AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A week after the check has cleared, he sees the figure in his online account, and he feels rich. He thanks Mrs. Flanders for her generous hospitality but announces that he will be leaving her soon.
“Are you sure? You don’t have to. Wherever will you go?”
“Thank you, Mrs. Flanders, but I cannot stay here forever. I think I should like to see some places. Travel abroad!”
“Abroad?” she said. “Where to?”
“France, maybe Rome? America? A friend’s given me a few tips on where to go and where to stay. I think I should like to see it all for myself, learn what it means to be out there in the real world. To drink coffee on a promenade or eat patisserie on the cobbled stones of Paris. To experience life.”
“America,” she said. “That’s where Ellie went.”
Before he leaves, he purchases her an iPad and sets her up with a social media account. He takes a photo of her on the HD camera and sets it as her profile picture. At first, he is her only contact, and he promises to stay in touch through his travels. But soon the requests come flooding in: from her childhood friends in Ghana, from cousins and aunties and their children, and soon she discovers a request from a certain someone that has her in floods of tears.
18
WHERE BETTER PLACE TObecome enlightened than Italy?
His flight lands in Fiumicino, and he rides the train into Termini station, where the Roman streets are plastered in graffiti and the buildings and ruins crumble around him. The sky is cloudless, the sun hot, and he takes a taxi to the boutique B&B with its three-star rating in Trastevere. He checks into his room overlooking the Tiber River, where he eats complementary citrus fruit at breakfast and fills a vase with long-stemmed lilies, which he buys from a market stall one street along.
Riding the tram to the Colosseum is easy, and he walks north past the Foro Romano and throws a coin into the Trevi Fountain. He eats cacio e pepe for lunch in a restaurant with red paper tablecloths on Piazza Navona, followed by real limoncello gelato from one of the ice-cream parlors, before trudging on to Vatican City. Here the dome of St. Peter’s looms mightily, but the Castel St. Angelo pales in comparison. For days the Eternal City is his world; he discovers things he didn’t know were there, like the poet John Keats’s gravestone in the Cimitero Acattolico, whereupon it is written: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water”; Percy Shelley’s too, though later that night he reads that although Shelley died in Italy, his heart lay out in Dorset, in the St. Peter’s Churchyard, alongside his wife, Mary.
In an instant his time in Rome is over, and he is back at Termini station at six thirtyAM, waiting for the notice board to tell him the platform for his Venice-bound train. He spends only one week here and is expecting something of a fishy smell and sewage. In reality, it is an otherworldly place of winding streets and narrow bridges, of shops selling designer clothing, expensive jewelry, carnival masks, and postcards with cats on them. He buys a tiramisu cannoli despite the taste of coffee, and walks through the Renaissance architecture, the colonnades which remind him, for a moment, of Trinity. From the expansive square he scrutinizes the gold zodiac signs in St. Mark’s clock tower in Piazza San Marco. He enjoys watching the boats as they cruise along the seascape, but hates how many tourists clog up the spaces, and he one of them. From Venice he flies on to Prague, where he walks the Charles Bridge up to the castle and plods along the Old Town to hear the chime of the Astronomical Clock Tower at night. He is disappointed not to snag a ticket to the Klementinum library before moving onto Berlin, which on the whole he finds uninspiring. Too much of a modern city, though with lots of people he reads as queer in the edgiest sense.
Exhausted from his travels, he takes a day for himself, to do nothing. Lying naked in crisp white sheets, he has food delivered to the door from an app on his phone, and is glued to another app which has him connecting with male strangers. He changes his bio to “alone and palely loitering,” which gains him little interest. One man, Luca, only half a mile away, sends him a headless torso and asks him for pics, then persuades him to meet up that Friday night. He agrees, though it is his penultimate night here, and three cocktails later, a band is tied to his wrist, gaining him entry into a grotty club where he snorts cocaine for the first time in his life—just because it’s there and he’s under the influence of alcohol—and says no to giving this man a hand job in one of the bathroom stalls. In the morning he finds he has been blocked on the app.When in Rome, he asserts to himself, though he still feels disgusting and sad, as though it is he who has done something wrong. He sobers up, remembers he’s in Germany.
