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This one Sarah recognized; it was Led Zeppelin doing ‘Whole Lotta Love.’
    ‘Anyway, don’t worry about the letter, honey,’ Lisa said, resting her hand lightly on Sarah’s arm. ‘I mean, this was different. The guy knew her. They’d dated. It wasn’t just like, you know, some pervert writing out of the blue. That happens all the time. See you later, sugar, I just have to go and dance to this song.’
    And Lisa dashed off inside the house. Sarah finished her rum and Coke and chatted with a few other guests, her mind hardly on it at all, then looked for Stuart to take her home.
    Not being able to drive was a hell of a drawback in Los Angeles, she had found, but the idea of getting behind the wheel of a car – especially on the freeways – terrified her even more than the inconvenience of calling cabs or relying on friends.
    She wasn’t ‘big’ enough yet to merit a limo and driver from the network, so Stuart would often give her a ride to the studio. He lived in Brentwood, which, while it was practically in the opposite direction, wasn’t very far away. If Stuart couldn’t make it, she would call a cab.
    The show’s producer wanted Sarah to learn how to drive – at least enough to look comfortable behind the wheel of a police cruiser on TV. Stuart had taken her out in the desert a couple of times for lessons, and she’d learned the basics, like how to turn on the ignition and put it in ‘Drive,’ which was the gas pedal and which was the brake, but that was as far as she had got. The roads out there had been empty; she couldn’t imagine herself ever driving in traffic.
    Led Zeppelin rocked on. The bass and drums were so loud that Sarah worried the vibrations would shake the house loose and send it careening down the hillside the way mudslides often did in the canyons.
    The whole setting was ridiculous anyway: a house propped up on stilts near the top of a steep slope. How could Jack live up here, perched so precariously? Sarah didn’t think she could.
    Still, it seemed that no matter where one lived in Los Angeles, there was danger from the forces of nature. Impermanence was a fact of life that insinuated itself into people’s psyches in odd ways. Sarah had often thought that explained some of the general craziness of the place. Nothing’s permanent, so don’t get hung up on anything.
    Since she had been living in LA, there had been fires, heavy rains and a major earthquake, and she had heard people say that the four seasons in Southern California are called flood, fire, earthquake and riot. Yet here she was, standing on the deck of a stilt-house high on a canyon side probably within spitting distance of the San Andreas fault. Crazy.
    Talk about floating on air. It was bad enough feeling as if she were forever wobbling on stilts, constantly feeling that someday someone would come and pinch her and say, ‘It’s all been a mistake, love, you’re not really a star, you’re just a snotty-nosed little girl from Yorkshire and all this has just been an illusion, now it’s back to the meat-packaging factory where you belong.’
    Bad enough feeling it, let alone living it. Suddenly she felt an attack of vertigo coming on; she had to get back to solid ground. Brilliant, our Sal, she thought, catching Stuart’s eye across the deck, now Los Angeles is a metaphor for your insecurities.
    Before she left, she looked again at the Christmas lights across the canyon and shivered. ‘This was different,’ Lisa had said of her friend. ‘The guy knew her.’ Then she turned and looked at the party crowd. Could it be someone close to her, someone who knew her, someone who knew her real name and her address, like Jack and Stuart? Then she tried to dismiss the idea from her mind as ridiculous. Jack and Stuart were the only real friends she had here. They weren’t perverts. They couldn’t be.

6
    ‘What are the chances of an ordinary person becoming the target of the kind of person you’ve been talking about?