The English American

by Alison Larkin

  “Billie’s never talked about him since. I think she’s blocked it out.”

  I’m back in the room with Walt, numb now. Walt’s eyes are full of tears.

  “The last time I saw you was a few moments after you were born. Billie was under. She’d become hysterical, so they gave her drugs to calm her down. I held you first. You were fiercely beautiful and so tiny. And so brave. You’d just lost your twin, and you were about to lose your parents. You were wrapped up in a hospital blanket. When I held you in my arms, I knew that giving you away meant giving away part of my soul.”

  Walt’s voice comes in and out. My mind is focused on my twin. I had a twin. I had a twin. So I wasn’t alone in there.

  Walt is somewhere else, too. I come back to him as he talks. I’m with Walt now, in the hospital. He is a young man. I am a newborn, staring up at him.

  “I held you tight, then I looked you in the eyes. Then I brought your little ear to my mouth, and I made you a promise. ‘When you need me,’ I whispered, ‘if you need me, however many years from now, whatever I am doing, no matter what battle I am fighting, I will come to you.’

  “Then I kissed you on the head and handed you back to the nurse and on to God only knew where.

  “Then I walked past the room where Billie was lying in her drugged sleep, and down the brightly lit corridor into the nearest empty room, a small room at the end where they draw blood. And I closed the door and sat on a gray plastic chair opposite a clock with a crack in it, until the morning.”

  We sit, saying nothing, for two, maybe three minutes.

  “Nobody told me I had a twin who died. But I knew. I must have done. That must be why I’ve been writing about it…here,” I say. Trembling, I hand Walt the script of my play.

  “Read this,” I say, turning to the final page. “Please.”

  As it ends, only one of the two characters is left onstage. Walt reads the narrator’s final words aloud. His voice sounds far away again.

  “I hear a voice crying in the wind. It is the voice of my brother, drowning in a pool.”

  We sit for half an hour on the edge of my bed, on the multicolored blanket Dad bought me when he visited Lesotho, saying nothing.

  Walt’s packing his luggage in his tiny pink hotel room. His flight leaves in three hours.

  “Don’t ever do anything that doesn’t feel right because other people tell you you should. Trust yourself,” he says. He keeps saying it. “You’re the real stuff, kid.” And then “Courage, kid. You’re a warrior, kid. Courage.”

  We drive to the airport. My parking is terrible. I get the time wrong. We’re two hours early. We check him in and then drive to the Green Man pub. I buy him some pork scratchings, a packet of prawn cocktail crisps, which he absolutely loves, and a ploughman’s lunch. He eats everything but the pickled onion.

  On our way back to the car, I sneak six packets of prawn cocktail crisps into the side of his bag and manage to zip it up without him noticing.

  “I thought about you so much over the years,” Walt’s saying. “Wondering.”

  “Wondering what?” I say.

  “When I held you in the hospital, just after you were born, I thought I saw something in your eyes that I’d not seen before.”

  “What?”

  “My spirit, Pippa. For the past twenty-eight years, I’ve wondered if the child I gave away was the one child of mine who had inherited my spirit.”

  “And am I?” I say.

  “God, yes.”

  Everything I hoped to find in my reunion with Billie, I have found in my reunion with this man. For the first time in my life I feel recognized. Validated. By someone who reminds me of me.

  “Why are you crying?” he says.

  “I’ve just found you and now you’re going away on an airplane,” I say.

  “I will never go away again,” he says. “I will always be here for you. Home,” he says, laughing, “is somewhere where they have to take you in.”

  I withdraw instantly. “But you mustn’t ever out of some sense of obligation, just to be kind or anything…” I begin, but, as I say it, I realize this is an old insecurity speaking that has no place here. That will, in time, go away. I know that this man is filled with the happiness I am full of.

  “No unauthorized crying,” Walt says as we wander toward customs. “You see, there are other people like you in the world,” he says.

  “I love you,” he says. “I love the way you light up a room when you walk into it. You’re a warrior. I love you, kid. Remember, there can be no courage without fear.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  ITELLNICK EVERYTHING.He replies immediately.

