When I came back to Australia after three years away, my own father didn’t recognise me.
He looked straight past me – like the tourists in the Mona Lisa room look straight past the other paintings – and went to get himself a beer. I mean, the man had been hit pretty hard in the head by a truck that didn’t give way, but you don’t need your presence to be the catalyst that brings back this memory, this knowledge that the old brain isn’t what it once was.
And I didn’t recognise my own brother. It was only the questioning expectation in the eyes behind that black beard that made me realise that apparently I knew this guy.
A strange family dinner that night, let me tell ya.
I felt like a monster.
I don’t want to be unrecognisable again. I don’t want to scare people.
So I try to keep myself centred. I try not to dissolve into the various cultures I live among. I want to keep a familiar part of Honest Dave alive. My nationality helps this. It bolsters my sense of self.
There are times when I am lost in other places other continents and I can’t find my core. But I can find an approximation of myself through my Australian-ness. People let me be rude and irreverant, because that is how Australians are; they let me be a drunk because Australians are drunks.
So I carry a wall around me. A wall of my habits, opinions, and my language, impenetrable. I take pride in that now, in still being recognisable on my return home.
And Australian cliches are a good way to do that. It is like surrounding yourself with FHM posters so that you won’t catch gay. My great cracked-and-baked-and-burned continent is my companion wherever I go. But it doesn’t matter how much beer I drink. Nor how often I say sheila or dunny or doona or thongs or poofter, or scratch my balls or re-use a dirty pair of underpants or wear mis-matched socks, all to maintain either my nationality or my individuality. Countries and cultures and cities always turn out to be bigger than me.
They always manage to soak through even my most bigoted defenses.
Pretty much the first person I ever saw in London was a woman on the opposite platform. Absolutely filthy angry she was, looking up at the timetable : « Seven fucking minutes ! Cunt ! ‘sfucking tube ! Seven fucking minutes ! »
I’m thinking, damn, get over it sweetheart.Three months later, I’m on the tube platform and I’m coming down and I’d woken up on a floor somewhere and I’ve got a meeting with my boss and I’m gonna be fucking late and my mouth is full of ulcers and I look across the tracks to a lonesome fly-blown backpacker, innocence in his wide black eyes. And I’m looking up at the timetable, and rage is baking my skin into a hard crust: Seven fucking minutes I’m hissing between grinding teeth.
I spent over a year in London, sleeping on floors in lounge rooms, curled around radiators (rolling over every hour to get an even spread of warmth across my body), under staircases, in boiler rooms, church attics, finding refuge in the cooling spaces left behind by those departing.
But what it meant was that I didn’t have space around me that was mine.
This was liberating for me – this unqualified freedom – but Brad and Maria were Kiwis. And they had really helped me out once before. They had naturally thought that I would offer them a place to crash when they visited. But my London just didn’t operate like that. There really was no room.And I had to tell them no. This utter contempt toward hospitality is something unrecognisable to them.
And it left me feeling grimey.
And London defeated me a little. It robbed me of my Aussie-ness.
I was in Egypt, on the shores of the sea of Aqaba, during an Islamic festival. I was trying to get into this vegetarian Swedish girl’s nickers.
So I had a little vegetarian picnic all packed, and a nice spot on the beach all worked out.We mounted the dunes. Before us, was a grotesque sight was arrayed.
It looked like the remains of some Satanic ritual.
To celebrate the end of the month-long fast of Ramadan, the Bedouins had earlier been down at the beach, and each group of them had ritually butchered one of their herd for the feast.
And they left the heads there, right there, on the beach. One after another after another evenly spaced into the haze, the eyes, the eyes. Gazing emptily int othe middle distance toward the Saudi coast. Camels and goats mainly. I think they were goats.
And so what does cute Swedish bird do, (who as I’ve mentioned is a vegetarian), but burps up a mouthful of chuck all on herself.
And so much for my date.
They don’t usually chuck till much later.
Another Swedish bird, Linda. Another vegetarian too for that matter. Now I think of it, I’m pretty sure all vegetarian girls are Swedish.
We were in a hostel above Talaat Harb in Cairo, and I had managed to entice her out onto the balcony away from all the filthy mongrels that were trying to get into her panties. We’d had a good day together, and to be honest, I thought I deserved a root.
But then we saw him, sent by Allah to stop me getting laid, goddammit, I never used to get laid back then.
Far down he was, on the streets below, shambling asymetrically. I thought at first he was a dwarf. Let’s be clear: I didn’t give a fuck who he was – Linda was the cutest damn thing I’d ever seen. But she always is the one to shed a tear for the crippled masses – that’s one thing I loved about her – and she leaned on the curling banister, her eyes all foggey, to find what was distressingly wrong with this guy.