In Bruges he pursues more innocent affairs. He sees the blood of Christ at the Basilica of the Holy Blood, a Romanesque building tucked away in the corner of the square in the heart of the city, beside a restaurant and a chocolatier (from which he purchases a hot chocolate and then two waffles from an outside food truck). If he hadn’t been looking out for it, he would have missed it completely, so indistinct it was to the surrounding buildings. He enters through the triple archway, where, he’s read online, the relic will be shown to the public every Friday before and after mass. Visitors gather beneath the pulpit, and from the left chamber the priest ascends holding a glass cylinder, crowned on either side with jeweled coronets, which is said to hold a cloth with the blood of Jesus Christ. The priest places it down for all to see and it looks, to Bron, like a glorified perfume bottle. Not at all worth the wait. He buys himself another waffle. Finally, he lands back into Heathrow Airport, where after a three-hour layover he begins his greatest venture and longest flight yet.
And in truth, America is everything he’s imagined it to be and more.
In New York City he witnesses more homelessness than he’d ever thought possible. He gives a man some spare change and fills his own backpack with sandwiches from a 7-Eleven, which he distributes out as he walks the city. When he asks for a bottle of water from a stand outside the Empire State Building, the server struggles to understand him. “Water,” he says. “Waw-tuh.” He tries again in an American accent, and his purchase is successful.
He comes to the place where it all began, where a brick was thrown by two trans women of color in the West Village, and is proud to see this part of history. He is bumped into by a sinewy man who, on impact, flings his plastic bag onto the pavement. Bron hears the glass shatter and apologizes profusely outside the inn.
“That was my wife’s anniversary present, goddamn it,” the man says. “It cost me twenty bucks.”
Bron immediately fishes out his wallet and offers him twenty dollars for replacement wine.
“Best make it forty for the inconvenience,” the man says, and when Bron hands over forty, the man snatches the wallet from his hand, having seen the wad of notes, and runs off, calling him a faggot. Bron crosses the street and hurries in the opposite direction, increasing the distance between them. He didn’t expect to be called that here—not in the Big Apple, New York City, where dreams are made. It is almost a mile away on the corner of the street that he understands there’d been no spillage, no liquid puddle emanating from the bag. Just the broken glass of an empty bottle. The remaining hours of his day are dampened, and he returns to his hotel room and shelves today’s misfortune in the corner of his mind under “Life Lessons.” This is why he is here, after all. To experience more of the world, however terrible it might be. To learn.
The next morning he gets lost in Central Park for hours, finds the Flatiron Building, which Harry said he ought to see, and revisits the streets all through lower Manhattan until he stumbles onto the Staten Island Ferry, which is free to use, only to turn right back around. Passing the Statue of Liberty by boat, he thinks what a sight it must have been for those who’d left their homes across the ocean and traveled for weeks to get here. What a sight.
His phone pings in his pocket. When he pulls it out, the screen alerts him to a message from Ndidi Flanders, with an attachment sent as a message. He opens up the snapshot: she is beaming with joy in her cramped, cluttered living room, and there is a woman beside her who is also smiling, and leaning out with one arm to capture the two-person selfie. Ellie is sitting on the side of the sofa in the place Bron would have normally sat. They are wrapped in a light embrace.
He sees the three dots wriggling away beneath the image, which indicate she is typing.
His heart lurches in his chest, and now he is smiling too. He is thinking,What a sight, what a sight.And then thinks something more: that there are things in the world worth living for, taking risks for, and there are things in the world that aren’t. This is still what he is thinking when he exits the revolving doors of his hotel on his last day here and says goodbye to the concierge, stepping out into New York—where the sun is baking the street’s many bags of garbage, and the air is blaring with car horns—on his way to Los Angeles, his final destination.
The end of his travels has come upon him fast, but he is ready to return to England a more well-rounded person. Or so he’d like to think. Sitting on the beach at Santa Monica Pier, he is secure in his location, in this populated place at the edge of the city, where the Ferris wheel shines neon blue and dyes the dark sea purple; the night sky is sharp with the smell of the ocean and potential. Here the whole of the world surrounds him.
