Emma hearts LA (4 page)

‘You’ve lost me,’ I say.

He sets off walking and I follow him. Just round the corner are two ducks standing on the pavement. They’re looking back at Oscar as if awaiting further instructions.

‘They wander away from the pond and then can’t get home,’ he says. ‘They do seem to be particularly stupid ducks.’

As if to underline this, another big bird flies past, causing the ducks to flutter about six inches off the ground in panic.

‘It’s OK,’ Oscar says soothingly to the ducks. ‘They’re nervous wrecks,’ he says to me.

Without actually thinking about it, I find myself bent over like Oscar, creeping along after two neurotic ducks.

‘How far is it?’ I whisper.

‘Not far,’ Oscar whispers back. ‘Why are we whispering?’

‘I don’t know. It just seemed like a whispering occasion.’

About two minutes later we turn another corner and are faced with the children’s playground we passed yesterday and, next to it, a small pond full of much less gormless ducks.

‘There you go!’ Oscar says. The ducks flutter gratefully into the water. ‘You should maybe just think about staying here, yeah?’

The ducks stare at him as if they’re genuinely listening. They really do.

I laugh. ‘What are you? Some kind of duck whisperer?’

‘Ah,’ Oscar says, ‘we can all talk to the animals as long as we believe.’

‘Yeah,’ I say, grinning. ‘Course we can.’

‘You seem to have forgotten that I taught my budgie to talk and you, madam, did not.’

‘You taught your budgie one measly word,’ I tell him. ‘Not impressed.’

‘It was still one more word than you managed to teach yours,’ he says, bumping his arm against mine.

‘It wasn’t even a good word,’ I say. ‘You could’ve at least taught it to say “bollocks” or something.’

‘“Hello” was a perfectly reasonable first word to teach it.’

‘Yeah, first word. Not only word.’

‘Well, I really didn’t expect it to be his only word. I thought I’d have him chatting away in no time.’

I laugh and remember the look on Oscar’s face when he’d first spotted my budgie, Nipper. Nipper was grey and white and really sweet. Oscar was obsessed and nagged his parents until they gave in and bought him his own budgie. His was green and yellow and he named him Busby. Nipper showed no inclination to talk at all. All he wanted to do was chew up newspaper and look at himself in the mirror. But Busby used to sit on Oscar’s finger for hours, watching his mouth as he chattered away.

I used to take the piss out of him and call him the Mad Bird Boy of Bramhall. Which was a bit rich now I think about it, since I bloody loved Nipper. When he died, I was so upset I got sent home from school. And I was in Year 8.

As we turn to walk back to the canal, I shade my eyes and say, ‘What are you wearing?’

He looks down at himself and then back up at me. ‘What?’ But he’s grinning, so he knows exactly what I’m getting at.

He’s wearing baggy long shorts and a sort of tank top over a T-shirt with bright green trainers and no socks. He always did dress weird – as if he couldn’t care less what anyone thought – but not this weird. He’s also got a sort of barrel bag over his back with badges pinned to the strap. One of them says
WE ARE ALL MADE OF STARDUST.

‘More to the point, what are
you
wearing?’ he says.

I glance down at myself and feel my cheeks get hot. In my rush to find out what Oscar was doing I didn’t even realise what I’d left the house in. I’m wearing a black T-shirt over Elmo pyjama bottoms.

‘I may have Elmo on my pyjamas, but you appear to have him on your head,’ I say.

He reaches up and runs his hand through his red hair. ‘Oh yeah. I did this for a bet, but I like it. What do you think? It’s eye-catching, right?’

‘Almost eye-searing,’ I say.

He grins and points to his teeth. ‘No brace either.’

His teeth are straight and his grin is just as huge as it always was. People used to call him Banana Mouth.

I realise I’m grinning back at him without even thinking about it.

He sort of pats me on the arm and hops up and down a little bit. ‘It’s so good to see you!’ he says.

‘You too,’ I say.

And it is.

