Paris and Other Disappointments

by Adam Rozenbachs

  Travel agents can call airlines directly. They have the secret phone number that gets you an actual living human. If I tried calling, it would be a four-hour exercise in futility, being put on hold so long that the music drove me to accepting the middle seat on a thirteen-hour flight. Travel agents make stuff happen. Stuff like Marie securing emergency-exit row seats for Dad and me just weeks before we took off, ensuring we didn’t have to go through that lottery when we arrived at the airport.

  I tried to sell Dad on how great the emergency-exit row was. On the 23-hour flight to Munich we’d have extra leg room, the ability to leave our seats without annoying anyone, and we’d be in charge of everyone’s survival should the plane ditch into the ocean. All the benefits!

  Dad’s focus wasn’t on the extra space, though.

  ‘Twenty-three hours? Is there nothing faster?’ he asked, as though if we slipped the pilot a fifty-dollar note he might take us the back way and get it done in seventeen.

  I told him, ‘No, I’m pretty sure the airlines tend to take the direct route.’

  To finalise the booking, Marie needed to know who was sitting in which seat. It was arbitrary, since we could swap once we were actually on the plane, but I wanted to be nice. So, on my next visit home, at a family lunch for Easter, I asked Dad if he preferred to sit by the aisle or the window. Although I’d had to take the itinerary out of his hands, I thought I’d at least allow him to make this choice. But as he flip-flopped between the two options – aisle or seat – I realised I’d made a mistake: I’d given him options.

  It would torment me for the entire trip, but this was the moment it first dawned on me that I’d saddled myself with the worst kind of companion: the wishy-washy traveller. They’re ‘I don’t mind’ personified, agreeing with absolutely every possibility that’s put in front of them without really committing to any of them, until you feel like grabbing them by the throat and forcing them into a choice. Even if it was jumping the Turkish border into Syria to join ISIS, you’d be ecstatic they’d made a decision.

  ‘Do you want aisle?’ I asked Dad.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You’re sure you don’t want the window?’ I followed up, because what sane person doesn’t want the window?

  ‘Okay, I’ll take that.’

  ‘Right. So you want the window?’

  ‘Yep. I can talk to the birds.’

  I took a deep breath, hoping that he’d see that as a sign of me needing him to be serious for a second.

  He didn’t see the sign.

  ‘No – aisle. I can roll Jaffas down them.’

  In the end I chose the window and gave Dad the aisle. Weeks earlier my brother Jason had said he was jealous of Dad and me doing this trip together, but after witnessing this deranged exchange at Easter, he admitted he wouldn’t be able to cope with Dad for three weeks.

  I tried to convince myself I was blowing Dad’s non-committal attitude out of proportion; things would be okay once we’d actually made it to Europe. But my gut instinct laughed that off. I knew that I was in for three of the most maddeningly frustrating weeks of my life, and nothing was going to shake that feeling. Outwardly I projected a sense of calm, but internally I was already sweating the trip. I had to talk myself into taking things one day at a time, and we hadn’t even made it to Melbourne airport yet.

  The trip was a big deal for my whole family. I knew just how far out of his element Dad would be, even if he hadn’t realised yet. We grew up definitively middle class and unadventurous – three-week overseas holidays weren’t a thing. Dad had a comfort zone that had been years in the making, and he was about to be removed from it in one fell swoop. If I told Mum on the phone that I wouldn’t be able to make it to dinner at their place until 7 pm at the earliest, I could hear Dad complain in the background that he’d be eating after his usual time. Doing things ‘on a whim’ was not in our family vocabulary.

  When we were kids, we only ever had the one TV and, when the plunge was taken to get a video recorder, there was no debate over VHS or Betamax – we were so late to the party, Beta was already off the market.

  Dad went all out, buying a VCR with a remote control, an exceptionally new technology and one that showed we were buying at the top end of the market. Either Dad had worked a lot of overtime or the VCR had been on special, because splurges like this were unheard of. But the excitement was short-lived. Opening the box, we discovered that the remote control had a cord running back to the VCR.

