LA to The Bay

Chapter 5: Los Angeles International Airport

Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)

I stare at my reflection in the mirror, mortified. I can't believe that the first time I'm going to see Louis in a year and I look like this; like I've just spent the past eleven hours not on an air craft but in a tumble dryer filled with bleach; an experience which has left me with the look of windswept paralysis and with all colour stripped from me. How people can just walk off an airplane looking like 'they've just stepped out of the salon', yeah you remember the advert, I have no clue, but this appears to be the case judging by the young women who are clambering around me, fighting for a look at the mirror so they can re-powder their already sparkling noses.

'That sure was a long flight, huh?' One of the angels speaks to me, her blonde waves bouncing and her all American grin smiling at me so sincerely, so pearly white. I look back at her in horror, mute, having re-caught a glimpse of my own pale image. I haven't even made it through baggage reclaim yet, but I'm already beginning to think that maybe California isn't the best place for someone like me to be visiting. Someone gothic looking. Or Parisian chic as I prefer to call it.

'I told you that bag was no good.' Harry hurls at me as I stumble through arrivals, my hand bag slipping repeatedly from my shoulder as I struggle to pull my suitcase at the same time.

'Well may be if you just offered to pull my suitcase for me that would solve all of our problems?' I smile at him sarcastically but still with an actual bit of a real plea in it. I mean why can't he pull my suitcase for me; both of his hands are free since he's only carrying a back pack (where are all his clothes and personal hygiene products and medicines etc. etc.?), and it's hardly like he can't handle the extra load; you could pack the boy up like a donkey and he wouldn't break a sweat. Plus I thought carrying a ladies bag was the sort of thing guys like him liked to do? You can bet that if I were that blonde girl from the toilets he'd be offering his services as quickly as a rat running out of a drain pipe.

'You're such a girl.' He snatches the suitcase handle from me, feigning that I'm somehow putting him out, like he actually has anything better to be doing.

'Wait!' I thrust my hand in front of Harry's chest as he barges towards the exit, but of course I fail to make even a dent on to his tall frame.

'What are you doing?' He stops, more likely out of curiosity than any general willingness to do what I am asking of him.

'We can't just walk straight out there.'

'Why not?'

'Because it's America out there.' He's looking at me like I've gone crazy, but seriously he can't actually expect that I'm just about to bound out the door without giving any appreciation to what is about to happen? Talk about a philistine.

'And?'

'And I've not been to American before.'

'Me neither, so what are we waiting for?'

'Because I need to savour it, to take the moment in, because this is the only time in my life that I'm going to step out in to America for the first time.'

'You are so weird; Lottie was dead on about that one.' Losing his patience he steam rollers his way out of the exit, the sliding doors revealing, one, two, three.....a multi-story car park. But still it is different, not the grey and brooding concrete of home, but beige, sunlit.

'Wow, it's just like being born.'

'You remember that?'

'Of course not!' Talk about an idiot. 'I mean metaphorically, since we're so far away from England. This is the furthest away from England I've ever been. It would actually be physically impossible for me to walk home now, what with there being an ocean in between. I've never been anywhere where there was an ocean in between before.'

Ignoring my request for just a minute longer to study both the grand symbolism of the moment and the car park, Harry hurls me in to the nearest available taxi. It's an actual yellow taxi cab, just like from the New York movies, except we're not in New York, we're in Los Angeles. Who knew that they have them here too; has it driven all the way across the country from New York, just to meet me? I would have stared in awe, just at the size of the damn thing, which was nearly the length of a bus, but Harry has opened the passenger door and rudely threw me, as if from a slingshot, across the black leather seat of the car.

'Wow,' I repeat as the taxi circumnavigates the airport concourse for what has to be the third time. 'I read that even Los Angelenos are daunted by the size of LAX. That must be why even the driver doesn't know where he's going.'

'Yeah, and the whole city; I thought Sydney was big but that's practically a village compared to LA. Did you see the size of it as we were landing?'

'I tried, but your big fat head was in the way, remember?'

Los Angeles had started about an hour before the plane actually landed. Despite my view being semi-obscured by Harry's sudden giddiness to look out of the window when the plane began its descent, something which reminded me never to have children, or pets, or anything else with the mental age of a two year old, I had managed to witness the moment that the barren nothingness, which too had stretched on for hours after the ice had ended, turned in to something, at last the marked line, the perimeter of the metropolis, and just like the nothingness before it, the urban sprawl, a giant grid of criss-crossing lines, went on and on forever.

Now that we are on the road, I begin to realise that it too is continuing with no obvious end in sight. Just like they said, everything in America really is bigger. One road merges with another and another until I begin to think that there might be nothing else here other than road. Big fat dusty concrete road like a giant spaghetti junction. I wait expecting a semblance of a town to begin to form, to feel like we are headed towards its centre, but it never comes, until after what must have been an hour the taxi suddenly cuts off the motorway and pulls in to a car park. The car park of the Holiday Inn, Anaheim. I've travelled all this way to stay at a hotel on the edge of a motorway. Aren't there supposed to be things in Anaheim, like Disneyland? But I certainly can't see Disneyland. All I can see is a motorway.

Authors note: Who can relate to this feeling when they step off a plane? I always feel so grubby no matter how short the journey (I'm not a good flyer and find 2 hours to be too much!), but yet some people always manage to look amazing; how? This chapter is dedicated to @Fangirlishness especially Erin for writing amazing things about my stories.

PS: I uploaded Creep by Radiohead, because it is hilarious in an ironic kind of way, especially the line 'what the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here.' Since it sums up Niamhs life right now.