Going La La (6 page)

Looking out into the rain, she numbly watched as the lights of the bowling alley disappeared, before turning her face away from the window. Shivering, she stared miserably down at the floor, and it was only then that she noticed she’d forgotten to change her shoes. It was like rubbing salt into her wounds. Staring right back at her were those bloody red, white and blue lace-ups.

Letting herself in through the front door, she could almost fool herself that nothing had changed. Everything looked the same, everything was still as they’d left it: Hugh’s coffee cup by the phone, her make-up bag on the hallway table. It reminded her of a party game she used to play as a child. Where you had to close your eyes and somebody removed something from the room and then you had to say what was missing. But it wasn’t a game and she knew what was missing. Love. It sounded corny, worthy of a toe-curling line from a slushy Mills & Boon, but it was true. Hugh didn’t love her any more and it made everything around her look different. As if she’d been watching life on a colour television and now, suddenly, everything had switched to black and white.

Dropping her keys in the silver ashtray on the coffee table, she slumped down on the sofa. Fred opened a lazy eye and, without changing his Sphinx-like position, extended a furry paw on to her lap. Always the more demonstrative, Ginger uncurled her body, arched her back and yawned, before tiptoeing delicately on to Frankie’s bare knees. Nuzzling her small damp sandpapery nose into her neck, she began to purr. Normally Frankie would stroke both cats lovingly, tickling them under their Velcro chins and fondling their soft, velvety paws. But this time she didn’t. Unable to move, she lay limply against the cushions, staring vacantly into space.

An involuntary sob rose in her throat and her bloodshot eyes began brimming again with tears. Never in a million years had she expected this to happen. They didn’t argue – well, not really, only over stupid stuff like whose turn it was to wash up or who’d used the last of the loo roll, and they had a good sex life, at least she thought so. She felt her stomach tighten. Oh God, don’t say it was that, anything but that. OK, so she wasn’t swinging from the chandeliers – not that they had a chandelier, it was one of those white paper Chinese lanterns you get from Habitat for a fiver – but he seemed to enjoy it.

Frankie cringed, as one awful thought after another fired at her like poison darts. It was probably all just an act, all that kissing her neck and nibbling her ear lobes – Hugh was big on ear lobes; his hard-on was probably a fake too. After all, if women could fake orgasms, surely men could fake erections. Even worse, maybe he’d been imagining she was someone else – Suzy ‘with the nice pair’ in accounts, or that new temp with the French accent who kept buying him croissants. Jesus, don’t say he was having an affair with her. Don’t say he was giving her a pain au chocolat behind the filing cabinets. The more she thought about it, the more she remembered how he had been odd these past few weeks. Distant, less attentive, as if he had something on his mind. Bloody hell, what an idiot she’d been. There was she thinking he was contemplating marriage, and all the time he was thinking about splitting up.

And as if things weren’t bleak enough, she now had to find somewhere else to live. But how? If she had a job she could start looking, but somehow she didn’t think the dole would stretch to two-hundred-quid-a-week flats in W2. There was always the option of calling up a few friends and asking to kip on the sofa, but she dismissed the idea. Nobody wanted a weeping, wailing wreck camping out in their living room, however sympathetic they might be to her plight. That only left her parents, but she didn’t want to worry them. She was twenty-nine years old, she should be able to sort out her own problems and not have to run home crying as if she was a kid again and she’d come last in the egg-and-spoon race, or dropped Tiny Tears head first into next-door’s ornamental pond.

They were both getting on a bit now – her dad would be seventy-two next May and her mum wasn’t far off – but they were still happily married, even after fifty years. Her mum always loved telling her the story of how they’d first met ballroom-dancing in Blackpool, and how, when they’d married six months later, they’d waltzed down the aisle and foxtrotted to the reception. But her mum’s all-time best, oft-repeated tale was the one about when she’d turned forty and started feeling unwell. And how, terrified, she was fearing the C word. But – and this was the bit she loved telling the most – it had turned out to be the P word instead. She wasn’t dying, far from it. She was four and a half months pregnant with Frankie – she’d discovered the right kind of lump.

Covering her face with her hands, Frankie started to cry again and her sniffling tears gave way to loud, choking, convulsive sobs. Fred and Ginger looked at her, confusion reflected in their amber-flecked eyes. On and on, until their fur was soaked with her unhappy tears, and her face was blotchy and bloated. And then she couldn’t cry any more.

