Further Under the Duvet (27 page)

‘It’s an animal,’ Nick said. ‘A small British animal. I’m pretty sure.’

I wasn’t so certain. Like, how could I
commit
a small British animal?

To be fair to my superiors they’d pulled out all the stops to equip me for life in Los Angeles. I had a hire car and – even better – the ability to drive it, a fake résumé and a glossy collection of eight by twelve headshots.

As I drove under clear blue skies and along palm-fringed highways to Beverly Hills, I passed skanky-looking motels, dentists, adobe-style houses, nail-salons, gun shops, pet care outlets, tanning salons, more dentists… and I wondered about the personality I’d been given. Generally, I didn’t seem to be too neurotic, I hadn’t had one urge to self-mutilate. I also seemed to be punctual. And a non-smoker. All a little dull, however.

The agent, Robyn Dude, was a power-suited power-house. She spoke extremely quickly, out of one side of her mouth. She was the kind of woman who’d look magnificent pulling the pin out of a grenade with her teeth.

‘Yeah, I think we could get you some parts. But,’ she said, ‘I’m going to give it to you straight. Your face is great, that cherubic look is kinda now, but if you don’t drop to ninety pounds, soaking wet, you’re gonna be playing character parts for, like, for ever.’

‘The fat best friend, the fat roommate,’ I said, almost sulkily.

‘Right!’

I felt a strange resentment. Okay, this wasn’t my body, I’d only got it on loan and only for a week, at that, but couldn’t they have given me something a little more appropriate for an actress?

There seemed to be nothing further to say. Just before I left something occurred to me. ‘Do you know the meaning of the word Sloth?’ I asked.

Her face filled with dark colour and she looked like she might pop. She opened her mouth and yelled, ‘Some nerve! No one works as hard as me.
No one
. Okay, we’ll try and get you some non-fat parts, if that’s how you feel, but you’d better get to a spinning class
right now
and don’t leave until you’ve dropped three dress sizes!’

I had no clue what she was talking about. None. Nervously, I thanked her for her time and closed the door on her. In the waiting room was a brainy-looking young woman. Or at least she was wearing those rectangular, tortoiseshell-framed spectacles that people wear if they want to look brainy.

On impulse I said, ‘Sorry to bother you, but do you know what Sloth is?’

She shrank back against the wall like I was a crazy person.

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, making for the sunshine and my car.

‘It means lazy,’ she called after me.

‘It’s not a small British animal?’ I called back.

‘No, that’s a
stoat
. A sloth is a lazy South American animal.’

‘Thank you.’

So sloth meant being lazy.
Lazy
. No wonder Robyn Dude had been so offended!

I drove home, depleted of any energy. All this being human was exhausting. For the rest of the day I lay on the sofa, watched talk shows and energetically committed sloth. I also ate many, many small, round, wonderful things. Pringles, I believe they were called.

The following day, Los Angeles behaved totally out of character – it was
raining
. As I watched the drops scoot down the window, I composed a letter of complaint in my head. ‘I was
distinctly
promised blue skies and endless sunshine, yadda, yadda.
Imagine
my disappointment… I’d like a
full
refund…’

Tandy and Nick went to work and I hung around the mall, but eventually I had to return to the apartment – lured by savoury snacks.

Late afternoon, Nick came home and did a bit of that moody-prowling-around-the-room stuff that he was so good at, then came to a halt in front of me.

‘You’ve eaten that whole tube of Pringles. You glutton!’

‘I’m a glutton?’ I asked faintly, hardly able to believe my luck. ‘Do you mean that I’m committing…’ I could hardly say the word with excitement, ‘… Gluttony?’

‘Hey, I’m kidding. It’s just nice to see someone eating around here now and again.’ He looked meaningfully at Tandy’s bedroom door as he said this.

‘It’s not a problem.’ I was very excited. ‘I just need to know if being a glutton is the same as committing Gluttony.’

‘Yeah, I guess,’ he admitted reluctantly.

There went Gluttony off my list. And it had been great! Almost as comforting as Sloth. And Envy had smelt very nice. I could see why people enjoyed the seven deadly sins so much – my empathy and understanding were simply
exploding
. Next on my list was, let me see, Lust, perhaps. Or Greed.

‘You can be –’ Nick studied me, ‘– a little strange, sometimes.’

I swallowed, suddenly nervous. The expression in those eyes of his unsettled something in me.

