French Leave

by Liz Ryan

  ‘I’ll come over next week,’ I promised, humbly.

  ‘Great. I’ll pick you up at the airport.’

  Even if in some respects it’s like going back to visit the bloke who used to beat you up, visits home are good. Not even visual Skype calls are enough: eventually you want to physically see your friends, embrace them, hang out and have fun with them. Not that they will be lined up where you left them, like dolls in a playhouse, unchanged since you last met. In your absence, life goes on, people move on, things will be different.

  Booking my ticket online that night, I wondered whether Ireland itself would have changed much since I’d last seen it. Such was its rapid rate of development – motorways, shopping malls, housing – I’d almost needed a map to find my way around on my last visit. A short, frenzied trip, it had been gobbled up with flying visits to all and sundry as I made the classic mistake of trying to pack everyone into too short a space of time. Of expecting too much of them, too, because Ireland works a full forty-hour week. Nobody has time for much more than a quick coffee with visiting layabouts from thirty-five-hours-a-week France. This time, I wouldn’t expect anyone’s undivided attention. Au contraire, I’d be grateful if they made time to see me at all. I’d make a real effort not to annoy them by calling jeans ‘a jean’, to stop saying ‘ah bon?’ whenever they said something interesting, and above all not to kiss them on both cheeks, which made their eyes cartwheel with terror. I wouldn’t mention the weather, and I would take the advice of my friend Seán, who’d long lived in Paris.

  ‘Don’t say anything about enjoying France.’

  But …?

  ‘Just don’t! People who move abroad voluntarily are seen as deserters. Traitors. Some people resent us for doing what many of them would love to do but never will do. So when you get there, just say that France is fine. Nothing more. Above all, don’t criticise any aspect of Ireland. Zip the lip and pretend it’s perfect. Otherwise people get upset and don’t want us coming back any more. They’d probably take our passports off us if they could.’

  This sounded barmy, almost paranoid. But in the time I’d been in France, I’d realised he was right. I’d learned never to say I was loving France, merely to shrug that it was okay. If there had been any recent disaster that could be mentioned – a gas explosion, a rugby defeat, an avalanche – all the better. Anything that clearly illustrated that France wasn’t perfect. Which, of course, it isn’t.

  ‘And,’ Seán added by way of final warning, ‘remember to get all weepy if anyone sings “Galway Bay”. Fake the most awful nostalgia, and you’ll be fine.’

  And so, thus armed, I embarked for the mother ship. Who knew? Maybe the nostalgia would turn out to be real. Maybe I’d have to be dragged back to Dublin airport at the end of a week and returned to France at gunpoint, with a note around my neck telling it that it was welcome to me.

  After an hour outside arrivals, I gave up. The promised friend hadn’t arrived, and we couldn’t seem to contact each other on our mobiles. No matter: people not turning up was simply part of the Irish lifestyle. Instead, a bus conveniently stood waiting. Boarding it, I rummaged through fistfuls of coins for the exact fare required. Patiently, the driver grinned.

  ‘Ah, Girl Guide, were you? Always prepared?’

  His laugh, and that of the other passengers, was lyrical, lovely. French bus passengers, far from laughing, all look as if they are being transported to a labour camp in darkest Siberia. And they’re not even required to produce exact change. Laughing back, I hauled my suitcase aboard, whereupon some kindly man said ‘Here, missus, let me help you with that.’ Setting off, the driver turned on his radio, where Joe Duffy was doggedly hammering away at some wretched politician. Roasting him, flaying him in best Irish tradition. Hurray! Although Liveline sometimes brings me out in what the French quaintly call ‘buttons’, in that illogical flash I felt at home.

  The drive into Dublin, it must be said, does not present the city at its best. Miles of roadworks to raise the Port Tunnel, whose roof had recently been discovered to be too low for the intended lorries … Dorset Street, scruffier than ever … O’Connell Street, where two cops were trying to break up a brawl. (‘Yet another street fight,’ reported Geraldine Lynagh on the news that night, ‘the gardaí say they can’t cope any more.’) And then there was the Spike, variously viewed as ‘beautiful’ or ‘a monument to Dublin’s junkies’. Resolutely, I pushed the Eiffel Tower from my mind: after all, Parisiens initially hated that too. Once, O’Connell Street was lined with trees, but now they were gone, as was ‘The Floozie in the Jacuzzi’ fountain, which had been (ab)used as a rubbish bin. Instead, the stark street was lined with burger joints – a bleak vista in this land of much-vaunted prosperity.

