I Conquer Britain (2 page)

Another thing normal families have is regular cars that can go over thirty without something falling off so it doesn’t take them half a day to get to the airport but we have a VW van that remembers Woodstock. You can live in it, but it’s worth your life to try and ride in it.

The next two reasons why I figured I should’ve swapped my life aeons before were Bachman and his dog Bruce Lee. They went with us to see me off.

Bachman was in one of his dark, surly, argumentative moods.

“Mark my words,” he said as he threw my duffel into the back of the van. “You’re going to wish you’d changed your mind. The English are all wusses. You’d have a lot more fun if you stayed here and went camping with me.”

“Yeah, sure.” I mean, what girl would want to go to London, one of the most exciting, cosmopolitan cities in the world, when she could be trekking through the Catskills with a fifty-pound pack on her back and a bear-alert out? I passed him the cardboard box. “In your dreams.”

The entire Scutari family was on their front porch across the street, waiting to give me the official Brooklyn send-off.

“Yo, Cherokee!” Mr Scutari winked. “You look like a refugee with that duffel and that box. Only you’re going the wrong way!”

Mrs Scutari and her daughter Barbee came down to the van. Mrs Scutari had a box of Oreos and Barbee had her baby.

Mrs Scutari shoved the cookies into my hands. “Just in case they don’t have nothing to eat.” Somebody told Mrs Scutari that the English eat cucumber sandwiches (which she says is the same as bread and water), and ever since she’s been convinced that the only reason the British colonized the world was to get a decent meal.

“It’s going to be great,” Barbee assured me. (And this from someone who probably can’t find Brooklyn on a map, let alone England!)

I said I was counting on it.

“I mean, at least they speak English, right?” said Barbee. “Instead of something else like in those other countries.”

Mr Scutari and his sons stayed on the porch. The Scutari men all dress exactly the same – T-shirts, jeans and baseball caps that say
Scutari & Sons
– and they all look pretty much the same too (like they’re the last people you’d want to see come through the door if you ran one of those all-you-can-eat buffets). Since it was more or less the cocktail hour, they were sipping from cans of beer.

“Cheerio, Cherokee!” George Scutari raised his can. “Have a good time.”

“Thanks.”

“That goes for me, too,” said Errol. “Don’t drink too much tea.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“Did I tell you what my uncle told me?” asked Mr Scutari.

“Yes.” Mr Scutari’s uncle was in England during World War Two. “Yes, you did.”

Mr Scutari told me again. “The only thing the English have is rain. No chocolate, no oranges, no nothin’. They didn’t even have toilets in the house when my uncle was there. You had to go outside. No heat neither. But it never stopped raining. That’s why they’ve all got arthritis and such bad teeth.”

“Don’t you listen to him.” Mrs Scutari patted my arm. “They’ve got the Queen.” Mrs Scutari has gone on record as saying that she doesn’t care what people say about the Queen being stuck up and everything because she wears that lovely tiara all the time. Mrs Scutari is a fan.

“I know.” I’d also heard Mrs Scutari’s opinion of the Queen before. “She’s had all the problems anybody has.”

“That’s right,” said Mrs Scutari. “Maybe more. What with that husband of hers and her boys and those grandsons, and poor Princess Diana, may she rest in peace.”

Jake honked the horn. “Let’s go, Cherokee! You won’t get to London before Charles is king if we don’t get a move on.”

“Don’t forget to take a picture of that big clock they’ve got for me!” called Mr Scutari as the van rumbled into the road. “I really like that clock.”

I sat up front to navigate. My mom can get lost just going around the block. Bruce Lee sat on my lap.

Bachman leaned over my shoulder, talking, but I wasn’t totally listening. I was thinking about England. Crumpets and cricket … bowler hats and double-decker buses … Mary Poppins and Sherlock Holmes … the Beatles dressed in mini skirts…

I was just sitting down to my first cup of real English tea in a real cup (as opposed to an old, chipped mug with a broken handle) when Bruce Lee brought me back to the moment by throwing up all over my lap.

“You see?” said Bachman. “He misses you already.”

What Jake missed was the road to JFK.

