Stranger In A White Dress

Chapter One

1980, five days after Good Friday

The immigration officer studied my passport.

‘Length and purpose of your stay?’

I hesitated. ‘One week, I’m visiting my boyfriend…’ I left out the hospital part.

He raised his eyes. ‘Travelling alone?’

‘Yes, but I’m meeting his mother at The Holiday Inn in Maryland.’

He nodded. ‘Hope it all works out for you, Miss.’ He stamped my passport and pushed it across the counter. ‘Welcome back to the USA.’

My hands trembled as I shoved it in my bag, mumbling, ‘Thanks.’

Hope it all works out for you. Me too.

A stream of announcements boomed around the terminal and I froze on the spot. I couldn’t think, couldn’t think what to do. Last time Jon led and I followed, but that was in California. My American dream. Now I stood alone at Dulles Airport.

What dream? Let’s call it a nightmare

People knocked past me, a few in pairs, some in groups, all surging on with purpose. A cluster of passengers I recognised from the plane gathered at an overhead screen. I unglued my feet and followed them. The rolling sequence of numbers and letters made no sense until my flight details flashed up, along with directions to Baggage Reclaim.

Of course, my case.

Luggage of all kinds trundled by on the carousel. At last, I spied mine, a grey, pummelled suitcase bumping towards me. I braced myself, grabbed its handle and scraped it off to a thud at my feet, cursing its weight under my breath.

Others strode off towards Customs leaving me in their wake. They had something I didn’t – a trolley. A quick scan around revealed a row of them stacked against the opposite wall. “One dollar per Cart” read the sign. I didn’t have a dollar bill.

Time was melting away since landing. I checked my wristwatch and gulped: the hour hand ticked to four pm. I cast around for a wall clock with the true time on America’s East Coast – eleven am. I moved my watch hands back five hours. Farewell, British time, for now.

Evelyne expected my call, but my bladder was fit to burst. I needed the…what do they call it here? Not toilet. Bathroom? Restroom? I found a restroom first, then a telephone among several on a wall, each one housed in mounted, plastic domes reminiscent of hairdressers’ dryers.

The queue – line, its line, Tom’s voice sniggered in my head – stretched long. Long enough for scrunching the scrap of paper with Evelyne’s number like worry beads in my fist.

One came available. I dashed over as fast as possible with a suitcase to lug, dragged it inside and straddled it as I checked the instructions. A stab of nostalgia for a grimy old British red phone box with its greasy-thumbed phone book turned to sweat beads at the nape of my neck. It hit me: I had never used an American public phone. I didn’t know how.

With my back angled to the gathering behind me, I fished through my purse for what was left of my American change. A dime and a nickel for a ten-minute call, the instructions stated. Ten cents or five cents? Big or small? I slid what I hoped was the dime into the slot. It caught, fell out, and in my fumble, the other coins clattered to the ground.

Snake-like panic coiled around my throat.

My frenzied attempt to sweep them up brought me eye-level with a black, shiny shoe tapping inches from my face. My gradual rising view revealed it belonged to a man in a smart suit, his frown a furrowed vision of impatience.

‘Sorry.’ I straightened up, embarrassment stealing my decorum. ‘Not sure how to…’

He sighed, stepped forward, and took the small coin from my open hand.

‘This is a dime, just put it there in that slot.’ He pointed to the bigger coin. ‘Then the nickel.’ He met my blank stare with another sigh. ‘You got the number, right?’

With a weak though grateful smile, I handed him my crumpled, hand-hot piece of paper. He took the change, slid the coins into the slot and punched in the numbers.

‘Here you go.’ He planted the receiver in my hand. ‘You’re through.’ I turned back to thank him, but he had darted inside a vacant booth.

Evelyne picked up at the first beep, breathless, agitated. ‘Sherri, thank God, your taxi’s waiting outside, he’ll bring you to the hotel then we’ll go on to Jon.’

In the bright blaze of spring at the exit, I squinted at the huddle of chauffeurs holding signs with the names of their fares. A middle-aged man wearing baggy jeans and a sweatshirt emerged. He approached me with hopeful recognition and his instructions from Evelyne. My taxi driver.

‘You from London?’ He took my case and laid it in the trunk.

‘I flew from London,’ I said, wanting nothing more than to retreat in silence.

‘It rains a lot there, yes?’ I smiled. ‘Hopefully the sun will shine for your visit here.’

No weather where I’m going. ‘Thanks, that would be nice…’

I flopped with relief onto the back seat. I had made it this far. The clunk of the door closing and the rev of the engine as he pulled away from the airport gave me no room for doubts, if I had any. Too late now in a car with a man I didn’t know, driving me anywhere he wanted in America. He might be the Zodiac for all I knew. But the mounting dread bearing down on me had nothing to do with him or where I was going.

It was for all that was waiting when I got there.

