30/100: An American Trip

six months before the century changed.

Last night, I couldn’t stop seeing a kidney shaped, Hockey blue swimming pool I swam in when I was 20. I think I am trying to write about my father. Or I know I am trying to write about him, but he was a man who existed in fragments only. This form of him, dictates the form he takes on the page. I cannot write about him as a coherent whole since he was the least coherent and whole person I knew. After he died, I wrote this piece. Also in fragments. Lately, I have begun to wonder if I write biography more than memoir. Certainly I am more interested in people outside myself than I am myself. Below is a true story.

It comes back to me as a series of photographs. I use my last film camera to capture a country that is too vast to be caught any other way. This is how I’ve consumed it for years. Without film, it forbids consumption, perhaps this is the only medium to really see America through. It demands a lens. I do not know it will be my last film camera. I am only vaguely aware of digital cameras and phones are still used for phoning. 2001 and the air was full of lasts, we just didn’t know it. I don’t remember what the camera was like, but what I do recall are the photographs.

Here it is. The roadside motel with the white balcony; the doors, facing the courtyard seem too flimsy for someone used to hotels with corridors, secure locks. We divide ourselves up. Sleep three to a room. The rooms are sparse yet intoxicating at the same time. There are no attempts to make them look anything other than they are: utilitarian. One double bed, one single, a large TV, a desk by the door, well worn white sheets. I’ve seen it before. This is where people escape to or fail to escape from, a movie set we barely dare disturb.

There it is, the kidney shaped swimming pool; that Hockney blue that on closer inspection reveals itself to be a trick. The inside is painted blue to make the water bluer. America, a series of carefully rehearsed tricks. Bluets has not been written yet; I do not know that blue itself is a lie. I am still innocent largely and find it impossible to tell when I am being lied to. There is a safety in this. Or so I will come to believe later, once I can spot a liar at 50 paces. It creates a certain disadvantage, to no longer be able to stand dealing with this common currency. I swim in this pool on the first morning, leaving the room in my bikini before anyone else wakes. The surface of the water almost warm, but under, night cold still. I swim quickly to warm myself up. It does not take long, little is truly cold when you learnt to swim in the North Sea. I stop at one end, the paint is peeling, under, the pool is chalk white. I will take a photograph later in the morning and think myself artistic. I should forgive myself this, I was only 20 and knew very little of art.

The difference between the water and air temperature turns my arms to goosebumps when I leave. My white blonde hair on my tanned arms stands up. When the photograph is developed it is date stamped 03.15.21. Beware the ides of March they say, but back then, I had not read much Shakespeare and superstition was forbidden. It was a simple morning: the pool, the peeling paint, the cold water, or was at least before we got into the station wagon and continued to drive south.

There they are, outside the house. This is a photograph I have been sent in advance, so I will recognise them at JFK. The house is painted white, an old colonial, impossibly exotic to someone used to grey stone built houses. He is leaning with his back against the black station wagon and his maroon shirt is undone by one button too many. Grey hair on his sunburnt chest. His face is too red, a redness exposing his many autoimmune conditions. His body, trying to rid itself of him. His skin paper thin, his veins under, raised and blue. I have been told he is good looking, yet he is not looking good. He has his arms around two beautiful brown children; girls, with long plate glass smooth hair, their smiles impossibly white and wide, convincingly American by now. He has written something on the back. I do not know where this photograph currently is, so I cannot read it or recollect what his handwriting looks like. I have developed a habit of losing things, in the hope that appearing careless conceals the fact that I wish very much that I could care less. Doctors, I know, from my grandmother, have bad handwriting, but his was not as bad as I expected. I should perhaps have noted this discrepancy.

