by Pip Adam
We have a week north of London first, in a friend’s flat, in a huge tenement block, in Stevenage. People in Stevenage look like they’re taking the piss out of themselves. It’s chav heaven. There are whole families in shell suits. We catch the train into London, go to galleries and look through the bars of Buckingham Palace. We see squirrels, and marble steps that are worn away by millions of people, over hundreds of years, climbing them. We sleep on the lounge floor and annoy each other – but it’s cheap.
On Thursday a black car turns up outside and the driver calls and asks if we can come down because he’s a bit worried about leaving the car there. We come down in the piss-smelling lift and he puts our backpacks in the boot of the shiny, black car that local youths are now standing around and shouting at. We get driven to Milton Keynes in the grey cold.
The hotel we’re staying in is like Fawlty Towers. There are ducks, and people in sunglasses arrive and hug each other. All the way in the car, Bo says, ‘Be cool, just be cool.’ When the big stars start arriving at the hotel I am very, very uncool. When I say big stars, I mean Giles from Buffy, and all the hobbits and people from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. One of the hobbits gives Bo a hug, says ‘Boooh,’ and pats him as far up his back as he can reach. A taxi arrives, it’s the female cyborg from Terminator 3. Someone carries her luggage for her. We go to our room and Bo goes for a walk. He says he saw a fox but I highly doubt it. He’s nervous. It’s all about him. Tomorrow he has to earn our trip to England. At dinner I look around and think, this is ridiculous. I want to say to him, ‘Don’t be nervous, this is ridiculous,’ but I’m not sure whether it would help or hinder.
The next morning a limousine picks us up. We travel with a former child star and his wife who looks like what most people would expect the wife of a former child star to look like. A man who was in Goonies with the child star is reading the paper. He starts ripping out an article and says, ‘I gotta save this for Benicio – he wants to play Che.’ He seems to be saying it to me, so I sort of smile and nod. Nothing in my life has really prepared me for a conversation of this nature.
There are hundreds of people at the mall when we get there. It’s a bit of a mutant ghetto welcome. They scream and we get escorted down an aisle between the screaming people. Someone says the hobbits came separately. They’re coming round the back while we’re coming in the front – we’re a diversion.
They haven’t opened the mall yet and inside there are tables set up with huge posters above them. One of the women who came with us in the limousine is beautiful; I keep looking at her, thinking she probably plays some sexy vampire or something. She sits under a poster of herself with a Klingon crab-shell on her forehead. George Takei is there and the guy who used to be in Benson. Bo gets ushered under a photo of him as the Witch King, which could be anyone. I say, ‘Have fun’ and they sit the albino twins from the Matrix 2 on one side of him and Pussy Galore on the other. Then they open the doors.
The idea is that ordinary people buy a photo of the famous person of their choice then get that famous person to sign it. Ordinary people are allowed to take a photo with the famous person as well, so long as the queue’s not too long. About ten minutes in they announce they’re virtual-queuing for all the hobbits and Giles. I ask someone and they tell me virtual-queuing is when you’re given a number and sent away and they call out the numbers over the mall loudspeakers – it keeps the mall clear so if there’s a fire or a bomb threat, people will be able to get out. I start thinking about Dawn of the Dead. The other friends and partners of famous people seem to know what to do while their famous friends and partners are signing photos and having photos taken. They go shopping and get their hair done and read books in Starbucks. The former child star’s wife sits next to him the whole time, rubbing his back. Bo’s line is pretty long. He’s talking to the guy from American Werewolf in London. The twins are wearing sunglasses. They tell Bo it’s because of the flash photography. I have another opinion. I take a walk around. I see the oak they built the mall around. I find a grocery store and buy some lunch for Bo, and a coffee. I ask one of the security guards to give the coffee to Bo and Bo smiles, and the security guard says, ‘Sorry, no drinks from fans. They have drinks.’ I say, ‘Oh, cool,’ and shrug at Bo.
