‘So is it true that, like, nearly everything in Australia can kill you, know wha’ I mean? You know, like animals an’ ’at?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I replied. ‘Most of the wildlife is pretty deadly.’ I looked around at the group of kids – about six of them hanging on my every word. It was my second week at the Academy in Islington and word had got about that I was from Oz.
‘Snakes innit?’ said one girl.
‘Snakes are pretty bad, true,’ I said. ‘Did you know that fifteen of the top twenty deadliest snakes in the world are from Australia?’ I seemed to remember that wasn’t too far from the truth, as it turned out. Not that I was overly bothered with the truth.
‘But they’re in the desert an’ ’at, yeah?’ said another girl. ‘What do yer call it? The bush.’
‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘We’d get them in the house all the time.’ I spread my arms wide. ‘Metres, sorry, yards long, thick as your arm. I woke up one time and found this massive python wrapped around my leg.’
I was pleased to see that the pairs of eyes around me had widened appreciably.
‘What you do?’
‘Unwrapped it, of course,’ I said. ‘Took it out into the garden, let it go. The pythons aren’t a problem. It’s the eastern browns and the taipans that’ll kill you soon as look at you.’
‘An’ you got them in the house?’
‘All the time,’ I lied. ‘Them and red-bellied black snakes and tiger snakes and … and panther snakes.’ I was pretty sure that panther snakes didn’t exist, but what the hell. I paused and picked nonchalantly at a fingernail. ‘Sea snakes are bad, but no one bothers with them because sharks are more likely to get you. Great whites, mainly.’
‘And they’re like everywhere in the sea, yeah?’
‘You can’t throw a rock without hitting one,’ I replied. ‘Then there’s the blue-ringed octopus.’
‘The what-now?’
‘The blue-ringed octopus,’ I said. I fiddled with my phone, brought up a YouTube video. ‘Here’s one. They look so cute, but they’ll kill you stone dead. They’re deadlier even than koalas.’
‘Wha’?’
I figured I’d maybe stretched the truth just a little too far with this, but I was having fun.
‘Not many people know that koalas have very sharp claws,’ I said. ‘They might look cute and cuddly, but if they get in the mood …’ I brought my hand up to my throat and made a cutting gesture. ‘Don’t get a koala angry, is my best advice.’
‘Wha’ bout spiders?’ This from someone who hadn’t said anything yet.
‘Big as dinner plates,’ I said. ‘And aggressive. Sometimes they kill pissed-off koalas, which is handy.’
There were six very satisfying (from my perspective, at least) gasps.
‘Let me tell you about the drop bear,’ I said.
London was a strange place until I got used to it. I thought I knew what living in a big city was like, coming from Melbourne and its five million people. London was nearly twice that. Accents were totally weird, doubledecker buses everywhere, restaurants amazing and nearly as good as Melbourne’s, traffic really really crazy (much quicker to walk), the Underground like something out of a movie with all those steps and tunnels and escalators that made it sometimes feel like you were journeying to the centre of the Earth. Sam had rented a two-bedroom apartment in Angel, which I thought was a super cool name for a suburb, and it was small but really expensive. Mum said it was about twice the price you’d pay to rent a similar place in Melbourne. It had central heating – these weird radiators dotted around the place with hot water running through them. No garden, but then again it was normally too cold to go outside anyway. Best to hug a radiator. There were supermarkets with strange names like Asda and Sainsbury’s, though Aldi was a familiar face. You had to pay to watch the television. I don’t mean there was a slot meter or anything, but you had to buy a licence, which was something crazy like three hundred bucks a year. Even if you didn’t have a television but wanted to stream programs on your phone, they’d sting you with this charge. Didn’t make any sense to me. Instead of using a myki card to get around, you used something called an Oyster card. It would be dark when you went to school and dark when you got home. Even when there was daylight it was dark. Cold. In summer, apparently. Especially in summer, I was informed.
And the rain. Don’t get me started on the rain.
I began to love the place. It crept up on me, as love has a habit of doing.
Mum got a job as a teacher in a school that mainly dealt with ‘challenged’ students. She told me she challenged them to do work and they didn’t. Classroom management was a nightmare. Marking was easy because they didn’t do any writing.
After a few weeks of coming home and gently beating her head against the wall, she started to love the school and the students.
Sam was apparently highly thought-of in his advertising agency, which brought us all benefits. For one thing we could afford the scandalous rent in Angel, but we’d all go on trips, sometimes for work and sometimes just on outings at the weekend. Glasgow was amazing. Sam said everyone spoke English, but that wasn’t my experience. I didn’t understand a word the whole time I was there. We went to Stonehenge. We went to villages in places like Suffolk and Kent and Dorset and saw thatched cottages dating back hundreds of years. We explored castles. One was called Highclere Castle and Mum almost wet herself with excitement because it was the set for a television program called Downton Abbey, whatever that was. A guide there, spotting my Australian accent, pointed out a bit snootily that English history dated back well over a thousand years to Anglo Saxon times. I sniffed and informed him that Australian history and culture dated back over sixty thousand years. He looked suitably snoot-deflated.
