‘I need to leave the country’ I say vaguely, as if I’ve committed some terrible crime.
The time has come. The world is open. I cull my belongings, pack up what’s left, and send it to Scotland. Small scraps of domesticity, destined for years in storage. I give up the lease on my attic room in Bloomsbury. I wake up on the first of April and I don’t live anywhere, anymore. By the time the sun rises, I’m on a flight to New York. Hand luggage only. Off we go.
After five days in the city, I get up in the night to travel from the East Coast to middle America. Three hour flight, tight turnaround at O’Hare, then we file diligently into an old Bombardier packed so tight there’s no room for luggage above the seats. It reminds me of the small planes my brother and I used to take to Islay as children, turbulence throwing our little bodies into the aisles. I hear my mother’s voice, warning us about the dangers of mountain waves. Vivid tales of flying Cessnas into Dundee in darkening storms, the way she taught us the NATO phonetic alphabet alongside our ABCs.
We land in a regional airport on the edge of a field. All you can see are fields, flat patchwork of the Midwest. As we walk through baggage claim, a song I will later discover is the local university ‘fight song’ plays over tinny speakers. ‘Fight, Tigers, you will always win! Proudly keep the colours flying skyward….’.
When I get to the hotel, a young Australian man in a hospital gown with gaping holes where teeth should be is inexplicably sitting at reception. In the lift, there’s a large decorative sticker covering the door, featuring two women laughing in the backseat of a convertible alongside the word LOL. I unpack in my room. An episode of a crime show is playing on the TV, some CSI offshoot, and in this storyline a woman staying alone in a hotel is raped and murdered by a man who sneaks in through the emergency exit stairs. My room is opposite the emergency exit stairs. All of this feels like a bad omen. I head out to see the sights.
I walk in the wrong direction alongside a highway. I explore second hand bookshops and a musty Salvation Army, selling lightly-stained sweatshirts with slogans like ‘TURKEY, PUMPKIN PIE and FOOTBALL’. There’s a strip club in the building opposite. It’s 4pm and the car park is full. I buy a tiny candle, enticingly described as ‘romance’, in a hippie shop. Wherever I go there’s an American flag in sight, sometimes whole rows of them fluttering in the breeze. That night I fall asleep sideways, in a bed so vast I can stretch out in any direction.
The conference begins. One night there’s a party at the host professor’s house on the edge of town. Rolled disks of charcuterie are served in tiny plastic cups. The mayor turns up and does a speech, wearing Union Jack cufflinks out of respect for the esteemed guests. Everyone gets drunk on local beer. A rumour goes around that certain attendees are members of the town's secret swinging community. The host says, seriously, that they’re considering buying a chunk of the Berlin Wall.
A conversation begins. At one point I laugh so hard that I double over, like a sitcom skit. Three drinks in and I’ve been convinced to speed read the first chapter of Moby Dick. One more and I’m handing out French cigarettes, another and we’re walking into town to play pool in a college bar. Our self-appointed chaperone buys unnecessary shots of Jameson and breaks a pool cue over his leg because we’re not taking the game seriously enough. Entire conversations play out in looks not words. In the Uber to the hotel, the driver silently puts a disco light on the ceiling and the red, green and blue disks spin over us as we cruise through the dark streets.
Back in my room, I lie in the bath for an hour and eat an orange stolen from breakfast. Sinking into the water, I close my eyes and see a map of the city we both spent so many years in, our bodies moving around the ancient streets like tiny pinpricks of light. I wonder if we ever passed each other before tonight, chance encounters in old pubs or basement clubs. Perhaps we met on the bridge on May Day. Perhaps we struck up a conversation on the bus. Perhaps there are versions of us out there, living out the consequences of those meetings, and this shiver of recognition is just a tiny tear in the fabric of another universe.
In this universe, I dry myself off and climb into my enormous bed alone, the nape of my neck leaving a damp indent on the pillow as I fall asleep.
