Three large windows looked out over a shabby but bucolic scene of green meadows, large, leafy trees and peeling Greek Revival houses. The house smelled of damp and something else, almost like nutmeg – sweet but faintly rotten. Lara tried to open one of the windows to let fresh air into the dusty fug, but, probably during the cold winter months, some idiot had applied thick paint around the sashes, gluing them tightly shut.
She moved on straight through an arch to the large, linoleum-floored kitchen.
What she noticed first was the blue vase holding the two dozen red roses. Their scent leached into the hot room. A nice touch, Lara thought.
Tea was what she craved, but she couldn’t see a pot or kettle, nor anything in the cupboards beyond some evidence of insect activity. The giant, genuinely retro fridge that stood humming and whirring in the corner was empty too, except for a light furring of mould. She tried to get the six-ringed enamel stove to work, but there didn’t appear to be any gas connected to it.
At the far end of the kitchen, at the very back of the house, a glassed-in porch baked in the morning sun. Again, there seemed no way of getting any air in. Dead flies littered the sealed window frames and the once-white woodwork was covered with a greasy layer of dust. As she gazed at the empty, potholed car park at the back of the building, Lara tried to breathe, but her lungs felt furred up.
Despite the heat of the room, a coldness began to percolate into her bones. What had she done, insisting they all tagged along behind Marcus to come
here
? Dragging her three children halfway around the world to
this
? She tried to take herself back to the excitement they had all felt when Marcus had got James’s email begging him to do the job. It had been Lara, in fact, who had driven forward James’s suggestion that the whole family could accompany him. She had found the money, located and booked the cheapest flights, let out their own house for the summer, sorted out the car hire. She had also worked insane hours at her local government graphic design job, combining her inflated time-off-in-lieu allowance with her entire annual leave so she could come away for six weeks and still be paid. This had been a necessary step, since, aside from the accommodation, the theatre was only paying Marcus one hundred dollars and five diner lunches a week.
She returned to the kitchen and opened the back door, letting in air washed by the mist hanging over the grass beyond the car park. Again she caught that musky rubber-glove scent from the night before, though the damp morning diluted it. Pushing her way through the fly-screen door, she crossed a small deck and sat down, her bare legs dangling over the edge, her ankles brushing the dewy grass beneath. A light breeze filtered over her face, and she breathed in. Her eye was drawn to a shed that stood less than twenty feet from where she sat. Dangling from the eaves on the corner closest to her was a long, transparent tube full of a clear liquid, and buzzing around it were what looked like a couple of large moths. Lara hated moths, but her curiosity got the better of her and, jumping down off the deck, she padded over the hot tarmac to take a closer look.
‘Little birds,’ she said with delight. ‘Little tiny birds.’
Two hummingbirds fluttered around what she saw now was a feeder full of something delicious to them. Their wings an iridescent blur, their long beaks held still among all the motion, they sipped at the liquid. Lara stood and watched, enchanted by their exoticism.
And
that
was why she had brought everyone here. To see the new and, furthermore, to entertain the opportunity for change. Marcus, she hoped, was going to have his long-awaited moment of success – the first time since drama school he had played an eponymous lead. In doing so, she hoped he would rediscover a part of himself that he seemed to have discarded too many years ago. The part, she feared, she had once loved.
She hoped it would work out for him. At first sight, the theatre didn’t seem to be quite the cultural powerhouse James had painted in the long Skype calls he and Marcus had shared in the weeks leading up to their arrival. But then she had only just glimpsed it the night before. And perhaps they did things another way over here. Perhaps different things carried different weight in America.
No, she thought, this was going to be a brilliant summer. People would come up from New York City to see Marcus and he would land a Manhattan agent – it was much easier, he said, for an English actor to make his mark in the States. And she would leave her soul-sucking job at the council to start her own business.
And then they would be happier than they had been for a long, long time.
Lara looked at the little birds, busy at their nectar, and allowed herself to enjoy the anticipation.
The slam of the fly-screen door brought her back with a start. She turned to see Jack, in his long T-shirt nightie, his eyes puffed up and pink.
‘My chest is all stuffy, Mummy.’
‘I know. Poor baby.’ She went to him and held him close. He felt hot, but then again, he had just got out of bed.
