64

My eyes were gooey. I shuffled a slow, post-flight zombie shuffle to the endless metal snake of the carousel. The colours on the signs seemed so much brighter. The American yellow was a truer yellow, the American blue more honest and the American green clearer. Everything looked new and big and unafraid to talk to you. We were ushered through with polite instruction delivered so formulaically as to not be polite at all, and found ourselves slumbering through an automatic door that opened like wings webbed with metal. Lou held my elbow. It felt traditional, gentlemanly and good. Unsure of what I was looking for, I faked a confident stride, hoping that the people in the expectant crowd of loved-ones would notice my gait before they did my eyes scanning their signage. We walked to the end of the row, where we ran out of people, the runts of our flight’s litter. I watched people I recognised from the plane throw bags to the floor as arms not seen in some time were flung around them. Embraces exploded in excited squeals.

‘Excuse me.’

An accent, new and pleasurable to our ears, like bathing in the sound of a happy belly. Together we spun on our heels, where a sign written in blister-red lipstick on the inside of a cereal box said simply ‘Lou’. Wrapped around it were nails in that same stop-sign red. They clung like cockles to fingers bedecked in clusters of sparkling golden rings. Discs and bands and jewels. Rings with names on, rings with faces. They moved around and over each other, a busy hive of shiny wasps. Our eyes were magpies, gliding up two smooth black arms to Norma Bee. Her smile was a grand piano, her laugh a grandiloquent diva snickle. She had breakneck curves from her neck down over her huge bosoms and out in glorious rolls round her hips. She had a mayoral amount of jewellery wrapped around her and her bright blonde hair shaved to curly miniature ringlets.

She took us both in her arms and laughed some more, kissing us, leaving rails of red across our faces. We curled up and wallowed in her genuine warmth.

‘Lou. And Mr Ede, I presume?’ she said in the best way. ‘I’ve been expecting you. Now let’s go eat.’

We followed her, through more doors, to the tarmac. We came to her car and she talked at us, I caught barely half of it, not concentrating, Lou nodding, our bearings shot.

‘Have a good flight?’ she said. ‘So looking forward to your visit. I’ve made you some beds.’

Beds. Plural. Our stay followed an explanatory letter, I thought. We were not together, not in Norma Bee’s head or Lou’s. Only mine.

Her car was huge. Wide and full of crisp, cold air. In the back I had room to extend my legs without them touching the door, and the leather was new and pungent. I inhaled it, clearing my sleepy head. While Lou and Norma Bee made small talk in the front, about Mal and England and tents and fat and butchery and trailers and my mum and dad, I was bombarded through my window by Ohio sunshine. Hard to think it was the same sun. The sky in America seemed so much further away, the roads you viewed it from wider, the eyes you saw it through tinted. I saw the America me and Mal learned about on late-night television. Red fire hydrants. Hanging traffic lights. Steam. I felt smaller and smaller around each corner. More new visions in a journey than in a lifetime so far. We got faster and faster as we drove out from Cleveland, further from the stores and billboards, bigger and bigger distances apart until soon there was little around us but road. Then the lanes multiplied, winding like a neckerchief around a new city on the horizon. The dry heat sucked wet stencils out of my back and by the time we arrived at Norma Bee’s house on the outskirts of Akron, my white shirt had joker lips.

‘Here we are,’ said Norma Bee, standing in the centre of the patchy rectangle of grass where the trailer once cast its shadow. ‘Home sweet home.’

It was a small building, a clear distance from the neighbours on either side, with wooden steps cut thick leading up to a sparse veranda and through a dirty screen door into the house. Inside a small dog yapped and bared its teeth until Norma reassured it that all was fine and it climbed into its basket, gnawing on a bone twice its size.

‘Now there isn’t much room, so we’ll make do,’ Norma said.

The inside of the house had been knocked-through in part to make room for her dead husband. I found a fold-up travel bed laid out in the hall. Though it looked little more than the debris of a crash between some twisted metal springs and a pile of knitted rags, I looked forward to having my own room. I unpacked my clothes into the drawers she provided in cupboards vast and heavy. There were shirts and trousers in there with no purpose any more. Enormous and specially made, some of them the circumference of those huge Army-issue water tanks rolled out when there are floods. There were waistlines for clowns and chest sizes for bears. There were collars that would fit a Sphinx and jumpers so wide you could have hidden children in them. And I thought how odd it was that I wasn’t used to the sight of gargantuan garments, because Mal was always naked.

By the time we’d finished unpacking, it was early evening and a buffet fit for a returning war hero crowned a table on the porch. We sat there all night, relaxed and calm, the sky a thunder blue but clear and quiet, disco-lit by stars and the blinking bulbs of planes far away. But for the bark of the dog at the passing of a car, there was nothing. I was cast out of the storm and it was beautiful. We ate charred roast chicken and glazed ribs and drank red wine until we slurred our words like badly controlled puppets. And then we went to bed. In it I resolved to make Lou mine here.