First Born(6)

‘US citizens queue over there,’ says a woman. ‘If you’ve been to the United States before on your ESTA, then queue over there.’

Then a man shouts, ‘First time visiting the United States, you need to be over here.’ He points to a long queue and I join it. I am gripping my pristine passport so hard it’s starting to bend, and my palms are sweating.

When I reach the front of the line I say, ‘Hello.’

The man says, ‘Passport, ma’am.’

I hand it over.

He looks at me, taking in my features, my unwashed brown hair and my narrow face and my green eyes. ‘Business or pleasure?’

My twin is dead. No one seems to know what happened to her.

‘Pleasure.’

Far from pleasure. The furthest thing from it.

‘Place your thumb here.’

I do as he says.

‘Stick it in further, follow the diagram.’

I do it.

‘Fingers.’

I do it.

‘Other thumb.’

I do it.

‘Fingers.’

He looks at me and at my passport one last time then he stamps it and hands it back.

‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Have a nice day.’





Chapter 4


I run to the restroom and break down. Tears and dry-heaving. Have a nice day. I doubt I’ll ever have another nice day in my lifetime. A kind woman from the next stall asks in a thick Spanish accent if I’m OK. I rub my eyes. Afterwards I douse my hands and arms and face in alcohol sanitiser gel.

The bags aren’t on the carousel yet so I choose a position, my back to a wall, to wait for my suitcase to show up. People stare at my red eyes. I still can’t comprehend that she’s gone. Permanently gone. Not around for me to call on a Sunday, or play Monopoly with at our parents’ house outside Nottingham each New Year’s Day. I’ll never discuss Dolly Parton songs or Shirley MacLaine movies with her again, nor share the small everyday irrelevancies of life.

In a way, in many ways, this city came between us.

I compose myself and take a deep breath, and then I walk calmly through the ‘Nothing to Declare’ channel.

When I pass through I’m greeted by emotional strangers with their arms held out wide. One man’s in front of me holding a red balloon and a rose. He’s almost crying. There’s a family of six waiting for an elderly relative, all of them sporting home-made name placards.

I break into a run.

People stare.

I run outside and continue jogging towards the cab rank, and my bag twists on the kerb, and my wrist turns the wrong way. I correct my grip and a black Suburban SUV drives past so close the wing mirror grazes my shoulder. ‘Uber?’ he shouts. I retreat and join the queue for an official yellow cab.

No New York skyline out here. No Brooklyn Bridge. No sign of the Empire State Building.

Drizzle and a cool, gentle breeze.

A friendly guy with a scar on his cheek beckons me over to his taxi and places my suitcase in his trunk. I opt to keep my hand baggage with me in the back seat.

‘Could you take me to the corner of West 44th Street and the Avenue of the Americas, please?’

‘44th and Sixth, yeah, no problem.’

‘No, the Avenue of the Americas, please,’ I repeat firmly.

He ignores me and starts talking to someone on his phone through an earpiece and mic. I think he’s Senegalese because there’s a miniature Senegal flag hanging from his rear-view mirror, along with a Black Sabbath album cover and a Greenpeace placard. He’s laughing and chuckling on the phone as he drives out of JFK. I’d rather he focused on the traffic but I don’t say anything.

This is nothing like I expected it to be. I check my phone and the GPS map tells me I’m in Queens. Low-built houses with small yards and barking dogs. Homes stuffed into small lots; American equivalents of the family house where my sister and I grew up. I drive past one place with a tarp secured over its porch roof.

The driver cackles in the front seat and I study the map some more. We are heading in the right direction. I am comforted by my GPS. I reference it at every turn, every intersection.

‘Could we take a bridge to Manhattan Island instead of an underground tunnel, please?’

He checks me in his rear-view mirror. ‘What is it, lady?’

‘Bridge, please. I don’t like tunnels.’

‘Sure, no problem. Queensboro. First time in New York, yeah?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘First time. Thank you.’

He returns to his call and I see the beginnings of a skyline. It’s part-eclipsed by industrial terminals and warehouses but I can see the tips of skyscrapers and the reflection of the East River. My heart is beating so hard in my chest and I cannot believe I am here in New York City on the saddest week of my life.

We cross over to Roosevelt Island and Manhattan reveals itself. My goodness. It looks exactly like a movie. Low sun streaming through grids of buildings; headlights shining like fallen stars. The city is pulsing. London has a rhythm all of its own, but this place is something else.

My twin sister lies somewhere in all this. Cold. Lifeless, in a stainless steel drawer or on a slab. She travelled to this city, this epicentre, and now she is dead. It’s perverse, but I can’t shake from my head the notion that I am somehow replacing her. I’m not, of course, not in any sense, but our base DNA is one hundred per cent identical. It’s almost as if this city lost that specific DNA and now that loss has been corrected. The deoxyribonucleic acid, each miraculous double helix, has been replaced by a clone. A perfect spare. On a cosmic level there is something beautiful and monstrous about that. It’s as if I shouldn’t be here at all.