Chapter 10 Part 2

Judging the expressions of delight and surprise when the captain announced that it was clear and sunny day in Manchester, with a temperature of fifty degrees, Californians had just many illusions about the English weather as the Brits had about theirs.

Either that or global warming was messing everything up. No one took off their jackets, though; fifty was still too cold for an Angeleno in December. As Sarah had British passport, she avoided the long queue at immigration, Her one large suitcase, packed with Christmas presents, arrived quickly at the carousel, and though one of the officers gave her a second glance when she walked through the 'Nothing to Declare' exit, it wasn't because he thought she was smuggling something in.

The airport was noisy with the clamour of waiting relatives. Sarah's plane had arrived at the same time as a Jamaican flight, which explained the colourful costumes and steel band. Here to greet a visiting dignitary or sports team, she guessed.

She stood by the barrier holding on to her pushcart and scanned the crowd for Paula. There she was, waving both arms in the air behind a group of a Indian women in colourful saris. Sarah pushed forward, muttering excuse-me as she went. The arrivals concourse was crowded that is impossible to get through without bumping into people.

She almost ran over a small child and earned a dirty look for catching an elderly woman a glancing blow on the shin before she reached Paula. They hugged briefly, then Paula pushed Sarah back to arms-length and examined her. 'Let's have a look at you, then, our Sal.' The board Yorkshire accent came as shock to Sarah, though she didn't know why it should

She had spoken that way herself once, but now it sounded awkward and primitive to her, the mark of a certain class. She felt embarrassed for thinking such thoughts and cursed the English class system for always leaving its mark, no matter what you achieved. Had she been born to the upper classes and bred for success , Sarah though bitterly, she wouldn't always feel the bubble was about to burst.

'Well,' said Paula, I must say it's a big improvement on the last time.' What is?' 'Don't you remember? The make u, frizzy hair, the leather?. Sarah laughed. 'Oh. Yes of course.' She didn't remember, though which was hardly surprising given the condition she had been in during her last visit home. That was before California, before the U.S. tour Gary and his band, but it wasn't before the drugs and drinking; though she hadn't recognized it immediately, the craziness had already begun.

She didn't remember anything very clear about that period of her life. Nor did she wish to. This time she was carrying her quilted down her coat of many colours over her arm, and her blonde hair was trimmed neat and short. She also woke no make-up, a real treat after having the stuff plastered on every day at the studio.

'Mind you, Paula went on. 'You could do with putting a bit of meat on your bones. Have you been slimming and going to one of them health club places likes they do in Hollywood?' Sarah laughed. 'I run every morning on the beach, but that's about all.' In fact, only yesterday morning I stumbled across a dismembered body, she almost added, but stopped herself in time.

No point getting into that with Paula. 'Anyway', she said, it's illegal to sell fatty foods in California.' Is it?' 'Only kidding. Though sometimes you'd think so.' 'Well, you looked a bit better padded last time I saw you on television. How long ago did you make the programme?' 'Not long. Television puts at least ten pounds on you, didn't you know that.?

'How would I? I've never been on telly. I'm not the star in the family.' 'I just thought people knew, that's all Sarah said. 'Anyway, I hope I don't look that fat on the series.' 'I didn't say fat did I? Just a bit better padded.' 'Well thanks.' 'Don't mention it. Anyway, I suppose you look healthy enough,' 'Through for the life of me, I can't see where you're hiding your tan.'

'Which way?' Paula pointed and Sarah started pushing the throng. 'I don't tan well,' she said. 'I never did. You know that. The sun just burns me. Besides, she might have added, the studio prefers my 'poreclain' complexion; they say it goes with the plummy Brit accent. 'Well, pardon me for mentioning it.' Sarah laughed. Same old Paula, prickly as a cactus, quick to take offence when none was intended.

'Finally, they arrived at the car park and found the red Nissan. 'Unless you've learned to drive since you were last here, love,' Paula said, I'd try the other side.' Sarah blushed. Sorry.' She gone automatically to the driver's side. She get in the correct side and fastened her seatbelt. 'How was the drive over? she asked. Paula lit a cigarette and breathed a sigh of relief. 'Not bad. Roadworks near Barton bridge and an accident just past Huddersfield, but other than that...'She negotiated her way out of the car park, refusing Sarah's offer of money to pay the man in the booth, and headed for the motorway.

'It's a bloody maze round here,' she muttered. The car felt cramped and tiny to Sarah after Stuart's gigantic hunk of Detroit steel. She wriggled around in the seat to get comfortable , but still the roof was too near to her head and the windshield too close to her face. Cars made her more nervous than planes, which was one reason why she had never learned to drive. The smoke made her cough.