As he approached it became clear that he actually had no legs. There were just two stumps, with pillows tied onto the ends with filthy rags. And using these two once-were-limbs, and his arms and hands, he heaved and dragged his piteous self down the street. The crumbly sick-white balustrade slowly crumbled behind us. Ferrets dragged meat off down alleys. The Nile pulled foreverness down its course. Time around us set hard like iron. Speaking was a trap. This poor malformed man blossomed thoughts from normally unused brain-coils from deep in the fathoms of my mind.
And I was suddenly and physically incapable to even attempt to try it on with Linda. I mean, I didn’t even really want to any more. Such swollen emotion of sorrow, and gratitude.
And Egypt’s steeped and sacred profanity defeated me once again. My fresh and shiny Tom-and-Jerry shallowness was as meaningless as digging a sandpit in the Sahara. There is the inexorable momentum of 7000 hallowed years of culture. And there’s me in my Aussie-flag boxer shorts thinking I can impress the eternal creeping of a sand dune with my wit and a few sharp dance moves.
You can’t beat Egypt.
Don’t even try.
Japan. I didn’t want Japan to seep through. I pissed off train platforms, vomited in class, slept in parks. I tried to be its antithesis. It still got in there. One day I found myself marveling that my yakitori had arrived before my edamame. A few days later I was salivating over plastic food in a restaurant window, and cringeing in sickened distaste at a tourist stabbing his chopsticks into his rice.
Chopsticks are so civilized. Long, slender, wooden. These days I find it wrong when people eat with spoons and forks ; those pieces of metal jangling and rattling about in their mouths, clanking and grinding vulgarly against their teeth. It’s like chewing down on a piece of aluminium foil.
I spent three years in New Zealand. This was more than enough time for my razor sharp Aussie accent to be roughed and filed and smoothed into the blunt and jungle Kiwi one. I learned to hear the Aussie accent with Kiwi ears. The piercingness of it slicing at your eardrums. The sound of it blistering paint, and peeling strips of wallpaper from the walls. I eventually affected a Kiwi accent, simply out of politeness to local sensibilities.
Paris. I went down to the municipal pool to go for a swim, build up my muscles, that sort of thing. But did you know that in Paris’s municipal pools they won’t let you swim in boxer shorts. You have to wear dick togs. Meat hangers ! Cock hammocks !
So if you were to go down to the Piscine Blomet on a Sunday morning, you might see someone you recognised. Familiar, but for the fact that he is wearing goggles, a swimming bonnet, and lycra dick togs.
And then, after a while, I started to wear the damn things by choice.
I’ve gone all strange.
I see time pass in different ways than most. While, for your average sedentary person, time courses past, I see time in chunks. I don’t see people for years. Time doesn’t pass too slowly for me to notice it’s senescent effect. I see people age in nuggets, chunks of years at a time. And I see how, except for physical appearance, people don’t change. People hang on, there fingers sinking into the clay of the bank, while the river of time courses past them.
And it is hard for me, because I am aware that people see me after I have been ravaged and bloated by the passing of years.
This is my conflict. It is me against the world. The sugar fighting against being dissolved in the hot coffee. I am not afraid of change, but I do want to be recognisable on my return home. My oldies are pushing along a little, and I don’t want to frighten them.
This is the struggle which is turning me unusual. Do I accept change with grace, do I deliquesce into the new culture, do I drink a white wine with my lunch, do I slurp my noodles.
Or do I hang on to what I know, to what I am, do I mention after I gently remove a sliver of foie gras and inhale as it slowly dissolves it my mouth that it ain’t bad, but that it’s got nothing on a T-Bone, chips and gravy from the Spotted Cow.
I worked in a Parisian English school. People I met in there I didn’t know if they were teachers or if they were students or if they spoke English or Spanish or French or Arabic or Japanese.
I didn’t know whether to shake hands when I met someone. I didn’t know whether to nod, offer a hug, bow, kiss one time, two times, four times, start with the left cheek, the right, or just flick my head back Maori-style. I mean none of the options come naturally to me any more.
So I wait for the other to initiate the greeting.
And I wait, ready to accept the pass. And I stutter and stumble and blunder and grope my way through it, thus presenting a first impression of this weak-mannered ill-fitting weirdo.
Which I then counter by not caring what they think, and expecting them to find for themselves my hidden depths, without any help from me.
I mean, fuck.
Sometimes it is easier just to stride in with a « Gday mate, » and a firm slap between the shoulder blades. Cause that’s what all Aussies do after all, this is what I understand.
So forgive me. I have decided. If you think that I overuse works like dunny and root and sheila ; if I sound a bit much, a bit forced and overdone, just remember that I am sticking to what I know – scratching my balls in public, blowing scotchies, and wearing the same undies for days on end.
It has served me well up to now.
And it’s what Mum and Dad will recognise.
honest dave