Home/Land E-Book

Rebecca Mead

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

When the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, she was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she'd given up as she left New York, her home of thirty years, she tried to knit herself into the fabric of a changed London. The move raised poignant questions about place: What does it mean to leave the place you have adopted as home and country? And what is the value and cost of uprooting yourself? In a deft mix of memoir and reportage, drawing on literature and art, recent and ancient history, and the experience of encounters with individuals, environments and landscapes in New York City and in England, Mead artfully explores themes of identity, nationality and inheritance. She recounts her time in the coastal town of Weymouth, where she grew up; her dizzying first years in New York where she broke into journalism; the rich process of establishing a new home for her dual-national son in London. Along the way, she gradually reckons with the complex legacy of her parents. Home/Land is a stirring inquiry into how to be present where we are, while never forgetting where we have been.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY REBECCA MEAD

The Road to Middlemarch

One Perfect Day

HOME / LAND

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

First published in the United States of America in 2022 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

Copyright © 2022 by Rebecca Mead

The moral right of Rebecca Mead to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Grove Press UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 660 6

Ebook ISBN 978 1 61185 869 3

Printed in Great Britain

For George and Rafael

HOME / LAND

A few years ago, when my son was in middle school, he would every so often ask me an odd question:

What’s your favorite apocalypse?

What do you mean? I would ask, puzzled and a bit impatient. The apocalypse isn’t a color, or an ice cream flavor, or a band, or a book. It’s not the kind of thing you have a favorite of.

If you had to choose, Rafael, my son, would say. I know you don’t want any apocalypse in real life, obviously. But if you had to pick one, what would it be?

He would offer alternatives. Would I prefer an apocalypse of fire and explosions, burning forests to the ground and reducing cities to rubble? Or an epidemic: contagion spreading ruthlessly from person to person and nation to nation? Or would I choose his own personal favorite, a zombie apocalypse, hiding out in the woods with a stash of rations, building shelters from sticks, starting campfires with birch bark and twigs, on the run from legions of the living dead who march through the land with their arms outstretched before them, shredded skin hanging from their limbs, eyes rolled back in their skulls?

His own eyes would shine as he described this last permutation of the end of the world, and I would know where his favorite apocalypse was set: at summer camp. For a few years, he attended an all-boys camp in the mountains of Vermont, trading his Brooklyn bedroom for a rustic cabin overlooking a lake. There were lessons in knife skills and fire-starting skills. There was a climbing wall, strenuous hiking and a fair bit of idling—at least that was what my husband, George, and I could discern from the very occasional letters our son wrote home. One time, we received a long letter in which he confessed to having accidentally set a patch of hillside on fire when he and a couple of other campers were playing around with a contraband box of matches. What could have been a disaster was turned into a cautionary lesson—the three boys had their fire privileges revoked for the rest of the season. The envelope was covered with penciled postscripts, scrawls of mortification, though later he would turn the story into a comic anecdote—that time when some real-life danger intruded into the highly curated pseudo-risk that the camp specialized in.

The camp was intensely rustic, with no electricity in the cabins, and no flushing toilets. (A cup full of sawdust tossed down the black pit: that’ll take care of things.) There were bonfires and cookouts and thrilling mass games conducted by flashlight and moonlight. Every session ended with a banquet for which inventive counselors decked the dining hall with festooned greenery and papier-mâché sculptures, like a stage set, then dressed up in costumes like something from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The camp had been founded on Quaker ethics, which had morphed by the 2010s into an observance of secular, progressive principles: campers and counselors stated their pronouns upon arrival. The environment offered an antidote to the popular culture in which boys like my son were daily immersed: electronics were forbidden, and there were no movie nights or candy Fridays, as there were at some of the camps his friends went to. At the same time there was also a highly intentional intensification of the contemporary currents of liberal parenting as they were observed in the part of brownstone Brooklyn in which I lived. Lord of the Butterflies— that was how I thought of the place. I was enchanted by so much about it; and at the same time, it drove me a little crazy.

