When they are first born, most people find the world a
fascinating, magical place. It is a place full of colours and sounds and
wonderful things that they have never seen before. There are metal boxes that
move up and down the street, bags of sweet powder that fill your mouth with
explosions of delight, soft barky things that jump up and lick your hand, tall
giants with rustling leaves and little feathery objects that fly around in them
singing songs.
Everything is new and exciting.
But as time passes, people come to believe that these extraordinary magical
things are not really magic at all, but just ordinary things with ordinary, dull
names like car, sherbet, dog, tree and bird.
So after a while, they stop noticing them.
They forget how to look.
Which is why the grey speck on the corner of Sam Palmer’s
bedpost would have gone unnoticed by most people. Most people would be too busy
looking at televisions, magazines or each other.
They would never notice something so small and colourless.
Sam, however, was an exception. He had never grown out of
his fascination with the world, and what interested him most were the small
things that most people never see.
Ever since learning to crawl, Sam had followed woodlice to
the cracks in the skirting board, knelt by ants as they cleaned up spilt sugar
and watched bumblebees bouncing from foxglove to forget-me-not. Where most
children ran away from wasps, Sam ran after them, watching them hunt among the
long grass and listening to the faint scrape and scratch of their jaws on the
wooden window-frame as they chewed it into a pulp for their papery nests.
But just recently, he had noticed something else.
At first he had thought that it was just his imagination.
But the more he looked around him, the more he began to believe that it was
true.
The insects were starting to follow him.
It seemed that wherever he went, the wasps went too. Not
great swarms of them – just one or two, following him everywhere. Yesterday,
walking up the lane on his way home from school, he had seen several of them
hovering above his head like small helicopters. It was getting more noticeable,
and since moving out here into the country, he had found himself becoming
obsessed with insects.
He glanced up at his bedroom walls, covered with the
pictures of flies he had carefully copied from illustrations and photographs.
Strewn across the floor were the books about insects that he had borrowed from
the library and on his desk was an unfinished diagram that he was sketching,
showing the mouthparts of a mosquito. He stared at the pictures with a mixture
of fascination and disgust.
What was happening to him?
The sun edged its way up over the horizon and in the early
morning light Sam sensed the silence and stillness of the air that hangs over
fields and woods before an unusually hot summer’s day. In the distance, a wood
pigeon called softly from the trees at the edge of the meadow that lay behind
the house. A gentle breeze stirred the hedgerows and Sam briefly caught the
scent of wild honeysuckle before the air was still once more.
He stared out of the window at the dry, parched lawn and
thought of the Saturdays he used to have before they moved: riding his bike into
town, buying drinks and gum from the shop and then cycling off to meet his
friends by the bandstand in the park. They used to play Russian roulette
together – shaking up a can of fizzy drink, mixing it up with all the other
cans and then taking it in turns to open one up next to their heads. He
remembered how Chrissy Johnson had been practically blown off the bandstand and
Bobby’s sister Kayleigh had laughed so much that she’d had to run home to
change.
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today's globalized world.
The story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one. But that exception is the beating heart of this extraordinary novel.
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