Only in America

But this is one party where there is no eye contact, no handshakes, no back slapping. Prospective buyers size up the house furtively, orbiting each other like repellent moons before bidding a gracious farewell to the hostess and running to the car to hit the phones and call in the bids. The owners are nowhere to be seen and the highest bid doesn’t always land you the house. I had to write a grovelling letter to ‘Dear Mr Tupling’ about how I could ‘imagine my family thriving in your wonderful, inspiring home!’

It worked. We bought the house even though the agent informed us that we had offered less than the other contestants. At first I thought she was trying to make us feel better. Then I realized she was probably telling the truth. Americans pride themselves on the constitutional protection of the individual. But when it comes to personal finances the open market and culture of competition subject them to serial indiscretion. The actual sales price of every house in our neighbourhood, including ours, is frequently advertised by local estate agents. The size of my mortgage and my monthly payments seem to be in the public domain judging from the number of letters I get from rival mortgage companies advertising. ‘Matt, don’t you want to save money? Don’t you want to enjoy the lifestyle you KNOW you can afford? So why pay X Dollars a month on a X Dollar mortgage, when we can offer you X Dollars a month?’ Why indeed? I could practically feel the mortgage consultant’s hot conspiratorial breath in my ear. But none of that bothered us too much. We had signed the deeds. We, or rather Acacia Federal Savings Bank of Illinois, now owned another tiny slice of America. It was to time to turn the Tupling house into a Frei home. A week later a team of Ecuadorean construction thugs ripped the walls apart, tore out the fusty old bathrooms, obliterated the kitchen and started to eradicate every possible trace of the dear old Tupling home. When we finally sell up I will also demand such a letter as the one I wrote and expect my taste to be trampled on. But it’s all worth it. There is something curiously satisfying about owning a piece of the world’s most powerful real estate, however small.

Compared to life in London it is also astonishingly comfortable. There are two schools at the end of the road, a park, two playgrounds and three public tennis courts. After a ten-minute walk you reach one of Washington’s best cinemas, an excellent Italian deli and four good restaurants. In the autumn Tilden Street is a riot of reds, yellows and fluorescent oranges as everything disappears under a carpet of fallen leaves. Snow obliging, in the winter it looks like a scene from Narnia. Spring is a succession of blooming trees working in colourful shifts: first the magnolias, then the cherry trees, then the dogwoods. Summer is hot and humid and belongs to a new generation of feisty mosquitoes, soldiering 24/7 to make our lives miserable. The vegetation on Tilden Streets sprouts aggressively. We live in a jungle. The seasons and the setting are almost rural but the idyll is constantly interrupted by the intrusion of modern Washington life, post 9/11. The effect is schizophrenic.

There’s the never-ending squawk of police, fire engine and ambulance sirens. The Israeli Embassy is situated less than half a mile away. Police cars sit in front of its bomb barriers or lurk in nearby alleyways and side streets, keeping an eye on what must now be the target within the target. I reassured Penny that if you’re going to make it all the way to Washington as an Islamic extremist, bombing the Israeli Embassy would make a rather tangential statement when the city is already groaning with targets.

Next to the Israeli Embassy is the new Chinese Embassy compound, carved into a hillside and built entirely by Chinese labour flown in from the Middle Kingdom. The workers in their blue uniforms are housed across the road in a makeshift compound, complete with proletarian banners extolling the virtues of the People’s Republic in a language that the host country can’t read. And so right at the end of our little road we get a fleeting glimpse of the face-off taking place between two global giants: the incumbent superpower and the emerging one.

The Chinese construction workers wake up to patriotic songs blaring through their compound of Nissen huts. They compete with the pledge of allegiance being recited, by law, in the playground of Hearst School, opposite our house. Every morning 110 children, none older than ten, stand next to the flag pole and listen as one of them bellows out the pledge of allegiance on the crackly intercom system. A high pitched reed-like voice cuts though the dank air pledging to defend the Constitution and honour the flag that flutters a hundred feet above the children’s heads.