*****

The signs, at first, were small.

On a bitterly cold January morning, my car chugged, sparked and died. I pulled on the choke and pumped the accelerator, promptly flooding the engine. Jon hopped out to push-start it back to spluttering life.

‘I’ve never seen you so cold,’ I said when he slid back inside, teeth chattering. I turned the heat vents to high, grinning as I added, ‘even when you wear your jacket!’

T-shirts and jeans worked well in LA but not in Suffolk’s frigid winter temperatures.

‘Yeah.’ He patted both arms. ‘It’s fucking freezing out there.’

But my joke wore thin. The shivering made sense, but not the breathlessness he denied. ‘It’s nothing, just the ‘flu, everyone’s got it on base, I’ll be fine.’

I wanted to believe him when he dismissed my concerns about his night sweats. I wanted to believe him when he rubbed his knees and hips and blamed his workouts. And when he tightened his belt one notch at a time. An unrelenting sore throat had me pleading with him, ‘Please, Jon, see the doctor?’

At last, he made an appointment on base for Good Friday. On Thursday night he called, full of reassurance. ‘I’ll get some antibiotics, pack up my stuff and be with you by lunchtime tomorrow. We’ll have a great Easter, okay?’

But Good Friday came and went and no Jon. I spent all afternoon willing him to leap out from his taxi with his see-I-told-you-so smile, and I’d fold in relief, my groundless notions consigned to history. Instead, I paced by the front window and no taxi, no Jon and no smile. The phone rang hours later, strident, urgent. I had it clamped to my ear at first bell.

‘Jon?’

But the American on the line was Wild Bill, his friend and roommate.

‘Jon’s asked me to call you to say he’s held up but he’ll call you as soon as he can.’

‘Is he okay? Where is he, do you know?’

His sharp intake of breath stopped mine. ‘Look, I’m sure it’s nothing, just a precaution, but they’re taking him to RAF Lakenheath.’

‘Lakenheath? But that’s fifty miles away, I don’t understand…’

‘He’s gone by ambulance,’ he cut in and my heart thumped to a standstill. ‘If… there’s anything you need, call me, okay?’

Every calamity imaginable stormed my thinking, each one too awful to contemplate. I clambered upstairs and crumpled in a heap on my bed where I waited, motionless and unblinking for Jon’s call. And when it came late that night, his words left me drowning in quicksand, shaking with bone-rattling shock.

‘The doc found something he didn’t like.’

The next day they strapped him to a gurney and airlifted him to a military hospital in Maryland. From then to now in a taxi five days later, my desperation ruled me – go to him. Go now.

The soft thwump thwump of the taxi tyres on tarmac gave a strange, hypnotic rhythm as we journeyed on. Lush trees bursting with fresh leaves flashed past my window, a great verdant forest of them cut through by the freeway. No palm trees here.

Would I have changed a thing? Should I have walked away?

I should have known. I had dared, dared to believe we’d be happy, our future within our grasp. But a vague disquiet gave constant nagging chase. The rumble of a distant storm though up above the sky spread bright and blue. A crackle in the air. An observance from the shadows. Something not quite right.

A happy girl, happy in the garden, seven-years-old with Mum planting roses, Paul digging for worms and Dad leaning on his spade. Tap, tap, tap with his cigarette on his silver case, the scrape of a match to light it. The sleeves of his red plaid shirt rolled up, jeans tucked into his gardening boots and he grins through wisps of grey smoke crinkling his eyes.

‘Let me see then, show me how you fly like a bird!’ I flap my arms, twirling so fast that my dress forms the shape of a bell. I trip and land on the grass and we laugh. ‘Very good!’ He grinds his stub in the ground and carries on digging.

It comes then. A harsh, raucous wail. I clamber to my feet and train my eyes above the roof of our house. Another, then another as if in mutual reply, mournful cries rippling a disturbance through the air. They have invaded my haven and I go back inside, play over.

I know it comes from the peacocks at the mushroom farm across the road. They are exotic and gleaming and strut around when I wait with Mum to buy goat’s milk for our kittens. But while Dad digs and smokes, Mum presses down soil and Paul races around with his knees black as mud, they don’t notice me watching from the window. The cries are a warning but they don't hear it. They don't listen. I am alone.

And on the day when trouble came, my girlhood logic told me those peacocks cried for me. It told me to hide my turmoil from the world. And so it morphed to something darker – a spectre lurking in the shadows, a claw down my back, a reminder to keep watch over my shoulder.

Something terrible is coming. Are you ready?

The White House gave a glimpse in the distance. I imagined President Carter signing papers in the Oval Office. A white, gleaming obelisk traced the skyline, its history lost on me, with no thrill as it came into view. But Washington DC was lost on me, no more than an entrance to its neighbouring state of Maryland. No more than a way through to what must come next.