There are a lot of people dressed in long black coats and others dressed all in white with fangs. I sit down and watch it passing me by. A woman sits next to me, and I say, ‘Hi – are you having a good time?’ She’s beaming. ‘Hell yeah.’ She has a child with her, a girl of maybe three. The woman has lupus. I’m sorry to hear that. She says that when she was really sick and pregnant, she couldn’t move from the couch, and she watched every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. ‘Giles saved my life,’ she says. I say, ‘Neat.’ She is so excited to see Giles. She’s virtual-queuing for him. They’re calling 75 – she has 149. I say, ‘What do you think your chances are?’ and she says, ‘Pretty good.’ She says neither her nor her daughter would be here if it wasn’t for Giles. She took out a £500 personal loan so she could see Giles. She can’t wait to shake his hand and she’s talked to the security guards about having a photo of him with her daughter. They said she would have to wait and see. She leaves to go and see Buffy’s gay friend. I start talking to other people; a lot of them say ‘New Zealander!’ and I smile and say yeah. I start to feel a little famous myself. I say, ‘Oh, I’m married to the Witch King.’ And most of them are pretty impressed.
I watch Bo for a while. People come up, and he signs their photos and stands up with them for a photo, over and over again. A lot of them go ‘Wow’ and giggle when he stands up. Some of them tell him he’s really tall. When they close the mall doors, he comes out from behind the table and says, ‘Those twins have got something about the sunglasses and the flash photography.’ I say, ‘Only two kinds of people wear sunglasses inside – criminals and wankers.’ He has stuff with him. Some Germans wrote him a poem. Germans like him. Some girls from somewhere knitted a scarf for all the hobbits and him. ‘There are some pretty weird people here,’ I say combing my fingers through the fringe of the scarf. ‘Some pretty weird people who paid for our trip,’ he says. He’s right. I tell him I’m going to Bletchley Park on Saturday and that I can’t catch a bus. He finds this hard to believe but I tell him a bus driver told me.
There’s a panel that night at a movie theatre. The famous people are going to sit on stage and answer questions and then they’ll play the movie, but not before the famous people leave because they’ve already seen the movie. I can’t go because it’s sold out, completely, even the aisles. I find myself in a bar, in a multiplex, in Milton Keynes with the hobbits and Bo and Sauron and the other Ring Wraith. Bo says, ‘Just be cool, eh?’ I am not cool again and giggle a lot and am rude and eventually just sit in a corner. The panel goes well. Bo says they asked him what movies he’s working on now and he said, ‘None, I’m a librarian,’ and people laughed. The hobbits want to go out for a Thai meal. Milton Keynes has one Thai restaurant. We want to go home. We ask if we can go home. I’ve had enough of the whole hobbit road show. Every now and then I look around and all the hobbits are scruffing each other’s hair and jumping around and laughing and I think when I was a kid, and all I wanted to be was special, I would have loved this.
The next day is the same as the day before. I find more food. We don’t have a lot of money so I can’t go shopping. I sit and watch the people and watch the hobbits. The kid from Star Wars arrives – another Kiwi – he’s a bit of a shit and is trying to ‘pull the birds’ as my dad would say. Bo and I say, ‘Dead, hey dead – there’s someone at the door,’ behind his back and slap our knees at how funny we are. I talk to another bus driver who points to a timetable and says, ‘You want to catch this bus here and get off it at the indoor ski field, then get on this bus, and the Enigma’s not missing it was returned. It’s only some bits that are missing.’ It sounds bloody confusing but I tell Bo I think I’ll give it a go. It doesn’t feel like anything can go to
o wrong in Milton Keynes on a Saturday morning. That night they close the indoor ski field to the public so the hobbits and Boba Fett can go snow-boarding.
