‘Bu–’

‘Nnnneh!’

She was clearly reluctant to let it go, but at least she didn’t start disagreeing with me again. ‘Do some work,’ I urged.

‘All right.’ She switched on her laptop and disappeared into her writing. I switched on the telly, hoping for a similar type of escape, and so began another day without someone buying Emily’s script: I had a sudden surreal flash that I was in some sort of Beckettian play, and that the rest of my life was going to be spent stuck in this house with Emily, waiting for good news that never came.

After thirty minutes of unproductive channel-hopping, my nerves couldn’t take any more so I decided we needed food, and set off for the supermarket.

The raggedy shouting man was there, like he always was, this time roaring about police shoot-outs and heroes taking a bullet. I must have been giving off kick-me-when-I’m-down signals, because as soon as I got out of the car he lit up, sprinted straight across the parking lot at me and yelled ‘Zoom!’ right into my face.

My heart pounded with shock. Though Emily had said he meant no harm, he seemed out-of-control crazy. Skirting around him and his manic eyes and his bad smell, I hurried across the tarmac, trying to avoid the indignity of full-blown running. I was close to tears by the time I reached the air-conditioned haven of the supermarket.

Then there was the worry of how to get back to the car without being accosted by him, so when I had finished shopping, half-ashamed of my wussiness, I asked one of the bag-packing boys to escort me. Just as well I did, because as soon as we appeared through the sliding doors, the raggedy man yelled angrily at me, ‘You’re supposed to be ALONE!’

‘He’s kinda harmless really,’ the boy tried to reassure me, as we put our heads down and rattled the trolley at high speed across the parking lot.

‘Mmmm.’ But I was no longer that concerned for my physical safety. It was what the nutter had said: ‘You’re supposed to be alone.’ It sounded almost prophetic and I was indescribably depressed by it.

‘We’ve a visitor,’ Emily said as I staggered into the house with the shopping bags. I assumed it was Ethan. Since the night he’d slept on the couch, he was a regular guest, under some illusion that he was welcome. He kept showing up to hang out and watch television.

But it wasn’t Ethan, it was Mike, armed with his smudge stick and lepping about good-oh.

‘Hey, Maggie,’ he grinned. ‘Just clearing a little more of the toxic energy in here.’

‘Good man,’ Emily urged.’ Get rid of it all, so I’ll get good news from the studio.’

‘That’s not how it works.’ Mike gasped a little from his exertions. ‘What it means is the right thing will happen.’

‘And the right thing is that they’ll buy it for a million dollars.’

‘I keep telling you, be careful what you wish for,’ Mike grinned.

When he was taking a breather from the dancing, he turned his attention to me. ‘And how about you, Maggie?’ ‘I’m OK,’ I said unenthusiastically. ‘Yeah?’ ‘Mmmm.’

He beamed at me, a full-on, beardy beam and said, ‘When you re in a dark place, you know what you gotta do?’ I shrugged. ‘What?’ ‘Hold your face up to the light.’

I hadn’t a clue what he meant, I don’t really get that woolly, mystical talk, but for the second time that day I was a little tearful.

‘Be kind to yourself,’ he said.

‘How?’

‘Nurture yourself. Take time out to smell the flowers or listen to the ocean.’

‘Urn–’

‘You’ll know what’s right for you. Maybe do a little meditation and listen to your own stillness?’ ‘Ah, OK.’

‘Hey, if you girls aren’t doing anything tonight, why don’t you come by ours? We’re having one of our fable-telling evenings.’

Both Emily and I froze as we frantically sought some sort of excuse.

‘Er, what goes on at this fable-telling evening?’ I asked. It was the best I could do.

‘Some beautiful people come by and we tell stories from our different cultures.’

‘When you say beautiful people,’ Emily said, ‘you’re not talking about Gucci-sunglasses-streaked-hair-and-speedboat beautiful people?’

Mike laughed. ‘I mean beautiful on the inside.’

‘I was afraid of that. Anyway, asking me to come to a fable-telling evening would be like inviting a dentist over for dinner, then getting him to do a couple of root canals between courses. I’m telling stories all day long, it’s my job.’

Mike shrugged equably. ‘I hear you.’

I shoved my feet into my mules. ‘OΚ, I’m off. ‘’Where?’

‘I’m holding my face up to the light and I’m going shopping. I don’t know how I didn’t think of it before now.’

‘Excellent!’ Emily said. ‘Good for you.’

I took myself down to Santa Monica, where I spent an unexpectedly happy afternoon wandering along Third Street Promenade in the sunshine, popping in and out of Aladdin’s Caves of fabulousness.

So much was happening that I was once again glad to be in LA: a man with a clipboard gave me two tickets for a test-screening of a new movie; I saw someone who might have been Sean Penn buying a packet of Lifesavers; a man painted from head to toe in silver, juggling silver balls, was being filmed by a small crew. All the time the sun shone and the funny-knees-denim-skirt shop gave me a sympathetic hearing. ‘Why are you returning this garment?’ the girl asked, her pen poised over the form (oh yes, you’ve to fill out a form when you return things).

‘It makes my knees look funny.’

‘Makes… knees… look… funny,’ she said as she wrote.

Then she went to her manager to see if making knees look funny was worthy of an actual refund or just a credit note. It was close, she told me, it had gone to the wire, but in the end the manager felt that as the garment couldn’t actually be regarded as defective, I was only due a credit note.

For the rest of the afternoon, I didn’t even do my usual stunt of buying too much of the wrong things. Money changed hands only once – when I bought two little T-shirts with stuff written on them. Emily’s said ‘I want, I want, I want’ and ‘Boys are Mean’.