The mother’s leg pains get worse.
NOW
It’s June 28th. We get on the Rottnest Island ferry at Fremantle dock and immediately on the boat I hear ‘The Mighty Quinn’ on the cabin’s radio. Haven’t heard that song in years and now look. This is a sign. Of what? Rottnest is a holiday island, once a colonial barracks and prison; its main hotel was originally the summer residence of the Governor of WA. It has bars and restaurants and little cute animals called quokkas, rabbit-sized kangaroos, and I’m excited about going. It’s that thing, again, about travelling over water. It exhilarates me and seems somehow to possess some mysterious depths of meaning and significance, even if the purpose of the trip is simply to get drunk and stroke small animals.
The ferry disgorges a load of students in sombreros and shorts and flip-flops, carrying boom-boxes and small barrels of Heineken. Loud and look-at-me-ish, like students the world over. I ponder on what might be a good collective noun for students; an arseache? A wick? A gobshite of students? Tony didn’t come to Rottnest with me when I was a kid – I went with the school, I think – so I tell him about the quokkas, and how they gave the island its name (the early Dutch settlers thought they were rats, hence ‘Rat Nest’ = ‘Rottnest’). Their defence against threat is to curl up into a ball; take that, and the employment of the island as a haven for pissed-up Aussies, and you get ‘quokka soccer’. Nice.
It’s a rough crossing. The ferry bucks and bounces on the sea like an angry stallion. Even this mad motion, I trust. Something about water, travelling over water. It feels right, to me. In the little harbour when we get off, a dolphin is throwing a big fish high into the air, catching it in its mouth, breaching out of the water, tossing the fish again, catching it again. Awesome and beautiful. This is nothing but play. The dolphin’s behaviour is just a revelling. He’s happy to be alive, that dolphin. A couple, older, are watching him with great glee and I get talking to them. They’re Ten Pound Poms too, been in Oz for forty years, as long as I’ve been on the earth. He’s from Leeds, she Somerset, with a mother from Tremadog. I like them. We watch, with a shared joy, the dolphin exult. I exult too.
The tourist office offers me and Tony accommodation at $30 a night. This is amazingly cheap. A full-sized bungalow – a balcony, several bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, for thirty bucks a night. Even better, we’re next door to a gaggle of gorgeous women, who are on their balcony drinking and dancing and laughing and not wearing very much. A century ago, this was a high-security prison for aboriginal miscreants. Now it’s karaoke-capital. Some changes are to be applauded.
This is brilliant. I love this island. The quokkas are everywhere, and so accustomed to human company that they’ll approach you for a tickle. They swoop on the leftovers outside the cafés; I watch one pick up a chip in his wee paws and dip it into a bowl of ketchup before eating it. They hang around the bars, gazing longingly through the windows. They’re entrancing to watch. We get on a bus to tour the island. The driver asks where we’re from and we tell him that we live in Wales.
–Wales, ey? Play much rugby there or are ya still learning?
–Learnt quite a bit in four hundred years or so, mate.
–Didn’t ya beat the Poms?
–Aye. During the Six Nations grand slam last year.
–In that case I’ll only charge ya Aussie prices. Seven bucks.
I like this feller; I like his openness, I like the way he understands that Britain is not all Pommie-land. And he shows us great things; huge and hulking wrecks on the beaches, astounding rocks and cliffs. And then he points out an osprey’s nest on a rock and asks us if we have ospreys in Wales and we tell him yes, there’s a few breeding pairs recently returned, and he says:
–Yeh, but we look after our birds here. It’s not like in the UK. Buggers don’t steal their eggs here. Our birds are under protection.
–As they are in Wales, I say. –Twenty-four hour CCTV. Armed guards, in some places.
He doesn’t seem impressed by this, or even convinced, and, even though I quite like this feller, I’m annoyed. Typical Oz attitude; everything we do is better. What, does he think that we have open season on our raptors in Britain? That we’re allowed to shoot them, steal their eggs? Does he not think that we revere and respect our ospreys, just as they do on Rottnest Island? And this from the place that gave the world quokka soccer. Don’t lecture me on how to look after our wildlife until you can look after your own. Jesus Christ.
And now I’ve had my fill of Australia. I’m sick of that general superciliousness, that smugness, and I’m sick, too, of the Brit ex-pats who have slavishly been taken in by it. I’m flying back to Brisbane tomorrow to catch a plane to Los Angeles and I’m looking forward to it. Want, now, to be out of Oz. I’ve had more than enough of the place. Glad I left when I did, at the age of twelve. Hate to think how I might’ve turned out, had I stayed. But I’m going to make the most of my night on Rottnest so I get drunk and tickle quokkas behind the ear until my index finger turns white.
