Life in a toilet

So far, so bad. The entire morning had left me feeling bewildered and lost. After Adam left, I quietly unpacked some of my clothes onto the wooden shelves. I couldn't hang anything on the bar because there I had no clothes hangars. I placed a few pictures on the shelves, along with a brightly painted wooden box an artist friend had made for me years ago.

Instead of making the place feel more like home, seeing my few belongings so far away from everything I knew made me feel even more lonely.

My suitcases filled the little space to bursting and I could only cross the room by clambering over the bed.

This was no way for a grown woman to live, I thought reprovingly. Back home I'd had a two-bedroom apartment filled with things I owned. My pictures on the wall. My color scheme. My furniture.

Now I owned the things on that shelf. Some clothes, a couple of photos. A pretty box.

I had the two keys Adam had given me. The emptiness of the key ring reminded me of the James Spader character in the film Sex, Lies and Videotape. His goal had been to live his life with just one key. To him that symbolized freedom and independence. (Although I did puzzle over that while watching the film. He had a house and a car. Surely he had two keys? But I didn't like to quibble - it was a very good film.)

Wait - why am I thinking about Sex, Lies and Videotape right now?

By now I was fairly certain that moving to England had been a foolhardy action, taken without sufficient reflection or consideration, and likely to leave me in a worse position than when I'd started.

So, the usual then.

If I wanted to, I thought wearily, I could go back home right now. I could be gone by the time Adam came home tonight. He'd wonder what happened to me. I'd be a great mystery - he'd talk about me for years. And I could just tell my friends in Seattle that I'd hated it here.

I imagined their responses, and realized I couldn't actually do it. They'd think I was nuts. Or a coward.

'You can't just give up!' I told myself firmly. 'You haven't even given it a chance. Quit being a baby. Pull yourself together.'

The first thing to do, I decided, was to get out of this room.

So I explored the chilly house from top to bottom. Or, at least, I explored all that I could - the other bedroom door on the top floor was closed, and I didn't dare open it.

That must be 'Shazza's' room. What kind of name is 'Shazza'? Sounds like a genie. Or a horse.

A door left ajar at the end of the hallway opened onto a bathroom - more spacious than the one downstairs - with a 1970s acid-green bath tub, sink and toilet. It was clean, but the color scheme depressed me.

Somebody had carpeted it with thin, gray carpet that was darkened with mildew around the tub.

Down, then, to the next floor, to the living room and kitchen, which were nice enough - I suspected I'd spend most of my time here. Down again to the garden-level, where there were two more doors. One was closed, and I presumed it was Adam's room. The other was ajar, and I pushed it gently with the back of my hand and peered into the gloom. The spacious room was twice the size of my bedroom and filled with odd pieces of sitting room furniture, most of it antique - dating back, I figured, to the 1940s. The room was dusty and dim; the dusky pink brocade curtains were closed. Boxes were stacked here and there, and an ironing board was set up near the door. It was a strange looking room to find in a man's house, although it was clear it wasn't used much. I suspected I wasn't welcome to poke around it.

Back in the lemony yellow living room, I pondered my next step. I was tired and longing for sleep, but I was too anxious and excited to rest. I needed a purpose, and food could be that purpose.

Taking the map Adam had left on the kitchen table, I grabbed my new keys and struck out for the Tescos.

Once on the street and in the fresh air, I regained my equilibrium. Now it felt like I was exploring. Intrepidly researching my new neighborhood. This would allow me to make more educated decisions about whether or not I liked the place. It was time to meet the neighbors.

The first decision was simple - right or left? Left would take me to the park at the end of the road, and its green depths were attractive. Right would take me further along the curving length of Marlborough Road - into the unknown.

Right it was.

As the map dictated, I turned right again almost immediately into a narrow alleyway lined with little 19th-century cottages. In one of them a baby screamed lustily. Ahead of me a startlingly young woman pushed another child in a stroller.

She strode confidently through the shadow cast by an ominous Victorian aqueduct that hung over the street like a bird of prey. I followed hesitantly, thinking what a perfect murder location it would make. I could almost picture a body lying in a pool of blood in the gloaming beneath it.

But there was no body. Just bricks and the cooing of pigeons nesting in the bridge's under-skeleton.

