In Which It Is Only Convenient To Leave London

Tube Air

by ELISA ARMSTRONG

"Let me know if you want me to bring you anything,” whatsapped my best friend from London, in anticipation of her Australian visit. “No, I don’t miss anything actually. Hahahahahahaha” was my quick reply.

I had moved back to Australia after 5 ½ years in London. A move that was partly visa-enforced but mainly emotionally enforced. My mind and feelings drained and slack from years of struggle in a city where apathy outweighs empathy. I had grown tired of peak-hour faces, the particular way the sides of the mouth threaten to drag an entire expression south. Seeing those faces and knowing they were a reflection of my own. Breathing in the tube air, wondering how the rats inhabiting the space actually managed to live past a few days. Holding on, just.

Once I knew I was leaving, one year left on a visa and no chance of renewal, I took pleasure in saying to myself, “That’s the last time you’ll go to this pub/gym/shop/park” and surprised myself by feeling delighted, giddy even, without any sadness. How often does one get a chance to start anew in their home country?

It’s been 6 months and every day I wake up happy that I am no longer in London, but curious as to whether the move was entirely right. Now my peripatetic heart is forced into stagnancy for at least a little while. Friends, tired of Australia, ask for advice on moving to London and it takes all my energy to not scream, "DON’T DO IT." So instead I say, “You’ll need at least £15,000 to move there. Oh and did I tell you I used to pay £136 a month for tube travel?” That rarely fails to end any conversation.

I have moved to Melbourne. It is not really my home, but the city that contains my mother and all my friends. I only lived here for 2 ½ years but always told acquaintances in London “I’m from Perth AND Melbourne." Cue confused faces from those enquiring, wondering how someone can be from two ends of a country.

I have moved to the exact area where I used to live. No ghosts here, everything has the glaze of familiarity with none of the emotional connection.

Until I walked to the market. Retracing steps I made from my old share house (2006-2008), I felt lifted into a dream and periodically taken back to my early-mid 20s and the budget constraints that full-time study with no income provides. I walked between stalls looking for the cheapest zucchini to spiralize into low-carb, paleo-friendly, authentically-lacking pasta - I am none of these things except authentically half-Italian. I felt vindicated when I found it $4 cheaper a kilo and greener, but with a lack of polish that endorsed its un-genetically modified state. I walked into the Asian stall, desperate for sriracha, but experienced enough to know that a giant bottle will gain intense crust around the spout before I can finish it. I pass by the stall selling British McVitie’s Hob Nobs, once a favourite, with a smirk on my face.

I moved from a wintry London into an autumnal Melbourne. My body went into shock and in the first month of winter I developed a bronchial infection and lung inflammation. Never mind that Melbourne temperatures in winter are equivalent to London summer (or at least an Edinburgh summer). We can bear extreme weight, more so than slight weight. My body was more ready for polar vortex cold than Australian cold.

To go from winter to winter requires boots. Boots that withstand the long walks I like to make over suburban terrain (and am made fun of for). My boots were purchased in London but worn for a month in Berlin and in Boston and New York. These boots have held up in Melbourne. You have crossed three continents, I tell them, and tell myself.

I do miss one thing about London, being able to leave it: quickly, cheaply, unglamorously, inconveniently. £34.99 for a flight to the part of Spain that seems exclusively for English tourists. £69 for a return Eurostar to Paris: leaving at 6 a.m., and returning after midnight. I miss my friends. I miss being an ex-pat. Not the lifestyle but the state of being. This is all I miss.

Elisa Armstrong is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Melbourne. You can follow her on twitter here. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find our mobile site here.

"I Keep It Composed" - We Were Promised Jetpacks (mp3)

"Bright Minds" - We Were Promised Jetpacks (mp3)

In Which We Return From A Darker Place

Layer of Fog

by JESSICA FURSETH

The text he sent me yesterday, telling me he misses me and wants to be my friend. I respond I would like that too, but I don’t know how. We sigh, as far as that’s possible to do over text, and then do nothing.

That I’m old now, meaning I know you don’t get to be friends, not right away like this. The god of break-ups owns this time, and the deity will make you sit in the waiting room flicking through the thoughts in your head, working through every little tedious thread in the tangle. 

That I know why we broke up but I don’t think he does because he keeps asking me: “Did you leave because I’m so broke right now? Did you end it because I take drugs sometimes? Was it because of that guy you met, the one you keep meeting up with?” I feel the anger swell in my chest when he asks this, because it’s none of these things and yet all of these things, and so much more. But most of all it’s how he doesn’t hear me when I try and tell him. I spent the best part of a season trying to salvage things, trying to explain what the problem was, desperately sifting through all the words in my arsenal to find the ones that would show him how I felt. More than anything I wanted him to understand.

