“If it makes you feel any better, I had a toy elephant I called Mr. Price. I have no idea why either.” She laughed. “God, I’d forgotten about him! So what happened to Verbal James Gerbal?”She ate another mouthful of food and looked at me. “I have a feeling you’re about to tell me events took a tragic turn?”
“I’m afraid so. Frances set Verbal James Gerbal free in the night. On purpose.”
Gretchen shook her head. “That was a low blow. Did he come back?”
“Unfortunately, no.” I shook my head, suddenly wondering why on earth I was telling her this, and why she was humoring me. It was nice of her. “We heard him scrabbling around under the bathroom floorboards, but Dad didn’t want to take the new carpet up.”
“He probably just escaped to a better life of freedom … To Verbal James Gerbal,” she said and raised her glass.
“I think, given the stink from under the floorboards that made everyone spontaneously gag every time they went in there, it’s unlikely. But thanks anyway.” I grinned.
“OK—Verbal James Gerbal, RIP.” She raised her glass again, without missing a beat.
I laughed, and then after a pause said, “I have no idea why I just told you all of that, I think I’m a little bit drunk. And it’s the heat.”
Gretchen shook her head emphatically. “Not at all. It’s refreshing to meet someone on one of these things who’s normal.”
Normal? Oh fuck. I felt crestfallen. I clearly hadn’t fooled her for one second. Mind you, what enigmatic creative would talk about their childhood pets? She must have seen the look on my face, because she raised her glass again and said, “I mean that as a compliment. Cheers!”
We chinked glasses and Gretchen drained hers in one.
An hour later, we moved en masse upstairs to the Sky Bar, which was centered on a decadent rooftop pool of enticingly still water. Around the edge were huge squashy cushions and tables lit by flickering candles, all set off by the dramatic backdrop of downtown LA, twinkling like fairy lights. I was starting to feel pretty smashed and had said just about all I could to the makeup girl on the subject of skin-firming creams when Gretchen excitedly appeared by my side, arm in arm with the stylist—who was completely sloshed—and said, “Alice! Come and see! You’ll never guess who’s here!”
She reached out her hand and I allowed her to lead me into a more formal seating area, where, when I refocused slightly, I became aware of a rather small man, looking very bored, surrounded by a lot of fawning blonde women.
“It’s only Rod bloody Stewart!” she whispered and then cracked up as my jaw fell open. “Go and tell him you had his hair, aged five or whatever it was.”
“You didn’t go and say anything to him, did you?” Tom chuckled, the phone line crackling slightly. I could imagine him sitting at his desk, absently checking work e-mails as we chatted.
“No,” I laughed and leaned back on my vast hotel bed. “Of course not. What time is it?”
“Ten A.M. So that’s what, two A.M. with you?”
I groaned. “I’m going to be wrecked tomorrow, but you know what? I’m actually having fun. I can’t believe I’ve only just got back from a club. Tom—I went clubbing! And I thought those days were over!”
“What are you talking about?” Tom said. “We went clubbing three weeks ago, when we went home for Sean’s birthday!”
“Tom,” I said good-naturedly, “your old school friend’s birthday in a small, sweaty room on your local high street that smelled like an armpit was not clubbing.”
“Hey! There’s nothing wrong with Images.” Tom laughed. “God, you have one trip to LA …”
“Yeah, yeah.” I smiled and lifted a foot up and looked at it. Both of them were still throbbing. It had been a long time since I’d danced properly like that. “The other girls are really nice,” I said enthusiastically. “Especially Gretchen Bartholomew. We chatted quite a lot over dinner. The stylist is a bit of a pain though, one of those aggressive, pissed types.”
“Sounds good,” said Tom, not really listening. “I can’t be too long, I’ve got a meeting in a minute, but I phoned that bloke about the room. It’s all settled. He’s going to call me tomorrow to confirm when he’s actually moving in.”
I closed my eyes. “Well done,” I said.
“I think I’m going to draw up a contract though, just to protect us. Also, if we sublet, I’m not sure how we stand on an insurance front.”
“We’ll sort it out later, don’t worry about it.”
“I know it’s boring, Al,” he said straightaway, “but what if we came back and he’d cleared the place out while we were at the supermarket or something?”
Oh God. “Tom,” I yawned, twisting onto my tummy, “can we do this when I get home?”
“Sure,” he said, slightly huffily.
