Marooned in Manhattan (3 page)

Chapter 4

W
e ate Indian food last night, which
Leela brought in little plastic containers, Bhindi Anardana and Sarson Ka Saag and Aloo Gobi and potato and chick pea samosas. Leela told us that she is putting together a cookery book with tips about getting divorced because it is a simple and surefire way to celebrity and easy money.

‘What’s the difference between
putting together
a book and writing one?’ I asked curiously.

Leela glared at me and ignored my question.

‘I am going to call it,
Healthy and Delicious Vegetarian Indian Meals for Divorced or Separated Dads
.’

‘Why not mothers as well?’ Joanna asked.

Leela snickered and said, ‘Women don’t tend to like me because they are jealous of the way I look.’

‘There is something true in that,’ said Joanna as she got up, stacked her plate very noisily into the dishwater and left, muttering something about having years of laundry to do. Leela watched her go, still rambling on about what she called her book concept. She thought she should wear a traditional sari, but in white with silver accents, in the photograph on the front cover of the book.

‘Tasty and tasteful,’ she said, glancing at Scott.

He didn’t respond because he was devouring the samosas while sleeping with his eyes open, a talent that drives Joanna and Leela nuts. It’s probably the only thing they have in common, apart from being women.

Leela is Hindu. She said she doesn’t eat meat because it is against her religion.

I said, ‘In Ireland, years and years ago, people didn’t eat meat on Fridays because Jesus died on Good Friday. Janet’s father, my honorary grandfather, still doesn’t eat meat on Fridays but he has a huge fry-up with tons of bacon and sausages on Saturday mornings.’

Leela didn’t look very interested in Janet’s dad’s eating habits but she said, ‘Cows are very sacred animals in India.’

Scott woke up and said that sometimes he wished he had a country practice so he could treat cows and horses and other farmyard animals.

The phone rang and I raced to get it.

‘This is Jeremy Humphrey, I need the vet to come right now because my goat is acting weird,’ the caller announced.

‘Your, em, goat?’ I asked.

‘Yes, G-O-A-T, my goat.’

I think Scott gets to treat more farmyard animals than he realises. I’ve been trying hard to be a helpful assistant and already I know I need to get details of the symptoms to help Scott with the diagnosis.

‘What do you mean exactly by “acting weird”?’ I asked politely.

Mr Humphrey sounded annoyed.

‘Weird weird. Tell Dr Brooks to come straight away. He knows where I live, and don’t send the chick, I want the man vet!’ and he hung up. It was a good thing that Joanna didn’t hear him because she wouldn’t have been impressed.

Scott was already heading downstairs to get his bag of instruments and medicines. It’s not a black bag like the medical bags used by doctors in movies. It’s a bright blue sports bag. I rushed to catch up with him while Leela whined about being left alone with nothing to do. We walked quickly, the way everyone walks in Manhattan, towards Mr Humphrey’s place on West End Avenue and 74
^th
Street but slowed down on the last block because Scott said he felt bloated.

Mr Humphrey lives alone in the ground floor apartment with a large back garden. He buzzed us in and we walked through the apartment to the back yard. Mr Humphrey’s goat is a dark caramel colour, and, his name is Billy, which, I mentioned to Scott, is pretty much up there with calling a collie Lassie.

‘Or a Great Dane, Scooby Doo,’ he answered.

‘I had no i
dea
Scooby Doo was a Great Dane.’

The only goats I had ever seen before were at petting zoos. Billy took me by surprise because he was so small. Scott explained that he is a ‘pygmy goat’, a type of goat which first came to the United States from West Africa in the 1950s. He said that Mr Humphrey had trained Billy really well to walk on a leash and he is very docile and friendly.

Poor Billy was lying on the straw in a little shed and he
panted as if he had run a marathon. Mr Humphrey
whistled
softly in an anxious way and stroked Billy gently on his stomach. I helped hold Billy’s head while Scott opened his mouth and showed us how pale the gums were. ‘I think Billy has a parasite in his stomach called barber’s pole worm.’