This street was quiet but short, and carried me through to a bustling main road dominated by a graceful old town hall building where the clock told the wrong time. All around it winos perched in noisy flocks on iron benches placed around the gray town square. Empty potato chip bags wrapped the lower branches of beleaguered looking trees and bushes.

Somebody seemed to have painted everything here with a thin layer of dirt. Why on earth would they do that?

A wino shouted something incomprehensible in my direction, and I hustled by, towards the busy road ahead.

An old man with no legs propelled himself down the street rapidly in a wheelchair, a can of something nestled in his lap. He drew near another man in charity-shop clothes who leaned nonchalantly against the wall of a bus stop. The wheelchair-bound wino shouted in a thick Irish accent, 'Feck you, then! Feck you! Cunt! Cunt!'

Oh great, I thought. My first encounter with a person sharing my family's Irish heritage. How heartwarming.

Following the map's suggestions (I was now mentally adding tiny drawings of drunken hobos to it for future reference), I veered left, down the busy road, looking for the prettily named Morningside Lane. But after a few blocks it still hadn't appeared despite the map's insistence that it would, and I began worrying about the map's intelligence and trustworthiness.

I considered asking one of the people rushing by me, but they all seemed to move with the speed of the pursued. Then I saw sailing serenely among them the reassuring tall hat of a police officer. I made a beeline for him.

'Excuse me,' I began, and he turned his pale blue eyes on my appraisingly, 'I'm looking for Morningside Lane. It's probably right in front of me but I can't actually find it. And... ' I faltered as he studied me with open curiosity. 'I'm... new... here.'

'I'm sorry, I don't think I'm going to be much help,' he admitted in an accent nothing at all like Adam's. More like Michael Caine's. 'This isn't my usual beat. It might surprise you to know that I don't know this area at all. You'd probably be better off popping into one of the shops and asking the locals.'

Then, seeing my slightly crestfallen expression he asked, 'What are you doing here anyway? Are you a student?'

'No, I've just moved here from America. This is my first day,' I answered brightly.

'But you can't!' he said unexpectedly. 'You can't move here.'

'Why not?' I asked, startled.

'Because it's a toilet.'

He said it incontrovertibly. As a matter of fact.

Suddenly I found myself defending my newfound shit hole.

It might be filled with drunken, cursing Irish winos, teenage mothers and picture-perfect murder spots but, damn it, this was home.

'Oh, it can't be that bad, can it? It's got... shops, and...' my mind cast around wildly for anything to defend Hackney. I didn't know it well enough to protect it yet. And it looked pretty grim to me. What had I seen that wasn't wretched?

I came up with, '...and that nice town hall.'

He laughed at me. Laughed at me!

On my first day in London a policeman laughed at me.

Jeez. All I wanted was a sandwich.

'Well,' he said, 'I wouldn't want my daughter living here, and I don't think you should live here either. If you've rented a place, stay for as long as you have to and then take my advice: move someplace else. Just about anyplace else actually.'

And with that, he wandered off, whistling. And I still didn't know where the damned grocery store was.

Welcome to Hackney

Every traveler feels a strange isolation when they arrive in any foreign country. It's a kind of shaky, vaguely nauseating, but not unpleasant sensation. I think it comes from not knowing enough. You don't know who to call if things go wrong. You don't even really know where your hotel is. You don't understand the lay of the land. Terra is not firma.

When you arrive in a foreign country expecting to stay - or to 'settle', as the immigration officer had called it, calmingly, like a teacher to a class of unruly children - that sensation is amplified to a level just short of unbearable. This strange place is home now. Home sweet home. Where you don't know what zucchini is called. Or shrimp. Or shopping carts. You don't know how to call an ambulance.

Home sweet home for me was Hackney. Jon had arranged for me to rent a room (to be a 'lodger', he called it) there. His co-worker, Adam, made money by renting rooms in his sprawling house near London Fields.

I rented it sight unseen. Jon's recommendation was not exactly enthusiastic, but he made it clear I had few options. At the end of a long, useful email, he'd said of Adam, 'I think maybe he's a good person, although I'm not certain. He means well... or at least I suspect he does. He's just a bit crazy, but not in an entirely bad way... usually. At any rate, you don't have to live there for long and it's a better than a bedsit.'