Taking rapid, desperate breaths, she wiped the end of her runny nose with the sleeve of her new jacket, streaking it with salty tears and saliva, and, easing herself up gingerly from the sofa, walked across the living room to the large sash window. Pressing her hot, clammy cheek against the soothing coolness of the glass, she stared into the street below, half-heartedly hoping to see Hugh turning the corner, climbing the flight of steps two at a time up to the front door. But there was nobody outside, nothing apart from rows of parked cars and ugly piles of rotting autumn leaves.

She didn’t know how long she’d stood there before she noticed the answering machine, lying on the table beside her flashing. For a few moments Frankie watched it, not registering at first that there was a message, before leaning across and pressing Play. There was a click, and then the sound of Rita’s voice, her thick Lancashire accent, loud and familiar, filling the room.

‘Hi, Frankie, it’s me,’ she was shouting – it sounded as if she was on a mobile. ‘I’ve bought a car . . . a convertible . . . and I’m driving along Sunset, so I don’t know if you can hear a word I’m saying, but I was just ringing to wish you happy birthday. I sent you an e-mail but I don’t think you got it, ’cos you never replied. I don’t know where you are . . . probably out having a brilliant time with Hugh at some swanky restaurant, you lucky sod!’ The sound of a horn blowing and Rita swearing. ‘Bloody hell, some of these drivers don’t look where they’re going.’ Another sound of the horn. ‘Get out of the fucking way!’ God, sorry about that. Some stupid bastard in a Roller . . . Hang on, I think it’s Rod Stewart.’ Rita’s high-pitched cackle. ‘Anyway, changing the subject. When are you going to come and see me? It’s been three months and you did promise. Can’t you leave loverboy for a couple of weeks? You know what they say about absence making the heart grow fonder and all that . . .’ The screeching of brakes. ‘Oh, shit, what now?’ A pause. ‘Christ, I think it’s the cops. Better go. Love yer!’ The sound of kisses and then the phone went dead.

Mad-for-it, foul-mouthed, kind-hearted Rita. She’d been dumped more often than she cared to remember but always seemed to bounce back. But Frankie had no best mate to help her bounce back. Rita was on the other side of the Atlantic. Miles away. Which is exactly where she wanted to be. Miles away from the whole sorry mess that her life had turned into . . .

And that’s when the embryo of the idea was conceived and, as it grew bigger, and bigger, it triggered off an unexpected endorphinal rush of defiance. Sod Hugh. Sod
Lifestyle
magazine. And sod the fact that she was nearly thirty. She wasn’t going to lie back and take everything that was thrown at her. She was going to do something. She was going to take control of her life for a change.

Wiping her eyes she picked up the phone and dialled Rita’s number. There was no one in, but Frankie left a garbled message on the voicemail. Rita was always inviting her out to Los Angeles. Well, now she was going to take her up on the offer. Her mind was made up. If Hugh wanted space he could have it. Six thousand bloody miles of it.

7

With a muffled thud, the wheels of the 747 touched down on the tarmac and, decelerating sharply, the plane jolted noisily along the runway. The sudden impact woke Frankie from a deep, dream-riddled sleep. Opening her eyes, she squinted as the bright sunshine glared in through the rows of oval-shaped windows, throwing spotlight beams across her face. Groggy from nearly ten hours of uninterrupted unconsciousness, she blinked a few times, trying to focus on her surroundings. For a brief moment she didn’t know where she was, couldn’t work out what was happening, then suddenly she heard the plummy voice of the British Airways captain over the loudspeaker.

‘The time is twelve-thirty p.m. and the temperature outside is 87 Fahrenheit. Welcome to a hot and sunny Los Angeles, ladies and gentlemen.’

Los Angeles!
Thrusting herself forward in her seat, Frankie peered out of the window. Above her the sky was hazy with sunshine and smog, while ahead LAX shimmered in the heat like a mirage. But it wasn’t. This was for real.
This was Los Angeles
.