  DATE: November 9

  TO: pippa-dunn@hotmail.com

  FROM: NickDevang@bankglobal.net

  You remember that I met my father the year my mother died, and that meeting him changed everything, just as meeting your father has changed everything for you. But there is a difference.

  What I have told no one, until now, is that when I found my father he was living on a park bench in East London. His face was unshaven and his clothes smelled of stale beer. He told me he earned his living painting on the streets. Literally. That day’s painting had brought him seven pounds fifty. He’d show me his work, only the rain had already washed the chalk away.

  He had been raised in foster homes in England and told me that not knowing how he came to be was the great agony of his life. He knew nothing about his parents, except that, owing to the color of his skin, one of them must have been of Indian or Middle Eastern descent.

  He told me he had never left me and insisted my mother had stolen me from him. He told me he had spent time in jail. He told me he had once killed a man. He spoke of unfulfilled dreams, poverty, cruelty, and sorrow. Then, turning to me with my eyes burning out of his weatherbeaten face, he urged me to get the hell out of England.

  I didn’t know how much of what he told me was true, and I never found out. I went back the next day with all the money I had, which at the time wasn’t much, but he had gone. All that was left was a chalk painting of a river somewhere in India, full of the color, life, beauty, vibrancy that neither of us had ever found in England. A few months later I was contacted by a social worker who told me he had died of a heart attack, in a halfway house in East London. He was forty-six years old.

  I became good—very good—at what I do, vowing never to let the poverty that had destroyed my father touch me, and as soon as I could I did, indeed, get the hell out of England.

  I look at the faces of the people in the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, and Kuwait, searching for my father’s face. Searching for my own. Sometimes I think I see it, and that is when I paint. It’s when I paint that I feel I am connecting with the father he might have been.

  Meeting my father gave me permission to become who I am. A nomad, perhaps. A traveler certainly. The main difference between my father and myself, of course, is that he had to steal to survive. And, unlike his son, never knew what it was like to travel on a five-star budget.

  Love, Nick

  And then, later, Billie calls and offers me a job, starting in the new year. She tells me she wants to spend a lot more time in Georgia to write and be near her father. If I will come to Art Buddies and help with the promotional side of things, it will free up her time to do just that.

  “We don’t have a lot of money, but you can work for me in return for room and board, and we’ll pay you when we can.”

  I think of my dwindling bank balance.

  “Billie, I’m not sure I can afford to do this.”

  “Oh, but you can.” Billie’s excited now. “Daddy told me that if you come to America he’ll give you the second house!”

  “Oh.”

  I think of the little light gray wooden house on the creek, a few miles from Billie’s, that used to have tenants in it and now stands empty. You get to it by walking through trees and overgrown grass, about two hundred yards from the dirt track that, after a bumpy half-hour dri
ve, leads to the nearest store. I picture myself working at the farm next door, stripping tobacco in the barn, with only dim memories of the days when I dated men who had all their front teeth.

  “Billie, that’s very nice of him, but I really don’t think he should give me the house.”

  “If your grandfather wants to give you the house, he’ll give you the house! It should bring in at least thirty thousand dollars, if you sell it. That way you’re covered until we can afford to pay you.”

  Her enthusiasm is contagious.

  “I do still have some money left on my credit card—and if I was sure I’d eventually be able to pay it off, perhaps I could afford another plane ticket.”

  “Honey, I’m offering you a job and a free place to stay just outside New York City. I really don’t think you can turn this down. You’ll be perfectly placed to pursue any creative endeavor you want. And you’ll only be four hours away from your father.”

  When Charlotte calls and tells me she wants to sell the flat, I take it as a sign.

  “But what about your career in advertising?” Dad says, when I tell him.

  Wanting to put his mind at rest, I tell him Billie’s job comes with a proper salary, and that she’s not going to be there much anyway. Most of the time she’ll be in Georgia, so I’ll hardly see her.