'What's a bedsit?' I wondered.

Hackney. It sounds unpleasant. Tired. Worn out. An old, used up concept is 'hackneyed'. I looked it up on the internet and found little to change my mind. Words like 'crime' and 'poverty' came up a lot. But Jon said it was really quite trendy, filled with people who worked in publishing and television.

He'd helpfully booked a minicab for me, but after my epic experience at the immigration counter, a small luggage fiasco (my bags clearly weren't made to last) and the long hazy blur of plane time, I emerged exhausted from the arrivals section at Gatwick Airport without a clear idea of just what a 'minicab' really was. Was it very tiny? Did it have an engine?

It proved to be a slightly battered blue Ford that seemed to belch air freshener from every orifice. My bags would not all fit in the UK-sized trunk, so a big purple suitcase sat beside me on the backseat. It was taller than me, and I held my arm around it comfortingly.

The driver was a very small, very polite man who told me he'd lived in London for eight years but his heart was really in Bangladesh. He said very little else during the two hours we spent together listening to tinny British pop music interspersed with the bellowing of incredibly enthusiastic British DJs.

When asked, the driver said we were in Surrey, and I stared out the window learning what suburbs looked like in England - tiny yards packed with clothes on lines behind toy-town houses, all surrounded by traffic jams - and thinking. Worrying, really.

We barreled onto a slim freeway that seemed to have been built at a time when everyone drove much smaller cars. It was already clear that the protective cushion of personal space I'd always taken for granted simply did not exist here. Not around people walking; not around cars driving. Nobody touched, but they missed each other by inches.

I had two hours to think about that as the Ford rattled alongside cars that looked little different from those back home, save for the lack of SUVs and pickup trucks. At one point, I tried to figure out why the landscape seemed so empty, then I realized there were hardly any billboards.

That's nice, I thought. You can actually look around you without being sold something.

I thought about everybody back home, and wondered what Sharon was doing right now.

Hmm, it's 2am. She's sleeping.

I wondered if she wondered how I was. I pictured my old apartment, with its polished wooden floors, and big windows looking out over the bustling street. Every Saturday morning I would throw on my yoga clothes, step over the clothes I'd thrown on the floor the night before, run a comb through my tangled hair and walk down to Perkys to meet Sharon for bagels and papers before we went to yoga class together. Perkys was our local coffee shop - its real name is La Perc but absolutely nobody calls it that. We knew all the waitresses so well we didn't even have to order, and we were sort of an institution there since we went there at some point virtually every day, and had for the last four years. Sharon was the only person allowed to bring a dog into the place, since everybody loved her fluffy Lhasa Apso, Dalai.

I wondered what the coffee shops were like in Hackney. I wondered how I would get along here without a real friend.

I felt lonelier thinking that.

Gradually the roads narrowed and we slowed to a crawl, driving by battered 19th-century row-houses on gray, dingy streets that seemed to dissolve into the sunless, white-gray sky. Surely this wasn't it? It looked as if some evil genius had developed a system to extract all the color from the world. It made me tired.

Actually, maybe I just was tired.

I really must be careful not to panic. I could come to love this place.

The car stopped.

'We are here' my Bangladesh-loving driver announced, sounding relieved.

We both sat for a second, staring at the perfectly ordinary buildings around us. He waited patiently for me to move, but for quite a few minutes I just didn't.

Was I ready for this?

Finally, with a deep breath, I opened the door. He was out in seconds, and helped me move suitcases nearly as big as him to the sidewalk from the back of the cab, before politely charging me £10 more than the agreed fare because he'd had to wait for me.

$100 for a cab ride. Amazing.

With a thoughtful wave, he drove away and I was alone.

I stood in front of number 55 Marlborough Road, taking it in. Its windows were closed tight, and the glare reflected off the glass revealing nothing of the inside.

The cool humid breeze ruffled my hair. I focused on the positives. This is it. My new life abroad begins right here, right now. Hello world! I have arrived! To do... something.

Grabbing one of the enormous cases by the handle I dragged it up the 10 concrete steps to the door and rapped the glossy black wood three times with my knuckles.