Oscar had been on his way to see us when he’d spotted the lost ducks, so he walks back with me. Mum used to have this little wooden plaque on the wall in the kitchen – someone had given it to her at work as a jokey Secret Santa thing. It said,
FRIENDS ARE LIKE STARS. JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN’T SEE THEM, DOESN’T MEAN THEY’RE NOT THERE.
It pops into my head now and I actually roll my eyes, it’s so lame. But Oscar and I chat so easily that it’s as if I only saw him last week, rather than a few years ago.

I go through the gate and Oscar stands on the fence, like a kid. ‘What do you think of the house?’

‘It’s great,’ I say. ‘I can’t believe how quiet it is here.’

Oscar follows me onto the terrace and I open the door. ‘Mum and Bex must still be out. They went to get some stuff at the shop.’

I kick off my flip-flops, sit down and put my feet on the chair opposite.

‘I was sorry to hear about your mum and dad,’ Oscar says.

I glance at him and he’s looking at me really intently. I’d forgotten he’s quite intense about eye contact.

‘Thanks,’ I say.

‘It must have been a shock.’

I shrug. ‘It was, yeah. How are things with your parents?’

‘Good, thanks. Mum lives in San Luis Obispo now. I go up there quite a lot. It’s a really cool place.’

‘She’s got a boyfriend?’

He nods. ‘Jack. He’s great. Bit of a hippie, but he makes Mum really happy.’

‘Jack and Jackie?’ I say, smiling.

He grins. ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’

We all knew Oscar’s parents weren’t happy when we were growing up. They never fought in front of us, but they used to snap at each other a lot and often there was a horrible atmosphere in their house. I can clearly remember being in the car on our way home from visiting Oscar’s family and hearing my mum and dad talking about his parents’ marriage. It was, I think, the first time I heard of anyone ‘staying together for the sake of the children’ and I remember my mum saying that it wasn’t doing Oscar any good to live in that sort of environment. I remember feeling sorry for Oscar after that and, for a while, wondering if I should suggest Oscar could come to live with us. Because we were a really happy family. Then.

‘And what about your dad?’ I ask.

‘He’s fine with it. They’re both a lot happier now, so…’

‘No, I meant has he got a girlfriend?’

He laughs. ‘Oh, right. Sorry! No. No time. He works a lot. I hope your mum’s prepared for UCLA. If you thought they were workaholics before…’ He pulls a horrified face.

‘She’ll love it,’ I say. ‘I bet she would’ve gone in today if she could’ve.’

‘And what about you? Are you looking forward to…?’ He waves his hand to indicate everything.

I look around. It’s warm and quiet and, on the surface, completely blissful, but… ‘I don’t know. I really didn’t want to come…’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘My dad told me. I’ll try not to take it personally.’

I laugh. ‘Yeah, don’t. It’s just a long way, you know? And I just couldn’t picture myself here at all. I could see myself in New York, but not here.’

‘I thought that when we moved here too,’ Oscar says. ‘Also, it just didn’t seem like my kind of place, you know? All surfers and egg-white omelettes and plastic surgery?’ He shakes his head.

‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘And I was worried about everything being fake and obsessed with celebrities. I couldn’t even picture LA as a real place. I mean, where real people live. Does that sound stupid?’

‘No, I know exactly what you mean. I couldn’t picture it before we moved here either, but it’s not so much one big city, it’s more like lots of little communities. Venice is different to Brentwood which is different to Silver Lake…’

I nod. ‘You remember Jessie? She lives right in the middle of New York. It’s just a few blocks from Central Park, not far from Times Square, but she knows her neighbours, she knows the people in the shops…’

‘It’s up to you how much of it you want to experience,’ Oscar says. ‘I pretty much stick to Venice and Santa Monica. I live here, I work here, I hang out here and my friends are here. Hollywood and all that hoo-ha doesn’t really have an impact on me. Except when there’s filming down here and then that’s just as entertaining as it would be at home.’

I smile at him. ‘I wish I’d spoken to you before we even set off. That makes me feel much better about it all.’

He does a sort of half-bow in his seat and smiles.

