I Conquer Britain

by Dyan Sheldon

  I said I wasn’t planning to be out that long.

  “You can’t be too careful,” said Caroline. “You never know what may happen.”

  The woman must have been the poster child for the Girl Scouts when she was a kid. But if it made her feel better, she could give me an armed escort for all I cared – as long as it got me out of the house.

  Caroline showed me how to use Sophie’s phone. She told me how to get to the high street where the shops were. Then she gave me a book of maps that covered every street in London. In case I got really really lost. She showed me how to use that, too. She took a ten-pound note out of her wallet. In case I had to take a cab home. I said I wasn’t planning to go that far. I said that anyway I had my cash card so I could get some money of my own. Caroline said but what if the machine was empty? What if it was broken? What if it wouldn’t accept my card? I took the money. I couldn’t stand the burden of having her worrying about me not being able to get any money and then being chased by wild chickens through Putney because I couldn’t afford a cab.

  The houses around the Pitt-Turnbulls’ were pretty much the same as theirs. Some of them were bigger, and some of them were smaller, and some were older, and some were grey brick instead of red, but they all looked like they came out of the same box, if you know what I mean. There were flowers all over the place. If they weren’t actually growing in front of the house, they were hanging from baskets from balconies. (I figured the good news was that you never had to water them.)

  Eventually I got tired of looking in people’s windows (they all had furniture) and at their garden (no rusting cars or broken appliances) and headed for the high street.

  I thought maybe it was called the high street because it was on a hill or a bridge or something like that, but it was just the main drag. There were a couple of stores I’d never heard of before so I figured that maybe they were actually “British”, but there was a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut, a Starbuck’s, a KFC, a Benetton, and a Gap that definitely weren’t.

  The people all looked pretty much like they’d come out of the same box as Caroline and Robert, too. You know, like their kitchens all matched and there wasn’t any junk in the backs of their cars.

  I got my money out of the machine without being mugged, kidnapped or attacked by wild chickens, and was standing there wondering what to do next when who do I see slouching through the rain but Alexander Pitt-Turnbull in his blue sweatshirt with the hood up. He was carrying a bag so I figured he must’ve gone back to the house to get things he forgot when he stormed out last night.

  The Czar was walking in my direction on the other side of the street. He turned into the train station.

  There are people (like Caroline) who always think things through. Before they do anything – no matter how big or how small – they imagine every possible outcome of every possible action, and then they decide what to do based on all that thinking because they assume that means that nothing’s going to go wrong. And then there are people (like my mother) who pretty much see thought as the enemy of action. Jake says that things almost always go wrong no matter how much you think about them, so you might as well just go for it and deal with the consequences when they actually happen.

  I had money in my pocket, a cell phone and a map of every street in London so I couldn’t see any reason for not following him. This was my chance to see where the Czar slunk off to all the time. I went for it.

  There were two or three people hesitating at the kerb because the little green man at the crossing was flashing. I ran past them and straight into the road. I charged into the train station. I could see the back of the Czar’s head going down the staircase on the other side of the turnstiles. The woman in front of me at the ticket booth bought a round trip to someplace called Waterloo. I bought one too. I was a little shocked at how much it cost (I could have had two rides on the subway and lunch for that back home!), but I didn’t have time right then to start worrying about my budget.

  I more or less vaulted down the stairs and into the train just before it pulled out.

  The car was pretty full for the middle of a rainy afternoon – but it wasn’t full of Pitt-Turnbulls. I couldn’t see any reason for marching through every car until I found him, so I stood by the door. Every time the train stopped I stuck my head out to see if the Czar was getting off.

  He got off at Waterloo. Since that’s what it said on my ticket, I took this as a sign. I was doing the right thing. I got off too.

  In case you think that Waterloo is only a song or a battle, I can tell you that it’s also a railroad station. A really big one.

