I Conquer Britain (5 page)

Caroline’s mother had hurt her back so she had to look after her, and then there was Sophie’s trip to get ready, and wouldn’t you know it, the cleaner was on holiday too. None of these things really add up to
frantic
in Brooklyn (where the cleaner is what you put in the bucket to mop the floor!). Frantic is when you can’t pay the rent and they’ve turned the electricity off again and someone left the refrigerator door open and Bart ate everything that wasn’t in glass.

I said the house looked OK to me. This was an understatement. By my family’s standards it practically looked unlived in. There was nothing piled up on the stairs or the floors. Nothing hanging from the ceiling. The only things on the coat rack were two raincoats. There weren’t even any heaps of stuff on the small table in the hall. If it was in a state, it was a state of grace. “At least you don’t have to step over any cat crap to get through the door.”

“No.” Caroline’s voice kind of fluttered. “No, I suppose one doesn’t.”

I looked into the living room. “Wow…” I gave the Brooklyn whistle of appreciation. “You’ve got real furniture.”

It was too bad I wasn’t making a joke, since Caroline finally laughed at something I said. It wasn’t much of a laugh – if anyone had been opening a bag of chips nearby I wouldn’t have heard it – but it was definitely a laugh. “Righty-ho,” said Caroline. She hung her bag on the coat rack. “Let’s show you your room.”

I said I couldn’t wait.

There were five doors off the hallway upstairs. There weren’t any pictures or anything stuck to them and no blobs where someone with filthy hands or a muddy pig in his arms had touched them. They were so clean they looked like they’d just been painted. (If my family moved
every
week our house would never look like this!)

Behind the first door was the bathroom. It sparkled just like the bathroom in a TV commercial.

“Well that’s a relief,” I said. “Mr Scutari said it’d be outside.”

This time, when I was joking, Caroline didn’t laugh even a little. “Did he?”

Behind the second door was Caroline and Robert’s bedroom.

It looked like all they did in it was sleep – and afterwards they made the bed.

“Wow…” The wallpaper, the curtains and even the spread were all in the same tastefully dull rose print. “If you had a dress of that material you’d be invisible in there.”

“Um…” Caroline nodded. “I’d never really thought of it like that before.”

Behind the third was the flight of stairs that led to Robert’s office in the attic. I could hear him talking on the phone.

“He doesn’t like to be disturbed when he’s working,” Caroline warned me.

“Don’t worry,” I promised. “My dad’s the same way. He threw my laughing Santa out the window when I was little because it kept saying ‘Hohoho’ when he was working. I won’t go near Robert unless the house is on fire.”

I could hear sitar music playing behind the fourth door.

I said it sounded just like this Indian restaurant we go to on Sixth Street. “Except the restaurant has Christmas lights stapled to the ceiling and all over the windows and stuff.” I’d only just arrived, of course, so I could have been wrong, but it seemed really unlikely that there’d be any Christmas lights stapled to any ceiling in Number 22.

Caroline said it was Czar’s room.

“The Czar’s room?” Czar like the king of Russia who was murdered in the revolution? Nobody told me they had royalty living with them.

Caroline blinked. “Oh, no, not
the
Czar. Xar our son. It’s short for Alexander.”

I’d always thought Alex was short for Alexander.

“Oh, right,” I said. “I forgot you have a son.”

“I almost forgot I have one myself.” Caroline did another of her impersonations of someone who has to conserve their breath so I’d know she was finally making a joke. “He took a year off to do some travelling, but he’s going to Oxford in the autumn. He’s always been top of his class. We’re hoping he’ll go into law – possibly even politics. Robert’s always regretted not doing law.”

At last here was something I could identify with. “My dad – Sal? – he’s always felt bad that he never learned to swim and he almost drowned in this flood in Guatemala one time, so he made sure we all learned when we were little.”

Caroline didn’t hear me. You wouldn’t think a person could worry about knocking on a door in her own house, but you’d be wrong. Caroline could. She was staring at the door as though all of a sudden she was afraid of what was behind it.

“Oh dear… I wonder if we should bother him?” She smiled uneasily at the knob for a few seconds as though she was waiting for it to answer her question.

You really have to wonder how the English managed to colonize most of the world.
Should we get off the boat here? Should we bother them with our military might? Should we take their land? Should we give them blankets infected with smallpox? Should we convert them to Christianity and destroy their cultures?
I mean, really, you wouldn’t think any of them had ever gotten out of the house with all this dithering.

