The United States of Us Read online

  The United States of Us

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  MAY, 2006

  AUGUST, 2005

  OCTOBER, 2005

  JANUARY, 2006

  APRIL, 2006

  MAY, 2006

  JUNE, 2006

  JULY, 2006

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.

  I’ll meet you there.

  When the soul lies down in that grass,

  the world is too full to talk about.

  Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’

  doesn’t make any sense.

  ~ Rumi

  FIRST LIGHT

  MAY, 2006

  North American Wilderness

  It’s a code-red situation: Life or Death, the last thing on her bucket-list. Truth untold she’d always thirsted for this. To come this close to the edge of joining me.

  He pushes her to the forest floor, her face against soil and twigs. For a split-second of madness she allows herself to enjoy it – a perverse clash of joy and terror and a flash-shot to the brain of lions mating. He’s not thinking about what he’s doing. Primal instinct takes him over, she feels it.

  Mia Hart’s become the kind of girl who can take care of herself. Only last night she yelled at the American now on her back that she didn’t need his protection. A bear attack is some exception.

  I’m no mind-reader, not usually. I’m in her thoughts so much I can’t help it. We’ve become entwined – our connection mental, not physical. I have to stop it. To stop all of it. I try to pick up a rock, a stick, to scare off the bear, but my hands slip through solids again and again. My powerlessness is torture. I’m strong but stuck. All I can do is watch. Since my death, most of my male ego is vanquished but when I’m with her, I’m still the guy – I want to be the hero.

  I am the seer. I am the unseen.

  Mia’s heart pounds in her neck, head and ears. She draws in her elbows, her fingers. Warm liquid trickles down the back of her neck – she can’t tell if it’s his saliva or blood. It’s the closest she’s ever been to him. She loves his smell – she always has, though she’s tried to deny it.

  This is a story about soul-mates, not where it began but where it needs to begin: twenty-two-year-old Mia pressed against forest floor, crazed bear bellowing in her ear and a man shielding her body. This is a story about love, the power of actions over words. A story of how one day can change everything.

  NINE MONTHS EARLIER

  AUGUST, 2005

  The Island of Utopia, Tyrrhenian Sea, Europe

  Utopia is what the kids are calling it. It is a sun-drenched, semi-secret island commune in the Tyrrhenian, just off the coast of Italy. The kids are the intrepid travellers who come from all over the world to live as part of an international community, who want to escape the pressures of life. It attracts nature-loving, resourceful types, those with peaceful ideals. I’d love to be part of it, if I was still alive. I try not to feel too much. I’m training myself to detach. Allowing anything more is painful, dangerous, frustrating. I learnt that the hard way.

  An island of good cheer and colour, this is the last place on the planet a person could be lonely, and yet Mia still is. That’s her, in the dusty thoroughfare, under the apple tree, writing her journal, distractedly watching a procession of chatting, laughing islanders pass by. In fact, she isn’t so much journaling as sketching birds; lately she doesn’t know what to write, creative flow run dry. Outwardly, she’s the personification of freedom. Secretly she’s enchained. We are linked to each other by her inability to let go of me. Earthbound, I am held here, unable to move on. Always by her side, I watch her all the time. A girl haunted, she thinks of me just as often.

  Mia takes a bite of apple, a summer of fresh fruit helping her healthier appearance. Weeks ago, she washed ashore as driftwood, a worn-down piece of the person she once was – dark circles around her eyes and cold sores at the corners of her mouth tell-tale signs of her depletion, of sadness surfacing. As a freelance travel-writer, Mia had taken on that many jobs in foreign lands whilst she wrote that by age twenty-one she’d led a hundred different lives. Trying to lose herself in the world, she’d become estranged from everyone, disconnected from her roots, to the detriment of her own well-being.