  This was definitely more interesting than the high street. There were people rushing all over the place – and a lot of them looked like they probably didn’t have a kitchen, never mind one where everything matched. I could tell I was really starting to get the hang of being English, because whenever someone walked into me I said I was sorry.

  The Czar slipped through the crowds like he slipped through his home (you know, like a ghost), and I trotted after him.

  I was so happy, finally out on my own in the middle of the teeming metropolis instead of back in the house like the Prisoner of Putney, that I think if anyone had offered me a cup of tea I would’ve taken it.

  There was so much to see that I got a little caught up in my head I guess, the way you do. I started checking out all the different people (talk about a melting pot) and the building (if you looked closely you could see that it used to be really old but it was fixed up to look modern) and stuff like that. I was watching these women all wrapped up in black yashmaks dragging their children through the crowd like we were in some exotic bazaar when, the next thing I knew, I looked around and the Czar had vanished (talk about ghosts). I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t taken my eyes off him for more than a few seconds.

  I started running in the direction he’d been going, begging the powers of the cosmos not to let me lose him. The powers of the cosmos don’t always listen to what I say (having a lot of other things to do), but it must have been a slow patch for them because this time they did. There he was! He was at the bottom of a staircase – and with him was the girl with the red hair. She wasn’t wearing the tutu today. They were practically standing on top of each other, talking intensely. The Czar looked at his watch and shook his head. Then they suddenly turned and started towards the street.

  I galloped after them. I had to battle my way through about eight hundred people all trying to get up the staircase, so by the time I reached the bottom I was just in time to see the blue hood getting into a bus. It was one of those really long buses that can bend in the middle so they can get around corners. It was a bit sad that my first bus ride in London wasn’t going to be on a double-decker but what can you do? I hurled myself down the street and through yet another set of doors.

  My personal experience of bus drivers is that they can often be pretty grumpy. I always assumed that was because they were driving in the insanity that is Brooklyn traffic, but it turns out that it’s what my gran would call a hazard of the occupation. The ones in London can be pretty grumpy too. The driver wouldn’t let me on.

  “You have to have a ticket.”

  I explained that I didn’t know where to buy a ticket.

  He pointed behind me. “At that machine over there.”

  “And you’ll wait?” I knew that bus drivers can be tricky as well as grumpy. “You’ll wait while I get a ticket?”

  He wouldn’t wait. He had a schedule.

  “But I’m a visitor!” I wailed.

  He gave me a look. “I don’t care if you’re Dracula’s bride. You’ve got to have a ticket.”

  All seemed dark and lost.

  Mr Young was right, though – the English really are a civilized people, and some of them are kind and generous too.

  The man behind me tapped my shoulder. “Allow me,” he said. “We can’t have our visitors walking in this weather.” And he touched this round thing in front of the driver with a
plastic card.

  The Czar was standing in the middle of the bus. I couldn’t see the ballerina of the revolution, but the bus was really crowded so I figured she was sitting down further back. I made my way up the aisle so I was near enough to jump off when the Czar did, but not so near that he might look over and see me and think I’d been sent to follow him by his mother.

  We splashed through the rain, and I kept one eye on the streets we passed and one on the Czar.

  But Jake was right: things always go wrong.

  I was really starting to enjoy myself when the blue hood turned towards the front of the bus. It wasn’t Alexander Pitt-Turnbull. It was some dude who was so pale he looked like he’d been living under a rock for the last twenty years.

  This is the sort of thing that convinces me that there’s somebody at the controls of the ship of life. I mean, really – what are the chances that two blue-hooded sweatshirts of roughly the same height and build were walking in the same direction in Waterloo Station at the same time on the same day? About twelve trillion to one.

  I was still coming to terms with this astounding piece of bad luck when the bus set itself on fire.

  There were a few disgruntled shouts of “Oi!” and “Bleedin’ hell!”, but the driver just stopped the bus where it was and told everyone to get off.