“I’m just tired, Tom.” I appeased him. “That’s all. It’s not that I don’t appreciate”—I took a deep breath—“the importance of what you’ve just said.”
There was a slight pause. I could tell he was frowning, five thousand miles away. “You’re so patronizing sometimes,” he said eventually.
I closed my eyes again briefly and managed to suppress a heavy sigh. I’d been having such a fun evening and now he’d totally ruined it, but in my disappointment and irritation as I felt the moment slip away from me, I realized I couldn’t be bothered to start a row. “Sorry,” I said, in the sort of voice that meant I wasn’t at all and thought he was being an arse.
“That’s quite all right,” he said loftily, also being deliberately annoying. “Apology accepted. You’d better get some sleep. Have a safe trip. Night.”
“Night,” I said shortly and flipped the finger at the phone as I hung up crossly. I knew he was right—we probably did have to sort out the insurance or whatever, but bloody hell, I was in LA. Didn’t I just deserve one night off?
There was a knock at my door. “Alice? It’s me, Gretchen!”
I opened the door to see her standing there clutching a champagne bottle and a few glasses. “Nightcap.” She grinned as she held them up. “Come on!”
“I shouldn’t,” I said uncertainly. “Long flight tomorrow and all that.”
She looked puzzled. “But won’t you just sleep on the plane?”
I hesitated. And then I heard Tom’s voice in my head saying, “You’d better get some sleep.”
“Go on!” Gretchen smiled mischievously. “You know you want to!”
And actually, yes—I did.
“I think she was just a little surprised,” I said, laughing, at eight the following morning in the hotel’s outdoor hot tub. I sat back in the water and tried not to get champagne or water bubbles from the jets up my nose. “As put-downs go it was pretty left-field. You’re right, I do feel better for this.” I took a sip of my bucks fizz.
“Told you,” Gretchen said. “Hair of the very hairy dog. Cheers.” We chinked glasses and Gretchen sighed as she leaned her head back. “Well, I had to say something. She was really rude. I mean OK, that poor little makeup girl truly had nothing else to talk about, but you can’t just round on people like that. She was the stylist on another shoot I did yonks ago. She was just as bad then, a nasty piss-head bully.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I don’t want to go home. We’ve been so lucky with this hot weather! How nice would it be if we could just laze here by the pool all day? Just think, in England we’d be having to drag around in thick jumpers and tights, and here we are sitting outside.”
“Don’t,” I said, thinking of the brain-freezingly boring Fulham engagement party that lay ahead of me at home. I didn’t want to leave LA. I wanted to stay after all.
Gretchen reached for her glass and I noticed, for the first time, a faded squiggly mark on the inside of her left wrist. “Is that a tattoo?” I said curiously.
She glanced at it. “Yeah. I got it when I was a dickhead seventeen-year-old.”
“Teenage rebellion?” I asked.
She looked at it thoughtfully. “Boredom, actually. Or maybe I thought I was being anarchic, I can’t remember. Nowadays everyone’s got one—they’re about as anarchic as big pants.”
“Can I see?”
She held her wrist aloft and I spelled out “T.T.W.P.,” then looked at her inquiringly.
“This Too Will Pass,” she said, looking embarrassed. “It was supposed to remind me to make the most of good times and not let the bad times drag me down.”
“That’s impressively profound for a seventeen-year-old, isn’t it?” I said. If I’d have come home with a tattoo at seventeen my parents would have spontaneously combusted on the spot—that was much more the sort of stunt Fran would have pulled.
She pulled a face, and then smiled. “Not really. I didn’t know my arse from my elbow … or my wrist it seems,” she began, leaning her head back again, but then she frowned and tried to focus. “Oh my God! Look!” She nudged me.
A hush descended as I looked up to see a tiny, bespectacled gentleman in long orange robes, head down, walking quietly over the wooden footbridge that arched above our heads. He was accompanied by ten other similarly clad, serenely quiet men. It was the Dalai Lama and his entourage.
“Ha!” said Gretchen delightedly. “It’s true! He is here. I heard someone at reception say he was staying here, but I thought it was bull … I mean rubbish,” she said, awestruck. “Look! He wears Hush Puppies!” she exclaimed. “How completely random!”
We watched in amazement as the procession silently trotted back to their rooms and finally disappeared.
“I have a toast,” Gretchen said finally. “To good times and surreal moments.” She raised her glass again. “Long may they continue.”