  Getting off the bus, I found myself in front of the building where I’d worked for twenty years. Sold since I left, it now stood deserted, awaiting integration into Arnott’s department store next door. Maybe it should have evoked a flood of nostalgia … but I felt nothing. It was part of the past. As the Chinese say: ‘You can’t stand in the same river twice.’ Inexorably, the river flows on.

  A few friends, a few stunningly expensive bottles of wine, a chow mein from the takeaway, and we were all picking up where we’d left off, having fun, catching up on all the chat and craic. Was it my imagination, or were the Irish now talking way faster than the French? Conversations seemed to leap like lightning in every direction: everyone was lively, laughing, no sentence ever seemed to get finished, nobody had the slightest hesitation in interrupting anyone else and everyone was united on just one subject, the thunderingly scandalous state of the health service, bewildering in so prosperous a country. It was France turned inside out – exactly the opposite of that country’s economic torpor and allegedly marvellous health care. And it was a huge relief not to have to decide whether to address anyone as tu or vous. Even in formal institutions such as hospitals or banks, Ireland is on first-name terms with everyone. In France, I was madame; in Ireland, I was just me – a nuance I’d never really noticed before, but now rather liked.

  The conversation was, at this moment, about a new film we’d all been to see. For a dangerous moment, the atmosphere teetered; how could it possibly have screened six weeks earlier in France than in Ireland? After all, France wasn’t in any respect ahead of Ireland, was it? Feeling somehow responsible for this time lapse, hastily explaining that sometimes movies screen the other way round, I was relieved when somebody asked my opinion of what we’d seen.

  ‘Terrific,’ I said, wallowing in the luxury of speaking English. Whereupon half of the gathering vehemently concurred, and the other half vehemently argued that no, it was dreadful! Rubbish!

  The film’s merits didn’t matter. What mattered was the robust response to it. In France, a film is either ‘excellent’ or ‘interesting’. ‘Excellent’ is rare and high praise, while ‘interesting’ is polite code for ‘fell asleep’. Nobody would ever say ‘crap’ or ‘bloody great’ or raise their voice in heated discussion, as we were now doing. Nobody would thump the table or help themselves to yet another glass of wine, as we were now also doing. Nobody would ring their babysitter to say hang on, I’ll be late home, can you hold the fort? It was nearly midnight and the French would be long since in bed, snoring all the way from Cannes to Cherbourg. (As a friend remarked during the ghetto riots of 2005: ‘France doesn’t need to impose any curfew. A voluntary one has been in operation for centuries.’)

  Eventually, offhandedly, someone looks at me curiously. ‘So, what do you do all day in this French outpost of yours? It must be getting pretty dull by now.’

  Fleetingly, the outpost sprang to mind, with its miles of walks, cycles, skating lanes, beaches. The tennis court, sports complex, bowling alley, cinema, theatre, library. The Italian class, the table tennis I play in the village hall with my pal Marian. And then I remembered Seán’s advice.

  ‘Yeah. It’s pretty dull. I just do a bit of walking and reading.’

  This seemed to b
e the right answer. ‘Mmm. Of course, this French lark is just a whim. It’ll wear off.’

  Maybe it will. Who knows? Maybe next year will bring an ungovernable urge to take up flamenco dancing in Andalucia or tulip farming in Amsterdam.

  ‘We hear on the news that things are pretty bad over there. Riots, high unemployment … and all that famous red tape of theirs. It must drive you mad.’

  Eh oui. There are days I could cheerfully slay the mayor, the chief executive and the entire staff of several French monoliths, plus Nicolas Sarkozy, the strutting little politician who adores America and would love to see France turn, like Ireland, into an offshore American state.

  ‘And is it true, do they really eat horse meat?’

