MAKING IT HOME – 1 SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL
The airport shuttle arrived at the bottom of my driveway at half past five in the morning. I managed to bundle my bags into the back, and then fell into a seat behind the driver. There were a couple of other travellers in the back row of seats, an elegant older woman wearing pearls, and a young girl with dreadlocks who was half asleep. The woman with the pearls was wide awake however, and said good morning very cheerfully to me. Then she didn’t shut up for the entire drive. We picked up a few more passengers around the university campus, and then headed down through Oakland and across the Bay Bridge. It was still dark and chilly, and the decorations in the city looked strange without the bustle of the Christmas shoppers on the streets, and without the flashing lights and Santa Clauses on every corner.
The woman with the pearls kept asking me questions about myself. She wanted to know all about what I was teaching, my research, how I liked living in Northern California. I did my best to answer politely, but without going into too much detail. We were the only ones in the minivan who were talking, and it made me a bit self-conscious. The girl with the dreadlocks opened her eyes at one point and winked at me, and I realised that she had been pretending to be asleep all along to avoid getting the same interrogation. We all climbed out at the kerb outside international departures, and the driver made a pile of our luggage. After paying him, people went off their separate ways, wishing each other a merry Christmas, or happy holidays, as they like to say over there. I headed for check-in, and found myself in the queue just behind the girl with the dreadlocks from the shuttle. She had a lumpy rucksack and a tie-dyed shoulder bag, and wore lots of layers of baggy clothes. She gave me a funny sort of smile when I put my suitcase down beside her luggage. I thought of asking if she was on her way home for Christmas. In the end, I decided not to say anything.
MAKING IT HOME – 2 A BOY IN A PHOTOGRAPH
I got the first letter five months ago. In a strange way, I wasn’t even surprised. I think I knew what it was when I saw it on the kitchen table where Charlie had left it, in among all the bills and bank statements and things. The name and address were written in spiky black handwriting that I didn’t recognise. It was addressed to Margaret Olden, my maiden name, rather than Margaret McDonnell, which I’ve been for the last year, since marrying Charlie. There was no return address. I left it sitting there for a couple of days, and Charlie didn’t say anything about it. He might have guessed as well. He knew the whole story, of course, and he knew why I had been in such a funny mood coming up to the fifth of June. I suppose I am every year, but this year was a little different. This year, he’d be turning eighteen, wherever he was. And that meant that if he went back to the adoption agency, he’d be able to get the letter I’d left there for him, eighteen years ago. I’d been in touch with them again more recently, and sent them an updated address, so that he could contact me if he ever came looking for information about me. Which he eventually did, it looked like.
I waited ‘til Charlie was out one night, and sat down with a cup of tea at the kitchen table and opened the letter. My hands were shaking. I tore open the envelope and took out the three folded sheets of paper. Tucked in between them was the photograph, the only one I’ve ever seen of him. I looked at that first, and I nearly dropped it in shock, because it was so completely familiar. There he was, sitting on a bench outdoors somewhere, wearing shorts and a t-shirt. He looked tall and thin, and quite tanned. It might have been taken on holiday – it looked like somewhere sunny. His hair was very dark, and cut quite short, but you could see it would be curly if he let it grow. His eyes were brown, and he had a cheeky smile. They had exactly the same smile. The same face. I knew that face well, when I was the same age he is now.
MAKING IT HOME – 3 THE SUMMERHOUSE
My parents used to own a house in a little village down on the coast. We’d go there every year, often for the whole summer holidays. The place was a bit of a wreck, but I think that was one of the things they liked about it. I remember when I was very young, there wasn’t even proper plumbing. There was a fairly primitive toilet, but we had to get water from the well in the field behind the house. We had to heat it on the old stove, so baths were quite rare during the summer, which suited my sister and me fine. My father still had to work, so he’d just come down at the weekends. Then he’d spend the whole time fixing the roof, or putting in new windows, or rewiring the electrical sockets. When he got his two weeks holidays, he’d arrive with tools, bags of cement, planks, and complicated plans for new improvements. He seemed to find it relaxing though. The place was never finished, I don’t think. There was always something else to add: a porch, a patio, a fireplace. If he’d ever finished the place to his satisfaction, I think my father would have had to sell it and maybe build another house from scratch. He could never just do nothing.
