Angels (10 page)

ANGELS / 69

“We're nearly there. Nice, isn't it?”

“Lovely.” It was just that I'd expected something a little edgier from Emily.

“When I first moved to L.A. I had to live in a rotting—literally, it was rotting in the heat—apartment building in East L.A., and people kept getting shot and killed outside my window.”

Okay, maybe edgy wasn't so great.

“The murder rate in Santa Monica is way low,” she reassured me.

Marvelous!

We pulled up outside a white clapboard bungalow with a small lawn edging the pavement. Water sprinklers worked like searchlights, back and forth, on the grass.

“Keep an eye out for them fucking sprinklers,” Emily advised.

“They're on a timer, and they're always surprising me and destroying my hair. And keep an eye out for the neighbors on that side, they're the kind of people who give L.A. a bad name.”

“Serial killers?”

“New Agers; they'd read your aura as soon as look at you. The neighbors on the other side aren't much better. Boys. College students, doing computer programming or something. They're handy if you ever want to buy drugs, not that you'd want to, I know.”

This gave me a little breathing space of relief; I didn't want to be surrounded by married couples. Drug-dealing students were infinitely preferable.

Flowers blazed shocking pink against the dazzling white of Emily's house. It was all very pretty. Then I noticed the “Armed Response” sign in the front garden and my delight with my surroundings dimmed somewhat. What happened around here that an armed response was necessary?

We dragged my stuff into the cool, shady house. While I oohed and ahed over the hardwood floors, white blinds, and pretty back garden, Emily made straight for her answering machine.

“Gaaaaaargh,” she groaned. “Ring, you bastard.”

70 / MARIAN KEYES

“A man?” I asked, with as much compassion as I could muster.

“I wish.”

“Oh?”

“Maggie,” she said, slumping onto a chair. “I'm officially Down on My Luck.”

“Are you?” I asked faintly, suddenly aware that I wasn't the only person in the world who was midcrisis.

“I'm so glad you're here.”

“Are you?” How had I suddenly mutated from comfortee to comforter?

Emily sighed, then unraveled her whole sorry story.

After the studio had passed on
Hostage
(or was it
Hostage
!?) her agent had fired her, which was nothing less than catastrophic.

Studios never but
never
looked at work that hadn't been submitted by an agent; and it was almost impossible to get an agent, she explained. Every day literally thousands of screenplays arrived in the mailrooms of the big agencies and had to go through a savage screening process. If the mailroom kids didn't like it, it was out. If it made it past them, it had to pass muster with a reader. In the unlikely event of that happening, it got read by an agent's assistant.

And only if they raved about it would an agent deign to look at it.

Emily had spent the past year and a half writing several new scripts, and every time she tried to get an agent, she got rejected.

“But you've got a name.”

“I've got a
bad
name,” she corrected. “Everyone remembers that the studio passed on
Hostage
! I'm in a worse position than a total newcomer. It's an unforgiving town.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Dunno. Too ashamed. Me, the big success story. And I kept hoping things would improve. You know?”

I did, as it happened.

Only ten days ago Emily had managed to place her most recent script with a new agent. But he was with a much ANGELS / 71

smaller agency, which didn't carry the same clout with the studios.

“His name is David Crowe; he's gone out with my script. He's trying to get a buzz going and see if he can kick-start a bidding war.

And I've heard nothing.”

“But he's only just gone out with it.”

“Things happen very fast in this town or they don't happen at all. It's working my last nerve,” she said. “If this doesn't take off, it's over for me.”

“Don't be mad. You'll just pick yourself up and try again.”

“I fucking won't, you know,” she said grimly. “I'm burned out.

This city has me in shreds. The casualties are everywhere. You'll see.

“And I'm broke,” she added.

“How?” I was shocked. She'd gotten a huge advance for
Hostage
!, which she didn't have to return when the studio passed on making the film.

“I got paid nearly three years ago. Two hundred grand, after taxes and agents' commissions, doesn't last so long. And don't think I was too high and mighty to look for commissions writing B-movie, straight-to-video crap. I even pitched for a porn film!”

“
To be in it
?” Were things really that bad?

