Work Text:
The record had been in the house longer than Lucinda-Rae, which at seven years old seemed like a qualification for antiquity. She found it on the afternoon of February twenty-fifth while trying to reach a biscuit tin Máire had put on top of the sitting-room cupboard and forgotten to move before leaving for work. The cupboard was too high for Lucinda even with one foot on the lower shelf, and reaching blindly behind a stack of old magazines produced not biscuits but a shallow cardboard box coated with grey dust. She lowered it to the floor by stages, first onto the arm of the sofa and then into her lap, sneezing hard enough to make her eyes water. Inside were records without proper sleeves, two cracked picture frames, an envelope of photographs whose corners had curled, an old parish programme and one LP protected in a plastic cover yellowed at the seams. Its front showed a woman standing beneath the glowing sign of a roadside motel, one hand resting against the roof of a huge cream-coloured car. Behind her stretched a road so straight that it appeared to disappear directly into sunset. Across the top, in letters faded from red toward brown, was written SONGS FROM *THE HIGHWAY SAINT*, and underneath, smaller but still visible, *Marlene DeWitt as Lucinda-Rae Bell*. Lucinda sat cross-legged on the carpet holding the sleeve upright against her knees and read the name twice before calling toward the kitchen, “Mam! There’s another Lucinda-Rae.”
Máire was not home, which Lucinda knew perfectly well. The shout was reflex rather than expectation, the sort of thing she did when discovering something too large to remain contained inside her own head. The only answer came from rain ticking against the front window and the central heating giving a reluctant knock somewhere inside the wall. Lucinda read the sleeve again. She knew the first part of her own naming story because it had been told often enough at family gatherings for adults to assume she had heard it too many times: her mother and father, still teenagers themselves, had passed around a battered American novel with friends and become fascinated by a country singer in it named Lucinda-Rae Bell, a woman who drove from town to town singing in bars and sleeping in motels, leaving before anybody could keep her. The novel had become a film years later, or perhaps a television film; adults never agreed on that part. This record was apparently from the adaptation, with an actress called Marlene DeWitt singing songs written for a woman who had never existed. None of those distinctions mattered much to Lucinda. There was her name on a record, and the woman on the cover was standing next to the largest car Lucinda had ever seen outside a cartoon.
The family record player occupied the lowest shelf beneath the television, mostly because Máire had nowhere else to put it. Its lid was scratched and one hinge had been repaired with tape. Lucinda knew how to use it because she had been permitted to put on records under supervision and because, like most children, she had translated supervision into knowledge faster than adults realised. She carried the LP with both hands, holding only the edges because Máire had explained fingerprints, slid it from the inner sleeve and placed it onto the turntable. The first attempt began at the wrong speed, transforming a woman’s voice into something grave and cavernous enough to frighten Lucinda into lifting the needle immediately. She studied the switch, remembered another record being played at thirty-three, corrected it and tried again. This time guitar came through the small speakers first, soft and twanging, followed by brushed drums and then a woman singing about a bus station in Amarillo as though leaving Texas at midnight were the saddest and most beautiful thing anyone could possibly do.
Lucinda stopped thinking about the biscuit tin entirely.
The song ended. She moved closer to the speaker.
The second song concerned rain outside a motel room. The third involved a woman driving west because somebody had told her not to. The fourth mentioned Nashville, which Lucinda knew was in America but could not have found on a map. By the end of the first side, the sitting room around her had altered without changing physically. Bootle remained outside the window in February rain, terraced houses darkened by water, television aerials sharp against a colourless afternoon, cars parked nose to tail along the street. Yet the record supplied another geography directly over it. Rain belonged to both places. Streetlights could become motel signs if one did not insist upon accuracy. The road outside their house, ordinarily too crowded and familiar to suggest distance, could theoretically continue all the way to Arizona if enough streets were joined together and nobody explained oceans too firmly.
