Further Under the Duvet (26 page)

PS I spoke to Mr Walsh and he tells me that Saabs are very good cars, much better than Ford Mondeos. Actually he said Saabs were ‘sexy’, which I find highly annoying. Everything has to be ‘sexy’
these days. Tell me, how is a car ‘sexy’? Bottoms are ‘sexy’ (or can be). Eyes are ‘sexy’. Not white couches or risotto or indeed cars… Sorry, I lost my train of thought there, where was I? Oh right, Mr Walsh says – and I can only apologize if this sounds harsh but I’m just passing on what he said – he said if he was a woman he’d sleep with the man with the Saab.

Q.
Dear Mammy Walsh, I wonder if you could advise me. I have a boyfriend whom I love very much. We’ve been seeing each other for over two years and recently we moved in together. Last night he told me that his parents, who live in Nottingham, are coming to spend the weekend with us. This is not really a problem, the problem is that he says his mother will expect me to cook a large roast on Sunday, and I am a vegetarian. I find meat disgusting, and the thought of even touching it makes my skin crawl. However, my boyfriend is quite insistent that I must do this; his mother won’t approve of me if I don’t, he says. What should I do? Should I insist that he cooks the roast lunch and pass it off as my efforts?

Angie, London

A. Are you off your skull? Do you want your flat burnt to the ground? Men are hopeless in the kitchen, everyone knows that. No, you need to cop on to yourself and knock off that vegetarian nonsense. My middle daughter, Rachel, was a vegetarian for a while, but she was only looking for notice. Then she became a drug addict and tried to kill herself and was able to stop being a vegetarian because she got all the attention she needed. The thing is, Angie, that meat is delicious, there is no point in a dinner without it and you need it to get iron and other essential nutrients. Otherwise,
you’ll get ear infections and dropsy, and who’ll end up running up and down the stairs minding you? That’s right, your mammy. Start with some chicken – Marks and Spencer do some very tasty all-in-one dinners – and before you know it you’ll be on the fillet steak! Good luck!

I am an angel. Go on, have a good laugh, but, really, I am. An angel. A proper, fully paid-up heavenly one with wings, halo, the whole lot.

And I’m in Los Angeles on a mission. A mission from God, since you ask.

Which all sounds very important but, to be honest, the reason I’m here isn’t such a great one. Some angels just have a natural aptitude for the job. I, unfortunately, am not one of them so I’ve been sent to earth on a training course. In order that I can help humans I need to understand them. So while I’m here I have to commit – but not too enthusiastically, of course – each of the seven deadly sins. I’ve got seven days to do it in.

‘Envy, Sloth, Greed,’ Ibrox, my superior, listed off, ‘Gluttony, Anger, Envy – no, I said Envy already, didn’t I? I can never remember the seven. It’s the same with the seven dwarves, I can usually do five, then I just draw a blank. You try.’

‘Grumpy, Dopey, Snee –’

‘No! The seven deadlies.’

‘Sorry. Okay, Greed, Envy, Sloth, Anger, Gluttony…’ I looked at him helplessly.

‘Pride,’ he supplied. ‘And you’ll remember the seventh.’

So off I went. And here I am in Silverlake, Los Angeles, standing outside the apartment which is going to be home for the next week. Apparently I’ve been recommended by a friend of a friend of a friend and I will have two flatmates – Nick, an actor who plays a lot of psychopaths, and Tandy, an actress who gets offered slutty-girl roles a lot.

I rang the bell. No one came. I rang again and heard some muffled shouting from inside. Then a man wrenched open the door. ‘What?’ He was a
mess
– wild hair, wild eyes, horrible smell. Looks like this Nick is a method actor.

I stuck out my hand and stapled on a smile. ‘I’m Grace and you must be Nick!’

‘And you must be out of your mind,’ he growled. ‘Nick lives next door.’

‘Ah… right… sorry.’ See what I mean about me being crap at my job? Imagine if I was the Archangel Gabriel? I’d probably call at the wrong house and tell the wrong woman that she was the mother of God. I’ll never make the big time, not if I carry on like this.

I moved one apartment along and a woman I assumed must be Tandy answered the door. She gave me a speedy but thorough once-over and when she saw that she was thinner than me, she visibly relaxed, then smiled. ‘Come on in.’

She was really, really pretty, but I could see why she kept getting the hooker-type roles. Her lips were so pneumatic they looked as if they were about to burst and she was X-ray skinny, apart from a very large pair of breasts which clearly belonged on a different body.