The taxi driver brought me ever closer to my destination. Ever closer to Jon. Whatever he faced I would face it with him. But fear gnawed my gut: was I strong enough for Jon? Was I strong enough for me?

Chapter Two

In 1978 I had a dream. An American road trip kind of dream.

It came to me sitting with Mary in her room stuffed with records and books belting out the lyrics to Baker Street. We’d take the Greyhound, work in bars and eat pancakes drenched in real maple syrup in real American diners and go to Hollywood.

The Great Escape had me utterly spellbound at twelve. At eighteen, Steve Mc Queen’s poster still donned my bedroom wall. He had sealed my mission – fate? Destiny? I chose all three – of going to Hollywood, finding him and riding off together into the Pacific sunset.

But as our plans spilt out into the small hours, my longing did not linger on a faded school-girl crush. The place itself, California, it pulled and it tugged. It came from a deep-seated part of me. A slow, steady drumbeat, it called.

Mary had listened to me enough times blathering on putting to rights the futility of my place in the world. I likened it to a sense of chasing the wind where the leaves blew, of asking questions without answers.

We had met the year before. There she sat on the floor at the party, back to the wall, smoking a cigarette. She made a beeline for anyone she deemed an outsider, I discovered. I was no exception. She caught my eye and wandered over. Her open, honest face and faded, flared jeans met me in my floral, frill-hemmed midi-dress twirling a warm Cinzano and lemonade in my hand. When she offered me another drink, she caught me glance at my boyfriend, absorbed by his older friends across the room.

Surely she had read my mind: why shouldn’t I drink as much as I want?

‘How about you come out with me to The Buck one night?’ She said, her eyes ablaze with indignation. ‘Have some real fun.’

Thus I escaped to my single life and lived for the weekends dancing and drinking and smoking with my new best friend. With all my friends.

‘You looked like you needed rescuing, Sher,’ she later told me.

And when Saturday Night Fever burst onto the big screen in Ipswich, I lost myself in the disco beat on the dancefloor in those hours through the night.

But as spring turned to summer, a familiar restlessness seeped through my plans, red wine on a dazzling white napkin. Doubts about the road trip crept in. I would have to give up our jobs. I didn’t have enough money. And did I have the guts to take my chances in America? Excitement, risk. Exhilaration, danger. But what if…? What if something bad happened? The truth emerged: I wanted adventure and the daring that came with it, but it made me afraid of what it meant if I got it. And afraid if I did it would burn to ash.

Maybe one day, maybe then.

Maybe at summer's end when an American GI bought me a drink in a pub on a quiet Sunday evening. His name was Jon, stationed at the US base in Woodbridge, three weeks in. He’d chosen California for all eight bases on his “dream sheet”, but they’d sent him all the way to England.

‘Man,’ he said, ‘that’s trippy, don’t you think?’

More “trippy” for me when he said California. Because he lived there.

He got recruited in LA – his hometown.

I had to ask. ‘Do you like Steve McQueen?’

He swigged his ale and shot me a lop-sided grin. ‘Of course! He’s the King of Cool.’

And Jon knew where he rode his bike, somewhere called Pismo Beach. Because he’d ridden his bike there too, by the Pacific, on the sand. Before he’d signed up as an airman in the US Air Force to straighten his shit out. Girl trouble and a job pumping gas.

At a small, round table in a corner away from the bar, our legs pressed together in the small, tight space and I liked it. Did he like it too? When he took a soft pack of Marlboro cigarettes from his top shirt pocket, the kind all the Americans smoked, he offered me one. I took it, he lit it and I let my fingers graze his hand to guide the flame until it snapped dead. Then he leaned in closer as if with a secret meant only for me.

‘I’ll take you back to California next summer if you want? I mean, as a friend…’

If I want? Did he mean it? I didn’t care. I didn’t want him as a friend; I wanted him all. But was it real? We had met once before and all I had known was his name and I had almost given up hope of ever seeing him again.

A few weeks earlier in July, out with my friends as usual at The Buck. Wishing on a Star played. I didn’t fancy a steamy smooch with the guy making moves, so I ducked outside for a smoke. I finished, stubbed it out and turned back to the door.

‘Scuse me, Miss,’ came a voice behind me.

A light and gentle touch skimmed my arm.

Startled, I spun around.

I didn’t need to hear his accent to know the tall guy with a military buzz cut and wide, friendly grin was American military. Like his fellow GIs, he stuck out a mile in a sea of long-haired locals at the only nightclub in town when the pubs closed. But none had the effect on me this GI had now.

Neurons fired at rocket speed through my brain cells. In those thirty seconds they say it takes to like someone I knew: I liked him a lot. The way his Levi’s jeans hung on his lean hips. The cut of his sweater across his broad shoulders. Brown eyes.

And in that smooth, formal way he’d called me “Miss”…