Chapter Forty Four

 August 2003

I'm staying in a hostel in Los Angeles. It claims to be right by Venice Beach but I can't find the beach. Instead I find the internet cafe Global Gossip.

   I haven't checked my email since the north shore of Oahu. There is a message from Steve telling me I should find a rich "scetic tank" to buy me drinks in Waikiki. I assume he means "septic tank." I frown at the words till I work out it's rhyming slang for "yank." I tell him about the free tours I went on with the hostel. I don't tell him about Justice. I don't tell him any of the things I wrote in French in Waikiki.

   I find the beach, a vast expanse of sand. The sea seems a million miles away. I take off my flip flops and trudge across it, feeling the damp sand between my toes.

   The sea is cold. I didn't expect this. It's the Pacific Ocean, it's LA, isn't it meant to always be warm here?

   I sit on the beach, writing in French again.

   Je ne voulais pas pour cela à passer.

   I didn't want this to happen. 

   It's probably grammatically, idiomatically incorrect. But that's the point. I don't know how to say it in English. I don't know how to say it in French, so I have to find a way, piecing together words I know, so the enormity of the meaning becomes lost in the puzzle of how to express it.

   A man sits next to me.

   He asks me if I'm a student, where I'm from. He says I don't look English. I wonder what Americans think English people are supposed to look like.

   He asks if I want to go for pizza.

   'No.'

   'Why not?'

    'I'm not hungry.'

    'Do you have a boyfriend?'

    'Yes.'

   He leaves me alone. I'm annoyed that it's my boyfriend's "ownership" of me that he respects, not my right to say no.

   I walk to Santa Monica Pier and amble along it, looking out to sea. The horizon is so far I think I can see the curve of the earth.

   I remember my friend, Lucy, and I, aged sixteen, sitting in the alleyway behind her house looking up at the stars.

   'Sometimes you can see the earth's round,' she said.

   'Yes, you can see how the sky bends round it,' I said.

   That was before she became pregnant with a drug addict, before I became pregnant with a man I'm not even sure I like anymore.

   But obviously I'm not pregnant or that man on Venice Beach wouldn't have talked to me.

   As I walk back to Venice Beach a man stops me. He is middle aged, wearing baggy trousers and a kaftan. He tells me he can see pain. He sees pain in my lower back.

   There is no pain in my lower back.

I get on the bus to spend my last few days in Hollywood. I walk along the road with all the stars. There are people dressed as stormtroopers. At the Chinese Theatre I put my hand in the handprints. I think my hands are the same size as Julie Andrews'. I go to the square where you can see the view of the "Hollywood" sign on the mountain. A coach load of pensioners is there too.

   'Is that it?' says one woman to her husband. 'We walked all the way  up here to look at a sign? Jesus Christ.'

   'Excuse me,' says another woman standing nearby, her voice dripping with disapproval at Jesus's name taken in vain.

   'Oh, I'm sorry, darling,' says the first woman. 'I didn't mean to upset you. It's just all that, just for a sign?'

   As I walk back to the hostel a man hands me a leaflet advertising an event. 

   'My name's Eddie,' he says. 'I'm twenty two and I'm studying s- Hey are you pregnant?'

   I nod. 

   'Good luck.'

   I smile.

  I nodded I nodded I noddedInoddedInodded

  I told someone I'm pregnant.

  A stranger. The first person I told was a stranger. 

  A man I'll never see again, a man who'll probably have forgotten I even exist by the end of the day.

   But of course it was a lie that I'm pregnant. I nodded just because he would have felt awkward if I'd said no.

   I'm not pregnant.

   Someone saw that I'm pregnant, and wasn't afraid to say it out loud.

I'm sharing a dorm with two girls who are in LA trying to become actors. They are working as strippers. One of them is meeting a man privately. Her boyfriend arranged it. I hear her talking to the man on the phone in the middle of the night.

   'Did you miss me? She giggles, her voice false.

   He's obviously not interested in flirting, She stops giggling abruptly. Her voice becomes business like. 'Yes. Yes. I'll be there in ten minutes.'

   I wonder if she'll ever make it as an actor, or if she'll keep sinking further into this underworld.

I'm on the top bunk. There's no ladder. It's hard to climb up with my stomach feeling so out of place. 

   One morning in the shower I noticed my nipples are bleeding, a bloody imprint of each of them is in the cups of my bra. It must be from sand, I think. Gritty sand from Venice Beach caught in my clothes and rubbing till I bleed.

In the square where you can see the 'Hollywood' sign a theatre company are putting on a free show, a selection of songs from a play they have created. It's based on Frankenstein. I read that Mary Shelley wrote the book after a miscarriage. If I lost this baby what would I write?

   There is no baby to lose.

On my last day my flip flops breaks. I hobble back to the hostel on it.

Then I'm on the plane Heathrow.

It feels strange returning after all this time. I think maybe home is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I just need to hold on till January when I can meet Steve in Asia.

Chapter Forty Five