by Joanna Coles
But today he provides the answer himself. Hardly has the chime of the security bell stopped than he is greeting me effusively by name, producing the latest issue of the Spectator and the London Review of Books, which he says he’s been saving especially for me.
I can hold back no longer. ‘You seem a lot friendlier, all of a sudden,’ I venture.
‘Yes,’ he happily admits. ‘This is true. I was very afraid of you, Mr Godwin.’ Then he gives an embarrassed little laugh. ‘You see, I thought you might be Mr Godwin, the escaped murderer. But now I checked with the police and now I know you’re not!’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, one of my hobbies is amateur sleuthing. So many people come through this shop every day, and I have an excellent head for faces, so I check all the reward notices – just in case. Some of the rewards are extremely generous. I could retire, you know. Anyway, I thought you were Glen Godwin, you look quite like him. The FBI are offering $50,000 for his capture, you know. Go and check on their website if you don’t believe me.’
Later I do just that and discover that the FBI has a website of its Top Ten Most Wanted. Someone called Glen Godwin currently sits at number three. He is an escaped murderer serving twenty-five-to-life in Folsom State Prison. At least he was until late June 1987, when he became one of only three people to escape from that penitentiary, by crawling out of a storm drain down to the American River, where a getaway raft was waiting. The FBI believes my namesake to be armed with handguns and a nine millimetre rifle, and is indeed offering $50,000 for information leading to his capture, although they warn reward hunters that the fugitive is extremely dangerous and on no account to be approached by any member of the public.
I scroll down to see that the newsagent is right. Apart from the same surname, Glen Godwin is exactly the same age as me and of similar weight and height. There follows a photo gallery of Glen Godwin, in various poses, and he does look unnervingly like me.
I briefly consider getting a laissez-passer from the FBI, assuring any party who challenges me, that I am not Glen Godwin the former construction worker turned dangerous fugitive, but Peter Godwin the former journalist turned blocked writer; that I am unarmed and relatively unthreatening unless relentlessly provoked.
Thursday, 17 September
Joanna
We are becoming infected with the American idiom. This morning at breakfast I hear myself using the word ‘conflict’ as a verb. ‘I’m conflicted over what to write this week,’ I moan.
Predictably, Peter, who is more of a linguistic purist, rounds on me. I defend myself by hailing the great messy potage of current English – which thrives as a welcoming stew, absorbing all manner of grammatical gristle, street slang and newly invented vocabulary.
But the truth is I started doing it just to annoy him and now I seem to have lost control of the process. Yesterday I caught myself describing how my pregnancy ‘has impacted on our relationship’ and then a bit later on I heard myself describe how my London flat had once been ‘burglarized’. I have even begun saying zee instead of zed.
But Peter ‘has issues’ with even the most obscure of Americanisms. He is irritated, for example, that Britain’s shish kebab has, on its trip across the Atlantic, reshuffled itself into ‘shish kabob’. ‘Why?’ he keeps asking whenever he sees it on menus. No one seems to know.
Thursday, 17 September
Peter
I am on a Marmite run in Myers of Keswick on Hudson Street in the West Village. It is a strange little establishment, an English general store circa 1950, faithfully preserved in expatriate aspic, patronized by immigrant Brits, ex-Rhodes Scholars and Anglophilic gays. In the window stand pyramids of canned Heinz soups and baked beans, Bisto, Dettol, Lucozade, HP sauce, Golden Syrup, Nescafé Gold Blend, McVitie’s Ginger Nuts, Vanish stain remover, Robinson’s Barley Water, Ambrosia rice pudding, Yorkshire Tea and plain old Typhoo – all the foibles of the peculiar British palate.
It was from Myers of Keswick that Fergie, already the spokeswoman for Weight Watchers, apparently ordered four sausage rolls, prompting the New York Post to speculate that she was bulimic. The next day, one of Fergie’s assistants rang the Post, insisting on a correction to make it clear that three of the sausage rolls were for her friends.