“No, to write it. But now that you mention it, I'd probably have had more luck if I'd auditioned to star in it. Even they turned me and my studio pedigree down—I couldn't get arrested.”

“Oh, my God.”

“It's been a horrible eighteen months,” she admitted. “The day that Beam Me Up Productions—”

“Who?”

“Exactly. Some C-list outer-space merchants operating out of a trailer in Pasadena—the day they passed on my pitch to do the fourth sequel to
Squelch Beings from Gamma
9 was my blackest day so far.”

I was crippled by the magnitude of her problems. It was 72 / MARIAN KEYES

too hot, I was too tired, and I wanted to go home. But home no longer existed.

“Oh Christ, Christ, Christ.” She looked suddenly stricken. “I'm sorry, Maggie, I'm terribly sorry…What a thing to be doing to you!

Let me make you something to eat.”

She flung together a salad and opened a bottle of white wine.

Mercifully, she seemed to cheer up.

“Things aren't so bad. I can always go back to Ireland and get some film work there. Now that I have a lot of contacts,” she chattered.

She paused. “Do you know who I see occasionally in the course of work?” Something in her tone alerted me.

“Who?”

A beat. “Shay Delaney.” It was clear that she'd been waiting for the right time to tell me.

“How?”

“He's a producer with Dark Star Productions. An…”

“…independent film company,” I finished for her. I'd suddenly remembered what the name had meant to me when he'd told me who he worked for.

“He has to spend a lot of time here in L.A.” She sounded almost defensive.

“Of course he does. People who work in movie-production companies tend to.” She looked puzzled and I said, “I ran into him.

Last week.”

“No way!” As Emily marveled at what a coincidence that was, I hunched over my salad.

Was that why I'd been so eager to come to Los Angeles?

I AWOKE IN
darkness to the rattle of machine-gun fire. My blood was pounding. I listened for more sounds—shouts, moans, police sirens—but nothing.

We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto
.

Lying in the blackness, I admitted the bitter truth. I was sorry I'd come. I'd expected to magically feel better, but how could I when I'd brought myself and my failed life with me?

And living in someone else's house—even a good friend's—was tougher than I'd expected. Despite the eight-hour time difference and general exhaustion, I hadn't gotten to sleep for ages because Emily had the telly on so loud. I'd seethed in my bedroom (which was actually her office), wishing she'd turn it down. But there was nothing I could do; it wasn't my house.

When a raucous blast of canned laughter exploded through the thin walls, I experienced a violent longing for my life with Garv. I couldn't live like this. All at once I was ready to admit that splitting up had been a terrible mistake and that business as usual could resume with immediate effect. I was used to harmony and being able to turn off the telly whenever it suited me.

But was that a good enough reason to reconcile? Probably not, I decided reluctantly.

I did eventually go to sleep, but now I was awake again.

74 / MARIAN KEYES

Another crackle of machine-gun fire caused my heart to burst against my ribs. What was going
on
out there?

If only I could go home, I yearned. But I suspected I had to stick it out. Everyone would think I'd cracked up if it came out that I went to Los Angeles and stayed only a day. And this wasn't just about me, it was clear that Emily needed someone around. Christ, maybe we'd be going home together, a duo of failures. We'd have to sit in a special cordoned-off area on the plane in case we infected the other passengers.

A noise at the window made me jerk about three feet off the bed.

What was it? The branch of a tree banging against the glass? Or a roaming madman on the lookout for a girl to torture and murder?

My money was on the roaming madman. After all, this was Los Angeles and, by all accounts, full of pathological killers. I'd read one or two Jackie Collins novels in my time and I knew all about the psychos who think in italics.

Not long now. Not long before revenge would be his. And then
they'd be sorry they'd laughed at him and refused to return his
calls. He was strong now. He'd never been stronger. And he
had his knife. The knife that would do his deft bidding. First
he'd cut off her hair, then he'd cut off her jewelry, then he'd
start opening her skin. She'd beg, she'd plead for mercy, for
the agony to stop. But it wouldn't stop, because this time it was
her turn for the pain, this time it was her turn…

I began to sweat. These clapboard California houses were so flimsy and I felt the vulnerability of being on the ground floor very keenly.