So it was clear where my son imagined his favorite apocalypse transpiring—there, in the sun-warmed freedom and privileged primitivism of a Vermont summer. Meanwhile, he got his apocalyptic ideas, his rich array of alternative end-times, from a culture saturated with entertainment that offered the enticements of incipient destruction and violent demise. At the bookstore, he’d be drawn to thick volumes with lurid cover images—a scythe-bearing, hooded silhouette, or the close-up quadrant of a young face that was not so different from his own, with brown hair flopping over a green eye, though the skin in the illustration was pallid and gray and the terrified eye was rimmed with rust-red shadow.

When we rode the subway together, he studied the movie posters featuring cataclysmic images plastered on the platform walls: the White House in flames, helicopters circling overhead while a tattered American flag burned; a cityscape of scarred skyscrapers and crumbling bridges. There were images of square-jawed men equipped with exoskeletal body armor and guns so oversized that the combatants would surely stagger under the weight of them, like the kids who haplessly attempted to wield foot-long water pistols in summertime battles at the playground. There were images of good-looking teens advancing warily through dense forest growth, armed with improvised cudgels or lances and dressed in ragged sweatshirts, bearing camouflage-print backpacks like the one my son had insisted on buying at an Army surplus store and which he was forever filling with supplies for an impending evacuation or escape: a Nerf gun, a compass, a pocketknife, a notebook.

The posters were alarming and beguiling. There was a glamour and excitement to the various catastrophes they portended—as palpable to me as it was to my son, even as I would attempt to steer him down the subway platform to a cozier poster from a cartoon or a comedy while deflecting his persistent questions about what was represented in these action-movie images, the firepower of their weapons and the volatility of their civilizations.

“We’re all going to die!” one of Rafael’s classmates shrieked excitedly when George and I dropped him off in the playground of his middle school, a few blocks from our house, the morning after the presidential election. Our son joined the throng of children competitively comparing notes on the night before—who’d seen the shocking result coming first, who’d stayed up the longest, whose parent had cried—while George and I went to walk in circles around the hilly, verdant park at the end of our block, turning over what had transpired as we passed beneath old-growth trees. For months, I’d been in a state of agitation, experiencing an anxious constriction that I knew only from the most grief-stricken moments of my life—during the serious illness of a loved one, or when a difficult work environment had curdled and become intolerable. The edges of my consciousness had turned shadowy. I felt as if my existence had contracted, shrunk down to a meager tunnel of survival. But I had anticipated that relief was inevitable, and that the shadows would begin to clear.

Now, it seemed, the darkness was only at its beginning. We could leave, George and I started to whisper to each other as we walked through the park in the days and weeks and months that followed. Should we leave? When will we know whether we should or not? When will it be too late? We thought of George’s paternal grandparents, who fled their home in Vienna with my father-in-law, then eight years old, and his older brother only when they learned their names were on a list to be rounded up the next day. We engaged in our own apocalyptic imaginings, watching with despair that was renewed daily as the news unfurled. This isn’t that, we told ourselves. But what this was, we didn’t yet know.

Periodically, my cellphone now sends me photographic reminders of those days: You have a new memory, it tells me, as if I have forgotten the march in Washington, with the tip of the Washington Monument wreathed in mist and the hordes milling on the Mall. The next day, I slumped in the passenger seat of my friend Nancy’s car on the return journey to New York, my son and her daughter listless in the backseat, their cardboard protest signs creased and shoved in the trunk. Nauseated, either from fatigue or fear, even before we set off, I vomited into a ziplock bag as Nancy drove, then gazed weakly out of the window into the imperceptible distance. Another memory: a rally a few days later, at the Battery in downtown Manhattan, my son’s face pinched beneath the hood of the blue winter coat in which he is bundled up, the sky clear and astringent, so cold that before the protest was over my feet were numbed through the thick soles of my boots.

