For probably the first time in his life, the next morning Dad didn’t bother to make the bed or clean up after himself. He couldn’t get out of Paris fast enough. If the option had been available, he’d have lined up outside the car hire place at 5 am, like he was waiting for the latest Apple product to be released.

We were headed for Caen. Pronounced Cane. Or Cannes. Or Cairns. I could never get it right. It’s a town about three hours west of Paris, in Normandy.

Even though we were on a sealed freeway and not really in the countryside, there were enough fields and meadows off to the side to let us know we were free of the city. A distinct lack of traffic helped too. Dad could finally relax. We hired a Renault, which wasn’t anywhere near as luxurious as the Mercedes we’d hired in Germany. It wasn’t said aloud, but I have no doubt the lack of heated seats made a list.

It seemed we were coming to a toll station every five minutes, and I had no idea how much I was being charged each time I fed my credit card into the slot. But Dad didn’t complain about the tolls; they were barriers we were putting between us and the dreaded city we were leaving behind. Cost wasn’t important anymore.

I’d put Normandy on our itinerary so I could see the beaches where the Allies made the famous D-Day landings of World War II, turning the tide of the war. If you’re not familiar with D-Day, it’s the opening battle scene of Saving Private Ryan. If you’re not familiar with Saving Private Ryan, think Beaches, but with Bette Midler pinned on the beach by Wehrmacht machine-gun fire and then getting her arm blown off.

Driving out to Caen, to see a series of beaches Dad had zero interest in, I started to get the sense that I’d made a mistake by making the trip as long as I had. For me, time off was a precious resource, so whenever I travelled, I tried to maximise every waking moment. Particularly when it was Europe or South America, I felt I needed to stay as long as I could to justify how long it had taken me to get there from Australia. I’d already lost two days of holiday time flying there and back, so I wanted to make the most of the rest.

I usually timed my arrival home to be the day before I went back to work, not concerning myself with jetlag because I could recover on company time. Usually the writing assignments I worked on weren’t expected to be completed in a day, so as long as I kept myself alert enough during meetings with Nō-Dōz washed down with coffees topped up with Red Bull, I could fudge my way through the day and make sure I was okay enough to get it all done the following day.

If I was staying at a resort, then ten days of holidays was plenty. Time doesn’t matter when all you’re doing is lying around a pool. The biggest issue I faced on those holidays was hoping no one noticed I’d spent four hours at the pool bar without getting out to go to the bathroom.

But somewhere like Europe, full of history and culture, plus all kinds of different regions and landscapes and cities, you want to go for as long as possible to take it all in. And for the unprepared, i.e. Dad, three weeks on the road can be a shock. Like dog years, Dad had his own sense of time – if you’d asked him in Caen, which was the two-week mark of our holiday, in Dad years we’d already been in Europe half his life. The excitement of Munich was long gone; he was bored now, just getting through each minute until we could get home. He didn’t complain, resigned to the fact that we had a week left and there was little he could do to change that.

Because we’d managed to get a fair amount of stuff done in Paris in pretty much a day, he’d wondered why I’d booked the place for four nights. If he’d had his way, we would have spent only two days in each city. When I was planning this trip, I thought that wouldn’t be enough time to see everything worth seeing and really immerse ourselves in each place. As it turned out, Dad would’ve been happy with two hours in each city. Or however long it took for a hop-on/hop-off tourist bus to do a lap. He could just tick off the major tourist sites as we went past, sitting on the upper deck of the bus with two singlets under his shirt to avoid the cold.

Arriving in Caen, we checked in to our hotel, and for the first time on this trip we weren’t sharing. It was a nice boutique hotel, containing only fifteen or so neat little rooms that had the feel of luxury about them, not just mass-produced furniture placed in the same configuration in room after room. Dad’s and mine were a completely different layout. Heaven compared to the apartment in Paris.

