Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(52)

“Christ Almighty,” the kid continued. “Someone should take a picture.”

Writing about it the following morning, I’d recall how incredulous the boy had sounded. Yes, the guinea pigs were big—like furry slippers, sizes nine and ten and a half. They were hardly gargantuan, though. Had he possibly confused them with hamsters? The look on his face and his unexpected reaction—evoking Jesus as a weather-beaten adult would—were remarkable to me, and standing there in that dinky zoo, my knee throbbing, my little notebook firmly in hand, I knew I needed to keep the moment forever.





Mind the Gap




I said to my father yesterday afternoon, “Do you fancy my new jumper?”

When he answered, “Huh?” I was like, “‘Jumper?’ It means ‘sweater’ in England.”

“Right,” he said, adding that it was ninety-two degrees out and that if I didn’t take it off I was guaranteed to get heatstroke or at least a rash, and wasn’t that the last thing either of us needed at a time like this?

“Ninety-two degrees or not, I still think it’s the most brilliant jumper I’ve ever seen,” I told him.

My father made some joke about giving it an IQ test, but honestly, by that point, I’d stopped listening. We were in the driveway at the time. He was watering his dried-out hydrangeas, and I was sitting on the bonnet of the car, just waiting for him to call it the hood or some such thing. He’s so stupid, my father is. My mum wasn’t much brighter, but now that she’s dead I’m just trying to concentrate on the good things, like how she paid for me to go to England with my school’s history club. I’m not a member—it’s actually one of my worst subjects—but the adviser, Mrs. Carkeek, let me come anyway because she needed a minimum of twelve students and only had eleven after Kimberly Shank got a B in German and tried to kill herself. It was my first time out of the country, and it really opened my eyes to what stupid cunts the people are here in the United States.

“How can I be a cunt when I’m a guy?” Braydon Hoyt asked when I saw him at the funeral on Tuesday. He didn’t know that the word means “idiot,” so the more times he asked, the more of a cunt he became. (And to think I once dated him!!!) The problem with Braydon, and with all American blokes, really, is that they’re so literal. And it’s not just me who thinks that way. Fiona, who’s my best mate in England, said that except for me she won’t go anywhere near an American because they don’t know what irony is. She and I met outside the Globe. Mrs. Carkeek had taken the group to see The Temptress, I think it was, but the play was so bloody boring I snuck out at intermission. In front of the theater is a walkway that faces the river, and that’s where I met Fiona. “Fag?” she asked.

That’s how I got practically addicted to Mayfairs, which, unfortunately, you can’t get in the States. I ask everywhere, and people look at me like I’m crazy. “Blue box? Big picture of a diseased lung on it?” You can’t find Walkers Prawn Cocktail crisps here either, which is another thing Fiona turned me on to. She and I talked for almost ten minutes before she realized I wasn’t English. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re a Yank? Really? You?”

At first she was thrown by the way I talk. I don’t notice it myself, but according to Dad and everyone at the funeral, I completely picked up an English accent during the week I spent there. “It’s not just that though,” Fiona said. “It’s your Union Jack jumper, your Doc Martens, your whole way of being.”

By this she meant my attitude—the way I can look at something and automatically see that it’s complete bollocks. Fiona has that same ability, and we agreed that it’s a double-edged sword. “I mean, sometimes, McKenzie, don’t you look at all these stupid gits and just wish you could be that easily satisfied?”

It was crazy how much the two of us had in common. Both of us love London, for a start. She wasn’t born there but moved from Coventry when she was fifteen to live with her granny in Barking. I think “granny” is absolutely the most brilliant thing ever to call your grandmother, but unfortunately it doesn’t work in the United States. My mum’s mother just wants me to call her T.J. “I’m sixty-two years old, for God’s sake,” she said on Tuesday when I saw her at the funeral. “I’m young and I’m active, and if you ever call me that again, I’ll wash your mouth out with soap.” I’ve never seen her so mad. “And don’t tell me that in England the soap is called ‘chuff’ or something, or I’ll wash it out twice.”

My other grandmother—the one on my dad’s side—had a stroke last winter, so I honestly don’t know what she said when I called her granny, but she didn’t look too happy about it. She’s out of her wheelchair finally, but if it were up to me, I’d put her back in it. My God, was she slow—took her twenty minutes to get from our sofa to the loo. That means “bathroom” in England. Our ground-floor loo has an old person’s bar next to the toilet. Dad put it in at Easter when Mum got really bad, and I told him I’m not going back in there until he takes it out again.

“Why?” he asked.

“It makes me feel like I’m in hospital,” I told him.

“In a hospital, you mean,” he said.