‘Well, I’m a woman,’ I said heartily. ‘Think of a man, then subtract all reason and intellect!’

This got a half-hearted laugh out of him.

‘How was your day?’ he asked cautiously. ‘Did your agent call?’

‘No, seeing as how I haven’t dropped twenty pounds since yesterday. How was your day? In fact, what do you do?’

‘Carpenter. Just until I get my big Hollywood break,’ he said drily.

‘I thought all resting actors worked as bellhops.’

‘Not me. I haven’t got the right look for a bellhop.’

I knew what he meant. He did have a touch of the psychopath about him. No wonder he’d got typecast as a man who can hold his hand in a flame while remaining impassive.

‘Well, you know my closet door? It’s the worst piece of carpentry I’ve ever seen. Could you fix it for me?’ I asked.

‘Fix it? I made it.’

‘Whoops,’ I said, my face, rosy at the best of times, igniting into an inferno of shame. ‘Sorry, I… er, sorry.’

Come home, Tandy. Oh please, come home.

And then Tandy walked through the door. I am not a very accomplished angel, but sometimes, if I try really, really hard, I can make things happen.

‘You’re early,’ Nick accused.

‘Yeah, I am.’ Tandy looked in confusion at her watch. ‘What’s going on? It’s five after six now but I didn’t leave work until six-thirty. I must’ve read five-thirty as six-thirty. Or something… That is so spooky…’

Yes, I felt ashamed, since you ask. Freaking her out like that.

Only the fantastic news she’d had earlier in the day was enough to distract her from my dirty low-down manipulations in the space–time continuum. She’d been sent a script by her agent and she was going for an audition in the morning.

‘Isn’t that the best news? I’ll be in my room learning my lines.’

I have to admit I was disappointed. I’d been hoping we could get dressed up, go out to a bar, flirt with men and see if I could get a Lust thing going on with one of them.

‘I just hope,’ she sighed, ‘that Crazy Karl doesn’t do anything too crazy tonight. I could use a good night’s sleep.’

‘What’s with Crazy Karl?’ Nick suddenly sat to attention and looked at the wall that divided the two apartments. ‘It’s very quiet out there.’

‘Too quiet,’ the three of us chorused.

‘But seriously, we haven’t had to call the cops in days. There hasn’t been one drunken tantrum from him since… since
Sunday
.’

‘Not since Grace called on him.’

‘Grace called on him?’ Nick sounded slightly
too
interested.

‘When I first arrived I got the wrong apartment,’ I hastily explained. ‘He told me I was out of my mind.’

‘Sounds like Karl.’

Tandy went to her room with Granola and I spent the evening watching TV, while a succession of heartbroken women kept Nick on the phone murmuring, ‘I know, baby, I’m sorry, baby, you’ll meet someone else, baby, no, your life is
not
over, baby…’

Then I went to bed where I had another great night, with all those movies showing in my head. The plots were a little far-fetched and inconclusive at times, but who cares? And I awoke to another dazzling Los Angeles morning.

Nick wasn’t much of a talker first thing. In silence he hunched over his cereal (apple and cinnamon Fruit Loops this morning) while I sipped coffee.

When Tandy marched into the kitchen, I actually thought she’d just got home after a night of hard partying. She wore a barely-there pink dress, which revealed her long, lean, gold-leaf legs. Pink marabou-feathered, spindly heeled sandals were on her sparkly toed feet. Her car-tyre lips were
defiantly sexy, her honey-blonde hair a heavy swishy sheet and her hip bones were sharp enough to fillet plaice.

‘Guys,’ she commanded, ‘I want to know if you want to sleep with me?’

‘Suuuurrrre.’ Nick’s eyes were half-closed as he looked her up and down appreciatively.

‘Grace?’

‘Sure. If I was gay.’ Except I didn’t think I was.

‘Excellent.’ She smacked those lips with satisfaction. ‘That part is so mine.’ She handed me the script. ‘Will you do a read-through with me?’

I began, but two lines in I had to stop. ‘But, Tandy…’

‘What?’

‘Your part. You’re supposed to be a nun dying of cancer.’

‘So?’ Her stance got even more defiant.

‘So you look like a hooker,’ Nick interrupted.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Tandy said in exasperation. ‘This is Hollywood. Doesn’t matter if I’m playing a crack addict dying of Aids, a nine-month pregnant woman, or a suicidal depressive, I’ll never get the part unless every man in that casting room wants to sleep with me!’

