I Conquer Britain

by Dyan Sheldon

  “Thank you, Cherry. Sometimes I worry that it’s a bit silly, painting pets.” The umbrella and the head both bobbed and more water dripped down my back. Caroline sighed. “But there isn’t much time for that sort of thing, of course. Even when my mother can walk the dogs herself there’s always so much to do looking after Robert and the children and the house.”

  I sympathized. “Jake says that’s one of the reasons all the really famous artists have always been men. You know, because they never had to do anything else.”

  “Does she?”

  Robert suddenly materialized at the French doors.

  “Caroline!” he called. “Caroline. I thought we were going to eat.”

  She gave me a look. “I suppose one could say the same about writers.”

  I Meet the Czar Who Escaped the Revolution

  Lunch wasn’t exactly the Mad Hatter’s tea party (everybody stayed in their chairs and there weren’t any rodents in the teapot or anything like that), but it was still pretty peculiar.

  There we were in the dining room with a real cloth on the table and the vase of flowers and everything like it was Thanksgiving or something and we had twenty people for this big, fancy meal. Only it was just the three of us and we weren’t having a big, fancy meal. We weren’t even having something typically English like boiled cabbage or crumpets to celebrate my first day in London.

  “This is great.” I looked from my plate to Caroline. “I love pizza.”

  “I thought you might.” She passed me the salad. “Make you feel a bit more at home.”

  The feeling at home thing only lasted for as long as it took me to realize that the cutlery beside my plate wasn’t just for the lettuce and tomatoes. (I figured this was another point for Mr Young and his belief that the English are so terrifically civilized. I mean, how far away from our hunter-gatherer past do you have to be even to think of eating pizza with a knife and fork?)

  “Wow,” I said. “In Brooklyn we just pick it up with our hands.”

  “You also drive on the wrong side of the road,” said Robert.

  “It’s so messy, though, isn’t it?” Caroline daintily speared a small triangle of pizza. “What with the sauce and all.”

  I picked up my knife and fork, and dug in. A big chunk of pie jumped into the air and landed cheese-side down on the immaculate tablecloth.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” (That was Caroline not me.)

  “It’s Sod’s Law, isn’t it?” asked Robert.

  I didn’t know who Sod was.

  “Sod was some poor bloke who worked out that if someone throws you a knife you’re going to catch it by the blade.”

  “We call it Murphy’s Law.” (Sky says it would be an Irishman who figured that one out.)

  “See what I mean about you Americans?” said Robert. “You always have to be different.”

  After that, Robert went into writer-brooding-over-his-book mode (a state I recognized from my dad, who was once so preoccupied thinking about what he was going to say about Arizona that he didn’t even notice that the stove was on fire), so it was left to Caroline and me to keep the conversation going. We talked about the weather and the garden and school and what vegetarians eat and her mom’s back and stuff like that. So this was normality. Eating lunch in the dining room with Robert sitting there like he was in a trance and the extra plate and cutlery across from where I was sitting. My gran has a friend who always sets an extra place in case Jesus happens to drop by, which is pretty weird since it isn’t like he’d show up because he was hungry, but this was even weirder. It was like the Czar was missing in action for the last thirty years but Caroline still believed that he would suddenly return from the war.

  I would’ve been really happy to see him stroll into the dining room and sit down with us myself. In my mind, he’d already become the friend I needed. Besides, talking about his trip to India had to be at least a million times more interesting than talking about bean curd and rain.

  Even eating pizza with a knife and fork can’t take for ever (even if it seems like it does), and eventually lunch was over and Robert went back to his garret and Caroline got ready to go to her mom’s. She didn’t ask me to go along.

  “You must be tired,” said Caroline. “Perhaps you’d like a lie down whilst I’m out.”

  Whilst? Was that a real word? I decided not to tackle it. “Lie down what?”

  “Yourself. You know, have a little rest.”

  I just got there. Why would I want to go to bed when I just got there?

  “My gran says you’ll get all the rest you need when you’re dead,” I told her.