'All right?' Paula cast her sideways glance. 'Yes, fine. 'Ill open the window if you want. 'No, it's all right.' 'Really I don't mind. It's no trouble.' 'Well, maybe just an inch or so.' Paula opened the window a crack and pretended to shiver. The draught blew the smoke right into Sarah's face. 'Shit!' Paula missed the turning and went around the rounding about again.

Sarah thought of the little roundabout in Venice, once of the few she had seen in United States. She felt a momentary pang of homesickness for her beach house. It was the only place where she had felt truly at home in years, perhaps because it was where she had started putting her life back together after Gary. But thinking of the house also bought to mind a fleeting image of the severed arm and the heart in the sand.

Then she remembered the letter she had slipped in her luggage unopened. She had found it when she dropped by the house with Stuart to pack-at the last minute, as usual- before going to the airport. She looked out of the window and saw a local diesel train rattling along beside a canal.

Two boys stood on the stone banks leaning over the water with fishing nets. She doubted they had much hope of catching anything there in December, mils as it was. A yellow sign showing a man digging with a shovel appeared by the side of the road, then another. Soon the motorway was reduced to two lanes and they were crawling along between a silver Peugeot and a juggernaut from Barcelona.

Only when they had left the Manchester conurbation behind did Paula seem to relax at all. She still sat hunched forward in her seat, though, gripping the steering-wheel so hard her knuckles were white and squinting at the road and the cars ahead as if they were some sort of malevolent entities bent on her destruction.

She doesn't like driving, Sarah realized. It must run in the family. Her father and mother, she remembered, had never owned or driven a car in their lives. Soon the Pennines loomed ahead, furry green hillsides made eerie by mist swirling on their lower slopes. There was still plenty of traffic on the motorway as it passed through the grimy urban sprawl round Rochdale and Oldham, but the cars thinned out as it climbed a long, slow hill and cut a swath through the Pennines.

All around, sheep grazed and becks and streams trickled through deep clefts in the dark green hillsides, flashing in the winter sun. They passed lonely barns, hamlets, small stone bridges, a reservoir. At one point the motorway got so high up that Sarah's ears went funny like they did on the plane. She yawned.

Paula glanced sideways again. 'Tired? You're quite a hit over here, you know. There'll be plenty of people in the village wanting your autograph. Just thought I'd warn you. You probably get enough of that over there.' She jerked her head back, indicating the Atlantic. 'Not really,' Sarah said. 'Hardly at all, in fact.' In the first flush of her television success, Sarah had worried about people recognizing her and approaching her public places.

She dreaded living the kind of life Elvis Presley had, for example, imprisoned in Graceland having to hire a whole movie-theatre just to see film, or an entire fairground to go one ride, always surrounded by bodyguards. But after a while, she had learned a very interesting thing: people tended not to recognize her unless she went out of her way to be noticed. As herself, she could walk along the streets, shop in the Beverly Center, or browse along Rodeo Drive, and nobody came up demanding autographs.

On the other hand, if she dressed more like Anita O'Rourke, then people spotted her immediately. Most of the time she went around in jeans, a t-shirt and a Dodgers cap. Even the detective she talked to at the Beach hadn't recognized her at first. Again, she thought of the letters and the body in the sand.

She remembered the touch of the hand, cold and stiff like a broken marble statue, and then the dark blood clotted with sand. There had been a body, she couldn't deny that, but it had nothing to do with her. When she went back there with the police, the heart started seeing things, she told herself. Have you seen the show?' she asked Paula, snapping herself out of the reverie.

'Oh aye, said Paula. 'We seem to get nothing but American stuff these days. The kids like it. Not that I think they understand it, mind you, but they know it's their Aunt Sal. It's not bad.' 'And Dad?' In the silence that followed, Sarah looked at her sister profile and saw the lips pressed tight together, the dry, raw skin of her cheeks. Paula had never been the beauty-always just a little too shapeless, her features just a little too pinched and sharp hair too coarse and oily- but the years had also been unliked to her.

Though she was only thirty-six, Paula looked in her mid-forties, at least, Sarah thought, with deeply ingrained lined around her eyes and the corners of her thin lips, and a permanent aura of weariness and suspicion. She could do something about herself if she tired-wore more suitable clothes, went to hairdresser and chose the right make-up for example.

Her eyes were still beautiful. A lighter blan than Sarah's they, could light up a room when they weren't poisoned by distrust and bitterness, a sense of always being hard-done-to, as they usually were. 'He doesn't watch much telly,' Paula said finally. 'Only old films on video. 'What does he do.' ' Reads the paper. Look at his stamps albums, Stares into space a lot.'

