On the bus Neil’s hangover really got going. His stomach felt empty, but also like it wanted to be emptier; he took a few deep breaths. As they bounced along the little streets leading out of London he felt each dip and speed hump add to the disorder of his gut. He wished he’d bought a bag of the curry crisps Veejay swore by. He wished he were at home in bed. He caught sight of a homeless person asleep in a doorway and would have pawned whatever social privilege he’d been born into if it meant trading the jostling bus for the sidewalk, which moved only very slowly as the earth spun on its axis, the planets rotated around the sun, tectonic plates shifted and—
Neil’s stomach gave a small, terrible hiccup, its contents apparently seeking a more stable environment. He looked around. The door to the lavatory was taped shut, the bus windows weren’t the kind that opened. The seat beside him was empty, but across the aisle there was a woman and a little girl. The girl was sleeping the determined sleep of a child on a bus and the woman’s eyes were closed. Her hair was twisted on top of her head in an African cloth and the weight of it made her chin dip down onto her chest. Each time her chin touched down, her eyes opened. Nothing would spoil her bus ride like watching Neil throw up all over his seat.
Now the speed humps were gone and they were stuck in traffic. The bus lurched into an intersection and stopped. The light was green but no one moved. It turned red, then green again. Next to them a truck’s engine stalled and started up with a puff of bluish smoke. The light turned red, and the cloud of truck exhaust floated up and made it purple.
In his lecture on the Second Industrial Revolution, Professor Piot had brought blackened, half-eroded bricks to class to show the effects of air pollution in London at the turn of the century. Umbrellas are black even today, he told them, because they first came into fashion when that was the color of the rain, and in the late Victorian era silver tarnished so quickly that people stopped eating off it—although it could have been due to socioeconomic factors as well. As factory jobs became more plentiful and the price of labor rose it would have been more expensive to hire servants to polish all those cool heavy plates . . . They were moving again. Neil leaned against the cool glass of the window, imagining Victorians pressing their aching heads to gravy bowls. The bus picked up speed, the suburbs passed by behind a smudge on the glass. Letting his thoughts smudge with them, Neil fell asleep.
Professor Piot believed in what he called observed knowledge, and he was always telling his students about all the things one could learn about the past by noticing the details of the present. In France, for example, where Professor Piot was from, you could tell if a town had had monarchical or republican political leanings, say, a hundred and fifty years ago, by whether or not the trains stopped there. If the town had a train station, and you had to bet, you’d better bet it had been republican, because the towns in good standing with the new République were the ones that got the rail lines to the capital. And Professor Piot told them you could go to little towns and look at where the World War One monument had been placed in relation to the church to see how religious the people were by the time the war was over and the town’s young men were dead. There was actually a statistically significant relationship between the number of local boys who had died in battle and the distance between the church and the town’s memorial to the soldiers that were lost. The more dead soldiers, the less inclined the townspeople were to build a monument in the churchyard. They’d put it up in front of city hall instead. There were some villages, Professor Piot had told them, where the World War One monuments included broken crosses—broken on purpose, maybe even carved that way, to show that the people of such and such a little town knew what was up, up there.
As Neil slept, the drone of the bus motor gave way to the nasal patter of Professor Piot’s voice. Neil hoped it was an indication of his future greatness as an academic rather than of extreme nerdiness that during restless sleep his dreams tended to center on the history department, and that Professor Piot’s voice in particular seemed to stick in his head, maybe because he had two classes with him that semester. Neil had even started thinking his own thoughts in Professor Piot’s accent, which was definitely weird, and during their meetings—Professor Piot was also Neil’s faculty advisor—he had to concentrate very hard to make sure he didn’t accidentally gargle his r’s.
Neil felt something move against his foot. He opened his eyes. The little girl across the aisle had crawled under her mother’s legs and was reaching for Neil’s father’s present. “It’s okay,” Neil said, as her mother hauled her back into her seat. “I’d let her open it, just—it’s not really mine.”
He settled his head against a new, cooler spot on the window. They were well out of London now. Something bright and yellow was blooming in the fields in all directions. The color rose and fell over little hills, like someone had taken a highlighter to the entire landscape.
Professor Piot would be able to learn something from the view out the bus window. Neil looked at the unbroken expanse of yellow flowers, but all he could think of was that there weren’t sprinkler systems in England. The Colorado prairie might have seemed endless to the pioneers, but every patch of green back home now had a dotted line running through it, wheels and pipes and bursts of high-powered water making frets in the landscape. When Neil was a kid he and his cousins used to run through Pop’s sprinklers on summer afternoons, and the water felt like the smack of a two-by-four when it hit them across the back. But in England there was rain, and Neil wondered if British farmers led a fundamentally sweeter existence, not always fixing broken irrigation pumps and wondering who upstream was taking more than their share. The yellow of the fields was so bright it hurt his eyes, so Neil looked out through his eyelashes for the rest of the trip, thinking about Nan and Pop’s ranch and wondering how his dad was doing now that he was running it all on his own.