A few seconds later it swung open. Adam was about 6 feet tall, with wavy brown hair cut quite short. He wore a trendy striped purple button-down shirt and expensive glasses. His blue eyes protruded slightly behind them. He had a friendly but nervous smile.

'Hello! I thought you'd be here hours ago!' he gestured me in, then turned and walked a little way into the hallway. Inside the brick three-story building, the walls were painted bright yellow, and I thought they could really stand touching up, as they were quite scuffed in places. A bicycle leaned against the wall by the door, making the narrow hall even narrower.

I dragged my case in, propped it against a wall, then turned back for the other bags still on the sidewalk.

'Oh, have you got more?' he asked, leaning over to peer past me. He sounded a bit surprised. 'Well, I wouldn't leave them out there, people will think you don't want them and somebody will wander along and take them.'

I walked down the stairs, puzzled. What had he expected? That I'd move to England with just one bag? Of course I had more. Wouldn't anybody have more? And why would I leave them outside? Did he think I was an idiot?

Silently, I put the shoulder bag across one shoulder, then dragged the purple monster of a case up one step at a time. He did not offer to help.

'Just leave your bags here,' he said as I walked back inside. 'You must need a cup of tea! I've got to leave for work soon, but I'll put the kettle on.'

He had an accent like Emma Thompson, but not as strong, I thought. His voice was nice - rich, like a radio presenter.

He led the way into the kitchen. It, too, was painted vivid, matte yellow - although more lemony than the shocking yellow hallway.

By God there was color in Hackney after all, and it was all in this house.

It was a pleasant enough room, though, opening onto a comfortable lounge with two sofas covered in loose, navy blue fabric. It had wood floors, and big windows looking out over a green backyard.

He took two cheery orange mugs out of the blonde wood cabinet and set them on the counter, asking all the normal questions about my journey and the cab ride. He seemed almost nice - if a bit too distant for real warmth - and I was puzzled that he hadn't helped with my bags. Why not? Was it a British thing?

Adam, I would learn, had timed his life just right - hitting 25 in 1992, the same year his dad died, leaving him only slightly bereaved and with an inheritance of £40,000. All this happening just as the London property market bottomed out. So he used the money as a deposit on this meandering, four-bedroom house, which he got for 80 grand. He could sell it now, he would tell me frequently over the coming months, for £400,000.

He beckoned me to sit down at the table as the sun appeared suddenly outside, brightening the already bright room still further. He'd put milk in the tea without asking. Milk in tea usually makes me gag, but today it tasted rather nice, almost soothing.

'Right. So I've drawn you a little map of the neighborhood so you can find your way around,' he was saying, showing me the hand-drawn page, replete with little labels reading 'bus stop' and 'newsagent'.

'You'll be wanting to get some food first, I suppose, so head to the Tescos here,' he pointed. 'It's about a 10-minute walk or so. Or you could just go to the newsagent here, but everything there seems to be past its sell-by date.'

In my head I was translating:
Tescos = grocery store
newsagent = convenience store
sell-by date = expiration date

'Gotcha,' I said.

'Catch the 38 bus if you want to come into the center, it stops just at the end of the road,' he said, finishing his tea.

'Now, quickly let me show you around. This is your cupboard.'

He opened a small cabinet door showing me three dusty shelves.

'In some houses everybody just puts their food in together but I don't like that - people can accidentally eat your cereal, and then where are you? Now, here's the loo...'

He showed me a small, clean, somewhat old-fashioned shower room just off the kitchen, then we climbed the stairs to the top floor. He opened the door, and led me into a small room almost entirely filled by a low, wooden double bed. There was no closet, just a bar hung from the wall beside the bed. There was no dresser, but a cheap wooden bookshelf by the window could be used as one, presumably. The walls were painted matte pumpkin orange.

My heart sank, but I kept my face studiously blank.

'I hope you'll be comfortable here. It probably looks small to you - everything in America is so huge - but for a London flat this is actually quite a sizeable room,' he said, a bit patronizingly.

'Oh, it's very nice,' I lied hurriedly.

