Almost French (22 page)

To Australians Sydney may be utterly urban, but to Frédéric it still signals adventure. One night as we’re sitting on the balcony, he suddenly leaps out of his seat, pointing excitedly inside. ‘I think I saw a big animal!’

We all look sceptically through the sliding glass doors into
the lounge. Other than our old boxer, we don’t keep ‘animals’ in the house. There is nothing there, not a creature in sight. Maybe he’s just jittery, reacting to a reflection on the glass doors of some movement in the trees. ‘Must have run away,’ my brother teases him. ‘Think you’d better have another drink.’

‘There!’ Frédéric is on his feet again and this time we see it: a rather well-fed possum scuttling towards the kitchen—back for seconds, no doubt. The scene descends into pantomime. A tea towel is thrust at Frédéric and he is pushed towards the kitchen, Dad yelling instructions, as together they try to shoo the creature outside. ‘Careful it doesn’t scratch the parquet!’ cries Mum. From a safe distance I laugh, watching Frédéric, who is clearly more concerned about being clawed himself, as he faces what he imagines is a man-eating marsupial.

His second close encounter with Australian wildlife amuses me a little less. As usual, first thing in the morning, we decide to go to the beach for a swim. Mum and Dad have left for work. Picking up my towel from a chair outside, I sling it over my shoulder—and too late I glimpse a dark vague shape among the folds. But when I quickly shake the towel nothing falls out. Maybe I imagined it—or, alternatively, whatever it was might have crawled onto my back. I hurry inside to ask Frédéric if he can see anything.

‘WHAAAAAOOOW!’ he shrieks the second I turn around, sending me catapulting into the air. From his hysterical pitch it’s obvious I am in unspeakable danger. Ohmigod, there must be a snake sliding up my back, maybe a funnel-web! Panicked, I tear at my T-shirt and swivel my head but I can’t see anything.

‘What is it?’

‘DON’T MOVE! IT BITES!’ screams my saviour, running away. He flies into the kitchen—I assume to get a knife to chop off its head.

‘GET IT OFF ME!’ I am hysterical now too.

The blow to my back momentarily winds me as almost two thousand white pages strike at full force. The fat Sydney phone book which Frédéric has just hurled—presumably at the predator—crashes to the floor. Beside himself, he grabs it, ‘I missed!’

‘Oh for god’s sake, can’t you just …’

A second blow cuts off my protest. The A to K tome falls with another dead thud.

‘Got it!’

We peer at the spider spread on the floor. It is hideous and huge, that’s for sure. About the size of a man’s hand, with thick furry legs that are making a final, futile attempt to crawl. But …

‘It’s only a huntsman. They’re harmless.’

Frédéric doesn’t seem to have heard me. ‘It’s ee-nor-mous,’ he says proudly, carefully pushing the spider onto a white notepad using a piece of paper. He arranges it on the kitchen bench like a class science display. ‘To show the others,’ he explains.

Unfortunately for Frédéric, Mum—who is entirely fearless when it comes to spiders—is the first home from work. Driven by some misguided male compulsion to prove himself as protector, Frédéric eagerly shows her his kill. In death, the huntsman’s long limbs have retracted, of course. It lies shrivelled and pathetic, no bigger than a five-cent coin.

‘Oh, they’re all over the house,’ says Mum, airily. As if that weren’t injury enough, she adds, ‘I usually just flick them away with my finger.’

I can’t let it pass, not with my back still sore.

‘Hear that,’ I hiss. ‘
Finger,
not a bloody phone book.’

We get a lot of laughs out of this story, although the description of Frédéric’s role in the affair differs according to who is retelling it. Our time in Sydney flies by in a blur of dinners and drinks and hours spent on the balcony reading, or cruising Pittwater in a boat my parents rented. Too quickly, it seems, Frédéric’s two and a half weeks are up (he couldn’t take more time off work). One week later I’m back at the airport for my departure, saying goodbye to a few friends who insisted on coming, and trying to be brave farewelling my family. Pretty soon, with a great roar and a shudder, the Qantas Boeing 747 takes off from Sydney’s Mascot airport.

