‘Oh damn. Actually, it’s tonight now. Timings. Sorry. Forgot to say. But they only really have to speak to Nora. So you can get an early night if you want.’
Ravi shrugged, dejected. ‘Sure. Yeah.’
Joanna sighed. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger. Though it’s never stopped you before.’
Nora wondered again where her brother was, but the tension between Joanna and Ravi made it feel wrong to ask something she should so obviously know. So she stared out of the window as the coach drove along the four-lane highway. The glowing tail-lights of cars and lorries and motorbikes in the dark, like red and watching eyes. Distant skyscrapers with a few tiny squares of light against a humid backdrop of dark sky and darker clouds. A shadowy army of trees lined the sides and middle of the highway, splitting the traffic into two directions.
If she was still in this life tomorrow evening, she would be expected to perform an entire concert’s worth of songs, most of which she didn’t actually know. She wondered how quickly she could learn the set list.
Her phone rang. A video call. The caller was ‘Ryan’.
Joanna saw the name and smirked a little. ‘You’d better get that.’
So she did, even though she had no idea who this Ryan was, and the image on the screen seemed too blurry to recognise.
But then he was there. A face she had seen, in movies and imaginings, many times.
‘Hey, babe. Just checking in with a friend. We’re still friends, right?’
She knew the voice too.
American, rugged, charming. Famous.
She heard Joanna whispering to someone else on the coach: ‘She’s on the phone to Ryan Bailey.’
Ryan Bailey
Ryan Bailey.
As intheRyan Bailey. As in the Ryan Bailey of her fantasies, where they talked about Plato and Heidegger through a veil of steam in his West Hollywood hot tub.
‘Nora? You there? You look scared.’
‘Um, yeah. I’m ... yeah ... I’m ... I’ve just ... I’m here ... On a bus ... A big ... touring ... yeah ... Hi.’
‘Guess where I am?’
She had no idea what to say. ‘Hot tub’ seemed entirely inappropriate as an answer. ‘I honestly don’t know.’
He panned the phone around a vast and opulent-looking villa, complete with bright furnishings and terracotta tiles and a four-poster double bed veiled in a mosquito net.
‘Nayarit, Mexico.’ He pronounced Mexico in a parody of Spanish, with the x as an h. He looked and sounded slightly different to the Ryan Bailey in the movies. A bit puffier. A bit more slurred. Drunker, perhaps. ‘On location. They got me shootingSaloon 2.’
‘Last Chance Saloon 2? Oh, I so want to see the first one.’
He laughed as if she had told the most hilarious joke.
‘Still dry as ever, Nono.’
Nono?
‘Staying at the Casa de Míta,’ he went on. ‘Remember? The weekend we had there? They’ve put me in the exact same villa. You remember? I’m having a mezcal margarita in your honour. Where are you?’
‘Brazil. We were just doing a concert in São Paulo.’
‘Wow. Same landmass. That’s cool. That’s, yeah, cool.’
‘It was really good,’ she said.