  Caroline showed me where anything I might possibly need in the next few hours was. That’s the water filter. That’s where the glasses are kept. That’s where the biscuits live. That’s the bowl of fruit. Tea and chocolate drink in there. Coffee in there. Small silver tea ball that looks like an owl for single cups in the spoon drawer. Milk in the fridge. She showed me how to switch on the electric kettle. How to work the coffee maker. How to light the stove. How to press the power button on the TV. How to work the remote. She left the number for emergencies and her mother’s number by the phone.

  “Just in case,” said Caroline.

  Just in case of what?

  “You never know,” said Caroline. “You have to plan for everything, don’t you?”

  My family plans for nothing – not even the worst.

  “But Robert’s here,” I reminded her.

  “Yes. Yes, he is,” she agreed. “But he’s working.”

  Obviously nothing – from earthquakes to invading armies – distracted Robert when he was working (which was about the only thing about him that reminded me of Sal).

  After she checked that the garden door was really locked and finally picked up her umbrella and left, I went up to my room to write some emails to the folks back home. To Jake to tell her I’d arrived in one piece (not that she’d worry if she didn’t hear from me since she knew she’d know pretty fast if I hadn’t) and to ask her why she didn’t tell me about the smiling and apologizing, and the plugs, and pizza with cutlery and the appalling gruesomeness of tea. To Tampa to let her know that I hadn’t run into Harry Potter yet. To Gallup to tell him about all the birds I didn’t see in the garden. And to Bachman to see if he’d met the Pitt-Turnbull yet and whether or not she looked like Barbie and was carrying a teddy bear.

  I put a CD in the stereo, turned it on, and sat down at the computer.

  I was still waiting for it to verify the password when I discovered that my room was right under Robert’s office. He started thumping on the ceiling like a demented rabbit.

  I turned down the volume.

  Thumpthumpthump. “Lower!” he shouted.

  I turned it down so low that the only reason I could hear it was because I’d heard it so many times before.

  When I finished my emails I realized I had a problem. Like, now what did I do? I’d planned to meditate to relax after all the stresses of the last twenty-four hours, but I was pretty sure that Robert would be thumping on the ceiling again by the third Om. On the other hand, there was no way I was going to stay in that room with nothing to do but count stuffed animals and shades of pink until I got some answers to my emails. So I went downstairs to see if there was anything to drink in the kitchen that wouldn’t strip paint.

  I found some green tea at the back of the cabinet and put the kettle on.

  It was really quiet. In our house the refrigerator always sounds like it’s about to take off, but in Caroline’s kitchen I couldn’t hear so much as a clock ticking. You couldn’t even hear the rain. I sat at the table, waiting for the kettle to boil. Being adaptable, I always try to look on the bright side of things, but I was starting to think that it was going to be a really long summer. And just as dull as waiting in some podunk town in Arkansas for your car to be fixed. I started thinking about camping with Bachman, and the time I tripped and fell flat on my face but my pack was so heavy I couldn’t get up again. We
’d laughed for at least an hour over that. When the kettle clicked off I realized that I must’ve zoned out for a couple of minutes because my eyes opened. And then I realized that it wasn’t the kettle I’d heard turning itself off, it was the front door opening because I heard it shut.

  Looking back on it, I know it doesn’t seem really likely, but at the time I thought it might be a burglar. Maybe it was because I was already bored, but I figured that was why Caroline left me all the numbers – because she knew The Terrifying Truth (that even though it looked about as dangerous as a glass of water Putney was actually the Crime Capital of London), only she was too polite to warn me right out. Until Jake got fed up with Sal and moved us to Brooklyn we lived in a trailer and travelled all over the States (that’s how I know about podunk towns with one mechanic who’s always fishing). The first thing you learn when you live like that is not to panic. I mean, what’s the point? Things are always going wrong. Tyres blow, engines set themselves on fire, you end up in Mexico by mistake. So I didn’t panic. I grabbed the cordless phone with one hand and the big frying pan that was on the stove with the other and peered around the door.

