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She sighed to show her patience was wearing thin. It wasn’t the first time I’d voiced my objections.
‘Didn’t you know, the streets of London are paved with gold?’
‘Really?’
‘We’ll see, won’t we?’
She got a job as a secretary.
‘Hired me on the spot. It’s about all I’m qualified for, but it’ll pay the bills.’
‘If there are so many bills to pay, why don’t we just go home?’
‘We are home, Sophie.’
After a week camping out at the Holiday Inn, we rented an apartment; the second floor of a two-storey walk-up near Parliament Hill. An oasis of green in the heart of North London, with ponds people actually swam in, a big adventure playground and a running track. A café too, that sold ice cream and pain au chocolat. Our go-to spot on a Saturday morning.
‘It’s where they did the Twilight Bark in 101 Dalmatians, remember?’
She was wrong, that was Primrose Hill. An easy enough mistake though. To our American ears, the names were deceptively similar. You only see nuance when you look for it.
We watched 101 Dalmatians that first night in our hotel room, curled up in the same bed eating the Twinkieswe’d picked up at Logan, both of us too jet-lagged to sleep.
It became a habit, eating in front of the TV, something Nanna G would certainly not have approved of. Uncivilised, she’d have called it. I could practically hear her saying it, see the appalled look on her face at the murky depths we’d sunk to.
Being civilised was very important to Nanna. I had an idea it meant holding a knife and fork properly and not eating with your mouth open. Manners maketh the lady, Sophie. Not much of a carrot. I was six, being a lady wasn’t high on my list of priorities.
I suspected my mother was the same when she was my age, though it was hard to imagine given how big she was on manners these days. From the scraps I pieced together, I figured she’d been a Tom Sawyer type; catching frogs, whittling wood, collecting little animal bones.
I don’t know what happened to the frogs, but she kept the bones in a cigar case at the back of her nightstand; Amelia’sTreasure Box– Hands Off, scratched across the top.
I thought the collection was a bit morbid and told her so.
‘There’s beauty in everything, Sophie,’ she said. ‘You just have to look.’
And we did look. One of our favourite things to do became scavenging about on Parliament Hill, searching for feathers and flint and bits of worn-down glass which I was convinced were emeralds. At night we’d cuddle up on the couch eating spaghetti and watching Columbo re-runs or video rentals from the Blockbusters down the street. Return From Witch Mountain. Grease. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Sgt. Pepper’swas my mother’s favourite. She was mad about The Beatles, had all their albums on vinyl. We used to play them on the turntable in our new living room, dance along. Her swaying from her hips like she was melting, me mostly jumping on the spot.
In Boston my bedtime had been seven o’clock, here it was creeping closer to nine.
‘Well, you’re older now,’ she said, though looking back I suspect it had more to do with her not wanting to sit up by herself in an empty living room. I wasn’t complaining though, not about that at any rate. Des Banister, the odd-jobs guy who lived in the apartment downstairs, was my real bêtenoire.
‘He’s creepy,’ I told my mother. ‘He smells like cheese and his teeth are horrid.’
‘Looks mean nothing, Sophie. It’s what’s in a person’s heart that counts.’
‘I don’t think he has a very nice heart either.’
She ding-donged my pigtail.
‘You don’t even know him.’
‘I know how he treats his dog. Its ribs are sticking out. He’s obviously starving it.’
‘For all you know, it’s just a picky eater. You remember old Gabe Robinson from down the street back home? How kind he was?’
‘Yes?’