‘Nick, come and say hey to your new roommate,’ she called.

In came Nick. I took one look at him and remembered the elusive seventh sin. Lust!

‘Hey,’ he said vaguely.

Hey, indeed!

Dark-haired, gangly, loose-limbed, and his eyes had a not-known-at-this-address distance to them. Just out of curiosity, I wondered if I was his type. I look a bit like those Renaissance paintings of angels, except without the halo, the wings and the nakedness – no need to freak people out, I always say. But I’ve all the other stuff – blonde curly hair, a round, rosy-cheeked face and I’m a little plumper than they generally seem to like them in Los Angeles.

Just then a girl emerged into the room after Nick. She was weeping.

‘Nick –’ she beseeched, trying to grab on to him. She was sloe-eyed, silky-haired and tiny; with a sudden, fierce passion I wanted to be her.

‘Take care, baby.’ He steered her, very firmly, to the door. ‘Missing you already.’

‘But –’ she tried again. Nick kissed her tenderly on her forehead, while managing to deposit her in the hallway.

From the way Tandy rolled her eyes at me, this clearly happened a
lot
.

Nick clicked the door shut, waited, tensed against a storm of crying and yelling from outside, then relaxed when nothing happened. She’d obviously decided to limp away and lick her wounds quietly.

‘Why do I always hurt those I love?’ he enquired of no one in particular, then absent-mindedly left the room.

Suddenly I was very glad I
wasn’t
that dainty, exquisite girl.

‘Granola,’ Tandy called. ‘Come and meet Grace.’

For the first time I noticed a little white terrier, sitting alert in a basket. He was staring, as though mesmerized by me. Yikes! You can fool people into believing you’re a human being, but animals work on a different level. Granola knew there was something very weird about me.

‘What’s wrong, doggie?’ Tandy coaxed.

‘Okay,’ she shrugged. ‘
Be
rude. So, Grace, you want to go out tonight and get trashed on strawberry cheesecake martinis?’

‘That would be delightful!’ I’d just been shot through with that lonesome, away-from-home feeling. Getting trashed on strawberry cheesecake martinis sounded exactly what I needed.

Later, as we left to go out, I told Tandy about calling first to the wrong apartment.

‘You did what? You called into crazy Karl’s?’ She was horrified. ‘He is, like, a totally insane alcoholic. He’s always yelling and howling at the moon, like a crazy dawg. Although,’ she said, as we passed his door, ‘he’s quiet right now.’ She sounded almost disappointed.

As we drove along, palm trees were silhouetted against the skyline. The sun was setting and the sky was layered with colours: pale blue low down, rising and darkening overhead to a deep luminous blue, in which the first twinkling stars were set like diamonds.

We went to a bar on Sunset. It was a cool, vibey place, packed with good-looking people. If I hadn’t been with Tandy I’d have never gone in – way too intimidated.

Almost as soon as we sat down, a bottle of champagne
was sent over by a handsome dude who liked the look of Tandy. ‘Take it back,’ she told the waiter. Then to me, ‘I don’t want to hook up with him so it wouldn’t be fair.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

Over flavoured martinis I got Tandy’s life story. She came from a rich, academic family back East. Her elder sister had a PhD in something scarily impressive
and
managed to run a home
and
was very good at tennis. Her younger sister made her first four million by setting up an internet site selling lovely handbags
and
she was so good at horseriding she could have made the Olympic team if she’d wanted. Tandy’s entire family were aghast at her decision to become an actress and even more aghast that she was working as a temp while waiting to hit the big time.

‘It’s hard when you come from a place where everyone else is perfect,’ she said wearily.

Tell me about it!

‘So how about you?’ Tandy asked. ‘You’re an actress too?’

They’ve given me a whole new identity, a bit like the Witness Protection Programme. Apparently I’m an actress, but on account of there being a little too much of me, my résumé shows only wallpaper parts – the fat best friend, the jolly fat work colleague, the weird fat roommate.
Fat
being the common thread.

‘So what age are you?’ Tandy asked.

I froze. What age was I? In real time I was several hundred millennia, but in LA years…? What had they told me?

‘It’s okay,’ she whispered. ‘Same for me. My résumé says twenty-two years old, but I’m actually in my mid-twenties.’

‘Looking good.’

‘Well, twenty-seven,’ she admitted with a sigh.

