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Don’t ever do anything through affectation or to make people like you or through imitation or for the pleasure of contradicting.
- André Gide, The Journals of André Gide
Eight months have passed since I got on a flight at Heathrow airport and left London, my home of six years, for Australia. People get on long-haul flights all the time, of course (even if this was more like three consecutive flights and a door-to-door journey of over thirty hours) but I’m not really one of them. I’m used to dithering around Europe for short trips. You go to Paris for thirty hours. You get on a two and a half hour flight in London and then when you alight it’s Rome outside. That’s about enough time to get nicely, cosily into a new book. Long enough to anticipate pasta and pastries and prolonged, unapologetic eye contact from strangers of the sort that would be considered an act of violence in London. Before we came to Australia, I’d never been further from home than Los Angeles and that felt like enough of a culture shock. I don’t want to spend money at Erewhon. $250 for the vegan fair trade cruelty-free food-free interdimensional breakfast wrap that Hailey Bieber currently credits with curing acne or staving off death or whatever. I’m not the wanderlust type.
This last flight was no dither to the continent. We approached the check-in desk at five in the morning, dragging the two gigantic suitcases that contained everything we would need until our boxes came by sea. That would take six months. The woman at the check-in desk quickly fell prey to the charm of my gregarious husband. That happens a lot — his optimism can beckon the most resistant forth from a grump. Even the ‘I’m on the 5am shift with Janice and Janice is a moron’ grump. ‘When is your return flight?’ she asks, smiling at him while I goblin around quietly in the background as usual, except wearing a tracksuit which is not at all usual.
Tracksuits do very little for you when you’re short. I feel a bit like a child at sports day as I hang back, coasting along on himself’s affability. Nothing new there. ‘My wife is mean’, he tells new people to whom politeness demands he introduce me at any work function or party, smiling merrily and rubbing my back affectionately. They laugh uncertainly, looking at him and then down at me (I’m five feet tall so everyone has to look down) as though I’ll be shocked by this grievous injustice or this may be a window into a marriage on the decline. “No no — he’s quite right there”, I say quietly, nodding and making Italian eye contact with them before wandering off disinterestedly to check if there’s cake.
‘We don’t have a return flight!’ himself replies to the check in desk lady, excitedly. ‘But we do have visas.’ He shows her the visas. ‘We’re emigrating today! So no return.’ He waggles his eyebrows at her conspiratorially. As though we are on the lamb. His excitement is contagious and so of course she catches it. Because we are doing something insane. Standing here before the sun comes up, primed for thirty hours of economy seats in our Crocs and our tracksuits, watching everything of value to us lumber along the conveyer belt and into the great circulatory system of airport luggage behind the check-in desks.
‘Good luck to you both!’ the woman chirps as we shuffle in the direction of security. I silently wave a hand, palm down, vaguely in her direction. It is both a motion of acknowledgement and the motion of a school bully’s hand pushing an invisible head into a toilet bowl. ‘Thanks!’ himself purrs, grabbing my hand and tugging me along in my Crocs toward departures, much the way a parent coaxes an intransigent toddler. “Will we get croissants?” he asks, jostling my hand excitedly as my short gait skitters effortfully along beside his lengthy, languid one. A chihuahua trying to keep pace with a great dane. Change keeps coming, I think, and often I am the one orchestrating it, and yet when it does come I so often respond like the cat who scratches at the back door till someone opens it only then to sit there looking disdainfully over the threshold as if to say ‘What?’
And so eight months later we are here and I’m no longer wearing the tracksuit but I am, to some extent, sitting just inside the open door. This may just be a feature of the immigrant experience. Or the emigrant experience. Or both. Eight months is not sufficient time in which to know a place. You must linger, shut your mouth, arrange your face, and listen. What else is there to do? And of course what you hear will differ depending upon who is speaking. Lending objectivity to one’s opinion is a feature of people everywhere.
Opinions here — I’m told — are more reflective of values found in places like London and New York than the rest of Australia. So you could presumably live in Canberra for a long time without getting a strong sense of what your average Australian person thinks about most issues. In a government town, there are generally more opinions about what the average person should think than discussions about what they do think. That is not, in my observation, unique to Australia.
