Vodka and Apple Juice

by Jay Martin

  Marilyn’s face looked like she was a Finnish diplomat I’d invited for lunch. ‘Travel around Poland?’ she said, breaking the silence. Perhaps not knowing what to make of this information, she instead turned the conversation to another expat staple: travel plans for the summer – still a whole six months away. Now, here was a game I could play! Julie opened with two weeks back in Melbourne. Dee raised her a month in Cuba – direct flights, apparently, from Ottawa, their next post. Marilyn trumped us all with two months in Sardinia. My chest fell. This was the professional summering league. I was an amateur.

  ‘It’s great that your husband can get so much time off!’ I said.

  Marilyn laughed. ‘Oh, our husbands don’t come. They stay here.’

  Sarah asked what my plans were.

  ‘I want to tick a few last places in Poland off the list. I haven’t been to the Masurian lakes in summer yet, and I have been thinking about maybe going hiking in Bieszczady.’

  Dee gasped. ‘But no one stays in Poland for the summer!’

  Apart from their husbands, of course.

  ‘It will be the last summer we’re here,’ I said. ‘It seems a shame to miss it.’

  ‘And summer is the nicest time in Warsaw,’ Julie said.

  ‘How are you feeling about leaving?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Mixed emotions,’ I said.

  ‘What, relief and elation?’ Marilyn said. She popped the cork on another bottle of champagne with manicured talons. That was a talent.

  ‘There’s a lot I won’t miss, sure. But I’ll miss the people I’ve met …’

  ‘All the people I’ve met here have been wankers,’ Marilyn said.

  Mary who prays for me, is this a test? If so, are there points for trying?

  Kids of various ages raced in and out between the kitchen and the backyard. In the absence of a beach or pool, the typical venues for an Australia Day swim and a spot of improvised cricket, Bluey had constructed a snow luge. Raf brought the sausages and steaks in, finishing them off in the kitchen when the barbecue had proven too difficult and then taking them to the table. Senior oil and gas engineers, ambassadors, partners in international firms. Important people. The kind of people who wouldn’t be interested in knowing me at home. Although to be fair, some of them didn’t seem that interested in knowing me here. But today, we were all just Australian (or near enough), and trying to maintain the traditions we knew as best we could, even if we had to improvise a little. Just like descendants of the British had tried to maintain Christmas in the colonies. Not put off by the fact it made no sense whatsoever.

  I lined up for the food and turned to Sarah. ‘So, what do you plan to do with yourself here then?’ In some ways I envied her, remembering the novelty and wonder of those early days here. I felt thankful my introduction had been in July rather than January, though.

  ‘Well, this is my fourth move, so I have something of a system. First, I enrol in language classes.’

  ‘Polish is a tough one, are you sure about that?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve learned Arabic and French so far, so I’ll give it a go. And anyway, Raf’s family are Polish, so it will be good for me to learn a bit about the language and culture.’

  ‘OK, you’ll be fine.’ We made our way to the lounge, and took a seat on some plush couches. ‘What’s next in your system?’ Not that I thought I was going to do this again. But just in case.

  She told me how she had started off running Pilates and yoga classes for foreigners in other places, but realised she would have to stop and start that every time they moved. So she had started up a business doing health and safety policy assessments, which she ran remotely from wherever she ended up. ‘That’s the majority of my work, and I run a few yoga classes and that locally, depending on the interest, mainly to meet new people. The local International Women’s Group is usually a good way of getting business, so I always join that early on too. And they always know where to get things.’

  ‘You’re right there. Sounds like you have really managed to make Raf’s job work for you,’ I said.

  ‘You have to, if you’re going to live an expat life,’ she said. ‘Otherwise –’

  ‘I don’t know why you bother.’ Marilyn was standing over us. ‘It’s impossible to work here. In my field, anyway.’ The woman spoke in italics. I’d never met anyone who did that before.

  ‘And what’s your field, Marilyn?’ I asked.

  ‘Public relations.’

