by Fiona Wright
The day after I get home I drive to Menai to my family – my brother and sister-in-law are staying with my parents for the school holidays, my two nieces, fuelled on Easter chocolates and homemade sherbet, running riot through the house. We drink wine and eat cheese and tell stories. We play in the sandpit. We draw pictures of dinosaurs and dogs.
That night my housemates and I open the champagne I brought back from the south-coast vineyards for them and the evening disappears so fluidly I barely notice. I’m surprised, and it feels wonderful, to be at home.
‘Today’s love,’ Gwen Harwood writes, ‘must sustain / today, and no life is made / of manageable stuff.’
One Sunday I decide to visit the giant Bunnings in Alexandria, and then Ikea, to gather up the fittings and the gadgets that we still need for the new house. I drive there in my tiny Hyundai, its boot barely large enough to hold a suitcase, and wind through the back streets slowly, dodging children playing ball games amid the leaf litter and parked cars. I can smell the charity sausages from three streets away. My stomach turns, although I can’t tell if it’s with hunger or disgust.
I buy a vacuum cleaner for the new house, which has carpet in the rooms upstairs – I’ve not lived in a house with carpet for eight years – a screwdriver set and a drill, rosemary, sage and thyme.
In the afternoon I sit on my balcony, facing the street and watching the people tumble back towards King Street, carrying their groceries from the Metro in grey plastic bags. I never make it to Ikea, and I’m relieved.
Our housewarming is demon-themed, and held on a cold evening after a glorious day, humming with sun. I drive my housemates to the supermarket, and we stock up on awful-looking food: algal blue corn chips with a weird metallic shimmer (an ill-advised tie-in for a recent sci-fi film), hot pink taramasalata, the smelliest, bluest cheese that we can find. There’s some sort of special event on in the bottle shop, with trestle tables at the end of each aisle, and bored-looking sales workers standing one apiece behind them, constantly rearranging their tiny plastic wine cups into ever-neater rows, constantly rearranging their practised grins as people approach. One of them is selling a low-gluten beer called O-MISSION, and the poster behind him shows a glossy-haired woman in activewear stretched into a one-legged yoga pose, dancing warrior, on a clifftop by a beach. The salesmen says that the company’s launch event included beer-yoga, which was invented in Berlin by an Australian and a German and is an excellent cultural experience, and that people are now so scared of gluten that you could rob a bank with a baguette, and I smile and nod and buy cheap prosecco instead.
In the afternoon, my housemates draw big-eyed and long-clawed monsters on huge pieces of cardboard to stick to the walls, while I bake devil’s food cake, devils on horseback, red velvet cupcakes with thick blobs of icing. I make myself a flower crown (I hate flower crowns) out of kale (I hate kale), stuff extra bunches in my pockets, and my housemates can’t keep from laughing when they try to talk to me.
Just after midnight I pull the kale leaves from my costume and bake them in the oven with oil, and lashings of salt. It all gets eaten, despite the fact that half of it had essentially been, for hours by then, inside my pants. I fall asleep before the last guests leave; I always do.
The café that I write in most often, which is close to my new house and close to yoga, which is sun-filled and friendly (the owner often refuses to let me pay for my breakfast, or hands me a muffin with my change because, he says, he can tell that I’m a good person, whatever that might mean) closes for four weekdays for refurbishment. I know in advance, and so make other plans on each of those mornings, but on the Friday, the day they’re due to reopen, there’s a sign on the door saying they’re not quite ready. Earlier that morning, I had driven to Ryde, across the Anzac, Iron Cove, Gladesville bridges in thick traffic, to drop my car off to be serviced and I am tired already, already vaguely tense, and I stand outside the café door for five full minutes, trying to decide where to go instead; I start walking and change direction four times, the whole time thinking, not this again, this still.
When I pick the car up in the afternoon the mechanic says, I’m glad we changed the brake pads, I wouldn’t want your pretty head to go through the windscreen, and I don’t say anything because I am polite.