  After the smoke cleared (more or less literally) I realized I’d lost the map book in the stampede off the bus and had no idea how to get back home. So Jake was right that things always go wrong, and Caroline (otherwise known as Girl Scout of the Millennium) was also right that you shouldn’t leave the house without a back-up plan. I rang her on Sophie’s cell phone to ask for directions and even though I begged her not to she came to get me. (Lesson for the day: Be Prepared!)

  As soon as we got in the car I started telling Caroline how sorry I was (at the rate I was going I figured the Queen was going to give me a passport) about getting lost and everything.

  “Thank God it wasn’t worse,” said Caroline. “You might have been killed.”

  I didn’t think so. “Mr Trainer, he was the man who was standing next to me, said it happens a lot. He said the drivers should be getting combat pay.”

  This didn’t really reassure her. “But it could have gone up like a pile of old papers. What then? What if it had turned into a ball of fire?”

  “But it didn’t. Mr Trainer figured we were lucky it was raining.”

  Caroline sighed. “You poor thing. You must have been terrified.”

  I hadn’t been even vaguely scared. Nobody was. Everyone acted like it was the kind of thing you expected. Mr Trainer said London had had the war and then it had the IRA and now it had self-incinerating buses. It wasn’t a big deal.

  “But I still don’t understand.” Caroline shook her head sadly at the traffic in front of us. “Why did you go to Waterloo?”

  There was no way I could tell her the truth. (I told Bachman, of course. Bachman said he’d had a similar experience with his Pitt-Turnbull, only she knew he was following her and she wouldn’t wait up. She even locked herself in the house and wouldn’t answer the door! There was obviously something genetically wrong with both of them.)

  “I told you.” I gave her my most innocent, sincere and trustworthy smile. “I didn’t have a reason. I just saw the train station and I thought: why not have some fun? You know, a little adventure. I mean, it’s not like I knew the bus was going to spontaneously combust, was it?”

  “No.” She gave another sigh. “Though I don’t suppose it would have stopped you if you had.”

  With Friends Like These…

  Days passed, but Caroline kept smiling and being bright and cheery like nothing had changed (you know, like the Czar was still sleeping in his room and leaving his dirty dishes in the sink).

  “So has Xar gone away?” I finally asked.

  “Away?” Caroline sounded like “away” wasn’t a word she knew.

  “It’s just that I haven’t seen any crumbs all over the counter or anything like that for a few mornings now.”

  “Oh, it’s there,” lied Caroline. “But I clean it up before you come down.”

  I let it go. I mean, it wasn’t really my business. But I noticed that she jumped every time the phone rang or Robert came in the front door. And every now and then I’d find her just standing in the kitchen, staring at nothing. Once I even caught her in the Czar’s room with a mug of old tea and bacteria in her hand.

  “I just thought I’d get rid of any alien life forms,” said Caroline. “While he’s out.”

  It looked like he was going to be out long enough for her to get rid of everything in the room, paint it and rent it out, but I said that sounded like a good idea.

  But there was some good news – especially for those of us who were starting to feel a little mildewed. It finally stopped raining on a permanent basis. There might be a shower in the morning or the evening or in the middle of the night, but they’d be separated by hours of solid sun instead of seconds of grey skies. All of a sudden everybody was outside and taking off their clothes. Every patch of green was filled with people trying to get sunstroke and skin cancer. And the streets were haunted by ice-cream trucks playing music that sounded like the theme song for some horror movie where an evil clown doll comes to life and starts murdering everyone.

  It wasn’t really hot – not by Brooklyn standards (in Brooklyn if you can see the air or if you sweat when you’re standing still, then it’s really hot) – but by day two everybody was complaining about the temperature and the weathermen started saying we were having a heatwave and worrying that we were going to have a drought.

  “You see?” said Caroline. “It’s not as if we never have any good weather.”

