The Exchange

Alice Boyle

When I was seventeen, Mum insisted we host a Belgian exchange student. The email had pinged into her inbox: a plea for a host family, any host family, who were prepared to take on a Belgian vegetarian with a fear of dogs. It was accompanied by a personal profile headed by a photo of a tall, pale girl with a mess of ginger curls. Mum called me into the study and asked me what I thought. According to her, the vegetarian thing was a non-issue – I still had a lingering reluctance to eat meat after my heart had been broken by a vegan a year earlier. Apparently the dog thing was fine too – our cocker spaniel, Max, was more like a very hairy black slipper than an actual dog.

Mum’s face lit up as she read the profile. Words were jumping out at her: ‘loves reading’, ‘theatre’, ‘learning languages’. Just like me, in other words. Words jumped out at me, too: ‘Roman Catholic’, ‘youth group leader’, ‘small town’. I said that definitely, categorically, under no circumstances was I dragging a Catholic youth group leader around for six weeks. I’d only just extricated myself from the closet a couple of years prior, and felt lucky to have made it out alive the first time. I refused to fold myself back into a space that had been too small for me since my first homo make-out dream at the age of ten. No bloody way was it happening. Point blank no, Mum.

So that’s how we ended up hosting a Belgian exchange student.

*

I was a shit to Annelien before she even arrived. Rather than go to the airport with my family like a dutiful host sister, I blew off her arrival for my friend TJ’s black-and-white birthday party – my last moment of freedom before being saddled with a conservative religious nut, I figured.

TJ’s doorbell rang at around ten, and I was summoned to meet the Belgian. I dragged my beribboned heels the length of the hall. It’s no mean feat to be sullen in a French maid outfit, but I have to say I handled it with aplomb. Annelien stood on the doorstep, bursting with more energy than was properly decent immediately following a twenty-hour flight. My parents looked exhausted by comparison; maybe they were just reeling from the incessant stream of chatter.

‘Hi, my name’s Annelien, it’s so nice to meet you, I’ve been looking forward to coming to Australia for the longest time, and now it’s here, and the flight was so long but it’s fine, I’m not tired at all, and your parents said you’re attending a party – would you mind terribly if I stayed and joined you?’

Her accent was, disconcertingly, full British. She flung herself at me and gave me a hug. I was thrown off balance in more ways than one. I invited her in. She was decked out in a rainbow jacket and a purple scarf, a rosella in a flock of magpies. She didn’t shut up the whole night. I already adored her.

*

I’m not sure how Annelien didn’t clock my queerness for the six weeks she lived with us. Maybe she did but was too polite to say. Even though I thought she was amazing, and even though we could each talk the hind leg off a donkey – leaving the poor donkey almost legless – I didn’t say anything. Even though I figured out pretty quickly that she wasn’t Catholic and that her youth group was actually a theatre troupe full of queer kids and art freaks, I still kept my mouth shut. Call it internalised homophobia or self-preservation or whatever. When the topic of romance came up, I fudged; technically, I told myself, it wasn’t a lie to say that I didn’t have a boyfriend. Thankfully, Annelien had enough to say about her own boyfriend to compensate for my supposed chastity.

Once or twice a week, I’d send Annelien home on her own, ostensibly because I was ‘hanging out with friends. You wouldn’t like them.’ My girlfriend and I would meet up in the city, she in jeans and a hoodie, her hair stiff with gel, me tugging self-consciously at my snooty private school uniform. We’d make out behind flower beds in the Alexandra Gardens, lying on the damp, cold ground and pushing frantically at each other. One time we went to the movies just to have somewhere warm and dark to go. A white baby boomer spun around in her seat and told us off for making spectacles of ourselves.

It was winter, and options were limited. At that point, my parents were still alternating between rage and denial over having a gay kid. My girlfriend was deeper in the closet than I’d ever been, trying to hide her queerness from the entire Vietnamese population of Melbourne. I followed her lead and kept our relationship hidden from all but my closest friends. Secrets were how we lived. What was one more?