The moment when it started breaking. Of course I didn’t understand at the time but with hindsight I can see it: a freezing day with grey fog hanging low over the city, on a bus because the train wasn’t running. He told me something about what he believed in and how he wanted to live, some dream about communal living and sharing resources and a commitment to social activism. All things I can understand and even admire, but the opposite of everything I wanted for myself, as a fickle introvert with a bad case of wanderlust. And felt an ache swell in my chest, realising in a flash that I’d put my eggs in his basket without understanding who he really was, and how could I have let that happen? I got off the bus and went home alone, deflated. We recovered, but I slowly started to retrieve my eggs, one by one, keeping them safe in my own house again because I didn’t trust him with them anymore.

Some Humpty-Dumpty metaphor. 

That time he broke it off via text message while we were trying to work it out, sending me a missive while I was standing in a train station buying wine for a weekend away. I couldn’t even engage with what he was saying, blinded by the indignity of being dumped by text: “I am ending this because you no longer put our relationship first.” Or something like that; I’m not sure what it said exactly because I deleted it, too surreal a message to exist in the world.

What I remember is that I laughed, then shook, and then I raged at the absurdity, the humiliation of being dumped in the manner of my mobile operator informing me I’ve exceeded my monthly data allowance. When I got back there was a wall of ice between us, which melted as he came knocking on my door late at night. We spent three days in bed, in a time capsule, but it didn’t last.

The fact that I felt relief when it finally ended. Too many repetitions of the same arguments. I’d stare at him in disbelief, across the pub table or across the stream of text messages, wondering how it was possible to have been with someone for so long and have it end in such confusion. How black and white it felt, everything he said. How he refused to allow for the fact that things could change. How I was probably equally frustrating to talk to for him but I can’t see it, because when you are breaking up, you no longer are who you are.

That I’m realising you never quite finish with someone you used to love, not really. My ex and I still possess pieces of each other, even as he lives on the other side of the city where he calls another woman girlfriend and I have someone else who answers to boyfriend. See it didn’t take long; I told you the breakdown was a relief.

The worst thing about this is realising how wrong I was about him. How it took me so long to get to really know him, blind to reality at an age when I really should know better. How it makes me look at my new boyfriend with a twinge of skepticism, wondering what’s lurking under the surface, as I’ve always thought myself to be a good judge of character but maybe not. I don’t often wish things were different, but I’d give a lot not to feel this way as my new boyfriend deserves better.

That I regret nothing about my ex. Not getting into it in the first place, nor any of the things that caused it to end because when it was good, it was fantastic. And when it started to break down, it felt natural. I can never admit this to him though, because it’s cruel. But I know what it feels like to be so broken up about a relationship that you can hardly breathe, and this isn’t it. All I know is that I toss my phone across the table in frustration at yet another text message where he completely misses the point. But even as I do, I know it was all worth it.

Jessica Furseth is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in London. You can find her website here and she tumbls here and twitters here.

Photographs by the author.

In Which It Really Means Pineapple

For Beginners

by DANIEL D'ADDARIO

I went to London to spend the summer teaching-assisting at a summer program for students from around the world. I chose to believe the program was in the city of London long after it became obvious, in mailed materials, that I would be in a small village. Just how small became clear only on my ride from the airport – the town has only a bar and a combination post office/newsstand. I would sometimes wake up early to buy the Guardian at the newsstand, or go in the middle of the day to get an ice cream bar. It closed in the evening, and then I had to go to the bar.       

I always wanted to join the Scrabble games in the faculty room, but no matter how early I arrived, I was always ten minutes after the start. When I finally arrived at a Scrabble game on time, I found that a hierarchy had been established: certain players were not actually playing but floated around, giving advice on optimal moves, and others sat on the sidelines heckling. I thought I was pretty okay at word games but this felt more like psychological warfare, and I resolved to stay out of the faculty room altogether.       

I only grew more sure of this resolution later, once a co-worker, wife of the chief Scrabble heckler, told me to stop typing so loudly, then said, “Now you’re just typing quietly to piss me off! Go back to normal!” This laserlike focus on other people’s behavior was what united the faculty: stuck in a small village in a strange land, we only had one another’s quirks keeping us tethered to reality.       

I certainly had enough to keep me occupied, having been placed in the classroom of an English-as-a-second-language teacher for whom English was a particularly difficult second language. I tried to parse out for the students assignments that even to me seemed mind-bending and Kaufmanesque, requiring in most instances a keen grasp of the absurd. Once the students had to imagine themselves as babies and think of questions about nature – why one needed to be a baby to ask questions about nature was left unstated. On faster-paced days, whimsy was abandoned in favor of the ability to write one requested set of data with the left hand and another with the right.       

My head teacher told me, in a discussion that fell just short of an argument, that she didn’t think the students in our class were teachable. "They are all naughty!" she declared, with the conviction, and the thick accent, of a woman whose nation’s 20th century had seen plenty of congenital naughtiness. "They cannot be taught." Maybe she was right, in a way; the class was boisterous and clearly didn’t want to be learning English during their summer off from school. They all seemed too young, munching Maltesers in too-big Lacoste their mom (or maid) was still needed to iron; or they seemed too old, rolling their eyes when I asked if they understood the assignment, if they understood generic distinction. Did you hear what the teacher said? Dynasty is a soap opera. That’s a genre.  