'Does her get out much?' Paula shot her scathing glance. 'He's got bloody emphysema,' she said. 'He spends most of his time in a bleeding wheelchair with an oxygen tank strapped to the back. What do you expect?' Sarah said nothing. She felt herself redden. 'Course, Paula went on. it's bloody pit that caused it, you know.

Over thirty years down that pit, he was then what do they do? Thatcher's lot closes it down and chucks him out on the dole, that's what. On the bloody scraphead in his prime. A few years later he starts getting shortness of breath. And do you think there's any compensation? Is there hell-as like.' Sarah remembered that her father had smoked about sixty unfiltered cigarettes a day as well as woking down the coal mine, but she didn't see any point in mentioning that to Paula.

She also had to get used to the idea that, while Paula might complain about no money she felt she was entitled to from the government , any offers of helps form family or friends would taken as charity and dismissed. It was fine for the state to pay, but not for her sister to do so. Sarah had been allowed to put down the deposit on the cottages and pay for the renovations when they were knocked into one, but Paula would struggle with the mortgage, with the help of Dad's pension and her earnings as a barmaid, and she even made it clear that she regarded the down payment as a 'loan'.

Stubborn northern pride, Sarah thought. But she knew she might not have got so far without it herself. They edged away from the difficult subject of their father and Paula asked Sarah about life in Hollywood. Somehow, Sarah got the impression she didn't have much interest except for the occasional opportunity it gave her to put down the Americans and theirs ways.

To Paula, Sarah soon began to realize, Hollywood was, quite simply, a fantasy. It wasn't real; it didn't exist except on celluloid and in newsprint; its inhabitants were cartoon figures or cardboard cut-outs that just happened to look like handsome men and beautiful women. Their real-life exploits were scripted to titillate the masses. Actually, Sarah thought with a smile, Paula turned off the M62 south of Leeds and swung north-east towards the York bypass.

It was too warm in the car now. Stifling. Sarah found herself fading in and out of sleep. Rothwell, Swillington, Garforth. She saw them all through half closed eyes. Run-down housing estate, burned-out cars on patches of wasteland, the odd small park with bare trees and empty flower-beds, lots of pubs, squat churches, schools with iron railings around the playgrounds, zebra crossings and Belisha beacons out front, the occasional strip of shops newsagent's, mini-market, DIY, grocer's turf accountant's all in the inimitable mixture of dirty red-brick and dark millstone right.

The road ran close to the house and shopfronts, separated only by a narrow flagstone pavement. Everything seemed so tiny, so scaled down. It all felt so close, pressing in. Stout old women in threadbare overcoats waited at pedestrian crossing, faces obscured by umbrellas. Paula cursed the weather and lit another cigarette. Sarah opened her window another inch. The cool draught roused her a little. She could hear the hiss of the wheels along the wet road surface. The rain smelled fresh and sweet. A few drops moistened her cheek.

Paula glanced sideways. 'All right?' 'Mhmm. Just a bit tired.' 'forecast says we're in for a miserable Christmas.' Paula said with relish. 'Rain, rain and more rain. Maybe gale force winds too. And hail. We won't be having a white Christmas this year. That's what they say. Course, they're not always right.' Sarah closed her eyes and imagined fat snowflakes drifting into the sea and melting. Despite the freak conditions at Manchester, she had no illusions that weather was going to be anything other than grim; she knew she would feel chilled to the bone day and night, no matter how many layers of clothing she wore or how high she managed to persuade Paula to turn up the central heating. After all, she had lived in England most of her life.

On the other hand she didn't care whether it rained or hailed it was going to be cold. That was all that counted. She couldn't get all excited about the Christmas spirit in LA, especially with the unusual number of warm, sunny days they were getting this year. Even the few Christmas trees she had been appeared to be willing. She wondered what it must be like in Australia, when Christmas came in the middle of summer. Sarah rolled the window up again when Paula finished her cigarette. As they headed over back the bleak wilderness of the North York Moors, the rain driving almost horizontal and pouring so hard the windscreen wipers could hardly keep time, she slid sideways and rested her cheek against the cool glass.

She closed her eyes and smiled to herself. Paula was cursing a van churning up spray in front, but it didn't matter. Here, at least, were demons she could deal with, demons she knew. Family. It was hardly going to be merry Christmas, but she might be able to rebuild a few bridges and, more important, while she was away all her problems back in Los Angeles would disappear. When she got back to the beach house, all would be as if it had never happened.

Or so it seemed as she sat with the cool glass against her check and the rhythmic swishing of the windscreen wipers lulling her to sleep for the first time since she had pulled that severed arm out of the bloody sand.