So I remain in a mental state of download. I’m not about telling a country that has the grace to have taken me in (arguably a bad call even if I’m not arguing with it — I get that Australia needs more engineers and teachers and doctors, but writers?) how to conduct its business. I felt similarly about the UK during my time there despite being more critical about the place in general. I’m writing this in English after all. There’s a history there. Still, for all the British trundled into the villages of my ancestors and pulled children from their sties and pigs from their cottages and whacked everyone over the head with Shakespeare’s collected works and told them to stop standing up and kneeling down so much at mass, let them elect who they please. Think what they please. The UK has a poor record when it comes to assimilation, especially within the last several decades, but for this or other reasons, it never felt like my country, for all I enjoyed being there. I can’t forgive them that flinty, anaemic unsalted butter that scratches your gullet on the way down. Dash it against a wall and it would shatter. That culturally catholic butter. The irony.
I have been writing on being an Irish emigrant in Australia in The Irish Times for a few months now and every now and then, someone will message me to say that they didn’t like what I wrote. Often it is the lighter stuff that grinds their gears. Last week, my editor sent me in search of an Irish culinary delicacy called a ‘Spice Bag’. It’s the invention of enterprising Chinese restaurant owners in Dublin. A fearsome concatenation of chips, peppers, breaded chicken, onions and a blend of spices. There might be curry sauce on the side if you have the courage for it.
It comes in a brown paper bag which you tear open like a marauder before laying waste to the contents with your hands in a way that feels like voyeurism to witness. Obscene. It is a feral culinary experience, often indulged in drunkenly at a bus stop. It is a delicate culinary experience. Picked over on the couch as you watch a film you’ve loved for twenty years, the pliant, athletic liquid heat of a sleeping cat tickling its purrs along the length of your pyjama clad thigh as you eat.
Someone sent me an email objecting to my having written about the availability or otherwise of spice bags in Australia as ‘not news’. It made Irish people seem unserious, they suggested. ‘Have you met Irish people?’ I think. There is stuff happening all over the place which is undeniably absolute, bona fide news and yet here I am getting the phrase ‘spice bag diplomacy’ into a national newspaper. But this is writing anything on the internet. People get annoyed. People are annoyed and they don’t need to look far for a hook to hang it on. They don’t know they’re emailing their complaint to the mean lady at the party. Maybe they do.
Of course there is no merit in seeking people’s displeasure for the sake of it but it is useful to remember that everyone has a clutch of eggs over which they brood owlishly, weird little feet tucked, eyes agoggle. It is not news that you cannot live in the world without jostling somebody’s eggs from time to time. Just by moving about, passing through, or being. Everyone believes their offence is legitimate. Everyone believes their offence generates an obligation in others to do, or not to do, something. Every offended person puts on a policeman’s hat and ascribes objectivity to their emotions, deciding what is or isn’t useful, funny, honest or necessary. In order to be liked and not to bother anyone, never to unintentionally press on somebody’s tender something or other (and we all have several), you must make yourself quiet and small. You must be frightened.
And listen - obnoxiousness is never a good quality. Meeting someone’s hurt feelings with pride or delight. Seeking them out for the ego tweak or profit in generating futile discomfort for the sake of it. There must always be room in a scenario to have done better, been more generous, more sensitive, less certain. But there must also be room to know yourself and to meet your own standard rather than someone else’s. There must be room to treat other adults as responsible for their own emotional regulation.
You can be small and quiet and afraid. You can facilitate and commiserate and tolerate. There will still be people who dislike you. Or the facsimile of you generated in their own imagination. No matter where you are, there will always be people who see you as a door, and themselves as a shoulder approaching at speed. They will always need something to run at. To throw their weight against. It is best not to let them in.
Or better still, open the door as they charge. Olé! As for there being people who will never like you, Don McClean has a song about it on American Pie: Everybody Loves Me, Baby, What’s The Matter With You? Anyway, being disliked simply doesn’t occur to narcissistic only children. ( We were adored, and thereby cheated, but that’s another story…)
I loved the Spice Bag article! It takes all sorts, as they say. I love that you don’t let them in.