Every other storefront is a sandwich shop without a low-carb advertisement in sight. Are Londoners really willing to embrace the doughy delights of an Atkins-free world? It’s a thrilling prospect for a girl raised in a culture plagued by cellulite bogeymen. The customers are directing the deli man with the un-Nerving efficiency of Starbucks regulars babbling coffee instructions.
‘Next.’
‘Erm.’ That stuff in the metal bowl is unrecognizable beneath all the mayonnaise.
‘Next!’
‘Tunafish sandwich, please.’ Is that corn mixed in there?
‘Bap?’
‘Sorry?’
He’s pointing to a roll.
‘Okay.’
‘Butta?’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Butta!’
But a what? ‘Oh, no thanks, no butter.’ Who puts butter on a sandwich?
‘Salad cream?’
Now what? ‘Uh, no.’
Carefully he arranges a tablespoon of dry tuna on the roll.
‘Um, can I have mayonnaise?’
‘Tsch. I did ask.’ A pea-sized blob lands judgementally on the flaky filling. ‘Salad?’
I don’t see any salads. ‘No, no salad.’
He closes the sandwich and starts wrapping it.
‘Uh, can I please have some tomatoes?’
The lady next to me is staring at me like tomato is a dirty word.
‘You didn’t want salad.’
‘That’s right, no salad. I want tomatoes.’ There she goes again, like I’ve said hairy penis.
‘Tamaydas?’ he mimics. The lady sniggers.
‘Yes, please.’ I can feel my face going red. Red as tamaydas. Congratulations, Hannah. You’re an expat.
What am I doing? I’m living in a room too small to open the closet without standing on the bed, in a city I’ve never set foot in before, whose language I obviously don’t speak, 3,000 miles from everyone I know.
ex•pat•ri•ate
1: (noun) A person living in a foreign land.
2: (verb) To withdraw oneself from residence in or allegiance
to one’s native country.
That makes me a noun with slight verb tendencies.
Thinking about it now (admittedly a little late), I probably got carried away with the idea of starting afresh. Perhaps Stacy was right; a new haircut would have done the trick. But sometimes we’re swept up in a seemingly unstoppable tide of events. Or we get drunk and do something stupid. The verdict could go either way in my case, given that I’ve just landed upon England’s gentle shores without the faintest idea how I’m actually supposed to build myself a new life. I’m not an expat in the traditional sense. I haven’t just finished school, with a network of acquaintances to leverage for a job. This was no overseas posting, with the usual electronics allowance to buy my flat-screen TV and straightening irons whose voltage won’t set my hair on fire. I don’t have British cousins or a long-time family friend in the city. I arrived at Heathrow with a freshly minted passport, 5,000 dollars and a vague idea that an adventure awaited me in London.
You know how, in any group of friends, there’s always one who organizes the nights out, the holidays and surprise parties? That’s not me. I’m the one most likely to arrive at the wrong theatre/restaurant/airport and miss the whole thing. So here I am, jet-lagged, with no clear plan beyond dinner.
‘Stace? It’s me.’
‘DO YOU LOVE IT?!’ Stacy’s been my best friend since we were seven. Being at least 50 per cent responsible for my being here, there’s hope in her question.
‘I haven’t even unpacked yet.’
‘How’s the hotel?’
Somewhat disingenuously, it declared itself ‘charming’ on its website. Translation: last habitable during Queen Victoria’s reign. Its rooms are perfumed with Eau de Oodles of Noodles1 and there are dust bunnies2 in the corners from the Thatcher era. Hookers trading sex tips in the hallways wouldn’t be out of place. Evidently this is what a hundred bucks a night buys you in London.
1. Oodles of Noodles = Pot Noodles or any of the ramen-based justadd-water soups favoured by students after a night of binge drinking.
2. Balls of unidentified fluff, often found under beds or anywhere your mother won’t notice you haven’t cleaned.
‘I hate the owner.’ Not just because she looks like a slightly less feminine Mrs Doubtfire and has sofas that need fleabombing.
‘How come?’
