(2003) Overtaken Read Free

brunette.
    We were
very close, all went together to see plays, films, exhibitions at least a
couple of times a week, talked all the time on the phone, e-mailed and texted,
took at least four holidays a year together. I’d say we’d been pretty much
everywhere in the world where you could easily get a drink. Only a couple of
years ago Colin had introduced a previously unknown type of cerebral malaria
into the north-west of England after a beach holiday we’d taken in Cambodia. As
Colin said, that country was great when we went there but really it’s been
ruined now. In the last couple of years it has somehow lost its innocence.
    So the
walking holiday in Los Angeles? Well, about four years ago we all abruptly one
day desperately wanted to get into walking. It’s funny, you think when you get
an idea like that that it’s all your own, it’s unique to you, you’ve plucked it
out of the air; only when you look back on it a year or two later do you see
all the magazines you read at the time included big features on walking boots,
Gore-Tex jackets, the fun lives of hill shepherds and how walking is the new
thing.
    So
where were we going to go on our walking holiday? The six of us would go round
to each other’s houses excitedly clutching the beers and street vendor foods of
the country whose brochures we were poring over that week. Still it was hard to
decide: would it be exploring the canal towpaths of the Black Forest? Fourteen
days rambling the lakesides of the Argentinean pampas? Or three weeks falling
off the goat tracks and down the steep crevasses of the High Atlas Mountains?
Nothing really appealed to us until Sage Pasquale suddenly said, ‘Do you
remember. that Michael Douglas film Falling Down?’.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Directed
by Joel Schumacher,’ said Colin.
    ‘In
that film, he abandons his car, Michael Douglas, and he walks right across LA
to the sea at Santa Monica .’
    ‘Where
Robert Duvall shoots him,’ said Colin.
    Sage
Pasquale ignored that. ‘I’ve always thought it would be amazing to walk down
some of those boulevards of LA.’
    ‘But
didn’t the guy in that film get attacked by gangs and stuff before he was shot
by Robert Duvall?’ asked Siggi.
     ‘Yeah,
I know,’ replied Sage Pasquale, with some asperity. ‘Like obviously some parts
of LA are too dangerous to walk in, we all know that for Christ’s sake!’
    Yes we
did, we knew there were many areas of Los Angeles where no one ever walked;
we’d been there before, but when we looked at the maps there still seemed to be
huge stretches in the prosperous parts of the west of the city, Hollywood,
Westwood, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills in which it must surely be safe to be
a pedestrian.
    And the
thing was, we were entranced with how us it was — quirky, individual, original.
We were already thinking of the stories we’d tell other people even before we’d
bought the airline tickets to fly there. Thinking back now there were probably
little groups of Europeans doing exactly the same thing up and down the
boulevards of LA that summer. I’ fancy now that I saw them off in the distance.
Some of them are probably still there, their bleached bones lying in the
concrete drainage ditches of the LA River where they had their throats cut.
    So in
the brown heat of a California summer we trod the sticky streets of LA, along Fairfax
Avenue to the Farmers Market we went, down Wilshire Boulevard to the famous La Brea
tar pits we shuffled. (‘La Brea means “Tar Pits” so they’re called the Tar Pit tar pits,’ moaned Siggi.) Up 107th Street to the famous Watts Towers we limped.
    Yet
rather than being the quirky fun we imagined it would be, the whole thing was a
horrible, unpleasant experience right from the start. See, it turns out you
cannot tell what Los Angeles is like from a map; all those streets, even in the
nicest areas that had appeared benign, even on those streets, the sidewalk
would suddenly run out and an evil-smelling culvert would