Inside the gloomy shop the walls are decorated with tea towels bearing the Union Jack and the Welsh Dragon. The owner, who originally ran a butcher’s shop in Keswick in Cumbria, sits working at his paper-strewn desk in the corner of the shop, like some Dickensian clerk.
I come away with not only my Marmite, but a Scotch egg, a box of custard creams and a packet of Wall’s pork sausages.
Back home I present my bounty to Joanna.
‘Why on earth did you buy this?’ she challenges, snatching the Scotch egg and brandishing it angrily. ‘It’s things like Scotch eggs that made me leave Britain.’
I have no idea now why I bought it.
Friday, 18 September
Joanna
This morning I determine to solve the mystery of where Margarita goes. She turns up early, bins the trash and does a few other cursory tasks, and then loads our swollen bag of laundry into her battered shopping trolley and disappears. She does not burst back into our space until about one p.m., when she wheels in our cleaned and folded clothes, fretting about terrible queues in the basement laundry. Then she sets to the apartment with her formidable turbo vacuum, sucking up admirable amounts of dust and various baubles besides.
‘Listen, I don’t care how long the bloody queues are down there, it cannot take four hours to do the washing. She’s just taking the piss,’ complains Peter.
So today, after she’s been gone for a couple of hours, I wander down to the laundry room myself, seeking an explanation for her prolonged absences. I peep through the window pane of the door to see her darting between teetering piles of alien washing and the long bank of humming washing machines and dryers. She has all the synchronized efficiency of a magician spinning plates.
It becomes clear to me Margarita is in fact running a laundry business, mostly on our time.
Friday, 18 September
Peter
Panting slowly along the Hudson on my thrice-weekly jog – now that I have given up rollerblading – I approach a small dog of indeterminate breed, wearing a Black Watch tartan coat. Its owner, an elegant middle-aged man dressed in a peppercorn tweed suit, accessorized with a gold fob watch and a Leander pink paisley hanky peeping from his top pocket, has hoisted the dog up by the tail so that its two rear legs are several inches off the ground, and he dabs fastidiously at its bottom with a rolled-up ball of tissue.
A gaggle of toddlers mills by and one little boy yells out in astonishment, ‘Look, mommy, a doggie getting its butt wiped!’
I notice that the dog wears an expression of resigned humiliation.
Saturday, 19 September
Joanna
Peter has read somewhere that it takes seven minutes for the average person to fall asleep. He’s now perturbed that it takes him far longer than that and decides to time himself. But I point out there is a practical difficulty: he will fall asleep before he has done the final clocking. I refuse to lie awake timing him, which leaves him the option of setting the alarm – to see if he exceeds his seven minutes. But that seems counter-productive, even to him.
In any case, he worries about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle – that by studying something, you inevitably change the thing you study. The very act of trying to measure the time it takes him to fall asleep will in itself distort that time. He falls asleep almost immediately pondering this problem.
Saturday, 19 September
Peter
I am shopping in D’Agostino’s, incredulous as ever at the sheer swollen size of everything in American supermarkets. It is as though an entire culture is on steroids. Orange juice comes in gallon containers, chocolate in slabs the size of roof slates. As I wander down the aisle, tubs of something called ‘I Can’t Bel
ieve It’s not Butter’ compete with neighbouring vats of ‘Move Over Butter’ for my shopping dollar.
On my way home I wander absently through a fair in the street neighbouring ours. There are bright pennants fluttering in the breeze and music and crowds and stalls, people eating candyfloss and corn on-the-cob and drinking out of beer bottles concealed in brown paper bags. But two yards in I realize that this fair is not as other street fairs: everyone is in black, many with studded bodies. Some wear spiked dog collars. And the stalls are selling bondage gear; whips and cuffs and giant, gnarled plastic dildos. I am wearing shorts and a T-shirt and deck shoes, carrying my grocery bags. I smile brightly as I walk through, nodding companionably like a country vicar negotiating a ghetto.