  She ran around like she was in some kind of housewives’ marathon, trying to do all the things she had to do and still have time to work in her garden, but for me it was pretty much business as usual (except that now, besides e-mailing Bachman, I helped do things like wrench weeds from the earth and worry about greenfly). Caroline had been so turmoiled by my trip to Waterloo and the possibility that I could have gone up in smoke like a Kleenex thrown on a campfire that I was sticking pretty close to the hacienda. I figured she had enough to worry about.

  We were sitting in the kitchen one morning after breakfast. Caroline was making a list of all the things she had to do before she could get into her garden and I was finishing my tea and contemplating an afternoon of wrenching weeds – otherwise known as plants in the wrong place – from the earth when the doorbell rang.

  Caroline looked up all curious and puzzled, and then she shuffled off to answer it.

  “Why Jocelyn!” she cried. “What a lovely surprise!”

  I knew who Jocelyn was. Jocelyn was Sophie’s best friend. I leaned over so I could see into the hallway, but the only thing I could see was Caroline’s back.

  “Come in, come in.” Caroline couldn’t have sounded happier if one of her gardening gurus had shown up to help her. “Cherry’s heard all about you, of course. She’s really looking forward to meeting you.”

  None of this was exactly true. All I’d heard about Jocelyn was that she and Sophie had been inseparable since they started high school, and as far as looking forward to meeting her went it was a generic kind of looking forward to. I’d have been pretty happy to meet the Pitt-Turnbulls’ dentist by then.

  Caroline stepped aside to let Jocelyn in. She was petite and fair and all dressed up like she was expecting to be photographed (though, to my relief, she wasn’t all in pink!). There wasn’t a hair out of place or a crease or wrinkle in sight. She was so immaculate it was scary. You know, like she was really an android pretending to be a human.

  “Cherry! Look who’s here!”

  “I’m really sorry I didn’t come sooner,” Jocelyn was saying as she followed Caroline into the kitchen, “but I’m afraid I’ve been away.”

  Theoretically, you should never judge a person by the way they look. I mean, just because a man’s
wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit doesn’t mean he’s not a nice guy. And just because a girl is really well dressed in a this-season-you-have-to-wear-pastels-floaty-skirts-and-wedges-or-you-might-as-well-be-dead kind of way, doesn’t mean she isn’t a deep, intelligent and sensitive person. But when Jocelyn said, “I’m really sorry I didn’t come sooner, but I’ve been away,” my first thought was: thank God I wasn’t counting the days or I’d really have been wasting my time.

  Jocelyn had stopped by to see if I wanted to go shopping with her.

  “I’m going up the West End,” Jocelyn informed us. “I thought Cherry might want to come along.” She gave a little shrug of apology, more or less in my direction. “I know it’s not Fifth Avenue, but it’s still pretty cool.”

  Not Fifth Avenue? I was pretty sure she meant Fifth Avenue in Manhattan (a place I only go to on the way to somewhere else), not Fifth Avenue in my neighbourhood (which specializes in dollar stores instead of designers). Why would she say that? To me? Why would I care about Fifth Avenue? I mean, look at me. Even when I dressed up I hadn’t worn anything with a name or a logo on it since kindergarten, but today, because I’d been planning to spend the morning digging around in the garden, I was wearing my old black jeans, a ratty old CONFORM OBEY CONSUME T-shirt Sky gave me one Christmas and my No Sweat hightops. She was either nuts or legally blind.

  I said I’d love to go. I figured that if you swap lives with someone, you don’t just get her pink room, her teddy bears and her crazed family – you get her best friend too.

  “I’ve never known anyone who was into Goth before,” Jocelyn said as we walked to the subway. “I can hardly believe it. You really do look like Morticia Addams, don’t you?” Her eyes moved from my feet up to my head. “Well, except for the clothes. She always wears a dress, doesn’t she?”

  This was when I realized that Jocelyn hadn’t just turned up unbidden. Caroline must have been so worried that I had nothing to do that she called in the cavalry.

  I smiled back. “More like her daughter.”