When Máire returned shortly after five, exhausted from work and carrying a plastic shopping bag cutting red marks into two fingers, she heard the chorus before she had closed the front door. Lucinda had started the record again. Máire stood in the hallway listening for several seconds before calling, “Where in God’s name did you find that?” Lucinda came into view wearing a faded jumper, one sock beginning to slide around her heel and the expression of someone who had discovered family evidence. She told her mother, “It was behind the cupboard things. It says Lucinda-Rae.” Máire put the shopping down and said, “So it does. I haven’t heard that in years.” Lucinda wanted to know whether it was hers. Máire said it had belonged to both her and Lucinda’s father when they were young, though the ownership had followed Máire because she had actually remembered where records ought to be kept. Lucinda asked whether this was the woman she had been named after. Máire explained that the woman singing was Marlene DeWitt, while Lucinda-Rae Bell was the character from the book, and the record came from the screen version. Lucinda accepted this distinction for perhaps four seconds before asking, “So that is what Lucinda-Rae sounded like?” Máire hesitated and then said, “That’s what one woman decided she sounded like.” This answer delighted Lucinda more than certainty would have.
She followed Máire into the kitchen while the record continued playing through the wall, asking questions at the pace children used when a subject had opened too quickly to be managed one piece at a time. Had Máire seen America? No. Had Lucinda’s father? Not as far as Máire knew. Had either of them ever seen Amarillo? Only written down. Was Nashville full of singers? Quite a few. Did every American have a car that large? Certainly not. Why was the road on the cover empty? Because photographers preferred roads without lorries ruining the picture. Lucinda wanted to know why Máire had liked a story about a woman who kept leaving places. Máire unpacked potatoes, tea bags, margarine and a tin of soup while considering how much of teenage longing could sensibly be translated for a seven-year-old. She finally said, “Because she could go. We were young, we had no money, and America in that book seemed enormous. She could get angry, get in a car and be somewhere else by morning.” Lucinda asked, “Couldn’t you get the bus?” Máire laughed despite being tired and said, “Not quite the same romance in the number fifty-two.”
By dinner the record had played three times. By six-thirty, Máire had imposed a temporary ban because she wanted to hear the television news without a fictional American country singer informing everyone that Oklahoma had broken her heart. Lucinda accepted the interruption badly. She ate potatoes and sausages while staring toward the sitting room as though the LP might disappear in her absence. Máire eventually said, “It survived about ten years in a box. It’ll survive your tea.” Lucinda wanted to know why nobody had shown it to her earlier. Máire answered honestly that she had forgotten it existed. This seemed almost offensive to Lucinda. “But it’s mine,” she said. Máire corrected, “It isn’t yours. It’s a record in my house.” Lucinda pointed out, “It has my name.” Máire said, “If I find a record that says Máire, does the whole thing become mine?” Lucinda considered the problem carefully and decided, “Yes.” Máire smiled into her tea and declined to continue negotiating property law.
The next morning, before school, Lucinda asked to hear one song. Máire said no because one song would become three and shoes still had to be found. Lucinda protested that she knew exactly where her shoes were. Máire asked why one of them was under the radiator and the other beside the stairs if that constituted knowing. Lucinda said, “Because I know where both are,” which was logically difficult to defeat even though it did nothing to improve the household. The record remained unplayed until after school. Lucinda came home, dropped her bag near the door, removed her coat only after being reminded and went directly to the turntable. Máire, preparing tea before another evening shift, called from the kitchen, “Side two today. If I hear Amarillo again before supper, I may personally close the state of Texas.” Lucinda shouted back, “You can’t close Texas.” Máire replied, “Then stop testing me.”
Side two produced the song that became Lucinda’s favourite, although she could not have explained why. It was called “Neon Mary,” and the arrangement was spare enough to leave space around Marlene DeWitt’s voice. The song described a woman working nights at a roadside café beneath a blue neon sign, watching lorries move along a highway she never travelled herself. Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody died, married or escaped. Neon Mary poured coffee, smoked cigarettes by the back door and knew the destinations of roads through other people’s stories. Lucinda listened kneeling near the speaker with a sheet of school drawing paper on the floor in front of her. Halfway through the song she reached for crayons.
America began with a yellow road.
She drew it across the page from the bottom left corner toward the upper right because roads in America, according to the record sleeve, had to be long enough to disappear. On either side she added red desert using the only reddish-brown crayon still possessing a point. She had seen deserts in films and assumed most of inland America consisted of them unless buildings had been specifically added. The first building she drew was a terraced house.
