Isabelle

There is a bathroom in Los Angeles. It sparkles and dies each day as the least of the sparkly things leave the bodies of its visitors.

         I will never visit Los Angeles. I will never stand in that bathroom. And it’s a damn fucking shame because I really want to. I really want to be in that bathroom when he is in there. Because I know he has to be in there soon. I know that on the night I am sure he will win and either before or after or maybe before and after he will use that long bathroom like the one I saw in The Substance. And maybe it will look like all those pictures that came out of the Met Gala once upon a time, or maybe it will look like those ones that Isla threw up in the city last month. They had heavy doors, the architecture of a Pirates of the Caribbean set.

I wonder if they have a fancy bossman. They must do. I wonder if it’s a retirement-age posho from the home counties who never made it big, or if it’s just me in a few years.

I wonder. Maybe he’s going through the same things I am. The one who’s there to win, not to sell gum. Maybe he’ll skip meals out of nerves that week. Maybe he’s got sharp things in his inside jacket pocket. The one where the old Bogart’s would have a hip flask or a cigarette case. I wonder which cigarettes he smokes. I wonder if it’s the ones I bought the first time, or the ones the boy who said he was absolutely not my boyfriend would reek of. I wonder if he can even buy our cigarettes over there. Maybe he visited here recently and took them back with him because the UK simply has better cigarettes.

I wonder if he cares if he wins.

I wonder if there is a way to go there.

To be in that bathroom.

I wonder if I’ve got anything right.

Hopefully by the end it was apparent that this was not my, but rather Isabelle’s, story. I do not tend to write from a female perspective for obvious reasons so this was scary but worth a go.

Have as wonderful a week as you can. Do far too much.