Oddly, what always made me feel safe on Tilden Street was not the permanent police presence, not the Mossad agents with weighed-down jackets searching the bushes for bombs. Not the buzz of helicopters above or the unmanned drones eyeballing any potential threats. No: it was Barbara, walking the streets with her Labradors, keeping an eagle eye on everything on Tilden Street. In 2007, however, Barbara fell out with the one neighbour she knew better than anyone else: her husband. A grumpy fellow who was as absent from Tilden Street as his wife was present, he bolted after more than two decades of marriage. They divorced, the house was sold, Barbara moved away and Tilden Street was never the same again.

THREE The Colour of Fear

I am used to it now. After five years of living and travelling in America I start unbuckling my belt automatically as soon as I leave the check-in area of an airport. I wear shoes that can be kicked off easily. I no longer bother packing shaving cream in my hand luggage because it will be confiscated, and as I disrobe in the ludicrous pyjama party that has become airport security I think of those who are responsible for every act in this elaborate, involuntary striptease. The coat and additional ID check are, of course, courtesy of Osama bin Laden. So is the confiscated Swiss Army penknife that my father gave me when I was a boy. The separate screening for the computer predates bin Laden. It is, I believe, an Abu Nidal legacy. The shoes, of course, are a gift from Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber. I have nurtured a special place of loathing for him even though he never actually managed to detonate his sneakers. The confiscation of creams, aftershave and medicine bottles goes back to the liquid bombers who tried to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic in 2006. What happens if someone uncovers a plot to conceal a bomb in their boxer shorts or panties?

The Transportation Security Authority, or TSA, has managed to recruit people who would normally be stuck on the breadline without any qualifications, put them in a uniform, told them that they are the front line in the war on terror and encouraged them to unleash a barrage of humourless officiousness on the paying passenger. When I showed some annoyance about having to part with a newly acquired bottle of expensive aftershave, the screener, whose belly hung over his belt like a blubbery white sporran, shouted at me: ‘Sir, are you doubting our Homeland Security guidelines?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Some of them are absurd!’ This was the wrong answer. I was immediately rounded on by two of his superiors who took me into a special booth and gave me a search that involved just about everything apart from the intrusion of a gloved hand.

On flights from New York to Washington you had to exercise heroic bladder control because you were not allowed to get out of your seat for thirty minutes prior to departure in case you wanted to loiter with intent by the cockpit. This ruling only applied to the cities of New York and Washington. On any other destination you are permitted to use the loos at the front. In any case the cockpit doors these days are as secure as Fort Knox. Once I forgot this dictum, got out of my seat as we were approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and was screamed at by a stewardess as if I was charging at the cockpit door with an axe. ‘Sit down NOW!’ she hollered, only seconds after asking me sweetly if I wanted another cup of coffee. Why, I wondered, had she offered me the drink if she didn’t now allow me to make room for it in my bladder? In theory the passengers were probably on my side. In practice none of them was showing it. Everyone looked down at their newspapers or folded hands. I sat down, chastened, like a naughty schoolboy, and crossed my legs, hoping to feel the plane descend soon.

At Washington National Airport a huge American flag is draped across the departure hall. In Europe such an exuberant display of patriotism would make the headlines. Here it is standard. Soldiers in desert fatigues and crew cuts shuffle through the airport on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan or heading home after another deployment. America is unmistakably at war. Uncle Sam feels fearful, vulnerable and pissed off. When strong countries feel weak strange things happen.

Washington’s other airport, Dulles, which receives international flights, has become a fortress. For non-US citizens the immigration line can last up to two hours. The use of mobile phones is strictly forbidden as if the tired and bedraggled passengers were about to call in air strikes. Here that famous American spirit of welcome and friendliness has taken leave of absence. Once I turned up at Dulles after a tediously delayed flight from London. The queue was of biblical proportions. My surreptitious use of the BlackBerry had caused the ‘customs arrival overseer on duty’ to have a seizure. Then I committed the ultimate faux pas. In filling out my visa form I described myself as a ‘resident’. It seemed logical to me. I was living in the US at a fixed abode. The customs officer, whose neck was wider than his face and whose face was as red as the alarm buzzer on his desk, looked at me as if I had just burned the Stars and Stripes on his desk.