What he knows about America is no longer what he imagined of Harry’s life, the smell of him at school, or what he’s heard from Darcy’s time in the California hills. This is America to him: the open expanse of nature, the city sprawl in the palm of his hand, the bending of the marsh plants in the wind and a place where green trees engulf him and all birds sing. New York had given him a sense of the real, buzzing world, and when he walked the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, he was a different person altogether. More confident in the way he moved, the stomp of his foot. Might even take to wearing higher heels. But he was also more fearful, of the invisibility that city life brings, of the dangers that surround us all. But either way, more of life.
He now believes what Darcy told him about America to be true: there is so much more possibility outside the realms of England. But he also acknowledges a feeling that Darcy did not express, a connection he knows Darcy will have missed.
At Santa Monica, at the edge of the world, he feels something nostalgic, something outside himself. The palm trees surrounding him are California trees—that much remains true. And yetwhen he closes his eyes, the wind is English wind. He looks up at the pier, the peaks of the wheel, the knowing crests of the Hollywood hills a taxi ride away. Those hilly paths of Hollywood are the same as those of the Yorkshire Moors or the surrounding fields of Cambridgeshire. The dip of his toes in the water is all at once the flow of the Pacific on the shores of Venice Beach and the oared-through waters of the River Cam.
At the edge of one ocean, he closes his eyes, hears Darcy’s voice whistling on the wind, through the reeds of the marshes. He can feel Darcy across the stretch of water and sends kisses through the air, hums notes of song and speaks words of endearment, knowing that the breeze will take them across the world and back to Greenwood Manor, where he hopes Darcy is waiting for him.
At Heathrow he carries his suitcase through the maze of aisles to the underground and onto the Piccadilly line, where he swaps off at King’s Cross Station for the next departing train to Cambridge. For the first half of his train journey, he is typing away on his laptop, flitting between tabs where he is fixing sentences, deleting typos, and uploading attachments to a website’s interface. When it signals that his application to the University of Cambridge has been successfully sent, he shuts the lid, crosses his fingers, and thinks,Maybe third time lucky?He is also thinking through ways in which he can turn an old hobby into a successful side hustle, by building an online store where he could sell T-shirts and mugs with phrases like “Queer Literari” or puns like “I am queer, no box ensnares me.” So far, he likes this idea. Then he turns his attention to the dust-speckled window, through which he sees the world for what it is.
The hedges are in leaf, and he is surrounded by English countryside; there lies the parish spire, the monopoly-sized houses, and the old village. He sees an isolated manor house and a lake, and over there a chestnut tree that looks miniature from such a distance, but he imagines a woman walking past it: Jane Eyre, carrying her letter all the way to Hay, or Keira Knightley as LizzieBennet, and the effective way she could walk and read simultaneously. The cows are eating the meadow flowers, and the lambs are bleating and leaping on the lea. Speeding over a viaduct and through a tunnel, the fields and farmland disappear into thickening foliage and crumbling walls, emerging to bleak high-rise buildings, scaffolding, and cranes. The factories are camouflaged blue, gray, white, disappearing into the fading sky as though they were never there. And he feels, with a jolt, a homesickness for what is no longer here and probably never was. This sceptered isle, this pleasant land, has come a lengthy way.
But looking beyond the past at the here and now, he thinks that maybe, just maybe, England is not such a terrible place after all. He doesn’t know how he will feel next year or what turmoil may come to rid him of this sense of calm. But today he is at ease. Because clambering through the wooden gate, he approaches another expanse of green, sets down his bags.
He is unsurprised to find Darcy there, who, clad in cricket whites, is crouching in a way that flatters his physique, especially his behind. He is about to throw a ball to his daughter, who is gripping her bat and practicing her swing on a sunny afternoon in September. The gray dog, who is remarkably sitting idle at their side, has his eye marked on the ball, but barks at Bron’s approach.
The little girl drops her bat and screams, runs to him, and jumps into his open arms. The dog is frantic now and barking. Bron squeezes her tightly and admits how much he’s missed her. She pulls away and says how glad she is to see him, how very glad.
Yanking at his hand she leads him onward to a man who has lifted the discarded bat from the grass, holds it to his chest. He is looking toward them, smiling, and shielding his eyes from the sun.