*

I didn’t tell Annelien the truth until a couple of years later. She went home without ever knowing, but we stayed in touch. I’d always sucked at long-distance friendships, and yet, somehow, this one seemed to stick. We both finished school, started uni, had literary aspirations. My long emails contained most of the truth, although a few important details were carefully omitted. For example, the fact that my girlfriend and I had gone our separate ways, me having been a dickhead and dumping her in the thoughtless way that comes so easily to teenagers. I was already dating a sweet painting student who loved David Bowie and wore fifties-style dresses when my dad, so fit and healthy, started having chest pain. Mum had him at a cardiologist that afternoon, her GP training making her swift and decisive. Yes, there was a blockage. Yes, he needed surgery. No, it couldn’t wait.

I don’t know why I sent Annelien that email. It’s not like Dad wasn’t totally fine. He came home from hospital, pale and slow, but otherwise his usual self. Still, I emailed her in a mess of tears. Something about mortality and not living a lie. Some carpe diem shit that I probably picked up at my fancy school. The message was something along the lines of: ‘Dad’s just had heart surgery and I thought he was going to die, oh, and also I’m gay, didn’t want to lie to you anymore, sorry ’bout that.’

Mainly she was just pissed that I hadn’t felt like I could trust her.

It felt like breathing out. And so our friendship went on.

It was also around that time that my cousin proposed to his French girlfriend. The wedding would be happening the following European summer, and would I like to come? As one of the few English- and French-speaking guests, I would be Very Valuable for cross-cultural translation. France is right next to Belgium. Of course I said yes.

*

Annelien and her mum picked me up from the station in Bruges, and we drove back to their family home. Rumbeke is little more than a blip on the map, a stretch of road with a bakery, a pharmacy and a few houses surrounded by cornfields. A funny place for an arty theatre-book nerd to grow up. I met Annelien’s kind blonde sporty family. She and I were the off-kilter peas in the proverbial pod.

We stayed in Rumbeke for two days, crisscrossing the paths through the cornfields and filling each other up with our news. I told her about my latest girlfriend, a strong-willed theatre student who lived by the beach, made excellent poached eggs, and when pressed supposed her favourite musician would probably be Michael Bublé. Annelien told me about moving halfway across the country to study, about her boyfriend (yes, still the same boy) and her dream of becoming a writer.

Once my jetlag wore off, the two of us made the three-hour pilgrimage to Antwerp, where Annelien was studying. Our train pulled through stations with names I couldn’t pronounce: Kortrijk, Waregem, Sint-Niklaas. The train had long benches arranged in open compartments, with luggage racks and hooks for passengers’ coats. Nobody was wearing a coat. It was the hottest summer Belgium had had in years. The heat was different to that at home. Melbourne summers were a sharp, dry, burning heat; crispy grass; air-conditioned supermarkets and cinemas; and ghost-town streets as everyone flocked to the shore. In Belgium the heat was still and damp, and the countryside was so green, even at the height of summer. We cracked open the train windows and inhaled the smell of the foliage. There’s no air conditioning in Belgium – there’s usually no need – and our sweaty legs stuck to the vinyl banquettes. Belgians often joke that summer is the nicest day of the year, but that year, summer went for weeks.

Annelien’s room was a blaze of sunlight in a shitty old building. The communal kitchen smelt like mildew, but at least it was cool. I slept on a mattress on her bedroom floor, flung out and exhausted after spending each day walking along broken-up cobbled streets in clogs, drinking beer on terraces, and talking with Annelien, always talking. We met her friends for pizza, we went to the chocolate museum, we shopped for vintage suitcases. She told me the legend of how Brabo had cut the hand off a giant and thrown it into the Scheldt, giving Antwerp its name. It was a fucked-up story. We also visited her uni to pick up her exam results. The place was straight out of Harry Potter. Tall girls in floral dresses pushed their bikes around campus, calling out to each other in Flemish. My life in Melbourne paled in comparison.