‘Here, do this,’ she said, standing up, holding her arms out and letting the breeze stroke her limbs. Jack did as he was bid, and they both stood for a while, smiling, enjoying the brush of the air.
‘I’ll get you another pill, then let’s find something to eat,’ Lara said. She tiptoed upstairs and felt around their bedroom to pick up Jack’s clothes, pills and inhaler without waking Marcus. Then the two of them crept out of the slumbering house to look for a shop. Jack insisted on sitting in his buggy, flopping in the heat in a cheap baseball cap that had come free in a rucksack supplied ‘For Kidz’ by the airline.
They turned right and trundled along the uneven pavement away from the house. The road they were on was long and straight – called, she remembered from the directions the night before, Main Street. To her left was a grid of side streets named Third Street, Fourth Street and so on. When they got to Sixth Street, just before a vast, lawned cemetery, she realised they had reached the end of Trout Island, so they took the turning on to Sixth until they came to a junction to their left with a smaller road called Back Street.
‘Inventive road naming,’ Lara said to Jack, who nodded though he didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going on about.
The houses lining the roads were mostly large, detached wooden buildings, set back on open lawns. Hills thick with trees rose almost vertically from behind the gardens of Back and Main. So far, so small-town movie set. But there was an emptiness, an eerie unkemptness to all but a few of the houses. The lawns weren’t neatly mown, and the paint on the shingles was far from fresh. Old icicle fairy lights hung from porches, abandoned toys lay in the front yards, and faded flags drooped from chipped poles on every other lawn.
Where was everyone?
They reached the end of Back Street and pushed on along First, past the theatre, and found themselves back on Main. They passed a couple of chapels, a closed ‘free’ library, a deserted fire station, a locked-up diner and a row of silent antique shops. Lara’s hopes rose when they got to a wooden building with a lit neon window sign declaring it to be a deli, but she tried the door and it was locked tight shut. They were nearly back at the house, and they hadn’t found a single open shop.
‘What will we do for breakfast, Jacky?’ Lara said. Jack shrugged. Then, just as she was about to give in, she spotted a petrol station, almost diagonally across the road from the house.
Behind the empty forecourt was a sort of shack. As Lara and Jack crossed the gasoline-scented tarmac, she realised what she thought was a jet-lag-induced hallucination was in fact canned music wafting out of speakers beside each petrol pump.
‘Whatever will they think of next?’ she said to Jack, as she pushed open the door to the shack. The minute she smelled the bad vanilla-scented coffee and saw the riot of goods inside, she knew she had found her shop.
‘How ya
doin
’?’ a voice drawled from somewhere behind the counter. Lara peered and finally made out, camouflaged among the visual riot of doughnuts, cigarettes, coffee machines and point-of-sale displays, an overweight, middle-aged woman with multiple ear piercings, blond hair and dark black roots. Squeezed into her red uniform, she chewed her gum with an open mouth and peered into a too-small hand mirror, attempting to clean a smear of mascara from under her eye.
‘Um, hello,’ Lara said. ‘Do you have stuff like milk and cereals for breakfast?’
‘Hey, cute accent,’ the woman said. ‘Where you from?’
‘England.’
‘No way.’
‘We’re here for the theatre.’
‘The what?’
‘The theatre. Trout Island Theatre?’
‘Oh. OK.’ Either she couldn’t fathom Lara’s accent, or she didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘Milk’s round the back. You got all you need for breakfast over there.’ She pointed a fat finger at the middle aisle.
Lara also picked up some cleaning stuff to tackle the mouldy fridge, a carton of orange juice and a packet of cookies, which she opened immediately, handing one to Jack. Finding no tea on offer, she consoled herself with a cup of scalding hot coffee, which, despite its plastic lid, took some carrying back to the house while pushing the buggy.
‘Anyone awake?’ she called once they were back inside, but there was no response. Lara was jealous of Marcus and the teenagers’ sleeping abilities. She was still firmly on British time; her body was telling her it was the middle of the afternoon, even though the clock in the shop had said it wasn’t yet nine.
The phone, sitting on an Arthur Miller side table, suddenly rang, breaking the silence. Lara ran to get it before it woke everyone up.
