“Lets go to New York.” H was excited by the prospect; standing over me with lustful longing in her eyes as I sat at my desk at work feverishly prevaricated.
“Go on. You deserve it...”
Recently divorced from problematic spouses and the financial baggage of eighteen months of divorce proceedings, perhaps I did. But what about the kids? What about all the years of marital conditioning? Wasn’t forty-seven a bit old to start travelling the world? Not to mention the danger of ostracizing someone who I had considered a friend for over a decade by forced close proximity.
“Yes, but I snore.” I wailed pathetically.
The previous Christmas I had shared a hotel room with H and she had ended up sleeping in the bath. My concern was not unfounded. My affliction was stress related and I had been reliably informed that I could strip wallpaper by sheer decibel power. After a dozen or so double gins in the face of years of abstinence I had retired the night of the Christmas ‘do’ to our shared hotel room stone cold sober and obviously deeply stressed about it.
“That’s alright I’ll get some earplugs.” H was not going to be shaken from her dream that easily.
A few weeks later I stopped prevaricating and caved in. My daughter was almost eighteen and my son, at fifteen, had discovered that self-sufficient Utopia requiring only a pot noodle and a guitar. I had run out of excuses. And besides, when did anything I ever plan actually ever happen?
The time passed quickly, a blur of inadvertently cancelled flights, hasty passport applications, misspelt names and dodgy unconfirmed bookings. I had no time to be nervous or excited, work ate away the days and weeks until summer was gone and the departure date loomed. Fate, in the form of Emma the incompetent booking agent, had done its best, but failed in the face of H’s determination.
We drove down to Heathrow on a Thursday night, skimming the tarmac down the M1 in five degrees of frost, the black abyss of the sky held back by the glare of high street lamps. Me handing H ham sandwiches and crisps and soaking my jeans with apple juice from a reluctant carton, already imagining the mayhem my two might cause with the cash card I’d left them ‘for essentials like milk’ for the five days I’d leave them home alone. Not to mention leaving them to oversee a builder charged with, ‘doing something with the garage’.
Even then, as I mentally repacked my suitcase while unzipping the extraordinarily well- organised plastic folder to recheck all the essential documents, it didn’t seem real. H was already beginning to buzz on the crest of an adventurous wave, but I felt displaced and reticent, my children abandoned too many miles in the wrong direction.
In order to combat the deeply engrained parental guilt, I had come to think of this as an experiment. It was, I decided, a giant step toward breaking the co-dependence that had once been our strength and was fast becoming a weakness now their father had departed and we had no common foe to stand united against.
On the day my husband left us he had been missing. The self- indulgent pleasure of having the bed to myself soon replaced by a familiar gut wrenching fear and heavy silence through which the children passed like wary phantoms in search of sanctuary. When he finally appeared and began packing his bags we said nothing to deter him, instead merely waited until he was gone releasing us from our shared misery.
Not even as a child, a lonely and tortuous phase that led to lonely and angst ridden teens when I finally decided that romantic love was a myth and have yet to be proved wrong, had I ever been so happy. All three of us and even the house seemed to settle as if the whole world had suddenly become a large comfy chair.
As the months passed and the divorce dragged its legal heels I set about clearing away the accumulated detritus of a twenty-five year failed marriage. Life became a never-ending stream of financial advisors, builders, decorators, plumbers, chaos and skips. Nothing was sacred not even my memories; a huge chunk of my life, his face, the sound of his voice, becoming nothing more than a troubled sleep that vanishes in the light of a bright spring morning. Life with only my children took on a dreamlike quality, far too content to possibly be sustainable and about as real as me jetting off on holiday to New York without them.
The Heathrow hotel H and I had booked for an overnight stay rose impressively against a frosty night sky. We booked in. They knew who I was and I was quite frankly amazed considering they didn’t know me from Eve when I rang to confirm and I had to prod Emma the incompetent booking agent into doing her job properly.
After a coffee, staring blankly at a silent football match on wide screen TV in the hotel lounge, we retired to the two ample queen beds and fading décor of our room to grab some precious sleep. But after what seemed like only a few minutes we were both wakened by an ominous clunk and the aroma of singed electric wiring. The archaic fan heater, doing its level best against sub-zero temperatures and H’s inability to retain heat, had given up the ghost and was about to ignite. H fell out of bed to turn it off and after exchanging anxious looks we tried to snatch a little more sleep before the four am alarm
The next morning, bleary eyed and freezing we scraped the thick layer of the frost off the car and headed in the general direction of the long stay car park, doing our best to follow the directions the hotel reception had given us in the feeble glow of the cars courtesy light.
