Dinner and a talk in Williamstown

In the morning I walked into town, for the last time, I thought. I planned to meet Rachael for lunch, and then she would take me to the airport for my 2:55 flight. Before I left the house, Rachael had looked around for the printout with my flight info (she'd bought the ticket), but couldn't find it. At Outback Email I checked the Qantas website just to make sure. One flight out of Alice on the 5th, leaving at 11:45. I looked at my watch: 10:20.

I dashed out without paying for my five minutes online and ran to a nearby payphone. I called Rachael but she didn't answer. I left a message telling her I was heading back to the house and she should pick me up along the way.

I'd become quite fond of the walk between her house on Kilgariff Crescent and town, a distance of about a mile. I would amble along the wide dirt margin of the road, admiring the red ridge to the south, maybe watching a flock of galahs pass over, following my thoughts.... But my last return was something else.

I took off my full waist pack and carried it awkwardly in one hand as I ran along the road, stopping when I could run no longer, jogging off again when I'd recovered a bit. Every moment seemed to count, and I knew it would be close. I also knew that my airline only flew to Alice three times a week, and that my flight from Melbourne to LA left early the next morning. When I heard cars approaching behind me, I stuck at my thumb but didn't look around. No takers.

I burst into the house. Rachael was in the bathtub, and I thought, it's hopeless. But she laughed sympathetically. "I found the printout, it's on top of your backpack there by the door. It is at 2:55. I wouldn't let you miss your flight." It turned out I wasn't flying Qantas after all, but Tiger Air--which I did know but thought Tiger was part of Qantas. No, Singapore Airlines. I walked back to town, a little sheepish.

After a second visit to Outback E-mail. I tried three souvenir stores on Todd Mall and culled through the ridiculousness till I managed to find a few things that were marginally appealing but probably not.

Rachael and I met at the Tea Shrine for lunch and each ordered a bowl of yum-yum noodle soup. At the airport we sat on an outdoor patio, and Rachael had a coffee and introduced me to Lammington cake, an Australian classic: lemon cake inside, a thin veneer of chocolate frosting and coconut flakes on the outside. Excellent. Yellow-throated miners moved among the branches of several large gum trees, magpie larks picked in the grass below, and a pied butcher bird swooped in and landed among the snack refuse at a small table. I sat close to Rachael with my arm around her.

When my plane was called we went inside and said good-bye. I presented my boarding pass to an agent and walked back outside, onto and across the tarmac to the plane, and climbed the stairs to the door. Rachael says that life in Alice often seems a throwback to the 1970s, and the airport is one of the examples she cites.

I flew two and a half hours south to chilly Melbourne, the land below changing from red to sandy to the pale wintry green of sheep pastures near the city. A bus and two trains brought me to Williamstown after dark, and using the map Rachael had written on a napkin I soon found 18 Railway Place, the white wooden house where Rachael's parents, Harry and Sheleigh live. I used the knocker and two dogs came running and barking towards the other side of the door. Sheleigh answered and waved me in. The dogs, Geordie (an Australian terrier) and Molly (a white West Highland terrier) scuttered about our feet. I followed Sheleigh down the long hall--pausing to drop my pack in a bedroom she showed me--then continued to the back of the house, where the hall opens up into a large, high-ceilinged space that serves as living and dining room and kitchen.

"We went ahead and ate," Sheleigh said, "but sit down and I'll get you a plate." A contingent of the family was still at the table: Harry, Helen (Rachael's sister), Madeleine (Helen's daughter), and Bella. I took the only empty seat, and Sheleigh put down in front of me a plate hot from the oven--slices of roast beef, a few small potato halves, and cauliflower covered with a hollandaise sauce. Harry gestured for my glass and then filled it with red wine.

They asked me questions about the Larapinta and about Rachael, and I talked while I ate, happy with the food and company and the warm room. To arrive in a strange city is daunting, and I could have asked for no better destination and reception. The talk soon turned to their own affairs, and I listened and had a second glass of wine. I put in something about my hopeless souvenir search, and Madeleine said, "boomerangs," and I agreed, yes, exactly. Harry is a man always ready with an anecdote, or bit of history or an unlikely fact, and he said, "I once had a friend who was a boomerang champion." He paused, and I said, "champion?" "Oh yes," said Harry, as if boomerang competitions were not at all unusual. "He was shaped a bit like me"--he put both hands on his stomach and Bella said "pudgy?" Harry squinted at her in mock displeasure, then said, "rotund." He continued, "he could throw the boomerang quite some distance and it always came right back to him. Me, I was rubbish with the damn things."

Bella and Madeleine served plates of apple crumble for dessert, and I followed the others' example by pouring a healthy dollop of cream over the top. Soon after, Helen and the two younger women rose to leave. The latter two both had classes in the morning, Bella at Uni, Madeleine at her high school.

Harry and Sheleigh moved to the living room and put on the BBC World News. I sat down with them and we learned of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's death. The following program, Foreign Correspondent, presented a long story about Italian political comedian Beppe Grillo. Harry loves Italy--they lived in Milan for five years in the late 1960s--and he enjoyed the piece immensely, laughing at the Italians' remarks and breaking out with short bursts of Italian himself. The next program was The First Tuesday Book Club, a favorite of both Harry and Sheleigh. Harry asked if I wanted a beer, but I said no, the peppermint tea Sheleigh had made me earlier was just fine. He got up and went to the frig. "I always have a beer shortly before bed," he said.

