‘That’s me now,’ Emily said. ‘And, you know, it’s not so bad.’

Silence descended, and I could almost hear the turning of the cogs in her overtaxed brain.

‘But I still can’t believe it,’ she breathed. ‘Like, what happened?. Did he end it or did you…?’

I didn’t want to discuss it. I wanted to forget it and enjoy myself. ‘Neither of us. Both of us, I mean.’ Then, like a grenade, I lobbed into the conversation, ‘I think he’s met someone else.’

‘Who? Garv!’ she shrieked, nearly so high-pitched that only bats could hear her.

‘He’s an attractive man.’ I felt oddly defensive.

‘That’s not what I meant.’ With a volley of well-targeted questions she extracted the story of Truffle Woman, and she took it almost worse than I had done. Driving into the sun, she muttered, I thought the decent behaviour of Garv Garvan was the one thing I could depend on. I thought he was one of the few good ones out there. Maggie, I’m devastated.’

‘I’m not exactly jumping for joy myself.’

‘And who is this girl?’

‘Could be anyone. Someone he works with. Could be…’ I made myself say it. ‘Could be Donna. Or Sinead. He gets on well with both of them.’

‘It’s not Donna or Sinead. They wouldn’t do that. And if they did I’d have heard. Men,’ she said bitterly, ‘they’re all the same. The few brains they have are in their mickeys. How much do you hate him?’

‘Lots. When I have the energy.’ The thing was that even though I was raging with Garv, in a way I didn’t blame him.

Emily gave me a sharp look. She knows me very well, I have no secrets from her. But before she could explore further I tried to head her off at the pass.

‘It could be worse,’ I said with grisly cheer. ‘At least it’s amicable… Amicableish,’ I added, less certainly. ‘The money and house will be sorted out properly.’

‘Of course they will. Garv is nothing if not decent. At least you don’t have –’ She stopped, aghast.

‘Children,’ I finished for her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘It’s OK,’ I reassured. It wasn’t really, but I wasn’t going to think about it.

‘Do you – ‘she started, at the same time as I said, ‘Anyway! So what road is this we’re on?’

Emily ignored my attempt to change the conversation. Instead she warned, ‘Amicable or not, you’re going to have to talk about you and Garv.’

I sagged with reluctance, and all of a sudden I knew what this reminded me of. When I was sixteen I’d slipped coming down the stairs and my knee accidentally went through the glass front door. I’d ended up with hundreds of slivers of glass embedded in my knee, each one having to be removed individually with tweezers. Pain relief hadn’t been on the agenda, and I’d been rigid and sweating with pain and the anticipation of more to come. Every word about me and Garv was like another sliver being picked from my raw flesh. ‘I will talk about it,’ I said. ‘But not now. Please.’

‘OK.’

Eventually, the character of the roads began to change until we were in a modest residential area. All the houses looked like one-offs – some adobe style, some New England, some deco, painted in low-key pastel shades. There was a general air of kemptness. Everywhere there were flowers.

‘We’re nearly there. Nice, isn’t it?’

‘Lovely.’ It was just that I’d expected something a little edgier from Emily.

‘When I first moved to LA I had to live in a rotting – literally, it was rotting in the heat – apartment building in East LA, and people kept getting shot and killed outside my window.’

OK, maybe edgy wasn’t so great.

‘The murder rate in Santa Monica is way low,’ she reassured.

Marvellous!

We pulled up outside a white clapboard bungalow, with a small lawn on to the pavement. Water sprinklers worked like searchlights back and forth on the grass.

‘Keep an eye out for them fecking sprinklers,’ Emily advised. ‘They’re on a timer, and they’re always surprising me and destroying my hair. And keep an eye out for the neighbours on that side, they’re the kind of people who give LA a bad name.’

‘Serial killers?’

‘New Agers; they’d read your aura as soon as look at you. The neighbours on the other side aren’t much better. Boys. College students, doing computer programming or something. They’re handy if ever you want to buy drugs, not that you’d want to, I know.’

This gave me a little breathing space of relief; I didn’t want to be surrounded by married couples. Drug-dealing students were far preferable.

Flowers blazed shocking pink against the dazzling white of Emily’s house. It was all very pretty. Then I noticed the ‘Armed Response’ sign in the front garden and my delight with my surroundings dimmed somewhat. What happened around here that an armed response was necessary?

We hoicked my stuff into the cool, shady house. While I oohed and aahed over the hardwood floors, white blinds and pretty back garden, Emily made straight for her answering machine. ‘Gaaaaaargh,’ she groaned. ‘Ring, you bastard.’

‘A man?’ I asked, with as much compassion as I could muster.

‘I wish.’

‘Oh?’

‘Maggie,’ she slumped on to a chair. ‘I’m officially Down on My Luck.’

‘Are you?’ I asked faintly, suddenly aware that I wasn’t the only person in the world who was mid-crisis.

‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

‘Are you?’ How had I suddenly mutated from comfortee to comforter?

Emily sighed, then her whole sorry story unravelled.

After the studio had passed on Hostage (or was it Hostage!?) her agent had fired her, which was nothing less than catastrophic. Studios never, but never looked at work which hadn’t been submitted by an agent; and it was almost impossible to get an agent, she explained. Every day, literally thousands of screenplays arrived at the mail rooms of the big agencies and had to go through a savage screening process. If the mail-room kids didn’t like it, it was out. If it made it past them, it had to pass muster with a reader. In the unlikely event of that happening, it got read by an agent’s assistant. And only if they raved about it would an agent deign to look at it.