“Goddamn,” Jake muttered as La Guardia appeared over the horizon. “How did we wind up here?” She took her eyes off the road for a second to glare at
me
. “I thought you were supposed to be navigating.”

I said I didn’t think I could be held responsible for Bruce Lee’s digestive problems. (Lesson for Today:
Never
take your eye off the map, even if it’s covered in dog barf.)

By the time we finally found the John Fitzgerald Kennedy International Airport there was no time for long goodbyes.

They all walked me to the entrance to International Departures.

Gallup gave me a picture he painted of the whole family (including Bart, Pancho Villa and Houdini) on the front porch. He wanted to know if I was going to come back with an English accent.

“Toodle pip, old bean,” I said. “You never can tell.”

Tampa gave me a wooden box to keep my hair clips and earrings in that she had decorated with pictures from magazines, glitter and beads. Tampa wanted me to say hello to Harry Potter for her.

“Righty ho,” I said. “If I run into him, I’ll be sure to give him your warmest regards.”

“Just try not to bring disgrace on the family,” said Jake.

As if.

I asked Bachman if there was anything he wanted me to bring him back from across the rolling sea.

“Just you,” said Bachman.

“That’s like that Bob Dylan song!” shrieked Jake, and she started singing.

I took that as my cue to leave.

I looked back before I stepped inside.

Jake was still singing. I could see the Christmas tree earrings Tampa gave her for her birthday (they were really cheap) swinging from her ears. Tampa (all in yellow because it was a yellow day) was standing on one leg in the tree pose. Gallup, wearing his you-are-what-you-eat T-shirt with the photograph of a footless battery hen on the front, was sitting on the floor beside Bruce Lee. Bachman, looking like a squatter, threw me the peace sign.

They all waved (including Bruce Lee), and Tampa shouted “Bonny Voyage!” loud enough to be heard back on Herkimer Street.

I gave them a big smile and waved back.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to miss them.

I
wasn’t really what you’d call a seasoned flyer. I was used to travelling by land. Not that I was scared or anything like that (I mean, have you
seen
the statistics for road accidents?). I just figured air travel would be even less interesting than waiting for an Internet connection (which on a scale of 1-10 is about minus three million). You know, nothing to look at but clouds, nothing to do but watch some dumb movie or try to sleep all squashed up with your knees touching your chin. There wouldn’t even be any of the distractions you get when you travel by trailer (like a couple of llamas in the road or a woman and a wolf pup hitching a ride – the kind of thing that used to happen all the time when we travelled with my dad). So I was pretty much resigned to a long, boring flight while every cell in my body positively
vibrated
with excitement (which meant
hours
of really slow torture). But like Sky always says, everything has a price – and the airbus was the price I had to pay to get across the Atlantic before I had to be back in school. I figured it wasn’t really a bad deal.

I sat next to Mrs Beeker. Unlike me, Mrs Beeker was what you’d call a seriously unhappy flyer. She was terrified of being more than a foot off the ground. Mrs Beeker was from a place called Kent that she pretty much wished she’d never left. She told me at least a hundred times that this was only her second plane ride before I even got the peaches box into the overhead locker. She was the only person who actually watched the stewards when they demonstrated how to blow up your life vest and where the light and the whistle were and stuff like that.

“Aren’t you afraid you won’t know what to do if something happens?” asked Mrs Beeker.

I said I figured we’d be dead before we hit the water anyway so it didn’t matter, but she didn’t laugh like I thought she would.

Before we took off Mrs Beeker couldn’t stop talking about how scared she was, but once we were actually in the air she just sat there staring out her window like she wanted to be the first to know if the wing fell off.

I read the in-flight magazine (which wasn’t exactly going to cause William Shakespeare to roll around in his grave) until it was time to eat.

That’s when the first disaster happened. Jake forgot to book me a vegetarian meal. I swore up and down that we’d ordered it and confirmed it and everything, but it didn’t do me any good because they didn’t have any more. Joe, the head steward, was really nice about it. He ran around trying to get me extra portions of salad and cheese and crackers.

That didn’t do me any good either, though, because before he came back with them Mrs Beeker was sick all over me. She was really really sorry. I said it didn’t exactly matter because Bruce Lee already barfed on me in the van.

