Away for the Weekend (18 page)

The six of them are waiting near the hotel as instructed – as, indeed, they’ve been waiting for the last fifteen minutes – when, from Gabriela’s bag, an instrumental version of the song “Hotel California” suddenly starts playing. Beth’s been surreptitiously texting the same message to Gabriela and checking for messages and missed calls all morning – every time she’s alone for a minute or goes to the bathroom. Her heartbeat stumbles. It must be Gabriela. She fishes the pink cell phone from the bag and holds it in front of her. It’s not her number, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t Gabriela. Beth was way too tired to charge her phone last night, Gabriela could be using Delila’s phone. Beth can feel the others looking at her. But she can’t talk to Gabriela with Lucinda, Nicki, Hattie, Paulette and Isla surrounding her, listening to every word. She glances over at them.

“Well, who is it?” demands Paulette.

Beth looks back at the phone. “I don’t know. It doesn’t recognize the number.”

“For God’s sake, answer it!” orders Hattie. “Find out who it is.”

“Maybe it’s the driver,” suggests Lucinda. “You know, explaining why he’s late.”

And maybe if she stalls long enough, Gabriela will give up for now.

“It’s probably one of my friends. They must’ve gotten a new phone.”

“But they wouldn’t be calling you now,” says Isla. “They know you’re busy.”

The song continues playing.

Paulette takes a step towards her. “Are you going to answer that, or what?”

Beth takes a step back. “But why would the driver be calling me?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Hattie pokes her. “For God’s sake, Gabby. Just answer the phone! It could be important.”

Beth turns so that the others are looking at her back. To her relief, it isn’t Gabriela. It also isn’t the driver. The driver has a deep, rich voice that makes you feel as if you’re sitting by a fire on a snowy afternoon. The driver is always calm, even when someone cuts him off. This voice is high and thin, and belongs to someone who is almost never calm.

“Thank God I finally got through to someone!” screeches Taffeta MacKenzie. “What the hell is wrong with everyone today? Did they all throw their phones into the ocean?”

“I’m sorry,” says Beth. “Who is this?”

“Who do you think it is?” snaps Taffeta. “Your fairy godmother?”

“Ms MacKenzie?” ventures Beth.

“Where are the others? Why don’t they answer their phones?”

The others move closer, their whispers like the buzzing of bees.
What is it? What’s the matter? What does she want?

“But their phones didn’t ri—”

“There’s been a change of plan. This is not supposed to happen, of course. For what that damn limo costs, it should be as infallible as the Pope.”

“Something’s happened to the car?” guesses Beth.

“Yes, something’s happened to the car. It’s broken down. On the freeway! He can’t break down in town. Or near a garage. Oh, no. He has to break down on the freaking freeway. What was he even doing there?”

“I’m sorry. I—”

“You’ll have to take a cab. Go out on Sunset and grab the first cab you see.”

“Bu—”

“I’ll pay for it when it gets here.”

The line goes dead.

Traffic is heavy, but moving fast. In the few minutes it took them to reach the main road, more than half a dozen cabs have gone by, but now there isn’t one. They wait. And wait.

“How can there not be one single cab?” moans Isla.

“There’s some kind of curse on us.” Hattie is looking at Beth.

“You can say that again.” Paulette is alternately shaking her phone and holding it to her ear. “This is, like, totally dead.”

“I knew I’d have time to go back and look at those shoes again,” grumbles Hattie.

“Why couldn’t she have called us a cab?” complains Nicki. “It’s not like we know our way around.”

Beth, still nervous that the man in the Panama hat is going to show up again, isn’t listening. She looks up the road. There are several buses coming, but still no sign of a cab. Beth sighs. She doesn’t notice Aricely, Jayne, Esmeralda, Delila and herself hurrying along on the other side of the street because, just as a bus starts to move towards the stop a few feet away from them, a car parked further up the road suddenly shoots into traffic – so that she can now see the small red sports car parked behind it.