“Why not?” I asked. “He’s not studying law right now, is he?”

The smile fluttered like a trapped butterfly. “No, no, of course he isn’t.” She raised her fist and knocked really gently. “Xar?” she called. And then (in case he didn’t recognize her voice), “Xar? It’s Mummy.”

No one shouted back like they would on Herkimer Street.

“Are you sure he’s in there? Maybe he just left the CD on.”

“Oh, I don’t think so…” She made it pretty clear that leaving the CD player on wasn’t something the Pitt-Turnbulls do. “And he didn’t say he was going out.” She gave a few more I-don’t-really-want-to-bother-you raps. “Xar? Xar, darling, are you all right?” She lowered her voice. “He really hasn’t been the same since he got back from India. One never knows what one might pick up in places like that.”

I decided not to tell her that when Sal went to India he picked up amoebic dysentery. She obviously had enough to worry about.

“Maybe he can’t hear you. You know, because of the music. Maybe you should knock a little louder.”

Caroline knocked a little louder, but by Brooklyn standards she might as well have been hitting the door with a sock.

“Xar? Xar, I’ve brought Cherry to meet you. Please open the door.”

My mom (who you’ve probably figured out by now has a take-no-prisoners kind of nature) is a major advocate of direct action. She would have kicked the door in by then. It was possible that I was more like her than I thought.

“Maybe if you rattle the knob he’ll notice,” I suggested.

“What a very good idea.” Caroline rattled the knob, but she did it like she was afraid of breaking it. “Xar, darling? Xar?”

I shuffled from one foot to the other. I’m all for politeness and good manners, but there are limits, aren’t there? Even when you’re trying to make a good impression. “You want me to try?” And before Caroline could say no, I got in front of her and pounded on the door the way the cops do when they really want to get in somewhere.

Caroline sort of gasped and stepped back as the door swung open.

I stuck my head into the room. There weren’t any boxes of Christmas lights stapled to the ceiling, but this was definitely where Caroline’s passion for neatness, floral patterns and colour co-ordination came to a dead stop and keeled over. The walls were covered with Indian fabrics, the bed was unmade, and there were heaps of stuff all over the floor. There was even a shrine on the dresser with a stone Ganesh at the centre with a piece of incense sticking out of his head. Except that it actually had real furniture it almost reminded me of my half a room back home. Hope took hold of my heart. Maybe my summer wasn’t going to be all smiles and apologies after all. A regular person lived in this room. Not a particularly neat person, maybe, but a regular one. And I was willing to bet that the Czar wasn’t as well-mannered and polite as his parents. I bet he shouted and grumbled and stuff like that (if the smell was anything to go by, he definitely farted).

“He’s not here,” I reported.

“Oh.” Caroline stayed well out of visual and olfactory range so I figured she did know what was inside after all. “Oh, I must have misunderstood. I didn’t realize he had plans today. We hardly ever see him any more, he’s in and out like smoke. I suppose he must have a girlfriend. But I did tell him…” She sighed. “Well, you’ll meet him later, won’t you?”

I said I couldn’t wait.

Caroline started apologizing about my room before we even got to the door. “I’m afraid it isn’t very large … and it does look out on the road … and it doesn’t really have a proper bathroom – just the shower…”

Not only did I have only
half
a room on Herkimer Street but it looked out on Houdini the rooster and the only time it came close to having a shower was when Tampa threw a glass of water over me to wake me up. As long as Sophie’s room didn’t have a litter tray or Tampa or Gallup in it I couldn’t give a piece of toilet paper if all it had was a bowl and a pitcher. “A shower’s great.”

“And there isn’t any lock– I wouldn’t want Sophie trapped in there with an allergy attack…”

Of course she wouldn’t.

“That’s OK, I’m not used to locks anyway.”

“But there is an orthopaedic mattress.” You’d think she was a real estate agent and I was a prospective buyer. “We wouldn’t want Sophie to get back problems in the future.”

God forbid
.

I felt like saying that maybe she shouldn’t have sent Sophie to sleep on my old mattress on the floor then, but all I said was, “Oh, right. Of course you wouldn’t.”

“And there are blackout blinds. You know, for migraines.” Caroline shook her head sadly. “Do you get migraines?”

