Her body was telling her it should be the middle of the night, her heart was telling her her life was over, but the brazen mid-afternoon Californian sun dazzled and scorched regardless.
As Ros dragged her suitcase through the crowds and the drenching humidity towards the taxi-rank, she was stopped in her tracks by a woman’s shriek.
‘It’s an alien!’ the helmet-haired, leisure-suited matron yelled, jabbing a finger at something only she could see. ‘Oh my Lord, look, just right there, it’s a little yellow alien.’
How very Californian, Ros thought wearily. Her first mad person and she wasn’t even out of the airport yet. In other circumstances she’d have been thrilled.
Hastily Bib assumed invisibility. That was close! But he had to get out of here because he knew bits and pieces about planet earth – he’d been forced to study it in ‘Primitive Cultures’ class. On the rare occasions he’d bothered to go to school. Apparently, Los Angeles was alien-spotting central and the place would be overrun with X-Filers in a matter of minutes.
Looking around anxiously, he saw a small girl-type creature clambering into a taxi. Excellent. His getaway car. Just before Ros slammed the door he managed to slip in beside her unnoticed, and the taxi pulled away from the crowd of people gathered around the hysterical matron.
‘But, Myrna, aliens ain’t yellow, they’re green, everyone knows that,’ was the last thing that Ros heard, as they skidded away from the kerb.
With heartfelt relief, Ros collapsed on to the air-conditioned seat – then froze. She’d just got a proper look at her cabbie. She’d been too distracted by Myrna and her antics to notice that he was a six foot six, three hundred pound, shaven-headed man with an eight-inch scar down the back of his scalp.
It got worse. He spoke.
‘I’m Tyrone,’ he volunteered.
You’re scary, Ros thought, then nervously told him her name.
‘This your first visit to LA?’ Tyrone asked.
‘Yes,’ Ros and Bib answered simultaneously, and Tyrone looked nervously over his shoulder. He could have sworn he’d heard a second voice, an unearthly cracked rasp. Clenching his hands on the wheel, he hoped to hell that he wasn’t having an acid flashback. It had been so long since he’d had one, he’d thought he’d finally grown out of them.
When the cab finally negotiated its way out of LAX, Los Angeles looked so like, well, itself that Ros could hardly believe it was real – blue skies, palm trees, buildings undulating in the ninety-degree haze, blonde women with unfeasibly large breasts. But as they passed by gun-shops, 24-hour hardware stores, adobe-style motels offering waterbeds and adult movies, and enough orthodontists to service the whole of England, Ros just couldn’t get excited. ‘It’s raining in London,’ she tried to cheer herself up, but nothing doing.
To show willing she pressed her nose against the glass. Bib didn’t, but only because he didn’t have a nose. He was enjoying himself immensely and thoroughly liked the look of this place. Especially those girl-type creatures with the yellow hair and the excess of frontage. Hubba hubba.
Tyrone whistled when he drew up outside Ros’s hotel. ‘Class act,’ he said in admiration. ‘You loaded, right?’
‘Wrong,’ Ros corrected, hastily. She’d been warned that Americans expected lots of tips. If Tyrone thought she was flush she’d have to tip accordingly. ‘My job’s paying for this. If it was me, I’d probably be staying in one of those dreadful motels with the water-beds.’
‘So, you cheap, huh?’
‘Not cheap,’ Ros said huffily. ‘But I’m saving up. Or at least I was, until last night …’
For a moment terrible sadness hung in the air and both Bib and Tyrone looked at Ros with compassionate interest laced with a hungry curiosity. But she wasn’t telling. She just bit her lip and hid her small pale face behind her curly brown hair.
Cute, Bib and Tyrone both realized in a flash of synchronicity. She’s cute. Not enough happy vibes from her though, Tyrone felt. And she’s not quite yellow-looking enough for my liking, Bib added. But she’s cute, they nodded in unconscious but undeniable male bonding.
So cute, in fact, that Tyrone hefted her suitcase as far the front desk and – unheard of, this – waved away a tip.
‘Maaan,’ Tyrone thought, as he lumbered back to the car. ‘What is wrong with you?’
After the glaring mid-afternoon heat, it took a moment in the cool shade of the lobby for Bib’s vision to adjust enough to see that the hotel clerk who was checking Ros in was that Brad Pitt actor person.
What had gone wrong? Surely Brad Pitt had a very successful career in the earth movies. Why had he down-graded himself to working in a hotel, nice as it seemed? And why wasn’t Ros collapsed in a heap on the floor? Bib knew for a fact that Brad Pitt had that effect on girl-types. But just then Brad Pitt shoved his hair back off his face and Bib realized that the man wasn’t quite Brad Pitt. He was almost Brad Pitt, but something was slightly wrong. Maybe his eyes were too close together or his cheekbones weren’t quite high enough, but other than his skin having the correct degree of orangeness, something was off.
Before Bib had time to adjust to this, he saw another earth movie star march up and disappear with Ros’s suitcase. Tom Cruise, that was his name. And he really was Tom Cruise, Bib was certain of it. Short enough to be, Bib chortled to himself smugly. (Bib prided himself on his height, he went down very well with the females on his own planet, all two foot eight of him.)
The would-be Brad Pitt handed over keys to Ros and said, ‘We’ve toadally given you an ocean-front room, it’s rilly, like, awesome.’ Invisible, but earnest, Bib smiled and nodded at Ros hopefully. This was bound to cheer her up. I mean, an ocean-front room that was rilly, like awesome? What could be nicer?
But Ros could only nod miserably. And just as she turned away from the desk Bib watched her dig her nails into her palms and add casually, ‘Um, were there any messages for me?’ While Brad Pitt scanned the computer screen, Bib realized that if he had breath he would have been holding it. Brad eventually looked up and with a blinding smile said, ‘No, ma’am!’
Bib wasn’t too hot on reading people’s minds – he’d been ‘borrowing’ spacecraft and taking them out for a bit of exercise during Psychic lessons – but the emotion coming off Ros was so acute that even he was able to tune in to it. The lack of phone call was bad, he realized. It was very bad. Deeply subdued, Bib trotted after Ros to the lift, where someone who looked like Ben Affleck’s older, uglier brother pressed the lift button for them.
Bib was very keen to get a look at their room and he was half impressed, half disappointed. It was very, tasteful, he supposed the word was. He’d have quite liked a water-bed and adult movies himself, but he had to say he was impressed with the enormous blond and white room. And the bathroom was good – blue and white and chrome. With interest he watched Ros do a furtive over-her-shoulder glance and quickly gather up the free shower cap, body lotion, shampoo, sewing kit, emery board, cotton buds and soap and shove them in her handbag. Somehow he got the impression that she wasn’t what you might call a seasoned traveller.
A gentle knock on the door had her zipping her bag in a panic. ‘Come in,’ she called and Tom Cruise, all smiles and cutesy charm was there with her case. He was so courteous and took such a long time to leave that Bib began to bristle possessively. Back off, she’s not interested, he wanted to tell Tom. Who’d turned out not to be Tom at all. He only looked like Tom when he was doing the smile, which had faded the longer he’d fussed and fiddled in the room. At the exact moment that Bib realized why Tom was lingering, so did Ros. A frantic rummage in her bag and she’d found a dollar (and spilled the sewing kit on to the floor in the process). Tom looked at the note in his hand, then looked back at Ros. Funny, he didn’t seem pleased and Bib cursed his own perpetual skintness. ‘Two?’ Ros