I take a Greyhound bus to St Louis. The hotel is haunted. When I tell people, everyone assumes I’ve chosen it deliberately. I have not. The room is so unsettling that I shower with the curtain wide open for fear of being grabbed by an unhappy spirit. I soon discover that the whole building burnt down a hundred years ago, killing scores of guests. They rebuilt it in the exact same spot, papering over the cracks. Management keeps the front doors locked at all times, even in the middle of the day. It’s not safe, they tell me. They’re not talking about the ghosts.
The one-day travel card is branded as an ‘adventure pass’. An older white man gets off the train in front of me. The back of his t-shirt reads UNTIL I AM OUT OF AMMO OR I AM OUT OF BLOOD I WILL FIGHT FOR AMERICA. I get a coffee from a trendy cafe on the edge of town, a few streets from where Tennessee Williams grew up. I wait for the click, I wait for the click. I go to the zoo and walk around, looking at the listless animals in their little prisons.
I stop to talk to pro-life protesters outside Missouri’s last Planned Parenthood. They seem relieved that I’m not trying to fight them, that I want to understand why they’re here. The eldest must be in her seventies, a grandmother with a sweet smile. She tells me about all the poor girls she’s heard of having abortions against their will. She’s just trying to help them, she says, looking pained. I can picture her serving cookies on a Southern porch, eager grandchildren pulling at her pleated skirt. She could have been my grandmother, in another life. In this life, my grandmother nearly bled to death from an illegal abortion at seventeen. According to family lore, her own mother once begged the doctor for arsenic after a dozen pregnancies. Its told as a joke - couldn’t get out of bed quick enough in the morning! - but in hindsight, it’s not particularly funny.
Three weeks later, a document is leaked showing that the Supreme Court intends to overturn Roe v. Wade. If you’re surprised, you haven’t been paying attention.
I’m sitting in the garden, finishing a paper about death and poverty. My legs are so sweaty the laptop keeps sliding off but I refuse to move out of the sun, shedding the long winter one sunburnt stripe at a time. In LA all the colours are so bright it takes my eyes a while to adjust. Theres a filter of full saturation over everything, an intensity that feels almost false. Everything tastes incredible, Californian sun seeping into the produce. Even the cemeteries are in technicolour, Hollywood sign looming in the distance over manicured lawns and Grecian pillars. All the references collide; I’m in a Waugh novel, I’m in a Lynch film, I’m in Selling Sunset. I’m exhausted.
I expected the freeways, the C-list celebrities at (formerly) cancelled cafes, the aspiring screenwriters drinking $10 pistachio mylk lattes in cream-toned coffee shops. I didn’t expect to feel at home in this bizarre, sunny corner, perched on the edge of the world. I tripped and fell a decade into the future, where dinner costs a hundred dollars but at least you can purchase a tailor-made high from the Apple store of weed to take the edge off.
It’s almost midnight by the time I reach the J train in New York, empty carriages making me feel uneasy. I start to regret taking an edible on the flight. A man gets on at Fulton Street and I see him taking covert photos of a girl at the other end of the carriage. I want to warn her, but he stays in his seat as she gets off at my stop. We take different exits and it’s only as I’m heading down the stairs that I glance behind and realise he’s stepped off too and is leaving by the same route, following her as she walks into the dark. I don’t know what happened next.
That weekend I climb the hill in Green-Wood to look over the city and lie in the grass among the tombs, eyes open, staring at the blooming blossom above me. Last time I was here the trees were awash with orange; now it’s blossom season. A week later, at dinner after the runway show, someone tells me about an app that announces the blooms at their peak, triggering a sudden seasonal rush of influencers on the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.
This city doesn’t let me sleep; that is to say I sleep but I don’t rest, not really, my mind always whirring, body vibrating. Even when I try to unwind, something takes over me; I sign up for a two week trial at a hot yoga studio and end up going nearly every day, forcing myself out of bed in the dark to bully my body into submission under the guise of self-care. ‘I feel like a scrambled egg on the sidewalk’ I say in a voice note to a friend who is in Tasmania, or Sydney, or Paris, it’s hard to know anymore, just comforting sounds travelling across the world to each other.