Sunday, 20 September
Joanna
‘I’m going to change the light bulbs,’ says Peter, bursting into the sitting room dragging our red stepladder behind him.
‘But we don’t need new bulbs,’ I say mildly.
‘This is no ordinary bulb,’ he says, holding it up against the window as if it’s a glass of fine claret. ‘This is a full-spectrum bulb which mimics natural sunlight. It will stop you being depressed,’ he promises.
‘But I’m not depressed,’ I protest.
‘Well, I think that we may both be suffering from early SADS, seasonal adjustment disorder syndrome, it’s caused by lack of exposure to natural sunlight,’ he carries on, wobbling from the top of the stepladder as he unscrews the old bulb.
It is true that, while our loft is wide and high, it only has windows at one end, and the further you penetrate into the interior the darker it becomes, requiring lights on throughout the day.
‘I saw this news story about an old people’s nursing home where both the staff and the inmates, even those with Alzheimer’s, were hugely rejuvenated after full-spectrum bulbs were installed,’ says Peter.
To my amazement he has purchased an armful of these bulbs, at $10 a piece.
‘Much cheaper than a shrink,’ he says. ‘Right, now I’ll go and change the one in the kitchen. Can you try and observe if it makes any difference?’
Sunday, 20 September
Peter
Susan, a New Zealander web designer, a friend-of-a-friend, has set up a website for my last book, Mukiwa. She has connected it to various search engines so that it can be tracked down by people interested in Africa. The site itself has various click-on links, a blurb about the book, a specimen chapter and a rather blurred picture of myself, trying to look contemplative and authorial, but managing to appear, it seems to me, faintly phoney.
It also has a guest page. So today, as I do every few days, against my better judgement, I log onto the Mukiwa site to see if anyone has left a message on the guest page. After an initial flurry of comments, mostly from old school-friends trying to contact each other and hurling jocular abuse at themselves and me, the page has become sadly inactive of late. It now appears to be stuck on guest number forty. My habit of checking the clearly moribund web page is now verging on self-flagellatory, but I can’t seem to resist these futile peeks. And I wonder about all the forgotten websites that orbit unvisited through the great galaxy of cyberspace, like ghostly outer planets on which all signs of life are absent.
Monday, 21 September
Joanna
‘How are you feeling?’ asks Peter. I suspect he’s being unusually attentive because he’s about to leave for Africa.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Why?’
‘D’you think the full-spectrum light bulbs are making any difference?’
‘Um, not yet.’
‘No. Neither do I.’ He looks crushed. ‘But perhaps the Heisenberg uncertainty principle has distorted our judgement?’
‘It’s only been twenty-four hours, maybe they need a big longer to take effect.’
Monday, 21 September
Peter
I am on my way to South Africa on assignment for National Geographic Magazine, cruising at 35,000 feet, thinking about my life. Not the mundane ‘to-do’ list of everyday existence, but the grand organic sweep of it all. This happens every time I take a transcontinental flight. Cocooned in a protected capsule, soaring and uncontactable – I am provided with a spiritual enema. I measure my life in these solitary aeroplane journeys, as close to God as I now come.
I have begun to think of aeroplanes as flying cathedrals, or at least in the way that secular folk use cathedrals – as catalysts for contemplation. Even the layouts are similar. The aisles are naves and the altar is the cockpit. The priests are pilots and the stewards and stewardesses are altar boys and girls. And just like cathedrals of old, some pews – the ones endowed by the wealthy – are closer to the altar than others. First-class seats are always closest to the cockpit.
We, the passengers, are on a journey from one place of being to another. And rather as rival religions offer us spiritual flights to essentially the same Nirvana, so competing airlines hustle to take us to the same destinations. Regular churchgoers are rewarded just as frequent fliers are, with grace, which serves as religion’s airmiles.