‘Hi hon.’ It was James, who offered no apology for calling so early. ‘Just checking on my star, his dame and the pretty chickens. Everything OK? Isn’t the house divine? Do you have all you need?’
‘More or less,’ Lara said, wishing she had the guts to tell him what she really thought. But she did manage to mention the windows and the gas, and James promised to get someone round to sort it out ‘A-sap’. She also got directions to the nearest town, where, he told her, she would find a marvellous independent supermarket called Green’s.
‘And hey, hon, Betty’s breaking out the fire pit for the first-night party tomorrow. You have to come. It’s compulsory. We’ve got a little surprise for you, too.’
‘Really?’
‘Can’t tell you though. My lips are sealed.’
‘I’m intrigued.’
‘Oh, you should be, darling. You should be. Now then,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘You’re all set?’
‘Well, I was just wondering if you’d managed to get the internet access sorted?’
This was the one thing she had asked to be in place for their arrival – she had a couple of small jobs to do for the council while she was here, and Olly and Bella would die without Facebook. She also didn’t know how she and Jack would get through the days without any CBeebies. He had always gone to her workplace nursery and being together all day every day was going to be a test for both of them.
‘Well, is the router there yet?’
‘The what?’
‘The router. You know, the box thing.’ He pronounced it ‘rowter’.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Damn them. They said it’d be there for you. I’ll chase it up,’ he said, in a way that managed to convey he had quite enough on his plate with the musical opening the following night without having to worry about the concerns of actors’ wives.
‘Oh, and thank you for the roses,’ Lara said, not wishing to appear ungrateful.
‘Roses?’
‘The roses in the kitchen?’
‘Oh. Oh, Not me, I’m afraid. That sounds like a Betty touch. She does love her blooms,’ James said.
Lara hung up and looked at her watch. She wondered how she was going to last the day.
‘Let’s go to the shops, Mummy!’
Smeared and temporarily enlivened by his chocolate chip cookie, Jack had jumped out of his buggy, grabbed Lara’s bag and was holding it up for her to take. He had heard Lara mention a supermarket during the phone call, and he was one of those rare small boys who viewed a shopping trip as an outing to get excited about.
Lara smiled at him. She loved the way children could help you find your momentum when everything ground to a halt. She scribbled a quick note to the others, and picked up the car keys from where she had left them the night before. She folded the buggy and checked her purse for her credit card. Then she and Jack set off in the giant car, following the directions she had taken down from James, over Trout Mountain to the nearest town, ‘just’ twelve miles away.
THE SIREN BUILT AND BUILT UNTIL BELLA THOUGHT SHE COULDN’T
bear it any longer. Then, as slowly as it had started, it faded down and away, and she was sitting bolt upright in her soft, sweaty bed, hyperventilating.
What the fuck was that?
She rubbed her eyes. Overnight, the dust in her room had crept all over her face and up into her nose. Her body, unwashed since England, gave off a sour smell.
She jumped out of bed and, grabbing her camera from her hand luggage, darted towards the window, scuffing her feet along the worn linoleum floor. Drawing back the sheet tacked on to the frame as a sort of curtain, she peered outside. What was that siren about?
The street outside was deserted. No one was running for shelter, or shouting for help. The only movement was the leaves of the big trees that lined the road dancing in the breeze, the only sound that of insects, chattering and buzzing from somewhere unseen. In the distance, a dog’s bark echoed against the hills. Then, from further along the road than she could see, she heard the rumble of a truck. Her heart picked up its beat.
This is an invasion, she thought. The Axis of Evil – a phrase she had heard on the TV throughout her childhood, without ever fully understanding it – has finally invaded the USA. And it had to happen on her first morning here. She unhooked the fly screen, leaned out of the window and focused her lens on the vanishing point of the long, straight road. The rumble grew louder and a large truck finally hove into view. Slowly, it transformed from a shimmering pinprick in the hazy tarmac to a full dusty red presence. Bella clicked the shutter as the vehicle thundered towards the house, revealing itself to be a great tanker with
GOT MILK
? written on its side in fading letters. Far from being an invading menace, the driver didn’t seem to be concerned with anything other than the sandwich he was cramming into his mouth. Bella zoomed in and caught him, open-mouthed, in the act of biting.