Being in New York always feels like being in the centre of the world, close to the molten core. An existence you didn't even dream of because it felt so impossible, and yet here you are, eating tiny steak tartare at the bar at Lucien, cooking pasta in a Greenpoint kitchen, drinking at on a moonlit rooftop in Ridgewood, so embedded into a life here that’s it’s always confusing to leave. Complaining about inflation, complaining about Midtown, complaining about the 7. Rats so big they could be cats, rain that floods the sidewalk, screaming pipes that wake you in the middle of the night.
I’m afraid that I can’t feel it all, that too much is happening, that I can’t keep track of all the fragments. And yet the more that interesting or thrilling or unbelievable things happened to me, the closer I got to another world, the less I wanted to share them with anyone except those in the room. I wanted to keep my own counsel, did not want to reveal my life in anything other than snippets, lest it cause the fragile card tower to tumble. That feeling comes over me again, as if whatever vague thing was keeping me grounded - the notion of a semi-permenant home, a semi-permenant life - has come loose and now I’m spinning off in every direction, speeding up with no sign of stopping. I do not want to burn myself out but the sparks are already pinging dangerously off the walls, threatening to scorch the whole house down.
I go to upstate to read a photographer’s diary from 1866. The town is full of ugly flyovers and brutal grey buildings, reflected endlessly in pools of stagnant water. It feels desolate and desperate. A makeshift memorial stands outside the mini mart near the archives, tributes to a man murdered there three days earlier.
Near the station, the streets are decorated with banners showing proud local veterans. Family names repeat, generations handed over in the fight for some imaginary freedom. The whole country feels knitted together by collective collusion, an identity resting shakily on the illusion that this is the greatest place in the world. The most advanced, the most modern, the most coveted, the most powerful.
The train back to New York weaves along the Hudson, windows streaked with rain. We travel through small towns I recognise from the songs of American alt-rock bands I played on repeat as a teenager. Catching a train to Poughkeepsie sounded achingly cool to a fifteen year old girl in Oxford, lusting after troubled skater boys and throwing up alcopops into bushes on the weekend. Years later I’d briefly date a man who’d gone to college in one of these upstate towns and spent a lost year serving drinks in another, stories he told me as he mixed negronis in my little Paris kitchen as Sacre-Coeur glowed through the window. I’m transported, suddenly, to the smell of citrus, the sink against my back, the warmth of the silver chain around his neck. Memory is merciless. I half expect to see him appear on the platform, clean-cut and cruel.
Weeks later, naked in a cramped toilet cubicle in Gatwick Airport at 7am, spraying deodorant all over my body, I briefly question every decision I ever made that brought me here. I’ve been sleeping on sofas, planes, trains, in spare rooms, sublets, the odd hotel. I’ve got two phones, three wallets, three types of plug socket, overnight bags stowed away with essentials in four countries - toothbrush, face wash, pyjamas, jumper. Cheap water shoes in one, for late summer trips to the Calanques; a goose-feather down coat in another, for those icy East Coast winters. Five bank accounts, three active currencies, four in wait. Seven library cards. One passport, one permanent residency, no driving licence, no fixed abode. An existence facilitated by a constellation of friends, scattered across continents, stretched out in a safety net underneath me. Who would choose this life? Who wouldn’t?
I rearrange my face and put on clean clothes and go directly to a two day conference. That weekend I sleep on the sofa in the living room of my former apartment, in my old sheets, the room lit by a crooked table lamp I took from my grandmother’s house after she died. The year ahead unfurls in front of me, the possibility of weaving through the world with no end in sight. I wonder if standing still will ever feel like enough, now, or if I’ll spend the rest of my life with one eye on the door.
Optional soundtrack: Lord I Need You - Kanye West