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Stuart Parkes
00:02
Ada?
•••
Stuart Parkes
00:09
Shit I have to go to sleep, message me when you can
TWENTY-FIVE
The light in Florida hit Ada like a memory, though she’d never been there before. Stark and white. It was afternoon but there was none of the yellow tones of a London summer afternoon or the dusky pastels of a Scottish evening. She realised it was Australian light, somehow packaged and transported, and she felt a rush of something she tried not to feel very often. She tried to connect to the airport wifi but gave up after it asked for her email and put her phone away. She walked through security and saw a sign specifying that bullets must not be loaded into guns that were passing through the metal detector and she felt less at home.
At the immigration check the man asked her three times why she was travelling from London on an Australian passport and she started to feel the lightheadedness that always accompanied these sorts of interactions. Ada’s impulse was to tell him to shut the fuck up but he was holding her documents so she simpered instead. He saw that she had listed ‘actress’ on her arrival form (gender-neutral language was not for bureaucracy) and he asked if he’d have seen her in anything. She said no, she mostly did stage, and then he asked her to deliver a line for him.
Ada was tired, too tired for this and she tried to remind herself that she was white and cis and many of her friends went through far worse than this to travel but she was too tired to acknowledge her privilege right now either. She would acknowledge it later when telling this story though, she knew that already. She smiled at the man in the booth, staring expectantly at her, enjoying the power imbalance, and said, ‘I really can’t think of anything right now.’ And he said, ‘What about Shakespeare?’ so she dug into the recesses of her mind and said, ‘ “Puppet? Why so? Ay, that way goes the game—” .’ The immigration officer handed her passport back to her and said blandly, ‘You’re good. Next!’ and she walked out, through, until she saw her parents waiting for her.
Her mother was dressed just like her, she noticed, a wide-legged jumpsuit and her hair pulled back. She was checking her phone. Her father waved frantically, ecstatically, when he saw her, and he nudged her mother who looked up and smiled at her baby. Ada ran to them and pulled them into her, noticing that her always tiny mother appeared to have shrunk even more and deciding not to mention it. They chatted about the flight and the weather and her dad pulled her bag for her and then her parents argued about which level the car was on and then they were off down the Florida freeways.
Ada watched the billboards and the cars without much interest and started to close her eyes but her mother said, ‘We’ll drop your bags and go straight over to Gabby’s, OK? I said I’d pick up dinner so we can all eat together, then leave them to try to get some sleep.’ Ada said, ‘Sure, I mean, we could just go over in the morning? I don’t want to make a big fuss if they’re tired,’ and Ada’s dad looked at her in the rearview mirror and said, ‘No, we’ll go today. You only have ten days, we don’t want to waste it.’
‘Exactly,’ said her mum, looking at her phone again, ‘Hank didn’t fly you out here to lounge at home.’
‘Is he nice?’ she asked, because it seemed like the right question, and her mother started talking about Hank and his wonderful cooking and his boat that they could use any time and his kind but shy parents and how much he ‘loves our Gabby’. Ada looked out the window again.
This is how her parents had always coped with her and Gabby, as though they were actually very close, two people who would definitely choose to spend time together even if they weren’t related. They didn’t acknowledge the resentment Gabby felt towards Ada even when it was overt, even when it was screamed in their faces. They couldn’t or wouldn’t accept how exhausted Ada was by Gabby, how long ago she’d given up reaching for her approval. They watched them leave the house for school together every day and then didn’t see that Gabby would take a different, longer route to the train station to avoid walking with Ada. The best they had ever got along was when Gabby moved to Melbourne for university and Ada had the school to herself and their parents to herself and they texted each other happy birthday and exchanged books at Christmas.