  A dude wearing a blue hoodie over a collarless white shirt was tiptoeing down the hallway. Just like a thief. Only I knew right away that he wasn’t a thief because of the set of house keys in his hand (and because he had a tan that hadn’t come from anywhere around Putney – not unless he’d used a lamp). It had to be the Czar. The image of being stuck in a town where the only things that happen are dawn, dusk and the weather vanished from my head. I’d been right. The Czar was exactly what I needed in my new life. A really cute, young guy who wore jeans and a silver Om symbol in one ear. He was my ticket out of the sleepy streets of the suburbs and into the dead cool London Kev told me about.

  The Czar didn’t see me. He was eyeing the top of the stairs like he thought the cops might be waiting for him up there. The cops or his mom.

  “Hi!” I put on the warm and friendly smile of the charming, really low-maintenance American teenager anyone in his right mind would want to hang out with. “You must be the Czar.”

  He was so surprised that he totally forgot that he was on a secret mission. He jumped and hit the table in the hall, and then he turned on me like I’d pushed him or something. “Where the bloody hell did you come from?”

  I held up the frying pan. “The kitchen.”

  He obviously didn’t inherit the genetic disorder that makes it virtually impossible for Caroline not to smile. “What’s that for? Were you going to hit me with it?”

  “Only if I had to.”

  This didn’t make him laugh like it was supposed to. His eyes darted back to the top of the stairs and he lowered his voice. “Where’s my mum?”

  “She’s gone to your gran’s.” I kept on beaming warmth, companionship and goodwill at him, even though I was pretty sure I was wasting my positive energy.

  “That’s all right, then.” He sounded relieved. “And it’s Xar,” he corrected. “As in Alexander. You must be the Yank.” He didn’t make this sound like a particularly good thing.

  “That’s right.” If I’d smiled any harder my lips would have split. “My name’s—”

  “It’s some sort of fruit, isn’t it?” He turned and started up the stairs. “Strawberry,” he guessed.

  “No, it’s—”

  “Oh, I remember,” he said without turning around. “It’s Cherry.”

  “Actually, it’s Cherokee,” I shouted after him.

  “Right,” he said as he reached the landing. “Like the car.”

  “No, like the Indian tribe.”

  He vanished into his room. That’s the trouble with hope, I thought. It leads you on. I was still standing there, gazing up the stairs, when he came running back down carrying a small satchel, a lot like the one that Bart ate. Why is there never a destructo pig around when you really want one?

  “Tell my mother I won’t be in for supper,” he commanded as he strode back down the hall. “Something’s come up.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d be delighted to.” I caught a glimpse of a small red car parked in front of the house before the front door banged behind him. If you asked me, I was right about calling him the Czar. He definitely acted like he thought he was better than everybody else. I stuck my tongue out at the empty hall. “Nice to meet you, too, your majesty.”

  After my encounter of the third kind with the king of rudeness, I went back upstairs with my tea. There was an email from Bachman (the friend I really needed) waiting for me. I would’ve shrieked with joy if I didn’t know Robert would start thumping on the ceiling. Bachman said Bruce Lee wanted me to know he was really sorry for barfing all over me like that, and that he wanted me to know that he was sorry for getting on my case about going. Rain sounds pretty good, wrote Bachman. It’s already so hot I feel like my skin’s starting to melt. He was working in his dad’s hardware store, which meant he was pretty much sitting at the computer (except when he had to go get somebody some nails or cut a key or something), so I wrote him right back. And that’s how I spent my first afternoon in London – emailing Bachman in Brooklyn. At least I made him laugh. He said he was tempted to go into Smiling Pizza for lunch and ask for a knife and fork. He figured he’d get his picture in the neighbourhood paper. He wanted to know if I still wanted him to rescue Sophie from the insanity of my family. If the cops see me walking around with a girl all in pink carrying a bunch of stuffed toys they’re going to arrest me. He wanted to know what I was doing on the weekend, since I was missing the Mermaid Parade. Having lunch with the Queen? I said we were having a barbecue tomorrow. Oh, right… Bachman answered. Now I understand what they mean by the global village. He cracked me up.

