He didn’t answer directly, instead deflecting by telling me he wouldn’t have wanted to go into the catacombs in Paris, either. It had been on my list of potential sights, a series of tunnels underneath Paris filled with the bones of the dead to relieve the strain on the city’s overflowing cemeteries. I’d been to catacombs in Lima and Peru and thought Dad might like to check it out. And as a metal-head, the stacks of bones looked like some of my favourite album covers. Dad kept his relief to himself when we discovered they were closed, because October is Europe’s attraction-renovation season. Again, I said if he’d told me, I would’ve crossed it off the list.
I’d successfully distracted Dad from the Chunnel, but talking about the catacombs allowed him to make the claim that ‘they suggest if you have gumboots with you, you put them on’.
As though you’d be out doing tourist things in Paris, decided to go into the catacombs, and just happened to have a pair of gumboots with you. ‘Oh these? You think I should put them on? Well what do you know, after all those years of taking them out and never wearing them, they’ve finally paid off.’
Though at this stage of the trip I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a pair of gumboots hidden in the east wing of Dad’s suitcase.
For the rest of the train ride, my mind replayed all the places we’d been that were enclosed spaces. The crypt in the Bamberg cathedral, Paris’s Metro system, the windowless bedrooms in our nightmare apartment. He seemed fine with it all, but now that I knew, I would actively try to avoid those situations. All it took was one actual, real conversation!
I made a note to cancel the 12-hour isolation tank session I had planned in London.
LONDON
As we stepped off the train at St Pancras in London, Dad loosened up almost instantly. He smiled, was chattier than he had been in days, and for the moment even seemed to be walking pain-free. The writing on all the signs was in English, the cars were on the right side of the road and, most importantly, it was not Paris. We could’ve pulled into Kabul Station and he’d have been happy.
There was also the sense that we were closer to the end of our journey than the beginning with only a week remaining, which gave us both something to look forward to.
It was my first time in London in a decade, not having visited since I unsuccessfully attempted to move there in 2001, giving up out of sheer misery. I arrived with high expectations, wanting to try to make it in stand-up in one of the world’s hubs of comedy. But I was beaten down, arriving in the middle of winter with absolutely no idea of what to expect. I couldn’t deal with the bleak conditions. Cold, overcast, wet, my tiny little mind blown by it getting dark at 3 pm. I slogged it out for two months before giving up, desperately missing home, depressed that a relationship had ended for this. Things weren’t helped by the lack of smiles from the Brits in almost every facet of life. It seemed they were all as depressed by the gloominess as I was, and I longed for a happy stranger to come walking off an aerobridge smiling and talking to everyone.
Dad and I would be staying in Camden Town, which was easy enough to get to from St Pancras as it was only a few Tube stops away. Dad seemed fine with the prospect of going underground, though we’d have to navigate Friday night peak hour to get there. That would have been enough of a pain with standard luggage, but Dad’s suitcase could easily have been attached to the back of the train and used as an extra carriage.
As we stepped onto the train, two guys in their mid-twenties saw us haul it on and immediately started ribbing Dad.
‘Sure it’s big enough, mate?’
‘You got a body in there?’
‘Is that your hotel room?’
Dad could not have loved this interaction any more if he’d tried. They were speaking English and they were giving him shit like people would back home. Dad had never been too serious about himself, always happy to have a laugh at his own expense. Whether it was his lack of tech know-how or being mocked by my mates for his homemade stick-man tattoo he did when he was fourteen, as long as it was good-natured he never minded.
It was the first time I’d seen him genuinely smile in over a week, and gave me confidence we’d finally found a place he might like.
The apartment in Camden Town was perfectly normal, which was another relief after Paris. Camden itself is a bit of an alternative area, with markets and a strong music scene. But it still has that London suburb vibe of tightly packed terrace houses surrounded by off-licences, betting establishments or chain pubs with names like the Slug & Lettuce, the Hungry Horse or the Soulless Rip-off.