Our time in Caen was like a holiday within a holiday. Separate rooms meant that for a few blessed hours, between sightseeing and dinner, we could get away from each other and sit in unfilled silence. Dad was free to talc all he wanted without complaint, and I was free to not answer strange questions or get lung cancer.

The countryside, away from the crowds, was a relief to Dad. Traffic was minimal and rather than a main thoroughfare our hotel was on a two-lane street, surrounded by cute two-storey attached terrace houses. We were on the outskirts (but not the horrible industrial outskirts) of the main part of Caen, so it felt like the suburbs – quiet and relaxed. I didn’t dare take Dad out for a walk as all the surrounding streets were paved with cobblestones. Aside from visiting the D-Day beaches and going to some of the museums that would inevitably be attached to them, I had nothing solid planned. We’d be dropping back to the pace Dad had probably been expecting all along: one item of interest, followed by hours of nothing.

Dad didn’t have an interest in World War II history like I did, but after the intense city life of Paris, going to a beach sounded alright to him, so that first afternoon we headed out to see the D-Day landing sites. We slowly drove from one beach to the next: Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah. Our stays at each became shorter as we realised, after the first three, that they were all pretty similar. A bunker or two, a commemorative plaque here and there, and a museum. We didn’t bother going into the first few, as I knew that Omaha Beach held the army cemetery, a host of museums and a theatre. By now I knew I couldn’t use up all my Dad tickets too early, and didn’t want to waste his limited attention span on a not-as-good museum.

We made our way through a few bunkers and over concrete embankments, constantly reminded of what occurred here by the uneven, pockmarked landscape, craters from the naval bombardment having grassed over in the seventy years since. We did visit the Arromanches 360, a cinema set up like a planetarium, replaying archive footage from the Battle of Normandy on the ceiling above us. The cinema was free for WWII veterans, which I thought was a nice gesture, though I wasn’t sure how many of them would want to relive that time, and it did seem slightly cynical since as time went on fewer and fewer veterans would be around to take them up on the offer.

Then we arrived at Omaha, generally considered the main beach of the invasion, being the most heavily defended and where the Allies suffered the greatest casualties. This peninsula may have marked the beginnings of the Allies’ counterattack on the Nazis, but for Dad it was a happy place, marking his own liberation from Paris.

We walked through the American army cemetery at Omaha Beach, a sea of white crosses that left me awestruck. Most of these deaths had occurred on the one day. It wasn’t often I got to see the physical incarnation of sacrifice.

From here I wandered down to the beach in the hope of finding some memento, not really sure what I was expecting – perhaps a bullet casing, or an old rusted weapon. I wanted an item to bring back as a reminder of the trip that, unlike Dad’s, didn’t belong in a road. I wouldn’t find it here.

Dad stayed up at the top of the cliffs as I walked down, his legs giving him way too much grief by this stage to even consider joining me in heading down the steep embankment. I didn’t force the issue. I’d seen the problems Dad was having every time he got in and out of the car, and a walk down to the beach wouldn’t have been pleasant for him.

On our leisurely drive back to the hotel, we soaked up the beautiful countryside, the roads dotted with tiny little not-even-towns. They had old houses set so close to the narrow, winding streets, I felt sure I was going to lose the bond on the hire car by tearing off a sideview mirror.

 

After some much-appreciated alone time, I headed over to Dad’s room to work out what we’d do for dinner. We were both tired from being up early and walking the beaches, so trying to find somewhere to eat once again began to feel like a chore.

There was a restaurant attached to the hotel, and Dad asked, ‘Why don’t we eat here?’

It was a fair enough question, considering we could have jumped in the lift and been there in about 40 seconds. But the answer was: because I had looked at the menu earlier, and I knew him.

‘We can . . . but it’s a Michelin-starred restaurant.’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a fancy degustation restaurant . . .’ I responded, his blank look letting me know he didn’t know what a degustation was. I kept going. ‘You know, like eight courses —’ Dad’s eyes lit up, his mind completely misleading him, thinking of eight serves of any type of food.

