Essay

SEARCHING FOR HOME

by

Mary McCluskey
 

The week that I left LA, two rather ordinary, middle-aged women were stabbed to death in the city. One had just visited her husband in hospital; the other was walking to her car in the parking lot of a crowded shopping mall. Both met their deaths at the hands of total strangers. The latter crime took place in mid afternoon, under a bright winter sun. That same week in Palmdale, an arid LA suburb where hot, desert winds blow frequently and the incidence of spousal and child abuse is chillingly high, a young husband hurled his three-year-old stepdaughter against a wall, fracturing her skull.

"She wouldn't stop crying," he explained later.

These crimes seemed unusually brutal even in a city that is well used to gang wars, drive-by shootings and random acts of violence. And they increased the uneasiness I had felt for some time; the certainty that at the edges, beyond the relentless sun of the City of Angels, were shadows hiding danger and menace. And the shadows were encroaching.

I began to avoid the metro section of the newspaper, reading only national news and the dark entertainment of political squabbles. But horror is hard to miss. A few days later, I heard a morning newscast that began:

"At Granada Hills High School this morning…"

I whirled around to stare at the screen as my mouth went dry. It is the school my sons had attended.

A teenaged boy had committed suicide in front of the school. He had placed the gun to his head as he stood before a video camera. One theory, aired on television, was that he recorded the act so that his parents could later witness the suicide.

These are not valid reasons for abandoning a life style of two decades, of course. My world had imploded two years before, at 8:31a.m. on a Saturday morning when I picked up the phone to hear a police officer's voice say, "I am very sorry to have to tell you, ma'am, that your son Robert…" and, after an enormous whoosh when the air was sucked out of the universe, I screamed until my husband took the phone out of my hand.

My youngest son had been killed in a traffic accident. This was just weeks before he was due to graduate high school and attend UC Berkeley. A bright, handsome boy, his death was devastating.

Since that phone call, California had become a desolate place for me and I was nervous in it. I jumped at strange sounds, hated the acrid air that was too heavy, too dry, to breathe. It was as if the San Fernando Valley had become alien and menacing and I was a stranger in it. I wanted out.

A small incident convinced me. Outside my local market, I exchanged pleasantries with a neighbour as we loaded groceries into our cars. Then I saw, on the console of his Camry, a revolver. I watched warily as this respectable male drove to the exit.

I knew then it was time to go home. I had research to do for a novel, friends to visit, aging parents who would be happy to see me. I needed green fields, hedgerows, cool rain. I wanted to be around people who believed, as I did, that to carry a gun while grocery shopping was lunacy. But it had been over twenty years. I married in California, raised my children as American citizens. Would it be possible to become English again?

~~~

I felt American as I sipped a gin and tonic and listened to the returning British holidaymakers on the Virgin flight to London.

"It was smashing weren't it, duck? That Disneyland?" one asked a companion. The accent and the syntax sounded strange. The fact that I was leaving the San Fernando Valley, where the temperature in summer doesn't drop below 90 for weeks on end, to return to a climate that was presently freezing, caused my immediate neighbour some considerable amusement.

"Must be off yer rocker," said a cockney woman with a round face and a big smile. "It's minus 2 bleedin' degrees."

I had forgotten the metric system after so many years in California so I had no idea how cold that was. The answer is - bone chillingly cold.

But I'd grown tired of endless sun, endless summer. I imagined brisk healthy walks through green fields, in the fresh cool air.

~~~

British poet Hilaire Belloc described the Midlands as sodden and unkind and indeed, my first weeks visiting family in Birmingham and the Warwickshire villages, I had to agree. I felt disorientated and wondered if I had made a mistake. Why had I not simply moved out of Los Angeles? To Northern California perhaps. Or to Oregon or Seattle. It rains there too. I found myself making comparisons constantly - how green England is compared with the burnt siennas and desert shades of the Santa Susanna Mountains. How timid but how infinitely polite is the British personality after the brash confidence of the beautiful people of Melrose Avenue and Beverly Hills. Lacking surgically adjusted noses, perfect skin, straightened teeth, the teenagers seemed sullen, surlier than their LA counterparts. The women were dowdier, the men hunched and worried.

