The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

England. Bloody England.

From a few rows behind came the now-familiar sound of a baby sharing its confusion and discomfort with the world, urgent with the selfishness of the infant. Kerry realized the flight had doubtless been far, far worse for the infant’s parent, but still wished both mother and child had been checked as baggage instead. She fished in the seat pocket and retrieved the Bose headphones. They’d been outlandishly expensive, but there wasn’t much point listening to music through anything less than the best. With the buds slotted comfortably into her ears, she found the album on the iPod she’d bought on the first day of the trip and cranked the volume up high.

She smiled as the opening track crashed into her head and, eyes closed, gently rocked in her seat to the beat. She so nearly hadn’t gone, but Washington had been a lot of fun, in the end. A hell of a long way to go to watch her best friend (finally) get married — leaving Kerry as the last single girl in their crowd, cheers for that — but a good excuse to get out of the country for a week. And what a week. The small but bullish English contingent (mainly old school friends of Diane, whom Kerry hadn’t known) had done their best to have a good time in a foreign land, to show the locals that when it came to alcohol consumption, Brits were all about Shock and Awe. They’d succeeded, big-time, and Kerry still carried the vestiges of her sixth hangover in a row.

“… and there are aaaaiiiiiiii-aaiinnGELS!”

She suddenly realized she’d started singing along to the music, and opened her eyes. The man across the aisle was smiling at her. She stared at him blankly until he turned away, then jacked the volume up again and closed her eyes as the second track began.

She’d downloaded the album almost at random in a Starbucks right after buying the iPod, before she’d met anyone, before the party started. Downloaded quite a few albums, in fact, but this was the one that had stuck. Everything about the jangly guitars and raucous girly harmonies brought to mind music from thirty years ago, back when you saved your pocket money and bought the latest single by your fave band, rushing home to tear it to shreds on a cheap turntable, annoying the crap out of your parents as a bonus. Nobody had fave bands or listened- to-shreds albums these days. They had nonlinear playlists instead, and — if they were old enough, stuffed into a bookcase in a disregarded corner of the living room — a few ancient LPs (one Dire Straits, one Phil Collins, one mid-period Bowie, one syrupy Vivaldi), some Oasis or Chemical Brothers CDs (to show they were still trying to keep on top of things in the 1990s), sandwiched between doomed attempts to learn to like club music when you weren’t on drugs, and stuff they couldn’t even remember buying. Nobody hated anybody else’s choice in music anymore, either, aside from knuckle-dragging online “reviewers” who one-starred anything that hadn’t been on The X Factor. Nobody had the backbone to truly hate anything, these days: They were too busy liking — Facebooking or tweeting whatever track they were listening to, right this minute, right now. On the assumption, presumably, that all their virtual friends would give a flying fuck, that they would interpret these bleatings as a sign of character, rather than a yelp for attention in a digitized void. When everyone wears headphones, music is not sociable anymore.

As the music pumped through her head, Kerry felt herself transported to a room in the Embassy Suites Hotel in D.C., back into the arms of someone she was never going to see again. She’d been a bad girl (well, a bad woman, actually, let’s face it), and the window for being able to ignore this fact would close the second the jumbo’s wheels smacked back onto English soil. Richard was going to be pissed off at her, and knowing him, she’d pay for a good long time. On the verge of tears, she pushed the volume up to full and filled her head with memory.

She felt the impacts as the wheels touched down. The double thud of a textbook landing, like a heavy hand knocking on a sepulchral door.

Welcome back to the morgue.

She turned the iPod off, blinking rapidly, and sat waiting while everyone else stood up and milled impatiently in the aisles, three hundred sheep eager for the slaughter of Real Life.

The immigration queue took even longer than usual, and by the time she handed her passport to the fatuously jolly official, Kerry’s mood had plummeted further. Maybe it was guilt over what she’d done, but she seemed to be taking the return to England even harder than usual. She knew that in a couple of weeks everything would seem normal. Her rut was there, ready and waiting, the random set of circumstances that she’d colluded in turning into her life, her story, the Kerry Jones Experience. She didn’t want her present anger and depression to fade, however, didn’t want to be accepted back into the fold. She stared balefully at the passport official, mentally daring him to give her a hard time: The photo had been taken only three months previously; she was even wearing the same jacket, for God’s sake. He merely welcomed her back, though, his accent sounding strange and provincial and dull, and waved her on toward baggage retrieval.

Welcome back?

To what?

She waited for her bag to meander out onto the belt, very much wanting a cigarette. Her consumption had skyrocketed during the week in Washington, and the duty-free cache wasn’t going to last long. She was supposed to be giving up, of course, turning into clean-living, gym-rat Kerry, the better version of herself that always seemed just out of reach. Wasn’t going to happen today. Tomorrow didn’t look great either.

Her bag eventually emerged blinking into the light, as if by accident, and she hauled it onto her shoulder and tromped off toward Customs. Slowing as she approached the channels, she tried to decide a question that had mildly stressed her out for the entire flight. She didn’t know for sure if the new iPod had to be declared, but eventually elected to head down the Nothing to Declare channel. She never got stopped anyway. She looked like a good girl.

A Chinese man with a stupendously large suitcase veered in front of her, and she accelerated round him, anxious to get out of the airport and onto the final leg of her journey, onto the tube up to Camden. She wanted a bath, some tea, and a cigarette, preferably several. She didn’t want to see or talk to anyone.

“Good morning, madam,” a firm, female voice said, and Kerry felt a hand on her shoulder. “Would you mind stepping this way, please?”

* * *

She let herself be led to one of the tables by the young Scottish woman, her guts taut with weary anxiety. It was just her luck, just her sodding luck.

“So,” the woman said, “where have you been?”

“Washington,” Kerry replied, loading the word with as much cheery innocence as possible, as though hoping through pronunciation alone to demonstrate herself incapable of transgressing any law.

“Anything you want to tell me about?”

Kerry decided to go for it. “Well, there is one thing,” she said, putting her bags onto the table.

The woman’s eyes remained friendly. Sort of.

“I bought an iPod,” Kerry continued, offhand. “I don’t know whether I should have decl — ”

“If you didn’t know, then you should have gone down the other channel. That’s illegal, by itself. And yes, you should have declared it.”

The woman unzipped Kerry’s suitcase and started lifting her clothes out onto the table. Other passengers strolled by, flicking curious glances, relieved that some stranger had been sacrificed to the dark gods of Customs, and not them. Kerry watched as her holiday was picked out and strewn over the surface. The dress she’d worn to the bridal shower. The card Diane had given her to thank her for coming all that way. A souvenir ashtray stolen from the Embassy Suites. Her lips twitched slightly when she saw this last. The first time John’s hand had touched hers had been an accident, as they simultaneously stubbed out cigarettes, early one evening two days before the wedding.

“What were you doing in Washington?” the woman asked, unzipping Kerry’s toiletries bag and tipping out the contents.

“I was at a wedding,” Kerry chirped, still doing her best to seem Trustworthy and Normal, though thrown sufficiently off balance to half-fear that Washington, D.C., was well known to be off-limits to British nationals, but somehow no one had told her, and she was falling further and further into a trap. “My best friend married an American, and they had the wedding there.”

The woman gave no reaction to this, and instead unscrewed the cap of Kerry’s shampoo. She squidged a little out of the container and squinted into the bottle.

“What are you looking for?” Kerry asked, striving for a tone of bright and innocent inquiry.