THEN
The mother stays home with the baby and the father takes the three other children to a quiz night in the Wanneroo town hall. They come last, and win a cabbage. Tony’s friend from school, Warren Arbuckle, comes first. Ponce.
A travelling fair visits the district. It has a dunker stall; a man sits on a retractable plank over a tank of water and if you hit a bullseye with a ball the plank is whipped out from under him and he falls in the water. Tony hits the target. The feller’s dunked. The watching crowd yell: Give it to the Pommie with the dead-eye!
Out in the bush one day the childen make a fire and cook damper; flour and water and raisins mixed and wrapped in foil and cooked in the embers. Linsey calls this ‘spotted dick’, and sets her tracksuit top on fire and runs away like a comet. She’s unharmed, and the mother buys a patch in the shape of an ‘L’ and sews it over the burn-hole.
The father comes home from work one day with a mirror advertising Swan lager. A present, he says, because he’s leaving the job. A few days later, on June 6th and after some frantic jettisoning of belongings, they drive out to the airport and board a plane for London.
NOW
–It was that sudden, was it?
–Don’t you remember?, Tony says. –We were all shocked. No sooner had they told us we were going back and we were on the plane.
I have one last thing to do in Perth. I have to visit the Palm Court Reception Centre at the zoo on Labouchere Road, where we spent a Christmas day as kids. I don’t recall anything about it, which might be just as well because it doesn’t exist any more; it’s now the Zoological Gardens Functions Room. Same building, though, and as I stand in front of it some recollections do trickle back; the plants, the huge and vivid flowers, the purplish colour of the building materials. I ate a Christmas dinner here, once. A long time ago.
We return to Fremantle. Get a room above a pub, a shit-hole of a room with half-drunk bottles of beer all over it and sheets that smell of someone else’s sweat, opposite a brothel which stays open all night. I’m tired, so sleep through the pub hubbub, and we take the van back in the morning and get my deposit back and meet up with Higgy and get on the plane to Brisbane where Tony meets up with his pole-dancer who will, in a few weeks’ time, reveal herself to be sadly approaching unhinged. I stay that night in a motel close to the airport and ask the owner where the nearest pub is and he answers ‘about 9 km’ and there is no taxi service in the area and even the external areas of the motel have signs saying ‘NOBODY SMOKES HERE!’, with a little smiley face, don’t be maverick, be like us and we’ll all get along just fine, do what we do and let’s all be nice except I’m there and I do smoke and I can’t believe there’s not even a bar within walking distance and no fucking taxis to be had either so I just go to bed and in the early morning I fly to Los Angeles and that’s it. I’m out of Oz. Sick to the gizzard of Oz.
THEN
The plane leaves Australian airspace and the pains leave the mother’s legs. As if they’re
umbilically linked to Australia; they stretch as the plane moves away from the country and eventually snap and are twanged back to Oz earth like severed hamstrings.
An age later they land in London and get on a train to Liverpool. The parents give each other a look as the train starts to slow at Edge Hill along trash-strewn railway tracks beneath a sky the colour of drain-water. On the platform at Lime Street, the mother’s mother is there to greet them, wearing a headscarf and mac and holding a plastic bag. The father’s face falls further.
And they grow and age and change. It is discovered that Nicola has a serious heart defect – due, maybe, to the travel-sickness pills which the mother took on the trek across the Nullarbor – which needs to be treated with a big and invasive operation. She is in hospital for a long time, and the boy weeps when he sees her; tiny, octopus’d by tubes. But the operation is successful. The father discovers an off-licence on Myrtle Parade, close to the hospital, that sells his favourite Swan lager. The boy, in later years, will use this off-licence when staying with his girlfriend on Bedford Street South and when all goods in the shop are protected by smash-proof perspex and it is run by the most hilariously rude man the boy, or the young man he will then be, has ever met.
Jump to 2000. Nicola, a woman now, is working in Liverpool Museum. She is approached by a couple who ask her if she remembers them. They are Lily and Jerry. They last saw Nickie when she was an infant, and it is truly incredible that they recognise her now.
Five years or so later, there’s an unexpected knock at the mother’s and father’s door. The dad opens it. There’s Peter Higgins on the doorstep, Higgy, soon to become the Mighty Hig.
Soon after that, Nickie and her husband return to Australia, and New Zealand, for a long holiday. Shortly after that, Tony does the same thing with his second wife, soon to become his second ex. And shortly after that, I too go back. And, of course, return.
They grow, and age, and change.