The girls in the flat next door thought it was cute that Neil’s father was a farmer—actually his dad had been an English teacher, but Neil left that part out. During halftime the night before Neil had told the girls about the first time Neil’s dad brought Neil’s mom home to meet the family, which happened to be on a day Pop was castrating bull calves. Nan had served Rocky Mountain oysters for supper—the marriage was obviously doomed from the start—and Amanda thought the idea of breaded testicles was so funny that she sort of fell against Neil’s shoulder while she was laughing and stayed there through the penalty kicks. Neil made a mental note to ask his father if anything interesting had been happening at the ranch in the months since they’d talked. It was too bad the cows had been sold after Pop died; it would have been great to have some stories about calving chains or coyote problems to tell the girls.
Now that he was finally delivering the Christmas present, Neil was honestly looking forward to talking to his father, and he figured that with the time difference it would work out perfectly to give him a call when he got back to London that night. He’d tell his dad about Professor Piot’s class trip to East Sussex, where they’d tramped through privately owned meadows looking for the famous and possibly nonexistent ditch where the English made their last stand during the Battle of Hastings. He would save the news about getting picked to go to Paris for last, knowing that when his father was proud of him for something he tended to choke up and get awkward and would probably end up hanging up before Neil was actually done talking. Unlike Neil’s mother, who didn’t see why Neil wouldn’t want to spend one last summer at home, working at the movie theater and saving money for school, Neil’s father would understand that it was a big deal to be the only underclassman on Professor Piot’s research team.
The bus station in Swindon wasn’t much of a station, just a place for buses to turn around and a covered waiting area. The bus stopped and Neil peeled his face off the window. His cheek felt flattened and cold from the glass, like a refrigerator cookie stuck to wax paper. His mouth had the briny, nutty taste of terrible breath. He searched for a piece of gum in his jacket pockets and fo
rgot his father’s package under the seat, then had to fight the getting-off crowd to go back and get it. In the bottom of his pocket he found a restaurant mint, long since unwrapped and fuzzy from his jacket lining. At first it stuck to his tongue, then began to dissolve slowly, turning one half of his mouth sticky and cool. Neil’s headache had concentrated itself into a single jab down his spine and his stomach felt gritty and hollow. He needed a Coke and a cheeseburger and a nap and a toothbrush. With his father’s present under his arm—the real-feather fletch of an arrow now sticking almost completely out of a hole in Santa’s chin—Neil was the last person to get off the bus.
Most people headed toward the city bus stop. A couple of cabs stood by but no one took them. Neil looked around for someone who could be the daughter of a mail-order girlfriend of his father’s—he was pretty sure that was the situation. But aside from a lot of blue eye shadow or something, he didn’t know exactly what such a person would look like, and anyway, it was hardly fair. He could only imagine what the friend’s daughter would be expecting of him. So Neil looked around again for a normal female person. A youngish woman sat at the city bus stop, but she was talking on her phone with a serious British accent. A bus came and she got on. Nobody got off. Neil crossed the street to the ticket-buying area. There was a girl smoking a cigarette outside. Neil smiled but she didn’t. She ground out her cigarette and didn’t seem to notice as he passed. Neil went inside the ticket office. A guy with no shoes was asleep across the chairs, despite the armrests. Behind the ticket window a woman ate a vending machine sandwich, avoiding the crusts.
Neil went back outside. He checked his phone, but no one had called. Maybe she forgot. In a few minutes he would call Veejay and probably wake him up and get him to dig through the stuff on Neil’s dresser to find the notebook where he’d written her number, which he had forgotten to put into his phone and which was going to be embarrassing, because Neil was pretty sure he’d written a couple of incriminating lines of poetry in that notebook about Amanda. Neil was no poet, but Amanda had a way of tracing her fingertips along the edges of her clothing while you talked to her. It was literary, or so Neil had thought the night before, when he was supposed to be watching Arsenal but was really watching her, and when he was likely to have already been slightly drunk. Maybe it was better to leave Veejay sleeping, his notebook safely buried under pizza boxes, and just go home.
Another city bus came and went. Neil stood with the now only mostly wrapped souvenir bow and arrow under his arm. He was suddenly sick with the thought of the stupid things he’d said to Amanda last night, combined with the thought of her fingers brushing along the edges of the shirt she’d been wearing. His breath mint was almost totally gone, and he felt his hangover gathering strength for a last assault before burying itself in the patient recesses of his liver.
“Ni-yell?” It was the girl with the cigarette, who had apparently decided to notice him.
“Oh hi,” he said. “I didn’t know it was you.”
“I am waiting for you on the other side,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” Neil said. “I guess you didn’t see me.” She seemed distracted, like something interesting was going on behind him. Maybe she’d expected someone better looking.
“We should walk?”
“Okay,” Neil said, and they started up the street. “Cool town.”
“London is more cool,” she said.
She was about Neil’s age, or maybe a little older. She didn’t seem to have on eye make-up of any color, and Neil felt like a jerk for expecting her to look like a hooker or something, though she did have an accent like the hot robot in Warcraft Reloaded. Jesus, what was her name? Had she said? He couldn’t remember.