Half an hour later we were hopelessly lost. The immense complex of Heathrow’s outlying maze had undergone some major transformation that seemed to involve only putting up barricades and random diversion signs.
“Turn round, go right then left, then left again past Julian and you’re there,” the guy in the high visibility jacket sounded helpful, but at that time in the morning, who can say.
We ploughed on through the freezing morning air, tormented by the boom of departing jumbo’s overhead. It was now 6am, far too close to the flight time for me to be my usual positive self and prompting H to resort to random obscenities.
“Look!” I prodded at the car windscreen and drab grey of the rising dawn. “The Jury Inn!”
Laugh! Well actually no, we didn’t.
Needless to say we made the flight. The unmitigated thrill of queuing for tickets, queuing for boarding passes, queuing to check in our bags and queuing to enter the boarding area was behind us. H had been frisked and though I stood around half hoping that I too might be manhandled, I was passed over by an extremely dismissive Heathrow employee. I took it as a personal sleight.
“I hope they don’t lose my suitcase,” H repeated her fear that had slipped into every conversation since the first signpost pointing to Heathrow and a fair few before that. By now she had finally been passed as not being a terrorist with a stash of C4 in her jeans and was pulling on her travel socks in the boarding area.
I adopted a weary smile. H was one of only a select few that I allow to get close enough to call friend, a hangover from a relationship that didn’t tolerate any form of independence or exterior criticism. Wrong, I know, but some conditioning dies hard. Tall, elegantly slender, blonde, single and a control freak with fatalistic tendencies, we are the very definition of an odd couple. I am dark haired, awkward, overweight, incredibly stubborn, about a decade older than H and have a pathological hatred of my reflection, but for some reason we get on, always have.
She is one of a very few who I can talk with for hours about nothing in particular, put the world to rights and have a laugh along the way. Like myself, her view of men, relationships and mothers is that of a hardened cynic due to past experience. Yet she has an innocently romantic streak that makes her grip my arm all dewy eyes and trembling lips at the closing scene of ‘Pride and Prejudice’.
After what seemed like an age of waiting, quietly appalled by a family of shell suit wearers shuffling loudly in their seats facing us the boarding area, it was announced that we could board the plane. Women and children first, first class next and then by seat number, we were herded through a narrow door into what seemed mid air.
I gathered up my possessions sure that I should have been giddy with excitement, but still fretting, unbelieving and unable to gauge H’s level of giddiness due to a cock up with the seating. She was already seated somewhere down near the tail section, the bit that always falls off first in the disaster movies, I pondered uncharitably as I shuffled forward among a sea of unfamiliar faces to find my allotted seat on the Virgin flying cattle bus.
Once seated, it became clear why airhostesses are painfully thin, five foot nothing with their hair glued back and smiles painted on in bright red. Strapped down, jammed in by intrusive strangers elbows and with the seat in front so close you can’t check your seat belt without risking a head injury, they need to be able to scamper down the aisles like well-dressed Meerkats if only to escape the passengers.
In their defence, Virgin does offer perks. The food is edible, the portions aren’t mean and are delivered with reasonable frequency. And in an attempt to force exercise and avoid legal action for deep vein thrombosis, the grinning hostesses provide copious free drinks to keep your bladder full to point critical. Each seat is also allotted an individual screen to play games, watch TV and films and guarantee the onset of myopia. I did my best not to doubt H’s assurance that the person in the next seat can’t see your screen. Still, when I found myself unexpectedly and completely accidentally faced with an explicit sex scene on my screen, I almost knocked myself senseless in the rush to turn the offending movie off before my neighbour formed the impression that I was a pervert.
Stretching bits of me into every available space, too nervous to allow myself to sleep in case my snoring caused a fracas, I settled down for the seven-hour flight. With no one to talk to and aided and abetted by a couple of over-sized gin and tonics unaware of the effects of altitude, I withdrew into the rumbling dimness of the cabin and my thoughts.
Though we hadn’t started out terribly well, I still harboured the notion of experiencing a view the Statue of Liberty as we swooped majestically toward the airport and alighting in a frenzy of strangely foreign excitement. After all isn’t JFK one of those enigmatic places where America greets you with an expanse of largess and ‘have a nice day’?