  Only an unplanned visit to her eccentric great aunt – her Zia – in Italy turned things around. She told Mia of the island retreat, said she should visit – it would do her good – what’s more it held personal significance. ‘You should visit, Mia,’ she said. ‘It’s part of your heritage. That’s where my parents – your great-grandparents – met. My mother was left by sea-gypsies at that old abbey as a baby. When she grew up she returned to the island as one of the nurses who cared for war-wounded men taken to its hospital during the First World War. Your great-grandfather arrived there an injured soldier.’ Zia claimed that, since then, the island has been a safe space for people to heal and to reconnect. ‘Miracles happen on that island,’ she told Mia.

  Mia needed a miracle.

  Attributing her restless spirit, her wanderlust, to the little she now knew of her sea-gypsy ancestry, Mia told herself it was in her DNA, that she wasn’t just running away from what happened to me. Putting her fear of the sea aside, she took her chances, paid close attention to the whispers of the savviest travellers on the mainland coast and got a small boat across to Utopia.

  Upon arrival, Mia was pleasantly surprised to find the island a laid-back, deeply spiritual place – life centred around mass meditations in an informal sandstone church with high domed roofs, people sat on carpet with ethnic throws and cushions instead of pews. More than a retreat, to many, it’s a celebration of life, a nature camp, a writers’ and artists’ haven. Here, you can be your true self – not your slip-ups, your pay-slips, your job-title or relationship status. Utopia’s an uplifting place to engage with heart and soul. Mobile phones collect dust under bunk-beds and there’s not a laptop in sight – most people here prefer real connection. Candles are used rather than light switches, fires instead of electricity. Utopians sleep out under stars or in wigwams, yurts. Unmapped and unadvertised, plenty still find the island, with two-hundred travellers living here this summer.

  It’s full of good people, yet Mia hasn’t let anyone close to her.

  She shuts her journal and starts on a solitary walk away from her single-occupied room and the utility station where she worked this morning.

  As part of a working community, everyone on the island takes a job. Mia opted for laundry duties – changing beds, washing linen – others garden, pick fruit and veg, clean the solar-showers or prepare meals for the masses in the rustic stone kitchen. Utopians live this way all summer – between chores, enjoying warm starry nights around the camp-fire, pristine stretches of white beach and blue crystal waters – their hilltop community alternating between sanctuary and carnival. This is this island oasis that, for the past couple of months, Mia has come to call home.

  Naturally curious, Mia came in part to check it out, hoping for inspiration. She’s been searching the world, hungry for a story – something to sink her teeth into, that book to solidify her bitty writing career. If only walls could speak – the stories that this place held – wartime romances like that of her own ancestors, but no, she’s trying only to look forward, to where she’ll go after summer when she’ll have to leave this place. And she’ll have to leave this place, everyone will; it’s an imminent reality. The community is only open to the non-ordained for the summer, and summer is drawing to an end. It’s easier said than done; reminders of me are everywhere – in the song
s of birds, the sound of sea.

  There’s only one place in Utopia where Mia consciously allows herself to think about the past.

  She likens the spiralling steps of the wishing-well to venturing deeper into the psyche. It seems private, no-one else ever here when she visits; Mia supposes that others aren’t aware of it, or aren’t interested in hanging out in a dank underground grotto, despite the shade it offers from the blazing sun. To her this spot is special, not only because it feels like a hidden treasure, but because there are no distractions here, she never has to feign an I’m fine smile. Stone circle of water below her, circle of blue sky above, things feel elemental, real, and she’s safe to simply be.

  Mia winds down the well to where mermaids cobbled together with shells decorate the walls, to where food was kept cool in days of old, and where she hides from the heat. This is where she is, stood still before the water in the wishing-well, the first time she ever sees Zak Ryder.

  Mia isn’t making any wishes this time. Usually she wishes for a story to write – she’d write about the island but likes that it’s not publicised – the other wish she’s wished a thousand times is that she could go back to that day on the beach and change what happened to me.

