Paris and Other Disappointments

by Adam Rozenbachs

  We wandered the various departments of Harrods, surrounded by incredible luxury and wealth. Dad was just as blown away as in the duty-free store, this time marvelling at how expensive things he wouldn’t normally buy could be. He was completely in his element with so many price tags to inspect and comment on.

  ‘You should get Mum one of those tote bags. She’d love it,’ I suggested, pointing out a Harrods bag.

  Dad looked at it for a second. ‘How much is thirty pounds?’

  I did a quick calculation. ‘I don’t know, about fifty bucks.’

  ‘I’m not paying fifty dollars for a bag. Fifty dollars! For a bag!’

  You’d think I had suggested he spend his money on a £900 Givenchy handbag. I argued that the tote bag wasn’t about the value for money, that he could afford it and that Mum would have really liked it. None of those arguments helped. He couldn’t justify spending that much money on a tote bag. And that was that.

  It wasn’t until later that I thought perhaps I could have bought Mum the bag myself. But I figured I’d already given her the gift of getting Dad out of her hair for three weeks. Nothing in all of Harrods was as valuable as that.

  After keeping our budget on track in Harrods, we spent the day roaming inner London as we had in the Tiergarten, with no destination. I hoped Dad wasn’t getting too attached to our strolls, because it certainly wasn’t going to happen when we got back to Melbourne.

  We wandered around, the pace slow, as I pointed out Carnaby Street, Soho, Piccadilly Circus, Covent Garden, Leicester Square, Hyde Park, Trafalgar Square and more. Places he’d not be able to recount if his life depended on it. He saw them all.

  Though Dad walked around without much complaint, I could see he was bored. If he wanted to walk around aimlessly, he could do that back home with Mum every Friday night at the Airport West Westfield. He didn’t need to be 17 000 kilometres away from home to do it.

  We still had three more days in London and the tourist attraction tank was running low. I knew I’d have to really sell anything more I wanted Dad to do and spread things out to cover the remaining days. But I felt I had his trust, now that he’d had his first opportunity to regale people with tales about his trip to Europe. Whether he enjoyed it or not, on reflection he could see that everything we’d done had served a purpose: he had travel stories. Now it would be his turn to be the most annoying and boring person at a dinner party.

  Over the last two weeks I’d also adapted the way I went about things. I’d learned to lower my expectations, to not expect Dad to be amazed by anything at all, and not to overload him with too many things in one day. I still pushed him, knowing he wouldn’t do anything if I didn’t get him out of his comfort zone, but we’d finally found a balance.

  That balance included having more downtime in our accommodation. That evening in London, as I was reading my book, relaxing in our apartment, I heard Dad fiddling with the front door. Having moved on from the windows of Europe, he’d noticed a unique mechanism on that lock.

  Again it was handle related. To paraphrase (read: I didn’t really listen to what Dad said), if you turned the handle down it opened like a normal door; if you turned it up it would semi-lock the door, only openable from the inside. ‘But still locked from the outside, Adam.’ If you turned the lock after that, it would lock the door from both inside and out.

  It didn’t matter to me. I was inside, reading my book, happy he was playing with the lock and not annoying me by announcing the water pressure. For those who care, London had great water pressure. I’ll leave you to imagine what Paris’s water pressure had been like.

  I managed about four pages of distracted reading while he was going CLICK, HANDLE TURN, CLICK CLICK, DOOR OPEN, DOOR CLOSE, HANDLE TURN, CLICK CLICK, DOOR OPEN, DOOR CLOSE, KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

  He’d locked himself out. I stood and put the book down, but paused, considering leaving the door shut, before going over and letting him in.

  ‘That’s a great lock.’

  I responded, ‘That’s good.’

  Now that Dad was back inside, I suggested a few things for us to do the next day. I knew they weren’t high on his list (i.e. he’d never heard of them), but we’d been to all the main sites and I was forced to offer up lesser-known ones. In my mind they were no less interesting, but I knew it was going to take something special on my part to get them over the line.