I explained it was going to be small dishes of really fine, crafted food, something not in his repertoire. To Dad, fine, crafted food is a rolled-up slice of ham, perhaps with a toothpick through it. If there was some Coon cheese and a butter pickle at the end of the toothpick then it really was a formal occasion.

Experimenting was not high on Dad’s list. He was in a 45-year eating groove and anything outside of that was not entertained. Dinner was ritually at 6 pm, unless some force of nature dictated otherwise. A polo shirt would cover him for pretty much any venue he wished to dine. And there was ‘no need for the spicy food!’ Mum told us kids that, before we were born, she managed to get him to throw caution to the wind and go to a Chinese restaurant – he ordered the mixed grill.

These days, Mum and Dad’s dining experiences were generally bistro-based, complete with members’ and seniors’ nights, be they at the local pub or the footy club down the road. These places adhered to Dad’s theory on food, which was that you should never be able to see plate. Every available space on the serving dish that could be covered with food should be covered with food. This was consistent with his suggested serving size of ‘as big as your head’. If it happened to be bigger than your head that was a win, but certainly nothing smaller. He was probably upset that pizzas were round but came in square boxes, squandering potential deliciousness.

The Ivan Vautier restaurant we were about to dine in would have been awarded its Michelin stars for their ‘high culinary merit’. They’re rarely awarded extra stars because their foie gras and lobster marinated in Normandian pommeau is generously served in a bucket.

While Dad’s eating habits made it appear as though he’d survived a famine during a depression, his cooking requirements were also ‘no fuss’. Steaks were to be, ‘Really well done, thanks.’ When they arrived, the more burned the better – not that he could taste the charcoal outer, burying it under a tsunami of tomato sauce (from the pantry). The Eiffel Tower mightn’t have been big enough, but if his chicken parma was an inch thick then you had his seal of approval and had given him a memory that would last a lifetime.

Like most families, growing up we had our weekly food routines. There was kai si ming, Mum’s version of all-encompassing Asian, made up of beef mince, shredded cabbage and other assorted (read: leftover) veggies, with a mild spice flavouring that I imagined was a combination of curry powder and MSG.

We had chops, never steak. We weren’t ‘bloody millionaires’.

The only dish Dad would make was spaghetti bolognaise, his specialty. He used every available condiment and spice in the pantry, making the sauce thick, red and delicious. It also ruined the taste of a simple Napoli sauce for me – Dad’s was so heavy and sweet that anything else was as worthless as eating a chip without salt.

Dad knew what he liked and stuck to it. We had our local pizza place, and there was never any thought of changing. Dad loved them and I’m sure thanks to his dedicated custom they came to love him too. When they answered the phone, the first thing they’d ask for was the address, to check if you were in their delivery zone. Upon hearing our address, they’d reel off our order before I had a chance to, starting with: family-sized capricciosa. That was for Dad. Alone. Family-sized. He’d eat that every Friday night after returning home from shopping with Mum.

Ours was a family of big serves. We ate it all, whether we felt like it or not. Countless times I’d sat at the table, my stomach stretched like an overinflated football, drifting into a coma, only for Dad to start light-heartedly cajoling me. ‘Finish it. Come on, there’s hardly any left.’

If I somehow managed to protest without bringing it all up again, he’d follow that up with, ‘You’re not wasting it!’

In Europe he’d so far gotten by without straying too far from what was familiar, sticking to the western, less cultured part of menus in restaurants and bakeries, which he could eat in large quantities.

But in Caen, emboldened, he said he was up for the Michelin dining experience even after I’d explained the concept to him. That made me excited too. Not so much for the food, although I was looking forward to that, but because I was enthusiastic about watching him during the meal. For that event I could have sold tickets for upwards of $5000 to anyone who knew him.