  Mia, alone as usual, is staring into the water, reflecting on how her Italian great-grandparents would’ve been about her age when they got together on this island, and how lost she feels by comparison – single and drifting without purpose. She consoles herself that at least the current community look out to sea to check for new travellers arriving, not in fear of enemy invasions, that they look to the sky, marvelling at weird cloud formations, not cowering beneath air-raid planes. She’s considering what to do with her life after the island when, out of the blue, something drops in the water before her, a little splash making silver ripples. A patter of laughter – she glances up the well, sees a smile – a flash of white teeth, gone before she gets a proper chance to see.

  Who was that? A man’s face – one she doesn’t recognise – and she knows everyone on the island, by sight. She moves up the stairwell, starts to run up and up till she’s outside, blinded by sun. There’s no-one there, just the trail of a scent – musky, powerful, intoxicating. She looks around her. Everything’s still.

  Whoever was there with her in the wishing-well is gone.

  * * *

  Leaving her dorm, Mia hears her name called as she passes neighbour Anna’s window. Czech dorm rep Anna has been trying to befriend Mia all summer, her persistence only tugging on Mia’s nerves, which tighten up like a drawstring bag whenever Anna tries to prise Mia open. Beyond the amiable interaction required of community living, Mia keeps herself to herself and minds her own business. It’s not that she’s unfriendly, but she only has so much space for company and I take up most of it. It’s like she has a wall around her, just the two of us inside of it.

  Anna’s stood at her own window behind a vase of flowers and glass bottles every colour of the rainbow, melting sunlight pouring into them making them glow. She told Mia she’d found them in an old workshop where the elders used to distil essential oils, and brought them back to her room to store her home-remedies. Mia sees she’s stirring a potion by the sink, using the apricots she’s been sun-drying on a wooden rack outside for the past week. Anna’s been playing alchemist since she borrowed a book on homoeopathy from the reading room; Mia’s noticed her reading it.

  ‘You can try when it’s ready,’ offers Anna.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Today, iron tonic. This one great for energy. I keep little bottle just for you – being vegetarian you need. I make with apricot – I find apricot tree here on the island, just past apple orchard. Full of fruit!’

  Mia, more interested in solving the mystery of the face she glimpsed above the wishing-well, sees her window of opportunity. ‘Has anyone new come to the island?’ she asks Anna, the dorm rep, who was usually up-to-date with such things.

  ‘No. The boat list is still the same. Why?’

  ‘I think I saw someone new today. Someone I haven’t seen before.’

  ‘But we know everyone on the island.’

  ‘That’s what I thought…’ Mia looks perplexed. Never one to linger making small-talk, she turns to leave, but Anna stops her again, always so keen to connect. Mia has systematically shied away from Anna, diverting her neighbour’s inquisitive mind with historical novels Mia found under her bed – books that had not only improved Anna’s English, but now explain her sporadic use of bygone terminology.

  ‘You going for walk? Here, take home-made sunscreen.’ She puts down her wooden spoon and holds out a little tub to Mia through the open window.

  ‘It’s nearly sundown.’

  ‘So use it tomorrow, I pray thee,’ insists Anna. ‘Made with coconut oil. No terrible chemicals.’

  Mia accepts the tub. ‘Thank you,’ she says with a small pang for not being more open to caring but overbearing Anna, whose offers had included teaching her how to read tea leaves, how to read the sky, who joked about being a little witch but who hadn’t missed a single mass all summer.

  ‘Forthwith, I wish to make banana conditioner. We have too many bananas in camp-kitchen – how you say – going off. I can treat your hair.’

  Mia smiles politely, rests the tub outside her own door and keeps moving on just the way she’s used to.

  She walks through the biodiversity garden with its beehives, through the orchards and down to the bay. Waves lap gently on the shore, glinting like diamonds in the setting sun. Further down on the smooth sands, Spaniards sit relaxing, their laughter carried on the sea-breeze as she nears the water. A scattering of silhouettes lie talking as colours change all around – orange, violet, gold.