We’re going to spend every weekend marching, we said to ourselves back then, though we didn’t, of course. When I scroll through photos of that time, and the months that followed, I see ordinary life, too: images of Rafael dressed in an academic gown and gray V-necked pullover, improvised Hogwarts, for a literary-themed costume party at school—it was that kind of school—or grinning goofily with a friend on the waterfront at Brooklyn Bridge Park at dusk, the Manhattan skyline framed behind them and the wide East River glistening. There are images of Rafael with his arms gleefully thrown around his big brothers, George’s three older sons—all grown men now, though when I first knew them they were still a distance from adolescence, the oldest barely thirteen, the younger ones eleven and eight. There’s Rafael’s twelfth birthday party, held in a playground near our house, with water pistols and cupcakes and a gaggle of kids, wet-haired from the sprinklers and glowing in the early-summer heat. There’s an annual camping trip with friends to Fire Island, where the kids frolicked in the cold surf of the Atlantic by day and played after sunset on the shore, wheeling through the darkness with colored lights attached to their fingers. We adults drank red wine from plastic mugs and talked about the books that we’d been reading under our beach umbrellas that afternoon while doing our best to ignore the headlines on our phones. Inevitably, we would end up discussing the news anyway: the executive orders signed, then contested in the courts, then tweaked and signed again; the belligerent tweets and the xenophobic pronouncements—each proposed policy testing the limits of what, moment by changing moment, the law and the popular mood would allow, with a relentlessness as incremental and as erosive as the ocean’s encroaching tide.

And there are shots of visits to England, where I was born and grew up, and where I lived until I was twenty-one and moved to New York for what I thought would be only a year, though it turned out I was still in the city three decades later. Here’s my son, swimming in the cold, clear water of the bay on which my seaside hometown lies, in the southwest of the country, the pebbles visibly gleaming beneath the calm surface. Here he is in the nave of the church just a few miles from my childhood home in which a seventeenth-century clergyman gathered a group of would-be settlers to sail to the New World, among them—the coincidence amazed me—one of George’s maternal ancestors. Here is Rafael again, lounging on the bulbous, modernist couch in the lobby of the fancy London hotel where we scored a discount on a room. The hotel was near Trafalgar Square, and we walked to the National Gallery, where we stood before the painting by Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, which depicts two French noblemen, swathed in rich furs and silks, who have been dispatched to the court of Henry VIII. Beneath them is rendered a puzzling, distorted black-and-white smear, which, when viewed from the correct angle, resolves into the image of a skull. It’s a memento mori, George explained to Rafael. That means a reminder of the inevitability of death.

The photo roll on my phone does not show exactly where in this progression of time our own fretful half-formed thoughts of leaving New York resolved into a more concrete image. It does not capture the conversations George and I started to have as we circled the park on our afternoon walks, the arguments we started to stack on one side or the other, as what had begun in a sickened impulse toward flight—we could always leave—began to press upon us as a compelling plan, even a hopeful one. If the steady, vile drip of our newsfeeds had something to do with our sense of destabilization, there were other factors at work, too. We were ready to be set in motion, to veer from what seemed to be the predictable path of our lives.

For a while now, George and I had talked, or at least fantasized, about making a change. When we rode our bikes through different parts of the city, we wondered what it would be like to live closer to the river, or to occupy a glassy modern apartment instead of our creaking, dilapidated nineteenth-century house. We had once been seized with a feverish, weekend-long notion of getting a place out of town and drove a rental car to Long Island, where a realtor took us to see what was available in our very theoretical price range: a clapboard fixer-upper with sagging steps and an unconvincing roof; a bare-bones, open-plan cabin with an aspect onto its own gravel parking space. We drove home with that particular fever having broken, but a sense of restlessness remained.

The restlessness was not really about moving house— although moving house, even from one part of Brooklyn to another, might have relieved the itch for a while. It was, rather, an increasingly urgent questioning of whether we could sustain the structure of the life we had built together so far, and whether we wanted to. For as long as George and I had known each other our plans and decisions had been more haphazard than not, influenced by impetuosity as much as by common sense, though we could often make plausible arguments for our choices in retrospect. Unlike some remarkably organized people whose habits I’d observed, we had formulated nothing so concrete as a five- or ten-year plan: here is when we will trade one domicile for another; here is how we will cover our rising health insurance costs; here is how we will pay for college; here is where we hope to end up, when our past extends back much further than our future looks forward. Rather, we had the habit of sorting through our situation in conversation moment by moment, probing alternatives and floating possibilities. We could do this. We could do that. But how about doing the other?

As we circled the park, walking and talking, hitherto unspoken urges coalesced and were given utterance. There was a buried yearning, on my part, to endow my son with a real sense of his dual-national heritage—for him to know England not just as a fun place to go on holiday, but as a culture he could move through with ease and confidence, a place that was not just mine, but his. Rafael was still young enough to be moved and transplanted to a different educational system, but with high school around the corner, he wouldn’t be much longer. The chance would be lost if we didn’t take it now. There was a weariness, on George’s part, with the ever more burnished, ever more capitalistic glossiness of New York, a city which he had left and returned to multiple times in the decades before he met me.

