Ways to Come Home

  ALSO BY KATE MATHIESON

  Tea and Travels: Tales of a Nomadic Life

  Songs of Birds

  First published in 2016 by Kate Mathieson

  This edition published in 2017 by Impact Press

  an imprint of Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

  www.impactpress.com.au

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  Copyright © Kate Mathieson 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  ‘The Lost Hotels of Paris’ from REFUSING HEAVEN by Jack Gilbert, copyright © 2005 by Jack Gilbert. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Author: Mathieson, Kate

  Title: Ways to Come Home / by Kate Mathieson

  Category: Memoir

  ISBN: 978-1-925183-66-5 (print)

  ISBN: 978-1-925183-95-5 (ebook)

  Cover design: Working Type

  Internal design: Brugel Images and Design

  The paper in this book is FSC® certified. FSC® promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.

  ‘We need the tonic of wildness.’

  Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, life in the woods

  PROLOGUE

  A faded lithograph of a bridge. A smear of peach paint below. One long brush stroke. As if someone made a mistake. Because the rest of the place is as white as fake teeth. White walls. White ceilings.

  There are no other pictures in Ward E.

  People with pens carry them like scythes. They point them at the sky, emphasising their words, and joust at each other when they disagree. Mostly they scribble furiously and scrawl our stories across paper.

  The pen people want to know – Why? Why? Why? – and everything is punctuated with this incessant ticking.

  Secrets fall out.

  When your world falls apart, you can run. Or bunker down, pull across the hatches and squat, hunched but standing, like Atlas. But sometimes, helplessly, you find yourself with nowhere to run and not enough strength to eat a spoonful of old oats floating in milk. And when that happens, when the scaffolding of your life begins to buckle – well, then, sometimes …

  You find yourself here.

  Where everything is upside down. Your bed, your dreams, your life. You wait by the phone.

  But the person who put you here – the one who calls herself your mother – does not call.

  OUTSIDE MY window a cherry blossom rubs against white shutters. A haze of violet wisteria, thick and round, wraps itself around a wooden gazebo in the park across the street. The smell of spring – new jasmine – wafts gently up to me while in the distance an indigo shroud builds. A sweet storm is coming.

  Down below, Parisians stride along the cobbled street. To the boulangerie. To late lunches. To the mysterious places Parisians go. Across the road, a crepe maker takes a break from his hot skillet and lights a cigarette, his feet propped on a milk crate.

  Do I have time for a quick walk by the Seine before the storm comes? Something tells me I don’t as the crepe maker tosses his cigarette into the street and pops up the brown awnings of his shop before he’s lost from view. Cafes close. Shutters are drawn. Outside tables are packed away.

  Clouds gather. Spring rain lashes, leaving the hot roads steaming. Splatters across my window trying to find a way in. I finger the white envelope. Tickets for tonight. I am excited. Vivaldi. A quartet: two violins, a viola, and my favourite, the cello. Strings, someone once told me, strings have a way of getting inside us. Strings open the heart.

  When the kettle clicks I pour a coffee, strong and black. For a while I listen to the rain – on the roof, on the windows, sizzling on the roads below. Finally, I open the royal navy cover of my unlined, uncreased book. Blank cream pages stare at me.

  Tomorrow, London. My bag is already packed. A few weeks later, Singapore. Hong Kong. Is this it? Am I finally going home?

  I write in the middle of the first cream page:

  I am always on the border. Moving – leaving – going to. On the edge of something.

  IT’S NOT my first time here.

  I’ve travelled across Europe the past few years, yet I keep returning to Paris. There is something about this city that calls me. Is it the delicious smell of lemons? Of blossoms? The way the light falls, veiling the entire city like a bride of the sun, mysterious and golden?

  I first visited three years earlier with a friend, Adrian. He was a seasoned traveller and I was deposited in Europe for the first time.