  “And Dad, if it doesn’t work out—and of course it might not—at least I’ll have a proper title on my CV,” I say, running as far as I can with it.

  “It does sound like a good opportunity,” Mum says.

  “Yes,” Dad says eventually. “I suppose it does.”

  My instinct is screaming at me so strongly to go, it drowns out the guilt I feel. Almost.

  Christmas and New Year will come as they always do with the usual round of drinks parties, present giving, and Scottish dancing. And no one will say anything more about it.

  The night before I leave, I will get a two-line e-mail from Nick.

  DATE: January 2

  TO: pippa-dunn@hotmail.com

  FROM: NickDevang@bankglobal.net

  I consulted the I Ching. It said “The queen is returning to her castle.”

  WINTER

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  ITHOUGHT WE’D SHARE MY ROOM,”Billie says, pulling my suitcase along the corridor toward her bedroom in Adler. “This way we can lie in bed at night and talk, like girlfriends.” After sharing dormitories for seven years, I hate lying in bed and talking “like girlfriends.” I’d rather sleep in an airing cupboard.

  But the simple fact of my sharing a room with her seems to make Billie so happy, and I’m relieved to be back in Billie’s home after the torturously long security check at Heathrow and the cramped flight back to America. So I climb into my side of her enormous bed and fall asleep to the sound of Billie’s voice telling me she’s thinking of writing a book. “There you were longing to be a writer all your life,” she says. “And now you’ve inspired me to become a writer too.”

  The next morning, after a breakfast of Slim-Fast, a kind of chocolate milk that Billie shows me how to make with ice, in a blender, I go into the sitting room to be officially introduced to Billie’s creativity counselors, or, as she prefers to call them, art buddies.

  My job will be to publicize Billie’s workshops, because it’s through the workshops that she gets most of her clients. For a fee, clients who have taken one of Billie’s workshops can call Carol, Marvin, or Tom to talk about how their work is going. Billie determines who she thinks would be a good fit for them. If they’re feeling insecure, their counselor will encourage them. If they’re feeling blocked, their counselor will lead them through a series of creative visualizations, either in person or on the phone, until they are unblocked again.

  Marvin is thirty, bald, skinny, and shakes my hand with the enthusiasm of a born-again Christian, because he is a born-again Christian.

  “When Marvin’s not counseling clients he acts as my secretary,” Billie says. “Without him I’d be lost.” She smiles at Marvin, who clearly has a crush on her.

  Tom is about fifty and looks like the kind of well-worn New Yorker you read about in books. I like the way he dresses. His corduroy pants are scuffed at the knees and his lumberjack shirt is too big for his frail body. His eyes are young. It’s only his body that looks old.

  “I was introduced to Tom by his psychiatrist,” Billie tells me. “He kept drinking and then blacking out in the middle of Manhattan. Then I gave him a job working for me, and the rest is history. Tom helps our clients with their time-management issues. All artists need structure. Isn’t that right, Tom?And he’s a world-class Scrabble player.”

  Tom and Billie play Scrabble every lunchtime, on Billie’s bed. While they play, Billie makes phone calls to clients. Tom drinks strong black coffee with six sugars out of a dark green travel mug. He smokes two packs of Marlboro cigarettes a day.

  Billie’s clients are mostly people with regular jobs who want to learn to express their artistic side. She’s very inspiring when she speaks. Tom tells me she could make Karl Rove believe he could jack it all in and become a sculptor if he just put his mind to it. His voice is deep and raspy. I notice his hand shaking as he puts his coffee down.

  “And this is Carol,” Billie says. “She came to dinner one night and told me she wasn’t happy working at the library. So—ta da! I made Carol president of my company and made myself chairman of the board! All world-beaters need someone like Carol behind them, overseeing the organizational side of things.”

  Carol has an open, kind face and the clear skin and bright eyes of someone who works in a health-food shop. She’s wearing a dark green pinafore dress with a light gray shirt underneath and a pair of flat brown shoes.

  “My daughter’s just like me, Carol! We’re going to be one helluva team!”