I still loved New York, the city for which I had fallen when on the brink of adult independence, and to which I had stayed faithful for far longer than to any romantic partner. But I was nonetheless seized with a melancholic sense of foreclosure. I did not want unthinkingly to let the next years or decades pass by and to discover that, having at one time had the drive to launch myself into the unknown, I had never been sufficiently brave to try it again. I did not want to shy from trying something new—and, although I had been born in London, living there as an adult would be a novel experience for me, so long had I been absent from the country, and so unfamiliar to me was the city. Once, when stuck with a difficult decision, I’d been advised by a friend to imagine the choice has been made on either side, and to see how I felt about the alternatives. When I tried this thought experiment, picturing myself having stayed in New York City or having left, I discovered that I wanted, decisively, to leave. George had his own reasons to weigh in the balance, but his conclusion was concordant with mine. We were energized by a new, shared determination. Neither of us wanted merely to subside—that was the word we returned to, as we imagined breaking out of the circle in which we were moving and setting ourselves onto a more erratic course.

There’s something important we want to talk to you about, we told Rafael a few days into January, a year after we had marched and protested in the streets of Washington and Manhattan. We went to lunch at our favorite local restaurant, where we sat at a table by the window and ordered a plate of red and golden beets for us, a burger for him. I’d been unable to sleep the night before. Rafael also looked worried. Later he told me he’d been afraid we were going to announce a decision to divorce, though the opposite was true. In the crisis we had come to, George and I felt more unified, more married to each other’s fate, than we’d had reason to articulate in years. When we got the words out—we’re thinking that we might move to London, we said—Rafael’s face lit up. We’ll be able to visit Grandma more often, he said. We’ll be able to go to Europe for the weekend. Will we live in a house, or a flat? Where will I go to school? His buoyant enthusiasm was heartening, and it was concretizing. I wept with relief at the table, then laughed at the tears trickling down my face. I’m okay, I told Rafael, who looked at me with tender confusion. It’s just a very big deal.

When I scroll through the photos on my phone, different sorts of pictures start to appear in the stream from that time on. There are residential streets of terraced houses built from London stock brick, the familiar gray-yellow beneath the gray sky of an English winter. There is the low-lying concrete Brutalist structure of a state secondary school, built fifty years earlier during a boom in city-council-funded construction. There is a stretch of shopfronts whose signs betray their British locale: a chemist’s, a launderette, a tea shop. There are images taken in Brooklyn, too, of outgrown playthings—a train set and a bag of model farm animals, ready to be deaccessioned—as well as photos of the interior of our house, the scruffy kitchen cleaned up with newly acquired mason jars arranged on a shelf and flowers on the table, and my son’s bedroom radically tidied, with books aligned and toys tucked away, ready for visits from prospective new owners.

There are realtors’ contracts, and passports, and residency-application forms, and certificates from the vet confirming that our two cats are rabies-free: the time-consuming paperwork of voluntary, privileged exile. Then there are images that show the work of a removal team—the boxes stacked high before the emptied bookshelves in the living room; the old, torn, chenille-covered couch that I had bought twenty years earlier to furnish my apartment in Manhattan, long before I was married or a mother, and that had moved with me to Brooklyn when I first made a home with George. George took a picture of me, skinny from anxiety in old blue jeans and a beat-up T-shirt, sitting on the couch where it stood on the cracked bluestone of the sidewalk, beneath the wide boughs of the cherry tree, before it was hefted early the next morning into the crushing jaws of a trash truck, one armrest still hanging out of the back of the compactor as the truck pulled away and rounded the corner.

There are pictures of partings, pizza dinners with family and friends. There are images from a final nighttime walk up the hill in the park at the foot of my block, my son scaling a lamppost on the plaza around the monument to the Prison Ship Martyrs, Americans who died in the war for independence. An image taken at dusk at the marina near the World Trade Center shows words from a poem by Walt Whitman cast into an iron barrier along the waterfront, picked out in gold paint: “Proud and passionate city! Mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!” An image shows my son shadowed by the cast-iron loft buildings of a SoHo street, looking over his shoulder at passing trucks and yellow taxis while before him is an assortment of wheeled suitcases and bulging duffel bags and a black plastic file box: two items per person, our family’s luggage allowance for the first one-way flight from New York to London that I have booked in decades.

