Not the End of the World (4 page)

Under neon loneliness, motorcycle emptiness, as another Welsh crooner had put it.

The boulevard was being cruised by a different kind of vehicle at this less fashionable hour of the day. If there was a shopping‐
trolley dealership nearby, it had cleaned up, because everybody had one. And no wonder: low on gas consumption, four‐
wheel drive (each independent of its partners), and enough space to store everything the driver owns. In the world.

Only downside was the engines looked fucked. All of them. They trundled by, glancing at Steff with no more interest than as if he was a streetlight or a mailbox. They seemed to be trudging along with the resigned automation of commuters, thinking neither of their journey nor their destination; they just did this, every day. Steff wondered where they were going, where they went when the stores opened and the Japanese teenagers erupted from the Roosevelt in search of a Hollywood that plainly didn’t exist any more, if it ever had.

One stopped a few yards ahead of Steff, both hands gripping his trolley, a deluxe model with a brake‐
bar underneath the handle. He wore a browny‐
green coat with combat pretensions, perhaps more suited now to purposes of camouflage in an environment of cardboard and shredded polythene. His face was partially obscured by matted dark hair, which draped down as he hung his head, looking towards the floor. His skin was an irregular brown, or maybe even dark ash‐
grey, and it was only as Steff drew nearer and caught a glimpse of his profile behind a gap in his crusty hair that it became apparent that the man was white. He was pissing from somewhere inside the flapping coat. Just standing there and pissing, the urine splashing down around his feet, directly on to one of the stars that lined both pavements east of La Brea, around Mann’s Chinese Theater.

The trolley man unclasped his brake‐
bar and shuffled on, ignoring Steff’s inquisitive presence. Steff looked down at the centre of the puddle. Burt Lancaster. Yeah, he thought. I saw The Cassandra Crossing too.

Ah, Hollywood. The glamour.

Steff crouched, his back against a palm tree, and took half a dozen shots of the boulevard as it tapered into the east, those trolley‐
jockeys with their backs to him looking like they were on a desperate pilgrimage towards and beyond the concrete horizon. He stood up again and stepped away from the tree, looking up at it and clicking off a few frames of its flaccid and ill‐
coloured foliage. The tree looked like it smoked. You’re fooling no‐
one, he told it. You don’t belong here any more. You just hang around, making everyone feel guilty about what’s been spoiled. Get your own trolley and get out of here.

He looked at his watch again and swore. He had known this would happen. He’d flown in from Heathrow yesterday: eleven‐
hour flight, eight‐
hour time difference. The trick is to stay up as late as you can, so that you crash out at close to the local equivalent of your regular bedtime, even though back home it’s already the next morning. The obstacle is your digestive system. He had gone out for a walk around half six, and found the surrounding neighbourhood far too disturbing to explore in his current jet‐
weary state. Mann’s was just opposite the hotel, but the only picture starting around the time he was passing was a Merchant‐
Ivory number, and he decided this would constitute a foolish and unnecessary element of challenge in his quest to stay awake. He settled for a take‐
out pizza, a six‐
pack and an in‐
house movie. He was asleep in his clothes by seven thirty, and hopelessly awake at four a.m.

Someone called Joe Mooney was picking him up at the Roosevelt, for breakfast and then to take him to collect his hire car. But that was at ten.

He had leaned across the double bed and reached for his bag, remembering even as he thrust his hand inside that the book he was half‐
way through was now probably somewhere above the Atlantic, jammed firmly into seat‐
pocket 22D, between the lifejacket instructions and the boak‐
poke. Still, if he fancied a read there was always the Bible, as one had been considerately left in his room (as it explained on the cover) by the Gideons.

The Gideons, whoever they were, had Steff baffled. An organisation dedicating time, money and resources to leaving Bibles in hotel rooms all over the world. What the fuck for, he wondered. Who ever actually sat down and flicked through one at home? Probably the same kind of person who would also carry one around with them anyway. Sure, if one of those people arrived to find they had forgotten their precious tome, they’d be hugely grateful to find one in a drawer by the bed, but what were the odds, pitched against the number of wee brown books they had secreted round the globe?