Their father had been a lonely only child and their mother was one of six, which came with so much internal politics that they seemed to forget to hate each other. Ada thought of the family photos of her and Gabby when they were small, dressed in matching outfits and holding hands, repeated attempts by their parents to convince the world and the girls themselves that they were best friends. The alienation didn’t make sense to them, so they insulated themselves from it and they were doing it again, right now. People with their eyes open would never have thought that Gabby wanted Ada to fly over to meet her baby. They would never have thought Ada would do it. But Hank had paid for it and Ada wondered what Gabby had said about her. Gabby had said ‘I hate my sister’ so many times, often in Ada’s presence, but Hank didn’t seem the type to hate people. Especially members of his family. So maybe Gabby softened it with ‘we just aren’t close’ and maybe that was the truth now anyway. They just weren’t close. Any hate was historic.
Ada’s mother looked over at the car’s display and said, ‘Rich, something’s flashing,’ and her dad looked down and said, ‘Fuck, we need petrol.’ He smiled at Ada in the rearview and said, ‘The rental place only had these gas guzzlers,’ and Ada said, ‘I’m guessing Florida isn’t really up on the whole climate-change thing,’ and Diana said, ‘Actually, baby, there are some very progressive pockets! Such an interesting state.’ Ada felt that Diana would never criticise the place one of her daughters had chosen to live unless they said it first.
Ada looked at the flat scrub off the freeway and said, ‘So is this the south?’ and her father said, ‘Technically yes,’ and Ada said, ‘My friend Brandon is from Missouri and he says you know you’re in the south when there are more churches than fun things to do,’ and Diana said, ‘He sounds funny.’ Ada thought about Brandon, who had directed a workshop she took part in last winter and had a sexual focus on her butt to the exclusion of everything else, and she said, ‘He is funny.’
They pulled into a ‘gas station’, as Diana said in a terrible American drawl, and Richard got out to fill the tank. Diana unbuckled her seatbelt and whispered to Ada, ‘Should I sneak us some treats?’ and Ada didn’t know if her mum was play-acting nostalgia or really feeling it but she said, ‘Yeah I think you should.’ Diana got out of the car and did an exaggerated sneak into the shop and Ada saw Richard see her and shake his head affectionately. He treated his body, as he put it, ‘with respect’ and as her mother put it, ‘too seriously’, so for as long as Ada could remember, she and her mother would binge on junk whenever Richard wasn’t around. They got bolder as time went on and started doing it in his presence and booing if he tried to object and Ada appreciated this throwback. She wondered if her mother snacked alone now.
Diana got back to the car with packets upon packets of American treats – Twizzlers and Twinkies (‘they’re terrible, you have to try one’) and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (‘please don’t open them in the car’) and Milk Duds and Reese’s. The two women passed the packets back and forth over the muted objections of Richard for the rest of the ride, agreeing that Americans really weren’t good at chocolate but were masters of everything else. They turned off the freeway into the Sarasota suburb they were staying in, camping out in Hank’s parents’ house, around the corner from Gabby and Hank. Ada took in the strip malls and pointed to a sign that advertised ‘Guns and Ammo’ and Diana said, ‘Yes, the gun business is terrible, I try to tune it out.’ They pulled into a gated community, Richard waving his fob at the sensor in an embarrassed sort of way, and parked in the driveway of an all-white, one-storey house on a block of land that would contain a hundred London flats.
Diana said, ‘We can just take your bags in and be on our way,’ but Ada said, ‘I need to check my email if that’s OK,’ and then added, ‘work stuff,’ and Richard and Diana nodded because yes, work stuff did usually happen on email. They went into the house and Ada was surprised to find it tiled all the way through. White walls, white freezing cold floors, air conditioning blaring. Her house in Sydney was all floorboards and ceiling fans and she felt the two approaches to heat signified something but she couldn’t grasp at what.
She went to open a window and her mother stopped her, saying the mosquitoes were something else, so she settled under the cold blasting air con at the high kitchen bench. Richard retrieved the wifi password for her and she connected, skipping over everything apart from Stuart’s messages. She felt guilt and pleasure as she read them and she was about to reply when her mother said, ‘Sorry to hurry you, darling, but I said we’d be at the house by six,’ and Ada dashed off a reply and stepped back into the world.