It was hard to take in. Only last night she’d been in London, sorting through drawers full of sentimental junk – old cinema tickets, champagne corks, dried rose petals from last year’s Valentine’s bouquet – and trying not to get weepy as she’d turned the pages of photo albums. Only hours since she’d called British Airways’ twenty-four-hour reservation line, maxed-out her credit cards and bought a ticket to LA, then yanked her battered suitcases out from underneath the bed and hastily stuffed them with an assortment of clothes, shoes and God knows what else.

Dawn had broken with the sound of the minicab honking his horn outside in the street below and she’d locked the front door, put her keys through the letter box and clambered into the back seat. Arriving at Heathrow as the check-in desk was opening, she’d been greeted by the uniformed ground staff, bleary-eyed beneath their carefully applied masks of blusher and lipstick, and, without hesitation, signed the credit card slip and collected her ticket. Only then had the adrenalin stopped pumping, allowing her to stop and think about what she was doing. It was all very well packing her bags and flouncing off to LA – it was strong, it was decisive, it showed she had balls, initiative, an I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude. It was her way of singing Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ without having to do karaoke. But if she was so bloody strong, why did it feel as if her heart was breaking?

‘Will everyone please remain seated until the seat-belt sign is switched off,’ a red-faced steward pleaded frantically over the intercom, but his desperate attempts at crowd control fell on two hundred and fifty pairs of deaf ears. Like caged animals, irritable and impatient passengers began scrambling out of their seats, grabbing their hand luggage and pushing and shoving each other in the aisles, desperate to reach the exits and disembark a few vital minutes early.

Watching from the safety of her seat, Frankie glimpsed a Stetson bobbing about at the front of the plane. It was that arrogant American. Trust him to push forward.

Turning away, she stared out of the window. Unlike everybody else, she wasn’t so eager to get off the plane. Last night, shocked and upset, running away to LA had seemed like a good idea. Now, feeling homesick and hungover, she wasn’t so sure.

She’d only ever seen LA in the movies and on TV, when they showed the lifestyles of the rich and famous. From what she’d gathered, it was glamorous and glossy and inhabited by exercise-mad, health-obsessed, surgically altered people who drove around all day long in stretch limos with tinted windows. A city where women needed to have one of two things: a skinny body with giant-sized silicone breasts or a very old boyfriend with a very fat wallet. She had neither. She was now a very single 34B, who wore jeans and woolly jumpers, had a rapidly wilting bottom – in LA you were meant to have buns instead of bottoms – and enough cellulite to believe G-strings should carry a mental health warning. OK, so she had gym membership, but her workout consisted of twenty minutes in the jacuzzi, three times a month, and on top of all that she ate chocolate, got drunk, travelled by public transport, and the only surgery she’d had was to remove her tonsils when she was nine. Frankie closed her eyes again: this could all be one very big mistake.

LAX was a rabbit warren of corridors and moving walkways. Like a rat in a laboratory experiment, Frankie turned corner after corner before finally spotting the escalators that led down to baggage reclaim. Feeling relieved, she leaned wearily against the handrail. Below her, the tops of people’s heads became visible and, gliding downwards, she watched as their bodies gradually came into view. Only then did she realise that these masses of people were part of a queue – a roller coaster of a queue, an-August-Bank-Holiday-at-Alton-Towers of a queue – that zigzagged backwards and forwards around carefully erected barriers. This was Immigration.

Joining the end of the line, Frankie eyed the butch, uniformed guards with pudding-bowl haircuts and fingered her green form nervously. Would they be able to tell she was a desperate, dumped girlfriend, on the run from the dole, singledom and an ex-lover who went by the name of Hugh? She studied the other people around her – backpackers with well-thumbed guidebooks and Converse All-stars, families of four with fold-up pushchairs and pockets full of wet-wipes, businessmen with shiny leather briefcases and take-me-seriously laptops – before looking down at her laddered opaques and motley assortment of plastic-bag hand luggage. It didn’t look good.

Despite the number of people, the hall was eerily quiet as, one by one, jet-lagged tourists edged closer to the front of the line, trying to look all blasé and in holiday mode, while turning their immigration and customs forms into blotting paper in their sweaty palms. This wasn’t passport control, it was Russian Roulette. Impossible to tell who was going to be let in and who was going to be kept out. The seemingly random selection meant that while a tattooed, dope-smoking Hell’s Angel sauntered through without a hitch, an old dear with a blue rinse was gripped under her polyester, flowery-print armpits by two armed guards and frogmarched off into an interrogation room.