The Truth about My Success (21 page)

Harriet waggles in place, but doesn’t come. Oona crawls forwards. Now she can see why Harriet stays where she is; she’s tied to the table leg by a short rope.

There’s a flash, and then another. Oona’s not looking at legs any more; she’s looking into the lens of a camera.

“Thanks, sweetheart! That’s great!”

And now she’s looking at a face that isn’t as familiar as Harriet’s, but isn’t unknown to her either. She’s seen it on the street. Outside the studio. Looking in at her when she and Leone and Jack are out for dinner. Pressed against the window of a boutique or store. Sitting behind the wheel of a compact grey car that looks like thousands of others – but isn’t. It’s the car that follows her. And there, with the grin of a man who just won the lottery, is the man who drives that car. His name, though Oona doesn’t know this yet, is Ludlow Spantini.

Oona is on her feet as quickly as he is, but he has his back to her as he squeezes his way between tables and chairs and is unaware that she’s coming after him. She stops only long enough to untie poor Harriet and scoop her up into her arms.

Because there are so many tables and so many people sitting at them, and because Mr Spantini isn’t expecting to be followed by an irate teen TV star and her dog, he moves slowly, still smiling to himself and thinking about captions:
Fallen Angel… So Far from Heaven… Paradise Lost…

But suddenly there she is, blocking his way.
Avenging Angel
. He automatically puts his camera behind his back.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to touch your stupid camera.” Oona has learned a lot about enunciation and projection since she moved in with the Minnicks. Her voice is loud and clear and certain. The way God might sound if He were a teenage American girl. “I just want to talk to you.”

“Honey…” Ludlow Spantini is still smiling. “I really don’t have ti—”

“Oh yes you do. Time is something you do have. You sure as sunrise have enough to follow me around like you’re some kind of spy. I see you every day. Everywhere I go.”

He takes a step forward, but she moves no more than a brick wall would. “Look, honey, I think you—”

“No you don’t think. That’s one of your big problems. You just go around doing what you want without any kind of thought in your head, unless it’s how much money you think you’re going to make.”

Mr Spantini holds up his hands as if calming a restless crowd. “If you don’t mind—”

“I do mind.” Oona seems to be getting taller by the second. “I mind very much. I told you I want to talk to you, and I meant it. You’re so totally fascinated with me, I’d think you’d be happy to talk to me. I’ve seen you standing around with your camera when all I was doing was buying a bottle of water. A bottle of water! How fascinated must you be by me? Well I’m pretty fascinated by you, too. Because I don’t get you. I can’t figure out what kind of life you have, tailing people who are just going about their business. Trying to catch them doing something stupid or embarrassing or – better yet – something that could ruin their lives.”

Mr Spantini now tries to move backwards, but there seems to be someone blocking that way, too. “I really have to get going.”

“
Now
? You attach yourself to me like you’re a tick and now, when you can actually talk to me face to face, you want to leave? You’re hurting my feelings Mr— I’m sorry, what’d you say your name is?”

There’s no way he can go left or right, either. “Look, honey, I—”

“Stop calling me honey.”

“Look, Pa—”

“You know what I really wonder about, Mr Lots-of-Nerve-but-Nameless? I wonder if when you were a little kid, you used to lie in your bed at night dreaming of being a sleazy star-snapper when you grew up. Did you think, wow, wouldn’t it be cool to hound and harass people? Maybe even destroy their careers or break up their families? And how totally phenomenally great would it be to torment and terrify an innocent little dog just to make somebody look like a fool?”

At the mention of her, Harriet, who could probably have her own film career, whimpers gently and looks very sad. The air around them almost sighs.

Ludlow Spantini is aware, in a vague but uneasy way, that no one around them is eating or talking or even bent over their phones any more. They’re all listening to Oona. This is not the way his day was supposed to go. He shifts both his eyes and his body, looking for a way out. “I didn’t hurt—”

“Do you know what I did this morning?” Oona laughs. “But of course you know! You’ve been tracking me since I left my house. So you know that I went to a homeless shelter, and a hospital, and a hospice this morning. And I met some really great people. Decent people who don’t just want to take from the world, but want to give, too. People who are trying to help other people because they don’t just care about themselves. They work really hard, and they see a lot of suffering and unhappiness. The ones who get paid don’t make much, but a lot of them are volunteers. And then there are the people who’ve had some bad luck or made some bad choices, but they want to make their lives better. That’s how I spent my morning. And what do you do? You demean the art of photography, that’s what you do. And you don’t do much for being human, either. You make something happen just to get a picture. You have no principles and you have no shame.”