‘And I’m twenty-nine.’ I’d just remembered.

‘So am I.’

We gazed at each other fondly and decided to order another lot of martinis. I was having a Really Good Time, but I mustn’t forget that I was here to WORK.

I got my first break when we went to the ladies’ room to fix our make-up.

Tandy held a little bottle up to me. ‘You want some Envy?’

Envy! One of my seven deadlies. ‘You mean… in that container… is Envy?’

She twisted the label-side towards her and studied it quizzically. ‘’S what it says.’

I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d been here only a few hours and already I was making progress. They had told me I would experience the sins in the most unexpected ways. Now I knew what they meant.

Tandy squirted me and I beamed at her from my cloud of fragrant mist. One down, six to go.

Sleep is a wonderful thing. We don’t have it where I come from. But I’m a human now – so I will sleep, I will eat, I will work and, in the process, I will commit the seven deadly sins. Then I can go home, a better, wiser angel and no one will ever refer to me again as ‘Not the sharpest knife in the drawer’.

Already I was ahead of the game. On earth less than twenty-four hours I’d been sprayed with Envy. Would it be possible to just proceed to the local mall and buy Pride,
Gluttony, Anger, Sloth and… and… the others (I’ll remember in a minute what they are), experience the lot in half an hour and spend the rest of the week working on my tan? Unfortunately a discreet enquiry revealed that none of the other deadly sins were available in perfume form.

I awoke to a citrus-bright morning and I was hungry. Nick was in the kitchen, hunched over a bowl of marshmallow Cheerios.

‘Sleep well?’ he murmured darkly. Nick was good at murmuring things darkly. He didn’t seem to communicate in any other way.

‘Yes! It was great, I kind of saw all these movies in my head.’

He looked at me like I was insane. ‘Dreams,’ he said faintly.

‘Um… of course.’ Yikes!

Luckily the phone rang and Nick, giving me another odd look, threw himself at it. I heard a high-pitched gibbering, like the noise a broken cassette makes. A woman. She sounded upset.

‘Sure, baby,’ Nick crooned, ‘I know, baby, I’m sorry, baby, I never meant to hurt you, baby. Take care, baby. Bye.’

He slammed down the phone, sighed with enough force to almost knock the chairs over, then slumped into moody silence.

The noise of a key scratching at the door heralded the arrival of Tandy, back from walking her dog. Granola raced into the room, stopped dead when he saw me and took a couple of careful steps backwards. Tandy’s gorgeous face
was flushed and angry. ‘Why do I go to the dog park? Like, WHY?’

‘So your liddil doggie can play with the other liddil doggies,’ Nick said, his head in his hands, staring into his bowl.

‘I go to meet men!’ She addressed her rant to me. ‘Instead I get all these women coming up to me. How old is Granola? How long have I had him? What is the
point
?’

‘Calm down,’ Nick said. ‘Eat something. Oh no, I forgot, you don’t do that, do you?’

‘So, Grace,’ Tandy ignored him, ‘what are you going to do today?’

Actually, today I was hoping to commit Sloth. Just as soon as I found out what it was. But I had to play my part as a wannabe actress from Smallsville looking for a foot in Hollywood’s door. ‘I’m meeting an agent. There’s a chance she might take me on.’

On account of Nick and Tandy also being actors this provoked a storm of enthusiastic enquiry. Who was she? Who did she represent?

In the middle of their interrogation the phone rang again. Another woman for Nick. ‘I hear you, baby,’ he murmured. ‘But I never said I wanted a relationship.’

‘Why do I always hurt those I love?’ Tandy said, in a brooding voice that was uncannily like Nick’s.

Nick glared at Tandy. Tandy glared back.

I went to get ready for my meeting. I’d been sent to earth with
beautiful
clothes, everything a girl would need.

‘Oh my God, I love your purse,’ Tandy breathed
reverentially. Then I felt her tense up. ‘But… but isn’t this from the new collection? I thought you couldn’t buy it for another six months!’

Of course Tandy would know! What with her high-achieving sister – well, one of her high-achieving sisters – selling lovely handbags. I had to mumble something about having a contact in the design room and getting a sample copy. Honestly, sometimes they can be so inefficient Up There. And they have the nerve to complain about me…

As I was leaving I hesitated and said, ‘This may sound a little weird, but does either of you know what Sloth is?’

‘You’re right,’ Tandy said. ‘It sounds a little weird.’