NOW
The plane takes off at 11 a.m. I’m in the air for twelve hours and I land in Los Angeles at 7 a.m. the same morning. Hate long-hauls. I don’t understand them. Some hours to kill in LA so I get a cabbie to drive me around and show me some sights and I’m unimpressed and then I board the plane to Vancouver and I’m utterly exhausted and the world swims and spins and Vancouver customs take over two hours to clear, the interrogation at the desk taking half an hour itself, and another cabbie drives me into a city of sparkling towers surrounded by huge and snow-veiled mountains and at a traffic light the driver of the next car has a tattoo on his arm which reads ‘FILIPINO THRU N FUCKIN THRU’ and I check into my hotel, the Quality Hotel at 1335 Howe Street, and sleep for a few hours then I go exploring and drinking and in the morning my pockets are filled with beermats and cigarette papers with various names and numbers scrawled on them by the lovely citizens of this lovely city which Dylan Thomas called ‘a handsome hellhole’ and which I grow to think of, affectionately you understand, as ‘a stunning shitpit’. I’m in it for five days. I drink a lot and walk a lot in a kind of relaxed rush and slowly feel a very heavy weight lift off my shoulders and I gradually realise how glad I am to be out of Australia. It was getting to me, that country, and I don’t realise how much so until I wake up on my second day in Vancouver and breathe a deep sigh of relief. I spend a lot of time gazing at the mountains and the inland sea. I explore Gastown and, again, narrowly miss a mugging on Hastings and Main. Glittering bigness of the city. Even the beggars are sweet: ‘Good morning sir, and excuse me, but can I be a pain in the ass and trouble you for fifty cents?’ I’ve been in Canada before, in Ottawa, and was a tad underwhelmed then, but Vancouver I love. I could stay here longer. It’s not Australia.
I have a bulkhead seat back to London next to a sweet German girl, only eighteen, who’d just had a holiday in Vancouver on her own, and we land ten hours later and I’m exhausted and the plane to Manchester is delayed three hours and then when I’m on it it sits on the tarmac for a further two and the flight itself takes twenty mere minutes and I think of asking the steward to ask the pilot if he can empty the shit-tanks over Old Trafford but don’t and we land and I can hardly walk I’m so tired but there’s my girlfriend who I haven’t seen for seven weeks and we have a rib-cracking hug and my luggage has been lost but I’m past caring. We drive back to my parents’ house and I go in and the first thing I say to them is: ‘Thank Christ you brought us back from Oz’. And that’s it.
But the weight of a long history is a good one to carry. I dwell on this as we drive back, the next day, to Wales. The castles, the hill-forts, the old houses, the standing stones and cairns on the mountain tops and in the green fields. A depth of human life is open and available here, at your shoulder, ready to hand, and there’s a heft to it but it’s a good weight to carry, like muscle or a favourite coat. Makes you feel part of a grand and epic story. And the seasons turn around you, here, come and come again, alternately turning your skin pink then brown, pink then brown. Measure your life in the appearance and disappearance of swallows.
At home, there’s a parcel waiting for me; a copy of Diary of a Welsh Swagman. I’d tracked it down on-line in an internet caff in Vancouver. Thirty quid. I’d forgotten I’d ordered it. My eyelids are closing as if made of iron and it’s all I can do to stay upright and my words are slurred and I don’t feel good so I’ll start reading it tomorrow, when I feel better.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I'm sure it's obvious from the text who I wish to thank by name, but further thanks must go to Tony, Higgy, Uncle Roy, my mum and dad, and Ian Peddie. Also to the many Aussies I know and love in that country and this, not least among them Pete Salmon and Kerry Watson of The Hurst.
About the Author
Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966 and now lives and works in Aberystwyth.
His novels are: Grits (2000), a tale of addicts and drifters in rural Wales; Sheepshagger (2001), the story of Ianto, a feral mountain boy; Kelly + Victor (2002), Stump (2003), which won two Book of the Year awards; Wreckage (2004) and Runt (2006). There is also a work for younger readers, Bring it Back Home; a book in a series of Mabinogion re-tellings, The Dreams of Max and Ronnie; and two works of non-fiction, Real Aberystwyth and Real Liverpool.
Niall Griffiths also writes travel pieces, restaurant and book reviews, and radio plays.
Copyright
First published in 2011
by Parthian
The Old Surgery
Napier Street
Cardigan
SA43 1ED
www.parthianbooks.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2011
The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.
All rights reserved
© Niall Griffiths 2011
The right of Niall Griffiths to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Editor: Lucy Llewellyn
Cover illustration by Chris Iliff
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Typesetting by Lucy Llewellyn
ISBN 9781908069542
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th friends
Ten Pound Pom Page 16