After Joe tried to clean us off with those little towel things I tried to get some sleep, but just as I was nodding off some guy fell down drunk in the aisle next to me. There was a big hullabaloo about that. By the time Joe got him back to his seat, Mrs Beeker had recovered enough from being sick to let terror take her over again. I spent the rest of the flight telling her all about my family and why I was going to London and how Bart ate my satchel and stuff like that to take her mind off things like falling into the Atlantic like a really big rock.

I was beginning to think that we took a wrong turn somewhere and were never going to get to London when the captain finally said, “We’re about to begin our descent into Heathrow, ladies and gentlemen. I’m afraid it’s a typical summer day in London – rain and more rain.”

“Oh my god, we’re there!” I couldn’t help it, I just screamed out loud. I had to lift myself up to look out the window next to Mrs Beeker. Rain! Just like Mr Scutari said. I couldn’t have been happier if the Queen had been down on the landing field waving her tiara at me.

Mrs Beeker disentangled a couple of my earrings from her hair. “Thank God, you mean.” She said that with real feeling.

I patted her arm. “Don’t you worry, Anne, we’re almost there.” And then I remembered something I’d learned from English shows I’d seen on PBS. “As soon as you get home and have a nice cup of tea you’ll forget all about this.” Have a nice cup of tea! I was practically a Limey already.

Mrs Beeker patted me back. “And you’ll want to get something to eat, love, you must be famished.”

I said it was OK because the food wasn’t really worth eating (even if you could keep it down), and anyway I’d had Mrs Scutari’s Oreos to keep me alive.

Mrs Beeker was still weak from being so scared and sick and everything so even though I wanted to get off the plane as fast as I could, I had to hang around to help her get her stuff from the overhead.

It was like hours before I finally got to the door.

Joe shook my hand. He said I was a real trooper and wished me a brilliant holiday.

I made a mental note to remember that the English say holiday for vacation and brilliant for great. I figured I was a natural at intercontinental travel.

The woman who checked my passport was called Araya Sparrow. She said Cherokee Salamanca was almost as unusual as her name, and I said I’d rather have hers because hers sounded kind of magical while mine sounded like something that had just crawled out from under a rock. Araya was really interested to find out that I’d never really been out of the States before unless you counted Mexico, which I didn’t.

“Now fancy that. You must be well excited.” She hoped I had a good time.

“I am well excited,” I told her. “And I’m going to have a brilliant holiday.” I hadn’t even left the airport and already I was speaking another language. I figured there had to be some English blood mixed in with the Irish martyrs.

I got to where our bags were being unloaded just in time to see my duffel moving away from where I was standing. There were so many people all huddled around the carousel that there was no way I could push through them to grab it. But I didn’t want to wait for it to come back around. I was in a hurry. So I dumped my box on the floor and sort of launched myself at the carousel. You couldn’t say I landed gracefully, but it was still a pretty good dive (even if I say so myself). I scrabbled over a couple of suitcases that were in my way and grabbed the strap of the duffel. Unfortunately, it didn’t really solve my problem since my bag was still going around on the belt – only now I was going around with it.

I was trying to figure out how to get off in a dignified way (you know, without actually knocking anyone over or my skirt riding up to my chin or anything like that) when someone grabbed me with one hand and my duffel with the other and hauled us to the ground.

This was Kev. Kev was a big guy with really short hair and he was wearing a Nike hoodie, trackie bottoms, a Las Vegas T-shirt and a gold hoop in one ear. For a second I almost thought I was back in New York, but then he spoke.

“That was some leap.” He was definitely not American, even if he wasn’t wearing a dress and didn’t sound anything like Mr Young when he puts on an English accent. “Do you do kung fu, or are you a gymnast?”

I told him I do yoga. “It keeps me flexible.”

Kev got me a “trolley” and threw my duffel aboard. Kev said I was going to love London. He said it had some great street life and all these really interesting markets and graveyards and stuff like that. “Trust me,” he said. “I can tell you’re going to take to it like a duck to water. It’s a cert. It’s a dead cool town.”