  This was a massive let-down, but it wasn’t a surprise to Dad. He’d knowingly purchased a remote control with a cord, meaning you were ‘remote’ only as far as the cable length allowed, which, in our living room, did not include the couch. The remote would be placed on the rug in the middle of the room and you’d have to get up from your seat, walk over to this so-called remote control and pause/rewind/fast-forward whatever we were watching.

  But the remote was new and exciting, so to avoid fights between us kids, Mum and Dad would designate the ‘remoter’ for the evening. That’s right, we wanted to do it. Nothing could make it clearer how little novelty we had in our lives. It was an honour to be handed that work detail.

  The remoter was confined to the rug, because it was quickly decided the trip from the couch was creating too much of a lag in remoting. I learned to look out for station promos at the end of the block of ads I was fast-forwarding, letting me know the program we’d recorded was about to return. Paying attention was a big deal, because if you missed hitting play in time Dad would groan and the whole family had to wait as you rewound the tape (no way we were missing six to eight seconds of a show). This was something my sister Michelle did far too often, and her carelessness cost her the job. I became Remote King. It was a perceptive appointment from Mum and Dad. Who knows how many of Hawkeye’s antics on M*A*S*H we would have missed if it weren’t for me.

  The beverages in our fridge reflected our suburban tastes. Juice contained at the most 25 per cent real fruit juice. The flavour was almost always orange, though occasionally orange and mango would slip through. Sometimes apple and raspberry would appear if someone had gone nuts, or they’d accidentally grabbed the wrong one. Either way, it was a welcome change from the boredom of pretend orange. It wasn’t until years later that I bought a real orange juice and realised pulp was a thing.

  The preferred drink in our house was cordial – because it lasted longer. It was always orange and lemon, never Koola (green) or Red (red). Never. ‘Too sugary’ was the explanation, as if the citrus flavours had less sugar. I could tell who had made the cordial from the moment it hit my tastebuds; the sweet sensation of shitloads of sugar rushing through my body let me know it was a batch made by Jason or Michelle. Mum and Dad’s cordial concoctions were always much, much weaker. Theirs was so watered down it left only a hint of cordial, like the scent of a perfume that remained in a room from someone who’d been in there hours earlier.

  Still, it was better than footy cordial, which by my calculations is made at a ratio of 1 part cordial to 250 000 parts water. If you can taste flavour in footy cordial then you have a future in wine tasting or sniffing out truffles. I never understood why it was made so weak. Was there a football club that folded after someone blew all the funds on a decent strength cordial?

  Once a year, for Mother’s Day, our family ate out at a restaurant. Together with my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, we’d head to Alasya, a Turkish restaurant on Sydney Road in Brunswick. This was exotic compared to our usual menu, but Dad was a huge fan of the banquet of meats, dips, meats, bread and meats.

  One of the more exciting moments in our lives was where my sister and I shared a meal with Dad at the pub. At the time Dad was working as a laboratory assistant at CSL, a company that amongst other things made antibiotics and antivenin. He had picked up my sister and me from school, which he never did as we lived a five-minute walk away, and instead of going home, he decided to return to work drinks with us in tow. This was strange; I couldn’t understand wh
y we hadn’t gone home, but it was an outing we’d never had before, so we weren’t about to question it. Being a good father, he didn’t leave us in the car but brought us inside one of the rougher pubs in Brunswick.

  I loved it. I felt like a mini David Attenborough as I got to see Dad in his natural environment. He joked about his mates and made them laugh, but then was also the target of wisecracks and put-downs himself, which he enjoyed just as much. His behaviour was like that of my own friends, except this was Dad, who was usually telling us off for putting our feet on the couch. He made his friends stop their game of pool so we could play (which at that age was just pushing balls around aimlessly with the cue) and bought us food. With my limited knowledge of pub fare I’d ordered toast, and when a steak sandwich arrived he even pulled the meat out before I had a chance to whinge about it, handing me the buttery toast while he ate what would have been a very cheap cut of meat. I didn’t want the day to end, but after his eighth pot of beer Dad decided to do the responsible thing and drive us home.