When the café reopens on the weekend, the tables have been sanded back to beautiful blond wood, but nothing else seems to have changed. Yet when I place my order, from a menu that now lists cured egg yolks and sautéed kale as sides, the waiter tries to upsell me and forgets to bring my cutlery, and my food is different somehow, paler, on a bigger, whiter plate and this too makes me panic. I keep thinking: I don’t want to be the kind of person who resists change.
I text Alex, HEYYY, I can’t make it tonight, I can feel a BIG STORM CLOUD OF CRAZY coming on and reckon if I lie low I might nip it in the bud (you know it’s BAD when I mangle my metaphors), and he replies, OKAY, REST UP, and then a kissy-face emoji; I text, I’m sorry I feel like a right dick when I do this and his response just reads, APOLOGY NOT ALLOWED and I know I should know this by now but I keep on forgetting somehow.
I teach a creative-writing class at a private boys’ school near Hornsby, mostly because they agree to the fee that I suggest (and that I still think is cheeky: once a poet, always an undervaluer of work). We talk about setting and place, brainstorm ideas on a brand-new whiteboard beside the huge windows of the library, an impeccably neat garden of roses and rhododendrons beyond them. We start talking about cities and suburbs and the boys call out, in London the houses are narrow, in Hong Kong they build upwards, in Paris, in Singapore, in New Caledonia, in Shanghai, in Dubai. I’d never been inside an aeroplane until I was almost sixteen years old, when my family travelled overseas together for the first time, because it was likely to be the last time, my older brother having just turned eighteen. And I’ve been anxious now for weeks because I’m set to travel again this year, to Iceland, for a conference, and I am scared to my centre that I’ll come back sick and skinny, weak. In New York there are legit enormous rats, one boy says, in Delhi some days you literally can’t breathe.
Gwen Harwood writes, ‘Bless you, my protein-fed darlings.’
As the train back home crosses the harbour bridge, just before dusk, the water has turned indigo and the sun is spraying like an errant garden hose through a crack in the cloud cover. At Erskineville, the sky is pink, electric.
A REGULAR CHOREOGRAPHY
The week after I came home from Iceland I felt despondent, so despondent that it scared me. I struggled to get out of bed, even though I’m normally alert and active enough in the mornings that more than one housemate has threatened to hit me for it in the past. I couldn’t write, and even more unusually, could barely read. Couldn’t find the energy to take my seven-month-old puppy to the park, barely 400 metres from my house, even though the joy this brings her – the pure, animal abandon and ear-flapping elation – is one of the simplest yet most expansive pleasures of my everyday. I avoided social encounters, but forced myself to go to drinks and parties with my friends, only to drink too much too quickly, every time; I would come home and sit on my living room floor, my knees pulled into my chest so tightly that I could feel my heart squeezing against them. The week after I came home I found, written in tiny, over-determined letters and black ink, a phrase I’d printed on the back of an envelope I had been using as a bookmark while travelling: I was right to be nervous, it said.
This feeling, I was right to be nervous, is to me the worst of all of the things I think and feel out of anxiety, at least in part because it feels like a cruel joke. Clinical psychologists insist that the problem with anxiety is that the anxiousness – that tension in the gut and shoulders, the clamped jaw and cramping rib cage, the wildly circulating thinking and breathless panic – is always disproportionate, always misplaced; that the fear itself, that is, is always worse than the thing that makes us afraid. And so the treatment focuses on exposure, on deliberately coming into contact with the
things we fear and then coming out the other side unscathed in order to learn the hollowness of the focus (and locus) of our fear. So when I get this feeling – I was right to be nervous – it always feels like a betrayal: this was not supposed to be the lesson that I learnt.