Parasites. Uuugh! Even the word made me feel like vomiting but I held it in check because I didn’t want Scott to think I was too wimpy for this kind of work. We collected some of Billy’s goat pellets in a little tube to send off to the laboratory to make sure Scott’s diagnosis was correct. Picking up goat pooh is not the most glamorous side of the job.

‘Mr Humphrey, I am going to give Billy a drench but we seem to have caught the condition fairly early and Billy should be able to make a full recovery,’ Scott said, matter-of-factly.

A smile spread across Mr Humphrey’s face; he’s the first American I have met with yellow teeth. I thought about collecting some extra goat pellets. I was sure they could be potentially useful at some point in dealing with Leela, but Mr Humphrey had a suspicious eye on me so I restrained myself.

Later that night, I tidied my room because the next day was Thursday, which is the day Eurdes, Scott’s cleaner, comes. She’s not a big fan of Ben’s, because of his tendency to drink noisily from the toilet bowl when he is too lazy to go to his own water bowl and also because his hair can be found in the strangest places. Ben has two main enemies, the
sinister-looking
striped black and orange cat called ‘Mindy’ from
Apartment 4L and Eurdes’s vacuum cleaner. Ben is terrified of them both and runs away whenever he sees them, after a few protest barks. Bravery is not his strong suit.

Eurdes always turns up on time, at 10am sharp. On very hot days, even with the AC on, she removes her blouse and works in her bra and skirt. She has the most enormous breasts I have ever seen. I like Eurdes’s bras. They are very shiny and colourful, usually bright purple or neon pink with black lace. Scott enjoys looking at them too but he has to pretend he doesn’t notice. He’s not very good at that.

Scott is obsessively tidy, so Eurdes’s job became much harder since my arrival. Scott was pretty disgusted when he discovered that I didn’t make my bed. One morning, he told me, ‘It’s not fair of you to expect Eurdes to do it for you.’

That surprised me and hurt my feelings because I didn’t remotely expect Eurdes to make my bed. I didn’t expect anyone to do it. But I started making my own bed and I have to admit Scott was right because, strangely, it’s a lot nicer to get into a bed that is already made.

Chapter 5

J
oanna’s best friend is Rachel. She’s
from Boston but went to a famous college for women in New York, called Sarah Lawrence. I think they let men go there now. Rachel is the manager and part owner of a tiny art gallery on the Upper East Side. Joanna took me there to visit and Rachel gave us a tour of the paintings, which she called artworks. They were not interesting at all. I like pictures with people or animals or stormy seas with little boats or colourful strange shapes and splotches. The pictures in the gallery were of very tame fields and valleys, painted in neutral colours of muted browns and olive greens. I had to turn my head away so Rachel wouldn’t see me suppressing a yawn.

After the tour, Rachel brought us to her little office upstairs for some drinks. She and Joanna drank a bottle of Prosecco between them and I had real iced tea with mint and lemon. Rachel is single and has a daughter, Kylie, who is four months older than me. Kylie arrived while I was still drinking my first iced tea and she swept me away with her downstairs to the basement. This was being used as a storage area for dozens of canvases in all shapes and sizes, which were
stacked up against the walls. We sat on some packing crates. I felt a little shy so Kylie did most of the talking.

She was adopted from the province of Guangdong in China when she was two and a half years old, but she can’t remember living in China or meeting her mom, Rachel, for the first time or the flight to America. Nor can she speak a word of Mandarin, but she intends to learn. She is
extraordinarily
pretty, with delicate features and black hair with a streak of pink on the left side near the front, and black eyes with thin, arched eyebrows. She has a short, choppy fringe, which she called
bangs
. When she smiles, she looks like someone has just told her an amazing secret. She is slender and graceful and even though she is much taller than me, her feet are about two sizes smaller. She has the most beautiful, gurgling, musical laugh I have ever heard.

She nearly had a brother last year. She doesn’t know his real name so she and her mom called him Luca. He was being adopted from India and he was supposed to be six or seven years old. She and her mom had plane tickets to go to India to collect him, but a couple of weeks before the trip, the Indian authorities told them that medical tests on his wrists showed that Luca was in fact thirteen years old but so malnourished that he looked much younger. The Indian government doesn’t allow children over twelve to be adopted.