This was not an accident. Houses came in rows.
Lucinda had never seen a convincing reason America would be exempt.
The American terrace gained a little porch because films had porches, followed by another terrace beside it and then a third. Behind them she drew mountains, although the mountains resembled the triangular ones in schoolbooks rather than anything geological. A streetlamp went beside the road. Beneath it she placed a woman in a long dress holding a guitar. Her arms were too short and the guitar was shaped like an enormous pear, but Lucinda wrote LUCINDA-RAE above her head in careful capitals.
The rain came next.
Máire returned from the kitchen carrying a mug of tea and paused near the sofa when she noticed blue lines descending over the entire landscape. “Is that rain?” she asked. Lucinda said it was. Máire pointed out that the sleeve appeared quite dry. Lucinda told her, “The song has rain.” Máire said, “Not this song.” Lucinda answered, “One of the other ones does.” This was apparently sufficient to establish permanent American precipitation.
The car took most of the lower half of the second sheet.
Lucinda had no idea how automobiles that large actually worked in perspective, so she produced a long green rectangle with windows, four wheels and a front bonnet nearly the length of a bus. Máire sat on the sofa watching her and asked whether anyone could steer it around Bootle. Lucinda said, “No, it stays in America.” Máire replied, “Probably safest.” Lucinda added silver bumpers, then a second car in pink because she had seen a pink American car in an old film and assumed colour restraint was optional abroad. The pink car acquired fins at the back, too tall even by the standards of American automobile design. Lucinda was pleased.
By the fourth day, everyone in the house knew the record.
Máire knew every opening guitar figure again despite having forgotten half the songs for years. A visiting aunt who came by with a bag of clothes asked why the same woman seemed to be singing every time she entered the house. Lucinda explained the naming connection before Máire could. The aunt picked up the sleeve, recognised it and laughed, saying, “God, you two were obsessed with this.” Máire told her, “We were seventeen.” The aunt said that was not a defence. Lucinda asked what obsessed meant. Máire answered, “What you are doing now.” Lucinda regarded the record player and decided the word seemed useful rather than insulting.
The aunt sat at the table while Lucinda brought over the growing America drawing, now expanded onto five sheets taped together with strips of yellowing adhesive. The landscape had become impossible in increasingly specific ways. A desert highway passed directly between terraced houses whose chimneys released smoke into a stormy sky. Beyond them stood a wooden motel with a sign reading ROOMS, copied from the album cover. A red postbox appeared beside it because Lucinda knew Americans had different postboxes but could not remember what they looked like, so she used the one outside a nearby shop. A giant car travelled down the road toward mountains. In the sky, she had drawn a passenger aeroplane much too large and a crescent moon despite the scene otherwise appearing to take place in daylight. Beneath the streetlamp stood Lucinda-Rae Bell, singing into rain that somehow did not wet the desert.
Her aunt studied the picture for a long time, then asked, “Is this Liverpool or America?” Lucinda said, “America.” The aunt pointed toward the terrace and said, “That house is basically your nan’s.” Lucinda answered, “Nan could live in America.” The aunt opened her mouth, reconsidered and said, “Fair enough.”
Nobody corrected the picture.
Not because nobody could.
Máire could have explained that deserts did not begin outside every American town, that Nashville and Arizona were not adjacent, that most Americans did not live in motels or drive pink finned cars, and that Liverpool-style terraces would be an unusual architectural choice beside a desert highway. Her sister could have brought in an atlas. Somebody could have fetched one of the modern American magazines that circulated among neighbours and shown Lucinda actual photographs of Chicago streets, New York apartment blocks, Florida suburbs or wet industrial towns that bore no resemblance to country album sleeves.
Instead, the adults became interested in seeing what she added next.
A cousin told her America had huge forests, so Lucinda drew six pine trees behind the motel. Máire mentioned once that some places received enormous snowstorms, and a white mountain appeared in the distance despite the desert. An uncle passing through said Texas was bigger than Britain, which Lucinda interpreted not as information about scale but as evidence that individual Texan objects should also be larger; the next car occupied almost an entire sheet. When somebody told her New York had buildings taller than anything in Liverpool, she added three towers beyond the terraced houses. None had enough windows because she became bored halfway through.