  Yes, it is. They do. I wish the French would stop doing that, I really do. But there you go. Everywhere has its incomprehensible little foibles. At that moment, Ireland’s little foible was the merry borrowing of buckets of money. ‘Credit’s so cheap,’ I was told, ‘and the banks are lending as much as we like. You don’t even need the deposit for a house any more, you can borrow the whole lot.’

  Really? For once, I decided to do as I’d been told and say nothing. But, in a city-centre pharmacy one day with two friends, I did pipe up to protest when the requested price of a packet of aspirin was twenty (yes, twenty!) times the supermarket price. Instantly, my friends forked over the money, grabbed my arms and marched me out for a good talking-to.

  ‘Look, Liz. You’re out of touch. You’ve got to realise that we don’t query prices in Ireland. We’ve got lots of money, and it doesn’t matter what aspirin or anything else costs. You just pay it without even reading the price tag.’

  Of course, nobody knew then what was to come. But I did hear the economist David McWilliams on radio, warning that the property bubble could burst and tough times might lie ahead – whereupon the interviewer roundly castigated him for being a pessimistic misery. A pessimistic mistaken misery.

  The sales are on, and spending is epic. Ireland’s shopping centres (or ‘malls’, as they now seem to be called) look like something out of the last days of the Roman empire. The restaurants are crammed, traffic is at a standstill, all the current-reg Mercedes hum bumper to bumper, and as I drive around in my mother’s antique little Toyota (later to become a stolen victim of recession), I feel like a very poor relation. A Third World peasant. A visitor from some other, sadly deprived, planet.

  The houses are vast. Enormous. Everybody seems to have at least two iPods, three cars, four bathrooms, five bedrooms and six cinema-size televisions. Even if it’s not all paid for, even if credit-card debt is massive, it looks good. It is good. The houses are solid, cheerful, cosy. Exactly the opposite of France’s discreet chateaux and tottering farmhouses, they blaze with light: Ireland doesn’t penny-pinch on electricity. The atmosphere is lively, even gleeful, as if all the kiddies are raiding a sweetshop, having a ball. Everything about this energetic, enterprising country shouts success: it’s small, but spirited. Dynamic. It has come a long way from its famine days, and demonstrably has no intention of ever tasting poverty again. (Oh, hindsight!) Yet it has known hunger, and consequently retains a warm heart, contributes a lot to Third World charities, enjoys being on the giving rather than receiving end of kindness. Only once did I ever hear it criticised in France.

  It was the morning after the 2002 Nice Treaty referendum. Ireland had voted to deny EU membership to any further applicants. I was in the local pharmacy, where my accent betrayed me. The chemist peered over his bifocals in a way that boded no good.

  ‘Ah, yes. Our Irish resident. Madame, you should be hashamed of yourself.’

  But it wasn’t me! I wasn’t there! Couldn’t vote! I can’t vote anywhere, and I had nothing to do with it!

  ‘I must say, I ham happalled by your country’s behaviour. Thirty years hago, Hireland joined the EU, a poor supplicant, as the others are now, and nobody hobjected. Hit went on to massive prosperity. And now hit wants to deny that chance to others in turn. I had no idea the Irish could be so shockingly selfish.’

  Disapprovingly, heads nodded. Lips pursed. Mortified, I seized my purchase and decamped, ears burning.

  And – phew – shortly thereafter the vote was held again, and reversed. After that narrow squeak, I could venture back out onto the streets of France without a brown paper bag over my head.

  Now, maybe I need one in Ireland. People seem to feel terribly sorry for me. How can anyone possibly live in France without having at least ‘some little bit of property’ back here in Ireland? Would a pied-à-terre not be nice, and wise as well – a good investment, just in case … you know …?

  I think they mean for when I come to my senses and come home. And maybe they’re right. After all, they seem to know a lot about property. Everyone has their little pad in Marbella or Capetown or Miami – or had, then. Not to mention their huge home hacienda, rocketing in value almost by the hour. If I don’t buy something soon, I thought, I’ll never be able to. (Which just goes to show, never say never: you never can tell what’s around the corner.)

  And so I set off to do some property-hunting. Not in Dublin, where the prices were cosmic – you’d buy Lithuania for the price of a bungalow – but in the west, within striking distance of Shannon airport. Seven appointments and three extremely disheartening days later, I gave up.

