The second role of a good estate agent is exhaustive research for short-term loans.

To take an example.

“I wanna be Marilyn Monroe.”

1959 Hollywood may have had the glitz, the glamour and the flashing lights, but the Scarlet and Star Diner on North Arlen Boulevard served the worst scrambled eggs this side of the Greenwich Meridian. I prodded them gingerly with my fork while on the other side of the booth the body of Anne Munfield, forty-two years old, said, “I wanna be her, just for a few days. There’s a party on Friday, the whole town’s talking, and I thought, maybe Tony Curtis, maybe Grace Kelly, maybe I’ll go as a politician or even just a waiter, whatever–but then I thought. Marilyn. Just for a few days, a couple of nights, even. I wanna be Marilyn Monroe.”

My eggs, when prodded, oozed a thin liquid that might have been water, might have been undercooked grease–whatever it was, it could have formed the perfect medium for the evolution of some primeval monster.

“So…?” asked my companion, leaning across the rubber tabletop. “Whatcha think?”

I laid my fork to one side. The inhabitant of Anne Munfield went by the name Aurangzeb, for reasons which largely evaded me as, by her own confession, she’d been ghosting for less than thirty years and had been raised in her previous life on a farmstead in Illinois. Even had she not admitted to her youth, her behaviour would have been self-explanatory.

“All right,” I murmured. “Let’s go with this for a moment. Why Marilyn?”

“Jesus, why not Marilyn?” she exclaimed. “She’s got this sleek little body, and it’s perfect, but it’s also real, you know, I mean, she’s got a real arse and real tits and a real belly and you might call it chubby, but it’s not that–it’s just real.”

“The word is she’s also prone to alcohol and pills.”

Aurangzeb threw her hands up in frustration. “Who isn’t in this town? You seen some of the faces round here–it’s like they’ve been eaten by crabs. I heard you were the guy for this. I heard you were good. This body I’ve got, it’s got more money than sense–I can wire you whatever you need, whatever currency, I’ve got the signature down perfect. Just gimme this? OK?”

Anne Munfield might once have been a dignified middle-aged woman, serene and calm, quite possibly vegetarian. Now her face twisted with wheedling desire, her eyes looking up like a meek puppy afraid of a master’s slipper. Such juvenile imploring did not suit features better made for motherhood.

My eggs oozed oily water and my body craved cabbage. I had never liked cabbage, but now my stomach ached for it like a baby for mother’s milk, and Aurangzeb whined, straining every muscle, every fibre and vein beneath her skin with the need to be someone new.

“If I do this,” I grunted, “I want to be absolutely clear–one night, two at the most, and you’re out. Marilyn Monroe wakes up on Monday morning with a stinking hangover and a feeling that she’s missed something insignificant and that’s it. The end. No more, no less. Are we agreed?”

Aurangzeb whooped, punching the air in her glee, and I felt a momentary pang of shame that a body as beautiful as hers should be so ugly to my eyes.

It didn’t take much to research Marilyn.

She was one of the first movie stars not only to court the press, but seduce it, invite it round with an intimate suggestion, bathe with the press, share two straws to one milkshake with the press and, when the press looked up from its mug with a creamy moustache, it was Marilyn’s metaphorical–and not so metaphorical–handkerchief that dabbed the offending mark away.

A little more research was required to get the important–and perhaps more interesting–information on the people around her.

I spent half a day as a chipper black woman by the name of Maggie who brought coffee to all the execs in Fox; another three hours as a harried producer with thinning hair and what felt suspiciously like undiagnosed sciatica. I hopped around for three minutes as a security guard, two as a gaffer, seven as a costume girl and finally, angling for the exit, forty-five seconds as a minor movie star whose name I forget and whose mouth reeked of aniseed.

Out in the clearer air, my body–my preferred body–was waiting for me by the car.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“I hate this town,” I replied. “Every mouth aches from smiling too much.”

He shrugged. “Works out well enough. Hey, you in tonight?”

“I was thinking about it, why?”

“The Dodgers are playing. I thought, you wanna go?”

I thought about it. “Why not? I’ll change into someone less sensible.”

So saying, I took his unresisting hand, and jumped.

The Dodgers don’t interest me.

Baseball doesn’t interest me.

Sports trivia.

If you suspect that the body you’re sitting opposite is a ghost, I recommend sports trivia as a method of detection. A body wearing a Dodgers shirt should, if it paid for the threads, know the score–but what self-respecting ghost wastes time on detail like that?

That’s the kind of thing you pay estate agents to do.

Straight white streets through the straight grey grid of LA.

My body is young, stronger now for a decent meal, with a mole under my left armpit that I find perpetually fascinating and have to force myself not to fiddle with in public. He is also that most vital of employees for a jobbing estate agent–a clean, cooperative gofer.

I had met my body beneath freeway 101.

It was the place where dreams went to die. The failed actors, the porn stars who’d been too late to get the treatment. The handyman turned out when the studio went under, the scriptwriter who’d never quite hit the money. The drug dealer who’d lost his haul in the last bust, the kid whose father was in lock-up and whose mum couldn’t cope. It was the dead night-time stain of the city, the hollow-eyed place that peeked out between the brightness of the street lights. It was a dangerous place to walk alone at night. It was the perfect place to find unwanted flesh.

He wore stinking grey fabrics falling off him like the wrappings from a rotten mummy. His beard was down to his collarbone. His hair appeared grey, but when I squatted down opposite him and put a twenty-dollar note into his foul black hat, he told me his name was Will and he was twenty-two years old.

“Are you on drugs?” I asked.

“Jesus,” he groaned as the cars rumbled by overhead. “What kinda question is that?”

“A question that could change your life,” I replied. “There’s more than just money on the line.”

His head turned one way, then the other, twisting down like a swan examining its feathers. “No. You think I got the cash to pay for that shit?”

“What brings you here?”

“I fell for a guy.”

“So?”

“They don’t take kindly to sodomy in Texas. If it’d had been a white guy, maybe my folks would’ve been OK. Maybe they wouldn’t. With all the shit that went down, didn’t really stop to ask.”

“You got family, friends here?”

“I got folk who look out for me,” he replied, bristling.

“That’s… not what I meant.”

His eyes narrowed. “Spill. Don’t dance–talk.”

I sat back on my haunches, hands spilling over the tops of my knees. “In five seconds’ time you’ll be standing up, but you won’t know how you got there.”

“What the—”

I grabbed his wrist and switched.

Five seconds later he was standing up and didn’t know how he’d got there.

“What the fuck did you do to me?” he breathed.

I swayed, my body a little dizzy from the two rapid jumps, in and out. “I want you to listen to me carefully. There sometimes comes a moment–so fast, a flash in the pan–which can change your life. It’s the two seconds in which the driver of the truck failed to hit the brakes. It’s the single breath where you said something stupid, and you should have said something kind. It’s the moment the cops bust in through the door. Everyone feels it, that moment where their lives hang on a knife’s edge. This is one of those moments.”