‘I can’t fall apart because I’ve never fallen together.’
This was something my teenage hero had written, or words that meant something like that — the man whose blank stare I practised in front of the mirror. I reckoned that every time Andy Warhola painted a tin of American soup it was his way of escaping from the flat brown fields of Eastern Europe where his parents were born. Every single tin of clam chowder got him nearer New York and away from living in Exile with his mother in Pittsburgh. Andy’s words were like a prayer I said every night before I went to sleep, and they rolled around my mind now as I sat in the greasy spoon piling up napkins to write England on. While I drank my mug of tea and watched the red London buses arrive and depart from the station, I thought about his collection of wigs. Apparently he stored them in boxes in his factory in New York and actually glued them to his head. I was interested in Andy because I reckoned I was a bit in disguise too. Judy wasn’t really in disguise as Liza (she wore velvet hot pants and fishnet tights to the Wimpy). Everyone could see what she was aiming for because they had seen Cabaret too, but I was not really sure what I was aiming for, especially as Andy was a man. She told me to focus on David Bowie, the star man who came from Beckenham, which was quite near Lewisham, but who now lived in exile on the planet Mars.
English people were kind. They called me pet and love and said sorry when I bumped into them. I was clumsy because I was sleepwalking through England and English people didn’t mind because they were sleep walking through England too. I reckoned this was because it got dark so early in winter. It was as if someone pulled the plug out of England at 4pm. Most curiously of all, when Joan next door tied her dog to the Wall’s ice cream stand outside the corner shop she spoke to her pet as if it could talk back.
‘Holly, say hello to the girl.’
There was always an embarrassing silence after she said that. But Joan wasn’t embarrassed. Even if her dog just scratched its ear or gazed at the chewing gum stuck on the pavement, she always had an excuse for why Holly didn’t actually talk. ‘Oh she’s in a funny mood today isn’t she?’
EnglAND
eNGLAND
ENgland
As well as the England doodles I also wrote sentences very fast on the white paper napkins. This action (scribbling) and also my costume (the black straw hat) were like being armed with an AK-47: the sort of rifle the newspapers always show third-world children holding instead of an ice cream with a flake bar stuck in the middle of it. As far as the builders sitting next to me were concerned, I was not quite there. I had written myself in to some other kind of status and they didn’t feel easy about chatting me up or asking me to pass the salt. I was out of it.
Writing made me feel wiser than I actually was. Wise and sad. That was what I thought writers should be. I was sad anyway, much sadder than the sentences I wrote. I was a sad girl impersonating a sad girl. My mother and father had just separated. Some of Dad’s clothes were still in the cupboard (jacket, shoes, a hanger full of ties) but his books had disappeared from the shelves. Worst of all, he had left his forlorn shaving brush and box of migraine tablets in the bath room cabinet. Love between Mom and Dad had gone wrong in England. Sam knew and I knew but there was nothing we could do about it. When love goes wrong, instead of seeing the front of things we saw the backs of things. Our parents always walking away from each other. Making a separate lonely space even when they sat together at the family table. Both of them staring into the middle distance. When love goes wrong everything goes wrong. Wrong enough for my father to knock on my bedroom door and tell me he was going to live somewhere else. He was wearing his English suit and he looked torn up, like the road outside.
When Angie carried the English breakfast to my table, she hovered too near me and for too long, pretending to re-arrange the bottle of brown sauce. I knew she wanted to ask me where I was from because she could see I was curious about things that were quite normal to her. The red double-decker buses. The men smoking Number 6 after they tucked into the pile of beans and chips on their plate. The fact I asked for tomato sauce and not ketchup or said robot instead of traffic lights and thenk yoo instead of thank you. Angie had given me a portion of beans even though I had cancelled them. English people were so kind it was unbelievable. I loved my new country and wanted to belong to it and be as English as Angie, though it occurred to me she might not be entirely English because I had heard her talking in Italian to the man who owned the greasy spoon.
I was so pleased about the extra beans. I pierced one of them with my fork while I doodled on the napkins. The prospect of returning home to the house which no longer had Dad in it was unbearable. I counted the beans on my plate. Thankfully there were about twenty of them, so that would give me a bit of time to work out how I was going to get to my other life. The existential writers who I thought might give me some clues — I always got the letters of Jean Paul Sartre’s last name mixed up so it came out as Jean Paul Stare — probably didn’t have to clean ovens with evil Brillo pads.
They were evil because they were not just squares of scratchy material with pink detergent stuck to a piece of felt on the end. As far as I was concerned, they had been designed to waste the lives of girls and women. This thought made me so desperate that I ordered a slice of extra toast to slow the injustice of things down. Jean Paul Stare was French. Andy Warhol was half Czech but totally American and so was Liza Minnelli, who like Angie might be half Italian and all the rest of it. I wrote down some of the rest of it on the napkins with my leaky biro and it took quite a long time. When I looked up all the bus drivers and builders had gone back to work and Angie was asking me to pay for my extra toast. I hadn’t even noticed she had brought it to the table and I still had fifteen beans to get through. Worst of all, she was blatantly staring at the napkins I held in my right hand, the word ENGLAND biro’d into all of them.
‘Shall I hold those for you?’
I didn’t want Angie to hold my napkins because they were part of my secret life and they were also going to be my first novel even though they only had England biro’d into them and a few odd words and phrases. She watched me search for coins in my purse, all the while clutching onto the napkins as if something terrible would happen to me if I let go of them. Three of her teeth were completely rotten, the colour of the steaming teabags she scooped out of the urn with a spoon.
‘What did you do to your hand?’
‘I got stung by some bees.’
Angie screwed up her nose in sympathy and made her lips mime ouch, which was more than my mother had done.
‘Where were the bees then?’
‘They were in the washing machine.’
‘Ah.’ This time she rolled her eyes towards the nicotine-stained ceiling.
‘A pot of honey fell into the washing machine and the bees from outside flew in.’
‘Right.’ She smiled. And then she asked the question I knew she wanted to ask ever since I walked into the greasy spoon.
‘Where are you from?’
Now that I was fifteen years old, South Africa was the part of my life I tried not to think about. Every new day in England was an opportunity to practise being happy and to teach my new friends how to swim. I reckoned that if the council filled the pool with tea, everyone in England would be happy to put their heads under water. They would soon all become champion swimmers and win gold medals a go-go.
‘Where are you from then?’
Angie repeated her question in case I hadn’t understood it the first time.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well you don’t know much do you?’