Sleepy heads in foreign cities become foreign heads in sleepy cities. He dismounts, pulls at the engine. The car remembers your preferred temperature, and I connect my own Spotify to pulse through its speakers, singing Olivia Rodrigo in Hollywood with angst I do not feel and passion I have not felt. We draw up in traffic, and I glance at the car to my right, the driver made closer by his open window and my conviction that I must sit on the right-hand side of a car, no matter what, no matter which side of the road we drive down. He smokes a cigarette and chews gum simultaneously. I give a laughing, disbelieving exhale which comes out like a scoff. I have never seen anyone do that before. He is wearing cashmere in 29 degrees. His nails are manicured, and he drives a hybrid Honda. His watch has a thin black leather strap. I wonder whether I am describing the man next door or Patrick Bateman. I am glad to be behind tinted glass.
When the Havis are on there’s no stopping me, except for the fact they give me blisters. Your dress is so cute. Man, these Californians really have a thing for yellow spots.
I wonder if Art is always performative, and if vest tops have become a new religion.
I order a medium light roast pistachio milk latte, hot. He tells me it may be 25 minutes. I take my number and my handbag and I sit in the sun, in a funnel light which streams down the crack of the building like a chink under an unstopped door. Not every day is about publication. These days, there is a quiet in my mind which sounds like a baby sleeping. These days, I pour water through the fridge and it cascades onto the kitchen floor in a parturient, unfiltered mess. These days, I wake so early it could still be yesterday, I wash my hair with coconut scented curl shampoo and I dwell on the fact that my association with cities is unintentionally linked to what chemicals I have rubbed through my hair there.
(I am sitting so quietly, a fly has landed on the back of my hand. I am a canyon of pale discovery for it, its iridescent green body a dark spec of ultra-life on the gnocchi scar which discolours my hand. I feel him move in pencil sketches, the millimetres marking my skin in rhythmic, unintelligible dot-to-dots. He hovers; pauses; I lift my face to the sun; close my eyes; he rests. He stops in the reflection of my signet ring, basking in its golden orb, his rightful place found in the halo. I think of Jesus and the Last Supper. I think of the miles I flew to be here. I think that I never want to leave).
When my coffee arrives, I believe I could drown myself in it.
The mountains emerge from the clouds like sand dunes made out of cardboard in children’s pop-up books. Aeroplanes switch with seagulls in the sky, whining and crying as I lay my naked body beneath them, waiting for my pores to dry in the sun. I read for hours, suspended. (I wonder whether it is possible to be expelled by a book). The Santa Ana wind is blowing: anything can happen. It makes the palm branches look like dead animal hides in the gutters. Another plane whines overhead, rising too quickly from Santa Monica Airport. I shuffle, rolling onto my side, hitching one elbow beneath my ear in a victory salute (“V - for Victory”, I spelt it for the taxi driver). I can feel the cobweb of heat threading under my skin, my nipples burning tapenade and my elbow sprouting freckle spots all at once. Later, I will sit back on my ankles in child’s pose and listen to a homeless man shouting in the street. They all seem to wear black, the homeless people (though I saw one in Vegas-style rainbow platforms, his flea-bitten ankles swelling through the straps like watermelons in plastic wrap). They are grains of black sand in the stretch of Venice Beach. Pressed under foot, the wetness around them bulges, stains, and dissolves without a trace.
When I wake at ten past five I can hear the voices of people back home pulling at the strings in my head, tugging me in every direction as though tethering a hot air balloon while weaving a wicker basket and threading a spider’s web. I want nothing more than to ignore them, to shut off all these demands on my attention.
Nothing could be very small here. Nobody’s life, or coming-home-from-school routine, or extra-marital affair or breakfast. Two ghosts flap madly in the hedgerow, a bowl of tricks or treats enshrined in front of them like an alter. I picture curly hair, and satchels dragging along the pavement. I picture people’s lives, their mundanity framed, famed, in Hollywood starlight. It seems more unreal in reality than it did in imagination. This has felt like a very self-centred trip. I haven’t so much described my surroundings as my response to them. I wonder whether that is the malady of Hollywood, or the malady of myself.
I have never met a dog called Alice.
Hollywood is the grubby footprint of the city, its instep studded with stars and tourist shops selling dollar magnets. I flex my toes, testing the boundaries of pain that the taut blisters between them can produce. It feels like a burn, raw as sushi meat, but it is not uncomfortable. I do it again.
When I wake again I see crumpled sheets, twin beams of headlights, puddles spewled like blood on the stairway floor. I take an Uber to the cafe because I am impatient and hungry for my breakfast. The world smells of fried food and pizza. The human connection of a real taxi driver feels weird, like we are just reading a script. Manifesting against the rain. He has maroon seats and he begins to talk to me as we watch the orange flashing a tempo I feel in my body on the traffic lights.