S
he was just really, really nice,” I said enthusiastically to Tom. “Last night, after I got off the phone to you, we all had a drink in her room, and the stylist, who was a complete whack job, suddenly turned on the poor little makeup girl for no apparent reason and had an absolute rant, but Gretchen completely stood up to her.”
“What a warm, festive tale,” Tom said drily. “Celebrity looks after the little people—it’s practically a modern-day nativity story.”
I gave him a look.
“Oh come on, Al!” He laughed. “The stylist was hardly going to tell her off, was she? It’s pretty easy to stand up to people when they’re beneath you in the first place.”
I slung my bag down and flopped on to the sofa. “You’re a very cynical man sometimes. All I’m saying is I was wrong about Gretchen, that’s all. She was very friendly and extremely professional. She’s going to be a hit in the States and she’s a genuinely nice person. I felt really bad for being so dismissive of her before I’d even met her.”
“Well, good,” said Tom, dropping his car keys on the table and sitting down next to me, facing me side on. “Seriously, I think it’s great you had a good time.”
“Thanks for coming to get me.” I leaned toward him to give him a brief kiss.
“You’re welcome.” He smiled and kissed me back. “Want a cup of tea?” he said, our unspoken apologies for the night before over with. “I thought you’d be totally exhausted, but you seem to be buzzing.” He patted my leg, stood up and made his way over to the kettle.
“I think I passed through tired about three hours ago,” I said, “and no thanks.”
“Vic rang for you last night, by the way.”
“Oh great!” I said quickly. “I’ll call her back in a bit—she’ll love the story about the Dalai Lama. I told you about that, right?”
“You might have mentioned it,” Tom said, shooting me an amused look. “Oh, and your mum rang too.”
“What? Why? I told her and Dad I was going away. They never bloody listen.”
“She wants you to have a chat with Phil about the importance of working hard in your last year. Apparently, he’s not really getting down to studying for his finals as he should be. I told her to ring you on the mobile but she said it’d be too expensive and could you call when you got back. Now, at the risk of me pissing you off again by talking about house stuff,” he held up his hands defensively, “all I need to tell you is that the bloke is moving in on Friday and his name’s Paolo. At least I think it is. We had a couple of language problems on the phone.”
“Maybe I’ll teach him better English and he can teach me Spanish once he moves in,” I said brightly. “I’ve always wanted to learn.”
Tom raised an eyebrow and said, “How much coffee did you have on this flight back?”
“I’m just happy,” I said. Surely it wasn’t that hard for him to believe? I felt slightly irked that he assumed my good mood was in fact hysteria-induced tiredness or a caffeine overload. “LA rejuvenated me!” I exclaimed. “That’s a good thing, don’t you think?”
“I think,” Tom said, coming over and pulling me off the sofa, then wrapping me in a bear hug and planting a kiss on the top of my head, “that you’re very cute and it’s nice to see you smiling again. You’ve had a lot on your plate with the business and Vic going to Paris and everything. It’s about time some positive things started to happen for you. Trust me, Al.” He paused. “There are good times ahead.”
“I hope so.” I leaned my head on his chest and closed my eyes.
“I know so.” He began to twirl me lightly on the spot.
“You really enjoyed this trip to the States, didn’t you?” he said after we’d been standing there companionably for a moment or two in silence, just hugging.
“Yeah, I did,” I said. “It was fun. Why?”
“No reason.” He hugged me a little tighter. “No reason at all.”
Vic, however, was a little confused when I recounted the LA jaunt to her on the phone later: “But I thought you were trying to knock that sort of fluffy stuff on the head?”
“I was,” I said, folding my legs under me and sipping a tea, shivering a little. England was cold. I thought longingly of the hot tub.
“So how come you said yes?”
“Money, honey.” I shrugged.
“Ah, the evil lure of the dollar,” Vic conceded. “Fair enough. So was LA full of fakes, flakes and freaks?”
“Actually no,” I said. “I had a really good time! The weather was great—I’m so effing freezing back here—and we had a really good laugh, although mostly because of Gretchen. Everyone stared at her so blatantly during the shoot, Vic, you wouldn’t believe. She took it all in her stride, though. God, I felt hung over on the plane back.”
“Sounds like you had fun. How’s Tom?”
“Fine,” I said dismissively. “Well, I say that, but just before I left he started blathering on about getting a mortgage, saying they were just as much of a commitment as getting married—but since I got back he’s not said a word more about it, the big weirdo. Talking of which, can you even believe I saw the Dalai Lama?”