‘You are not a resident!’ he decreed.

‘I beg to differ,’ I hissed back, perhaps too eagerly. ‘I reside here. I pay taxes here. I own property here and my fourth child was even born here, which makes her a full-blooded American.’

The neck reddened. Somewhere inside the folds of flesh an Adam’s apple stirred. His grey eyes, as minute as a tick in a questionnaire’s box, signalled a combination of triumph and rebuke.

‘You are a non-resident alien.’

He left it at that. In his book he had delivered the ultimate insult. ‘Fair enough,’ I thought, yearning – briefly – to return to my own planet. Since Alice, our youngest child, has an American passport on family holidays we now place her in front like a human shield, holding up her precious blue document. It breaks the ice. Sometimes. I can fully understand America’s careful attention to security. But the one thing not to point out at the airport customs desk – unless you want to get deported – is that the biggest threat in terms of the number of people actually killed is thoroughly home-grown: road rage, school shootings – there is one on average every six months – shopping-mall massacres, disgruntled employees who avenge an overlooked promotion by blasting their boss with an M16 … America makes it very easy for someone with a grudge to buy a gun.

The fortress of Dulles Airport is located in the state of Virginia where it is much easier to buy a gun at the age of eighteen than a beer. A short drive from the airport there is a gun store that proudly announces: Open 364 Days a Year. Closed ONLY on Christmas Day. It was a Bushmaster rifle legally acquired by a man with an undetected history of mental instability that caused a terror spree soon after we moved to the United States.

October should be the kindest month. The blazing heat and the humidity of summer have yielded to cooler breezes. It is the perfect time of year to arrive in Washington. The children can play outside without having to be doused in industrial quantities of mosquito repellent. The evening air is filled with barbeque smells. We were counting our blessings. No more trips to Afghanistan or Pakistan. Despite fresh and searing memories of the attack on the Pentagon, Washington, DC, seemed safe. And then something changed.

Only a few weeks after our arrival we found that playgrounds were becoming emptier, until they were completely deserted. Schools forbade their pupils to play soccer on open fields or venture out into the sunshine during breaks. It was as if everyone apart from us had been issued with silent orders to evacuate. A hidden plague was stalking the open public spaces of the capital, spiriting away children. Many schools took the added precaution of masking windows with black cloth. Classrooms were turned into dark caverns, as if their inhabitants were underage vampires who could not be exposed to natural sunlight. But this bizarre behaviour wasn’t just confined to children and schools. I remember filling up at our local petrol station on Connecticut Avenue. There were five other cars. I noticed the inordinately tall taxi driver next to me – many of them are Eritrean or Somali – crouching down while he was filling his tank and looking over his shoulder as if he was whispering furtive words of encouragement as the petrol gushed into the tank of his Lincoln. I started bending over, too. And then so did everyone else in the petrol station, bowing in deference to their vehicle. But this wasn’t reverence for the automobile taken to new heights. It was a matter of personal security. We were taking cover.

No one wanted to stand out or be exposed, especially when the enemy might be hiding in a nearby forest or among roadside bushes. Wheeling the rubbish bins onto the street in front of our house became an even more onerous ritual. Now it was conducted with brisk efficiency and a nervous glance over the shoulder. One year after 9/11 the citizens of Washington were terrified once again. But it wasn’t Osama bin Laden or rumours of an imminent Al-Qaeda attack that triggered this wave of paranoia. It was the murderous rampage of a seventeen-year-old Jamaican called Lee Boyd Malvo and his forty-two-year-old mentor/godfather, John Allen Mohammed. For three weeks the pair cruised the heavily fortified area of the Nation’s Capital picking off on average one civilian every two days. They killed ten and injured six, including a fourteen-year-old schoolboy waiting for a yellow bus. He was shot in the stomach.