The bus thing is confusing. All the time I’m waiting, I’m asking anyone who’s around if this is the right place for the bus to Bletchley Park, because I panic when I’m waiting. When I get to Bletchley I have to walk from the town centre. Everything is shut and covered in graffiti like a ghost town – like everyone moved to the mall. I walk down a long, tree-lined lane and at the end there’s a sign saying ‘Bletchley Park – National Codes Centre’. I pay at the ticket booth and they give me a map and a sticker saying ‘Station X’. I follow the arrows that lead me into the huts and out into the sun and back into the huts. They’re rebuilding one of the code-breaking machines that Turing and Welchman improved from a Polish plan. It has a room of its own. There’s a mannequin standing beside it in a white shirt and a black skirt. She has high-heeled, lace-up leather pumps on and her hair is in Victory rolls. It’s a beautiful machine. They have made a beautiful thing for war. I read all the cards on the wall about Turing. None of them say ‘gay’ or ‘court-sanctioned chemical castration’ or ‘courage under abject cruelty.’ They say nothing about injustice and a lot about the glory of the British way of life. I stand back from the cards and take photos of the machine. I take photos until so many Boy Scouts arrive that I can’t take a photo without Boy Scouts in it.
The last hut is a computer museum. One of the computers has a cassette deck attached to it and I remember the first time I saw a computer and how it had green writing on a black screen. I remember an ad in my mother’s magazines, with a tall skinny woman in flares smoking a slim cigarette. It said, ‘You’ve come a long way, baby.’ The boy scouts arrive and start playing Pong on the Atari, and more than one of them says, ‘This is dumb.’
In the mansion there are photos. Army huts, army vehicles and, standing beside them, all the people no decent person wants to depend on in wartime: people who did crosswords in twelve minutes, homosexuals, pacifists, communists – smart arses. A lot of them look sick and weak dressed in their army uniforms, smoking. None of them look like they want to be there but all of them are.
In the sun, in the mansion gardens, it looks like every Bletchley local is here, dressed up. There’s a policeman on a bike, and women and children milling around. There are no soldiers and I’m not sure how many communists or pacifists. I buy a couple of aerograms with messages in code and post them to myself and Bo in a 1940s post box. There’s an announcement that the Enigma machine will be on display in an hour and a half. I decide I can’t wait for an hour and a half and get back to Bletchley to catch the last bus, so I buy a postcard of the Enigma machine and leave.
I catch the last bus back to Milton Keynes and the mall. I sit in the mall under the oak and read the brochure from Bletchley Park. The loud speaker says the mall is shutting in ten minutes. I meet Bo, and we get into a limo and go back to Fawlty Towers. The driver passes back an autograph book and says it’s for his daughter. I’m the only person in the car who isn’t famous. Someone from Star Trek says, ‘You should sign it anyway,’ because not being famous is kind of special in a car full of famous people.
Some of them are going to another convention in Scotland, another mall. Bo and I are going to Paris, on a train where no one recognises him. We get a room on the top floor of a hostel. If you lean out the window you can see the Eiffel Tower. Bo leans out the window and tries to take a photo of himself and the Eiffel Tower but his head gets in the way. That night, before it gets dark we sit by the Seine and watch a small dog play with the body of a headless pigeon. ‘Alan Turing killed himself with an apple,’ I say to Bo as we watch the dog. ‘Like Snow White,’ he says, and I say, ‘Yeah.’ The dog kind of throws the pigeon, what’s left of the pigeon, in the air a bit. ‘Or Adam,’ I say.
Shopping
May’s mother, Jane, walked toward the car, lighting a cigarette in the wind. It looked like she was holding something in front of her face with both hands; something small and soft, like a kitten. May had never seen her mother holding a kitten. They’d had a cat. It had been their neighbours’, they’d fed it in the holidays and the neighbours said to May, ‘It likes you so much. You should keep it.’ He was a large ginger cat called Tiger. May would call him, and hit the cat food tin with a spoon so it made a dull bang-bang noise. She was sure her mother had killed Tiger. Jane denied it but May remembered coming home in her green and white school uniform and brown Roman sandals to find Tiger gone. It was always summer in May’s memory. So hot she didn’t need to wear a cardigan; always in Roman sandals or bare feet. Her mother said she didn’t know where Tiger was and sometimes cats just crawled away to die.