I realized that Caucasian Californians are indeed golden. Their skin is tanned by an unrelenting sun. The British looked so plain and lumpy compared with the golden Los Angelinos with their wide, white smiles. And the populace looked oddly homogenous to me - skin that was pale with a greyish tint, like skimmed milk. Although Birmingham has a large number of Indian, Pakistan, and Caribbean residents, the faces I saw in the suburbs were mostly white ones. I missed the Hispanic, Vietnamese, Chinese, and African-Americans--the multi-hued shades and features of my old California neighbourhood. And my voice sounded strange, even to me.

"You've got an American accent," my brother chortled, delighted.

"Better than a Brummie one," I shot back.

I stared at the grey skies and wondered if it would ever stop raining. It did. It began to snow instead. And, though my sister set her heating thermostat to the highest level, for the first few weeks I slept in socks and shivered under the covers.

Then--I began to feel a change. I watched daffodils bloom outside my window and wondered if somewhere outside of the cities there was a place for me. Burford, a pretty village in the Cotswolds, charmed me, but after the pub, and the teashops there was little to do. I spent time in Oxford, a city I've always loved, but the war of gown and town continues and the town seems to be winning, with a focus on the consumer rather than the scholar.

"A good place to shop these days," said an old friend. Yes.

I spent a while in Dorset, marvelling at staid old Bournemouth now transformed and according to its tourist brochure the St. Tropez of the South Coast.

As the weather warmed and the grockles and the young clubbers invaded the South coast towns I moved again. I was on a quest: a search for 'home'. I tried Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. Later, Sussex, then Scotland and the Isle of Skye. Someone suggested Cumbria, another Worcestershire.

I visited Great Malvern on September 11. I liked the hills and the lunchtime pub. Then someone switched on the news, and as the twin towers collapsed I started to cry. In minutes, frightened, I was on the train to my sister's house.

I could not return to Malvern, but a friend suggested Ludlow and I set off, liking it enough to reserve a room for a month. One day, I took the 435 bus into Shrewsbury. The bus wound its way through Onibury, and Craven Arms and I stared, delighted, out of the window . By the time we reached Church Stretton with its views of the Long Mynd I was enchanted. After one week in Shrewsbury I made up my mind. It's a charming town, almost completely encircled by the river, and bustling with life: restaurants, galleries, bookshops. And yet, only minutes away, some of the loveliest villages and countryside I have ever seen.

I found a flat overlooking the Abbey. When I looked through the apartment that showed its dark splendour through every window I took the place immediately. Though my religious beliefs are diffuse at best, agnostic on a normal day, I couldn't image a better view. No ocean could be quite as soothing to the spirit as this solid lovely shape that has stood for centuries.

The day after I moved in I strolled around my new neighbourhood. A gentleman handing out tourist brochures outside the Abbey smiled at me.

"This place is SO cool," I said.

"It is indeed," he paused. "You an American?" he asked.

I grinned.

"No. Well, not really," I said. "I don't know what I am."

It was true. I was a stranger in my own land. To be so disenfranchised is odd. To belong nowhere. No allegiance to any flag. There was a moment when a weight seemed to lift. I felt light-headed.

"You going back then?" he asked. "To the States?"

I studied the elegant lines of the abbey, a dark shape against the brighter, lighter skies. "One day, perhaps. Not yet."

####

Mary McCluskey is a British journalist who alternates between Los Angeles, California and a small Shropshire village in the UK.

Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including Zoestrope's ALL STORY EXTRA, LINNAEAN STREET, The PAMAUNOK REVIEW, EXQUISITE CORPSE, SALON and ATLANTIC UNBOUND.

She has just completed a novel White Nights, and is working on another.

She is an Associate & Contributing Editor of LITERARY POTPOURRI and can be reached at:mary.mccluskey1@btinternet.com