  I tried to picture the ‘public’ that Marilyn would relate to. Other people who could open champagne bottles with false nails? ‘I’ve managed to find some writing work,’ I said. ‘It’s only small, but I really enjoy it.’

  ‘You’re obviously willing to work for a local wage.’ Was it my imagination, or had Marilyn started to enunciate her sentences to me more clearly. As though I were dim.

  ‘How did you and Julie meet?’ Sarah asked me. IWG book club, I told her – perhaps she’d like to join?

  Marilyn snorted. ‘Bunch of boring bitches with too much time on their hands.’ She was opening another bottle of champers. It wasn’t even twelve o’clock. I wasn’t sure my liver had ten expat years in it.

  ‘So what is it that you do with yourself then?’ I asked Marilyn.

  She waved a French tip. ‘I’m so busy. My daughter takes up a lot of my time of course.’

  ‘Is she at the American School or the British School?’ Expat kids attended one of the two.

  ‘Don’t be silly. She boards. In London. And as if I don’t have enough to worry about – now she’s having problems. Anxiety. Depression, some counsellor she’s been seeing says. What on earth does she have to be miserable about? She’s been given everything!’

  I began to wonder if you could suffer actual physical harm from a conversation.

  ‘So Rafael, your family is Polish?’ Sarah’s boyfriend had wandered into view. I asked him the first thing that came to my mind.

  ‘Yeah, they came out to Australia when I was two. They paid someone to smuggle them over the border, and claimed asylum in Vienna.’ He sat down next to us, balancing a plate of grilled animal on his knee.

  ‘Oh, a political conversation,’ Marilyn said, exiting stage right. I noted that useful trick for future reference.

  ‘Since I’m Polish, there’s no communication barrier. But because of the Australian background, my staff think I know everything and do what I tell them,’ Raf said.

  ‘Come on, you’ve been in Australia since you were two. Aren’t you just Australian?’

  ‘I’m Polish. I was just brought up in Australia,’ he said.

  I considered what he’d said. ‘Well, Raf, with your foot in each camp, perhaps you can explain something to me. Say it was Australia, invaded by a foreign army. And most people were stuck there, under foreign occupation, having a really terrible time, but some managed to get out and build a nice life in a safe country. And then, when everything was fine again, their kids came back and said, “Oh, now it’s safe again we’ll come back, we were really Australian all along.” I reckon most Australians would say, “Rack off you pack of quitters.” Yet Poland seems to welcome its own home as though they’ve never left. Why?’

  Raf had been chewing on a sausage with the peculiar Australian characteristic of being both burnt and raw all at once. He wiped tomato sauce and charcoal from his fingers with a paper serviette. ‘We had to leave our houses, our families. Everything. But we never left Poland. Not psychologically. When you’re Polish, you’re Polish.’

  ‘You can change your passport but you can’t change your narodowość.’

  Raf looked surprised. ‘Exactly.’

  And then there’s the Polish man with no cow, who sees his neighbour has one. He complains about it a bit and gets on with things.

  ‘Snow cricket!’ Tom yelled out through the door, and Raf disappeared outside to hit a ball with a stick in the snow before the wan light disappeared altogether.

  Now it was just Dee and me in the lounge room. I
had taken an instant dislike to Marilyn, and I’d never warmed to Dee either. But I liked Julie, and these were Julie’s friends. Maybe there was something I was missing?

  ‘So what have been the biggest changes in the ten years since you were last here?’ I remembered from the first book club how she’d said this was her second posting here – the first more than ten years earlier.

  ‘Nothing’s really changed,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘No. It’s all the same.’

  ‘But didn’t you used to have to bring toilet paper in from Germany? And now there are supermarkets …’

  ‘You could still get everything. You just had it flown in from London.’

  ‘Isn’t that quite different?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What else is the same?’ I said.

  ‘You go to the post office and it’s staffed by people who go out of their way to make life difficult for you.’

  OK, that hadn’t changed. I’d give her that.

  ‘And they still don’t know how to queue,’ she said.

  Well, it was clear that one thing hadn’t changed in ten years. They say that travel broadens the mind. Maybe not everyone’s. I pivoted and headed for Julie in the kitchen.

