After avoiding alcohol for a month
mostly in service of an attempt to get my body back, this last week I have been
wandering to and from pubs in Harborne, finding myself buying naan on the walk
home for 80p at the takeaway just past that old blown out roller skate
rink. On Monday, this stop involved having a chat with a police officer about
corruption in the UK police force compared to the US, me trying very hard to
not appear like I had just been out drinking and this man, excited to have a
bit of culture in his otherwise cultureless night. I turned over my one pound coin
and wished him and the man behind the counter good luck awkwardly. Good luck
with what.
And then last night, the church had a variety show, something that felt very British with vaguely colonial moments, and Yoko gave me five pounds to buy a bottle of white wine. I drank it over the two hours of the performance, the whole thing fading moment by moment into a surreal fever dream of 17 year-old me, thinking about England and Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath somewhere up in the Yorkshire Moors before she stuck her head in that oven. At the end, the lights came on and everyone belted out God Save the Queen, me included, full of cheap wine and irony, thinking, well, this is fitting. I tried to sober up enough to say goodbye to the Vicar, and thank him, Give me a passport now, I said. I'm British.
The Pihlajas of Harborne is an imaginary iteration of our family that I've been toying with while thinking again about my relative value in the community — am I just residing here for my own benefit, my beautiful children leeching off the welfare state with our free education and healthcare and Mia's free hot lunches. To be fair, very few British people seem to think this about me, the friendly white American man with the beautiful children and Chinese-looking wife. A mortgage advisor said to me several weeks ago when I was thinking I might buy a house, If we're getting rid of people like you, then we're really lost. Sure, I thought, but you don't know much about immigration policy in this country. It's not supposed to make sense. That's the point.
Despite my Tier 2 status, I want
to believe I have something to offer. Surely Harborne benefits from this splash
of colour. Today, in McDonalds, where I had taken the children in spite of Yoko's objection, I was drinking espresso from a paper cup. A
younger mother, with a boy and two little girls in highchairs, yelled over to
me, Can I use your phone, mate? I didn't know what to say, I hesitated. It's
fine, she said, I just need it to call someone to pick me up, I'm here with my
kids, I'll give you a pound. I didn't know what to say, It's not about the
money, it's just that- and I realised I had nothing to say, so I pulled my phone
and gave it to her with all the Protestant judgement I could muster. Call your meth
dealer on my phone, I thought, I've been feeling like I have nothing to lose
anyway.
She was thankful and had a short angry conversation on the
phone before saying she needed to send a text. I had eased into the situation thinking
about the parable of the sheep and the goats, which I had taught earlier in the
week in a metaphor class and felt increasingly like this might be a freebie: do whatever you need
to do. She lightened up, Where are you from? she asked, and I said, Chicago,
and she smiled happily and pointed at the girls, And them? Mia said, Japan! just
as I was saying, America too, and it felt disjointed and awkward. Well, you're
from America too, I said to Mia, which is, of course, a lie. The woman thanked me and went back to her table and I got back to nicking fries off the children and feeling bad about myself. The woman stood up and signalled to me that she needed to take a call on her own phone, which appeared, and left her kids. The boy was focused on me, It's hot in Chicago, right? And I said, well, no, not really. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught his sister in the high chair starting to get up to try and get a balloon she had dropped. I sprung up to stop her, suddenly holding this little girl saying, no, no sweetheart, you have to sit here, you can't get up. She sat back down, and I pulled my chair over.