Helped by the fact that had I been on terra firma I would have been on my back slurring inanities at total strangers, what I did experience was a stomach lurching descent and a disconcerting view of ice melting on the wing. Even when we had landed my head seemed to float three inches above my shoulders, which made getting my boots back on inordinately difficult and the wait for H an unsettling mixture of uncontrolled euphoric paranoia.
When she finally appeared, grinning broadly on her own sober high, I felt in good company and ready to face whatever followed unhindered by British reserve.
American customs officials however had other ideas.
It seemed that Virgin had taken the cattle bus concept to heart. We were herded out into an empty, bland terminal and ordered to queue by a variety of JFK staff who had been briefed by the FBI to expect trouble.
Brits, it seems are not popular.
“Stand there.” The uniformed pretender to Adolf Hitler indicated to an empty stretch of polished floor in front of a check in booth.
“But there’s nobody there,” I pouted, pointing my comment to the booth that had been recently vacated by the check in guy.
“He’ll be back,“ Ms wannabe Adolf waved her arm imperiously and stalked off.
He didn’t come back, so I moved queues, which was probably a mistake judging by Ms Wannabe’s expression when she swept passed me for the second time.
“Hi,” I beamed my friendliest ‘still under the influence’ beam to the check in guy in the next booth when at last it was my turn.
“You filled your form in?” He almost smiled.
“Yes,” I beamed. The form had been handed to us before we got on the plane and I had filled it out while H reiterated her luggage concerns and then carefully checked over just to be sure post gin and tonic.
“No you ‘aint. Fill it in here and here and here,” he stabbed the green form with an accusing forefinger and gave me the evil eye.
Form filled, eyeball photo and fingerprints recorded for posterity, I was reluctantly passed and went off to the carousel to find H.
“I hope they haven’t lost my suitcase.” Her stance reeked of fatalistic control freak, her lipstick narrowed to a perfunctory underline.
“Course they won’t have,” I soothed.
We waited…
“I hope they haven’t lost my suitcase.”
“It’ll be round in minute.”
We waited…
“I can’t see my suitcase.”
“Look – There’s mine.” I pulled my case off the carousel and deposited it beside me guiltily, the euphoric mist in my head rapidly clearing.
We waited…
The crowd of Brits thinned to an impatient herd.
We waited…
The herd of Brits dispersed.
We waited…
The same tatty specimens of luggage meandered past like lost children on an abandoned fairground ride as the last Brit but us vanished.
We waited…
“I don’t believe it, they’ve lost my ******* suitcase.”
H was puese and I was overcome by a craving for nicotine.
Standing around in an echoing expanse of empty terminal and feeling like a third wheel, I was ordered to take my luggage and stand elsewhere by one of New York’s finest while the mystery of H’s missing case was solved.
Now totally alone, I waited, arms clasped behind my back like a schoolgirl outside the headmaster’s office in the days of corporal punishment.
Then I waited some more.
“What you doin’?” Another of New York’s finest, who had been leaning on one elbow and perusing the newspaper, finally noticed me.
“Waiting.”
“What for?” He folded the newspaper into a neat square.
“I was told to.”
“Well seein as you’re doin nuttin.” He waved me forward and began dismantling my luggage.
“You left this alone at any point,” he rummaged through my underwear.
“No, but we were told not to lock our cases and well … I can’t say what happened to it after check in,” such obviously stupid rules always rile me.
He viewed me suspiciously and carried on rummaging until I felt myself blush.
“S’ok. You can go.” He zipped up my case and smirked.
Finally, finally released I went to find H.
“My case is at Heathrow.” The vein in her temple throbbed quietly. “I’m going to kill Emma.”
“I really don’t think losing your case is her fault,” being a fair- minded Libran with Virgo tendencies, I rushed to the defence of the girl from the holiday company in spite of the catalogue of unforced errors.
Seriously unimpressed, H grunted, the prospect of even one day without her makeup and straighteners far more than she could tolerate.
“When we get back you can write a letter of complaint.” H was clearly on a roll, one step shy of travel industry genocide.
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because you’re good at writing stroppy letters.”
Arguing this point would have been futile and involve undermining the abilities others insisting on convincing me I had. I decided not to bother.
We went outside and I lit a cigarette as H stood feigning patience.