  Julie and Bluey had just found out they were moving to Lisbon next. Shannon and Paul were going to Bucharest in September – solving the problem for us of what to do with our car, since they would take it with them. I wouldn’t want to be left here without the four of them, so I was glad we were leaving. But I was glad we were going home, not somewhere new. I felt exhausted thinking about starting again.

  ‘Hey Julie, do you think we’ve got it in us to survive?’ I said. I held out my glass and she topped me up. I’d had to sit out a few rounds. I wasn’t as experienced at being an expat as these people.

  ‘You mean this posting to Poland?’

  ‘No, I mean Australia. You know, if we were really tested. Like Poland has been. Would we come together? Or would we stand around grilling snags on the barbie while Canberra burned?’

  ‘ “A land of droughts and flooding rains”, ’ she paraphrased the lines of the well-known Australian poem. ‘I’m not sure the early years were all that great for the pioneers.’ True, but our enemy was nature. Poland’s was their neighbours. Maybe it was harder not to take that personally.

  Tom came over and touched my shoulder. Things had been as frosty inside the taxi on the way here as they were outside. He’d obviously noticed, too. I smiled up at him and put my hand on his.

  ‘Bluey and I are going out tonight. You’ll be right to get home, won’t you.’ He walked away without waiting to find out. It hadn’t been a question. My heart tightened. All of a sudden I wanted to be anywhere but here. Anywhere but this kitchen. Anywhere but this house. Anywhere but this country, anywhere but with these people.

  One ‘Are you OK?’ from Jules was all it took for the tears to come.

  She reached out and put an arm around me. ‘I know.’

  ‘No, no, you don’t,’ I said. I’d intimated a little that we might have been having problems, but now I shared the details. Tom’s disappearances, the fighting and tension between us. So much damage had been done – was still being done. I didn’t know how we could ever fix it. I wasn’t sure any more if we could. ‘I know it’s ungrateful to be unhappy when I have so much. But my marriage is falling apart, and I don’t know what to do.’ She moved a box of tissues closer.

  ‘And your best friends at home don’t want to hear how miserable you are when you get to jet off to Milan and Paris whenever you feel like it.’

  ‘Sweden and Switzerland. But exactly.’ So maybe she did know.

  I took a handful. ‘Jules, there’s something I can’t understand. Why are you friends with Dee and Marilyn? They’re just … they’re horrible! They lead these amazing, interesting lives, and all they can do is complain about everything!’

  ‘Do they lead amazing, interesting lives?’

  ‘Of course they do! Listen to them, all the money they have, the travel, the maids and nannies, nothing to do all day but go to the day spa …’

  ‘… can’t communicate with anyone, can’t work, can’t do the simplest things for themselves, don’t know where they’re going next or how long they’re going to be there, have bet everything on their husband’s job … I don’t think they’re leading their lives at all. I think that’s their problem.’

  ‘But they’re so …’ I stopped myself before I could get to ‘privileged’. And you were there for communism and all, she may as well have said.

  I’d barely lasted two and a half years in their life. And I wasn’t even sure I had lasted. Did Dee have people like Shannon who she knew were there for her? Did Marilyn have anyone like Gabby to bring her back down to earth from time to time? Something told me I had privileges these women would never know.

  ‘You know, Dee used to be a research scientist. Had a very promising career in some kind of bio-chemistry,’ Julie said.

  ‘And Marilyn was some kind of accomplished writer I suppose?’

  ‘No, I think she’s pretty much always been a wife.’

  ‘So where’s her husband then? What kind of saint puts up with her?’

  Julie took a sip from her glass. ‘The kind that tells his wife that he’s spending the weekend away with his secretary.’

  All of a sudden, a lot of things made sense.

  ‘And everyone knows, yes. And she knows that everyone knows,’ Julie added.

  My antipathy towards them fell away, and something else seeped in. Not sympathy exactly. I wasn’t a saint. But maybe a new way of looking at things. Their lives were privileged in many ways, yes. But that didn’t mean they weren’t also tragic in their own ways too. They just had a lot of experience at pretending they weren’t. And a lot to lose by admitting they were.

