they’d picked up their little Toyota, which looked like somebody had taken a real car and chipped out the inside. They both immediately got in the
wrong side. They did this every time they got in a car for the entire trip.

‘Okay,’ said Julia, once they’d swapped over, examining the layout. ‘At least it’s got gears.’

‘Those are gears? They look more like lollipops.’

‘Shoosh. I need to concentrate.’

Outside the dusty, hot car hire place were ten lanes of freeway steaming from somewhere they didn’t know to somewhere they didn’t know either. And Julia had forgotten to buy a map, and Ellie was continuing to have a mental block about the name of their hotel. The sticky plastic seating was already adhering itself to the backs of their thighs and secretly they both wished they were back at home.

‘Well, faint heart never won fair movie star,’ said Ellie finally, and shook the keys gently in Julia’s face.

‘Okay, okay,’ said Julia, her face grim. She fired up the puttering little engine and gradually shifted the car away from the door. The owner watched them with marked trepidation.

‘How far is it to San Francisco again?’

‘Oh, about half an hour I think,’ said Ellie. ‘It’s in the same state.’

‘Well, let’s just take a pootle around town, get acquainted. We’re not going out till tonight.’

Almost instantly, a truck as big as the side of a house came tearing down the freeway, almost landing on top of them. Next, an actual
house
came tearing
down, white, wood framed, securely fastened to a flatbed truck.

‘SHIT!’ screamed the two girls, Julia clenching the wheel.

‘Oh my God,’ said Ellie as the danger passed. ‘Maybe we should have planned this trip on bicycles.’

‘Yes, bicycles would be a
lot
safer on this road,’ said Julia, still white and breathing hard. ‘It’s okay. We’re okay. We’re sitting in a tin can balanced on a hairdryer built by people who’ve never had the slightest reason to like Americans. We’re going to be fine.’

She turned on the radio. Thankfully, out came some familiar 80s chords. Ellie turned it up.

‘Now THIS,’ she said, ‘is beginning to sound like Los Angeles.’ And a lost Los Angeles band blared back,

‘TAKE YOUR BABY BY THE HAND. AND DO THE NEXT THING THAT YOU PLANNED …’

Ellie turned down the windows, so they could let their hair flow out of the gaps and, loudly and happily, they puttered West, into the heart of Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, as they started to discover an hour later, Los Angeles doesn’t have a heart, physically or metaphorically.

‘How on earth can this still be the same street?’ said Ellie. The radio was now playing ‘Don’t Stop
Thinking About Tomorrow’. Julia hadn’t relaxed her grip any, and they still didn’t have a map.

‘It’s not a street, it’s a boulevard,’ said Julia grimly. ‘With, so far, 11,000 houses on it.’

‘Wow. That must be crap if you get off at the wrong end. And what about the postman … I’ll shut up now.’

The sun squinted through the window.

‘Is that the sea?’ said Ellie finally, pointing to a shining line, ‘Or am I going blind?’

‘It is! It’s the sea!’ shouted Julia excitedly.

‘Woo hoo! We’re … actually getting somewhere!’

‘Woo hoo! God, I suppose we are still in LA, aren’t we? What if the whole of the West Coast is actually really built up and we’ve just driven to Seattle?’

‘No, look, there’s a sign. This is Venice beach!’

‘I didn’t think we’d made it as far as Venice … oh my God!’

They drew up on the seafront. Stretched out for miles in front of them were endless acres of golden sand, blue sea, and hordes of utterly fabulous-looking women and utterly ridiculous-looking men. And some you couldn’t tell which were which.

‘Look at all that
muscle
,’ breathed Julia.

‘They’re all so
shiny
,’ said Ellie, stepping out of the car.

She caught sight of her own reflection in the car window and looked at the shimmering tanned dancing
girls on the beach; playing volleyball, rollerblading, wandering around slowly in bikinis and tossing their hair a lot, or simply lying on the sand, revelling in their own bronzed, toned fabulousness.

‘Jules, am I fat?’ yelled Ellie.

Julia locked up the car.

‘Of course not.’ Then she took in the whole scene.

‘Oh. Well, compared to what?’

‘I
am
. I’m locally fat,’ said Ellie, glumly, a cheerfully British mismatched uppy/downy person on the whole. ‘Oh no. Do you think they’ll throw things at me?’

‘Do you throw things at people you think are fat?’