Then, at last, there are images of arrival: George on the towpath of the Regent’s Canal as it wends past Regent’s Park in Central London, a weeping willow bending to the water that is vivid green with a bloom of duckweed as thick as a carpet; Rafael atop Parliament Hill, from which we can see the city laid out before us under an enormous, cloud-dappled sky that is as beautiful as any I have ever seen on any continent. There are mundane snaps of the interiors of houses we are taken to by estate agents, including one with a roof terrace that overlooks a picturesque stretch of back gardens leading gently up a slope to what we don’t yet know, but will learn, is the site of the local hospital on the crest of the rise. There are images from Europe, where—with nowhere else to go, our next short-term lease in London not yet begun—we spend two manic weeks driving from city to mountain to seashore, barely aware of the borders as we cross them between Italy and France and Switzerland and back to France again, staying in a seventeenth-century abbey on a lakefront one night and touring the ramparts of a Gothic castle the next, gulping down European antiquity along with the wine, the fresh fish, the diverse languages.

We end up in Marseille, a city we have never been to before, where we visit the museum of Mediterranean civilization, with its architecture that blends modernism and Moorish influences, and its exhibits telling the story of the ceaseless exchange and transit between the lands that edge these waters. We eat chickpea fritters at the old port and tell each other we love it here, we have to come back soon, there’s even a direct train from London. The holiday interlude ends with images of my son setting off for his first day at the Brutalist comprehensive school, grinning in a Nike hoodie and Adidas tracksuit bottoms— a self-conscious, semi-satirical emulation of the pictures I used to take in Brooklyn on his first day in pre-K, kindergarten, first grade, just as my father took one of me before my own first day at school almost forty years earlier, anxious in navy blue gymslip and bright red sandals.

The last pictures I look at are images taken on a bridge that crosses the lake in St. James’s Park in Central London. There’s one of George with his arm around Rafael’s shoulder, and I’m struck by their strong resemblance: they have the same jaw, the same cheekbones, the same warm olive skin, though George’s hair is silver where once it was as dark as our son’s. And there’s one of Rafael and me, his expression bright, optimistic and open, his arm thrown affectionately around my shoulder, the gesture he has adopted only recently, in the months before this picture is taken. At last, on the cusp of adolescence, he is taller than me. After a lifetime of turning his face up to me as he holds my hand on the streets or the subway platforms of Brooklyn, he now looks down on me from what seems with each passing day to be a greater and greater distance.

The time stamp is just after six in the evening in late September, half an hour or so before sunset. The last light is glinting on the water, and the blue sky is tinged with pink on the horizon beyond the roofs of Whitehall. The leaves of the trees have turned green-gold. It was, I remember, even without the phone reminding me, a breathtakingly beautiful evening. We were, I remember, slightly giddy—at the novelty of our surroundings, at the grandness of our gesture, at the prospect of our adventure. We felt the exhilaration of upheaval. Because while it is true that we were shaken by the shifts in the world around us, another truth is that we chose to rock our own foundations. We decided to bring the upheaval upon ourselves. We chose movement, because movement is a kind of freedom, too.

It’s a bright, chilly morning when I get a text from John:

Are you around locally? Need a quick chat.

My heart sinks—not because I don’t want to see John, but because I am afraid of what he will tell me: that there’s a hitch. John is a carpenter, and for a few weeks he’s been building some bookcases in the house into which we will be moving a couple of days from now, more than six months after the garbage truck carried off my couch in Brooklyn. We’ve been shuttling from one short-term rental, friend’s apartment or hotel room to another, and while the displacement has been voluntary, it feels by now almost punitive. Our possessions, including 170 boxes of books, are aboard the Maersk Gairloch, a cargo ship whose mesmerizing progress from Baltimore across the Atlantic to the English port of Felixstowe I have been checking on a tracking website: one among hundreds of tiny ship-shaped icons tracing the seas along invisible channels of passage and return.

