Chapter 31

In Transit

I’VE ALWAYS CONSIDERED long-distance plane travel to be a very odd thing. Four hundred people crammed into a tin can, hurtling through space at several hundred miles per hour. All breathing, snoring, and drooling on one another. It’s a sustained period of forced intimacy between complete strangers during which normal rules of social interaction are suspended. Personal space is routinely violated, all rules of basic hygiene are dismissed, and behavior that would otherwise cause outrage is somehow tolerated. On any given long-distance flight, it’s not uncommon to wake with your head on a stranger’s shoulder—a small wet patch on their shirt testament to how deeply you have been sleeping. Long-distance flights are also an opportunity to be exposed, at disturbingly close range, to fellow humans who consider such basics as cutlery and coming up for air between mouthfuls to be unnecessary to the eating process. Long-distance air travel is also a great way to get to know the bladder capacity, or lack thereof, of whoever is sitting beside you.

Whenever I am about to board a long-distance flight, I sense a kind of war-effort mentality among my fellow passengers. As we stand there at the boarding gate, checking each other out, dreading the ordeal ahead of us, we silently acknowledge that survival is going to be assured only if everybody is prepared to sacrifice a little bit of the personal for greater good of the group. A mile-high mucking-in.

As I stood at Charles de Gaulle airport, a ticket for Sydney in hand, wondering apprehensively if I was to have the distinct pleasure of sharing my personal space for the next twenty-four hours with the extremely overweight man near the ticket counter or the mother juggling screaming twins by the window, I paused to reflect on what had been a frantic couple of weeks.

During the barely twenty days since my carte de séjour application was rejected at the préfecture, I had been a busy little illegal immigrant. On the work front, I had negotiated a deal with the ICC. Since the screw-up with my working papers was partly their fault, and thanks to the existence in France of a labor tribunal that is famously workers’-rights-oriented, the good folks at ICC saw fit to offer me a relatively lucrative six-month contract to work for them as a “media consultant.” Whatever that was. They had a series of conferences and events on their near horizon, and with no obvious candidate to replace me in my job, they decided the devil they knew was better than no devil at all. On the work papers front, I had also been busy. Thanks to the trickle of freelance writing I had been doing since arriving in France, it transpired that I was technically eligible for a journalist’s visa. All I had to do was go home and apply for it. And on the personal front, I had had a similarly good result. I had crossed paths again with the Showgirl. It was only a brief encounter—me leaving a dinner party just as she was arriving—but it was enough to reinforce the mutual attraction. At least that was the impression I got.

And so Sydney beckoned. After you’ve survived the Europe-to-Australia flight ordeal a couple of times, you start to develop a system, a series of airborne habits to make the experience less painful. For some, it is a low-carb, high-liquid diet and a glass of wine with dinner to help them nod off to sleep. For others it is an uninterrupted schedule of in-flight movies. For me, it was a cocktail of drugs—sleeping pills and muscle relaxants—and as much water as I could force into my system.

I performed my long-haul flight ritual as the plane rumbled toward Central Asia, drifting off to sleep somewhere over Turkey. Some six hours later I was roused by rumblings from the two young Australian guys sharing my row of seats. I turned on my TV screen and looked at the in-flight map, noting that our plane was hovering somewhere over Burma—the way flights from Paris to Australia seem interminably to do.

When finally we touched down in Sydney, it was with no small amount of relief that I peeled myself out of my seat and poured myself into the waiting arms of my hometown. Yes, I had official visa-seeking duties to perform there, but for the most part, the trip was going to be a great chance to see my family and catch up with friends. What I expected, perhaps naïvely, was to pick up where I had left off—late nights out on the town in seedy bars, carousing with old work buddies. What I got was a whole lot of dinner parties and nights out at restaurants at which the conversation always seemed to turn to cladding.

I was also invited to the occasional trip to the pub. But none of these social engagements ever went beyond eleven p.m., lest they interfere with a sunrise yoga class or a personal trainer appointment the following morning. At each dinner party I would listen politely to explanations of where the jarrah wood was sourced for the upstairs extension, or how an architect had cleverly managed to incorporate the old gum tree into the plans for the back deck. Living as I did in the heart of Paris, in a building constructed in the seventeenth century (a fact to which my regular plumbing bills bore painful witness), in a tiny bachelor pad that was paid for each month by dropping off a rent check to the little old lady proprietor up the street, my interest in back decks and house extensions was minimal. But back in Australia I couldn’t turn around without tripping over a home renovation, either from peers waxing lyrical about their negative gearing, or from preening TV presenters grinning stupidly as they explained the finer points of cement rendering.