  We rose with the midday sun, strolled down alleyways without maps and ate our way through Paris. I had never eaten so much. While I showered in the small hotel bathroom, Adrian selected fresh baguettes and wheels of impossibly soft cheese that seemed to spill onto my bread and spread themselves. The takeaway coffee was perfect, strong and sweet, but strangely served in thin white cups (water cooler ones) that burnt through the plastic and scalded my fingertips.

  We sauntered up and down the Seine, crunching over gravel. Cherry blossom petals scattered in the breeze, a flushed carpet for us to tread upon.

  I awoke from a mid-afternoon nap to find Adrian standing in our hotel room with two strong lattes (double cupped) and an assortment of French patisserie bites. Morning delights.

  A sense of freedom emerged. I could do anything today – I could stay in bed if I wanted; drive to Berlin; take the overnight train through Switzerland. I could, I could, I could ...

  Possibility became a drug. Bold and innocent, I felt it could lead me anywhere.

  So I let it.

  IN THE heat of that first European summer I found myself moving north to Edinburgh. Summer, strong and sunny, did not last for long. It burst in full bloom as I arrived, then retreated just as quickly. There was a sharp month of autumn when leaves turned crimson and shed into piles knee-deep. Winter quickly closed in. Grey clouds gathered, and snow began to fall.

  I started a casual job at the local hospital, secretary to a professor of surgery. The days were enjoyably silent, patients slept and doctors prepped for operations. Mostly I typed, answered an occasional phone call. At times the only sounds I heard in hours were the whir of the kettle and the nurses’ soft shoes, whispering down the hallway.

  The city slumbered all those months. The sky smudged through three simple transitions – pitch night blackness; the silver translucence of dawn; and sometimes, for a few hours, the eerie light of ashy day.

  As winter deepened, the city became a place of eternal night. Stars hung close to the earth. Snow fell, lightly at first, landing silently on the ground. Fresh layers of powder sat waiting each morning, white and new. Up at dawn, I made the first mark with giant snow boots that squeaked while the rest of the city slept.

  Navigating the streets was an art form I had to learn quickly: avoid the sludgy snow with tyre marks. Take care of the black ice, hidden like secrets, treacherous and slippery. Many times I fell heavily, before learning to throw salt on the pavement to wear away the ice. Bruised elbows. Puffy knees. Jarred ankles.

  I tied a scarf around my face lest the breeze slice at my cheeks like razor blades. Step delicately, carefully through drizzle; more rain; sleet; snow. At times, Scotland’s squall had enough force to push you back where you came from. I learnt to walk against the felling wind, like a hunched granny with weakened bones, cleaved at the m
iddle, head first.

  When the cold began to seep too far into my bones (three months without sun), I flew to Cyprus. I peeled off trench coats and woollen jumpers and threw my pale veined body at the feet of the ocean, like a gift at an altar, worshipping the sun. I had colour again. Remembered the feeling of bare arms. The smell of sea salt. The tang of lemons on fish.

  I stayed for a week longer, then two, before the Mediterranean breezes pushed me north ...

  PASSIONATE AND eager, the Greeks were impossible not to like. Food the currency of their love, I sat at blue-and-white checkered tables eager to eat after months of stodgy Scottish fare. Robust tomatoes split easily, leaking seeds and sweet juice. Terracotta dishes filled with hard black olives made my hands greasy and when no-one was looking, I licked them clean. Tzatziki made from home-grown cucumbers scattered with handfuls of ripped mint. I piled spoonfuls onto large plates of flat bread, larger than my face, and rolled them up like a kebab, eating them quickly, dipping the ends into plates of salt and oil.

  It became a delicious way to avoid the bustling hot streets. I slipped into these kafeneía often, when the midday sun scorched the earth and my arms threatened to burn. Outside, fuchsia bougainvillea grew wildly between the stone walls; places people told you they never could.

  On Sundays, by the port, market stalls popped up, a small town of white plastic tents. Farmers sold crates of snake beans and large heads of leafy lettuce from the back of their vans. Mint and rocket wore damp soil on their roots, fresh from the fields that morning.