‘She asked me if my husband was joining me. When I said I don’t have one, she made that face. You know the one.’ Like I’d just confessed to an STD.
‘Brutal. What’d you say?’
‘Nothing. You know me.’ My retorts are subject to long delays.
‘You’ll come up with something eventually. Have you seen any royals yet?’
‘Between Terminal Five and the hotel?’
‘Right. I guess it’s still early. You could go see them now.’
‘Stace, you can’t just drop in on them, you know.’
‘Well then, what do you plan to do?’ She sounds disappointed by my unwillingness to stalk the Queen.
‘English stuff, obviously.’
‘So?’
I made a list on the flight. ‘So, have a pint at the pub, go for tea, try fish and chips, ride the big red buses, uh . . .’ I guess it’s more of a doodle.
‘Call me when you get back. I want all the details.’
‘Will do.’
‘And Han, I just know this is going to be great.’
‘Sure.’ Stacy’s confidence is legendary, if sometimes rather premature.
She wasn’t like that when we were little. She was painfully cautious, hanging back till she worked out whether a situation was likely to hurt her or not. Ever the compliant friend, I was her canary in the coalmine. Then fate blindsided her where I couldn’t help. Her dad skipped town, leaving them a note propped on the kitchen table. That was the last anyone saw of her vulnerability. Eventually she believed her own bravado and the confidence became a natural part of her. Being the world’s
cheerleader must get exhausting but I’m constantly grateful to have her on my team. And I think she’s happy, as long as she doesn’t think too much or dig too deep. As her best friend, it’s my job to keep those shovels out of reach. It’s remarkably easy ‒ I’m not exactly the poster child for careful reflection. I did, after all, move 3,000 miles out of spite (well, spite and a realization)
. . .
Sometimes small events have long-lasting consequences. A simple conversation about my sister’s weekend plans set the wheels in motion for me. She told me she was running errands, maybe renting a DVD. She’d done the same thing every weekend for at least two years. This was a woman who used to get arrested more often than she got her roots done. She seemed constantly to be chained to something in protest. What had happened to my cool, slightly felonious sister, the one who was interesting?
‘I don’t need to be interesting,’ she said. ‘I’m past all that.’ Chillingly, those were Mom’s words. How did that happen? We’d made a pact to be vigilant against the creep of Momness, not to let it insinuate its way into our personalities. And yet Deb believed that her life didn’t need to be interesting. And yet, who was I to cast stones? I hadn’t met any new friends, or tried anything new (or anyone), or even gone to New York in months. They call it a come-to-Jesus moment when people
face their own mortality and realize that their lives haven’t turned out as they expected. I’m lucky I didn’t have the same epiphany from a hospital bed. In that moment it dawned on me: my life is not a dress rehearsal. At twenty-six I was cruising into a lifelong holding pattern. Is it inevitable? Do we march methodically towards middle age, shedding our sense of adventure, our desire to spread our wings as we go?
It was then that I realized something even worse, something I dread more than running into my ex and his model girlfriend at the supermarket while wearing pyjamas after a three-day ice-cream binge. I was becoming my mother. I once had exciting plans for my life. Now I didn’t even have exciting plans for my weekend. Knowing me, I’d have cultivated this vague sense of doomed future indefinitely, dying a bitter old woman in Stacy’s basement, if fate hadn’t intervened one morning a few
weeks later. But that’s another story.
Meanwhile, if I’m truly in the grip of destiny, I only need to surrender to the forces at work. Camberwell Green. How idyllic. When I find a nice-looking pub, I’m going to get off the bus and drink my first English pint. This is so exciting! And my mother would wholeheartedly disapprove, which naturally adds to my pleasure. She hates when I ride the bus because, like most steadfastly suburban parents, she suffers from an upwardly mobile contempt for anything that could stigmatize us as the wrong kind of person. Incidentally, that list also includes leaving the house with a dirty face or unchanged underpants, and sharing woolly hats with classmates (lest they harbour head lice, aka social suicide). It’s no wonder America has more psychologists than dentists.