These guys had seriously miscalculated the demographics, too. The majority of hotel rooms on this planet – outside of stand‐
up obvious tourist destinations – tended to be used by businessmen travelling to meetings, conferences or whatever, sleeping one to a room. They get there after maybe a ten‐
hour flight or a long drive in the pouring rain. Steff would put real money on the first thing they said to themselves not being, ‘God, I need a prayer. If I don’t have a wee prayer to myself soon I’m going to go crazy. Oh, a Bible! Thank Christ! Acts of the Apostles here I come!’

He figured it would be a kinder service to mankind to go round the world removing Bibles from hotel rooms and replacing them with wank mags. It seemed a safe bet which one the average businessman would rather find by the bed when he came in alone, tired and stressed out after a long trip or a boring seminar. Just snuggling up against the headboard, all on his own, miles from home, crick in his neck, hasn’t seen the wife for four days … Only one of the two aforementioned publications would ensure he was fast asleep with a smile on his face ten minutes later, having shouted hallelujah and heartily thanked God for his good fortune.

Steff’s tilt at breaking the record for the world’s longest bath was thwarted by the hotel’s having installed the world’s shortest. He had settled for pulling the curtain inside and having a shower instead, but even the duration of that was truncated, partly by the water’s intermittent switching between cold and mutilatingly hot, and partly by his having to get on his knees to get his hair below the fixed shower‐
head.

Kneeling was a problem for Steff. Kind of a psychological thing, one might say.

So, having dried off, got dressed and familiarised himself thoroughly with the hotel’s fire regulations, room‐
service menu, laundry arrangements and international dialling literature, and having flicked through the vacuous TV channels and satisfied himself that the BBC were wrong not to market the test‐
card as a format overseas, he had opted for the heretical pursuit of taking a (very) early‐
morning stroll in LA.

His subversiveness was confirmed by the time he had made it as far as the Pantages Egyptian Theater, another archaeological remnant of the fabled lost city of Hollywood. Steff had seen the place in old movies and in documentaries about old movies, once a palatial showcase for the local product, site of legendary premieres where the gods of a black‐
and‐
white pantheon gathered before crowd and camera. Now it was a second‐
run cinema, showing last season’s hits for two bucks, like an ageing and ruined society beauty turning tricks to pay the rent, wearing the torn and faded dress that wowed ’em three decades ago. From red carpet to sticky carpet.

Steff had clicked off a whole roll in front of the place, and was moving on again when the patrol car pulled alongside. The window slid down and a uniformed white cop in uniform shades looked up at him.

‘Excuse me, would you mind stopping there a minute, sir?’ he said.

Being stopped didn’t surprise Steff. He didn’t necessarily cut a suspicious figure, but he did cut a conspicuous one. He was six foot seven, broad‐
shouldered but not muscular, and had straight blond hair swept away from each side of his face like curtains, running down to between his shoulder blades at the back. What didn’t help was that his default expression tended unintentionally to convey anything between bored disrespect and flippant scorn, depending on the observer’s particular insecurities. His imposing size had the delicately balanced dual effect of both aggravating those insecurities and diminishing the desire to take the subsequent disgruntlement too far. The real problems arose when the first effect outweighed the second, because that usually meant Steff was facing someone who was a lunatic, armed, or backed up by reinforcements. LA cops scored at least two out of three. For this reason, more than climate, he had listened to a friend’s advice about not bringing the long black coat he wore back home, ‘because it always looks like you’re concealing a shotgun inside it’.

Steff stopped and held out his hands to gesticulate his co‐
operation.

‘Mind telling us where you’re going, sir?’

‘Eh, nowhere, really. Just taking a wee walk.’

‘Along Hollywood Boulevard at this time in the morning?’

‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, with a please‐
don’t‐
shoot‐
me smile. ‘I couldn’t sleep. Just flew in yesterday and the time difference has kind of messed up my body clock, you know?’

The cop looked confused. The weakness in Steff’s tactic was that he had forgotten how few Americans ever travel beyond the place. Jet‐
lag empathy was a long‐
odds gambit. However, his main intention was to give them a taste of his accent and play the no‐
threat dumb‐
foreigner card. His information was that the average LA cop’s ‘you ain’t from round here’ reflex was an amusedly benevolent one. Long as you were white, anyway.

The cop nodded, his stern expression lightening.

‘It’s my first time in Los Angeles and I thought I might as well take a look around while the streets are empty, seeing as I was awake,’ Steff elaborated, trying to capitalise on the breakthrough.

