Читать книгу Hard, Soft and Wet - Melanie McGrath - Страница 18

The foyer of the ten-screen multiplex in Culver City, Los Angeles, is already full of teenagers just out of school, waiting for the late afternoon showing of Streetfighter – the Ultimate Battle.

I wander back into the mall, pick up a root beer and an apple pie in McDonald’s and sit myself next to an off-duty security guard with a face full of freckles and hands all knotted up like vine stems. We make awkward small talk for a while. He mentions that Culver City was recently voted the second most desirable neighbourhood inside Los Angeles city limits.

‘It just looks like a hatch of freeways joined by shopping malls to me.’

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ returns the guard, offended. ‘You should see this place for example, first thing in the morning. The folks from the Culver City senior citizens’ mall-walking club come in around ten. Perfect behaviour. It’s clean and quiet till lunchtime and then these mall rats –’ He gestures towards a group of teenagers lounging round McDonald’s drinking Coke. Two tough-eyed girls glower back – ‘begin drifting in and the whole atmosphere of the place …’ He holds his hands up to the heavens, then begins to twist a waxed burger paper into a candle, forcing it inside an empty carton of french fries. ‘I just wish they’d find someplace else to go.’

‘Like where?’ I say, trying to catch his eye. He looks up from his carton crunching and there’s meanness written on his face.

‘I don’t know, Tallahassee for all I care.’

I was seventeen when I first saw Los Angeles. Staying in a borrowed apartment in Venice, I spent my days boogie-boarding and watching TV and playing beach volleyball with Nancy. I thought everyone in California lived that way then. I was naive and I wanted to believe it.

A pay phone outside Footlocker.

‘Is Isaac there?’

‘Uh uh.’

I check my watch and see there is nearly an hour and a half before we’re due to meet. An almost inaudible sigh trickles down the phone line.

‘Are you his father by any chance?’

‘Stepfather, why?’ I explain that I’ve arranged to see Isaac later on.

‘That can’t be. Isaac had his mother drive him up to San Francisco last night on a business matter.’

I hang up. What the hell kind of fourteen-year-old makes last-minute twelve hundred mile round-trips on business?