'That's great, glad you like it. Here are your keys; I'm afraid I must be off. I'm out tonight meeting friends - won't be in until late. Shazza, who lives in the room next to yours, is at work now, but you can probably meet her tonight unless she's out. She's nice, if a bit quiet.'

I stayed in the room as he rattled down the stairs and maneuvered the bike out the door. The door shut with a solid thump.

The house was silent.

I realised he hadn't left me any way to contact him in case something went wrong. It then occurred to me that nobody in this country knew me well enough to really care if something went wrong.

I looked around the orange room and I did not cry.

'Welcome to Hackney,' I said aloud.

Then I walked downstairs to get my things.

So you want to live in England

It all started, as so many things do, with a guy in a bar.

My friend Josh had invited me to meet him at the Empire Bar near the office for a quick drink. Josh and I work in different offices within the same company. We started at the same time so we went through the incredibly dull two-week training course together. Being very bored for a long period of time can really unite people in friendship.

We worked together for a year or so, then he moved over to the magazine and corporate publishing division, while I was transferred to the children’s division. I'm a woman so I must love kids, right?

Suffice it to say: his job was much more interesting than mine.

When I showed up that night, the Empire was crowded as usual, and the music was deafening. I spotted Josh's head of hopelessly wirey brown hair right away - he's nearly 6 foot 5, so he's hard to miss. He was sitting at the bar with a much shorter, skinny guy with a strange haircut of his own and absurd glasses. Josh introduced him as Jon, and explained that he was over from the London office.

Jon was jetlagged and small - no match for the Jack Daniels and Cokes he was knocking back. His glasses glittered in the bar lights as he told us how much he liked Seattle.

'It's just lovely!' he said, his creamy British accent standing out like a Maserati on a used car lot. 'So green. And the air's so fresh! London's pollution is enough to give anyone lung cancer.'

Five glasses of Syrah later, I was telling Jon I’d always wanted to live in England, and he was shouting over the music, earnestly urging me to move there. ‘We’re looking for staff!’ he yelled. ‘I really think you’d fit in!’

His eyes were slightly glazed and he exhaled bourbon on me enthusiastically. Through the alcohol haze I thought I felt thrilled.

London. I’d never been. I did the whole backpacking through Europe thing in my early 20s, but I’d skipped England because it was too expensive to get to and from. You couldn't get on a train in Amsterdam and be there in two hours for 30 bucks. But you could be in Luxembourg. So I went to Luxembourg. I thought England deserved a trip of its own. And I never made that trip.

But I felt like I already knew it. The rooftops from Mary Poppins, the hookers via Bob Hoskins films, royalty from a youth barraged by images of Princess Di – yeah, I knew it.

When Jon sobered up, of course, he wasn’t quite as absolute in his assurances that I would definitely have a job in England and it would be something great. However, he didn’t completely back off.

‘It is not our policy,’ he emailed me a few weeks later, ‘to get visas for foreign workers, or to sponsor them, or to do any of the necessary footwork. But if you can get yourself a visa and get over here, we would probably be able to find something for you to do. You come highly recommended, thanks to me.’

Well, it wasn’t exactly my dream offer of a corporate apartment at Marble Arch and lunch at the Ivy, but it also wasn’t editing kids’ books in Seattle either.

It took me three months to get a visa and six months to decide to go. Among my friends the support was universal. ‘Get out,’ my ex-housemate Shannon told me one day as we discussed it for the umpteenth time in a coffeeshop near my office. ‘You’re bored. Seattle isn’t going to change and neither are you. Just go. Try it. If you hate it – come home. We’ll be here.’

Even as I held the yard sale I wasn't entirely sure I was making the right decision. As I sold everything I didn’t like and plenty that I did, collecting the crumpled dollar bills in an old baseball hat, I worried.

It seemed so limiting. I figured I could take three suitcases on the plane, but nothing more. How can an adult own only what will fit into three suitcases? One for each decade of my life.

But I kept talking myself back into it. Then one day I got on a plane and Seattle wasn’t my home anymore.

Just like that.

It is a strange fact that we are all deeply associated with a place. Whereever it may be, your hometown defines you. We say 'I am' a Texan, a New Yorker, a Parisian... Not just 'I'm from' but 'I am.' I am the place where I live. But that identity changes the second you get in a car and drive away. Or get on a plane and take off.