Back in the golden age of television, prerequisites for TV stardom included a quick wit, an engaging personality, and sometimes even an ability to sing. These days, it appeared that all you needed to have your own prime-time program in Australia was proficiency with a paint-brush and a full set of drill bits. Retreating home at midnight, all renovated out, I would plunk myself down in front of late-night Australian TV. During one of these edifying late night TV sessions, it occurred to me that you can tell a lot about the social life of a country by the quality of the television it produces.

In France, the TV is universally awful. The few hours of daily programming not taken up by mindless game shows or ponderous documentaries about obscure Polish performance artists are filled with monumentally dull talk shows. These latter invariably consist of a panel of apparently eminent persons (usually C-list celebs or crusty octogenarians) sitting in front of a studio audience holding forth on all manner of tedious trivia. The only thing more remarkable than the fact that TV executives allow this tripe to air in such quantity is the existence of a never-ending supply of gormless Frenchies willing to sit in a TV studio for an hour while it is being taped.

But rather than an indictment of French society, I concluded that the abysmal TV was a sign of how healthy the country’s collective social life was. The fact that the French produce only rubbish TV is surely because so few of them actually watch it. Conversely, the reason the British produce some of the world’s best television is that watching TV is pretty much all the entire nation of Great Britain does.

The French are all too busy eating in cafés, discussing politics over a pastis, comparing philosophical theories on the meaning of life, attempting to get each other into bed, or repelling the unwanted advances of drunken expat opportunists. In short, they are too busy living, being active members of a community, to watch industrial quantities of TV.

Unlike in Australia and even more so America, communal living in France meant much more than occupying a gated collection of cookie-cutter prefabricated homes. Being part of a community in Paris meant being a visible, active player in the daily (and nightly) drama that is played out on the streets, in the Métro, and in the restaurants, cafés, and bars of this thriving metropolis. Born of a rich cultural tradition in which town squares were the vital focus of communal village life, and encouraged by the fact that most apartments are the size of broom closets, this vast, heaving mass of physically interacting human beings makes for an exciting backdrop in which to play out your own life. On any night of the week, at no matter what hour, you can always find a crowded bar or café, take your place at a table, and feel as though your shuffle along this mortal coil is part of something bigger. It’s massively comforting. In Paris you are never lonely.

But here in my hometown, I was struck by the silence. If I had stepped out the door of the inner-city Sydney apartment in which I was staying after nine p.m. on a weekday, the only thing I was guaranteed to encounter was a tumbleweed. Dark, desolate streets, even in otherwise lively downtown suburbs, echoed with the sound of silence. The only hint of life in the apartments and terraces in the neighborhood was the faint blue glow from the TV set in each one. Unlike in France, in Australia sense of community is largely derived from going home to your little box, shutting out the rest of the world, turning on the television, and passively staring at the same home renovation show everyone else is watching. I watch Backyard Blitz, therefore I am. Only by witnessing the televised transformation of a dilapidated suburban home by an amiable team of do-it-yourselfers, led by a teeth-whitened former male stripper, can you truly say you are a participating member of Australian society. Such is the fervor with which my country folk devour TV that, if someone told me that a crack team of government operatives stole into your house at night and spirited you away for a month of intensive social reeducation if you weren’t up to date with who had been chucked out of the Big Brother house or voted off Dancing with the Stars, I would believe them.

Two weeks into my stay I started to feel apprehensive, worried that if I stood still for longer than five minutes, someone would either come along and renovate me or whisk me off to dress me in a sequined unitard and force me to dance the polka with Pauline Hanson.

In a topsy-turvy world such as this, a fella could turn to only one person to make sense of it all. It was time to visit Hazel.

 

HAZEL IS MY GRANDMOTHER, the dowager empress of the family, the keeper of the secrets, the knower of all things. Less a silent, omniscient oracle than a vociferous bundle of raw energy, at ninety-three years old she is often invoked by those who know her as a role model for the inevitable process of aging. Though some of her faculties are starting to fail, she is still sprightly. Though her eyes are affected by cataracts, they still have a twinkle, and while the step has slowed down in the last ten years, it still has a definite spring.