  I strolled back and forth, tasting olives and fried zucchini flowers, buying homemade almond butters and green beans, and watching the fishermen cast nets into the ocean from small dinghies. Slabs of feta, sold by the brick at the corner of the marketplace, tempted me every time. I always bought more than I could eat. Wrapped in a light paper to take home, I’d cut generous pieces, like I was slicing a cake, and eat the salty slivers on their own.

  There was a lovely sense of my body resetting, my skin shedding its dry, scaly cover. My right hip, which had ached all Scottish winter, suddenly seemed oiled and happy. A feeling of restoration and rejuvenation came over me. One that can only come with connection to the outdoors, eating things from the earth, and of course with time. I had time for everything. Time to talk. Time to listen. Time to meander. Time to eat. Time to breathe. Time to sleep, and sleep well.

  Things I had never noticed before started to make themselves known. The way the sea smelt differently from morning to evening. The soft yellow undercarriage of a pelican’s beak. The feel of my wooden front door after a full day in the sun. The smell of fresh fish frying in lemon and salt. The sound of bees blown by the afternoon breeze. This way of life worked like a meditation, slowing down time. Even – possibly – winding it back.

  ‘You do not need to know precisely what is happening,’ wrote the French poet and mystic Thomas Merton, ‘or exactly where it is all going.’

  Where is the magic in that?

  I found myself boarding a plane, then ferry, headed for Croatia. Dubrovnik was a city to be wandered, offering gifts to those who sauntered. Old houses one on top of another, neapolitan shutters; strawberry, chocolate and vanilla.

  Crumbled walls marked every part of the city. Shells and bullets from the war had penetrated to the core, but a decade on plants grew through the gaps – winter oilseed rape and caper plants and soft green ferns. Spaces could always be filled. Even the weeds with buttery heads were beautiful.

  It was a hard city to leave, as was Rome, and Riga and Innsbruck, and all the places that came after.

  I came to love them all; these places that shaped me.

  WHEN I think about the shape of me, more clearly than anything else I see Jason. Dark hair with a fringe cowlick. Skin the colour of milk. Arms that wrapped around me, and fastened, like a seatbelt. Never letting go, even when it felt like we were crashing.

  After many years together, we had begun, like wood, to curve and bend in the same places. Even being separated by oceans and continents for the last few years could not undo the shape of us – or so I thought.

  But he had grown exhausted by my need to seek, to be elsewhere. My pleas for ‘just another few months’ over a crackling phone line were met with silence. Not believing it was the end of our relationship, I refused to return to Australia and continued to explore the world. Our worlds trundled along; we allowed months, a year to go past without talking. We were together. And we were not.

  By the summer of 2005, sitting in this Parisian hotel watching the French women walk to boulangeries, and late lunches, waiting for the storm to pass, I call him for the first time this year. He speaks for fifteen minutes about the weather, his job, before asking, ‘Where are you?’

  I have to say Paris three times.

  Finally, he takes a deep breath and says, ‘I’m engaged.’

  I forget to breathe. To taste. I forget I have legs and am sitting in this blue-backed wing chair. I forget how lovely the rain sounds on the window.

  I ask in a tight voice, ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘I think so,’ he says. And I know it is only for me, to soften the blow.

  She is everything I am not: steady; homemaker; child-bearer.

  I say I have to be somewhere, and hang up the phone.

  But I don’t.

  I leave the hotel room and go out into the pouring rain, walking blindly towards the Seine. The crepe man has closed up and gone home. The streets are empty. People shelter inside cafes and restaurants. Large gusts of wind whip the flower heads off the wisteria, scattering them across the ground. They stick to my shoes, and make a purple paste.

  My clothes seep with rain and cold. The air is slightly smoky – fireplaces have been lit. Blankets pulled out. Winter is not over yet. My lungs grow tight. Something else is seeping into me too – regret. Have I stayed away too long?