There are a few seconds of silence when Oona finishes. And then the crowd starts to clap. If Oona were on the stage and not at an outdoor eatery it would be a standing ovation.

People
used to rely on their calendars. Calendars that would sit on the desk or hang on the wall or the back of the door to the kitchen with messages scrawled in the boxes of the days:
Joylene’s party… Shopping with Annie… Pizza night… Dentist 3.45
. Now most of us rely on our phones and computers to remind us when we have a card to send or something to do. But not, of course, at Old Ways. Because the ranch insists on living in the labour-intensive past, when the residents’ phones and computers are taken from them they’re given a calendar to replace them. The calendar has been specially made, each month decorated with an appropriate picture of the ranch at that time of year (next year’s will feature the work of Raul Riley). The ranch in summer. The ranch in autumn. The ranch at night. Teenagers smiling from the back of a pick-up. Teenagers with horses. Teenagers with cows. The barns under fountains of fireworks. Two girls leaning against a wooden fence holding chickens. A Christmas tree in the common room. A posse of kids sitting around a campfire with big grins on their faces as if they’d all been born under a clump of sagebrush.

Since things like the birthdays of aunts and visits to the dentist don’t really impinge on ranch life, most of the residents use these calendars to keep track of their chore schedules (Tuesday, kitchen duty; Wednesday, mop hall), therapy sessions (Monday, private; Friday, group), and special occasions (Saturday, camping; Sunday, barbecue). Since Paloma didn’t think of herself as a resident but as an inmate, she also used hers to tick off the days like a prisoner scratching off the days of her sentence on the wall. Every evening when she put another X through another box she’d think:
Another day down, not long now…

And so the days and weeks have passed – and Paloma’s sense of desperation has passed with them. The routines of the ranch have given her a new rhythm to her life. She doesn’t eat by herself, or spend hours on her computer by herself, or have no one to talk to but herself any more. Rather than crossing off the days, she puts stars in the boxes that are special – Pilar’s birthday… the talent show… the summer dance.

Indeed, it is about the summer dance that Paloma and Tallulah are talking as they leave the dining hall after supper on this pleasant summer evening. Paloma was elected head of the dance committee, a job she is taking very seriously.

“But it isn’t like it’s a debutante’s ball,” Tallulah is saying. “It’s just a dance on a ranch.”

“So? It’s a big deal for us. We have a real DJ.”

“I don’t know how real Calvin Meiser is,” says Tallulah. “You weren’t here when the goat trapped him on the roof of the chicken coop.” Life at Old Ways, though dull as swamp water, is not without incident. “It didn’t enlarge anybody’s opinion of him.”

“The goat won’t be at the dance.”

“OK, so we have a DJ. But it’s still not exactly the prom. We’re not all wearing fancy clothes and having our hair done. We’re just putting on clean jeans and T-shirts.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t decorate the common room and make it look special.” Paloma, of course, has never so much as decorated an Easter egg (Leone always buys a dozen from a local artist, and pays a designer to provide a different themed tree each Christmas). But over the seasons Faith Cross has decorated a desert dugout, a cave, an abandoned airplane hangar, a mud hut, a trailer and a giant Sequoia, so Paloma feels that she knows what to do. And she’s seen enough movies and TV shows to know what a dance should look like.

“You mean balloons?”

“Yeah, balloons. And streamers and coloured lights. Maybe we can make some paper flowers or something like that. Or doves.” Faith Cross once decorated a Christmas tree with origami doves. “Make it look like a garden.”

Tallulah laughs. “You really are too much.” Unlike previous occasions when Paloma has heard these or similar words, this is not a criticism. “What were the chances?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning look at you. All heated up about the Old Ways summer dance. If anybody had told me when you first got here that you’d change so much, I’d’ve laughed in their face and called them stupid.”