In the book show, a perky moderator and four panelists (one of whom was the current finance minister, another a tv writer) discussed two works, first a recent James Bond book, written by Sebastian Faulks "writing as Ian Fleming." The book had been enjoyed but was considered fluffy. Saul Bellows' The Adventures of Augie March was the other work, and all agreed--a bit of a slog but worth it.

Sheleigh went off to bed, after pointing out that she had left me a brown towel in the bathroom, and a bowl and muesli on the kitchen counter for the morning. I took my tea mug into the kitchen, then examined the contents of a dining room bookshelf. One section held all of Cormac McCarthy's books, which I mentioned to Harry, who still sat on the couch.

"Yes, I like McCarthy quite a bit. I've read most of his books more than once. He's on my list of greats. Peter Carey too, and David Malouf. Some people might not agree about Malouf, but that doesn't matter. And Tolkien. I've read his trilogy a dozen times. A masterpiece." He told me he was a big reader, that he spent most of his days reading, though mostly not very good books anymore. "I've read all the great writers already," he said. "Balzac, for example, people have no idea; his . . . what is it called? . . . yes, La Comedie Humaine. It's all there; brilliant." He said the writer's name again, separating and emphasizing the two syllables. "Bal-zac! A genius."

I said something about McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and we agreed on its merit. "I always loved America," Harry said. "I worked my entire career for Americans, for Roman-Hass. Dow bought up the company a few years ago. I spent a lot of time in the States. I used to love driving there. Through upstate Pennsylvania, up to Buffalo." He laughed at the mention of the city.

"In 1955, just after I started working for the company--were you born then? no?--I came over to Philadelphia. I remember the first night, my boss took me out to a restaurant, Bradley's, and I ordered the filet mignon. They brought me out this huge steak." He held his hands apart to indicate the size and laughed apoplectically, then started coughing; speechless, he raised both hands and threw away from him this ridiculous thing. "In England," he said, recovering, "we still had rationing at the time. You would get a small four ounce piece of meat"--he made a little circle with thumbs and forefingers--"and that was for the whole week. You people had no idea....

"When I was young I had dreamed of going to Australia--Canada too, but more Australia. We all did." I asked why. "Well, it was warm, and I'm from the north of England, Newcastle, where it's not at all warm. But that wasn't the main thing. More was the work, which we had none of. It was terrible....

"My people were very poor." He held his chin against his chest and looked up at me, knitting his brows. "You've no idea. This was in the 20s and 30s, the Depression." I mentioned that I'd recently read Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (a brutal account of the living conditions of miners and the working poor in northern England in the 30s). "Yes," Harry said,"that man had it right.

"My never had a full-time job his whole life. In winter he might shovel snow, or some such odd job, but nothing steady. Never. He had been gassed at the Somme. He was a morbid, gloomy man, and you couldn't break through to him.

"In 1928, around the time I was born, he joined other men from the north on the Jara March to London. Do you know it?" I didn't. "Very famous. They went to ask if something might be done for them, some work, but nothing came of it.

"No work, no medical care. Almost nothing in the way of doctors or medications. My mother died at 49 of a stroke, my father at 66, in a cinema, also of a stroke.

"The Queen Mother, you know, who died a few years back? She was from the north. Her family, the Bowles-Lyons, owned all of the northeast, incredibly wealthy people. I'm no socialist, though I do believe in social responsibility, and those people had none of that. They pummeled the poor, pummeled the crap out of them.

"For me and the others there seemed little enough reason to hope. Our people were poor and there seemed nothing for it. But I was"--he hesitated, then went ahead--"well, there's no other word for it--smart. I won scholarships and scholarships (like that Bella--she's a smart one). Not because I wanted to but because there was no other way out. I even won a scholarship to Cambridge, but I couldn't take it because my parents needed the twelve shillings a week I was earning at the time. Not that it mattered. Later I went to technical college, and that was good enough.... I only wish that my parents had lived to see how it all came out." It did seem an unimaginably long way from the gray poverty of northern England to middle-class comfort and leisurely old age in green Melbourne.

"And now here I am, in Australia. I've lived and traveled all over the world. Been around the world eleven times, right around it. Not that I even like Australia all that much, it turns out. But my children are all here, so...." Harry and Sheleigh had come to Australia in the 1970s, then returned to England in 1980, only to move again to Australia ten or so years ago, following (most of) their children.

"Oh, it's not that bad here, but it is 12,000 miles from civilization." He'd been speaking mostly with eyes closed, but now he opened his eyes and looked at me with a wry smile. "And I'm not talking about America." He laughed. "I mean England, Europe. I used to know every bit of London, and there's not a city like it in the world. Oh, maybe New York, San Francisco, Paris, but not many like it. There was a time you could put me down anywhere in London, and I'd know where I was at. Knew it all. And we could get in the car, drive through Britain, every spot rich with history; or we would take the ferry or tunnel over to France, find a small inn in the country. The same in Germany and Switzerland and Italy.... It's a lovely part of the world."

He paused, a wistful expression on his face, thinking about the past it seemed, and I waited for what might come next. But he was done. "Ah well," he said, "enough of that. It's time for bed. You've got me talking and all winded up, and I go on and on." He laughed and struggled up off the couch, and we shook hands, and he took himself off down the dark hall.

I went off to my room too, and pulled back the soft blue coverlet and climbed into the comfortable bed, and soon fell asleep for the last time in Australia.