  The Churchill War Rooms, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Lord’s cricket ground – all were knocked back. I was so desperate I threw in the Tate Modern gallery, of course to no avail. I knew I’d reached the edge of my sanity when I suggested Madame Tussauds, even though I could think of nothing worse than looking at famous candles-in-waiting. Again, a resounding ‘no’.

  I was proud of the level of patience I’d shown throughout the trip. I’d never been a patient person – people generally annoyed the hell out of me. But this time was different. I had a purpose. I was doing the trip for Dad. I wanted to say thanks for everything he had done for me throughout my life, and part of that was keeping my cool when I normally wouldn’t.

  Life wasn’t built for people to get along every second of every day. Overseas trips are worse, small annoyances heightened by the stress and expectation of travel, plus the close quarters, tension building like the single drops of water on the forehead of a torture victim.

  DRIP. Reminding Dad to get his Oyster travel card out every time we entered or exited a train station.

  DRIP. When we were at the pub watching the soccer, and I asked, ‘Are you hungry?’ and he replied, ‘Yes and no.’

  DRIP. Taking his Oyster pass from him and holding onto it for him, only handing it to him when he needed to use it, like you would for a child.

  DRIP. Drowning his fish and chips in tartare sauce because, ‘I paid for it. Not giving it back.’

  DRIP. ‘I probably should’ve worn these shoes in.’

  I had never been in a proper argument with Dad. There was the occasional shouting match when I was younger, but that’s how we dealt with things in my childhood. There were no rational conversations to work things through. It went from nothing to shouting to over, like a summer storm. Though we both knew that living under his roof meant I could only push disagreements so far, anyway.

  The most heated discussion we ever had was after I’d moved back home when comedy hadn’t bred instant success. I wasn’t really paying my way around the house. Dad had had enough, I dug my heels in, and luckily Mum was there to calm things down, sending us our separate ways before things got out of hand.

  But Mum wasn’t here now. Every person has their limits, and after two and a half weeks of struggle, Dad relentlessly shutting down my suggestions had taken its toll. The dam wall burst.

  ‘Jesus, Dad, can you help me out here? I’m suggesting all this stuff and all you do is knock it back. You’re really starting to piss me off!’

  Turned out Dad had his own dam, which had also been at bursting point.

  ‘I don’t want to do any of that! Maybe I’ll just go home tomorrow.’

  I was ready to fire back, about to ask him exactly how he was going to organise that without me, when he cut me off. ‘I didn’t even want to do this stupid trip anyway.’

  Dad = straw. Me = camel. My back = broken.

  I lost it. I spoke to him in a way I never thought I would, or could. To anyone, let alone my dad. It was anger, it was hatred, it was pain. If there was such a thing as an eight-barrel shotgun (a double, double, double, double), I gave it to him with all eight barrels.

  ‘Are you fucking serious? YOU didn’t want to do this trip? The only reason I’m here is for you. I’d rather be overseas with my friends, not wasting my fucking time with you. This is bullshit! Fuck you! I am out of here!’

  And before I did something stupid, like throw a punch or burst into tears, I stormed out.

  Except Dad had locked the door. And I couldn’t work out how to open it. I stood in front of it twisting knobs, yanking handles, kicking at it, mut
tering to myself, ‘How does this fucking stupid fuck —’

  All the while Dad stood behind me, giving me instructions, ‘Turn it that way. No, that way.’

  Eventually I managed to open the door and leave the apartment, having completed the single worst storm-out humanity had ever known.

  I stood in the street, adrenaline pumping through my veins, shaking as though I’d had too much cough medicine. I didn’t know what to do. This was as furious as I’d ever been with Dad.

  My first thought was to walk back into the apartment, throwing in a few extra reasons why I was there in the first place and where I’d rather be. But I knew that wasn’t going to help. I’d said my piece, and though a thousand thoughts bounced around my head, none of them particularly nice, there was no point in piling more on.

  I didn’t contemplate going straight back in to apologise either, as that would have been viewed as a sign of weakness. I couldn’t have risked that.

