Chapter One
In Chicago airport, I stepped off the airport train and into the arms of the stranger I already knew. I breathed in his scent as my face pressed against the skull on his T-shirt for the first time. He smelt how I knew he would: tobacco mixed with his own personal perfume.
“Hey, baby,” he said, stroking my face with his fingertips. “I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” I said. Tears were building up inside my eyes, but it was a busy place and I held them back.
“I love you. So much I love you,” he said.
“I love you too,” I said, with solemnity.
“How was your flight?” he asked.
“Long, but worth it. I’m really thirsty.”
“I’m real thirsty too. Were you ok during it?”
“I was, actually. It surprised me.”
“Told you you would be. You knew I’d be on the other side. Come on, let’s get something to drink and a smoke.”
He took my hand in his own. His hands were rough and callused; the hands of a hard life. We stopped at the airport shop. I dug through my purse for change, trying to identify twenty-five cents to add to the dollar bill on the counter. Gene laughed and pulled a quarter out without appearing to look first.
“I love you, baby,” he said, with a smile that came only from the creases of his eyes. His voice was suffused with affectionate amusement.
We walked out of the airport and it struck me that I’d been cooped up indoors for twelve hours, from check-in to the arrival on the other side. It was an eight-hour flight and I was stiff from the seat, tired from travel, but more wakeful than ever before. The day was here; the one I’d been anticipating one long day at a time, for seven months, but really for my whole life. I’d traversed three thousand miles to reach my love. The reverse might have been more romantic, but I had to travel to America because Gene wasn’t allowed to leave.
Gene gave me a soft smirk. “You walk how I knew you would.” He looked down at my legs and sneaked a glance at my bum.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t explain it. I just knew what your walk would be like. It’s a nice walk.”
“I knew what yours would be like too. How did we know that?”
“I can’t explain that shit, baby. Fate I guess.”
“Do you know where we’re going?” I asked him.
“We’ll figure it out, here, have a smoke first.”
He handed me a cigarette and lit the tip for me. He dealt out cigarettes before we did anything else, like “first things first.” I stood with him under the airport parapet and looked up at the azure blue sky. It was one more cloudless than I’d ever seen before. The sun was a big yellow ball; more exposed, more like the real thing than the one I was used to in Northern Ireland.
“It’s hot here,” I said, slipping off my leather jacket.
In May, Northern Ireland was still struggling to get rid of the last of its Winter. I looked across at Gene in his layers of black; an outfit that absorbed heat faster than any other.
“It’s not that hot, babe,” he shrugged.
He took a drag from his cigarette like it was the freshest of air to him.
“Man, look at that taxi line, maybe we should just call one. Have you got your phone handy?”
I handed it to him.
“Would you call them, babe? I fucking hate talking on the phone.” He dragged out “phone” like a singer holding onto a long note.
“You don’t mind talking to me on it.”
“That’s different, baby.”
I rang a cab number I saw on top of one of the cars. The line connected, and an American voice came through it. We struggled to make each other out, like cars having near-misses, both insistent that their side of the road was the right one to be on. Their right lane was my left. I handed the phone to Gene. He took it from my hand, unwillingly, with a roll of his eyes. A few curt replies and he handed the call back to me to disconnect.
“I told you I hate talking on the phone, baby.”
“Sorry, we couldn’t understand each other,” I said, flushed.
I looked across at the Hilton hotel. It was taller than any of the buildings in my home city, like a small-town sky scraper. The city was like a person I looked up to but knew nothing about. America was such a large country, with so much to discover that I knew I would never, in all my life, see. I thought of my little country, with its East and West coastlines a two-hour drive apart. I was free in the great unknown with the love of my life and I felt euphoric. I looked across at him, lighting his second cigarette. There stood before me the image of everything I had built up in my mind for seven months, even better than the imagined image. There was something almost holy about him, even though he was a vehement atheist. He had an aura that drew you in, like light to a sun-starved petal.
“Give me a kiss,” he said, leaning in and smiling. He kissed me right on my red lipstick, transferring it to his own lips. He wiped his mouth on the crisp white shirt he wore under his band T-shirt, leaving a little heart-shaped lip-print on the cuff.
“I’ll never wash it again,” he said, laughing and showing it off to me.