I stopped going down there with them when I was a teenager. Spending the entire summer in a little village by the sea isn’t such an attractive prospect when you’re sixteen, whereas the idea of being at home with your parents frequently away is pretty tempting. I usually got a summer job in a shop or an office, and my father was pleased I was doing something useful. My mother and sister still went though, every year. I didn’t really miss it very much. After I went away to college, I spent summers abroad, working in the States and travelling around Europe. I’d send them postcards, to the house by the sea.
Dad died last year. He had a heart-attack, two months before he was supposed to retire. I suppose it made sense that my mother sold the place shortly afterwards.
MAKING IT HOME – 4 CONVENIENTLY SITUATED
I had a notebook practically full of addresses, details, and landlords’ phone numbers. Most of them had a big black line through them. We were staying with an old aunt and uncle of his while we looked for a place. Their house was so clean and neat that just sitting on the couch I felt like I was making a mess. He’d go off to his new job every morning on the bus, and I’d get out of the house as quickly as possible and go to the internet café to look on the apartments-to-rent sites. There seemed to be fewer and fewer ads every day, and higher and higher prices. I’d scribble everything down in the notebook, and late in the evening we’d talk it over in whispers in the kitchen. Then we’d tiptoe off to our bedrooms. Separate bedrooms, of course.
Each place we went to see depressed me further. Windows looked out directly onto brick walls, or straight into the neighbours’ bathrooms. Ten minutes from the city centre meant forty minutes of hiking uphill through dilapidated housing estates. Agents proudly showed us grotty little cupboards that the websites had called “spacious and newly-furnished”. Shady-looking men with bunches of keys showed us round apartments with mysterious stains on the carpets, mould in the shower, and all the signs of having been abandoned in a hurry. By someone on the run from the police, for example. And nothing ever, ever looked like the pictures in the ads.
We were the first to arrive at the address that night. Two other couples turned up a few minutes later, and we all tried to ignore each other politely, but sort of aggressively as well. This was the competition after all. The letting agent arrived twenty minutes late without a word of apology. She led us all up the six flights of stairs, which smelled strongly of frying fish. A young guy answered the door and let us in. While we looked around, he leaned against the table, looking lost. A girl sat staring at the television, not even seeming aware we were there.
MAKING IT HOME – 5 THE LAST BUS
I pushed my way through the crowd by the bar and stepped outside. It was pouring rain, and the bouncer was shifting from foot to foot in the shelter of the doorway, looking wet and miserable. He nodded at me as I buttoned up my coat and turned up the collar, and said good luck. I hunched my shoulders against the downpour and stepped out into the street. The only people I passed were hurrying along with their heads down, past the brightly-lit windows of bars and restaurants. Wide puddles were rapidly forming on the footpaths, and, despite my efforts to avoid them, my shoes were soon soaked. I reached the bus-stop on the corner and ducked into the shelter. The rain still reached me, each gust of wind blowing a shower of drops sideways into the shelter. There was a young guy leaning against the bus timetable, staring into space. He was
[the fragment ends here … we assume that a longer sequence was planned … Typical Mick, to be fair …]
MICK TWOMEY
A not-so-young man with a glorious future behind him, Mick has failed at everything he ever undertook. The lesson is, never try. He dropped out of university in 2001, towards the end of an Erasmus year in Paris, and never came back. He has worked as a bookseller, a bar-man, in telemarketing, and as a really terrible clown. Early dreams of being a famous writer have given way to frustration and resignation; he completed his first novel, Very Few to Love, in 2009, and failed to find an agent or publisher for it, despite his lackadaisical efforts. A second novel, and a third, were started and abandoned.
He currently spends many hours tinkering with worn-out and overwrought prose first written several years ago. He is a dedicated decadent, and pursues excess and self-destruction with wild abandon. Long fascinated with the darker side of life, he has become a slave to his melancholy and his anomie, and takes refuge in oblivion and ecstasy at every chance he gets.