As we left the apartment the next morning, I had high expectations. Dad seemed the most relaxed he’d been for the whole trip and London was going to have a higher hit rate of tourist attractions that he was aware of. He didn’t even seem to mind that we had to walk to the next station down the line as Camden Town station was closed because the markets were on. Which Dad was happy to stroll through, looking at T-shirts of bands he’d never heard of, never intending to buy anything on offer. But at least he’d walked through them. London really had made him a new man.
I felt comfortable too; the two months I’d spent unemployed in London meant I knew where I was going, not having to stop every three seconds to make sure we were on the right track. I felt in a better place mentally for London this time around, perhaps because I knew what to expect, and, more importantly, when I was leaving.
We arrived at Embankment station, and as we exited up the escalators, our London adventures began. We walked out of the station to be met by the Thames and, on the opposite bank, the London Eye. My ferris wheel history and Dad’s newly outed claustrophobia meant that we were never going to go for a ride on the Eye, so seeing it was enough for Dad.
He only had one thought about the giant wheel. ‘Why isn’t it on a park?’
It was an interesting question. The London Eye is located on the banks of the Thames and it’s over one hundred metres high, so it offers excellent views stretching over greater London (I assume). But Dad seemed to think those views would be spoiled by the Thames, the river earning one of his brutal two-word reviews: ‘It’s dirty.’ As though for some reason the people on the Eye would spend the whole time staring at the ground right below them.
I’m not sure what he was expecting; Melbourne’s Yarra River is offensively brown all year round, so it’s not as though he’s used to glacial-blue rivers cutting through a city. He must have left his goggles and speedos in his mobile wardrobe, so I don’t think he had plans to swim it, either. At least it didn’t smell like cat piss.
Fortunately for Dad, a lot of London’s tourist hotspots are in a big loop, fairly close to each other, so it was going to be an easy stroll to see most of them. We walked along the river to the iconic (to almost everyone but Dad) houses of parliament, Dad not taking it in as he was still distracted by the non-park Eye and filthy river.
Which brought us to Big Ben. Dad took it in for a bit, and then hit me with, ‘Didn’t think it’d be surrounded by buildings.’ I took this to mean he thought the clock should somehow stand alone, maybe in a park. For a man who happily cut down any tree that got anywhere near his property, he suddenly seemed to have a real thing for parks.
He followed up with, ‘Could’ve just looked at the Dimmeys clock.’ Now, while that Richmond landmark is iconic to some of the people of Melbourne, it’s barely a quarter of the size of Big Ben and it doesn’t draw in millions of visitors from around the world. It’s not like tourists get picked up from the airport and rush straight to Swan Street so they can witness for themselves this clocktower they’ve heard so much about (from Dad).
Then we were on to Buckingham Palace. Dad seemed fairly impressed by his first ever palace. Well, he wasn’t actively unimpressed, so I took that as a victory. He was happy to stay for a while, most likely resting up, as we agreed that it’s not a bad second home to have. His only gripe here was the same as pretty much every traveller: we couldn’t get close to the place itself due to fences, security, beefe
aters and selfie-sticks. Our photos would be taken from a distance. I imagined he mainly wanted to get closer so he could see if the Queen had the special hinges on her windows too.
As the typical heavy English drizzle set upon us, I decided walking wasn’t on our agenda anymore as we’d end up drenched within the hour, so we jumped on the Tube to London Bridge station, with the intent of seeing Tower Bridge (the one most people assume is London Bridge). It was the first drawbridge Dad had seen in his life, and all he could think to ask was, ‘Why’s it that colour?’
The metal on the bridge was painted an inoffensive light blue, but perhaps his thinking was that bridges were grey and drab, and to paint them anything else was to misrepresent their bridginess. By then I’d given up trying to follow the logic of his needlessly articulated thoughts, so responded ‘don’t know’ and left it at that. We walked on, and I pointed out the Tower of London, giving him a brief description based on recollections of my tour through it last time I was here: a historic castle where they tortured the absolute shit out of people with some amazingly sharp and pointy implements. That was more than enough information for Dad to forget the moment we walked on.