As I took the last drag, streaming a blue grey cloud toward a non-descript sky we were hustled to one side by a Rabbi in wheelchair and his black clad retinue. My unbelieving self was finally dispelled; I was standing on a sidewalk with New York City rising high only a short cab drive away over the water.
Despite my lingering disbelief, I had many preconceptions about my holiday in New York. Re-enacting the opening scene of ‘Rhoda’, lounging in the hotel bar sipping cocktails purchased by hunky natives beguiled by my accent, being told ‘have a nice day’ copiously and feeling miles from home.
The truth is that my preconceptions were mostly misguided, the truth, as weird and wonderful as it was, enough to fill a novel.
Just prior to my visit, work had taken me to the financial district of London where I had been overawed by the beautiful high architecture huddled together round a magnificent statue of rearing stallions and separated by narrow streets.
Not unlike New York I thought, but I thought wrong.
New York is essentially square with neck breakingly tall buildings and wide boulevards on which yellow cabs scurry like demented oversized beetles incessantly beeping their horns. It smells of discarded hotdogs and old diesel fumes. Just like the movies, the roads emit steam from oversized manhole covers so much so that they put red and wide chimneys on some to puther the steam over the heads of dour faced pedestrians.
Manoeuvring through the streets, we joined the tourist hordes, too easily identifying the highly groomed Italians and waif like French from the depressing unrefined Brits. With just a few short days, we crammed in as much as aching feet would allow. A shopping trip to the nearby iconic Macey’s mid sale was well worth a visit for a silk blouse, even allowing the green suited concierge who did NYC rude so well.
H's agenda included a trip to Central Park, where I discovered I was not designed for ice skating. Clinging to the rinks wall with legs a kimbo and little chance of standing, much less moving, H’s beaming words of encouragement as she glided past fell on icy ground. With 911 still hanging like a heavy cloud, our trip to Ellis Island left us only able to stare up to face of the Statue of Liberty and the place we would have gone had security allowed.
Shuffling with the crowd we moved slowly down the gallery of lost faces on the white temporary boarding looking out beyond the place the Twin Towers had stood. So much had been lost, but the sorrow for me was compounded inconsolably by the destroyed church that no one ever mentions. Peering into the hole in the ground I watched the men working rebuilding the subway pondering on the plans for the site, hoping it wouldn’t be another tower.
The world moves on no matter the catastrophe, be it a marriage or the unexpected destruction of the innocent and innocence. If we are lucky we plant a garden on the site.
By the last day I had walked my legs to stumps and stayed in bed while H ticked off another item on her agenda, the Empire State Building. Even though we had gone to bed early every day, we had still been to see Fiddler on the Roof in an off Broadway theatre, enjoying the extra elbow room of diminished matinee audience. In the Grand Central Station Oyster Bar we perched on tall stools and been amused by a series of curious natives drawn by the accent to chat. To prove the world is a very small place, we met a man from my home town who was happy to act as tour guide and walk us back to our hotel.
New York would be my garden, the sights and sounds the flowers that would perpetually flower. Each individually a memorable version on a colourful theme.
courtesy of : unsplash.com. Author Remi Zik
The Chrysler building is reminiscent of a beautiful sleek chrome clad rocket upended and ready to soar into the ether, the Rockerfeller Building sheer sided gleaming glass and unbelievably tall. Times Square is total mayhem with its own neon lit police station and to step into Grand Central station is like stepping into breathtakingly gorgeous cathedral for the masses. New York at night is an eternal Christmas, every building lit like the brightest, longest imaginable fairy light. It is a health conscious, soup obsessed city upholding a white/non-white class crevasse, but it felt like home. London stretched and pulled beyond the bounds of imagination.
Every morning we strolled up Lexington to eat pancakes in Scotties Diner and every evening around eight we fell into bed exhausted but serenely happy. I snored only once when H’s fatalistic nature critically reviewed the number of new purchases in my case and I dreamt of irate customs officers - Apparently it seems I sleep talk too. But slowly, very slowly thoughts of home and a forgotten past were overtaken by selfish pleasures.
Five days later, I arrived home to a pristinely clean house, two ecstatically smiling children and a used to be garage, now as yet undefined decked area, filled to bursting with empty beer and sundry booze bottles and a reasonably healthy bank account.
The experiment, it seemed, was working and one day in early January I would wake into the familiar comfort of home look in the mirror and smile at my reflection.
And one day in January H will say, “lets go to Alaska.”
Written November 2010 (Revised 24 June 2017)
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