I text John back to say I will meet him in half an hour at a greasy spoon on the Kentish Town Road in North London. The street offers a wide variety of commercial establishments: a craft coffee shop selling complicated filtrating instruments; a thoughtfully curated independent bookshop; and a Pound-stretcher, where, the morning after we arrived at the first of our temporary London homes a few months ago and couldn’t locate the linen cupboard, in a rush I bought towels, which were black, the only available color, and utterly nonabsorbent. Using them was like trying to dry yourself with a piece of laminated paper. There are lots of charity shops in the neighborhood, and an equivalent number of estate agents. The Middle Eastern grocery has shelves stocked deep with tahini and the spice mix rasal-hanout, while the cluttered hardware shop offers a baffling inventory of screws and hinges, indeterminate metal fragments glittering in the gloom like an Aladdin’s cave with its contents turned to dross. Best avoided is the health spa that even I’ve been in the neighborhood long enough to have heard is a swingers’ spot. I’m meeting John at an old-school caff, its plate-glass windows streaked with condensation. When I arrive, he’s at the counter ordering a coffee and a bacon sandwich on sliced white bread, chatting with the guy behind the counter like an old friend.

John is one of nature’s celebrities—one of those people you occasionally meet who is touched with irresistible charisma. He’s sinewy and muscular, a physique that belies his seventy-odd years, though his face is craggy, and the joints of his fingers are gnarled and misshapen. His eyes are animated, vivid blue, narrowing with a sense of humor and, sometimes, the suggestion of menace. I get a coffee and we sit down at a table, and John runs his hand over the surface, appraising the varnished finish. He’s a scrupulous craftsman, laboring over dovetail joints with the same effort I expend in turning a sentence, and with the same pleasure when it all fits together.

I wait for him to give me the bad news: that he has another more pressing job to work on; that he’s stumbled upon a structural problem with the house; or, worse, that he’s run into private problems of his own. There’s going to be some reason why he can’t complete the bookcases that have slowly been materializing in what will be my living room but right now is a workshop full of plaster dust and wood shavings. I know people have their own troubles, and me being able to get my books in order is hardly the most important thing in John’s life. But dealing with the books has taken on an urgency beyond the inconvenience of construction: they have come to stand in my mind for the home George and I slowly built together and then swiftly dismantled. The prospect of shelving them again seems like a salve for our agitated domesticity.

I’m wrong: John hasn’t got bad news. He lowers his head, then withdraws a folded piece of paper from his pocket. His gestures, as always, seem slightly wary, slightly coiled—I have noticed that John never takes up more space in a room than he needs to. He unfolds the sheet, and I see on it a couple of images: samples of metal mesh for the radiator cover that I have asked him to incorporate into the bookcase.

“I was thinking we could use something like this,” he says, pushing the paper across the table to me. “What do you think?” He looks abashed, almost like he’s expecting rebuke.

What I think is that I’m so grateful I could throw my arms around him, and when he suggests we go in his van to a place he’s heard about behind St. Pancras Station to see if we can buy supplies, I forget whatever else I intended to do this morning and say I’m ready to head off. We leave the café and go around the corner to the side street where John’s white van is parked in front of a row of tiny townhouses painted in pastel shades of pink and blue and lilac, bursting from the grimy streetscape of the Kentish Town Road like a crop of bright bulbs springing from wintry soil.

John jerks his close-cropped silver head to the right, up the street. “My mum used to live just around here,” he says.

I don’t know John very well yet—he was recommended to me on a neighborhood website—but he talks to me as if I know his family and his history, and in a sense, I do, because I’ve read about it online. Google my name and all will become clear, he texted me not long after we first met. I’ve been out of the game for many decades. I’m just trying to get my life back together. I tapped his name into my phone, and a headline from a few months earlier popped up: “ ‘You start getting bitter’: What I learned from forty-three years in prison.”

I read on. Until recently, John had had the distinction of being Britain’s longest-serving prisoner, convicted of murder after settling a brawl in a pub in Hackney with a shotgun in 1975. A bouncer had slashed a friend’s face with a bottle, wounding him so badly that his eye was hanging out. John and another friend had taken the injured man to hospital, then returned, armed, to the scene of the fight. In the melee, John had shot the bouncer at close range. “I was really full of hatred, and, before it could fizzle out, I went and done the deadly damage,” the story read. “Obviously I wish we hadn’t, but there we go.”