When he laughed, I knew the origins of “haha.” He exhaled one loud “ha,” and it made me smile, just the sound of it.
“I wrecked your shirt,” I said, looking at its lipstick kiss, guiltily.
“No, you made it unique. It looks awesome now, ain’t nobody else got this shirt,” he laughed.
A taxi crawled up, as soon as the last of the taxi queue had dispersed, of course. The driver wore sunglasses and played reggae that was audible from well outside his wound-down window. Gene swung my suitcase into the boot of the car and opened the door for me. He closed it behind me and walked around to his own side of the car. I smiled at his chivalry that was so unexpected amidst all the “motherfuckers” he mouthed. We sat on opposite sides of the back seat, looking out the windows, hands entwined on the middle seat. I gazed with interest at the motorways that wound upwards in a loop; a network of highways that lead you to every US state, if you so wished. The vastness of the place gave me a sense of anonymity, of liberty. It felt like we could run away from the law together, from visas, from debts, from obstacles. We were alone together in a colossal city, with no disturbances; just pure happiness. The taxi arrived at our hotel. It was a place far less exceptional than our relationship, with a vending machine instead of a bar and a Subway instead of an à la carte menu. Gene took some change and fed it to the machine, punching some buttons and producing a pack of peanut butter cups. He had a rough way of doing things; like clumsiness mixed with impatience.
“Have you ever tried one of these?” he said, offering me one.
I shook my head, intrigued. Unwrapping one from its little cupcake case, I tried it for the first time. There was something about having insignificant first moments with Gene that made the moments unforgettable. I knew the mixture of chocolate and peanut butter would remind me of him forever, not that I needed reminding.
“It’s good, ain’t it?” he said. “Hey, are you hungry, baby?”
“Yeah, starving,” I admitted, “are you?”
“No, babe, you know I don’t really eat. I’ll have something if you are though.”
Where will we go?” I asked.
He looked around, like he was taking in the vast number of dining choices around him, a smirk on his lips. “Subway?” he asked, with feigned uncertainty on his face.
I laughed and hugged into him, against his belly.
“Sounds good to me.”
He bought some sandwiches, some “sodas” and a family-sized bag of crisps. Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting on the hotel bed, eating our Subway from their paper wrappings. Gene took large bites, mopping Southwest sauce from his beard with a napkin after each one. I looked at him affectionately, or I guessed I must have, judging by his reaction.
“What, baby?”
“You look cute eating your sandwich.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” he laughed, doing a silly voice and smiling.
The bug screen rattled on the window and I looked out, trying to see a view past the grill. We were overlooking the highway and the sky was fading away to invisibility.
“Why do they have screens on the windows here?” I asked him.
“To keep bugs and shit out. You ain’t never seen a screen before?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe you have more dangerous bugs than we do.”
I thought about all the little cultural differences and the millions of things there were left to learn about his country, and him, and felt excited at the prospect of uncovering them. Gene turned the TV on. It faced us at the end of the bed, lighting up our faces while we talked in the dark room.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said, wrapping his big arm around me and making a pillow of his chest for me. He shoved his free hand into the sharing bag of crisps and kept his eyes on the screen.
“I told you we’d make it, baby. Everybody thought we were stupid, but we proved them all wrong.”
I looked at my soulmate, who had been on the other side of the Atlantic my whole life, just existing and waiting for me to make my appearance.
“I can’t believe I’m finally here, “I said with relief.
“You made it, I told you you would. You’ll be ok baby, now we’re together.”
I had been diagnosed a few months before with a mental illness: Bipolar Disorder. I’d been hiding out in my house, in a state of paranoia, afraid to go anywhere for months until Gene drew me out of it. He had a mental illness too; he welcomed me with arms outstretched, even in my current state, like a symbol of my longed-for self-acceptance.
Gene brushed the crisp crumbs from his hands and threw the bag onto the floor. He leant towards me and lifted my dress over my head. He made love to me on the lumpy bed, with its mattress stains that did nothing to diminish the act.
“You and I: that’s all that matters, baby. We’ll get through all this shit together.”
By this shit, he meant our mental health problems, our lack of acceptance from the world, our past disappointments with life.
“Let’s go for a smoke, baby,” he said, drawing two from the one pack.
