She had vanished more effectively than I’d ever imagined, and people could remember her, and she was still gone. Maybe she was right; maybe that was a kind of freedom.
Finding nothing, on a whim, I rode the Greyhound bus to Salt Lake City. The bus wasn’t like the old movies; it was air conditioned, comfortable, a coach with a toilet at the back. “Hi there!” exclaimed the driver over the intercom, as we headed north. “There’s Wi-Fi for your entertainment, magazines for your pleasure, lights above your chairs for reading and a toilet for an experience you won’t ever forget!”
Salt Lake City: founded by Mormons, sustained by skiing and industrial banks. A puddle of straight lines beneath snow-capped peaks. I had a very good hot dog while choosing my next destination — so good I went back for seconds and the woman serving exclaimed, “Honey, you oughtta eat more and fatten up, else you won’t never survive the winter!”
I squirted more ketchup into the bun, tipped an extra two dollars, and caught the bus at 3 a.m. down Interstate 80, heading east, towards nowhere much.
Chapter 75
Names on the road. Evanston, Rock Springs, Rawlins, Laramie, Cheyenne, Ft Collins. Places where founding fathers planted a flag, where the railwaymen came with spades and dynamite, where old tribes fought and died, driven ever further west towards the mountains and the seas. Why am I here? Why am I travelling?
Travelling from, travelling to. It seems like the thing a pilgrim does. It feels like a kind of prayer.
A slow shift in the landscape, the beginning of names tied up with a different kind of history. Lexington, Kearney, Grand Island, Lincoln, Omaha. A decaying industrial heartland. Denver. Ft Morgan. Sterling. Ogallala. The chimneys are dry and dusty, the gates are locked, move with the times or be crushed. Insurance salesmen, dealers in second-hand cars, TV crews, pundits and merchants of opinion and vanity, come east, come east; there’s a ten-minute rest stop in Des Moines, thirty minutes in Walcott if you need to pee, toilet stinks but what of it, someone else will clean up the mess, litter in the road, tomorrow’s problem, today is today is today, what next?
Chicago. I sat by Lake Michigan, still as settled silk, and wondered if the first Europeans to come here had thought they were seas, oceans, and that Japan lay beyond.
I rode the L, marvelled that it could be so slow, crawl so close to the towers in the Loop, craned my neck to see a little piece of sky. I ate pizza by Wrigley Park and cheered for the Cubs, though they were destined to lose. I found a man who liked to rumba, thought, why not, why the hell not, and rumbaed with him all the way to his flat, which smelt of habanero and kidney beans, and it was only fucking, nothing else, and he didn’t ask if he’d see me again and I wasn’t interested in anything more, and I caught the bus the next morning towards South Bend, Toledo, Cleveland and New York.
And in New York, I looked across at the statue of Liberty, and I cried.
Seven-day-old clothes, the smell of pepper and sex on my skin, I hadn’t run for days, my legs were dead from the bus, my mind saw only the passing of the world outside, not me, not me at all, discipline, gone, breath, gone, counting, gone, knowledge, truth, thief, all…
Nothing.
Where had I come from? Where was I going?
From nowhere, to nowhere.
The past was just a present that had been, the future was a present yet to come, and only now remained, and I stood by the sea, recovering my land-legs from the road, and wept.
Chapter 76
The strangest thing.
A funny feeling.
I bought a French passport off a guy in the Bronx, a proper professional, his ID on the darknet an alpha-numerical tangle that expired the instant he had cash in hand. He’d done a good job too, right down to stamping it with an entry visa from the Canadian border, a couple from Turkey and one from India. I complimented him on his efforts, and he shrugged, great rippling basketball shoulders, and said when he was working it was like nothing bothered him, yeah.
I went to Fifth Avenue to find something fashionable to steal, but nothing leapt to mind, and that night I went to a casino off Eighth and West 36th and counted cards and lost a little but won more, and at one point a security guard stood behind me, and counted cards with me, but someone dropped a cocktail and started screaming at the man who’d bumped into her, and that briefly diverted the guard’s attention, and when he turned back, he’d forgotten what he was doing there.
Standing at JFK waiting for the plane, I saw a woman with a beautiful silver bracelet set with amber, and I went to steal it, and then stopped myself, and didn’t, and sat back down, and when a few minutes later she saw me, and I smiled, she smiled back, and her day was fine.
The cashier phoned her manager when I paid for my flight to London entirely in cash, but I showed her the paperwork from the casino and explained that I’d got lucky, but never had a bank account in the USA.
“You know you can’t take all that currency across customs, don’t you?” said her manager, and that was okay, I replied, I had a friend in the British embassy who was going to handle it for me. Then I sat in the toilet and counted out $9,990 from my stash, put the rest ($2,681.55) in a brown envelope and dropped it into the donations box for “Bioliving New York — for a greener city for all our children”. They stopped me at customs, and counted out my cash.
“Sweet,” said the lady who helped me re-pack my bag. “Ten bucks short of all the paperwork.”
“I had luck in the casino,” I explained with my best comedy-French accent. “Going to start again, a new life. You can only take what you carry.”
“Swell,” she exclaimed. “I always wanted a clean break, but you know, who doesn’t?”
I flew economy class, half watched a couple of films. A man in a grey suit fidgeted all the way to London, flinching at every bump of turbulence. Sometimes he looked at me and saw someone new, but he didn’t care. His fear would have wiped away all details of this journey, even if I weren’t his companion for the long journey home.
Home.
London.
Hotels, B&Bs, places I know, the river, the winter sun setting behind the London Eye, dog walking on Hampstead Heath, kites flying, is this home?
I took the train to Manchester. Straight streets between stiff, industrial architecture. Short cathedral tucked in between a shopping mall and roaring traffic. Museum dedicated to football, galleries from warehouses, town hall snaked round with trams, stone columns, red brick, not enough trees, crossing the canals at the lock gates, clinging to the black iron handles as you edge, one foot at a time to the other side. The screech of the railway line, the cyclists ready to pedal through the Pennines, is this home?
I ate chips in Albert Square while a steel-drum band played, went to the pub for a quiet pint, put a quid into the fruit machine, lost, and caught the train from Piccadilly to Derby as the sun went down.
Derby.
Is this my home, is this a thing that matters, a place that has some meaning? More than flagstones and concrete, bricks and tar?
I took a hotel room near the station, an ExpressPremierExclusiveSomething, room the size of a cupboard, sheets superglued to the surface of the bed, everything too hot, curtains too thick, night too dark, pipes creaking, slept like a stone.
Walking through the streets I hadn’t walked through for I didn’t know how long. Shops I had hung out in as a kid — CDs, DVDs, three for a tenner, four for fifteen quid, bargain, if you liked what they had. Phone shop, accessories; cases with owls on, hair extensions, toe rings, the tattoo parlour we’d never quite managed to go into as kids, despite bragging.