  Perhaps. It is hard not to think about my friends in varying stages of stability, engaged and happily married. Living in large houses on the edge of the city. Mortgages. Job promotions. Some with baby number two or three sleeping deeply in small, hand-painted cribs.

  I walk past a closed restaurant; a church with stained windows; Mary’s hands holding a small, soft body towards the light, a sweet smile of grace; a fountain overfilling, a million teardrops clinging to the sandstone sides, before spilling onto the ground. I am not convinced but I think of this other life, this blissfully domestic, safe and stable life. Do I want those things?

  I’D SPENT my childhood besotted with snow globes of cities. Copenhagen. Wellington. New York. London. I thought it amazing that a whole city could fit into my palm. Turning them upside down, shaking the snow around, and then upright, the beauty of silence and the glitter flakes falling to the ground. I looked for tiny people against the city skyline. If you stared hard enough, you could spot them floating about in the jelly water that filled each globe, bobbing down the street, forever frozen in the city.

  I had proudly lined them up, those snow globes, on my mantelpiece, and thought, This is what I’ll do when I’m older, when I grow up, I’ll line things up on my mantelpiece. Except instead of snow globes, there would be vases of flowers, and glazed pottery jars. And a kitchen of cast iron skillets and roasting pans where I’d cook delicious Sunday lunches for hours.

  I wonder if Jason’s kitchen has glazed pottery jars. Would they roast chickens? Or roll eggs into flour and make fresh fettucine? Would they listen to opera and pour glasses of shiraz as they smile at each other, barefoot on the wooden floor?

  The rain eases. The wind blows from the south, warmer. I can smell again the slight honey sap of spring in the air. I buy a coffee from a small corner shop. I walk over the trash that has collected in the streets. I pull the leaves from my hair. There are a thousand flowers drowning in the fountains. Above me the sky is a square of silver, as if any moment the sky might send more rain.

  On the street beside me, a woman struggles putting a puffy jacket on her child, who i
s refusing to be covered. Something in my heart flares. Stop resisting. Give in.

  I go inside the hotel. And book a ticket home.

  SYDNEY IS just as I had left her – glary and loud. From the time I exit the airport, buses are wheezing and braking. Phones are ringing. Loud conversations. Chatter on quiet carriages. Ads shouting from underground train screens. People on microphones inviting me to shop. To eat. Korean bbq. Peking duck. Creamy coffee. Chocolate croissant. Butter popcorn. Grilled burgers. Bread by the roll. Bread by the loaf. Make it healthy. Sushi. Salad. Smoothies. Green juices – someone’s saying, ‘Gotta eat healthy.’ Join Us – gyms – free two-week passes. Medicare – Medibank – HCF – ‘Now’s the time’. Banners – posters – bus signs. MasterChef – Kitchen Rules – restaurant renovations. Appointments – dentists – doctors. Sell – buy – lights – vacuums – dusty computers. Never have enough – cafes – cinemas – clubs. Pumping music so the bass breaks through the pavement beneath our feet.

  I pretend then, blanketed by noise and striding with the crowd, that surely, I must be full. And isn’t full another word for happiness?

  But, of course, it isn’t.

  Yet I am convinced I can make it work. I rent houses, cottages by the beach. Units in the city centre. Townhouses in the trendy inner west. Each time picking something that isn’t quite right – too noisy, too quiet, too close to things, too far from things, isolating, suffocating.

  I buy suits and high heels. Take jobs like you might embark on a love affair: with a swift novelty and an upward crescendo before they descend into monotony and stutter bleakly past their use-by dates.

  I rise at five in the morning to run the vacuum over the carpet that seems to dirty every day. I leave the house without make-up and spend the long train ride elbow to elbow with weary commuters. Emails and endless cups of black coffee fill the hours. The fluorescent lights above our cubicles flicker occasionally but never tell us the real time of day.