Michelin restaurants aren’t known for their exceptional value, but I kept that part to myself. I wanted Dad to deal with the birdlike serves on their own merits, rather than calculating that he could have had six serves of the Windy Hill bistro’s Friday night special fish and chips for the price of our first course.

The maître d’ seated us at our table, the rest of the fairly small restaurant full with about eight couples. Even though it was a fairly nice establishment, the mood was relaxed and welcoming, Dad and I not feeling underdressed in our suitcase attire. Once we’d sat down we informed our waiter we’d be partaking in the degustation. I decided to order a glass of wine, expecting Dad to get a beer, when he suggested we should grab a bottle to share. I had never seen him drink wine. Ever. It was always beer.

He’d had a spirits cupboard when I was growing up, but it was stocked mostly with booze not recognisable to anyone. The cupboard had an Aldi feel to it, containing a Baileys knock-off called something like ‘Cream of the Irish’ and a whiskey probably called ‘Gregfiddich’. The rest of the contents was padded out with undrinkably high-percentage homemade booze given to Dad by his customers.

As a teenager it was the worst cupboard to try and sneak a drink from. Not a Crème De Menthe in sight. How was I supposed to get tanked before a party? The only wine that was in the house was used for cooking, such was its value. As desperate as I was, I didn’t dare go near the homemade stuff for fear of going blind.

I was happy to share a bottle of wine at Ivan Vautier, but let Dad know I was genuinely surprised. He informed me he used to drink it all the time. Dubious, I questioned him on which one, and he told me he was partial to a sparkling red called Cold Duck, to be precise.

He was describing a different person from the one I knew. If I’d walked into the house one day with a chilled sparkling red, I’d have been mocked into oblivion. Not that it would be a one-way street; if I saw Dad drinking Cold Duck, I’d mock him incessantly too. Maybe that’s why he stopped drinking Cold Duck, not wanting his children see him drinking something that sounds like it should be ingested by fourteen-year-olds in a park.

We ordered a nice bottle of sauvignon blanc from the Sancerre region of France, settling in to enjoy the most expensive drink we’d ever had together, shattering the previous record of ‘Nine dollars for a beer!’

The degustation began with a shrimp mousseline, a combination of shrimp and mousseline.

Upon hearing shrimp, Dad naturally got excited. He loved Christmas because it meant prawns – Mum was not a fan of seafood, so prawns were off the menu the rest of the year.

Upon seeing shrimp mousseline, Dad became the opposite of excited. ‘What is this?’

His look of utter bewilderment told me that serving him food in a tiny entree bowl was not going to cut it. It wouldn’t have been the right thing to do, but I felt I should have gone into the kitchen to let the chefs know who they were dealing with.

‘Everyone, that is Tom Rozenbachs out there. I don’t think you realise who you’re doing business with. That is a man who destroys a family-sized capricciosa every Friday night by himself. By. Him. Self. All of it. Don’t serve him a meal in a bowl so tiny that if he was brought tartare sauce in it, he’d complain to the manager. And he’s a man! He’s expecting a knife that doubles as a jaws of life, not a flat, wide toothpick made for delicate eating, only good in the hands of a three-year-old with the dexterity of a surgeon. Lift your game! I want to see an improvement by the time dessert comes out. Or else you know a two-word review is coming your way.’

There are occasions in life when you know it’ll be the last time you’re doing something. The moment the first dish was served, Dad and I both knew this was one of those moments for him. I would have to savour every disappointed mouthful of fine dining that he took.

Any other time I’d be concerned Dad was too far out of his comfort zone, but I could afford to sit back and enjoy that dinner. The only danger was Dad passing out from malnourishment.

It was a night that would never be forgotten. Dad marvelled at the dishes, in his mind each more absurd and pointless than the last, from the sea scallop carpaccio to the Cévennes caramelised onions, which for Dad were disappointingly not sitting under a sausage in bread. Even as we headed into the seventh course, none of them was close to satiating his appetite. The night could only have been made better if, between the fourth and fifth courses, a jazz band came to play beside our table.