I’d organised for us to have dinner with my Spanish friend Lorenzo, a finance guru I’d met when he was living in Melbourne. He and his Australian wife, Sara, an opera singer, had since moved to London. Lorenzo was a good mate who I’d spent many a Sunday afternoon with, enjoying his homemade paella while Sara practised banging out a few arias in their bedroom upstairs.
If you’ve never been around opera singing, it’s quite startling. It’s not something that can be done at half volume. She punched it out at full blast, quite the change from the sounds of Triple R that normally permeated Brunswick.
Lorenzo chose a fancy-ish establishment in Belsize Park that had the menu of a very upmarket pub. Dad loved it, not least because this almost-fine-dining restaurant had steak. And not steak the size of your fingernail served on a hydroponically grown salt-cured pea. But an actual, life-sized steak.
I filled Lorenzo and Sara in with what was going on back home with the group of friends they’d left behind. I only had to fill in the occasional blank for Dad – he knew my friends well, so I didn’t feel like talking about all of them left him out.
Dinner with other people was a good opportunity for me to hear what Dad thought about the trip. My fast walking came up far too often; apparently it was easier to tell complete strangers about the problem than me, his son, who was in a position to solve the problem. But he was effusive in his praise for the Autobahn, the workmanship of the cathedrals and beer for breakfast.
Then of course the inevitable came: Paris. I couldn’t disagree with his appraisal of the apartment. It would have taken someone recently released from prison to think it was in any way habitable, and even then they’d probably commit a crime just to get back to the cleanliness of a cell. At least Dad had proved capable of laughing about it, so his subsequent trauma seemed under control. He mentioned again that the city smelled like cat piss, which amused Lorenzo and Sara. They’d clearly failed to pick that up during their trip the previous year.
Then Dad surprised me by saying everyone in Paris had been rude. I knew he’d not had the best time, but I didn’t remember that part of it. I needed to know more.
‘Who was rude?’ I asked.
‘Everyone.’
‘When? Everyone was really helpful.’
I reminded him of the woman who, after I said ‘catacombs’ fifty times as slowly and with as little Australian accent as I possibly could, finally understood me enough to explain that they were closed for maintenance.
‘Oh yeah,’ he said.
‘And what about the guy that helped us out of that car park?’ I asked.
Again, Dad had to concede that a Parisian had helped us get out of trouble. I explained to Lorenzo and Sara that when we were leaving the car rental place to drive to Caen, our pass wouldn’t let us out, stopping everyone from behind us from exiting as well. When I hit the intercom button the voice at the other end only spoke French, leaving us in yet another incoherent stand-off. Then the guy behind us exited his car, asked what was happening and explained the situation to the guy on the intercom. The boom gate went up, we said thank you to this kind stranger, and were on our way. It couldn’t have been a more pleasant experience.
I dislike rudeness as much as the next person, but I couldn’t let Dad re-write history for the sake of hating Paris. I made a note to double-check with Mum what he told her upon our return, in case he created a story about us almost getting robbed but only being saved by the gaffer tape in his suitcase.
As we were served our dinner (Dad finally getting his well-done steak, which meant all our meals were delayed), he recounted with joy the afternoon tea in the suburbs of Munich that was basically conducted in the dark, and he talked Lorenzo and Sara through the Michelin-starred degustation, of course including the camembert ice-cream.
It was good to get some live feedback on how the trip had gone, and it gave me a sense that I hadn’t done such a bad job after all. During the last two weeks I’d felt like I had been making Dad do most things against his will, but it seemed he’d appreciated the sights and scenes of Europe at some level.
Though there’d been some tense moments, Dad seemed to be looking back at most of what we’d done with good humour and fondness. I mentally patted myself on the back, knowing I’d been vindicated in incessantly pressuring him into doing things he didn’t want to do.
