Going La La (14 page)

Frankie was stunned. Of all the people in Los Angeles, she’d had to bump into that bloody American from the airport again, and literally. After a moment’s silence, she found her voice. ‘I should have known it was you. Do you make a habit of nicking things off other people?’ She’d definitely decided against apologising.

‘What?’ He couldn’t hear through the glass.

She wound down the window. ‘My space.’ She motioned to the space that was now the scene of the accident. ‘You were trying to steal my space, weren’t you?’ She wasn’t going to let him say it was her fault, not after the last two times.

‘What the hell are you talking about? It’s not your space. And anyway, you should look where you’re going. If you can’t drive, you shouldn’t be at the wheel of that museum piece.’ He looked in disgust at Rita’s Thunderbird, which was now less fin-tailed and more hammer-tailed. Pieces of the car were lying on the ground. Flakes of paint were falling on to the tarmac like confetti.

‘This wasn’t my fault, you know. It was yours, you weren’t looking where you were going.’ She glared at him, trying to stand her ground when her legs were shaking. He was wearing that stupid hat again. No wonder he couldn’t see.

He sneered. ‘Hey, I wasn’t the one who reversed into you.’

‘No, you were the one who drove into me.’

They dead-eyed each other. They were having another row. Sighing in exasperation, he took off his hat and ran his fingers through his flattened hair. This was becoming a habit. A bad habit.

‘Look, I can’t stand around arguing, I’ve got a job to do.’

‘Me too,’ retorted Frankie. Shit. The job. She’d forgotten all about it.

‘So I guess we should swap names and numbers.
For insurance purposes
.’ He emphasised the words.

Frankie felt her stomach flip. With her British accent, he obviously suspected that she wasn’t insured. She watched as he felt around in the back pocket of his faded Levi’s that hung on his hips, two sizes too big, and inside his battered leather jacket that was ripped down one arm, and decided to bluff it. Well, she wasn’t going to tell him the truth, was she? They were hardly on the best of terms. He’d probably take great delight in calling the cops and having her slung in jail. Her insides turned to ice. Perhaps her imagination hadn’t got carried away, perhaps it had been a premonition.

Eventually he produced an old leaking biro that was chewed at the end. She stared at it. Trust him to have a pen like that. An image of Hugh’s Mont Blanc, which he kept clipped on his inside breast pocket, flashed through her mind.

‘OK, what’s your name?’

‘Frankie . . . Frankie Pickles.’ She reeled off Rita’s telephone number, feeling her cheeks burning with guilty fear.

He scribbled it down on the inside of a packet of matches and then, tearing off the edge, wrote his. He poked it through the window. ‘Here’s mine.’

Snatching the piece of cardboard from him with a shaky hand, she glanced at it. And that’s when she realised. In between the blobs of ink, in surprisingly neat handwriting, was his telephone number and underneath his name:
Reilly
. Her heart took a nosedive. She’d just met her new boss.

Inside the studios there was a hive of activity. Beer-bellied ‘grips’ in heavy-metal T-shirts were clambering up twenty-foot-high scaffolding, while ‘sparkies’ with paisley bandannas and skull’n’crossbones tattoos rigged up hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of lights. Skeletal stylists in head-to-toe black were gliding around with rails of clothes, the art department was running about unloading props and panicking that they’d forgotten something, and in the far corner Make-up was fussing over sponges and foundation.

Away from the mayhem sat the director, producer and clients. Perched like royalty on high canvas chairs, they surveyed the scene before them and discussed ‘concepts’ and ‘brand images’ over coffee, muffins and Krispy Kreme Donuts, provided specially by Shirlene, the busty Texan in charge of Craft Services, the catering department. Having worked before with this particular heavyweight East Coast director, Shirlene knew they were his favourite and had been up at dawn, loading her catering truck with fresh supplies from the Krispy Kreme Donut shop in Van Nuys.

Today Pacific Productions were shooting a commercial for a new, ‘totally wild’ breakfast cereal which, for some reason, required a jungle set, a couple of real lions (who paced around their cages hungrily eyeing everybody up while the animal trainer, a balding man of about fifty, gingerly fed them white mice through the bars) and a bloke dressed up as Tarzan. Being new to all this, Frankie couldn’t understand the connection, but then she hadn’t been given a five-hundred-thousand-dollar budget to think of one. Instead she was being paid a hundred and fifty dollars to be laden down like a packhorse with two tripods, three reflectors, a camera bag, and a suitcase full of lights. In the world of photography, she’d discovered that assistant, translated, meant dogsbody.

