Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(53)

Six days earlier I’d had the same conversation, but in the other direction.

“My mother’s been in the hospital for almost three weeks now,” I’d said to Fiona.

And she said, “‘In hospital.’ We leave out the ‘the’ here.” She offered me another Mayfair. “So what’s she in for?”

“Cancer of ovaries,” I told her.





The Globe was on a Thursday. On Friday we took a day trip to Oxford, which the history club wankers practically wet themselves over, and just as we returned to London, at half six English time but twelve thirty in Missouri, my mother died. We were scheduled to fly home on Saturday, so rather than ruin the rest of my trip, my dad didn’t tell me until we saw each other at the airport. I actually can’t stand anyone in the history club so didn’t really mind that they saw my stupid father weeping like a girl at the baggage claim. I said to him later in the car, “Do you have to be so American about this? I mean, really. It’s not like you didn’t know it was coming.”

Something Fiona had noticed and I completely agree with is that people in the States are entirely too sentimental. They really will cry at the drop of a hat, partly because they’re babies and partly because they’re too attached to things. Not me, though. “Keep calm and carry on,” that’s my motto. I bought a mug that says so, and it’s absolutely the only thing I’ll drink my tea out of. I’m mad for tea.

Due to the jet lag, I was knackered out of my mind for the funeral. Not that it mattered, really. Like I wrote to Fiona, it was absolute rubbish. There I was, dying for a Mayfair, while all these people who hardly even knew my mother came up to say how much they were going to miss her. If I had a dime for every time I heard “Look how big you’ve gotten!” I’d have enough for a first-class ticket back to London and a whole year’s rent on a flat. Two years’ rent if I shared it with a flatmate.

After the funeral, scores of perfectly dreadful people came by the house. Luckily my grandmothers were there to help. Well, one was a help, the other just sat there like a toad and blinked. I only had a few chances to slip away, and when I did I went to my room and checked to see if I’d gotten any e-mails. I’ve written Fiona eighteen times since returning home but haven’t heard anything back quite yet, probably because she’s uncomfortable. English people are completely different than we are, especially about money. While Americans are all “Look what I’ve got!” the Brits are a lot more British about it, a lot more stoical and private. It wasn’t easy for Fiona to ask me for that loan. The whole subject was a complete embarrassment for her, I could tell. Especially given that she was so much older than me, in her thirties at least, not that that makes any difference. Due to my maturity, I have all kinds of older friends, or could if I wanted to. Fiona walked me to three different ATMs in order to get the money—so while the history club was at the Globe, being tourists, I was seeing the real London and falling desperately in love with it.

I was hoping that after graduation two years from now I could go to college there, but it turns out I’m already in college. Brits call high school “college,” and what we call college they call “uni.” Fiona says it’s strictly for gits and arseholes, but at least it would be a foot in the door. My father won’t like the idea one bit, but he’d better start getting used to it. He’s too preoccupied to realize it now, but in a lot of ways, I’m already gone.





A Cold Case




There are plenty of things I take for granted, but not being burglarized was never one of them. Whether I was in a good neighborhood or a crummy one, in a house or apartment or hotel room, every time I walked in and found my dresser drawers not emptied onto the floor, I would offer a silent, nondenominational prayer of thanks. I honestly believed that my gratitude would keep me safe, so imagine my surprise in late November 2011, when someone broke into a place I was renting with Hugh and my sister Gretchen and stole my computer bag.

I thought of my laptop—a year’s worth of work, gone!—but my real concern was my passport, which had been tucked into an interior pocket alongside my checkbook. Its loss was colossal because it was my only form of ID, and also because my Indefinite Leave to Remain sticker was in it.

This is the British equivalent of a green card, and getting it had not been easy. Before Indefinite Leave I’d had visas, and those had taken some effort as well. The rules have changed since I first applied, but in 2002 it was possible to qualify as a writer. All I had to do was fill out a great many forms and prove that I had published a book. Hugh, by extension, was granted a visa as the boyfriend of a writer. This meant that when crossing into England, I would be asked by the border agents if I wrote mysteries, and Hugh would be asked if his boyfriend wrote mysteries. No other genre was ever considered.

We had to renew our visas every few years. This involved going to the dismal town of Croydon and spending a day in what was always the longest and most desperate line I had ever imagined. It was also the most diverse. I thought I was good at identifying languages, but it turns out I know next to nothing. Surely they’re making that up, I’d think, listening in on the couple ahead of me. The woman, most often, would be dressed like the grim reaper. Her husband would wear a sweatshirt with a picture of a boat or a horse on it, and the two would be speaking something so unmelodious and dire-sounding I could not imagine it having the words for “birthday cake.” If Hugh and I were denied extensions of our visas, we would have returned to Paris or New York, while they’d have gone back to, what? Beheadings? Clitoridectomies? What they had at stake was life-and-death. What we had at stake was Yorkshire pudding.