He pulled his hair back from his face and tied it into a ponytail, throwing his brown leather jacket on. He yanked on the rusted door handle, nearly dislodging it, and let me walk out first.
Outdoors felt like indoors at home. There was no temperature drop to face to satiate your smoking habit. Crickets chirped noisily, hidden in their bushes. We stood next to a phonebooth that looked like it had stood empty since the invention of smart phones. All these small markers helped me to recall the night as a diary-worthy moment in my mind. I pulled the smoke from my cigarette into my small lungs, tasting Camels for the first time, and enjoying smoking more than ever before. The humid air made it something to be savoured, instead of something to rush to its end so you could get in out of the cold. Gene smiled at me through his intake of smoke and winked as he blew it out. His mouth always stayed in a straight line, but his eyes told you he was smiling. I looked up at the clear skyscape that was scattered with stars, feeling like fantasies were something tangible.
We went back inside and lay down in the simple bedroom. Our feet were touching under the beautifully cool, if somewhat discoloured sheets of the hot, muggy room. I looked at Gene’s shape in the darkness, only seeing the whites of his eyes and the outline of his sturdy form.
“It gets dark early here,” I said. It was summer and eight o’clock.
He lay, silently watching me, pulling my head in to meet his, like two swans bonding.
“It’s light at home until ten at night at the minute.”
He continued staring at me and nodded, pulling me closer to him.
“I’m so glad that flight it is over. I’m terrified of being stuck indoors for so long,” I admitted. “Are you?”
“I don’t know, babe,” he shrugged, “Never been on a plane to find out.”
“What are you scared of?”
“Nothing, baby. The cops?” he laughed.
I kissed him on the cheek. I was happy to have found my way to him against all the odds. We were already beating the system that worked to keep us apart.
“I’m surprised you managed to fit all your dresses into one suitcase. Did you even bring anything else?” he asked.
“They’re folded up really small. I brought my Kindle to save room on books and make room for clothes.”
Gene smirked, did a shrug-like laugh and squeezed my shoulder, sitting up. He understood why my clothes meant so much to me, but not my books. He wasn’t much of a reader; he described himself as borderline illiterate, but he read more complex song lyrics than I knew existed. He was much more intelligent than he led you to believe.
“I need another smoke,” he said, pulling on his checked trousers.
The seams at the bottom were unpicked. The first thing Gene did when he bought a new pair of trousers was to take the hems down and take a seam ripper to the ankles. He liked them to flare over his shoes with his sneakers poking out like two cheeky tongues. He had a style of his own and an attitude that made sure everyone knew he didn’t care what they thought of it. Gene turned away, lacing his Converse on the edge of the bed with his cigarette ready between his lips.
“You coming for one, babe?”
I nodded, I’d spent months waiting for him, I wasn’t going to miss out on so much as a toilet break.
“Are you going to marry me, or what?” he said, looking back at me over his shoulder, with a smile. His cigarette moved up and down in his mouth, muffling, yet punctuating every word.
“Yes,” I said, soberly.
I knew we would get married from when we first spoke, it was just a matter of when. We had discussed it many times on the phone, but Gene wanted to propose in person. He had already announced his great love for me over the phone and wanted to save the rest for when we were face to face, instead of just ear to ear.
“You’re made for me, baby. Man, I can’t believe we met on a fucking dating site. Don’t tell nobody that shit. If anyone asks, we met on a music site,” he laughed. “Tell them we met on Last FM or some shit.”
We had first come across each other’s profiles just months before. I’d received a message from, what was then, an elusive stranger. Had he not found my profile first, I probably would have still been poring over his, working up the courage to send the first message. I remembered my first impression of his profile: he looked interesting and artistic with an indefinable charisma.
I had been at an impasse when we first spoke, back in the countryside, isolated as hell. I’d lived in a big city in Scotland for years before that but had dropped out of my masters’ course and returned home, too ill to leave the house. I had no direction, a barrage of brutal break-ups in my wake, spells of psychosis and suicidal tendencies. Meeting someone in my current state seemed too much to ask for. Enter: Gene.