At Haze’s age, every day is an event—and she makes sure she dresses accordingly. She loves nothing better than a day out “in town,” as she calls it. And where others her age spend their days in tattered cardigans and slippers, she would rather be dead than be caught on the town in anything but a good dress and a smart pair of heels. When some women get old, they become wrinkled curmudgeons, lilac-scented, fragile little sparrows who are distinctly afraid of life. To them, every trip to the corner store is fraught with potential peril. Fed on a daily diet of fear-mongering from the tabloid media, they honestly believe a simple trip to fetch a carton of milk will result in certain mugging and rape.

But not Haze. With the days of her life counting down, every morning that she wakes up is a blessing, and she’s damned if she isn’t going to make the most of it. Consequently, if you try to call her anytime after nine a.m. Sydney time, she is invariably out the door—having already washed the curtains, dusted the Venetians, pruned the roses, and scrubbed the bathtub raw. It’s invariably the movies—or “the pictures,” as she calls them—to which she heads. Recently, as her hearing has become increasingly unreliable, she has taken to spending her mornings at the several inner-city cinemas that screen foreign films.

“I can turn off my hearing aid and read the subtitles,” she tells my long-suffering mother, who plays able assistant to my grandmother’s daily wrestle with mortality. As a result, Haze has seen more film noir, borderline porn, avant-garde, and esoteric cinema in the past five years than your average inner-city art student. I can only imagine what the ticket-sellers make of the old woman handing over her Seniors Card to get a discounted ticket to such recent art-house hits as the Swedish depress-fest Fucking Amal or the Kurt Cobain–inspired biopic Last Days. When I quiz her about these films afterward, her recollection of the plotlines is usually sketchy at best. I can only assume she sleeps through most of them.

For the better part of the last thirty years Haze has spent her grandchildren’s inheritance on overseas trips, so she is quite worldly for a person of her generation. Until recently trips through the Alaskan wilderness, South Pacific cruises, and boat tours up the Mekong River were all a part of Haze’s regular annual activities, but now no travel insurance company will touch her.

All of which has made her a relatively tolerant neighbor in the face of a complete transformation of the cultural mix in her neighborhood, Kingsgrove, in Sydney’s inner-southern suburbs. Where once Mavises and Alans brought up little scamps called Bruce and Trevor, now Stavros and Anastasia occupy their multipillared, two-story, red-brick home. So do Kuan Yin and Jiang Li and their extended family. More than most people her age, my grandmother takes the multiculturalization of her neighborhood in stride. While she will occasionally drop the odd racist remark, she manages to keep an open mind to most things.

As I discovered one afternoon, when I needed a break from home-renovating tips, and I decided to take her to lunch. My journalist’s visa for France had been approved the day before, and I was due to fly back to Paris in two days’ time. Haze and I were in the car, returning to her house after a heavy-duty eating session at her favorite all-you-can-eat seafood buffet at Sydney’s salubrious Star City casino. Years before, when I was barely old enough to carry my own dinner plate, Haze had taught me the cardinal rules of all-you-can-eat dining, namely, don’t fill up on bread before going to the buffet, use a layer of overhanging lettuce leaves to make the surface area of your plate larger, and always, but always push your way to the front when the new tray of shrimp comes out of the kitchen. Today at lunch in the casino buffet, she watched me stuff myself to the point of explosion. Then I drove her back to the home she had built and proudly maintained for the last sixty-odd years. As we pulled into her street, we saw an elderly Chinese gentleman shuffling along the sidewalk in full Chinese peasant regalia, complete with Mao suit and conical cane hat.

“Oh, we’ve got them all here in the neighborhood now,” Haze remarked. “Chinese, Greek, Italian, Lesbians—you name it.”

“Lesbians?” I shot back, incredulous that any self-respecting dyke would choose to live ten miles outside downtown.

“Yes,” came her reply. “You know, those ones from the Lebanon.”

Spending time with Haze back in the homeland was always entertaining. Saying goodbye at the end of these visits is always a wrench.

Though you try not to dwell on it, you know that as you drop her off and pull away from the curb, that glimpse in the rearview mirror of the snowy-haired, shrunken little woman—refusing to stop waving until your car has turned the corner—may be the last time you see her.

It’s a wrench that you only feel more keenly as you pack your bags and prepare for the journey back to Paris.

Your parents—whose support gave you the confidence to throw yourself at the mercy of the world in the first place—stand stoically at the airport departure gates, swallowing tears. Once you are in the plane and airborne, with the city slipping away beneath you, you realize you are trapped between two worlds. Paris is home, but you will never be a Parisian. Sydney is where your heart is, but you no longer feel you belong. You are torn between two countries, the inescapable fate of the expat.