But I’d learnt this fear – it hadn’t come from nothing. Before I left for Iceland I learnt that no existing policy of travel insurance would cover my costs if I needed to see a doctor for any reason related to mental ill health. I learnt that the program of the conference that had been the reason for my trip had scheduled fourteen-hour days to take advantage of the almost-eternal summer sunlight at these high latitudes, when stamina is always difficult for me, and the very first thing my body loses the ability to maintain whenever my illness gains any kind of foothold. I learnt that the early summer temperatures in Iceland are colder than those Sydney reaches in mid-winter, when I habitually wear two thermal undershirts and three merino jumpers underneath my goose-down coat but still suffer, unable to keep warm. I learnt that Icelandic cuisine is based mostly on seafood, on smoked lamb from the coarse-woolled and stocky sheep specially bred to survive the extreme cold, on hearty and warming meat soups, on potatoes, which can outlast the winter underground, and on skyr, a type of very mild cheese with the consistency of thick yoghurt – the exact and only texture that I can guarantee will make me sick every single time I try to eat it. None of these things I am comfortable eating, and I joked about this with my housemates and friends in order to avoid thinking through the ramifications of this fact. (Inside that envelope that I found after I came home was also a card that my housemate had slipped into my hand luggage; on its verso side she’d drawn cartoon illustrations of some of the foods my illness currently deems safe for me to eat, each one saying, in a wonky speech-bubble, I care-rot about you, you zuchi-need me, don’t brocco-leave me, call-me-flower; when I first read it on the plane I almost cried for its absurd and perfect combination of tenderness and tragedy, although I realise that tenderness and tragedy may well be the warp and weft of any life, not just my own.)
Before I left, I kept thinking: I don’t want to be the kind of person who is afraid of travel, that’s not the kind of person I imagine myself to be, it’s unadventurous, incurious, small. I said this to my best friend Laura before I left, and she leaned across the café table and took my hand: you’re not the kind of person who, she said, you are just you. Although, she added, you are still very small.
It took me some time to realise this, but part of what was bothering me about this nervousness, about this hesitancy around travel, was not just my personal history (how I still joke that I’m the only person who has ever spent six weeks in Germany and come back thinner, how I fainted on the overnight train somewhere between Tangiers and Marrakesh out of a combination of malnutrition and horrendous gastro, how vividly I remember my flight home from Sri Lanka, the thin padding of the airline seats woefully mismatched to my protruding hipbones, shoulderblades that have never been more aptly named). It was a cultural narrative too: travel is supposed to be transformative, worldly, independent, brave. It is supposed to be a breaking free from the things that bind us to our everyday and repetitious – and by implication stultifying – lives. We are supposed to value travel because of this, because it is international and not domestic, unsettling and not homely, disjunctive rather than routine. And I want these things, of course I want these things for my life and for that idea of myself as I’d like to be.
But this is a narrative that also devalues everything that lies on the other side of the equation – the domestic, the homely, the repetitious and the known. The worlds in which we ground ourselves, locate ourselves, build the habits and small rituals that make us feel more comfortable, maybe even safe. The spaces where we may truly be ourselves – our private, unscrutinised and unperformed selves.
Our small but significant selves.
When I arrived in Iceland, at the international airport originally built as part of a US Army base in 1943 – before which the country had relied on seaplanes, with no real need for anything larger or more formalised – I climbed into a huge white coach waiting by the terminal to ferry passengers to Reykjavik, almost forty minutes away. I sat at a window, so I could watch this strange new place as we trundled through it. I was hyper-alert, wide-eyed and watchful, even though I’d been in transit, by this stage, for almost thirty hours, had barely picked at the trays of horrible airline food in all that time.
I felt rubbed back by all of the small encounters I’d had in transit: the chatty Welsh woman returning home from Brisbane, where she’d been visiting her grandchild for the first time; the young couple, he with tribal-style tattoos curling up the sides of his neck, she entirely in stretchy black, who’d curled against each other to sleep and took photos out of the tiny plane window the moment we landed outside of London, their new home; the mid-western American man who’d asked me repeatedly to figure out the time zones in the places he was travelling between, until I’d shown him how to do this on his phone. By the time I landed I was feeling raw and so alone.