Slick with fear, I had to turn on the lamp and look on Emily's bookcase for something to read. Preferably something light to take my mind off my imminent dismemberment. But because I was in her office, all I could find were

ANGELS / 75

textbooks on the art of scriptwriting. Then I saw the bundle of pages on the desk.
Plastic Money
, her new screenplay. That'd do.

Two pages in, I was gripped, the roaming madman forgotten.

The story was about two women who pull off a jewelry heist to pay for plastic surgery for their daughters, so that they'll have better luck with men than they did. It was a comedy, a thriller, a love story, and, most important for Hollywood, it had the requisite schmaltzy bit. (“But I love you, Mom. You don't have to buy me new boobs.”)

Just before I fell back to sleep, I thought fuzzily,
I'd option it
…

When I woke up again, I got the fright of my life—the sun was shining, pouring lemon light into the room. With a pounding heart I wondered,
Where the hell am I
? The last nine months galloped toward me, gathering up awful memories and whooshing them at me, until I remembered why I was in this strange sunny place. Oh yeah…

Emily was in the kitchen, clicking away at her laptop.

“Morning,” I said. “Are you working?”

“Yes, on a new script.”

“A
new
new one?”

“Yeah.” She laughed, then got up and began making—what I would later come to know as—a protein shake. “I don't know if it's any good, but I've got to keep pressing on with it just in case
Plastic Money
doesn't work out.”

What a nightmare, I thought. To cheer us both up, I said, “Isn't it a gorgeous day?”

“Yes, I suppose.” She sounded surprised. “But they're all like this.

So did you hear the fireworks last night?”

“Fireworks?”

“Yeah, for the Santa Monica festival. But you were probably out for the count.”

“No, I heard them.” Then in a mortified rush I blurted out, “But I thought they were machine guns.”

“Why would you think they were
machine
guns? Christ 76 / MARIAN KEYES

in the marketplace!” Her face was stamped with distress and concern. “You
are
in a bad way.”

She was up from her chair and wrapping her wiry little Emily body around mine. I was so touched by the contact that for the first time since I'd left him, I was able to cry. All my tears had been packed tight inside me, frozen and out of reach until now.

“I'm so sad,” I choked. “I'm so sad, I'm just so sa-aa-aaad.”

“I know, I know, I know.” On a loop.

The grief that until then I'd only caught out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye glimpses of suddenly revealed itself to me, and I felt the full weight of all our blunted hopes.

The end of a marriage is the saddest thing in the whole world.

Surely no one gets married thinking that theirs might not make it?

I had an image of a twenty-four-year-old me and a twenty-five-year-old Garv, and our innocent trust in the future was killing me.

“All the hope we had and it did us no good.” I pressed a lump of paper towels to my leaking face. “I had to go, Emily, I didn't have any choice, it was so awful. He would have left if I hadn't.

But now it's all go-onnnne.”

“I know, I know, I know,” Emily murmured. “I know.”

“I thought I could never again feel as sad as I did last February,”

I said, coughing with tears, “but I doo-hoo. It's sadder than the hungry babies in
Angela's Ashes
.”

“Sadder than Mary going blind on
Little House on the Prairie
?”

“Yeah. Sadder.”

But the damage was done. She'd made me smile. After she'd mopped me up a bit and gotten me to blow my nose, she tempted me with “Will you have a protein shake? It's a local delicacy.”

“I guess so.”

Emily whipped me up a (frankly, delicious) shake and we sat outside in the tiny, sun-drenched back garden. I was feel ANGELS / 77

ing a little bit calmer until she decided to have another go at making sense of me and Garv.

“The thing is, it all feels a bit premature. Too sudden.”

I sat in silence while my arm got hotter and itchier.

“Nothing ends this cleanly,” she insisted.

“It's not clean.”

She tried to jolly me into engaging. “You've missed out on vital parts of the breaking-up process. What normally happens is, you go for counseling, you have to have at least two attempts at a reunion. They've got to fail really horribly, and if you think you're bitter now, it's nothing compared to how you'll be then.
Then
it's allowed to be over.”