Chapter 28
He arrived in New York City in the middle of the night on a bus from John F. Kennedy airport. He had been dumped in Union Square – he knew this because the driver had taken pity on him and pointed at something, before throwing his kitbag out after him. ‘You can stay there, kiddo,’ he’d said.
Tom followed the direction of the driver’s finger through the bus door to a blackened building showing fairly recent evidence of having been ablaze.
Several of its windows were broken; the sign above the door was listing, rusting and sad.
Tom squinted to try to make out its name. But he couldn’t read it.
As the bus drove away Tom felt in his pockets and realized he’d left his glasses behind.
He ran after it, managing to remain in the cloud of its fumes for almost a block, but it pulled away, heading out west across another bridge.
Tom stayed in the middle of the road, yelling and waving his arms but it was no good.
A yellow taxi driver wound down his window and swore at him to move the hell out of the way.
Slowly, Tom trudged back to Union Square, blinking in the morning light.
This, he told himself, was not an auspicious start.
After Jenny died, his headaches had got worse and worse, until he took the job working on the Westway and found that, in the evenings when he got back to Henry’s, sometimes his head hurt so terribly that he couldn’t see, like the bad old days.
Eventually, realizing Celia was probably right, he went to an optician and was fitted with glasses, and found it a revelation.
His right eye was doing all the work and shut down when it was too tired: he’d thought perhaps the blindness was coming back, that darkness was overtaking him again, like before.
The first time he tried on the black framed spectacles in the optician’s he had laughed with joy, recognizing the sensation of being happy in one moment like an old, forgotten flavour on the tongue.
‘What’s so funny, sir?’ the optician had asked. ‘Don’t they fit?’
‘They’re perfect. Thank you so much. I like the frames too.’
‘Hmm,’ the optician, an older man, had said rather acidly, for Tom had rejected the sensible tortoiseshell or wire frames he’d laid out, plumping for thick black ones. ‘You realize you look like some young Turk, don’t you?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Oh, some pop star, or politician, or artist. One of them. Someone in the news.’
Tom had laughed all the way home. And, when the optician’s fluffy-haired blonde receptionist telephoned to say he was owed five bob and she’d give it back to him if he met her for a drink after work that evening, he’d found himself staring in the mirror.
Were they … magic glasses? And then the following day, when he’d had a drink with Antoine, and Antoine had angrily told him he looked like Roger Vadim, Tom realized he was enormously fond of the glasses.
He had the glasses, and a taut, muscular frame from his building work on the Westway, and a kitbag, an army surplus jacket he’d bought the day before he flew; and when Tom caught sight of himself in the window at Heathrow Airport before he went to check in he’d stared at his reflection, in astonishment, that this was who he was, this urbane, tall, lean …
man. He hadn’t recognized himself. And the first thing he’d done in NYC was to lose them.
Tom thought of that moment again, looking around wildly to get his bearings, as the bus disappeared into the horizon.
I am here, he told himself. I am in New York. Don’t lose heart.
He slung his kitbag over his shoulder again, and walked. He did not know where he was going, only what Alice’s voice had told him: head for St Marks, Tom. St Mark’s.
After thirty minutes or so – during which time he talked to a pillar, punched someone in the stomach with his bag, stepped off a kerb, turning his ankle over in agony, and walked in a circle, ending up one block over from Union Square – Tom realized just how much he’d come to rely on the glasses and how unused he was to strange cities, new things.
An all-night diner with glittery lettering was emitting an aroma of fried bacon so delicious he swerved towards it.
Tom went in, and was seated in a red leather booth.
He ordered some eggs over-easy, bacon and a cup of coffee, cradling the warm cup between his hands and gazing out of the window, marvelling at the feel of the city, coming alive, feeling like a citizen already.
The coffee was warm. It did not taste like coffee he’d ever drunk before. It was delicious.
Am I from here? he found himself asking, as he left the diner. Did my mother walk on this street? Did she go into this park? This subway station?
Everything was different, but it was familiar too, like being in a film.
A cop in a peaked cap walking in a straight line, baton over his shoulder, stomach spilling over his dark trousers.
Two girls, about his age, barefoot, tangled hair, strings of beads, identically individual, aimlessly drifting towards him and across Union Square, singing light, fairy-sounding songs in broken little voices.