I hear a helicopter and I look up, shading my eyes.

‘You get used to them,’ he says. ‘They go over quite a lot.’

‘What are they?’

‘Could be news crews or the traffic copter. Or some celebrity who’s too important for the speed limit…’

‘Was it hard for you, moving?’ I ask him. He seems so comfortable here, it’s really surprising.

He shrugs. ‘It was a bit, yeah. To begin with everyone just seemed so cool – I thought no one would ever speak to me – but you’d be surprised at how far an English accent gets you…’ He gives me a little grin. ‘So school was easier than I thought it would be…most of the time. How’s Bex? She wanted to move, right?’

‘I think she thinks she’s going to be discovered. She’s already got meetings set up, you know? And she wants us to do yoga on the terrace together every morning.’

Oscar laughs. ‘Really? Wow. Usually it takes a little longer than a day to get the whole LA health bug…’ He fiddles with the badges on his bag.

‘You’ve got it?’ I ask him, grinning.

He laughs again. ‘I have been known to ride a bike…’

I burst out laughing. Our dads actually taught us to ride bikes together and Oscar was sort of infamous in our family for being absolutely hopeless at it. He had stabilisers until he was about ten when he finally decided it was all too humiliating and gave it up as a bad job. I was secretly pleased because I’d mainly heard from my parents how much better at pretty much everything Oscar was than me. Even stupid things like blowing his nose. I’d blow my nose, blowing more out of my mouth, and my dad would say, ‘Oscar can blow his nose properly, Emma, I don’t know why you can’t.’ And I used to wish we never had to see Oscar at all.

He’s still grinning at me.

‘They don’t even point at my stabilisers here,’ he says, and I laugh again. He always did have a sense of humour about himself. I’d forgotten that.

I hear ‘Hi, Oscar!’ from inside the house and then Bex appears. She’s wearing a sundress and Converse boots.

‘Hey! You look great!’ Oscar says, and Bex twirls.

Mum comes through and I swing my legs down from the seat opposite so she can sit down, but Oscar leaps up and hugs her. It’s a bit disorientating how much he’s changed. He used to be so shy around my parents. He’d be chatting away in my room, but if one of them came in, he’d immediately stop – sometimes part-way through a word – and blush. To be fair, once it was when I’d convinced Oscar to let me paint his nails, but even when we weren’t doing anything embarrassing, he’d still clam up. And now here he is chatting to Mum just like a normal person.

‘So are you busy now?’ Oscar asks. ‘I thought I could show you round Venice. Save you looking too much like tourists.’

Mum shakes her head. ‘That’s really sweet of you. I’ve got a few things I need to do – more than a few things, actually – but you should take these two.’ She gestures at me and Bex. ‘I’ll feel better leaving them tomorrow if I know they can find their way to the beach at least.’

I roll my eyes – I’m pretty sure we’d be able to find the beach without Oscar’s help – but I leave them to catch up and go up to shower and get dressed.

Half an hour later, Bex and I are following Oscar back down onto the canal path. He takes us over a different bridge and then along a path made of round paving stones, like stepping stones. It’s between two really weird houses – one seems to be wooden but has actual turrets along the top. The other is pink and orange and blue and looks like boxes, piled haphazardly. Even the wheelie bins are spray-painted with stripes.

‘What is it with all these houses?’ I say.

‘It was the 60s, man,’ Oscar says in a stoner voice. ‘You weren’t there, man! You weren’t there!’

I snort and he grins at me.

‘This place used to be a proper hippie hangout,’ he says, ‘but then it got cleaned up and now it’s much more exclusive. You have some actual celebrity neighbours, apparently. Not that I’ve ever seen them.’

We cross the road and head down another narrow path between buildings. We’re about halfway along when I realise that the blue in the distance isn’t just sky, but ocean.

‘Oh, wow!’ Bex says. She breaks into a little skippy-hop run, but then stops and turns back to us. ‘We’re so close!’ She’s beaming.

‘Yep. Just a couple of blocks,’ Oscar says.