  That’s when she sees him, sat on a rock, gazing to shore like a merman – the face from the wishing-well – to Mia a strikingly handsome face – with careless raven hair, aqua eyes –

  He catches her in his vision, she flushes and looks down. Suddenly aware of how she’s holding her body, she pulls herself up straight, slides off her flip-flops, pads across the flat sand, hitching up her sarong as she wades into the glittering water – it’s as far into the sea as she’ll ever go. Because of me. I made her afraid of water. I never meant for that.

  The earthly world’s on fire tonight. Sunset shines in the clouds and in her eyes. The first star appears bright, clear and lovely.

  ‘Buonasera,’ says a young voice at her side. A dusky-skinned child from the village approaches her, in his palm glistening shells. He’s wearing blue swim shorts and a pair of goggles on his head. He’s seven or eight, polite but unafraid.

  Mia stares at the boy. ‘Where are your parents?’ she asks him. The boy’s expression suggests he doesn’t understand. ‘Mamma? Papa?’ she urges.

  He points to a woman sat in the distance, mostly camouflaged by the palm trees. Seeing her child point her out, the mother gives a friendly wave. Relieved, Mia calms down and stoops to observe the boy’s proud collection. ‘Bellissimo,’ she says, picking up a flat pearly shell with a little hole in it, rubbing its surface with her thumb. One of her straw-coloured braids falls down by her face. The boy looks at it curiously then gently tucks it back behind her ear. She smiles at him and they hold each other’s gaze awhile – the boy all big green eyes and long wet lashes, the staid expression on his face suggesting he takes the art of shell-collecting very seriously.

  ‘Bellissima,’ he corrects her quietly. ‘It’s for you,’ he says.

  ‘Grazie.’

  They both smile, both distractedly for different reasons.

  Wading around in the warm evening waters, the boy child continues the important business of collecting shells for as long as the sun will allow it.

  As Mia turns back to shore, she sees that the man on the rocks has vanished.

  * * *

  Mia hobbles barefoot along the path. She’s carrying a book in one hand, a hurt bluebird in the other. In the hoo-ha that just occurred, she dropped one of the other b
ooks on her toes. A lizard scuttles alongside her and disappears into the rosemary.

  ‘Hey.’ Appearing from nowhere it’s the newcomer she saw on the beach yesterday, guitar strapped to his back. ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Here, let me help you,’ he says.

  ‘It’s fine, it’s fine. I’ve got it.’

  He follows. ‘Can I at least carry your book for you?’ An American accent – the hint of a drawl.

  She passes him the one book she’s still holding. ‘If you want to help you could rescue the other books I dropped on the track. They’re not mine, they belong in the reading room. I was taking them back to the exchange.’

  ‘Where?’

  Mia gestures back along the sandy path. ‘Just follow the yellow brick road.’

  Catching Mia limping past her window, Anna rushes out onto the balcony. ‘What happened? You look like you had fight with bush – is that how you say?’

  ‘I have – and a cat – it was trying to get the bird.’

  Anna follows Mia into her dorm – only the second time she’s been in there – the first when Mia gave her those classic novels as a diversion. Mia never invites anyone back here. She grabs a towel, lays it out, gently transfers the bird on top of it. ‘He flew into a window, was flapping about when this cat tried to pounce him. I dived for the bird, scared the cat away, dropped the book on my toes. How do you treat an injured bird?’

  ‘We need a shoebox,’ says another voice. They turn to see the new guy standing in the doorway. Without invitation he pads into her room. Mia, becoming stifled by the little party forming in her personal space, casts a glance at the both of them.

  ‘Bluebird,’ he says. ‘Italy’s national bird.’ Anna gawks at him. ‘Hey little guy.’ He props his guitar against the table. ‘Broken wing. I think we can rescue him.’

  Mia tips out a box of toiletries onto her bunk, takes the box back to the table. ‘Here.’