Usually it’s the role of the parent to be firm with their kids, forcing them do something for their own good. Certainly that’s the way it had been for me. For so much of this trip the roles had been reversed, as time and again it fell to me to be the bad guy, forcing Dad to do all these things he was now joyfully recounting.
Despite my babysitting difficulties, I’d always liked to think I would be a fun dad rather than strict with my kids. I guess every parent thinks that at the beginning. Everyone starts out assuring themselves that they won’t be like their own parents, just taking things in their stride, unruffled, until they realise it’s kind of hard to retain a carefree sense of joy when someone is mashing playdough into the carpet.
I knew Uncle Adam was definitely fun. I’d swan in for a few hours, muck around, crack some gags, make some kids laugh, then walk away leaving behind me whatever mess I’d created. Be it sugar-based hyperactivity or accidentally teaching them inappropriate language (they’d learn it eventually anyway), I was carefree.
I never wanted to be the cause of trauma, but that did happen when I visited my friend Dave one Christmas. His son, Rafferty, had been given a trampoline, telling me it was from Santa. I was happy to live with this lie.
‘Daddy, Daddy, can Adam come on the trampoline with me?’ Raff asked Dave.
‘Yeah, if he wants to, of course he can,’ Dave replied. He looked at me to say, ‘You don’t have to but you’ll be letting a three-year-old down if you don’t.’ I knew that look well.
Rafferty climbed in and I followed, Dave zipping us in from the outside. I should have known right then that it wasn’t going to end well. Raff was from a different generation – a generation that had trampolines with nets around them, designed to keep children safe.
But life isn’t always safe. Old trampolines were a metaphor for life: if you got too close to the edge, if you tried too hard and got a bit ahead of yourself, life was going to give you a lesson. Everyone over thirty reading this learned as a child that gravity and faces don’t mix. My sister Michelle bounced herself off our neighbour’s trampoline and ended up faceplanting into the springs. She’s now one of the most conservative people I know, and I put it down to that experience.
Before I go on, I should point out Rafferty was a first-born. He didn’t have an older brother to torment him and teach him unwelcome life lessons. Like that a fist may strike your face at any moment. I’ll forever be in Jason’s debt for teaching me that one.
As we played around
, Rafferty fell over. Not a big deal. Happens hundreds of times on a trampoline. Perhaps someone had given him a nudge, but with no CCTV cameras, there was simply no way to know for sure.
Now, what’s the one thing you should do when someone has fallen over on a trampoline?
[Pause while reader says, ‘DOUBLE BOUNCE!’]
That’s right, you double bounce them.
I found out the hard way you didn’t do that to a three-year-old. In my mind I figured if he’d been on a trampoline before, then he’d been double bounced. It’s a rite of passage.
Instead I discovered that hysterical laughter sounds exceptionally similar to hysterical crying. It took way too long for me to recognise those weren’t a snot bubble and urine stain of joy. If you’ve ever wanted to feel like an arsehole, or a bully, or an arsehole bully, then having a screaming child waiting for you to unzip a net so they can be released from your torment is a sure-fire recipe.
An activity that only minutes earlier was so much fun had suddenly turned into a torture session for Raff. I could still hear his sobs in the house as I climbed from the trampoline, shaking my head and letting out a sigh as a sign of apology to Dave.
Uncle Adam may not have always got it right, but Son Adam was on the right path. Buoyed by Dad’s storytelling at dinner the night before, for our next day in London I thought a fun excursion (I was starting to feel like a teacher dragging around an uninterested Year 8 kid) would be to visit Harrods, the luxury department store. I knew Dad would be aware of it, not least because of Mum’s love for Princess Di. Mum was devastated when she died, and wanted vast photo coverage of Buckingham Palace and anything else royal related we might stumble across. Harrods would also be a change of pace from seeing something historical or educational. And being modern, it would have escalators, which if we rode them properly would only have Dad counting to ‘one’.
Paris and Other Disappointments Page 16