‘You don’t sound English. Where you from, Australia?’ Success.

‘No.’ He laughed, shaking his head. ‘Scotland.’

‘Hey, I was close,’ the cop replied, not, apparently, joking.

‘Yeah,’ Steff agreed. Right planet, anyway.

‘Well, sir, if I was you, I’d get myself a rental car. You’ll see a lot more of the city that way.’

And if I was you, I’d lose the shades before Tom of Finland gets his sketch pad out, Steff wanted to say, but wisely settled for ‘Picking one up later this very day.’ This declared intention of reassuring conformity seemed to do the trick. The cop was putting his patrol car back into gear.

‘Well, I hope you enjoy your stay. Thank you for your time, sir.’

Hey, call me Ray, he thought. Ray fucking Bradbury.

Steff had been sitting in the Roosevelt’s impressive lobby for a hopeful half‐
hour before Joe Mooney appeared bang on ten as arranged. He had taken a walk around the overlooking mezzanine level with its Hollywood Golden Age memorabilia, including a photograph of the Pantages in its splendid monochrome prime. Perhaps the most fitting reminder of the area’s heritage, however, was in the closer view the mezzanine afforded of the lobby’s ornate ceiling, whose wooden crossbeams and elaborate cornice‐
carvings were betrayed as merely shaped and painted polystyrene. Steff smiled. Fair enough, he thought. This town was selling illusion, and no‐
one in it was pretending otherwise.

‘Stephen Kennedy?’ asked a voice beside him. Steff had been scanning the entrances for his contact, willing him desperately to show up and relieve the monotony. He was also ravenously hungry, as his body, eight hours ahead of the clock, was largely under the impression that it should have already had at least two meals and be gearing up for a third. Such distractions caused him to start visibly when he heard his name spoken just above his left shoulder, in what was unquestionably a female voice. He looked up to see a petite black woman standing before him, attractive in a ‘forget it, you’ll just upset yourself’ kind of way, and exuding a business‐
like smiling calm that was probably quake‐
proof. Her face looked like it had built‐
in air‐
conditioning, and she wore a blue trouser suit that an industrial steam‐
hammer couldn’t put a crease in.

‘I’m Jo Mooney.’

‘What? You’re …’ he flapped. She held out a hand, which he grasped unsurely. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he managed, unconvincingly.

‘I know, I know,’ she breathed, as he rose out of the leather chair. ‘You were looking for someone male and white. Good job I was looking for someone gangling and confused, or we might have missed each other completely.’

‘Touché,’ he conceded with a grin, which she returned.

‘Come on, let’s get to my car.’

Steff was glad to be led towards the valet car park at the rear and not out front to the street, as he feared that the incongruity of his elongated, jet‐
lagged and generally dazed appearance walking beside Jo Mooney’s shampoo‐
ad prettiness would inspire rescue attempts.

‘So are you Josephine, Joanne or what?’ he asked, trying to dig himself out of the hole she had dropped him into.

‘Joely. And, in answer to your next question, one of my great‐
grandmothers was Irish. It’s a real messy story. There’s an orphanage involved somewhere too. The details are pretty sensitive around my extended family. I learned not to ask.’

‘I wasn’t going to,’ Steff insisted innocently.

‘Well, why not? In case I told you Mooney was the name of the family that owned my ancestors in the Old South?’

He was hugely relieved to spot the sparkle in Jo’s eye that betrayed a hidden smile. She knew she had been rumbled and burst out laughing.

‘You know, I’m going to come round and take the piss out of you when you’re jet‐
lagged,’ he told her.

Jo laughed again and handed a ticket to the valet.

‘So did you get a cab out here from the airport?’ she asked, pulling her red Pontiac out on to Sunset Boulevard. Steff noted with disappointment that she was indicating left at the junction with La Brea. He didn’t know what imagined wonders he was hoping to see on Sunset, but the wide‐
eyed teenager inside him fancied it anyway.

‘Not so much a cab, more a kind of minibus affair, driven by a manic Korean and his co‐
pilot. I think we spent longer going round the terminals circuit than getting up to the hotel. Or maybe it just seemed longer, what with my whole life flashing before me every time we pulled in or out of a lane. It was like Cowdenbeath Racewall on a Saturday night.’