Suddenly I am someplace else.

The flight wasn’t nearly as dramatic as I’d hoped. The food was dreadful, but the alcohol was free. I sat next to an actress who talked like a butterfly fluttering, her words dancing tremulously in the air. Her huge blue eyes glanced at me tentatively from behind the safety of long lashes. She was as thin as a whippet and as shy as a mouse, but the movie being shown was horrible and we had nothing but time, so by Quebec we were talking. And as we crossed the Atlantic we shared far more intimacies than I had exchanged with anybody for years.

She told me about her boyfriend cheating on her, the small part she was travelling to London for, the trauma of an ingénue turning 30.

I told her about my aimlessness, and the strange anchorless feeling of being jobless for the first time in 15 years, the spontaneity (as I saw the six-month period of agonising) of my decision to move.

The next day, as a preternaturally bright sunrise broke Heaven-like above the clouds, we descended towards London, drinking lukewearm tea and eating blueberry yoghurt.

After a disorienting walk from the gate that seemed to go on for miles - a sort of weary Gatwick Death March - Immigration was grimly lit in industrial fluorescence that illuminated the passengers' secrets for all to see. They use the same kind of lighting in prisons.

The agent who handled my case was a fragile looking, white haired man who appeared absolutely delighted to see me.

‘Oh you’ve got a visa, how wonderful,’ he exclaimed, pressing the last two words together happily, like hands clapping. ‘Well allow me to be the first to welcome you to your new home.’

With great pleasure he kept me at his desk for nearly 30 minutes, talking about where I would live, what I would do, how I'd got my visa. We were nearly done before I realised he was quizzing me for the record, not because he was really interested.

But, eventually he released me with fervent hopes that I would be happy and that all would be well in my new life.

As I walked dazed into the baggage department the actress passed me on her way out, ethereally pushing a cart loaded with an eclectic array of overstuffed suitcases teetering dangerously to one side. She waved at me with pleasant emptiness, as if she’d already begun forgetting who I was.

I had arrived.

Are You American?

"Are you American or Canadian?"

Lost in contemplation of the gaudy magazine cover photo of a woman with huge breasts and no arse cavorting on a beach in some mythical sunny Celebrityland, I didn't hear the question. "She must be famous here," I thought. And, "I wonder who she is and why she didn't stop at a C-cup? Double-D was clearly a letter too far..."

"Are you American or Canadian?"

The question was asked in precisely the same tone and volume the second time, but it was expertly more insistent. The woman behind the cash register was smiling apologetically. She wore a sparkly sari over a tiny white t-shirt, and her long dark hair was lustrous.

Everybody's always apologising in England. They apologise and apologise, with smiles and vocal tones, shrugs, facial tics and tiny little head-ducks, but they always do it anyway, whatever it is they're apologising for. They're the politest rude people in the world.

After three weeks living in London, I already knew the drill. My face gave nothing away - I neither smiled nor frowned. Inside my head I heaved a huge sigh.

"I'm American," I said politely, urging my eyes to look friendly. But not too friendly. That, I had already learned, scared them.

"Oh, American!" the woman said, looking surprisingly delighted. "I've always wanted to go there. My brother-in-law frequently goes to New Jersey on business. Are you from New Jersey?"

"No. I'm from Seattle."

She looked completely blank, as if someone had switched her off. Disappointment bordering on resentment shown unfettered in her almond-shaped eyes. I knew what she was thinking ("Why couldn't she be from New Jersey? How difficult would that have been?") but she clearly wanted to be helpful - to make me feel better - so she was definitely going to say it, wasn't she? She was going to say...

"Seattle - is that near New Jersey?"

The time was going to come, I suspected, when I would say yes to that question. Some day, a few years down the road, out of sheer self-indulgent weariness I will start saying yes. Or I will say something equally despicable like, "No, but do you know where Florida is? It's right next to Florida."

Someday, but not today.

"No. Seattle is far away from New Jersey. As far away as New Jersey is from London."

"Oh," the woman said, unable to hide a kind of childlike wonder in her eyes.

