The Seven Deadlies
A MOMENT OF GRACE
I am an angel. Go on, have a good laugh, but, really I am. An angel. A proper, fully paid-up heavenly one with wings, halo, the whole lot.
And I'm in Los Angeles on a mission. A mission from God, since you ask.
Which all sounds very important but to be honest with you the reason I'm here isn't such a great one. Some angels just have a natural aptitude for the job. I, unfortunately, am not one of them so I've been sent to earth on a course. In order that I can help humans I need to understand them. So while I'm here I have to commit - but not TOO enthusiastically, of course - each of the seven deadly sins. I've got seven days to do it in.
"Envy, Sloth, Greed," Ibrox, my superior listed off. "Gluttony, Anger, Envy - no I said Envy already, didn't I? I can never remember the seven. It's the same with the seven dwarves, I can usually do five, then I just draw a blank. You try."
"Grumpy, Dopey, Snee..."
"No! The seven deadlies."
"Sorry. OK, Greed, Envy, Sloth, Anger, Gluttony…" I looked at him helplessly.
"Pride," he supplied. "And you'll remember the seventh."
So off I went. And here I am in Silverlake, Los Angeles, standing outside the apartment which is going to be home for the next week. Apparently I've been recommended by a friend of a friend of a friend and I will have two roommates - Nick, an actor who plays a lot of pyschopaths and Tandy, an actress who gets offered slutty-girl roles a lot.
I rang the bell. No-one came. I rang again and heard some muffled shouting from inside. Then a man wrenched open the door. "What?!" He was a mess - wild hair, wild eyes. Looks like this Nick is a method actor. And I wasn't too happy about the bad smell, either, but I'm sure they placed me here for a reason…
I stuck out my hand and gave him my biggest smile.
"I'm Grace and you must be Nick!" I was really 'on'.
"And you must be out of your mind," he growled.
Wrong apartment! Mine was the next one along. See what I mean about me being a lousy angel? Could you imagine if I was the Archangel Gabriel? I'd probably call to the wrong house and tell the wrong woman that she was the about to become the mother of God. I'll never make the big time, not if I carry on like this.
I moved one apartment along and Tandy answered the door. She gave me a speedy but thorough once-over and when she saw that she was thinner than me, she visibly relaxed and gave me a great big old smile. "Come on in!"
She was really, really pretty, but to be honest I could see why she kept getting the hooker-type roles. Her lips were so pneumatic they looked as if they were about to burst and she was x-ray skinny, apart from a very large pair of breasts which clearly belonged on a different body.
"Nick, come and say hey to your new room-mate," She called.
In came Nick. I took one look at him and remembered the elusive seventh sin. Lust!
"Hey," he said vaguely.
Hey, indeed!
Dark-haired, gangly and loose-limbed, his eyes have a "not-known-at-this-address" distance to them. Just out of curiosity, I wondered if I was his type. I look a bit like those Renaissance paintings of angels, except without the halo, the wings and the nakedness - no need to freak people out, I always say. But I've all the other stuff - blonde curly hair, a round, rosy-cheeked face and I'm a little plumper than they generally seem to like them in Los Angeles.
Just then a girl emerged into the room after Nick. She was weeping.
"Nick…" she beseeched, trying to grab onto him. She was sloe-eyed, silky-haired and tiny. With a sudden, fierce passion, I wanted to be her.
"Take care, baby." He steered her, very firmly, to the door. "Missing you already."
"But…" She tried again. Nick kissed her tenderly on her forehead, while managing to deposit her in the hallway.
From the way Tandy rolled her eyes at me, this clearly happened a lot.
Nick clicked the door shut, waited, tensed against a storm of crying and yelling from outside, then relaxed when nothing happened. She'd obviously decided to limp away and lick her wounds quietly. "Why do I always hurt those I love?" He enquired of no-one in particular, then absent-mindedly left the room.
You know what? I was suddenly very glad I wasn't that dainty, exquisite girl.
"Granola," Tandy called. "Come and meet Grace."
For the first time I noticed a little white terrier, sitting alert in a basket. He was staring, as though mesmerized by me. Yikes! You can fool people into believing you're a human being, but animals work on a different level. Granola knew there was something very weird about me.
"What is wrong with you, doggie?" Tandy coaxed.
"OK," she shrugged. "Be rude. So Grace, you wanna go out tonight and get trashed on strawberry cheesecake martinis?"
"That would be delightful!" I'd just been shot through with that lonesome, away-from-home feeling. Getting trashed sounded like exactly what I needed.
*
Later, as we left to go out, I told Tandy about calling first to the wrong apartment.
"You did what? You called into crazy Karl's?" She was horrified. "He is like, a totally insane alcoholic. He's always yelling and howling at the moon, like a crazy dawg.
"Although," she said, as we passed his door, "He's quiet right now." She sounded almost disappointed.
As we drove along, palm trees were silhouetted against the skyline. The sun was setting and the sky was layered with colours: pale blue low down, rising and darkening overhead to a deep luminous blue, in which the first twinkling stars were set like diamonds.
We went to a bar on Sunset. It was a young, cool, vibey place, packed with good-looking people. If I hadn't been with Tandy I'd have been too intimidated to go in.
Almost as soon as we sat down a bottle of champagne was sent over by a handsome dude who had the hots for Tandy. To my great disappointment she refused to accept it. "I totally don't want to meet him so it wouldn't be fair," she insisted.
"Ohhh-kaaay."
Over flavoured martinis I got Tandy's life story. She came from a rich, academic family back East. Her elder sister had a Phd in something scarily impressive and managed to run a home and was very good at tennis. Her younger sister made her first four million by setting up a dot.com site selling cool purses and she was so good at horse riding she could have made the Olympic team if she'd wanted. Tandy's entire family were aghast at her decision to become an actress and even more aghast that she worked as a temp while waiting to hit the big time.
"It's hard when you come from a place where everyone else is perfect," she said wearily.
Tell me about it!
"So how about you?" Tandy asked. "You're an actress too?"
They've given me a whole new identity, a bit like the Witness Protection Programme. Apparently I'm an actress, but on account of there being a little too much of me, my resume shows only wallpaper parts - the fat best friend, the jolly fat work colleague, the weird fat roommate. Fat being the common thread.
"And where are you from?"
Now that was a tricky one. Before I'd left we just couldn't get my accent right, no matter how hard we tried. So we decided that I'd say I was originally from Ireland, but that I'd moved around a lot on account of my dad's job.
"So what age are you?" Tandy asked.
I froze. What age was I? In real time I was several hundred millennia, but in LA years…? What had they told me?
"It's okay," she whispered. "Same for me. My resume says twenty-two years old, but I'm actually in my mid-twenties."
"Looking good."
"Well, twenty-seven," she admitted with a sigh.
"And I'm twenty-nine." I'd just remembered.
"So am I."
We gazed at each other fondly and decided to order another lot of martinis. I was having a Really Good Time, but I mustn't forget that I was here to WORK.
I got my first break when we went to the ladies' room to fix our make-up.
Tandy held a little bottle up to me. "You want some Envy?"
Envy! One of my seven deadlies. "You mean…in that container…is Envy?"
She twisted the label-side towards her and studied it quizzically. "'S'what it says, right?"
I couldn't believe my luck. I'd only been here a few hours and already I was making progress. They had told me I would experience the sins in the most unexpected ways. Now I knew what they meant.
Tandy squirted me and I beamed at her from my cloud of fragrant mist. One down, six to go.