Her words fell into shocked silence.

Nick was the first to break it. ‘Fair enough,’ he conceded.

‘Read,’ she ordered me.

‘Okay. “But, Sister Martha, you must rest!”’

‘“How can I rest? Those poor, motherless children need me…”’

Nick and I waved Tandy off by yelling affirmations at her. ‘You will get the part, you will get the part. Good luck, break a leg!’

As I closed the door I was sorry I’d said the ‘break a leg’ bit. Tandy’s endless legs looked thin enough to snap all by themselves.

All I’d meant was I wanted her to get the part because I really liked her. Well, I would I suppose. Being an angel I tend to like everyone, even the bad ones. I don’t get much choice in the matter. But there was something sweet and vulnerable about Tandy that touched me, something totally at odds with her sassy, sexy appearance.

Nick hung around for a little longer, somehow managing to look dark and mysterious as he ate another bowl of cereal. (Lucky Charms, this time.)

‘I gotta take off.’ He clattered his bowl into the dishwasher. ‘Work calls. Have a great day.’ With the fluid, careless grace that had half the women in the greater Los Angeles area beating down his door, he swung out of the apartment.

Then – apart from Granola, who still wouldn’t come near me – I was alone. So what was I to do? So far I’d managed to commit three of the seven deadlies, leaving less than four days to do Greed, Anger, Pride and… and… what was the other one? Oh yeah, Lust, how could I forget?

A dangerous little thought wriggled in. The apartment complex had a pool. How about if I lay beside it and scoped for men? Surely that way there was a very good chance of taking care of Lust?

And when I rummaged among the clothes I’d been given
for my mission, I found a sleek jade bikini, with a matching sarong. This convinced me that catching some rays was the Right Thing To Do.

There was only one other person by the pool. A man – as luck would have it. But the wrong kind of man. He was astonishingly thin and pale. You don’t get too many pale people in Los Angeles. On the other hand you get plenty who are thin, in fact it’s very hard to find people who
aren’t
. But this man looked thin in the way someone who’s been sick for a very long time looks thin. He lay inert on a sunbed, asleep behind his shades.

I tried a couple of exploratory swings past him, but no dice. So I stretched myself out on a bed and Thought About Things.

Perhaps it was actually A Good Thing that I hadn’t been a high-achiever. If I’d been a perfect superbeing, with an innate grasp of humanity, I’d never have been sent here. Dreamily I let the sun beat down on me while I wrestled with a philosophical conundrum: can angels get sunburnt?

After a while the worry became compelling so I jumped in my car, drove to the nearest drugstore and bought a bottle of factor 25.

But when I came out of the store, disaster struck. Suddenly I heard myself calling, ‘Hey! That’s my car.’

The two front wheels were off the ground, attached to a hook, attached to a truck.
I was being towed!
A man in a uniform said, ‘You shouldn’ta parked there.’

A feeling stirred in me. A strange, outward-spiralling rush where I had an irresistible impulse to physically assault this man.

‘I was only in there for five minutes!’ I yelled.

‘Hey, lady, no need to get so angry.’

‘I’m angry?’ I squeaked.

‘Too right you’re angry.’

I took a moment – and he was right.
I do believe I’m experiencing
…
ANGER!

I lunged towards the man and he put his hand up to deflect the blow. But there was no blow. Instead I hugged him. ‘Thank you so much.’

He was transfixed.

‘Aw, hey.’ He gestured to another man who was in the truck. ‘What the hell? She was only five minutes. Give her her car.’

‘No, no, no,’ I insisted. ‘You’re just doing your job.’

A small crowd had gathered. As my car was lowered back to the ground, a smattering of applause broke out.

‘This kinda thing,’ I heard one of the onlookers say, as I drove away, ‘restores your faith in human nature.’

Back by the pool, slathered in suntan lotion, I noticed that my pale, bony man was still immobile. Anxiety about his tender skin getting burnt began to gnaw at me. Gently, taking care not to wake him, I gave him a speedy once-over with my factor 25. But as I rubbed lotion into his arm I saw that he’d lifted his shades and was staring at me quizzically out of pale blue eyes.

‘You angel,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Sssshhh,’ I hissed – angrily, as it happens, now that I knew how to feel it.

The last thing we wanted was him figuring out what I was. Either he’d get locked up or I would.