‘No … well, there was that early morning DJ …’

‘Come on,’ said Julia. ‘Let’s get changed. FINALLY I feel like we’re on holiday, and not trapped in some screaming nightmare.’

‘If you scream one more time I will just walk out of here and drive away,’ Julia was saying threateningly, four hours later.

‘But it’s so
sooorrre
.’

They were back in the hotel room. Julia was helplessly trying to apply E45 to Ellie’s third-degree burns.

‘How many times did I tell you to get out of the sun?’

‘But I can stay out longer than you – you’re a blonde!’

‘You’ve known me twenty years, and you know my hair colour isn’t really blonde, Hedge.’

‘OUCH! Oh, yeah. I wasn’t sure how that worked.’ Ellie writhed in pain. ‘Could you just fill the entire bath with cream and I’ll just go lie in it?’

Julia tried to smear the cream as gently as she could.

‘God, Hedge, what were you
thinking
?’

Ellie screwed up her eyes.

‘Umm … I was thinking, “every year I burn myself really badly so I must remember to get out of the sun in time
this
year.”’

‘
And …
?’

‘No, that was genuinely what I was thinking. Then suddenly it was too late. Argh.’

‘But you have
two watches
!’

‘I’ve got an entire sense of touch, and if that can’t save me, nothing can. Ooh!’

‘Do you really still want to go to this Sky Bar place tonight? I’m worried you might get a little feverish. Plus, you screamed all the way back in the car.’

‘That car is holding onto several layers of my skin, I’ll have you know. We’re not exactly friends.’

‘Well, do you want to just stay in tonight, and we’ll go tomorrow night?’

‘No,’ groaned Ellie, standing up. ‘What am I going
to do in this shit hole, play stomp the cockroach? I think I feel better now. As long as I don’t come into physical contact with anything.’

‘Well, given that we have to wear the skimpiest clothes we have, that’s going to work out just fine.’

Ellie, with much wincing, slipped into a red shift dress she’d brought from French Connection before they left.

‘That … doesn’t look too bad,’ said Julia, as they peered into the dark mirror. In fact, Ellie was the same colour as a big lobster, and the dress made her look as if she was on fire.

Ellie gazed at her reflection in the mirror.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘You know who I look like here?’

‘Somebody who’s very,
very
embarrassed?’ said Julia.

‘No,
look!
I’m Molly in reverse!’

‘Molly in reverse,’ said Julia. ‘Now, why wouldn’t I have known that?’

‘Pink skin, red dress instead of pink dress and red hair! It’s fate I tell you.’

‘Fate for
what
?’

‘If I wear this dress tonight, I’ll meet Andrew. Don’t you see? It’s too coincidental.’

‘We’re definitely not going now,’ said Julia. ‘You’re delirious.’

‘It’s a sign.’

‘What if you meet Andrew in reverse? He’ll have
a really wide chin and narrow forehead and you wouldn’t like him at
all
.’

Julia had eventually managed to coax Ellie out of the red dress and into something which made her look less like a volcanic pustule, and now they were hanging behind the ropes at the Sky Bar on Sunset Boulevard, glancing at each other nervously.

‘You on the guest list?’ asked one of the alarmingly attractive bouncers.

‘No, but I love you both,’ whispered Ellie to Julia.

‘No,’ said Julia. ‘We’ve just arrived from London for a couple of days and we were really hoping we could go and, you know, take a look around.’

The bouncers looked at each other and shrugged. It helped that Julia stood almost entirely shielding Ellie with her body. Julia’s blonde hair and long legs did the trick and one of the bouncers pulled back the rope, then did a huge double-take when he saw Ellie.

‘This your first day in LA?’ he said, looking aghast at her flayed legs and arms.

‘No, I’ve been here ten years. I like to do this every day.’

Inside a woman surely too beautiful to be doing this for a living, asked to check their ID.

‘They think I’m under eighteen?’ said Ellie in disbelief.

‘It’s twenty-one here ma’am,’ explained the attendant.

‘You think I’m under twenty-one? Fantastic.’

‘No ma’am, we have to check everyone who looks under thirty.’

‘You think I’m under
thirty
?’ She dragged out her passport. ‘Well, better than nothing I suppose.’

‘She’s not,’ said Julia helpfully.

‘Yes, thank you, lifelong friend.’ They bounced up the circular staircase, and outside into the bar beyond. There they stopped and gaped.