“How’s your mom?” Neil asked.
“She’s good,” she said.
“She went back home?” Neil asked.
“Yeah. She’s having one restaurant now in Vilnius,” she said.
“Oh, wow. What kind of restaurant?” Henry IV had spent a lot of money trying to invade Vilnius before he turned his attention to deposing Richard II, but Neil couldn’t remember what modern country it was in. Belarus?
“Pizza,” she said. They crossed through a mostly deserted shopping center, then a little park. A fountain dribbled over mossy tiles. It made Neil have to pee. He wished he could remember where Vilnius was. Being a European History major, it was pretty bad that he didn’t know.
“Pizza is new big thing in Lithuania,” she said. Lithuania, Neil thought. Lithuania, Lithuania, Lithuania.
“Oh, yeah, I bet,” Neil said.
“And your dad?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah, he’s good,” Neil said. “You know.” Which was a stupid thing to say, she didn’t know his father, and if her mom had told her anything it was just that he’d been all alone in a big house since Pop died. They walked quietly for a little while, and Neil looked hard at the patchy flowerbeds, trying to think of something to say.
“So, what do you do?” Neil asked, just as she was starting to say something too. Their words got jumbled up in the air and they had to start again. “You first,” Neil said.
“No, it’s okay,” she said. “I am only asking it is okay to go to my house?”
“Sure,” Neil said. He really had to pee.
“So, what do you do?” he asked again.
“I work at one club,” she said. “Like giving drinks and things. It’s okay job, but, you know. And you?”
“I’m in school,” Neil said.
“At university?”
“Yeah. It’s like an exchange program with my school in America. They let you spend a year studying in London if you want to.” Studying in London. Jesus. She probably thought his dad was really rich. “See, usually you have to be a junior, but I’m trying to finish in three years to, you know, save money”—which was true enough, though with all his AP credits he was practically forced to graduate early—“so they’re letting me do it a year ahead of time. See, they have this program here, for what I’m studying—it’s actually better to learn about it here, because it’s European History, and this is Europe. I mean, I thought this was Europe until I got here and heard all the British people talk about Europeans like they were an alien race or something.” That was something the American kids in the history department joked about, and obviously she didn’t care, it might even be offensive, since she was a European. Her gaze kept flicking up past his shoulder, like she was trying not to look at him. He wondered if he had something on his face.
Her purse began to ring, and she dug around for her phone, which gave Neil a chance to do an all-over exploration of his face with his fingertips. He smoothed his eyebrows and wiped the sides of his mouth and the corners of his eyes. Since he hadn’t eaten anything, he could hardly have food stuck in his teeth. When he was done she was still on the phone, saying, “Yeah, it is plugged in by the wall? You are sure?” and he had a chance to really look at her for the first time. She had a very round face and hair that was intentionally cut at different lengths so that it wisped out at the slightest bit of wind, and she had on high-heeled boots like no one ever wore back home. American women in high heels always looked apologetic, like they knew they were crushing the dreams of their suffragist grandmothers or giving themselves varicose veins, and women in London wore heels with such grim awareness of how good they looked that Neil no longer found them attractive. But on what’s-her-name the boots had the effect that only Eastern European women could pull off. She didn’t look comfortable, exactly, but she walked like it was no big deal—and that in itself did something nice to her hips.
She finished the phone call, saying something in another language and then, “No, I am not talking to you when you’re calling me this . . . yeah, I know this, yeah okay good-bye.” She threw the phone back into her bag, which was large with a lot of buckles and fringe.
“Everything okay?” Neil asked, though it wasn’t his business.
“Well, everything is shit,” she said. She had on
e grayish tooth, like Neil had had when he was a kid and the roots of one of his baby teeth died after he got hit in the face with a swing.
They had turned onto a residential street—rows of houses with pale curtains across the windows and gardens in the back filled with hollyhocks and pieces of tricycles. She didn’t say anything more, but Neil felt like he couldn’t just leave it at that.
“What happened?” he asked.
She was still looking past his head in a way that made Neil want to give his face another once-over, thinking there must be something nasty on his cheek. Suddenly she leaned in, looking right at him with strange intensity. Either he had something on his face or she was going to kiss him. Neil thought he might pass out. But instead she smiled, like something there had pleased her.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
They stopped in front of a largish house. Neatly clipped hedges made it look businesslike, like a dentist’s office. She stood on the sidewalk, digging for her keys. “Wow, this is your place?” Neil said. It even had a garage.
“It’s my friend’s,” she said.
They went around to the back door and left their shoes in the hallway. Without her heels she was the same height as Neil. She put on some slippers and Neil followed her down the hall, clenching his toes to hide a hole in his sock.
The house was warm. It had a carpety smell and the soft floors seemed to absorb any sound. “My friend, he’s a little bit crazy today, so, you know, sometimes he says some stupid things.”
“Was that him on the phone?” Neil asked.
“Yeah, he’s always calling like this. He has some small problems with his computer, I don’t know what.”
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