Where does this story begin, my British story. It begins in 2002 maybe, when I was sleeping on the floor of Terminal Three in Heathrow, after I had I spent the week in Ireland with my sister and the day in London, wandering around and finally taking the underground back to the airport. I can still remember exactly where it was that I slept. Or maybe it starts in that second time we came back, when we flew in from Malaysia and there we were in queue at immigration on New Year's Eve and I wondered if the paperwork I had would be enough to get me into the country, my exhausted family behind me, another time we'd packed and sold everything. That night, when the girls and Yoko and her friend went on and I stayed back with our things, hired a car and stopped, on the way up the M1 to smoke a cigarillo at a Welcome Break. Maybe that is the beginning.
Everything is hard until it's not. I ran home from work and Yoko wasn't here and I texted and called and she came home finally with the package. Eight weeks, I told myself, and I opened it and read the first page, which said nothing, it said our Biometric Cards would come in a week. Yes, but where did it say we were successful, had we been successful. I turned the page and there, finally, was the sentence, Your application for indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom has been approved. There it is, there is the sentence. I pointed to it, and we pulled out our passports and took pictures with mobiles and I read the letter again. See, it was nothing. There it is, it's all done now. You did so many things wrong, didn't work all the loopholes you could have, didn't get reimbursed like you had thought, missed the chance to apply for numerous other jobs, didn't go to Finland when you could have, but now none of that matters. We took pictures and I read the lines to the kids, and we had dinner and it was over.
Where does it begin. Yoko and I are in Shibata and we've been arguing like young married people do with the baby there, and the email came saying I had won the PhD studentship — of course we couldn't say no to that. We were on the ferry with Naomi as a baby, pulling away from the port and I was thinking that I would be back in a few years. Of course I would be back, what else would I do. Or the night we left Milton Keynes for Malaysia in a taxi, a black van, down the M1. What did we think then. It was over then, wasn't it, or did I know that it wasn't.
The house on Victoria Road fell asleep and now, just now, wakes up like any other day. Someone will be crying again, and I will try to write and make my way up to the Plough to see Yoko and then have meetings at work and run home to trade-off the kids. I will now kick myself for the mistakes I made, for the things I should have known that I didn't know, the five thousand pound loophole that I missed, and work more and harder and feel guilty that we were okay in the end when so many other people weren't. I'll realise it all doesn't matter one day, I assume, whenever I realise the thing I've been trying to get has been here all along. When the girls wake up and I hug them and they tell me whatever it is they need to tell me. When the house is quiet before it is loud again, when I meet neighbours on the High Street and greet them. We were pretending until now, you can't see it, but we aren't pretending anymore.