This was ESL for beginners. I sat by a ten-year-old Scandinavian with grim Bergmanesque eyes until, after a few days of continuous attention (he was by far the youngest student at the entire program, and actually quite good at English, and I felt an unfamiliar paternalism that I guess teachers are supposed to feel often) he brightened, and out of nowhere told me a Swedish word. I was pleasantly surprised, when I looked it up, that he hadn’t tricked me into repeating a foreign obscenity: “ananas” really means “pineapple.”     

Eventually, in the way such things happen when one is a TA, I was switched into a new and far less eventful classroom. My post-Communist teacher surreptitiously looked over my shoulder as I checked e-mail and discovered that I had been, per routine, asked to submit an evaluation of the class to the academic offices; she called me a spy, told me I’d violated her contract, and asked if I was even qualified to judge her. "I am a certified economist, translator, and teacher. Who are you?" I saw her around a bit on campus after I’d been moved out of her class – she cut a line of students at Stonehenge to get an audio guide – but I didn’t talk to her. The Scandinavian boy asked me to play soccer with him during sports time, but I was wearing Birkenstocks, and had brought a book, and so I sat on the side supervising.

I find I tend to remember the egregious and absurd and thus there was little to report from my next class, in which I sat and watched and participated and learned a lot, I thought, about teaching. A colleague lent me a text called Learning Teaching but I was never quite in the mood to learn by the book once I got back to my dorm room, so it languished on the shelf next to a Spanish textbook I had brought but never opened. (I managed to break out some high school Spanish with the Venezuelan students, though – “Eres de Caracas?” was my opener, and closer.)

The dormitory was so inconducive to reading, or writing, or anything other than watching reruns on Megavideo, perhaps because it too was a workplace. I could not bring myself to devote attention to anything there. I was always on guard – it was my workplace. When not required to be there, I tried to get out and spend time with the younger faculty members – this was what I was supposed to be doing! I went to a nearby town with a few fellow TAs, and we sat by the river on a sunny day, had some drinks, and watched the white swans float by. A swan suddenly sliced open, a red line gashing across its feathers. I looked on in confusion until I heard my co-worker, a twenty-year-old graduate of the school, giggling. She was pouring her bottle of red wine onto the swan. Other sunbathers told her that the swans were the property of the Queen, or just glared at her, but she shrugged it off. “Wine washes off!” she laughed, as the swan, who knew something was wrong, tried to dip its stained backside deeper into the water. I finished my drinks quickly, and spent most of my subsequent free time alone. 

Students got the most excited about weekend field trips, which the faculty seemed to view as an imposition. ("I wish Stonehenge had moved me," said the co-worker who’d lent me Learning Teaching, who spent the trip asking if any of the souvenir shops sold "Stonehenge commemorative cigarettes.") The students could do as they liked, and they were far more worldly than I was at 15, at debate camp in Washington, when I couldn’t make it too deep into Georgetown without freaking out and asking a local for directions, then deciding to go back to my room and study old Supreme Court cases.      

They were maybe more worldly than I was now: on a trip to the town of Windsor, I tried to find Eton College and ended up walking twenty minutes through empty, flat green fields, the pastoral equivalent of the Sahara. I asked a young guy walking back towards Windsor where I was, and I’d been going twenty minutes the wrong way. We walked back together, talking about what I was doing in England and what he was doing in Windsor – he was a very personable young guy, about to go to school for business – and then he sent me off on something called “The Great Walk,” five miles of pasture ending in a bronze sculpture of a horse. “It’ll be totally worth your time.” I made it five minutes, then sat down and read an Adrian Mole novel I'd borrowed from the students' library.       

The greenery of the “Great Walk” – not an American park with overdeveloped flora, just a long green field with some trees in there – was a nice palate-cleanser from both the stresses of teaching and the world of the city. There was no shopping here – the students, when I ran into them, seemed ill-at-ease. I didn’t bother trying to sympathize.       

On an earlier trip into London, I’d gone into Harrods with a coworker my age, who said he just wanted to buy a Swatch watch. During his education in the new Gilded Age’s afterglow, I looked at coffee mugs in the Harrods gift shop. I’d been drinking a lot of tea, and this china cup with red buses – or this one, with black taxis! – would be adorable in my apartment, when I got home, when reality began again. I decided not, though. It’d just break in my suitcase, and I hadn't seen enough red buses or black taxis to feel legitimate sipping coffee – and soon it would be coffee again – from this mug. Mainly, though, it was the price. At thirteen pounds for a mug, I simply wasn’t being paid enough, when you divided it out hourly, to justify the expense.

Daniel D'Addario is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in White Plains. This is his first appearance in these pages. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find more of his work here.

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