By the eighth and final course, I genuinely thought the kitchen were on to this disappointed foreigner. I imagined them hastily trying to create the most obscure dish they could, trying to rattle him one final time.

When it arrived, I felt I should stand and applaud: camembert ice-cream. Genius. All the coldness of ice-cream, with none of the taste of ice-cream. The look on Dad’s face as he took his first bite went from delicious anticipation to shock to disgust within about a millisecond, his brain telling him in no uncertain terms that this wasn’t right.

I photographed the moment, his face pure horror. He wasn’t fearful, it was more as though he’d been the victim of a cruel prank, not unlike something he himself might do to an unsuspecting friend. ‘Ah, good one – you said it would be ice-cream but instead it’s a cheese that doesn’t come conveniently sliced and wrapped in plastic. You got me. Now, where’s the real ice-cream?’

Of course the waiter explained what each dish was as it was being served, but Dad never listened. He was probably too busy thinking about a steak so overcooked, every chef here would refuse to do it. I explained to him that it was camembert ice-cream. The two-word review finally came: ‘That’s shithouse.’

Then, for some reason, he continued eating. His contorted face told me he still wasn’t enjoying it.

‘What are you doing? I thought you hated it?’ I asked, mystified.

‘Not going to waste it – we bloody paid for it!’

I got up and ordered another bottle of wine, at the same time picking up the bill. Dad and I had been trying to outdo each other paying for dinners, but if he saw what they thought this dining experience was worth, we’d have to add on the price of a defibrillator. He and Mum once took cans of Coke with them to Hamilton Island in far north Queensland because they’d heard they were expensive up there.

Dad and I whiled away the evening with the wine that we both agreed was delicious, and he was at least able to enjoy the great selection of cheeses we had as dessert. I did have to give him some credit for being game enough to try this experience, even if he’d wound up hating it – I didn’t imagine too many of the diners here would have been up for trying the Windy Hill bistro’s schnitzel. Sure, Dad might have been misled by the idea of a big meal, but he was allowing himself to be nudged beyond his comfort zone.

 

Our Caen experience capped off with an awesome (for some) meal, the next day we headed back to Paris. Sitting at the main train station, Gare du Nord, amongst its vaulted roof and cheap eateries, waiting for the Eurostar train to take us to London, Dad broke the silence with yet another revelation: he was claustrophobic.

When we were planning the trip, I’d asked Dad if he was happy to get the train from Paris to London, through the Chunnel. He replied, ‘Yes.’ Stupidly, I took that to mean ‘yes’.

I should have known it really meant, ‘I’m claustrophobic and could think of nothing worse than being trapped in a tunnel underneath the English Channel, but I’ll say nothing because to do so would be a sign of weakness.’ So I guess we can all agree it was my own fault.

Who knows why he waited until that moment, after we’d already grabbed the Eurostar tickets, to tell me he was claustrophobic. He knew England wasn’t a part of mainland Europe, that there was a body of water between the two. He would also have been aware it wasn’t called the Channel Bridge, that the word ‘tunnel’ implied it was underground. Underground meaning enclosed. Enclosed meaning claustrophobia inducing.

For the thousandth time on this trip I wished he’d said something and allowed me to find another way. I wouldn’t have cared; there were other options for getting to England. I had looked into getting the ferry from Calais, or we could have flown. Although after hearing about this fear I was glad I didn’t go with my fourth option: locked in the back of a truck with refugees.

But admitting or showing fear had never been a thing in our house. When I was about eight, I overheard Mum and Dad telling some friends about a ghost they thought lived in our house. Mum recounted how she would be home alone and see something flash past in the hallway leading off the living room, only to find when she walked out to have a look that there was nothing there. Or at 2 am they’d both hear someone walking around the house – actual footsteps on the lino – and Dad would get up to tell us kids to go back to bed, only to discover we were all fast asleep.