“Come over,” the first message I received from him read. He was straight to the point after years of non-committal messages, years of being messed around by immature men. I looked at his profile picture and it was the prototype of my perfect partner: long hair, cool hat, dark features. I skimmed his profile page for a location and felt my heart sink. “Michigan, USA.” Three thousand miles was one hell of a barrier to meeting for a first date. I gave up on the idea of him, for a moment, at least. There was too great a chasm between us. I didn’t know him well enough to feel the loss, I told myself, I’d find someone closer to home. But there was something in his deep brown eyes that held a knowing look; even in a picture, he could cut straight through the bullshit to my innermost thoughts. I couldn’t help herself, reopening the window, I wrote a reply.
“To America?” I asked, “Cool, are you paying for my ticket?” I joked.
An all-day and all-night back and forth of messaging and phone calls ensued. I felt like I had once intimately known Gene in another place, another time. He was more familiar to me than people I had known my whole life. Talking to him was like arriving at the end of life with myself; the fully formed version I could never quite piece together on my own.
Back in bed, Gene’s eyes had closed over, I could tell when the whites of his eyes shut down their shiny stare. The only company left in the room was the voice from the TV. An infomercial played, trying to sell me an indispensable item I had always managed to live without. I lay next to Gene, stroking his long, coarse hair until I joined him in a sleep of the deepest contentment.
When I woke up, I was, at first, disoriented by the layout of the new room. The walls were a dingy grey, looking like they hadn’t been painted in decades. Nothing was bright and new, but it met our basic needs. I didn’t need extravagance in my surroundings to be happy with Gene. His company was all I required. A smile spread across my lips. I may have been three thousand miles from home, but I was closer to it than I had ever been before. I didn’t care for my home country anyway, I loved an adventure. Gene was already up; he was wrestling with the ancient air-conditioning system, trying to get a response from it. Nothing came.
“It’s hot as shit in here,” he said, pulling his hair back from his face. He was still wearing multiple layers.
“How come you wear long sleeves in the summer?” I asked.
It was funny, the small details of someone that you missed out on over the phone. He folded one sleeve back, displaying an arm of self-drawn tattoos.
“Me and my buddies did them when I was a kid, fucking stupid looking as shit,” he laughed, shaking his head at himself.
I thought they were cute; there was a skull that looked more like a smiling dog. He had a smiley face on his middle finger.
“Who’s the wee smiley face?” I asked.
“That’s the fuck-you-man,” he said.
“The-fuck-you-man?”
He held his middle finger up to me, the little face smiling in my direction.
I laughed. “He’s cool.”
“You should get a fuck-you-lady and then they can get married. Then we can tell the whole world to fuck off,” he said, smirking.
“Maybe you could do it for me,” I said.
“Were you paying attention when I showed you what my tattoos look like, babe?” he said, amused. “Let’s go get a smoke and some fucking coffee.”
It seemed that was how he subsisted, on caffeine and nicotine alone.
“You don’t want any breakfast?” I asked.
“Nah, I don’t eat it. I’ll sit with you while you do though”
“How come you don’t eat breakfast?”
“My mom never gave us no breakfast, I’m just not used to it, I guess.”
I looked at him sadly. There was a lot of sorrow behind that tattooed skin and those strong, dark features. Gene plugged the headphones into his phone, looking for a song. Shoving one earphone in, he left his other ear free to listen to whatever I had to say. He never seemed to be doing one thing at a time; like his energy needed to be directed in several places at once to keep up with his mind. We walked into the breakfast room of the hotel. It was a room filled with paper and plastic utensils; not a member of staff in sight. I lifted a bowl and filled it myself from the cereal dispenser.
“Classy place, man,” Gene mumbled into my ear and I did a blush of a laugh.
We sat at a pop-up table that rocked as I ate. There was a wide window that overlooked a patch of greenery, making it almost feel like a date. I sat across from him, spooning cereal into my mouth with a plastic teaspoon, while he topped up his first coffee cup from a second cup he had sitting ready. Gene drank coffee quicker than anyone I’d ever seen. He could finish off a full pot in ten minutes. He tilted his polystyrene cup towards me, like a salutation of cheers with a fancy wine glass and I laughed aloud. His knees were jiggling wildly, like sitting in one place for too long was too much for him.
“I need to get up, babe. Going to have a smoke. Will you be alright here for a minute?”