Paloma gives her a friendly poke. “You’re the one who told me to get with the programme.” Though no one told her that she has to look forward to the dance.

“Well yeah, of course I did.” Tallulah pokes her back. “But I didn’t expect you to do it.”

Paloma shrugs in the new way she has mastered since she accepted that tantrums and meltdowns no longer get her what she wants, like a duck letting water roll off its back. “Well, you know what they say about Rome.”

Tallulah doesn’t know.

The adage Paloma is thinking of is:
When in Rome, do as the Romans do
, but she doesn’t really know it either.

“It’s, like,
When in Rome, do something
– you know, like eat spaghetti or speak Italian. Something like that.”

“Yeah, but you’ve done more than eat spaghetti. You even did the Oregon Trail. I mean, that is really massive.” Tallulah winks. “I guess you’re even a better actor than you say you are.”

Paloma doesn’t quite hear that last sentence. Ms McGraw, aka the McNugget, is standing outside the office block, yakking to Ethan Lovejoy. “I’ll meet you in the common room later for that Scrabble game,” she says. “I have to go, Ms McGraw’s waiting for me.”

Next to talking to Ms McGraw, the Oregon Trail is a walk in the park.

Kara McGraw is a serious and earnest kind of person who totally believes the words of wisdom that decorate the walls of Old Ways. She always starts the day with a positive thought, and always ends the day promising herself to do even better tomorrow – a goal she often achieves. She and Paloma talk together for forty-five minutes three times a week, discussing everything from the food and the weather, to difficulties with other residents and livestock, to the anxieties and problems that have brought Paloma to this oasis of peace and security in a turbulent world. One of Kara McGraw’s many mottos is: No trouble too big or too small. And, as she never tires of telling Paloma, besides these sessions her door is always open – morning, noon or night – even if all Paloma wants is to shoot the breeze.

The breeze is not what Paloma would like to shoot.

Ms McGraw is a very nice woman, not even Paloma would argue with that, but she is also the human equivalent of a Hallmark card. A platitude for every occasion, that’s the McNugget. Forty-five minutes with her is like forty-five minutes wading through corn syrup in one of those old-fashioned dresses with the full skirt and ruffles. In the McNugget’s opinion the glass is not only always half full, it’s always half full of the purest, crystal-clear spring water (in which no fish, bird or mammal has peed or pooed). There isn’t a cloud that isn’t lined with gold. There isn’t a deluge that doesn’t produce acres of flowers. The darker the night, the brighter the dawn. Another of her many mottos is: God gives us problems so we can solve them.
How considerate of Him
, thought Paloma sourly the first time she heard this, but aloud what she said was, “You know, Ms McGraw, that’s really very true.”

Now, as she sits down and Ms McGraw asks her how she is today, Paloma says, “I’m good, Ms McGraw. I’m really, really good.”

“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that, Susie.” Ms McGraw looks happy. “I was just saying to Ethan how well you’re doing. You’re practically the poster girl for our philosophy and methods.”

Paloma, who still thinks of herself more as the poster girl for victimhood and parental cruelty, smiles her new at-peace-with-the-world smile. “Thanks. That’s really nice of you to say.”

“We get what we earn,” says Ms McGraw. “And look what you got.” She hands Paloma a postcard. It’s a picture of the sun going down over the Hollywood hills. “It came this afternoon.”

Paloma takes the card. On the back Leone has scrawled:
The sunset misses you, too. Hope you’re having a great time. Everyone sends their love. Hugs and kisses from me and Dad. Love, Mom
. Paloma slips the card into her pocket.

“What would you like to talk about today?”

“Well, you know, I was working on some ideas for the dance today and, I guess this is going to sound really weird, but it made me think about my mother.”

Paloma usually makes things up to tell Ms McGraw. Things she thinks the McNugget wants to hear. Or rather, she borrows shamelessly from TV shows and movies she’s seen. Tragic accidents. Horrible deaths. An extended family so dysfunctional they make the Borgias look like paradigms of human behaviour. In one memorable session that had tears in the counsellor’s eyes, Paloma even had herself separated from her twin at birth.