‘That’s terrible,’ I said. ‘Poor Luca.’

‘I know,’ Kylie replied solemnly. ‘When I’m eighteen I’m going to travel to India and try to find him.’

‘You can come with me if you want,’ she added and she also invited me to her apartment the next day.

Scott and Leela dropped me off the following morning on their way to New Jersey for a birthday lunch for Leela’s mother. I was very impressed with Kylie’s bedroom. She owns more clothes than all of the girls in my old class in Dublin put together. Her bedroom is painted purple and orange, and almost everything in it is purple and orange because those are her favourite colours, but if she were forced to choose between them to save her life, she would choose purple. Nina, the babysitter, gave us little plastic pots of baby
carrots
with hummus and glasses of cranberry-grape juice. We spent most of the morning playing dancing on Wii. Kylie is a much better dancer than I am and I’m not being modest. The streak in her hair was green this morning, not pink, and she showed me her hair highlighters in seven colours, which wash out very easily. She said that a royal blue streak would look cute on me so I let her highlight a big chunk of my hair that fell down over the right side of my face.

Kylie appraised her work and said in a satisfied voice, ‘It’s a statement.’

After a couple of hours, Nina walked with us over to the West Side and we stopped in a crowded bakery for cupcakes. After much agonising, Kylie chose a red velvet one but I had the banana pudding because it tastes like happiness, far better than all the cupcakes. Kylie talked about school as we ate.

‘I’m so bad at math, which really sucks because, since I’m Asian, everyone thinks I should be good at math but I’m not.’

‘I’m crap at maths,’ I admitted.

‘What are mats?’ asked Kylie in a puzzled voice. ‘Do you mean mat weaving classes, because my mom went to those? She bought a loom but she got fed up so now we just store her loom in the basement because she thinks she will start weaving again when she has more time.’

Kylie rolled her eyes at me.

‘No, no,’ I said, laughing. ‘I meant mathematics. What subjects do you like?’

‘I like ice-skating and dance classes but we don’t do them at school; I have private classes,’ Kylie said. ‘I’m going to be famous and have the frozen chocolate milkshake at Serendipity every day and go to all the movie premières and the best parties and I’ll wear custom ice-skating costumes designed by the coolest designers.’

‘What about the people who will follow you all the time and try to photograph you when you have toilet paper stuck to your shoe?’ I asked.

‘The paparazzi?’ she said, ‘that’s just the price you have to be prepared to pay for fame.’

‘You definitely seem prepared to make the sacrifice so I’m sure you’ll make it,’ I said sincerely and she looked pleased.

‘I’ve been thinking lately that I want to work with
animals
,’ I said, surprising myself more than Kylie.

She looked a bit sorry for me but she said kindly, ‘Maybe you could do a cameo on some show on Animal Planet’.

Scott stared at me when he saw me and I wondered uneasily if I had a snotty nose from all the air conditioning, but
then he said, ‘Are you trying to be a smurf?’ and I
remembered
my blue-streaked hair.

‘It’s a statement,’ I told him helpfully.

‘A statement of what?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted.

He looked confused.

‘Would Alicia have let you colour your hair?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think so, if it washed out, and this one does.’

Over tacos that evening, when I told him about how Kylie wanted to be famous when she grows up, Scott said that there are many millions of Americans who don’t want to be famous but everyone forgets that they exist because they’re not on reality TV shows. Then it got a little awkward because he said that he hadn’t been spying on me but he noticed because I borrowed his iPad that I seemed very interested in reading about death. He wanted me to go see a friend of a friend of his, called Dr Steve, who specialises in bereavement counselling for kids.

‘I can’t think of anything worse,’ I said rudely. ‘I’ve already been to Mrs Scanlon in Ireland and I’m therapied out,’ I added.

Scott looked sympathetic.

‘If you want to talk but you don’t want to talk to me, you can try Joanna, or you can try Ben; he’s an excellent listener and never judgemental.’

I nodded.

‘I promise,’ I said.