  Thursday night was fish and chips night. Traditionally it’s on Friday, but Dad couldn’t tolerate the crowds, so for our family it moved to a quieter night. I loved the trip down to the shops, being lifted up to the counter so I could place the order myself, reading from the note Mum had written. I don’t know why it had to be written out, considering the order never changed: five pieces of flake, $2 worth of chips (a lot back then), dim sims and potato cakes. Perhaps the note informed the orderer whether the dim sims were to be fried or steamed, and whether soy sauce should be added immediately or at a later stage. Vinegar was never put on the chips, though, as I’d been reliably – and constantly – informed it brought on my asthma. My brother and sister would always ask for vinegar, but Dad would incline his head towards me, reminding them that ol’ weak lungs couldn’t handle it.

  I shared a bedroom with one of my siblings for my entire childhood. First I shared with my sister, Michelle, then when we moved I was forced to share a room with my brother, Jason. He made it quite clear he was not into giving up his solo lifestyle by taping a demarcation line on the carpet.

  I didn’t experience the joy of having a room to myself until he moved out, when I was in my late teens. My brother decided it was time to leave after I came home blind drunk, interrupting him and his girlfriend watching TV. I stumbled in and passed out, almost making it to my bed. He started looking for a sharehouse the next day.

  Mum and Dad never forced the issue of us moving out of home, happy to look after us as long as we contributed with both chores and rent (which I tried to pay with humour, a commodity not accepted as payment in the Rozenbachs household).

  We had a garage, but much to Mum’s anger it was always occupied by various non-running cars Dad and Jason were fixing. I’m not entirely sure what Mum’s plans were had the space been available – an old upright piano she’d bought sat in the corner, but even if the space was clear I can’t imagine her learning to play it out in the cold. She remained constantly frustrated, usually because when a car left and the space was briefly opened up it was replaced with another bomb or, even worse, once Jason covered everything in plastic and used the garage as a spray booth to repaint his car.

  Dad and Jason were mechanical and I was not. I listened to their endless car talk (I still have an intimate, fairly useless knowledge of Ford engines), but when it came to physical participation the first time my cold knuckle smashed into a steel chassis rail I was back inside with Mum reading my Choose Your Own Adventure books for the fiftieth time.

  Our house wasn’t renovated until I was eighteen, the extension adding an extra room that we really could’ve used when my siblings and I were younger. By this time Jason was a qualified carpenter, so he built the extension. By comparison I was a metal-music-loving bookworm, and Dad thought I was a little on the soft side. So when he and Jason began building the extension, I decided I needed to step up and offered to help. It didn’t go well.

  My fear of heights meant it took me almost an hour to even work up the courage to climb up to the roof, where I had the idea that I was going to help put the corrugated sheets on. The moment I stepped off the ladder I was overwhelmed, hugging the roof with all my strength in case I should somehow roll off. I managed to crawl to the centre, as far away from the edges as possible, where I completely froze. I couldn’t even make myself move to get back down the ladder.

  Work carried on around me for about twenty minutes, until the roofing sheets reached my section and I either had to move or become part of the structure. So with my brother’s assistance I managed to inch my way across the roof, my shaking almost dislodging the ladder as I reached my foot over the edge to the first rung, Dad holding it steady and talking me through the climb down like a policeman talking a jumper off a ledge.

  Events like that didn’t help my standing of not being particularly useful. My brother was physically enlarging the family home – I was a blubbering statue on the roof. It wasn’t hard to work out who was the more useful son.

  Until now.

  Dad said goodbye to Mum like he was just off to the cricket. Mum wished us both good luck – for Dad to be safe and for me to be able to handle him for three weeks.

  In the taxi out to the airport I felt overwhelmed by the idea of that amount of time with him. In the last twenty years the longest we’d spent together was going to the footy, and that was only around three hours.

