Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  Gravy and sausage were spewed about in equal measure until Wills took to sucking on a whole sausage which dangled from his mouth as if he’d suddenly bitten the sexual appendage off a small dog. There were no dogs limping in the area but he was a swift child and I thought it a distinct possibility.

  Leslie came and sat with us for a moment but she had many people to see who had come from miles away and we were soon given back to our table. A general conversation about grits ensued as I couldn’t think of anything else to talk about. No one wanted to discuss the election any more and certainly no one seemed inclined to question the current state of the weather in England.

  ‘What are grits?’ I asked, struggling with a mouthful.

  ‘It’s wheat,’ said Wills’ father, while the food in question flew from Wills’ hand and on to the man’s trousers.

  ‘No, it’s corn,’ said Susan, the estate agent, who used to be an actress but has three boys and ‘couldn’t possibly now’.

  ‘It’s a product of corn,’ someone else ventured, ‘but it really needs something to flavour it.’

  Like real food, I thought.

  ‘Cheese or maple syrup or maybe both,’ Susan suggested.

  The biscuits and gravy were worse. It isn’t a biscuit at all but a small sweet white roll. It’s called a biscuit because it uses baking powder, not yeast, to rise. When they say ‘The South will rise again’ that is the ingredient everyone is thinking about. This ‘biscuit’ is then blanketed in a thick white gravy not unlike something we would think covered a cauliflower quite nicely. This gravy too tastes of nothing and is a possible contender for the maple syrup and cheese cover-up.

  A waiter called Alemu Kamedu served coffee. He was from Ethiopia. Apparently, ‘Alemu’ means world and ‘Kamedu’ means weight. His name meant weight of the world. It was a lot for one man to carry. I told him that my name means ‘defender of men’ but I didn’t go into the irony of that particular choice by my parents.

  I can’t say we got to know Atlanta. My personal tips are don’t eat at Anthony’s. It is much sold as the full Southern experience and described everywhere as ‘an oasis of green in the heart of Buckhead’. It turns out the place is green because they have surrounded it with astroturf and I suspect put some in the food. Do eat at Canoe. It lies on the west bank of the Chattahoochee river and I had the best meal I have ever had anywhere. Do also visit the largest tin chicken in the South. It’s a 57-foot National Landmark for Kentucky Fried Chicken where you can also have your picture taken with a full-size, white plastic model of Colonel Sanders. I don’t think I’ve time now to go into the artist we met in a forest, who, in partnership with Leslie, had tarred and feathered a head-less mannequin wearing a Victorian ballgown as a political statement against ante-bellum womanhood. It’s a long story but it did make me feel better about life in general.

  I learned little about Leslie except that she is a charming person who seems, until now, to have had better luck professionally than personally. I would say she has not always been fortunate in her choice of men and I can only hope the Pratt she has married is an improvement. How odd to flit into someone’s life for so important an occasion and flit out again.

  As we flew back the newspapers were full of the election and the possibility of the whole saga ending up in the Supreme Court. Some people are now saying if the contest is between George Bush’s intelligence and Al Gore’s honesty then the correct court for the case would be small claims.

  Bumper sticker: ‘Texas — I’m going in, cover me’

  An Interlude of Terror

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

  September 11. That’s all you need to write. It is, like Pearl Harbor, a date written in infamy. From now on there will be two halves to modern American life — the stuff that came before September 11 and everything that came afterwards. It changed America and, of course, it changed anyone trying to write about the place. I had come to seek out an America of the past and now could not help but be gripped by the present. I should have been in New York on 13 September 2001 but by then America had closed its air space to all European traffic. I should have been heading for a weekend on Martha’s Vineyard with a bunch of Gladyses but it didn’t happen.

  Despite having made a good start on my Gladys quest in 2000, many things had conspired to stop me completing my mission. Other work had arisen, the publication of my new novel had kept me on the road and I had been busy moving house to be nearer my children. Travelling up and down from London to the country to see them almost every day had become too much. You cannot compartmentalise time with your children and I wanted to be round the corner.

  I was in Italy on the day of the tragedy, on holiday on the shores of Lake Maggiore with my partner Alice. We were having a tranquil time, taking the small ferries across the still waters and imagining ourselves as a tiny piece in a rather beautiful jigsaw puzzle picture. In the afternoons we returned to our hotel. Here we helped bring down the average age of the clientele by about forty years and also made them feel better by going for the obligatory afternoon nap. That particular afternoon we had lain on the bed watching Italian television. Apart from being able to name twelve different types of pasta, my Italian is poor but we had gathered that they were showing some biography of Bruce Willis, the movie actor. Gripping as Willis’ life may have been, we fell asleep and awoke to the sight of the first plane crashing into the Twin Towers.

  ‘That’s a heck of an effect,’ I said.

  ‘What movie was that?’ asked Alice.

  Still convinced this was all part of the walk through Bruce Willis’ action-packed life we watched idly on and chatted about our day. Then they began to show other footage, raw news footage. I spent a year of my life working in a television newsroom. I know the difference between reportage and make-believe.

  This is happening. This is actually happening.’

  The world had turned into a Bruce Willis movie where bad guys did unbelievably horrific things.