*

I was still half asleep the morning Lise showed up at Annelien’s door. Lise spilled into the room, her clothes full of holes, talking a mile a minute about how she’d failed half her exams and her dad was going to kill her. She had masses of hair and a ready laugh. She was breathtaking. I yanked my nightie down, covering my nakedness. For once, I kept my mouth shut.

Later, as Annelien and I tucked my mattress out of sight for another day, I fished for information. I found out that Annelien had been friends with Lise since moving to Antwerp two years earlier. Annelien also told me that Lise had had a crush on a girl while on exchange, and that she, Annelien, had been sworn to secrecy; but she could tell me because what role was I going to play in Lise’s life?

I knew I was in trouble the afternoon we walked around the dock. Antwerp is a port city, and a fleet of old sailing ships had berthed for the week. We met up with Lise to walk the water’s edge, looking at the ships but not really looking. For the first time since I’d met her, Annelien couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Lise and I bounced off each other with fizzing energy. I gathered more titbits of information: Jewish, single-parent household, fluent in five languages, always flunking exams. She made my stomach flip.

We were nearly home, the shadows of the brick terrace houses stretching long on the cobbles, when Lise asked what I only found out later was her benchmark question: who was my favourite musician? I answered without hesitation: Jens Lekman, Swedish pop-folk crooner, and top-ten reason not to kill myself when being a bespectacled gay scholarship kid had felt like a burden too big for my weedy shoulders.

Jens Lekman? Lise loved him. She was especially into his 2005 EP compilation. How did she feel about Michael Bublé? She would rather poke her eyes out with a fork.

So you see, I was in trouble.

*

Annelien left town with her sporty family for their summer holiday. Would I be alight alone in her room in Antwerp for three days? She promised to ask Lise to look after me while she was gone. We’d got on so well that time we walked around the port, that time we went to the movies, the trip out to Lise’s family home in Essen, that time we drank beer until the early hours. We were already such good friends! Would it be okay?

I said it would be okay. I resolved to play it cool. I did not succeed.

Our first date was only one in hindsight. I invited Lise to visit the contemporary art museum with me. It would’ve been great if either of us gave a shit about contemporary art. I was sweating in my jeans that were way too hot but made my bum look reasonable. Lise bought some cake to share and it tasted like stale sawdust. It was hands down the best date of my life.

That evening, we cooked together, orbiting around each other while chopping vegetables in the kitchen of her tiny studio, unspoken things swirling between us. Lise’s friend Sidney arrived with fresh berries from her mum’s garden, and booze. We drank it all, then bought more. We stumbled to a gay bar where Sidney stole the candle holders and Lise and I pressed up against each other in a dark corner.

We didn’t sleep together that summer. We didn’t even kiss. I was twenty and had a girlfriend back home. A girlfriend who liked Michael Bublé, but a girlfriend nonetheless.

Our three days evaporated in a tangle of guilt-tinged arousal. Three days was at once both brutally short and long enough to realise that this thing right here was unlike anything else in the world. Once our days were up, Lise put me on my train to France. My cheeks became wetter as the landscape dried out. I met up with my parents in Paris, and we travelled to the middle of the country together. I used all my pre-paid credit calling Lise, clutching the phone like a portal back to where I’d left my insides.

The wedding was beautiful. The population of rural Anzy-le-Duc, the bride’s home town, almost doubled for the weekend. Our sprawling family filled every chambre d’hôtes in Saône-et-Loire. Mangled French and broken English combined to broker an understanding between the two clans. The party went for two days and two nights. I switched from French to English and back again. I was neither here nor there.

I flew back to Melbourne after the wedding. I broke up with my girlfriend the night my flight landed. She picked me up from the airport and had made me the most beautiful homecoming gift. She had had her hair cut especially. I felt like a cruel piece of shit, but I also felt free.