  I couldn’t afford a shoebox, never mind a house. Even the tiniest apartment in the middle of nowhere was well beyond my budget. It was also crystal clear that no ordinary person on their own could afford to run two houses. A foothold in Ireland was a ludicrous luxury and I was wasting my time, off the Irish property ladder with a thud. I have, I thought, no option but to go back to France and stay there for the rest of my life.

  Ah, well. There are worse exiles. And even if the value of my French house wasn’t rocketing as fast as an Irish one, whose value seemed to double by dinnertime every day, at least it was a roof over my head. Meanwhile, there were all these massive mansions to admire, with their cobblelock driveways and teak decks, multiple garages housing fistfuls of cars, their fountains and eagles, patios and state-of-the-art security systems.

  Naturally, some French houses have security systems too. I’d just never seen or heard them. Whereas here, alarms seemed to ring so often they were simply part of the aural furniture: nobody paid them any attention. Presumably the police reacted to all the false alarms, but nobody else blinked.

  Listening to the wailing sirens, to all the kiddies calling their mothers ‘mom’, reading the designer logos on their billboard bodies, I had the oddest sensation of not being in Ireland at all. Dublin felt more like Chicago or Los Angeles – until, that is, I picked up a copy of the evening newspaper. There seemed to have been a dreadful error in the printing process, because it was written in … Polish!?!

  Yes. The Polska Evening Herald, catering on Fridays to Ireland’s new Polish community, which now constituted four hundred thousand, or nearly 10 percent of the population.

  In an Italian restaurant, our waiter was Romanian. Our taxi driver was Nigerian. The supermarket cashier was some kind of Slav. The hospitals were heavily reliant on Filipino nurses. Dublin now had dedicated shops serving the black, Arab, Oriental and European sectors of Irish society, selling couscous steamers, mealie, harissa, vanilla vodka and sari fabric by the metre.

  I’m not in Los Angeles after all, I thought. I’m in Birmingham.

  Visiting the country formerly known as home is turning out to be fun. City life, once so stressful, is now a merry whirl of shopping and larking about, as if I were a tourist. In some respects I am a tourist, gaping at so much new development, visiting the new wing of the National Gallery, eating in one of the fleets of restaurants that have mushroomed, it seems, virtually overnight. Unlike France, Ireland has no real indigenous cuisine, but it’s experimental and adventurous, doing everywhere else’s with enormous enthusiasm. The experience of eating out – the pace, the presentation, the ambience – is completely different to the s
ometimes solemn French experience. There’s less stilted reverence, brisker service, brighter décor and a noisier atmosphere. And if the experience is sometimes less refined, so is the prim-and-proper decorum. In France, food is the focus, whereas in Ireland it’s conviviality that counts: the laughter and banter, the fun amongst friends. If France lives to eat, Ireland eats to live. Go to a restaurant with the right people, and a wonderful time is had by all. Gradually, I reacclimatised to the concept of going out for a drink, as if drinking were an end in itself. In France drinking is inextricably entwined with eating, and in Ireland I kept reaching for the fork that wasn’t there.

  Other things were frankly shocking, particularly on television, where the level of obscenity was astonishing – although nobody seemed to notice. Aghast, I saw my nearly nonagenarian mother watch unblinking as two ‘m … f … ing’ characters all but disembowelled each other – perhaps it’s a mercy that her hearing is now erratic. On the soaps, everybody was ‘bleedin’ warnin” everybody else, fingers stabbing each other’s chests, voices and faces contorted with aggression, roight? In Temple Bar, girls wearing leather coats open over only underwear cracked whips as they handed out their cards to passing youths. Little girls, as young as eight or nine, were wearing tattoos, jewellery and cosmetics: nail polish, perfume, earrings, the whole adult works. A traditional-music session in a Mayo pub was reduced to a Roman orgy by a bunch of lap-dancing women out on a hen night, and a when a friend confided the latest sexual practices amongst thirteen-year-olds, I was stunned: if you don’t know what a ‘rainbow’ or a ‘snowball’ is, trust me, you don’t want to know. Ireland, it must be said, has not been backward in coming forward.