Feeling like the new girl in class, she hovered nervously at the edge of the studios, which stretched out before her like a giant aircraft hangar. Everything and everybody was so unfamiliar. Anxiously, she glanced around her at busy people. Confident people. Intimidating people.

‘Hi there!’ An LA Child Woman wearing Gap khakis (size O, long) and a knotted at her can’t-really-be-that-tiny waist white shirt motored towards her. She had the entire production uniform: clipboard, pager, walkie-talkie. And she only looked about nineteen. Frankie glanced briefly at her and immediately regretted her choice of walking-the-dog-on-a-Sunday outfit. Trust her to get the dressing-down idea all wrong. Instead of looking casual yet trendy and attractive like Ms Gap Khakis, she looked like an unfashionable, unattractive, shapeless frump.

‘I’m Tina from production.’ Tina’s job was to meet and greet. She blazed fake friendliness. A skill she’d learned as a Gap shop assistant. Which explained the khakis. ‘Are you Reilly’s assistant?’

‘Er, yeah,’ answered Frankie’s begrudgingly.

Reilly’s assistant
. The words left a bright-red slap mark on her ego. She was still smarting from having to confess to him – of all the photographers in Los Angeles – that she was his new assistant. It had nearly killed her. Especially when she’d had to stand there in the car park, not saying a word, as he’d piled her up like a sherpa. She knew he was doing it on purpose to get his own back, but what could she do? She’d wanted to tell him to stick his job where the sun didn’t shine, but she’d had to swallow her pride and just get on with it. She needed the money. Now, more than ever.

Tina ran her square-cut fingernail down the list of names on her clipboard, reminding Frankie of the attractive girls who stand next to the doormen at hyped-up bars in Soho, smugly telling shivering punters desperate to hobnob with the likes of Take That, ‘If you’re not on the list, you’re not coming in.’ But Tina wasn’t British and bitchy. She was American and enthusiastic. ‘Ggggrrreeaattt,’ she cheered, using her highlighter pen to draw a wiggly line across her clipboard. ‘You’ve been allocated a location near the jungle stage, so—’ She was interrupted by her pager, which began vibrating and omitting a shrill beep. ‘Oh, man,’ she gasped, clutching her forehead and switching from joy to tragedy like the wannabe actress she was. ‘I’m needed in Wardrobe. Set up over there.’ She waved her clipboard dismissively towards the lion’s cage before dashing off across the studio, delegating loudly into her walkie-talkie and trying to strike the right balance of stressed-out-but-in-control.

The lion’s cage? Frankie hesitated. This was the moment of truth. This was when she had to look as if she knew what she was doing. Although she didn’t have a clue. Nervously, she eyed the king of the jungle, who licked his lips and watched her hungrily. What was that saying about being thrown to the lions?

16

After ten minutes crouching down in the corner on her hands and knees, unzipping the bags, unloading the suitcase and trying to put up the tripods, Frankie’s worst fears were confirmed. This was bloody impossible. If only she’d listened to her second, third, fourth and fifth thoughts, done a U-turn at Sunset and gone back to bed. She grappled with a tripod. Surely you didn’t have to have a brain like Carol Vordeman to work this out, she thought, fighting with legs that kept shooting out at varying lengths and kicking her. How could something with only three legs be so complicated? She took that back. Look at men. They only had two and nobody could ever work them out.

From the corner of her eye she could see Reilly, who’d just walked in and was giving high-fives to the rest of the crew. Laughing and chatting, he took off his jacket, threw it over the back of a chair and, sauntering across to Catering, poured himself a coffee. Frankie was jealous. She could murder a coffee. Having had to get up at such an unearthly hour, she’d slept through the alarm and hadn’t had time to make one. She watched as he shared a joke with Shirlene, who was plying him with doughnuts. Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t had time for breakfast either.