  I walked through Camden absentmindedly, swearing and muttering to myself like the sufferer of either an unchecked mental illness or the debilitating effects of travelling with a parent. Because it was London, I found myself outside a pub within a hundred metres, as good a place as any to gather my thoughts. And seriously dull the pain.

  Backing down from a fight had always been one of the hardest things for me to do. Firstly, I always think I’m right – I rarely shout in agreement. Mostly, though, I didn’t do it because backing down is not something that happened in my family, since we didn’t really fight in the first place. There had been shouting, but that would just be at us kids for not doing stuff: setting the table, taking the dog for a walk, homework. Nothing serious.

  I’d only ever heard Mum swear at Dad once, calling him a ‘shithead’. I was stopped in my tracks, thinking, ‘Whoa, that is serious! He must’ve really done something wrong here.’ Mum swearing was cool, but I never found out the source of the trouble, as I knew to keep moving lest I cop some fire from her as well.

  We didn’t talk about things. We’d always been an ‘actions, not words’ type of family. Saying ‘I love you’ was like putting sauce in the fridge – it simply wasn’t the done thing. It felt weird to even consider it. Maybe someone tried saying ‘I love you’ once, but like the sauce, it would have been shut down pretty quickly.

  If there was ever any conflict, whatever happened at the flash-point was the final outcome and the disagreement was never spoken of again. That didn’t mean it was the end of things and I’d move on; to the contrary, I continued to dwell on whatever it was. But those feelings were pushed deep inside, and no one ever had to suffer the indignity of admitting they’d been wrong. It was just the way our family rolled.

  As I ordered my third pint, I knew that had to change. If I went back in and pretended nothing had happened then we wouldn’t have solved anything. All it would do was plant the seed for a lifelong grudge between Dad and me. A grudge that would grow to the size of an oak tree by the time we got back to Australia.

  Pretending nothing was wrong would also ensure that every time I thought about the fight in the future I’d become more and more bitter, knowing I’d held my tongue against my better judgement. It was now or never.

  I felt sick as I approached the apartment, every possible scenario running through my head. Not one of them involved Dad saying sorry. Even in my fictions he was unrelenting. In my head he’d just sat down to watch TV the moment I’d walked out.

  I knew what I said to him would have to be a balancing act. I had to be articulate, stay calm and not get sucked into raising my voice.

  When I opened the surprisingly unlocked door, I found Dad sitting the couch. The TV wasn’t on. Perhaps he’d been thinking about it too. Or maybe he was still marvelling at the lock. It was hard to tell.

  I apologised first. I explained my frustration at getting every one of my suggestions shot down without any consideration of the effort I’d put into them. I said I had tried really hard to make our trip enjoyable for him, and that it would be appreciated if he tried to help me. I wasn’t asking for him to suddenly lead a tour through the Imperial War Museum, but to at least try some of my ideas. Or consider them for at least ten seconds before knocking them back. I also reminded him that he’d agreed to the trip and wasn’t there under duress.

  The flood gates open, I kept going, telling him that finding out he didn’t want to do the trip really hurt. I said I’d given up my time for this – for him – and I just wished he’d show some appreciation. I hadn’t wanted to say, ‘Hey, I hope you appreciate me doing this favour for you,’ because it was his example that had set me on a path in life where I considered actions to be stronger than words. But it seemed he wasn’t picking up on my actions, so I had to resort to words.

  Dad apologised too. ‘Okay.’

  Being fluent in Tommy Rozenbachs, I translated this as, ‘You’re right, I have been hard work on this trip. I’ll try harder to appreciate what a wonderful son you are. Thanks for being here, and this really does show me how much you love me and your gratitude for what I did for you growing up.’

  That was the last conversation we ever had about that fight. Until then we’d been two bulls in a paddock, ready to butt heads, but we’d avoided further confrontation. I guess it might even be described as a nice moment.

  Even though I felt like I was enabling him to be a quitter, I told him I’d look into getting us on an earlier flight home. He seemed pleased with that, even though we were giving up a marathon just as we’d spotted the finishing line. He wanted to go home, and I knew if we stayed any longer it would just end up causing me more frustration. Packing it in early was win–win.

