‘She can’t speak or move,’ said Mary, ‘but look at the power she has.’
‘Yeah,’ said Patrick. ‘All this chattering that takes place in between is nothing compared to the crying and groaning that takes place at either end of life. It drives me crazy: we’re controlled by one wordless tyrant after another.’
‘But where are we going for our holidays next year?’ asked Robert.
‘We can go anywhere,’ said Patrick. ‘We’re no longer prisoners of this Provençal perfection. We’re jumping out of the postcard, we’re hitting the road.’ He sat down next to Robert on the bed. ‘Bogotá! Blackpool! Rwanda! Let your imagination roam. Picture the fugitive Alaskan summer breaking out among the potholes of the tundra. Tierra del Fuego is nice at this time of year. No competition for the beaches there, except from those hilarious, blubbery sea lions. We’ve had enough of the predictable pleasures of the Mediterranean, with its pedalos and its pizzas au feu de bois. The world is our oyster.’
‘I hate oysters,’ said Robert.
‘Yeah, I slipped up there,’ said Patrick.
‘Well, where do you want to go?’ asked Mary. ‘You can choose anywhere you like.’
‘America,’ said Robert. ‘I want to go to America.’
‘Why not?’ said Patrick. ‘That’s where Europeans traditionally go when they’ve been evicted.’
‘We’re not being evicted,’ said Mary, ‘we’re finally getting free.’
AUGUST 2003
13
WOULD AMERICA BE JUST like he’d imagined it? Along with the rest of the world, Robert had lived under a rain of American images most of his life. Perhaps the place had already been imagined for him and he wouldn’t be able to see anything at all.
The first impression that came his way, while the plane was still on the ground at Heathrow, was a sense of hysterical softness. The flow of passengers up the aisle was blocked by a red-haired woman sagging at the knees under her own weight.
‘I cannot go there. I cannot get in there,’ she panted. ‘Linda wants me to sit by the window, but I cannot fit in there.’
‘Get in there, Linda,’ said the enormous father of the family.
‘Dad!’ said Linda, whose size spoke for itself.
That certainly seemed typical of something he had seen before in London’s tourist spots: a special kind of tender American obesity; not the hard-won fat of a gourmet, or the juggernaut body of a truck driver, but the apprehensive fat of people who had decided to become their own airbag systems in a dangerous world. What if their bus was hijacked by a psychopath who hadn’t brought any peanuts? Better have some now. If there was going to be a terrorist incident, why go hungry on top of everything else?
Eventually, the Airbags dented themselves into their seats. Robert had never seen such vague faces, mere sketches on the immensity of their bodies. Even the father’s relatively protuberant features looked like the remnants of a melted candle. As she squeezed into her aisle seat, Mrs Airbag turned to the long queue of obstructed passengers, a brown smudge of tiredness radiating from her faded hazel eyes.
‘Thank you for your patience,’ she groaned.
‘It’s sweet of her to thank us for something we haven’t given her,’ said Robert’s father. ‘Perhaps I should thank her for her agility.’
Robert’s mother gave him a warning look. It turned out they were in the row behind the Airbags.
‘You’re going to have to put the armrests down for takeoff,’ Linda’s father warned her.
‘Mom and me are sharing these seats,’ giggled Linda. ‘Our tushes are expanding!’
Robert peeped through the gap in the seats. He didn’t see how they were going to get the armrests down.
After meeting the Airbags, Robert’s sense of softness spread everywhere. Even the hardness of some of the faces he saw on that warm and waxy arrival afternoon, in the flag-strewn mineral crevasses of mid-town Manhattan, looked to him like the embittered softness of betrayed children who had been told to expect everything. For those who were prepared to be consoled there was always something to eat; a pretzel stall, an ice-cream cart, a food-delivery service, a bowl of nuts on the counter, a snack machine down the corridor. He felt the pressure to drift into the mentality of grazing cattle, not just ordinary cattle but industrialized cattle, neither made to wait nor allowed to.
In the Oak Bar, Robert saw a row of men as pale and spongy as mushrooms, all standing on the broad stalks of their khaki trousers in front of the cigar cabinet. They seemed to be playing at being men. They sniggered and whispered, like schoolboys who were expecting to be caught out, to be made to remove the cushions they had stuffed under their pastel button-down shirts, and unpeel the plastic caps which made them look as if they were already bald. Watching them made Robert feel so grown up. He saw the old lady on the next table drape her powdered lips over the edge of her cocktail glass and suck the pink liquid expertly into her mouth. She looked like a camel trying to hide its braces. In the convex reflection of the black ceramic bowl in the window he saw people come and go, yellow cabs surge and slip, the spinning wheels of the park carriages approaching until they grew as small as the wheels of a wristwatch, and disappeared.
The park was bright and warm, crowded with sleeveless dresses and jackets hooked over shoulders. Robert felt the heightened alertness of arrival being eroded by exhaustion, and the novelty of New York overlaid by the sense that he had seen this new place a thousand times before. Whereas the London parks he knew seemed to insist on nature, Central Park insisted on recreation. Every inch was organized for pleasure. Cinder paths looped among the little hills and plains, past a zoo and a skating rink, quiet zones, sports fields and a plethora of playgrounds. Headphoned rollerbladers pursued a private music. Teenagers scaled small mounds of bronze-grey rocks. A flute player’s serpentine music echoed damply under the arch of a bridge. As it faded behind them, it was replaced by the shrill mechanical tooting of a carousel.
‘Look, Mama, a carousel!’ said Thomas. ‘I want to go on it. I can’t resist doing that, actually.’
‘OK,’ said Robert’s father with a tantrum-avoiding sigh.
Robert was delegated to take Thomas for a ride, sitting on the same horse as him and fastening a leather belt around his waist.
‘Is this a real horse?’ said Thomas.
‘Yes,’ said Robert. ‘It’s a huge wild American horse.’
‘You be Alabala and say it’s a wild American horse,’ said Thomas.
Robert obeyed his brother.
‘No, Alabala!’ said Thomas sharply, waving his index finger. ‘It’s a carousel horse.’
‘Whoops, sorry,’ said Robert as the carousel set in motion.
Soon it was going fast, almost too fast. Nothing about the carousel in Lacoste had prepared him for these rearing snorting horses, their nostrils painted red and their thick necks twisted out ambitiously towards the park. He was on a different continent now. The frighteningly loud music seemed to have driven all the clowns on the central barrel mad, and he could see that instead of being disguised by a painted sky studded with lights, heavily greased rods were revolving overhead. Along with the violence of the ride, this exposed machinery struck him as typically American. He didn’t really know why. Perhaps everything in America would show this genius for being instantly typical. Just as his body was being tricked by a second afternoon, every surprise was haunted by this sense of being exemplary.