Arrivals

By Susie Wild

A poignant and subtle novella, this story unfolds slowly, revealing a mother and daughter in opposite corners of the planet, both experiencing their own personal revelation. Following the tragic death of her boyfriend, 19-year-old Amy escapes to Los Angeles, where a man lay in wait for her: a man she didn't remember; a man who had been missing for her whole life. Back home in London, unravelling former West End star Maggie also seeks escape, fleeing empty nest syndrome to find memories of her first love dotted along the Brighton seaside and messages at the bottom of bottles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parthian Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781908069344

Susie Wild

Rarebit is edited by Susie Wild, General Editor at Parthian Books. Her debut collection of short stories The Art of Contraception (Parthian, 2010) was long-listed for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2011. She is the literary programmer for Do Not Go Gentle Festival in Swansea and a co-organiser of xx women's writing festival held at Chapter Arts Centre. She currently lives in sin in Cardiff, where she is working on her second collection of stories and a novel.

Book preview

Copyright

Amy

‘Sometimes when I tell the story of you

I make you out to be the bad guy

And though it’s true

Sometimes you are the bad guy

You’re still mine.’

from ‘The Good & The Bad Guy’

by My Brightest Diamond

If life went the way I wanted it to, the way it did in my dreams, my journey to Los Angeles would have turned out a little differently. The stills would have been bleached out and long and lazy like those from a good road movie. I would have arrived in LA in a beat-up Chevy, with Johnny Depp circa What’s Eating Gilbert Grape at the wheel besides me, after snaking up Route 66. Once we arrived we would have found the sepia-toned Hollywood of the 1950s or 60s – all that glitz and glamour. Stars, not ‘celebs’. Instead, the lacklustre LA that greets me resembles a British enterprise park, the same soulless low-rise structures, but with wider roads and a noticeable lack of home improvement stores. My life hasn’t been going my way much at all lately. Still, I should count my blessings and be grateful that my plane did not crash. I travelled by air direct from LHR to LAX where a man lay in wait for me. A man I didn’t remember. A man who had been missing for my whole life, or so it felt.

On the plane I’d been strapped into an aisle seat in the middle section of first class. Next to me a like-mother-like-daughter pair ate grotesquely, shovelling the tiny portions of airline food into their big mouths with bigger hands. Fake Chanel bling and baubles had spilled from their earlobes and choked at their flabby necks. I couldn’t eat – I’d forced down one pretzel and one glass of champagne. In ten hours. I knew I should have consumed more – it being free and all – but I’d found I was too nervous to chew and swallow. Too worried about what was to come next.

The in-flight films didn’t help – they all seemed to have the same themes of reunion and happy ever after. They had made me feel worse. I was not five any more, but nineteen. I didn’t believe in God and I didn’t believe in fairy tales. The only thing I did know happened with any surety was death. It was why I’d come to LA. I had started planning the trip after going to my first ever funeral. Turned out I had a vacancy for a man in my life and so it seemed appropriate. Although, if my mother had known where my first port of call was to be, I bet you a dollar that she wouldn’t have agreed.

*

The waiting man, Allan, had met me at the airport as planned. Initially I didn’t take in much; at arrivals he had stood holding an A4 sheet of paper up to the glass wall between us. The name on my passport was biro-scrawled across it. I had to look twice because I use a different moniker at home, my ‘known as’ name, my spy name. He was shorter than I had imagined. That had been the only thought to cross my mind before I had been caught up in passport control and baggage retrieval. Then, when I had been spat out at the other end of conveyer belts, fingerprints and form-filling, my hunger and nerves swapped places; took over. I needed to eat.

We loaded my rucksack into Allan’s car. It wasn’t a Chevy. He wasn’t Johnny Depp. The disappointment bit. The man I didn’t remember drove us past charmless motels and malls to a soundtrack of ‘The Love Hour’ on a soft rock radio station before pulling up at a place named Lou’s Diner. There, we sat down awkwardly at an ugly plastic table, facing each other like opposing armies. I devoured the menu, and then the food when it had arrived, swiftly, while taking stealth looks at my lunch date over the sauce bottles. We ate in silence, and as we did I tried to recall something about him. Anything. All I could find were a few stored stills put to memory from curling snapshots. A bowed head of dark curls. A roman nose. A garden with an apple tree. The legs I had once sat upon going down the slide. There were no facts or quotable lines of dialogue that sprang to mind; just swatches of fabric and snatches of scenes.

A question. The real world came back into focus. I raised my tired eyes to the mouth that had spoken the words. Livery lips lying expressionless above a double chin. I raised my gaze further across the pale, overweight face to the glass-blue eyes blinking back at me through dark, stunted lashes. The face, taken in its entirety, had a ghostlike quality, like the faded photograph that I had carried in my wallet for the last nine years, found abandoned and long forgotten within a splintered box in the garage. Time had altered its shape and softened once-chiselled features to create an ageing-baby in place of a young man, the familiar contours masked by well-fed flesh. I almost reached out with my hands to wave them through what was surely an apparition; instead I pinched myself to rein in my jet lag, and I noticed the Thai waitress smiling away to my right was neither chewing gum nor called Velma. This was no stereotypical American diner. This was no typical day. Allan spoke once again, his soft English Midlands tones stretched and twisted by seventeen years of LA living.

‘Do you want anything else, sugar?’

Did I want anything else? I dangled my red patent ballet pump from my bare toes as I considered the question. My thoughts rewound – zipping across the planet, and time, to a poky North London house full of black furniture, industrial chrome, and late 1980s decor highlighted with red, grey and white.