It runs perfectly in whichever way you choose to look at it. No soul, a monument to consumerism, the church for shoppers and watchers. He walked up and down believing himself to be the troubled looking for the troubled with a feeling that he could be the salvation.

Who would he salvage?

It would be a pay-off, a trade for what he had decided. Save one, drop one, like in knitting.

He took a break, a rest if you like, from the long, meandering trek from his apartment along Fountain down onto Santa Monica Boulevard then into the world of the artificial, and cooled himself in the public parking car hotel, two free hours, that eased off Rodeo and cosseted the shiny metal rooms in which the pampered drove themselves around. And there he would have a little smoke. A little of the medical to give himself the cloudy belief that he was doing good.

Sitting next to a 1995 burgundy Jeep Wagoneer, he looked at the plastic wood and thought what a beautifully unnecessary concept of design the car was. Plastic wooden panels to convince no one, so that it existed as a falsehood from the start, in fact, was pleased with itself as a fake. The perfect car for Los Angeles, but the colour was wrong. Burgundy, a solid block, lacking in excitement, a complete non-thriller as a tone. Dulled by the sun, which had varied the intensity of colour in patches that were infinitesimally scratched by the endless washing that is demanded by the LA car; it looked outdated, not oozing enough class to pull off old age, to become a classic.

Then came one, and then another female form, lifted by scalpel-inflicted pulls of skin and muscle to defy the downward drag of the concrete gravity. An attempt to reach perfection, to rise to the heavens where they might exist on the goddess plane, to breathe the rarified air of the beautiful.

One was carrying a Bijan bag, yellow with squiggly script; the knowledge that everything was expensive in the store gave the bag an arrogance to hold its own despite its lack of taste. Another skyward-lifted face, carrying three large Barney’s black bags; cheaper, maybe, maybe not, but the choice of car proved disappointing. A Lexus. A pale blue Lexus. A colour he had hated going back to the beginning of time. His time, anyway.

*

A dullness that was smashed.

By a loud Spanish voice, propelling itself into a cell phone with an anger that seemed to have no effect on the old lady she was pushing in a wheelchair towards a large black Suburban that beeped as the lights flashed at the button command of the now-shouting Mexican.