Almost immediately, we arc inland and the inky blue Pacific Ocean disappears behind us. This is the worst part of the whole trip. A full twenty-three hours of crushing boredom—lucky it’s a direct flight—stretch between me and Paris, as challenging as any marathon. It will take four hours of flying just to reach overseas airspace—let alone nudge the northern hemisphere. The economy class movie screen illuminates to keep us from these dark thoughts. The images flash in quick succession. They’re a mix of Australian landmarks and predictable clichés—Sydney Harbour, lifesavers with zinc noses wearing skullcaps which use more fabric than their itty-bitty bathers. The airline’s signature tune, ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, hums in the background as kangaroos spring across blistered earth and Aboriginal children with traditional face-paint flash gleaming smiles. We’ve all seen these snapshots hundreds of times.

So what on earth is wrong with me? Although I’d managed not to cry saying goodbye at the airport, a lump of sadness is
now strangling me. Mortified, I turn away and stare determinedly through the window at the burning blue sky, trying to swallow it. In my pocket are a few gum leaves that I picked walking to the beach and I scrunch up one of them and inhale the eucalyptus oil on my fingertips. The flight attendant looks on sympathetically, which only makes things worse. Can’t she look at someone else? Out come my sunglasses—not such a mad idea, really, given I’m next to the window and the afternoon light is dazzling. Now I’m invisible. Big, pathetic tears splash into my lap.

Is this a normal reaction to an airline video? Was it the kangaroos? The soppy song about an expatriate Australian missing Australia? None of the other passengers seem to be donning sunglasses. What’s more, I don’t even know why I’m crying. It was brilliant having almost one month to spend with family and friends, even if it flew by at supernatural speed. Although it was sad saying goodbye to my parents, they look at my absence as an excuse for not-quite-annual holidays in France and they’ll be over later in the year, for sure. And now I’m going back to Frédéric and my life in one of the world’s most wonderful cities. Our bustling
quartier
. I should be excited, not sitting here sobbing.

But I guess the reason for my tears is no great mystery. I’m crying about leaving home.

The old Greek on Samos island had warned me.
‘It’s a bitter–sweet thing, knowing two cultures,’
he’d said.
‘It’s a curse to love two countries.’
Well I certainly don’t think of living abroad as a curse—I don’t think the Greek believed it either. He was just dramatising his dilemma, the feeling of being torn between two places. And this is something I now understand. For an expatriate, the whole matter of ‘home’ is an emotional conundrum riddled with ambiguities and
caprice. Paris is my actual home: it’s where I live. It can pull at heartstrings with a mere walk down our market street in the morning. But Australia is the home of homesickness and my history—a powerful whirlpool of family and friends, memories and daily trivia that I used to take for granted but now seem somehow remarkable.

Although I understand the French better now, the reality is in France I’m still an outsider. There seem to be so many contradictions, so many social codes for different situations that make life interesting but also leave you feeling a bit vulnerable. Living in Paris requires constant effort: effort to make myself understood, effort to understand and to be alert for those cultural intricacies that can turn even going to the post office into a social adventure. Yet in Sydney everything had seemed so familiar, so easy. I can’t even explain exactly why. It was more than the relaxing effects of sun and surf and being on holiday. It was as though back in my old environment I could finally drop the guard I didn’t even know I’d been carrying.

Outside my window, the earth below is beginning to blush as we fly seamlessly towards the Centre. Going from one hemisphere to the other can be disorientating. If air travel is fantastically fast, the changes are also abrupt. There is no acclimatising en route, no gradual getting used to the weather conditions and landscape that await you at your destination. Simply, woolly coats and scarves one day, T-shirts and sarongs the next. Or vice versa. My holidays home are carefully timed to coincide with the southern hemisphere’s summers and winter in the northern hemisphere. But after one month of Australia’s blazing light, returning to Europe in January or February is a shock. It takes time to readapt to the pale palette, for your senses to make the journey from
one extreme to the other. Having already made the trip, I know what to expect.