  “Good to meet you, Pippa,” Carol says.

  Billie is at the front door now, ringing a bell.

  “Heathcliffe! Pandora! Mandlebeam!” At the sound of the bell, Heathcliffe and two large cats I’ve not met before come running up the stairs, cross the sitting room, and dash into the kitchen. One of the cats is orange and white, thin, and silky. The other is a fat tortoiseshell, with a weak hind leg and a gummy eye.

  They run into the kitchen, jump onto the kitchen table, and start guzzling cat food from a cereal bowl next to someone’s half-eaten bowl of Cheerios. Billie lets the cats eat off the kitchen table, rather than the floor, because she says it’s easier to clean up that way.

  Billie comes back into the sitting room holding a fork with a glob of cat food on the handle.

  “My daughter’s smart as a whip and as talented as I am, so she’ll pick up most of it through osmosis.”

  Surrounded by Billie, Ralph, and my new colleagues, I think of the last time I heard the word “osmosis” and vaguely remember Miss Arbuthnott teaching it in biology. We used to call her Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle because she was round and motherly and used to scuttle from the biology lab up to the main school.

  Billie’s voice brings me right back.

  “Pippa’s background is in sales, so she’ll be in charge of drumming up new business. I know she’ll have some wonderful ideas.”

  Billie is so sure I’ll be a great asset to the company, I’m starting to believe her. Carol and Tom shake my hand.

  “That just leaves Cole. He’s out getting supplies. We met at a conference a couple of months ago. He’s going to oversee the financial side of things. He’s a wonderful painter, and very spiritual.”

  As if on cue, the doorbell rings. In walks a tall man of about forty-five, with dark black curly hair and cobalt blue eyes, wearing a light blue vest and blue jeans. He’s good looking, in a worn way. Sexy, even.

  “Cole!” Billie says. “Meet my daughter!”

  The phone rings. Billie goes to pick it up. I can hear her talking in the background.

  “So you’re Pippa,” he says. “Your mother has told me all about you.”

  He’s looking at me intensely. I feel na
ked. There’s something about him that I instantly mistrust.

  “Stop talking everybody and listen up!” Billie says, rushing back into the center of the room. She’s put on a black sweater with a blue cat on it and is speaking as if she is performing for an audience. We all stop talking. Then she drops her voice. As I’ve told you before, you absolutely have to listen to Billie when she drops her voice like this.

  “We have a crisis,” she says.

  Oh no.

  “I’ve got to get back to Georgia right away.” She pauses, to make sure everyone is ready to hear what she has to say. We are. Then, “Malice is holding Daddy prisoner. She’s hidden Daddy’s car keys, insisting he’s too sick to drive up the mountain!”

  “What are you going to do?” Tom says.

  “I’m going to have Daddy back up that mountain by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Within minutes, Cole is helping Billie put her suitcase—and Heathcliffe—into the car. I watch Cole kiss Billie good-bye. I can’t tell what kind of a kiss it is, because his long back is blocking my view. Maybe that’s something Americans do to be friendly. Like the French. I’m not referring to a French kiss. The kind that involves tongues, etc. I’m referring to the cheek-to-cheek thing the French do when they say hello. Cole’s kiss is sort of in the middle.

  The other counselors clean up the coffee cups. Marvin hovers around me. He’s obviously moved by my arrival. Finally he says, “God has brought you here, I’m convinced of it.”

  I cringe inwardly, as embarrassed by easy talk of God as I am by people I’ve only known a short while telling me they love me, and make an excuse to go into the kitchen.

  “So, Pippa,” Carol says, after Billie has left. Her voice is kind. “Welcome to the Billie Parnell Show.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  THE NEXT DAY,Marvin sells me his brother’s ’86 Buick for five hundred dollars. I call it Earl Grey, because the name Typhoo’s already taken. Following Marvin’s turn-by-turn instructions on how to get there, I make the forty-minute drive into the heart of Manhattan, excited to be exploring New York City for the first time.