One amazing Monday we went to Paris for a couple of days. I was allowed to skip school and the whole adventure was a blast. It was a few minutes’ walk to the Angel Underground Station, where we caught the Northern Line to Kings Cross St. Pancras. From there we got on the Eurostar and two and a half hours later, we were in Paris. Sam had a meeting somewhere, but Mum and I wandered through the streets, walked along the Seine, saw the Eiffel Tower (at a distance) and had a wonderful meal in a restaurant where no one spoke English. Not one person. I suppose I’d assumed that most people in the world spoke enough English to look after tourists, but Sam told me that night at the hotel that the French weren’t too impressed by the English or their language.
‘If you expect them to understand or speak English, then they won’t,’ he said. ‘Most times they’ll shrug and ignore you. But if you try to speak French they’re the friendliest people.’
‘Sorry, I can’t speak French,’ I pointed out.
‘Pardonnez-moi. Je ne parle pas français,’ he said. ‘That’s not beyond you. Then follow it up with “oui”, “non” and “merci”. Trust me, Cate, they’ll reward you just for making an effort.’
‘What about an electronic translator?’
‘Only if you can find an electronic French person. Come on. What do you have to lose?’
‘My dignity?’
‘I hate to break it to you …’
I tried my few words out the following day and he was right. I mean, my accent was disgusting, but people smiled when I talked. Some even replied in English that was a million times better than my French. I was surrounded by strange places, strange people, strange buildings and a strange language. But that just made me feel … alive. It made me understand that worlds and possibilities were all around.
When we got back to London, it felt like coming home.
Elise and I WhatsApped constantly and rang whenever we could. The time difference caused some problems, since evening in Melbourne was morning in London and I had to get off to school. When I got back at about four in the afternoon it was around one in the morning in Australia. By the time Elise woke up it was normally past my bedtime. Ho hum. But we managed. I still worried about her. Of course I did. When your best friend tries to overdose it doesn’t leave you. And distance makes you feel so … distanced. But she told me she was fine. Insisted on it, actually. With a few swear words thrown in. I found out that she had made friends with a boy who was new to the school. According to Elise, it was because he’d moved from London and she could quiz him about the life I’d be leading. But I know my friend. It was more than curiosity. Hey, I was telling her about life in London. Romance was lurking there somewhere and I was glad. I sent her postcards from everywhere I went. She sent me a postcard of Flinders Street station. Smart-arse.
Dad and I found a way to put what I still considered his betrayal behind us, though for me, at least, it lingered there in the background. We didn’t talk about it. I didn’t ask why he had changed his mind and he didn’t volunteer the information. I knew why I didn’t want to pursue it. What would I do if it turned out he had weighed up everything about having sole responsibility for a daughter and decided it wasn’t worth it? Can a relationship survive that? So I told him all about London and what I was experiencing and he was really interested. I even went so far as to tell him that I thought he had been right in giving me up, that living in Europe was better than I could have imagined. Was I trying to get a bit of emotional revenge? Maybe. I’m not sure. But if I was trying to wound him, then it didn’t appear to work. Dad just told me he was glad it was all going well.
I knew I was getting integrated into the Brit way of life when Mum told me I was losing my Australian accent.
‘I’m not,’ I said, more than a hint of resentment in my tone.
‘What do you think, Sam?’ Mum said.
‘Yup. Definitely turning Cockney,’ he said, stirring a pan of food while I laid the table. ‘Give it a few months and she’ll be saying, I met this bloke, he was radio rental, know what I mean, an ’e had more rabbit than Sainsbury’s, so we’re walking down the frog and ’e sees someone who he says is a tea leaf, real barney rubble.’
I knew some cockney rhyming slang, but most of this went over my head.
‘Translation, please?’
‘You must be mutt and jeff, Cate,’ said Sam. ‘Deaf. Radio rental, mental. Rabbit and pork, talk. Sainsbury’s supermarket has lots of rabbit. Frog and toad, road. Tea leaf, thief. Barney rubble, trouble.’
‘Clear as day,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell Elise about it on the dog.’
‘Dog and bone, phone,’ said Mum and Sam together.
In early November we went to a community bonfire for Guy Fawkes Night. Apparently this guy, Guy, tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament hundreds of years ago and on the fifth of November everyone in England burns an effigy of him on a bonfire, lets off fireworks and plays with sparklers. It didn’t make much sense to me, particularly since most people seemed to think Parliament was full of morons or crooks. Moronic crooks, mainly. But it turns out the politics didn’t have much significance. It was just a chance to warm your hands against a big bonfire and develop red noses from the cold wind. The three of us did both.
The days passed and my birthday and Christmas were on the horizon. The air in London was getting colder and colder, which I’d thought was a physical impossibility. I’d come home from school and stick my hands in the fridge just to warm them up. I’d moan about the weather – everyone did – but I was more than a little excited to think that maybe this year I’d experience a white Christmas. Could I make angels in the snow in Angel? I came home from school one day in early December and there were flakes drifting down from a sky that seemed made of metal. It wasn’t sticking, true, but it was a taste of what was to come. I couldn’t wait to share it with Mum when she got home from school. But it turned out she was already home. She was home and she told me my father was dead.