When the plane touches down in Paris indecently early in the morning, the city will be wrapped in darkness and a morning fog which may or may not lift later in the day. (Better to not get your hopes up.) Terminal One at Charles de Gaulle will seem drab and grubby for the simple reason it
is
drab and grubby. There’s no point telling Frédéric not to come to the airport, that I’ll just catch a taxi. He’ll be there, waving energetically through the sliding glass doors. This is his self-appointed role: a one-man Official French Welcoming Committee whose sunny presence at this god-awful hour is designed to melt any post-Sydney blues.

Despite his efforts to cheer me, a week or two will pass in a jetlag-fuelled daze, marked by a total lack of enthusiasm for my strange–familiar environment. The apartment will seem too small (how could I not have noticed this before?) and what’s more, we’ve no sea view (the fact that I couldn’t possibly afford one in Sydney will not occur to me). Where’s our garden, our balcony? Details will depress me. The ubiquitous Paris pigeons, for example, which occasionally have the indecency to die in our gutters. How woeful they are compared to the kookaburras which squat on the balcony rail at my parents’ home, their big heads cocked intelligently as they wait for raw mince from the refrigerator.

As the plane’s engines drum distantly, I comfort myself with the thought that we’ll be back next year. Frédéric is keen to return. After he’d got over his initial shock at the beach and the colour of the bricks, he’d had a great time in Sydney. He loved the atmosphere, the energy, the exuberance. And now I realise why this trip had been so important to me. It wasn’t just a matter of whether he liked Sydney or
not, it was the fact that he’d been home—to
my
home, that is. For the first time, he’d seen me in the context of
my
country and culture. The roles had been reversed. There
I
was the guide, the one familiar with how things work, where places are, the one explaining jokes that he missed. And he’d seen for himself how different Australia is from France—not better or worse but just so fundamentally different. He could understand my bouts of homesickness better now, my longing for light in winter. Aspects of my character made more sense too. My directness, for example, which he sometimes finds too blunt, too honest—and on occasions even harsh. But in Australia he observed a raw frankness in everything from the burning sun and unruly gum trees to the people. It had hit home that some of my idiosyncrasies might be cultural, not just personal.

A sense of reciprocity and compromise is vital in any relationship and even more so I’d say in a cross-cultural couple. And at heart, that’s what this trip had been about. By embracing Australia, Frédéric was recognising the importance of my home to me and consequentially its importance—albeit to a lesser extent—to him. Just like Baincthun is for me, for Frédéric,
Australia is part of the package.

Beyond my fish-bowl window dusk is falling and the sky has turned a deeper shade of blue. In just over eighteen hours I’ll be back in Paris. Images of my beloved rituals flash through my mind: morning coffees on Rue Montorgueil, daily market shopping, walks through Palais Royal. I start to feel better. My tears have dried up. Although it might take me a week or two to settle back in Paris, I also know that my homesickness will eventually pass, shifting like a patch of bad weather to settle, no doubt, on someone else.

A message from the cockpit interrupts my thoughts and
the cabin hum. Our plane is about to head out over the Indian Ocean, leaving land behind. If we look out our windows we can have one last glimpse of Australia, the voice says in that practised this-is-your-captain-speaking tone.

Sure enough as I watch, my homeland slides out from beneath us. The change in background is abrupt, leaving little time for sentimentality. One second we’re flying over what had seemed an incessant desert—such a funny pink in the evening light—then the space beneath us is a vastness of deep blue. Looking back over my shoulder, I watch the evanescence of Australia, transfixed. The coastline, with its white frill of surf, becomes smaller and smaller, until finally it disappears entirely as though I’d imagined it. A pang of nostalgia stabs my stomach and then I take off my sunglasses.