Amazing. It had happened several times already - that look on people's faces when I talked about home. I found it astonishing. It was as if, for some, America still held some power. I couldn't believe that it could after everything, but it seemed a little magic dust still clung to its fingers. It could still make some people dream.

"That's £1.95," the woman said.

Nearly $4. Good God.

The newspaper and bottle of water I was buying rested precipitously on the edge of the over-crowded counter between huge trays of chocolate bars, atop stacks of unfamiliar magazines, so there was no place to rest my purse as I wrestled with the still-unfamiliar currency. The woman, used to seeing foreigners puzzle over money, smiled with her own brand of weary politeness as she poured seven one pound coins and then a handful of change in myriad sizes and colours into my cupped hands.

"Sorry. No five-pound notes," she said apologetically.

The coins would never fit in my little American change purse, made for little American money.

"That's Ok," I said, determined to make the woman stop apologising. Or to not feel bad for apologising.

Stepping out of the newsagent's shop onto the busy sidewalk near Piccadilly, I dumped the change into the bottom of my shoulder bag and shoved the newspaper in after it while dodging the oncoming battalion of humanity, all of whom managed not to look at me while aiming psychotically straight for me.

I was lost.

The stop in at the newsagent's had been designed to get both water and directions, but the directions hadn't really helped. I never knew where I was anymore, and now was no exception. Maps were useless. London streets seem to undulate and twist into sailors' knots. I had concocted an elaborate fantasy that, as I walked, they un-tied and re-arranged themselves behind me, like something out of a children's book.

I was always lost.

Stepping back from the maniacal street hordes, I leaned against the stone wall and opened the bottle of water. Looking down, I saw that my feet, neatly clad in new brown boots, were primly parallel next to a pile of dog shit.

I moved to London because it seemed exciting. I was 32 and editing children's books in Seattle, because that was the only job in publishing I could get in Seattle, and the only job in publishing I was likely ever to get in Seattle, which is not known for its publishing industry. I'd moved to Seattle from a small town in northern California five years before, seeking, if I recalled correctly, excitement.

Stepping away from the dog shit, I turned left down a Georgian street that arched gracefully like the curve of an artful woman's back away from the buses belching pollution, the impatient taxis and the huge neon billboards.

I was going to be late again meeting my friend James - my only friend in London. He had started a few weeks ago as little more than an acquaintance but was rapidly being elevated to the position of lifeline as I grew increasingly panicked. What if I didn't like London? What if it didn't grow on me? What would everybody say if I just reappeared in Seattle? They'd thrown me a goodbye party, for God's sake. They'd given me an electricity converter so complex I couldn't use it. I couldn't just go back.

But I was so sick of being lost.

It's the strangest feeling to live in a country out of context. The celebrities are not famous to me - I don't know who I'm supposed to admire, envy, fear or desire. I don't understand the news, or get an image in my head when I read a name in the newspaper. A blank canvas can be frightening.

I allowed myself to be carried along by the crowds that threatened to wash over me like waves, diluting me until I became nothing more than part of them, and I looked for someone who might know where I was going.

I was filled with self-pity. Why do there have to be so many people? Why are they all in such a hurry?

When I saw the tall man in the perfect grey suit who didn't look like the rest of them, something made me choose him. He didn't seem to be in such a hurry, he had a kind face.

'Excuse me,' I said, touching his sleeve, and he recoiled. (They hate being touched, I thought meanly.) But he looked at my face and stopped, seemingly against his will.

I said, 'Can you help me? I'm lost. I've been trying to find Shaftsbury Avenue but I just keep walking in circles. I know it's right here... somewhere.'

I was near tears. Too lonely and at sea to feel stupid. Take care of me! I pleaded with him silently.

Pointing to the left, he said, 'It's actually just around the corner...' Then he paused, studying my damp eyes. He sighed as if he couldn't believe he was about to say what he was about to say. 'Listen, it's not far. I'll walk you there.'

My entire body sighed with relief. I don't know why it was so important to me that somebody should help - I would have found it eventually on my own, but that wasn't the point.

I said, 'I know it's idiotic, but I just can't seem to get where I'm going.'

'I know the feeling,' he said wryly, taking my arm and steering me smoothly through the crowd.

'So,' he said after a moment, 'are you American or Canadian?'