He tells me the way to see LA is to go to the places where the money isn’t. He says his daughter is the best thing to have happened to him. He tells me I am brave to travel, and that people should not be judged but co-operated with. He used to work at Disney, before they laid him off. I should go to a Lakers game: it is a catchment of Los Angeles life, and why, why, would anyone live anywhere else? (I crumble my cookie and feel senseless in my body because I am so absorbed in someone else’s life. The salt flakes under my thumbnail and the chocolate leaves a melted imprint on the fat knob of my thumb. I take a long pull at my coffee and fold cookie into my mouth, stretching my tongue out to meet it the way a Disney dog licks a baby‘s face. My final bite is pleasing; sweet. I suck the chocolate down with the froth of my coffee and bite into a grain of salt. My napkin lies scrunched on the plate, the funeral pyre of my breakfast).
We speed down the freeway and I do not mention that I’ve been taking Waymos, that I have contributed to doing him out of a job for the second time in a single year. He believes AI will be in our future, the way the internet was in 1999. “At least, the rich folks I drive tell me so”, he says, and I have a mental image of his white Mazda speeding up Beverly Boulevard, glamorous women draped in pearls catching his eye in the driver’s mirror while they languidly wave their elongated cigarettes at him, living off their husband‘s money and the dead-end free-fall of loneliness which seems to pervade the existence of women in their middle fifties all over the world. I picture him thinking he never wants his daughter to grow up like that, with that empty cavern robin’s breast inside her soul. I picture him thinking he’d rather she grew up like me: courageous. Brave. Either way, I don’t tell him we end up alone. (My hair is a lion in his rear-view). I am today’s 8:45, a young-faced girl on the backseat with yellow shoes and shiny skin, out without a sweater as he watches the clouds rolling over the Dead End signs, over the hills from uptown Malibu. I hear my life through his ears, tucked as they are beneath his baseball cap above his colourless shirt. I wanna teach middle schoolers in high school (but what does that even mean?). All religions; every book. In this morning’s retelling, every ending is possible. I’d live in New York, Paris – LA maybe I guess, the flash of a smile up to the reflection of his eyes in the wing mirror. You’d fit right in here. We’re all dreamers. I turn my face to the window, and repeat I am a dreamer in my head, spaced out like the words are a dotted staccato. I feel like I am clinging to reality with my toenails.
The doors are open and the air in the café is cold, blown in by the plops of the raindrops and the acid smell of burnt coffee. The rain comes in a downpour, and passes. The baristas are discussing a film, analysing the acting in detail and saying phrases like “she’s always shot with that lingering sense of longing” unironically. Tiny ant hills of goose flesh have risen on my arms, the soft hairs standing on end in a protective layer of militant fluff. The couple to my left draw a butter knife through thick brioche and – “I think it’s strawberry” – flip jam onto toast in clotting consistency. The raindrops which fall from the awning hit boxes of organic mushrooms. The tomatoes are Heirloom and orange. I shake myself – dreamer – and go shopping. Baseball caps are worn backwards over here.
It was more a talk to me goose than a lipstick reptile.
There is cut glass on the pavement and cacti in the street. I see white mustangs and try not to walk on the cracks, but this is too hard since they are everywhere, earthquakes and rubble, breaking up the pavement into a million piece jigsaw. I go places I can write and make that my entire reality, greeting drunk men on the sidewalk and pretending I will shop but just standing, staring, writing sentences in my head instead. The taxi seat is too tipped back on Muddlebury street and in the parking lot of a 7/Eleven I wonder which drug they’re all on to get caught in a hunch, static for a moment, trapped air and fizzling nerves, paralysed at a right angle. It takes minutes for them to revitalise, stand up, recover verticality like their ceiling was never the floor. The driver turns to look at me, shaking me from the notes page of my phone which is leading me down back alleys of lit-up LA as if from a bad dream. He offers to turn the air con down - “I can slow it down, if you are could” - which makes my scalp tingle even colder because he noticed me, offers something kind. The clouds are big bruises over the city, Olympic Boulevard a strip down which we travel in iced companionship, the left hand side of the city darkened with rain when to my right it is all sunshine and palm trees. The weather is bad: great patches of pouring rain and hot sparks of sun reflecting off truck bonnets. He clicks his knuckles one by one (the corner of my right eye flinches painfully with every movement) and clears his throat. We have no music, unusually. The stereo is paused on Nwaeze. I didn’t go out with the right clothes on but I do not care. When we join the freeway, he clears his throat again. I feel a twinge of guilt at not engaging in conversation, but this morning was enough. Basketball courts go by, flooded. The school busses are empty now. My days are stretching ahead of me in the formation of letters on a page, drawn slowly in 2B, lead pulled though treacle to leave sticky alphabets in the sun. I don’t feel jet lagged anymore. That shell is a coffin in last week’s graveyard, and I will fall into it again someday. The squirrels here are enormous, like they’ve eaten two McDonald’s cheese burgers before getting in a wind machine and blow drying their hair backwards. There is a slight warmth in the air underneath me, which feels like breath on my neck. Speckled raindrops blow at me like spray from the sea as I gather by book and my pencil and go to write outside. I have scooped pesto from the pot and chomped bananas from the freezer, so I pick up my tea, smiling at the Emma Bridgewater flag of Great Britain which makes me feel like home (because home is inside me), and move the outdoor cushions into a corner of the balcony caught by sunlight. My clothes are piled beside me. I open my notebook, stretch my arms against the tension in my neck, and begin.