They shot an elderly man mowing his lawn, two people at a petrol station, a bus driver in his seat as he opened the door to passengers and an FBI analyst who had just emerged from the Home Depot megastore with rolls of wallpaper and floor matting. They felled their victims at random, while they were engaged in the most mundane acts of daily life. This grotesque game of Russian roulette gripped the city and captured the imagination of the rest of America. What was novel about this killing spree was that it took place in the predominantly white neighbourhoods in and around the capital. Violent death in African American areas like Anacostia or Southeast Washington was so commonplace – and continued unabated during the sniper period – that it was banished to the inside pages of the Washington Post Metro section. Unless the crime was particularly horrific, no TV crew would be sent to cover the event. But the Washington snipers terrorized the usually placid suburbs of the capital at a time when the city had been turned into a veritable fortress. They made a mockery of the whole notion of homeland security.

The only things that can enter Washington airspace without strict permission from the Department of Transport or the Pentagon are pigeons and bald eagles. A day before Ronald Reagan’s funeral in June 2004 the executive jet belonging to the Republican governor of Kentucky caused widespread panic on the ceremonial Mall and triggered the evacuation of the Capitol because the pilot had failed to log his plane’s arrival. Antiaircraft Patriot missile batteries stand alert on a hill behind the domed Capitol and a phalanx of CCTV cameras supposedly records every suspicious movement. Police cars sit on just about every street corner ready to pounce on unruly drivers, as I have discovered repeatedly to my own cost. And yet for three weeks this overwhelming uniformed presence did nothing to make us feel safe. The Washington snipers had opted for something so simple and crude that the Department of Homeland Security hadn’t thought of it.

They had converted an ordinary blue Chevrolet into a killing machine. The back seat had been ripped out to allow the shooter to shuffle into the boot on his stomach. Here an orange-size hole had been made just above the number plate to allow the muzzle of a Bushmaster rifle to be poked through. From this position the young Malvo – he pulled the trigger in most of the killings – was able to kill Linda Franklin with a single shot to the head as she wheeled her shopping trolley into the covered car park at the Home Depot in Fairfax on a busy Monday night. Her husband had opened the car. He looked round to see his wife dying in a pool of her own blood. Penny and I had planned to go to the same Home Depot the following morning to buy supplies for our new house. We cancelled the trip. A week after the killings started the police received a tip-off about the shooter. (It was only at the very end of their hunt that they realized two gunmen were involved.) According to the tip-off the assailant was driving a white truck. For builders, bakers, refrigerator maintenance men, postal workers and plumbers this is the delivery vehicle of choice and for an entire week the streets of Washington were lined with white ‘box trucks’ held up by twitchy police officers.

It was at about that time that police stopped the car used by the snipers, because it was veering from one lane to another on a Maryland highway. The officer checked the two occupants’ IDs but never searched the vehicle. The snipers got away undetected and went on to kill another five victims. Had they not repeatedly sent letters to the police which were thinly veiled pleas for recognition, containing crucial details about their identity, they might just have driven to the next state and disappeared. In the end it was a truck driver stopping at a roadside motel in the middle of the night who discovered their car and called the police.

I had lived through my share of hairy moments but I never felt such relief as the day the snipers were caught. Everyone did. The playgrounds filled up fast, schools removed the black tarpaulins from their windows. There was no more crouching at petrol stations. And yet the city had been left with a bitter realization: how easy it is to terrorize people who have become used to a sense of security. We had just experienced a very crude but effective form of homespun terrorism, which took the authorities three weeks to neutralize despite all the means at their disposal. What about something more sophisticated? The very notion of ‘homeland security’, that folksy concept that combined heartland images of curtain-twitching vigilance with the Pentagon’s sophistication of unmanned surveillance drones, had been held up to ridicule. It turned out to be a fitting prelude to a year of terror alerts and paranoia. America, the country that possessed the mightiest military ever known to man, was feeling vulnerable. And when powerful nations feel threatened, they are prone to overreact.