In the bus I sat on top of my hand luggage so I’d be high enough for a proper view of the flat fields of black basalt stretching unbroken to the coastline, the heavy sky pressing down upon them. There were sculptures by the highway, huge boulders arranged into eerie, almost-human shapes, these figures looking out to the horizon as if they too were lost, were new, in this landscape that seemed to me to be so ancient, although I couldn’t say how, or why. Occasionally, we’d pass a cluster of brightly coloured and blunt-faced houses, or one more in a chain of oversized supermarkets with cartoon pigs grinning madly on their windows. The man sitting next to me wore a suit jacket and jeans and spent the duration of the journey holding a mobile phone in each tanned hand, alternately reading emails on one screen and sending WhatsApp messages on the other. I was irrationally annoyed by this behaviour, even though he was sitting neatly, quietly, unobtrusively (unlike so many of the other people, especially men, who I’d been seated beside in all the stages of my journey). I knew that I knew nothing about him, who he was texting, what he had left, why he was here, but I still kept thinking, all this is extraordinary, so sparse and blank and stony that we could well be on the moon, and you are looking at your emails.
And yet within a week I’d find myself, each evening, after a full day of travelling around the Icelandic coastline along the aptly named Road One – it is the only highway – of hiking around waterfalls and glaciers or the rims of dormant volcanoes, of watching whales or standing in the steam of geysers or swimming in the cloudy blue water of geothermal baths while lifeguards in enormous fleece-lined jumpsuits and snow-proof boots stood sentinel on the shore, after all of these things I would sit in my guesthouse room by myself and pull out my computer, check emails, check social media, send messages to my family and friends, and it felt wonderful and relieving, every day, to do this.
What this speaks about, I think, is what Iris Marion Young (drawing on Simone de Beauvoir before her) considers the two kinds of time in which we live all of our lives, the transcendent and the immanent. Transcendent time is that rare, luminous time of important or startling events – like travel, or those intense first weeks of falling in love, or the sweeping grief of sudden loss, the shock of an argument that wounds. These are moments where we are transported out of our regular selves and assumptions, where time feels different, slowed, or furiously hastened; it is time that breaks the rules of everyday life. Immanent time, however, is the rules – it is regular, unruffled, it passes mostly without us noticing. But we need immanent time, to rest, to reflect, to maintain our sense of self; and it is within immanent time that we live more completely and more often, if less intensely. It is here we are at home, wherever we may physically be. And it was to here I needed to return at the end of every day, in order to return too to myself.
That first evening in Reykjavik, I rolled my suitcase into the basement flat of a beautiful three-storey white house, an Airbnb opposite a
church built of grey concrete, arching up into the overcast sky; the people I was staying with, good friends and writers all, and all in Reykjavik for the same conference, were sprawled across the couches when I got there – reading, tapping away at laptops, marking up a manuscript. Earlier in the day, and after settling into the house and exploring the nearby parts of the city, they had bought food for us all at a nearby supermarket: muesli, pasta, apples, skyr, crackers and cheese; two bottles of red wine to share. I panicked. And so the first thing that I did in Iceland was buy groceries, walking through the suburbs, past garden beds exuberant with the largest, fullest tulips I have ever seen and circular trampolines with children wrapped in parkas and helmet-style beanies bouncing through the long twilight. I bought a tiny cauliflower the size of my palm, a head of broccoli, a packet of dried figs; I returned to the house and stood under the shower that smelt strangely, strongly sulphuric because the hot water was geothermal, piped into the city from a volcano barely twenty kilometres away, breathing into the bottom of my lungs to steady myself, to hold myself in my body. That night I slept on a roll-out single bed in the same large bedroom as a couple and it was soft and thick and finally, so blessedly horizontal.
And from the very next day, I started building habits. I woke in the morning, dressed myself in six or seven layers, and walked across the city, past the angular town hall, all glass and granite and water features, along the shore of the lake lined with dandelions and scotch broom, and up the hill, the houses quiet still, and sleepy. I sat in a café that two of my friends had recommended, and wrote for a while in my journal – I always (and only) keep a journal when I travel – trying not to worry about the full-cream milk in my coffee. I bought a loaf of crusty, oaty bread from a nearby bakery, with windows full of cinnamon scrolls and custardy pastries, to eat for lunch much later with tomatoes and basil and soft cheese.