  ‘Just six more months,’ I said to her. ‘We can do it.’ Yes, Tom and I would fix this when we got home. We just had to make it through to then. I took a few more tissues. ‘Here’s another thing I don’t understand. How do you two do this over and over again?’

  She poured us some more champagne. ‘Being an expat is like losing your virginity. The first time seems like a big deal. But once it’s done, you may as well just keep going.’

  The insipid gloom of the day faded and by three o’clock, it was dark again. The snow cricketers reappeared inside, rubbing their hands to bring back the circulation. Raf made sure everyone had a glass of champagne and, as host, Bluey raised his: ‘On the occasion of the national day of our great country, I’d like to propose an Australian toast.’ A group of company executives, diplomats and engineers and wives who were mostly doing their best, stood, glasses at the ready.

  ‘Up yer bum,’ he said, with appropriate gravitas.

  ‘Up yer bum,’ we all repeated.

  Julie’s words rang in my ears: ‘You may as well just keep going.’

  Anyway, what choice did I have?

  ***

  I dialled Paul’s number. The three rings it took for him to pick up seemed to take forever.

  ‘He hasn’t come home. I don’t know where he is.’ Tears spilled over from my cheeks into the phone.

  It wasn’t uncommon for Tom to be out till four or five. After the night out with Bluey it had been six. This time it was seven o’clock. It had never been this late before.

  ‘Asshole,’ Paul said.

  In a different moment, I might have been impressed with his economical Canadian insight. In this one, my eyes fell on the world outside our warm apartment. Everything with its layer of snow, off-grey in the muted light that was feeling its way through the thick, low-hanging cloud. I remembered when I’d thought it looked fluffy. I knew now how it really felt. Icy. Wet. Cold. The thermometer clinging outside the window showed minus twenty-two.

  ‘Do you want to come over here?’

  I nodded before it registered that Paul couldn’t see me, and allowed a small sound to escape from m
y lips. Tugging my winter jacket over my tracksuit pants, I forded the fifty metres that separated our buildings. I didn’t bother to change out of my house slippers.

  Shannon had the kettle boiling by the time I arrived. I hung my jacket on the wall. The thought of Tomek shaking his Slavic head at our Anglo-Saxon tea drinking came into my head and a brief smile came to my mouth. Then I remembered. It disappeared.

  Paul asked me if I had any idea where he was. I shook my head. I didn’t know. Everything was closed now. Had been for hours.

  ‘I’m going to pick up Alex,’ Paul said. ‘We’ll find him.’

  My head had dropped into my hands, eyes rammed shut as though that could keep the images from flooding through my mind. My husband, lying on a footpath, bloodied and beaten. Or drunk, unconscious, on a park bench, his fingers turning black and lips turning blue. Or in the warm bed of some blonde, his face smeared with her ruby lipstick.

  ‘He’s probably just in the drunk tank,’ I heard Paul say. Yes. The drunk tank. A sliver of hope.

  The door closed and my head collapsed on the table. I heard Shannon get up and felt her hand rubbing my back. ‘Do you know who he was with?’

  I didn’t respond. I felt like something inside would crack if I moved.

  Shannon picked up her phone and started calling people. I listened as she crossed off possible leads, one by one.

  Somewhere, you’re out there, Tom. But I don’t know where. My big, strong, precious husband. You’re out there and it’s twenty-two degrees below freezing and I don’t know if you still have your coat and what if you’ve lost your hat? Your head will be cold.

  The phone rang. I stopped breathing. Shannon listened for a moment before hanging up.

  ‘The police don’t have him.’

  Your head will be cold and I won’t be there to make you warm.

  Something inside me shattered.

  I threw myself down on the couch, face first, sobbing. I howled into my hands, into the cushions. Sounds I didn’t know I could make emanated from somewhere deep inside, followed by panting as I tried to get myself back under control. Over time my howling lessened and a measure of stillness filled the vacuum left by its loss.