Six months after 9/11 the new Department of Homeland Security devised a ‘terror threat advisory system’, a colour chart that was used to alert citizens about the degree of perceived danger from any potential terrorist attack. Red is severe. Orange, high. Yellow, elevated. Blue, guarded, and green, low. You cannot avoid the colours or the adjectives associated with them. Go to any airport in the United States and you will hear the same computerized baritone advising you that ‘the terror threat advisory level is currently at yellow or elevated’. That’s where it seems most of the time. In fact, since the system was put in place it has never gone down to green and only once to blue. For three months in 2003 Hawaii was let off the leash and lowered its coding to ‘guarded’ before moving it up again to ‘elevated’. There was no obvious logic to this move. Indeed, the Attorney General’s office, which is in charge of setting the codes, is under no obligation to publish the criteria or explain to a worried public why the colours have changed.

When they did change it was big news, as if the whole nation was taking part in a mass show-and-tell experiment. ‘Did you hear? We’ve gone to orange!’ It was a common talking point competing with the din of cutlery at the American Diner on Connecticut Avenue or the flatulent steam nozzle at the La Baguette Café on M Street. It engaged people’s attention. It rekindled their most recent fears. It made them call home. What was less clear was why the colours had changed. Had a new plot been discovered? Were we about to be attacked? Was it the latest Osama bin Laden video release that was really a code for triggering a wave of suicide bombers? Sometimes the administration obliged with possible explanations. The Attorney General had announced the unmasking of an alleged Al-Qaeda sleeper cell or a piece of intelligence about a potential threat to container ports. At first twitchy citizens lived on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but after a while the colour codes became like a faulty burglar alarm that keeps going off. First people stopped paying attention, then they started wondering whether the administration was manipulating the codes and treating us like a Pavlovian dog. The comedy shows started to make fun of it all.

‘There were more warnings issued today,’ Jay Leno told The Tonight Show audience, ‘that another terrorist attack was imminent! We’re not sure where. We’re not sure when, just that it is coming. So, who is attacking us now? The cable company?’ David Letterman chimed in on CBS. ‘Homeland Security has already warned about new terrorist attacks and it must be pretty serious because President Bush has already ignored three memos about this.’ This was just a tiny sample from a growing catalogue of derision which was enriched when it was discovered in 2005 that the deputy press spokesman of the Department of Homeland Security had been arrested for soliciting sex from a fourteen-year-old. ‘This fifty-nine-year-old guy, Brian Doyle, was arrested for exposing himself to a young girl in Florida on his webcam and sending her porno on the internet. It’s nice to know,’ said Leno, ‘that our surveillance cameras are being put to good use in the war on terror!’

Then the conspiracy theorists got to work. Brigette Nacos, a social scientist from Columbia University, began to track the uncanny coincidence of code changes and spikes in the President’s popularity. She then plotted the graph to a timetable of the 2004 presidential election campaign. Bingo! We were being taken for a ride, she concluded. Eventually, even the hapless Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, had to admit that the system ‘invited questions and even derision!’ Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, with an honest face and a firm handshake, admitted to me that he hated his job. ‘It’s a pretty thankless task, to manage a super-department of 170,000 bureaucrats and to live and work in a world of constant threats.’ A few months later he resigned and you could hear the sigh of relief all the way from the White House.

Perhaps the low point of the colour-code system was reached in November 2003 on the day the Department of Homeland Security hastily told people to prepare for the eventuality of a chemical attack. The result was panic, confusion and a collective scratching of heads. The following morning I was waiting for my train at the Cleveland Park metro station. The middle-aged woman standing next to me grabbed my arm. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing inside the carriage which had just swished to a halt. ‘There are too many people asleep.’

‘So?’

I didn’t actually say the word but I threw her an involuntary look, somewhere between disdain and surprise.

‘They might have been gassed!’ she added in a whisper.

Clearly mad, I thought. The doors opened and I walked in, leaving the woman on the platform, shaking her head. Then I looked around. Out of fifteen commuters in the carriage half were indeed asleep. My normal instinct would have been to join them and nod off, hoping not to miss my stop. I resisted. Then it dawned on me. It was nine in the morning! I should have been squashed in a throng of other passengers, fighting for half an inch of elbow room, trying to revive the blood circulation in my trapped feet. This was Thursday rush hour … and the subway was emptier than it was on a Sunday. Now that did make me feel uncomfortable. Penny had beseeched me: ‘Take a taxi. Don’t take the tube!’ No, I thought, I won’t let Osama dictate my commute.