  I told him I’d get onto changing the flights as soon as possible, but nothing could be guaranteed. In the meantime, I suggested we should head back out, grab a beer and try to find something of interest to him for us to do the next day.

  ‘Come on,’ I said as we headed outside. ‘Let’s go yell at some cobblestones.’

  As we walked to the pub, Dad brought up a topic from the day before, which let me know he had at least partially taken in what I’d said.

  ‘Why don’t we do that Frankenstein walking tour?’

  For a split second I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I remembered to think like Tommy. ‘You mean Jack the Ripper?’

  ‘Same thing.’

  I was proud of myself. I’d handled this extremely delicate situation with diplomacy I didn’t realise I had, which in turn made me feel like I was ready for fatherhood. I’d neither lost nor killed Dad, two fairly high prerequisites for becoming a parent (I assume).

  I had even grown as a person in those three weeks, having found an inner peace I never knew existed. Before we left, I was the most impatient person you could ever meet. Supermarkets, cafes, roads; they’d all felt the wrath of my impatience. If someone missed the green arrow at a set of traffic lights, I’d be banging on their window, screaming, ‘You dickhead, you missed the arrow, what is wrong with you?!?!’ And that was just as a pedestrian.

  As we made our way through Europe, avoiding a Dad-induced aneurysm every five minutes led me to a level of zen I hadn’t known was possible. Just like Dad teaching me to drive with incessant noise had made me a far better driver, three weeks of his insanity made me a calmer, better, more responsible person.

  He did it. THE SON OF A BITCH DID IT.

  We woke to the fortunate news we’d been moved to an earlier flight and that we’d be leaving that night. We didn’t make it the full twenty-one days I’d planned for us, but for the sake of our relationship, this was the better outcome.

  Dad had a spring in his step, happy to take to the London streets one very last time. He’d be home soon.

  We had lunch with Lorenzo at the 700-year-old Leadenhall Market in the financial district, a beautiful undercover market with an ornate roof. Dad added Spanish food to his list of things he’d never tried before, Lorenzo having taken us to a restaurant of his home country’s cuisine. Initial
ly Dad didn’t think the serves of tapas were big enough, but in the end we managed to order enough of them to satisfy his hunger.

  At the end of lunch I said goodbye to Lorenzo, and he laughingly wished us luck for the very short remainder of our journey. We both knew he wasn’t really joking.

  With only a few hours to kill, our last London moments were spent walking around Covent Garden Market. It could have been anywhere, neither of us really paying attention to our surroundings, both just killing time until we were on that flight home. I could see Dad was tired, and I knew by this stage there was no point asking him how he was.

  ‘We should head back so we can pack and then head out to the airport. What do you reckon?’ I asked, pretending to give him an option.

  ‘No worries,’ he replied.

  As we headed into Covent Garden Tube station, I’d forgotten it didn’t have escalators, so felt bad for making Dad trudge down one last set of steps. He was silent, and I figured this was the last thing he needed, but at least that would be it. He could relax at the airport and on the plane.

  As we reached the platform I could see our train was already there. Reluctantly I said, ‘Sorry, Tommy, we’ve got to get on this train.’

  We both bolted, Dad putting in one last effort to ensure we made it. We stood in the carriage, both getting our breath back, and after about fifteen seconds Dad leaned in and said, ‘Two hundred and five.’

  MELBOURNE

  It was night-time when we landed in Australia. We both felt better than we did after the flight to Europe, mainly because I’d convinced Dad he should try business class at least once in his life. ‘You can recline the seats like a bed’ was all it took to get him to agree, happy to shell out his hard-earned to be able to turn left upon boarding rather than right into economy. But no way he’d pay $50 for a Harrods tote bag for Mum. Overall he thought business class was okay, mainly because in both London and Bangkok we got to sit in a comfortable airport lounge with a buffet and free drinks. Well worth the extra cash.