  And Then There Was the Queen Who Could Have Started a Revolution

  Caroline and Robert were both in the kitchen when I went down for breakfast the next morning.

  Robert was staring out into the garden. He turned to look at me over his shoulder. “They used to say that the sun never set on the British Empire, but it’s possible that was because it never actually shone on it in the first place.” He waved towards the window. “Wouldn’t you know it’s pissing down?” (How poetic – he wasn’t a writer for nothing.)

  “Plan a barbecue and you’re guaranteed rain,” said Caroline. “Sod’s Law again.”

  Or Murphy’s.

  “Well, all’s not lost.” Caroline put a pot of tea on the table and a metal rack filled with toast (there really seemed to be no limit to English ingenuity). “We can have a nice family dinner instead. I’ll bring Mum round so she can meet Cherry.”

  Robert rolled his eyes at me. “She means get it over with.”

  “That is not what I mean.” Caroline’s smile looked really determined. “Mum’s looking forward to this.”

  I said, “Oh, me too.” I figured a normal old lady would be a nice change from my gran

  Robert sighed. “I suppose there’s no getting around it.” He gave his eyes another roll. “I can’t wait.”

  I was standing on my head (a perspective that made the bedroom look slightly better) when I heard the BMW pull up in front of the house. To tell the truth, I didn’t hear the BMW, what I heard were the dogs. One second the only sounds were the occasional muffled grunt or thud from Robert above me or a car passing by, and the next it sounded like somebody had opened the gates of Hell and let out the hounds.

  I came out of the pose and went to the window.

  Caroline was standing on the sidewalk by the passenger’s door holding her flowery umbrella, while two brown and white spaniels hurled themselves against her, barking hysterically like she had fresh meat in her pockets.

  I’d thought I had a pretty good idea of what Caroline’s mother was like. I figured she was going to be one of those sweet, frail, dithery old English ladies like Miss Marple (but probably not a crack detective). You know, in the grey skirt and pastel blouse and an old straw hat with a flower on it. The kind who’s always forgetting wher
e she put her knitting. I leaned forward as Caroline opened the door to see how good a guess I’d made.

  I wasn’t even close. (Lesson for Today: Don’t get fooled by stereotypes!)

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Caroline!” She barked louder than the dogs. “How can I possibly get out when you’re blocking my way?”

  Caroline took a step backwards, and moved the umbrella forwards. “I’m so sorry, Mum. I was only trying to—”

  “And get that bloody umbrella away from me. You’re going to poke my eye out.”

  “I’m sorry,” bleated Caroline. “But you’ll get wet.”

  “It’s water,” roared her mother. “Not acid. If you want to be useful see that the boys don’t knock me down.”

  Pinning the umbrella under her arm, Caroline grabbed hold of the dogs and hauled them back from the car to let her mother out.

  Caroline’s mother (otherwise known as Poor Old Mum) probably didn’t even know what sweet and frail meant. She was built like a silo. And forget the grey skirt and pastel blouse and straw hat malarkey. She was wearing an electric-blue pants suit, matching turban and enough gold jewellery to sink a rowboat. She looked more like some eccentric Queen than Miss Marple. (One who’s always giving orders and lopping off people’s heads.)

  “Drake! Raleigh!” she bellowed as she heaved herself out of the car on her walking stick. “Settle down!”

  The dogs had been yanking Caroline in all directions, but they immediately dropped to the ground. They knew their master’s voice when they heard it.

  “You have to let them know you’re boss,” snapped Poor Old Mum. And she marched past Caroline, who was struggling with the dogs and the umbrella again and trying to lock the car at the same time, and up the path pretty spryly for someone whose back was wracked with incredible pain.

  I didn’t know if I should just go downstairs and introduce myself or wait to be called. I opened the door to my room while I was thinking about it. I could hear Poor Old Mum in the kitchen. She had a voice that was loud enough to call the pigs in five counties, and that wasn’t even when she was shouting. That was when she was just having a conversation.