  I’m not sure that at first we all quite absorbed what had happened. Despite the events and general world panic, I still tried to get to America as quickly as possible. I refused to let this event get in my way. I phoned Rita. At first she was upset but calm. She too was determined to carry on and would still be going to the Vineyard to meet the others. Then, with each succeeding call, she became more and more unsettled. She needed to be with her church, her children did not want her to go and, in the end, she did not want to go. It was the beginning of rampant fear on both sides of the ocean.

  It was not until late in October that I finally managed to get back on my journey. My neighbour Paul was once again my travel companion and keen to see more of America. Richard and I were due to make some films for the BBC and he couldn’t get away. Paul and I arrived at the Washington Square Hotel in the heart of New York around midnight on the night of Hallowe’en. It had been an uneventful flight. A few extra security checks but nothing out of the ordinary and, despite the news of airlines looking like the Marie Celeste, a very full flight indeed. At the hotel, a handsome young man of Asian appearance was in attendance behind the desk. We were tired and went through the credit card routine as quickly as possible.

  ‘So, where are you from?’ asked the clerk.

  ‘London,’ we said. It is not London at all but it is near. I remembered Lori’s remark about the number of Americans who think Africa is a country and I thought it would do. The young man tapped on his computer with confidence and spoke confidentially to us.

  ‘Must be nice to get away from those race riots,’ he said.

  I thought I had misheard. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The race riots,’ he said confidently. ‘I hear there is a lot of racism.’

  I looked at Paul to see if I had somehow missed a huge section of news back home. He shook his head and said, ‘No, I don’t think so.

  The young man laughed at us. ‘Yeah, people rioting in the street about Af
ghanistan. The race riots,’ he repeated with more emphasis.

  ‘No. Not one,’ I said.

  He looked at me sympathetically. Clearly I didn’t even know what was happening in my own country.

  ‘I’m from Pakistan,’ he said, as if that gave him greater knowledge of where there might or might not be race riots in the world. I felt a sigh seep through my body. It was coming up for one o’clock in the morning but the desk clerk was ready to be on the Larry King Show.

  ‘Of course; I think this is all just for the governments,’ he expounded. They are the ones who are going to benefit.’ I won’t go into his full thesis of conspiracy theories but we did stand there long enough for me to contemplate phoning home to check the status of civil obedience. Paul and I popped out to buy some bottled water from a Duane Reede drugstore on the corner. Duane Reede on Fifth Avenue was the first shop I had ever bought anything in America although I doubt I had ever seen the clientele it attracted in the small hours of the morning.

  We found our beverages and went to pay. The Hallowe’en festivities were still going on and there were two men ahead of us in the queue. One was tall and dressed in fishnets, a baby-doll nightie and something of a 1950s woman’s wig. Behind him was an elderly tramp. I was impressed that both had made such a convincing effort for the dressing-up season. Then I noticed that the tramp stank of urine and was buying many packets of incontinence pants with a built-in waist strap. This seemed to be too close to method acting for the world of pretend. The man in the baby-doll winked at Paul and purchased some lip balm. Outside, clowns and devils walked past in a great throng.

  ‘Hallowe’en, I guess,’ said Paul.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘It could just be New York.’

  Half a dozen of New York’s finest were hanging around the steps of the hotel when we returned.

  ‘Excellent security,’ I commented.

  A young officer built like Joyce’s cooker tipped his hat at me.

  That’s what you’re paying for, ma’am.’

  It turned out we were staying in the place the local cops all use as a restroom. I was a little nervous and inexplicably it made me feel better. What they might have done to save me in the face of a descending 747 I have no idea. I lay on my bed and watched Star Trek with the lovely Captain Janeway. I thought about Lori’s foreign students gathering their notions of American behaviour from the show and I realised something strange — no matter how many times I have seen Star Trek, and I do love it, I never seem to see the same episode twice.

  I will confess to having been somewhat anxious about coming. Rita had phoned me in London to pass on an FBI statement warning of ‘impending further attacks’. The Governor of California had announced that he had ‘credible information’ that state bridges were to be targeted so he had stepped up security on all river crossings. Then the FBI had announced that the ‘rumours’ of impending attack might now be false just to scare everybody. I sent silent congratulations to whoever had started the rumours because they were certainly working for me.

  My room was very small indeed. Not only could you not have swung a cat, I don’t think you could both have been in residence at the same time. My miniature window looked out on to a brick wall some six inches away. In the morning I couldn’t see the sky or, indeed, tell if anything else had fallen out of it in the night. I thought I’d better check the news before I ventured forth but as usual the TV seemed to carry nothing but ads. I could only presume nothing else earth-shattering had happened or the world wouldn’t still be worrying about pocket-sized remedies for bowel disorders.

  Everyone said that New York had changed. That everyone was kinder. That the restaurants and theatres were empty as the natives stayed at home in the bosom of their families and the tourists stayed away. I was prepared to be treated kindly in the street and sense a new reaching out among the people. I don’t know why but I actually found it comforting to find that this wasn’t entirely true. It was a good sweeping hook for media stories but I am not sure it was what was happening day to day.