  I calmed myself by breaking the trip down. Three weeks wasn’t that much. It was just 21 days. 504 hours. A mere 30 240 minutes. 1 814 400 seconds with Dad. That was all.

  When we got to the check-in counter, I got my first real look at Dad’s suitcase, which, it turned out, came from a bin. This sounds a lot worse than it was. He ran a mini-skip business, so bins had become his life. He’d bought the business in his later years and absolutely loved it. He often regaled me with stories about the Wollert tip, the landfill he dumped his skip bins at, recounting the time some guy did something or other there. As should be obvious by my vague recounting, I didn’t really pay attention to these stories. I prayed he wasn’t about to use the impending flight to tell me about the recycling section they’d recently installed.

  He and Mum had built a thriving business partnership, Dad collecting the skips, Mum running an op shop. It was the perfect combination, Dad pulling items from the bin he figured had value, Mum selling them back to a vintage-loving public.

  Years of experience taught him to look out for the most valuable bin of all: the divorce clean-out. Super friendly and chatty, Dad would always get inside info, including finding out when a couple had reached this terrible (for them) time in their lives. For Dad, it was the perfect opportunity to swoop. In a divorce many almost brand-new items get tossed. It was like Christmas. In a bin.

  Which is how Dad got his suitcase.

  It was enormous. Imagine your standard overseas-travel suitcase, then increase its size by a third, as though it had been on a steady diet of Krispy Kreme donuts washed down with deep-fried thickshakes. And it was the deepest red you’ve ever seen – if you happened to be flying above it, you could easily mistake it for the heart of a volcano. I didn’t have proof, but I’d safely guess the suitcase had been the cause of the divorce in the first place.

  Oversized, glowing red, yet Dad still thought to put a ribbon on the handle in case there was another identical one on the baggage carousel at the other end.

  As we stood waiting, I asked him, ‘Why did you choose such a big one?’

  ‘Everyone said the one I tried before was too small.’

  ‘What do you mean “tried before”? You’ve never been overseas.’

  ‘Your mother and I did a dry run of packing.’

  Apparently he and Mum had packed his suitcase a few weeks earlier, to see what he would need. Not two days out, as most people might do, getting a bit of a head start by packing things they wouldn’t be using the next few days anyway.

  I assumed then that they’d done a dry run with th
is monstrously large suitcase as well, but when I grabbed a handle to help Dad out, I realised that couldn’t have possibly happened. It felt like lifting a small pallet of bricks.

  ‘Jesus, Tommy, what’s in this?’

  ‘I don’t know. Jeans, shoes, some jumpers.’

  ‘Some . . . how many is some?

  ‘Eight or nine.’

  ‘What do you need that many jumpers for?’

  ‘Your mother told me to.’

  That explained why this warehouse on wheels was so heavy. I’d told him two jumpers would be sufficient, explaining that it wasn’t a big deal wearing the same jumper two days in a row as we wouldn’t be seeing the same people again. When I looked back at photos from my backpacking days, you’d think I’d only packed one T-shirt.

  So a woman who had never travelled was giving advice to a novice about what to pack in his inner-city flat of a suitcase. Great. He probably had a dustbuster tucked away, ‘just in case’. I made a note to ask Mum how she’d managed to get him to take her advice, when he never showed interest in anything I had to say, even if I had a ton of experience.

  Not that Mum was immune; Dad would often ignore her solid advice. She’d tell him to put sunscreen on before mowing the lawn, only for him to return to the house with his nose redder than an alcoholic forced to drink his way out of a cellar. This went on for years, well after the Slip-Slop-Slap campaign was retired, so ingrained in Australians that it was deemed unnecessary. But not for Tommy. ‘Bit of sunburn never hurt anyone,’ he’d say.

  The suitcase taken care of, we cleared customs without too much trouble, Dad proudly handing over his passport for the very first time. He smiled, then caught himself and unsmiled, ensuring he replicated the photo in the passport.