Mum’s a very spiritual person, so she was convinced it was the ghost of an elderly neighbour who had recently passed away in the house over the back fence. To get rid of the ghost, Mum held a séance, telling the spirit he was in the wrong house. She did this BY HERSELF. You know, just your casual afternoon séance. Scary movies freak me right out, but here’s Mum just delving head first into the paranormal, calling out a ghost to leave the house. Which, based on movies I’ve seen, is a recipe for blood seeping out of the walls. All done before she casually got back into making dinner.

The sightings stopped after that.

I resolved never to eavesdrop again. I was eight. I didn’t need to hear that. Not when our toilet was out the living room door, down a dark corridor at the back of the house, attached to the laundry, which opened up to the backyard. As everyone knows, the perfect way for ghosts to enter a house was from the backyard and through the laundry’s flimsy sliding door. Trips to the toilet always ended with a five second burst of: flush—light switch off—bolt down dark corridor—explode through the door—casual stroll back into the living room as though I hadn’t just sprinted for my life.

I don’t remember either of my parents showing fear, or talking about the spectral sightings like they had been scared. Looking back, I can see they dealt with the situation as best they could. I probably would have just packed up everything I owned and moved to a deserted island, but each to their own.

Showing fear wasn’t a thing in our family. There was never a spider incident that rendered someone paralysed. We just matter-of-factly trapped the spider with a glass, slid the paper underneath and took them outside. There was no throwing of shoes or other hysterics. I remember European wasps were high on the agenda every summer, Mum and Dad constantly reminding us to cover our cans of fizzy drink at all times, just in case one crawled in and we swallowed it when we had a drink. But we didn’t walk around in bee-keeping outfits.

I’d love to say I was looking back at everything through rose-tinted glasses, but we were the type of family where, if someone lost their mind over something, they’d be reminded of it at every opportunity forever after. Anyone who ever entered our house knew about the time I lost it on the ferris wheel; I still don’t think the Foxtel man needed to be told.

 

As we sped through the Chunnel, I tried to distract Dad from the darkness outside the train windows, asking him how long the claustrophobia had been a thing and why he’d never spoken about it. I didn’t know if that was the right way to do it – to talk about the issue while he was experiencing it – but I figured it was better than letting him think about the walls slowly closing in and the fact the tunnel was probably only moments away from collapse because of all the water we were submerged under. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have said that out loud either.

He didn’t answer directly, instead deflecting by telling me he wouldn’t have wanted to go into the catacombs in Paris, either. It had been on my list of potential sights, a series of tunnels underneath Paris filled with the bones of the dead to relieve the strain on the city’s overflowing cemeteries. I’d been to catacombs in Lima and Peru and thought Dad might like to check it out. And as a metal-head, the stacks of bones looked like some of my favourite album covers. Dad kept his relief to himself when we discovered they were closed, because October is Europe’s attraction-renovation season. Again, I said if he’d told me, I would’ve crossed it off the list.

I’d successfully distracted Dad from the Chunnel, but talking about the catacombs allowed him to make the claim that ‘they suggest if you have gumboots with you, you put them on’.

As though you’d be out doing tourist things in Paris, decided to go into the catacombs, and just happened to have a pair of gumboots with you. ‘Oh these? You think I should put them on? Well what do you know, after all those years of taking them out and never wearing them, they’ve finally paid off.’

Though at this stage of the trip I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a pair of gumboots hidden in the east wing of Dad’s suitcase.

For the rest of the train ride, my mind replayed all the places we’d been that were enclosed spaces. The crypt in the Bamberg cathedral, Paris’s Metro system, the windowless bedrooms in our nightmare apartment. He seemed fine with it all, but now that I knew, I would actively try to avoid those situations. All it took was one actual, real conversation!

I made a note to cancel the 12-hour isolation tank session I had planned in London.