There’s me again, egregious solipsist, tripping through a glassy birth canal. Shoes, new. Bag, new. ‘Winter Wiggle’ dress also new. And winter sun piercing off the wings of a Boeing 747, the plane I’d just got off: TWA flight 00 to St. Louis, Missouri.
I stink of cigarettes (Yes! We were allowed to put our habit before the risk of mid-flight inferno) and the stink – I thought to myself – mixed quite nicely with the warm, sensual sillage of Chanel No.5. That was the perfume I chose to waft me into my new life; the odor I picked for myself in London because its smoky vanilla scent, along with my shoes and my bag and my cigarettes, seemed to make the leaving possible.
All those things hid quite well the fact that what I had in that bag was a heart in pieces. And that’s why I was there – to see if anyone in that America country knew how to stitch it back together.
I was aiming, first and foremost, for the man I had married six months before. He could do it, I thought. He could sew me up. It was my husband’s job to save me now.
So there I go, swinging my heart on two straps, ready to declare it; to tip it into a kidney dish at the Customs desk. The heart, heavy as a Robbie Burns haggis, thumps damp against my bag’s leathery insides. In my other hand is an envelope. And inside it – on a slip of paper no bigger than a Disney ticket – proof that I currently do not have AIDS, or cold sores. Thank heavens; they wouldn’t have had me otherwise. No, there were no deficiencies allowed where I was heading.
The envelope also contained proof from the Royal Bank of Scotland that I had £1.56 in my savings account; and a photo of my lungs. I hadn’t looked too closely at that. To actually see the smoke coiling inside me would have done my head in. Suffice it to say, they appeared to be the lungs of a ghost – vague, indistinct – which figured because (and I wouldn’t be telling them this), I could barely breathe.
The photo had been taken some months prior when, pre-dawn, me and a thousand others mooed across the cattle grid of a US Embassy-appointed ‘doctor’s office’ behind Marble Arch. We were grateful to be there. We didn’t mind standing cold and naked behind a flimsy, peekaboo scrim. And we paid as little attention as we could to the rough pokings and proddings, to the mean stingings of needles as they poinked for veins in our shivering bodies. And we certainly didn’t linger either on how different this ‘check-up’ felt from the NHS ones we were used to, when the inalienable creed to, “Do no harm” still held a bit of weight. But, heck, we weren’t needing bedside manner. We were heading for America! This hack job was a small price to pay for Freedom.
When I left that tauromachy, the sun was coming up; the sky over Marble Arch was x-ray-blue. I bought a coffee somewhere, and probably a doughnut, and I sat feeling sorry for all the little London people starting out their days, going about their dull, futureless lives. In a few months' time, once I had been judged to be a perfect physical specimen, I’d be off like a rocket to the Heartland. It made perfect sense for me to go to a place called that…
AB - 31.10.23
B! You take us there. I can hear you reading it out loud. Keep going, keep going...xo