I shook my head. “Not yet.”

Just when I was beginning to think we were going to be standing in the hall for the rest of the afternoon she finally took hold of the knob. “This—” I held my breath. “—this is your room.”

There was a bed with feet and a headboard and everything, and a desk, and a chest of drawers, and a bedside table. There was even an armchair – which was pretty astounding to me since we don’t even have an armchair in the living room in Brooklyn.

Though it wasn’t the only astounding thing about the room. It was just as well I wasn’t breathing or I might have screamed out loud with horror and shock.

“Well?” Caroline turned around to look at me – like a real estate agent who’s hoping she’s clinched the deal. “What do you think?”

Sky, the woman with a saying for every occasion, would have had one for this: Least said, soonest mended.

I smiled back at Caroline. “Wow.”

She interpreted this to mean that I thought it was great – which was what I hoped she’d think.

“Oh, I am glad you like it,” she gushed. “Sophie chose everything herself.”

“Really? That’s amazing.” So as well as being insane, Sophie had no taste that wasn’t bad. “It’s so—it’s so—” I’m not usually at a loss for words, but they were all scampering for cover like people caught in a sudden storm. “It’s—it’s really pi—it’s really pretty.”

What it was was really
pink
. All of it. The whole enchilada. Walls, curtains, rugs, dressing table, dresser, desk, waste can … even the TV and the phone. The only things that weren’t pink were the stereo and the computer, but they all had pink flowers stuck all over them to make up for that little oversight. God and all the angels in heaven… I thought. It’s like falling into a vat of Pepto-Bismol.

“Sophie’s cleared out most of her personal things so you’d have enough room,” said Caroline.

I’ll say she had. It looked like the looters had been in. Except for a piece of notepaper (pink!) taped to the computer with the password on it so I could get online there wasn’t anything anywhere. No pictures on the walls, no tchotchkes on the dresser, no junk piled up on the desk or the bedside table. It looked like a bedroom in Barbie’s model home. I seriously doubted that there were any dirty clothes under the bed either.

“And she’s emptied half of the chest of drawers.” She pointed to the dresser. “And half the wardrobe.” She pointed to the closet. “But she did leave them, of course.” She pointed to the bed.

I followed the moving finger. The Pepto-Bismol Experience must have temporarily blinded me. There was no other way I could have missed
them
.

I figured the odds favoured the bedspread being pink as well, but it wasn’t actually possible to see the bedspread because every inch of it was covered. By
them
.

“Gee…” The words were ducking for cover again. “Gee, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many stuffed animals in one place before. Not even in a store.” Not that I ever wanted to. It looked like the teddy bears were having their picnic in Barbie’s bedroom.

Caroline’s smile softened. “I think Sophie was afraid you might feel a little lonely at first.”

How incredibly thoughtful of her.

“Gosh, and all I left her was Tampa.”
Tampa and my dirty laundry
.

“I do hope you’ll be comfortable here,” murmured Caroline.

If I had a choice between living in a room like this in Brooklyn and living on the street, I’d have grabbed my sleeping bag and my backpack and headed for the doorway of the nearest church. But this wasn’t Brooklyn; this was London, England. What was a little pink and a few hundred stuffed animals in London, England?

“Oh, I will,” I assured her. “I’m sure I will. It’s great.”

With a little luck I’d be asleep most of the time.

W
hat’s the first thing that comes into your mind when you think of England? Lots of people would say The Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Other lots of people would say Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Bridget Jones. Angelina’s mother, who worked for an English family when she first got to America, would say that the first thing she thought of was how the English are very polite and never shout, not even when they’re so angry they want to stuff feathers up your nostrils. Mr Young would say good suits, great gardens and lovely accents. My gran would say stuff like the Clearances, Bloody Sunday and the Peterloo Massacre. Mr Scutari would say rain and an appalling lack of citrus fruit. Mrs Scutari would say bad food and the Queen. Barbee Scutari would say that they speak English. But I figure that most people would probably say tea. Everybody knows that tea’s the national drink. According to Jake, the English believe that there’s no problem – big or small – that can’t be solved by a nice cup of tea. She even has a song about it on one of her old albums. From what I could remember of the song, tea is a cure for everything from the weather to insomnia. I could only hope it would work as well on post-Pepto-Bismol trauma.