A newspaper vendor, holding out the New York Times , cap pitched low across his forehead.
Tom stopped to look. The print was different, close together and elegant.
US JETS BOMB RAIL YARDS AND SUPPLIES POLITICAL ACTIVISM, A NEW HIPPIE ‘ THING ’ CROWDS CHEER IN HARLEM FOR RETURN OF EXILED POWELL
A discarded copy lay on the ground, trampled and dirty. The pages fluttered up and down. Words he didn’t know – Harlem, Rockefeller, President Thieu.
As he reached Union Square again someone was playing the Byrds’ ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ out of a window at full volume. Tom stood, swaying with tiredness, letting the old words rush over him:
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
He turned. The sun was coming up, slotting its rays through the east–west grid of streets, filling them will blazing light. London was not like this. Nowhere was like this. Exhilaration surged through him.
The street numbers got lower – 13th, then 11th.
He walked down Broadway, past the Strand Book Store, past some young people gathered outside shouting at each other about Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon, past a curled-up figure – man or woman, he wasn’t sure – sobbing in a corner.
‘Can I help you?’ Tom said, crouching down next to them, but they rapidly unfurled one hand and batted him away, slapping away his concern.
‘Get off! He’ll see! The Evil Eye will see! Leave me alone, you hear!’
Then he was at St Mark’s Place, only it wasn’t really a place, it was a long street, like all the other streets.
Tom put his kitbag down by an ornate subway entrance and looked around.
A man was sitting on some steps belonging to a red-brick building.
Like a lot of buildings he’d noticed, it had iron stairs zigzagging across the front, all the way up to the top floor.
‘Morning,’ said Tom. ‘Can you tell me if someone called Alice Jansen lives here?’
The man shrugged. ‘What’s she look like? Nobody around here has the same name they had at home, son.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tom. ‘I think she’s my age. She’s from Orchard, New York. She came here five months ago. After Halloween.’
‘Listen,’ said the man, rubbing the frazzled hair on top of his head with his hand. ‘You might as well look for a needle in a haystack, friend. Every last person here is a kid who’s run away.’
‘Is there somewhere they stay? Somewhere they gather?’
The man offered Tom his joint. Tom took a long toke. His companion nodded, as though he’d passed some test. He jerked his head. ‘Go to Washington Square Park. That’s a scene on the weekends, it’s called a “Be-In”. Alice and Merlin are usually there. Peace and love to you.’
Tom felt as though he had been in New York for four weeks, not four hours. The sun had risen, and a large clock in the window display of a department store told him it was 10 a.m.
He smelled the incense and the pot about a block away.
As he approached he saw flowers strewn on the pavement, and two more young people passed out on some steps, and a girl – naked apart from a shawl, some flowers drawn around her collarbone and a dirty pair of ballerina flats – walking up to people, kissing them.
She pressed herself against Tom, her nipples pushing on his chest. She smelled stale, of sweat and urine.
Her dull brown hair had balls of tangles; a button was lost in one of the knots.
Her smile was huge. ‘Hey, brother,’ she said.
‘Hey.’ She kissed him on the lips, smoothed back his hair.
‘You’re welcome here, brother. You’re welcome. ’
Someone offered him a drag on a joint; he took it, and another; someone else passed him some liquor in a paper bag; he drank it.
A girl in a yellow pinafore handed him an antiwar leaflet – he promised earnestly to read it.
One man was cutting another man’s hair off, the discarded locks raining down on the ground, catching the morning sun.
Several people were playing the guitar, different tunes, but it all seemed to meld together.
He thought it did anyway. He wasn’t sure.
He slept for a while on a bench, right there in the middle of everyone, and then joined some people singing songs in a circle – a few he recognized, like Bob Dylan, most he didn’t.
One girl sang her own songs, which people listened to solemnly, nodding along, until a guy kept trying to kiss her and she lost her sense of humour and stood up and walked away.
It was hot. Tom wasn’t sure how long he’d been there.
The early scene – the bus, the diner, the silent dark streets – seemed like something from a film from another era.
This was life. This was now. Though his memory was hazy: why was he here?
In the blossom-flecked square, as the incessant sound of the paddle on the drum pounded into his head, he screwed up his eyes to remember.
Alice Jansen. He had to find her. She knew his mother.
And then, exhausted, he fell asleep again.