There was a lot of cat food left. May’s cousin offered May’s brother five bucks to eat Tiger’s food. Not all of it. They agreed a tablespoon of cat food for five dollars and shook on it. Her brother ate it but it turned out their cousin didn’t have five bucks. At a family meal, when they were teenagers and someone was telling the story, her brother said, ‘Yeah, what about my five bucks?’ Their cousin shrugged and everyone at the large family table laughed except May, who said, ‘What about Tiger?’ The laughing stopped, not because everyone knew what had happened to Tiger but because they knew Tiger always started a fight between May and her mother. Almost everything May said started a fight with her mother; she was always trying to start fights. May’s father, Gavin, laughed to himself and said, ‘What about my five bucks?’ Everyone laughed again, only not so loudly. At the hospital, during family counselling, May’s mother said, ‘You never even had a pair of Roman sandals. I hate Roman sandals.’ She said it was all in May’s head – all of it.
May wanted to say, ‘You can’t smoke that in here,’ but she got into the car and waited pretending to read the shopping list over while Jane finished the cigarette. May and her mother were going shopping for food for Finnegan’s first birthday party. Jane had given Finn a card saying ‘Happy Birthday Darling, You are so lucky to have such fantastic parents.’ She meant May and her husband. Jane bent down and stubbed the cigarette out in the gutter. She got in the car and said, ‘This is nice,’ and squeezed May’s knee. May smiled and started the car. They hadn’t spent time alone together for years.
Every time a car came close Jane inhaled swiftly, realised, and tried to cover it up. They were driving May’s father’s car. He held the keys out to May, thought better of it, and gave them to Jane. As they walked down the path, Jane put the car keys in May’s palm and said, ‘You drive, eh? You know the way,’ then, almost immediately, ‘Oh, my wallet. I’ll just go back for it.’
‘Nice day,’ May said as they came to a stop at some traffic lights.
‘Yeah,’ her mother looked out the window. ‘Let’s hope it holds up for the party tomorrow.’
May nodded.
‘How many kids are coming?’ Jane said.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Oh well, I’m sure if we get enough food for twenty that should do it.’ Her mother put both hands between her legs and pulled her shoulders up to her ears. ‘Shouldn’t it?’
The supermarket car park was busy and the sun was glinting off all the cars.
‘Should have come earlier,’ Jane said.
May parked the car.
In the fruit section Jane said, ‘Strawberries.’
May took the shopping list out of the back pocket of her jeans and said, ‘I have a list.’
Her mother stood beside the trolley holding the strawberries. ‘Does the list have strawberries on it?’ she said.
May looked at her then looked at her list and they both laughed.
‘Strawberries do not appear to be on the list,’ May said.
‘I can change that.’ Jane opened her bag, looking for a pen.
They both laughed again.
‘We can’t really afford them,’ May said.
‘I can afford them. This shop’s my shout.’
‘That’s kind bu
t we have money for the shopping.’ When she had wanted to put it right, May added up all the money she owed her parents and it came to eight thousand dollars. She made an appointment to see her father. People told her he would probably say, ‘Don’t be silly. It’s just great you’re doing so well.’ When May showed him the figure, itemised into money stolen, fines and bills paid, her father said, ‘That should just about do it.’ He gave her a bank account number and said if she could organise a direct debit, that would be fine. May got a job in a fast food restaurant and when it was all paid back she was invited to Christmas dinner. Gavin and Jane handed May an envelope and in it was a cheque for eight thousand dollars. May and her father did the dishes, and while Jane was in the back yard having a cigarette, he said, ‘Don’t fuck up,’ and he meant it.
‘We can go halves,’ May said. She wanted her mother to tell her she was doing a good job of looking after her family but more than that she wanted to get the shopping done, and she didn’t want to fight.
Jane put the strawberries in the corner of the trolley, ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but I’ll pay for the strawberries.’
They began to get the things on May’s list: oranges, bananas, apples. May read from the list and Jane went tothe shelves and picked the best fruit and put them in the trolley, carefully, keeping the strawberries in the corner away from everything else, like they’d been naughty.
‘Do you have to weigh them?’ her mother said as May put the bags of fruit on the scales. ‘I don’t shop at this one.’ Jane looked around nervously at everyone shopping.