I’ve just returned to Australia after a five-week trip home. After a year in Canberra mostly spent writing alone in an apartment in the centre of the 111-year-old city, it was something of a shock to go home to the places I know so much more intimately and to see so many people.
It was like visiting another version of my life. Like jumping into a parallel storyline – one in which I never left for Australia.
I got to eat chowder with my aunt and uncle in a pub that has sat in the same spot since before the 18th century. To have lunch with my friend in London as she prepares for her upcoming wedding. To collect conkers with my four-year-old niece from the same hefty horse chestnut trees whose hoary grey-brown bark I leaned against as a kid, neck craned skyward. Together, she and I gazed up through the feathery jewel-green and honey autumn leaves at the barbed armour of one impossibly large husk, a sliver of the apple-fat conker it cradled peeking out at us.
The rich, glossy umber of good brandy winked from it in that late September afternoon light that just makes everyone look younger and less troubled. “How can we reach it?” my niece whispered reverently to the conker, the afternoon or to nobody in particular, her eyes glassed over with longing.
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Five weeks is a huge stretch of time. I’m conscious that not everyone is lucky enough to be able to shove a laptop into their bag and take their work with them for so long a period. Still, it’s a logistical challenge to see all of the people you care most about for the last time until goodness-knows-when. Australia is synonymous with “far away” in Europe – every visit is the last until goodness-knows-when. As soon as you announce an intention to move here, some family and friends react with a sort of soft mourning, as though it’s perfectly possible that they’ll never see you again.
So when you do get home and into the presence of those close to you, and you notice that everyone is a little changed, you want to breach the gap that has begun to stretch between you – a gap that is more than mere geographical distance.
In the year I’ve been away, people have got married, begun new jobs and lost longstanding ones. They’ve been diagnosed with medical conditions that change everything for them. There are a few more grey hairs dispersed across us all. People have died, the children have got longer and lost some of their baby-roundness. The older people seem just a little bit frailer, the time with them suddenly rendered more urgent, less complacent than it once felt.
You don’t want to cross off spending time with all of these people like an item on a to-do list. You want to actually inhabit the present moment along with them. The finite sense of the visit – that impending return flight – lends a focus and a sense of pragmatism to every minute and how you choose to spend it. It makes that sense of time being borrowed, and consequently not for wasting, something that everyone is constantly aware of.
A lovely consequence of this is that everyone seems eager to make the most of your time together. Nothing is done passively and there is no “putting off” because the sense that there may be another opportunity just isn’t there. Hopefully, probably, there will be another time for you both, for you all.
But it is not guaranteed.
So you don’t presume. You act instead. There’s new incentive to have the important conversation, to ask the pressing question, to place a problem in perspective. To say the unsaid and do the things there is otherwise never time for.
When I came back to Australia, my husband asked what the highlight of my visit home had been. He seemed to be expecting something work-related. I’d justified the expense of such a long break by coming back to publicise a book. But I realised that the best day of all had been the overcast September one in which my brother drove us down to Kerry. It was the first full day I can recall spending alone with him in years. We bought sausage rolls on the way and stopped at White Strand Beach on a whim.
It was empty and had that mournful, otherworldly demeanour Irish beaches so often do, as though a portal to another universe might appear at any moment. I had arrived in Ireland at the end of August, fresh from the tail end of a sharp, mountainous Canberran winter into the slow, golden somnolence of Irish summer as it closed in that coquettish, slightly self-conscious way it does every year. Blushing gently out of being. Now, on the beach, which was softly sandy rather than peppered with the expected scree of sharp little pebbles, it was already mid-September and everything was washed-out watercolour. Autumn was shrieking in across the water on a shoving, agitated breeze that came at you cold as a slap. The dense grey sand sucked you in, saturated and gummy underfoot, as the gaining tide pawed clumsily at it. A reminder that we wouldn’t have all that much time before the sand we stood on slipped and shifted and was submerged by salty water.
I wouldn’t recommend emigrating to Australia as a means of improving relationships with friends and family at home, but it certainly does lend an appreciation to them that might otherwise get lost in what feels like – but of course is not – endless time.
I felt more connected to my brother standing on that beach as we looked out together toward the Beara Peninsula than I had in some time. With the bell jar of the return flight hanging over us as the water crept toward in at our toes, we were able to talk and to be quiet in one another’s company, in a way that everyday life rarely permits.
It shouldn’t take a trip back to realise that home is, above all, people.