There we are, in Walmart. I push the cart. Outside, it is hot, inside, the recycled air two degrees too cold. I am not used to the way you need to always carry a coverup in this country. It is never colder indoors than out in Scotland. Not having encountered air conditioning before, it makes me sick, I will have a cold for the duration of my stay. He will try to treat me with a number of home remedies, including advising me to eat an onion as I would an apple. This, he says, accounts for his longevity. He is 57. Every second day he injects me and himself with a concoction of vitamins. When my upper thigh begins to resemble a pincushion, I stop wearing shorts. My stepmother worries that we need lunch, although the motel buffet was only four hours before and lunch is a luxury I rarely allow myself. She is a peculiarly small woman, as if she is apologising for being present at all. I have only known her for four days, but there is something wound too fast about her. She scurries as a mouse might and talks too quietly. I would say it is unnerving, only it makes me very very nervous in a way that only makes me more aware of my nerves. Already, I am on high alert. I would like to be un-nerved, rid of this feeling. She says we need pizza. I have only eaten pizza once since I was 14 and have largely not missed it for six years. But she says, pizza, coke, and scuttles off in a different direction as my half-sister takes the edge of the shopping cart, steering it towards the gun aisle; come on there’s something you need to see. I am not sure anyone needs to see guns in a supermarket, laid out against the wall adjacent to the toy aisle. Later, we will sit in the station wagon with slices of pizza so large I need to hold the crust in two hands to be able to eat it. I fold it in two, the pizza becoming a sandwich. Before I do, my stepmother teaches me how to blot the oil from the top. I have read about this trick but never seen anyone do it. We wash it down with warm coke, passing the 3 litre bottle between us. Everything is so big here, I feel like I am six again.

There he is, in the snug. I only have one photograph of him. He is a child who prefers the shade, rarely leaving the shadows. When he is forced to go walks with the rest of us, he holds his arms stiffly at his side, swinging them back and forwards as a marionette might. His sisters are the perfect shade of brown, a mix of their mother and father’s skin; but his is patchy as if unable to settle decisively on what race he is; making him susceptible to sunburn. He sits in the corner, hunched in his chair, videogame controller in his hand. On the screen, planes fly low over buildings until they fly between the buildings. The New York skyline is recognisable to me now. He laughs as he crashes the plane into buildings. It is April 2001. Six months later and I will remember his laughter.

These are the photographs I took or was sent. These are the things I return to now, this wet July morning, after a period of such prolonged rain and little sun that everything is a startling Lorca green. The woods full of ferns unfurled and trees toppled by the weekend’s rain, the air a riot of cedar and pine. One morning, a different motel but the same kidney shaped pool, the same peeling Hockney blue, the air similar to where I now find myself. Each an outpost of sorts. Each, an exile. We are further south by now, on this morning I am re-collecting back to me, and there are scents I have not before smelt, such insistent smells that the air seems to take on a solid quality; jasmine, vines, honeysuckle, vying for attention they make me feel faint. Already the road is trying to disintegrate in front of me, the hot asphalt turning viscous as it melts. It is not gone 9am. I walk until I find the centre of the small town, low rectangular buildings clustered around a town square. Although I have the sense I have seen much of America before, I have never smelt it. I am not ready for how it smells this far south. I do not have a way of describing it, other than hot. I just smells hot. A certain kind of humidity I’ve never encountered before, my skin could be liquid and the rest of me too, it feels both like moving through honey and turning into it simultaneously. It is not unpleasant. Too early for anything to be open, the square is largely deserted. I turn back to the motel. On the fringes of the town there’s a garage, some black men are clustered around a car parked outside. They whistle. I put my head down as I hold my middle finger out to them. Outside the motel, my father is waiting for me. He paces up and down. His eyes, so clear they are nearly transparent. Where were you?, his soft South African accent lowering to a hiss. I tell him I went for a walk, that I was up early, and thought I’d see the town. Bad things happen to white girls like you in places like this, he says, letting go of my right wrist he’s easily circled with his left hand, let’s get coffee. For a week, I will caress the bruise as it purples before it browns.

These are the early photographs. What’s required of the photographer is a certain absence. It is impossible to do two things well at once, either you’re recording or you’re participating. You can’t do both. For three weeks, I watched. Recorded. Too scared to know what might happen if I was required to take part. It is this near objective distance that returns to me now, as I find myself again watching myself watching them. Of course, there’s one photograph I am omitting. This is the one that comes next.