I nodded and finished breakfast alone, watching him through the window. The breeze lifted his hair, like it was pulled up by puppet strings. He was like an image from a magazine, like a cool criminal, but one who made me feel safe. He turned to me and fired me a wink through his stream of cigarette smoke. I looked at the time on the wall. We had to leave soon to get to the train station. I felt a bit sad leaving the place; it felt like leaving our first marital bed behind, lumpy as it was. Gene came back inside, closing the conservatory door behind him with an accidental bang.
“It’s hot out baby, might want to put some sun screen on,” he said, brushing my pale, bare arms. They’d barely seen sun all year; I came from a country with unfortunate weather. It rained as often as Americans performed their security checks or displayed their star-spangled flags.
“You must be the whitest person in the country,” he laughed. “You’re like a porcelain doll.” He held his dark arm up to mine and produced another “ha.” “We’ll have beautiful babies, you and I. Little crazy babies.”
“Do you think they’ll be like us?”
“I fucking hope not,” he said, laughing.
I laughed too. He kissed my hand and gave me a wink.
“You finished, baby?” he said, peering into my half-drunk cup of coffee. “Man, you’re a slow drinker.” He smiled affectionately with one side of his mouth. “We better go if you want to see any of the city before we go home.”
He wheeled my suitcase out of the hotel room, swinging his bag over his shoulder. He’d crammed a change of clothes into a bowling bag and the sight of it made me laugh. He looked like someone who’d do well constantly on the move; he always managed to carry the few things he needed in his pockets or over his shoulder. He jokingly described himself as a well-dressed vagrant.
We got out of the taxi at the train station, heading for central-Chicago. The train passed over thin bridges and then underground, over and under, over and under. It showed me flashes of the city I’d never seen before; at least not outside a TV set. The buildings were all apartment buildings with fire escapes that reminded me of New York sitcoms. I enjoyed watching them, because, uninspiring though the view may have been, it was new to me. Gene sat next to me looking at the floor, moving his knee. He always wanted to be walking somewhere, never sitting in peace.
“Look,” I gasped, spotting the Willis Tower. Skyscrapers were something I didn’t often see; its height alone impressed me. At home, the only thing to reach such great heights was a plane. I imagined all the people working on the top floors, suspended in the sky. It was funny that to them, that was normality; tedium, even. Gene gave the building a quick glance and shrugged. He’d seen it all before.
“Want to go to the top of it, baby?” he asked, “I’ll go up with you if you want.” He had very open vowel sounds that made everything in life sound more possible.
I considered his offer until we reached the lengthy queue. It was probable we’d be queuing long beyond our train departure time for Michigan. Gene read my thoughts. It was the tourist hub, the busiest spot; the last place our minds could cope with.
“Let’s go to and pick up our train tickets. We can get some lunch while we’re waiting.”
We moved underground, into a station with as much activity as the city itself. It was its own little metropolis; restaurants, waiting areas, shops and seemingly, thousands of people.
“I wouldn’t mind some sweet and sour chicken,” said Gene, pointing to a Chinese takeaway and some plastic tables. He set the case and bowling bag down.
“I’ll go and get this, babe. Eh, I might need to borrow some money,” he said, reddening a little.
He’d used the last of his money to get to the airport to pick me up. He was poor to a level I’d never seen before. The first time we spoke, Gene was homeless, staying with friends in a bedroom that adjoined theirs, and he hadn’t eaten in a week. I’d sent him money for popcorn: his favourite food, and coffee, of course. We started making plans for our life together from the first time we exchanged “I love you.”
Rain, her husband and kids (the friends Gene was staying with) decided to move away. They couldn’t pay the bills and had to move in with her dad. Gene was a couple of weeks away from living on the street. We frantically looked for somewhere for him to live. At the final moment, somewhere popped up: the unused house of a friend. It was more of a squat than a house. We paid its tiny mortgage off with the savings I had and money from an elderly tenant who rented the downstairs of the house. He must have been there since the building’s erection and we were glad of his monthly contribution. He didn’t cause any bother, quietly living out of his retirement funds and keeping to his rigid routines. With our small amount of money to survive on and no job prospects for Gene in sight, our finances were a worry, but what did money matter when you were madly in love?
Gene turned to me. “Did you remember to bring your meds, babe?” he asked me.
I nodded, smiling. “Thanks for reminding me.”
Gene always made sure I was steady, safe and stable. My wellbeing was paramount to him.