The bus moves up to the kerb. The doors open. It will come as no surprise to learn that – along with drugs, sex, germs, vitamin deficiencies, sink holes, falling airline debris, cell phone radiation and killer bees – riding on public transport in Los Angeles is among the thousands of things that Beth’s mother has warned her about. According to Lillian, the only people who use it are people who have no choice – the poor, the criminal and the insane. There have been horror stories: robberies, knifings, infections, violent outbursts – even hijackings. Didn’t Aunt Joyce have her wallet taken right out of her bag? But for once Beth doesn’t heed her mother’s advice. Panic overrides Lillian’s dark prophecies. She doesn’t know what the man in the sports car wants, but she doesn’t really want to find out… “Come on!” she orders.

Hattie, Isla, Nicki and Paulette all look at her as if she’s mad, which is an understandable reaction.

Lucinda follows her on.

Remedios sits at a café near the bus stop. Her wig sits on top of several burger boxes in a garbage can on the corner. The only thing on her head now is a baseball cap with the inscription:
Have a Nice Day!
She watches Beth and Lucinda disappear inside the bus, the door shutting behind them so quickly you’d think they were tiny fish being swallowed by a whale. And she watches Gabriela sprint through the stilled vehicles, Delila behind her, and – thinking that she sees Beth – straight past Remedios and up a side street.

Remedios is feeling pretty pleased with herself. Otto knows that she paused time and traffic and got Gabriela across the boulevard as she was supposed to, but he doesn’t know that, because of her, Gabriela thought she saw Beth going up into the hills and followed. Nor does he know that Beth saw him, and got so scared she jumped onto the bus that just happened to come along before the swap back could be made. He’ll know that his plan has been thwarted, but he won’t know whom to blame. She really is one very accomplished angel. Remedios turns her head enough to be able to see the red sports car, its driver still trying to figure out what just happened. Resisting the temptation to wave at him, she slips from her seat and is gone.

Sodom and Gomorrah, what in the name of God’s blue sky is Beth doing? She’s getting on a bus! Why in Heaven is she getting on a bus? You might think that Otto, having experienced it for quite a long time now, is beyond being surprised by human behaviour, but it seems that he isn’t. She was supposed to wait for the taxi – which, of course, wouldn’t appear until Gabriela was right beside her, but instead she’s getting on a bus! And not just any bus – she’s getting on the
wrong
bus! He feels like shouting at her. “Are you crazy? Where do you think you’re going? You’re headed for the ocean!” She’s supposed to be going to The City of Angels College of Fashion and Design, not the
verdammte
sea. Why would she do something so stupid?

Otto watches Beth vanish into the moving billboard that is the westbound Metro, its body covered with a teaser for a popular TV show and bored-looking faces at the windows; and then he glimpses Gabriela striding into the hills.
Fire, flood, famine and plagues of locust, rodents and disease!
He bangs his head against the steering wheel, just as if he’s a real Californian. How could Remedios have blown such a simple task? Beth was standing there, waiting for a cab that wasn’t going to come. Gabriela was charging through the traffic as if it were no more than a mirage. They should have stood within inches of each other. They might even have touched! For the love of Lot, how much easier could it be? And, instead, what happened? Beth got on the bus before Gabriela reached the sidewalk, and Gabriela, guided no doubt by the illogic peculiar to teenage girls, kept right on going.

It is, of course, unseemly for an angel to groan out loud, but Otto is definitely tempted. He should, perhaps, be above such petty emotions as anger and the childish desire to push Remedios Cienfuegos y Mendoza into the Pacific Ocean, but Divine Beings have never been short of a temper – and he isn’t above anything at the moment; he’s right down in the thick of it: traffic, crowds, pollution and enough noise to make it a major miracle that the dead manage to sleep at all. And it hasn’t even occurred to him yet that Remedios’ failure to swap the girls back was deliberate.

Otto stares at the smiling, toothy faces painted on the back of the bus as it lumbers up the road. This is all his worst fears of what might happen to Beth parading around Los Angeles in the body of Gabriela Menz come true. Does she even know where she’s going? Will she know when she gets there? And what if she doesn’t get there? What if she gets off at the wrong stop? Is waylaid by some tanned lothario and never seen again? Drowns in the Pacific? When it comes to imagining worst-case scenarios, Lillian Beeby could take lessons from Otto.

“Don’t worry, Beth!” he calls after her. “I’m on my way!” Then bangs his head on the steering wheel again as another car hits him from behind.

City of more than angels

“It’s
called pay and ride, sister.” The driver, well aware of the dangers of making eye contact with strangers in Los Angeles, isn’t looking at Beth. “No pay, no ride. I don’t give change.”