  Paul and I wanted to walk. We wanted to walk south down to what everyone was now calling ‘Ground Zero’, to the place that had been the Twin Towers. I don’t know whether it was ghoulish or not. My brother Nick, a foreign news journalist, had flown out to Kabul to cover the story. I think when someone close to you heads off with a flak jacket on, you probably want to find out why.

  To see what it was that had involved my family in such a remote corner of the world. The first sign that we were getting near the site was a local fire station. Here they had clearly lost many. An entire wall beside the open doors was covered in handwritten messages, flowers and photographs of unbearably young men smiling with pride in their uniforms. Behind us in the street two fire engines wailed past as we stood and looked at the impromptu memorial. Where the Wall Street mogul had once been king of New York, now it was the fireman or policeman of my youth. Everywhere a roaring trade was being done in FDNY and NYPD baseball caps. Tacky T-shirts with the Twin Towers on were for sale on every sidewalk to ‘honour the dead’ and make a few bucks for the vendor.

  I saw a police officer standing on a street corner. He looked impressive and I stopped to take his photograph. That was when I saw he had a little white cart parked near by. He stood with his cap in his hand where he had tucked his morning post into the inside brim. He was a ‘correction officer’, a traffic warden. People nodded to him as they walked past. The city had really come to something when even the guy with the parking tickets was getting respect.

  The closer we got to the site, the quieter the city became. At the Chelsea Vocational College, groups of young black men littered the steps and pavements. Maybe it was my mood but they seemed subdued and listless. Maybe it was always like that at the college. Every downstairs window was covered in tough plates of grey mesh busy both protecting against crime and obscuring what little light might have got through the filthy glass. It was hard to imagine anything less vocational looking.

  Soon there was an acrid smell in the air. It burnt the eyes and the back of the throat. It was unlike anything I have ever smelled before. Was this burning flesh or had there not even been enough left for that? Another block and the world went from colour to black and white. We had stepped into an old film noir movie. A thick film of dust lay on every surface. About a block from the site, on a corner, stood an ancient shoe shop. It was the kind I remember from my childhood when there was a complete honesty about the window display. They sold shoes. Shoes you could walk in. Shoes that would keep your feet dry. They didn’t sell dreams or aspirations, just good sensible shoes and that’s what there were in the window — row after row of them. Not laid out with any nod to art whatsoever. Just in ranks like a large Imelda Marcos closet.

  It was hard to imagine that such an old-fashioned place had survived so close to the heart of the financial district of this great city. It was impossible to decide whether the dust on the shoes had always been there or whether it had arrived on the coat-tails of September 11. The women’s shoes were mainly for the wider fitting. The sort that provide a good covering for a problem foot or bunion. One blue tasselled pair of loafers was labelled ‘SAS Guaranteed Comfort Shoe’.

  It was hard to imagine the SAS selecting a slip-on for their operations, but who knows? It was all very odd.

  We walked on and the smell got worse. Soon we started seeing people in gas masks. A young man got out of his truck wearing a huge respirator with twin Barbie-pink vents sticking out from either side of his mouth. He looked faintly ridiculous. I suppose I would expect a young man like that to be rather more cavalier about his mortality; to cock a snook at Mr Bin Laden. But he wore his cerise protector when not everyone else had bothered. Several men were painting a newly constructed narrow wooden walkway towards the site. It began at one end of the street and ended at a dark green mesh wall that surrounded the heart of the towers’ collapse. It was hard to see what the walkway would be for. It was so narrow it could only be used
for one-way pedestrian traffic and it didn’t seem to go anywhere. Two men were painting it white while two other men added orange stripes. They were being slow and careful in what seemed to be a pointless exercise. The white paint was filthy as soon as it was applied and the orange striping appeared to be an unnecessary extra. The men all wore hard hats. I don’t know why. There was nothing above them but blue sky, but then I guess that is what people had thought on September 11. Hard hats and gas masks — everyone protecting themselves against something unknown and not understood.

  Handwritten signs on scraps of paper and cardboard hung haphazardly on the hoarding. There was nothing very official-looking about any of it. My favourite on a torn piece of A4 simply read, ‘It is unlawful to touch this sign.’

  There was a general sense of people having to make it all up as they went along. Plumes of smoke or dust still rose from the scene. A soldier was guarding the gap in the hoarding, which occasionally swung open to allow a sanitation truck through. He had thick glasses and was wearing traditional army green camouflage. This too seemed a little pointless. There was certainly nothing green for him to blend against in the event of an invasion. Quite tempting to run up to him and yell, ‘I see you!’

  He saw me too.

  ‘Don’t take photographs,’ he commanded. ‘This is a crime scene.’

  And, of course, it was but that is not what it felt like. Crime scenes are places where there is a single body at an odd angle drawn on the floor in chalk. Crime scenes are places where men in raincoats mutter and put bits of fibre in plastic bags. This was much too big for that. Above the mesh, the jagged remnants of the aptly named skyscrapers could just be seen. All the steel that was left was bent and bowed and blackened. A monument to man’s inhumanity to man. A police officer in his classic blue uniform trundled past in a golf cart wearing the new regulation pink mouth protector.