The record played beneath all of this.
“Neon Mary” remained Lucinda’s favourite, but she demanded entire sides rather than selecting tracks because she liked the arrival of songs in order. She began recognising the faint hiss before the music started and the small pop in the third song where the vinyl had been scratched long before her birth. That pop became part of the song for her. When Máire lifted the needle one afternoon to answer the telephone, Lucinda complained, “You stopped it before the crack.” Máire said, “Most people don’t wait for damage.” Lucinda answered, “It belongs there.” Máire replaced the needle afterward a little before the interruption so the crack could occur properly.
One evening Lucinda asked why her name had a hyphen.
Máire was folding laundry on the sofa while the LP turned quietly. She explained that the character’s name had one, and she and Lucinda’s father had liked the way the two names belonged together instead of one becoming a middle name. Lucinda asked why they had not called her exactly Lucinda-Rae Bell. Máire said, “Because your surname already existed, thankfully.” Lucinda wanted to know whether she might have been Lucinda-Rae Bell O’Shaughnessy. Máire told her that would have been excessive even by their standards. Lucinda said, “I like it.” Máire replied, “You would.”
The conversation stayed with Lucinda after bedtime.
Names, she understood, usually came from family. Children were named for grandmothers, saints, aunts, people who had died, people who had not. Her own had come partly from a woman inside a book about a country nobody in the house had seen. This did not make the name less real. If anything, it made America feel oddly involved in her creation, not historically or politically but privately, as though somewhere inside that enormous place there existed a road whose purpose had been to reach two Liverpool teenagers through a paperback and eventually become a baby’s name.
The next afternoon she added herself to the drawing.
Not the singer beneath the streetlamp. Another figure.
This Lucinda stood outside the terraced houses wearing a red coat she actually owned, with pale hair drawn in yellow and one hand raised toward the gigantic green car. She was much smaller than Lucinda-Rae Bell because children were smaller than singers, but she gave herself boots almost as large as the adult woman’s.
When Máire came in, Lucinda held up the completed pages and announced, “That’s me in America.”
Máire put down her work bag and came nearer.
The picture now stretched nearly the width of the sitting-room floor. Tape joined the pages at bad angles. One had been attached upside down before Lucinda corrected it, leaving a torn corner. America contained rain and desert, Liverpool brick, Nashville neon, a motel, skyscrapers, mountains, snow, a church steeple, two impossible cars, pine trees, a moon, an aeroplane, a red British postbox, a roadside café and two Lucinda-Raes separated by a yellow road.
Máire crouched beside it.
Lucinda pointed toward the singer. “That’s the other one.”
“I gathered.”
“She sings there.”
“All right.”
Lucinda pointed toward the child. “And I’m there.”
Máire nodded.
“You didn’t draw the Atlantic.”
Lucinda frowned.
“The sea between here and America.”
Lucinda considered the problem, then took a blue crayon and drew a narrow line across the bottom of one page.
“There.”
Máire said, “That’s not much sea.”
“I’m already there.”
Máire laughed, tired enough that the laugh became larger than either expected. Lucinda began laughing too without fully knowing why, and for a while the two of them sat on the carpet beside an America barely held together by tape.
The picture stayed.
Máire could not bring herself to throw it out when Lucinda moved on to other things, though moving on took longer than everyone in the household hoped because the record continued playing regularly into March. She folded the sheets carefully along their taped joins and stored them in the same cardboard box where Lucinda had found the LP.
Years later, when Lucinda’s tastes darkened toward post-punk, goth records, haunted women’s voices and songs full of candles, ruins, dread and romance, the country records would remain beside them without contradiction. Her name had given that music too deep a root to become embarrassing. She would eventually prefer American singers who sounded worn rather than cheerful, women who sang about leaving, betrayal, motel rooms, night roads and surviving things without pretending survival made them grateful.
But none of that needed explaining.
Lucinda was seven.
America was a yellow road through Bootle rain.
And somewhere beneath a streetlamp, a woman with her name was still singing.