Leaning up against a wall, Reilly dunked the edge of his doughnut into the polystyrene cup full of blisteringly hot coffee and bit into it, enjoying the rush of sugar and caffeine. Boy, did he need that. He looked across at Frankie. Would you believe it? Of all the women in LA, his new assistant had to be her, that stuck-up, pain-in-the-ass Brit. He was gonna kill Dorian. When he’d called yesterday and said a girlfriend of his needed a job, he’d assumed he was talking about one of those sexy airhead babes he hung around with. He should have said no, in fact he was going to, but then his dick had overruled his head. What man could refuse the opportunity to spend the day with a good-looking female? He’d probably have some fun, a little flirt. The coffee burned his tongue.
Flirt?
What a joke.

Frankie saw Reilly looking over and toyed with the idea of waving the white flag and asking for his help. But something made her decide against it. That something being Tina, Shirlene and one of the stylists, who, one by one, were edging closer towards him until they were circling round like a hungry pack. Laughing and joking, they hung on his every word. Tina was tossing her hair like a salon advert; the stony-faced French stylist, who looked as if she was in the Resistance and who ‘took ’erself and ’er work very zerious’, was giggling like a drunkard, cheeks flushed, eyes racoon-wide; while Shirlene had put the diamanté collars up on her stonewashed denim jacket and was flirting like a trooper.

Christ, no wonder he had such a big ego. Frankie felt peeved. There he was, being a babe magnet, and she was stuck by herself in the corner as if she didn’t exist. Clenching her teeth, she ignored him and carried on unpacking. Well, someone had to do it, didn’t they?

‘Hey, do you need any help?’

Frankie looked up, about to fire a curt ‘No, I’m fine thanks’ to Reilly. Except it wasn’t him. It was the fake-tanned Tarzan in his loincloth. ‘Oh.’

‘Hey, it’s cool. I don’t bite.’ He held out his honey-brown hand. ‘I’m Matt.’

Matt was a blond brawny surfer dude from Malibu who was trying to break in to acting. ‘This is my first gig, so I’m kinda nervous,’ he explained, fiddling with his shoulder-length hair, striped with chunky yellow-white highlights from the sea’n’surf. He didn’t seem to mind that he was practically naked apart from a scrap of leopard-print material sewn on to a jockstrap, courtesy of the French stylist, and a pair of fraying Converse. Frankie didn’t mind either. Who would with a body like that? It looked like something from
Baywatch
, and she wasn’t talking David Hasslehoff.

She smiled. ‘I’m Frankie.’

‘Are you Australian?’

‘No, English.’

‘Way out, man!’ He grinned, clutching fistfuls of hair distractedly. ‘I’ve got a friend in England. You might know him, his name’s Stephen.’ Matt spoke slowly, like a vinyl seven-inch on 33 rpm.

She shook her head. ‘ ’Fraid not.’

Not to be deterred, he continued, ‘He’s got dark hair, about my height.’

Frankie smiled apologetically. How big did he think England was? The size of a postage stamp? ‘No, sorry.’ She felt guilty. He was so earnest, so eager that she should know his friend. Maybe she should have lied.

‘Oh, well . . .’ Like a large Labrador puppy, he bounced back. ‘I was just hanging around . . . Hey, hanging around . . .’ he laughed at his joke. ‘Me, Tarzan, you know, on the vines . . .’

‘Yeah, I know.’ She nodded to show she’d got the joke – the first time.

‘. . . and I thought, Hey, man, that chick looks like she could do with a hand.’

‘Thanks.’ She smiled gratefully. After her solitary confinement in the corner, it was a relief to talk to someone. Even if it was like speaking to Bill and Ted’s younger brother. ‘This is my first gig too,’ she confessed, lowering her voice and adopting his lingo.

Matt jumped back, wide-eyed at this amazing coincidence. ‘Hey, man, that’s totally weird!’ He grinned, bending down, grabbing a tripod and wedging it under his arm like a surfboard. His muscles rippled down his flanks like a keyboard. ‘But pretty cool.’

Unfortunately Matt’s dazzling conversation and handyman skills were cut short by Cedric from Make-up, who dashed across the set in a flurry, wielding a plastic spray bottle. Panting like a prank caller, he began spritzing Matt with baby oil and rubbing in more fake tan. ‘Quickly, quickly, you’re needed on set,’ he chastised, lustfully slapping Matt’s bare buttocks.