Lucinda tugs on her arm. “Maybe we should just get off,” she whispers.

In Beth’s normal life, she would already be gone. All the driver would have had to do is clear his throat and Beth would have turned as red as sunset over the Gulf of Mexico, stammered an apology and backed down the steps (probably into someone trying to get on). But Beth is not in her normal life, and so she doesn’t feel guilty about not having the exact fare; nor does she feel that she has no option but to obey the rules. What she does feel is an overwhelming desire to get somewhere she considers safe as quickly as possible, and right now that somewhere is The City of Angels College of Fashion and Design, where Taffeta Mackenzie awaits them in a diabolically bad mood. There’s nothing like being hounded by some crazy creep to make Taffeta MacKenzie look like the soft option.

In her normal life, Beth never tries to argue or make excuses because it never really works for her. There is something about her face – the serious line of her thin lips and the fairly permanent look of worry in her eyes – that makes her look insincere and uncomfortable when what she wants to look is vulnerable and sweet. But today Beth’s face belongs to Gabriela Menz, a girl who’s been getting her way with a smile and a flutter of eyelashes since the day she was born, which gives Beth all the confidence she needs to try.

“Please,” says Beth, wheedling but not begging. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but we do have money. We just don’t have the exact fare.” She holds up a crumpled bill. “If you let us on, maybe somebody can give us change.”

Perhaps because this is such an extraordinary request, the driver finally looks over at her. This is a man whose job keeps him in an almost constant bad mood, but for some reason that bad mood is momentarily replaced by a feeling of warmth and kindness, as if an angel is whispering in his ear,
Oh, come on. Give the poor kid a break.

“Forget it.” He winks. “I won’t tell, if you don’t tell.” He waves them on and closes the door.

The bus lurches back into the traffic, which is now moving like a river in flood.

Beth stops abruptly only a few steps down the aisle. She has never been on a city bus before, and, like a desert nomad seeing snow for the first time, she is both intrigued and a little alarmed. She stares down the aisle. Narrow seats filled with weary-looking people, dingy windows and a floor that’s been trodden on by hundreds of filthy feet. There are probably enough germs on this bus to bring down the entire west coast. Music leaks from iPods and MP3 players; someone shouts – to whom exactly isn’t clear – “Yeah, well I care more about what my parrot thinks than your opinion!” The air conditioning isn’t working, and the heat combines with the smells of sweat, pollution, chemical fragrances and things that probably shouldn’t be named to create an aroma that is fairly unique to the public transport system of LA. Many of the passengers have their heads bent over newspapers, books or phones, but, with the exception of the blind man with the dog, the ones who aren’t absorbed in some activity stare back at her. Unblinking. Many of them give the impression of being fairly unstable. The guy with the beaded necklace and the tattoos. The old lady with a bag of light bulbs on her lap. The man in the tuxedo. The woman in the shower cap who’s talking to herself. The woman all in black saying the rosary. The youngish man rocking back and forth in his seat at the back.

And yet Beth realizes that for once in her life she isn’t afraid. Now that she’s over her initial surprise, she feels almost excited. She, Beth Beeby, is on an LA bus, without her mother, and the world hasn’t come to a horrible end. The spectre of Lillian Beeby in rubber gloves with a bottle of disinfectant under her arm, muttering about epidemics, may not be far away, but the actual flesh-and-blood person is. It’s as if she’s been released from a cage.

Lucinda, however, is nervous. “Gab?” she hisses in Beth’s ear. “Gab? What the hell are we doing here?” Lucinda followed Beth onto the bus without thinking, indeed without actually being aware of what she was doing, pulled along by some strange compulsion. And now she finds herself on a crowded city bus without being able to say how she got here or why. She’s never been on a city bus before, either. Indeed, the only city she’s ever visited is Portland, Maine, and Portland, Maine is not LA. Up until this point, that fact has been in Los Angeles’ favour; but now she’s not so sure. LA’s supposed to be all about glamour and glitz – beautiful people wearing fabulous clothes – but all that stopped dead at the door of the Metro. In here it’s just regular people with the glamour and glitz of dollar-store flip-flops. It is safe to say that had Lucinda heard Lillian Beeby’s warnings about public transport, she wouldn’t have ignored them the way some people have.