Tuesday, 22 September
Joanna
I am lying in bed in my room at the Tower Hotel in the shadow of Tower Bridge, staring at the brown bend of the Thames. I should be sleeping but for the last hour I have been hunched in the bathroom being violently sick. In four hours’ time I am supposed to go and finalize the details of my new job at The Times but feel so ill I cannot imagine ever leaving my bed again. In front of me stretches an intricate series of appointments which I will now have to unravel.
In desperation, I contact the hotel doctor.
‘I’m pregnant and I’ve just been very sick,’ I moan.
‘Well, up to the sixteenth week it’s quite normal to be sick,’ he says wearily, evidently fed up at being roused for an apparently routine query.
‘But I haven’t been sick at all throughout my pregnancy, this is the first time,’ I blub.
‘Well, as I say, it’s quite normal. I wouldn’t worry.’
‘I think it might have been the baked potato with tuna,’ I speculate. ‘I live in America and I’m already high risk, I’m thirty-six.’
‘That’s not considered high risk in England,’ he mutters. ‘You may have mild food poisoning then, but in any case there’s no danger. Call me back if you feel any worse.’
Terrified I may have poisoned the foetus, I lie in bed and weep.
Friday, 25 September
Peter
One of the main attractions of writing for National Geographic was to avoid the bustling deadlines and occasional danger of hard news.
But my plan for a safer, more in-depth journalism seems to have rebounded. On this trip I’ve been shot at several times, mostly in fairly ludicrous circumstances and mostly unintentionally: A fusillade in honour of an assassinated Zulu warlord went awry when a stoned gunman lost his footing on the freshly dug grave soil and scattered bullets at head height. Then a traditional Zulu stick-fight turned anarchic when a warrior walloped the referee, and a general fire fight ensued. And this was supposed to be a safe ‘anthropological’ story.
Saturday, 26 September
Joanna
Back in Manhattan Meredith calls to suggest supper, to cheer me up in Peter’s absence. ‘But we’ll have to go Chinese,’ she says, ‘I’m only eating lightly steamed vegetables.’
I’ve grown familiar with Meredith’s food fads, which usually stem from passing allergies, and decide not to pursue this one. But she’s determined to tell me anyway. ‘I’ve discovered I’m allergic to dairy,’ she continues.
‘How did you find out?’ I ask.
‘Oh it’s kind of obvious. I’ve been feeling toxic for some time,’ she says vaguely. ‘You know, bloated and nauseated and, well, I went to see Madonna’s herbalist last week and she said I was suffering from yeast-takeover.’ She stops and then whispers conspiratorially, ‘Meat is truly poison, darling, and so is dairy. From now on I’m only eating living foods.’
‘Living foods?’
‘Raw things, darling, uncooked fruits or very lightly steamed vegetables and I’m really into tofu. You should try it. Really. It would make you feel so much better.’
Saturday, 26 September
Peter
I arrive in Miami at dawn and am bounced from the immigration line and sent for ‘secondaries’. I am getting quite experienced at the dreaded secondaries, and obediently follow the sign to a great hall presided over by immigration officers, who sit behind a counter elevated out of punching reach, so that I have to stand on tiptoe to hand up my documents. Then I sit for several hours, among large, remarkably patient families of Mexicans and Colombians, Haitians and Brazilians, waiting to be grilled further on our intentions, should we be permitted to enter the USA.
Eventually my number is called and I am directed to a glass-walled office in which sits an immense female Latino officer.
‘Good morning,’ I say.
She nods without looking up as she frowns over my dog-eared letter from the US Embassy, explaining that I am in effect the ‘common law’ husband of a resident alien.
‘The Federal Government’, she explains, as many immigration officers have done to me before her, ‘recognizes no such thing.’
I nod meekly.
‘It’s simple,’ she says, as though addressing a backward child. ‘Either you’re married or you’re not. Which is it?’
‘Not,’ I admit.
‘Then ya gotta problem,’ she says, tapping her biro on her intricately doodled blotter. ‘Ya can’t just keep on comin’ in an’ out as a tourist. I mean you’re practically livin’ here!’
‘Well, I thought the letter from your Consul in the London Embassy explained the situation.’