*

It would take me a whole year to make it back to Belgium. I postponed uni, got a second job, turned down expensive nights out. I sent Lise lollies and books in the mail. I used my tax-return money to buy a laptop and fell asleep with it in my bed, Lise’s voice easing me into slumber. I treated every shift pouring Belgian beers for handsy, red-faced old men as another step towards a beer with my own Belgian.

My parents were reluctant to see me go. It was ridiculous, farfetched, a stupid waste of my time. Also, why was I still persisting with this gay business? My friends were also reluctant to see me go. What if I my heart got broken? What if she was an appallingly bad kisser?

My university was the most reluctant of all – not through any particular affection for me or concern for my wellbeing, but because they couldn’t be arsed doing the legwork. But I was persistent to the point of obnoxiousness. I pestered the exchange office for months until they finally relented. Fine, they eventually said, I could go to Belgium. Fine, I could count it as an exchange. But no, they wouldn’t help me with the paperwork. It didn’t matter to me, though. I was going.

*

I landed in Belgium expecting another sweaty summer, but instead touched down into rain and chilly winds. This time it was Lise who picked me up from the station. She held my hand so gently and smiled so shyly. She was shorter than I remembered. She was perfect.

That year in Belgium was magnificent and terrifying and exhilarating. For the first time in my life, I had my own sun-drenched room, my own shitty kitchen. Annelien and Lise’s friends lent me sheets, plates, pots and pans. Those friends slowly became my friends. I got chubby on fries and beer, and flunked French. I learnt some Flemish, and wandered through the Harry Potter halls in my own floral dresses. Mostly, though, there was Lise. Lise at dinnertime, Lise on Christmas morning, Lise getting up to pee in the middle of the night and then crawling back into bed, snuggling into my nook. That year made us real. It was a good year.

That year was followed by another good one, and then another after that. We were long distance, and then we weren’t, and then we were again. Sometimes it was hard. Sometimes we pissed each other off, had no money, didn’t understand each other’s cultural point of view. Occasionally it felt like too bloody much.

But like Annelien all those years before, our love has stuck. When people ask how long we’ve been together, the number sounds strange to me. We have become one of Those Couples. We have friends who have met, married, had children and split up in less time. We’ve had shitty jobs, shitty haircuts, shitty housemates. Loved ones have passed, and babies have been born. Annelien has even had two. They have her hair and her husband’s smile (yes, still the same boy).

We’ve bounced back and forth between our countries and visited a few new ones in between. We’ve seen each other through surgeries, homesickness and a gruelling bout with the Australian immigration department. One day soon Lise will be an Australian citizen. They’re going to give her a tree to plant, but her roots have been growing in this soil since the night we lay on her futon, buzzing with vodka and wonder, and just looked and looked. When Australia voted for marriage equality, we danced to John Paul Young, both of us soggy and frizzy in the rain. I cried while drunk on cheap cider and she held me tight.

We live in the same place now. We even have a lease. We own a coffee table and a stick blender. Somewhere among the long distance, the books read and the meals cooked, we’ve become adults. Despite all of that, I still feel free.

*

My queerness was born in a hot dry land that was never ceded. It took its first steps in underground parties in disused warehouses, eyeing cute girls on the cross-river bus and getting frisky in the back rows of Cinema Nova. It was born Australian, but along the way it veered off course. It’s grown strong on a jumbled diet of pavlova and pralines. Its ‘heaps good’ is sprinkled with some ‘ongelooflijk’ and more ‘ik hou van jou’ than you’d think. It’s drinking beer brewed by monks on a forty-degree day. It stands steady on cobblestones in the rain, and bobs in the waves off the coast of Victoria. Its roots stretch far and deep and are inextricably buried in the soils of two continents. It’s carried within the person by my side, who still holds my hand gently, but no longer shyly. I’m thankful every day that she stuck.