The Upside of Down (22 page)

***

Once we have made the decision to leave France I find myself looking at Paris through different, gentler eyes, the way one views an old boyfriend once he stops calling and his irritating habits begin to fade from memory. I don't want to leave the country remembering only the disagreements, the cultural clashes and the painful hospital moments when there has been so much more than that.

We have stayed five years—'two and a half times longer than planned'—I remind Darryl when he gripes. Despite the length of time, we haven't become French. I still can't cook a proper
crème brûlée
and will never know how to tie a scarf around my neck so I don't look like a Girl Guide. But to be fair to myself, I was probably never a good candidate for becoming French. Growing up in Marin County, California in the 1970s meant living in one of the most laid-back places in the US. My formative years were spent sunning myself on the beach and learning how to shoot hoops. By the age of eighteen I could play a mean game of just about anything involving a ball, but wouldn't have recognised a Versace handbag if it conked me on the head. I was at home with golden retrievers on the beach, not coiffed poodles on the Rue de Rivoli. And I grew up with a healthcare system that, although horribly flawed in some important ways, emphasised patient involvement and empowerment. Although I value hygiene and efficiency in hospitals, I still yearn for a greater role in decisions or at least a tender pat on my son's head during a blood test—things which clearly are not French priorities.

Despite spending so long here, I wonder if France has changed me at all. Yet two years after moving to Australia we will return to Paris with all three children for a friend's wedding. On our last night visiting France, we decide to eat dinner with Marie-France's family at what had been our local
crêperie
down the road from where we once lived. After sitting down the waiter brings us menus. Almost immediately he returns.

‘Madame, this is yours, no?' he says to me.

I look up at him, confused. He's holding out a small maroon child's jumper. I recognise it immediately: it is Oliver's.

‘Yes, I must have left it here, but I don't know when. How did you know it belonged to me?'

‘I have not forgotten you,
Madame
.'

By now, the others have stopped talking and are listening to our conversation. I look at Darryl who he is shaking his head, shocked.

‘I don't believe it. I mean, we haven't even visited the country for two years,' I say to the waiter.

‘Yes, I know that I have had it a very long time. I'm glad you have come back.'

I'm glad too. Maybe France and I haven't been such bad companions after all.

13

CHASING A HEALTHY LIFE

Life in our temporary home in Auckland is ideal. Raewyn's house is noisy and bustling with activity, everything is familiar and I'm not alone all day with two energetic young boys and a mountain of a belly. After a flying trip with Darryl to Melbourne—settling him in and house-hunting over a few packed days—I waddle back across the Tasman Sea to Auckland about a month before my due date.

Warm and welcoming, Raewyn draws us under her wing and into the home. Working as a florist at a city hotel, with wedding season approaching, her work is demanding. But any spare time and energy is devoted to playing with Aidan and Oliver. They are drawn to her like shoppers to the Boxing Day sales and she's smitten by them.

Darryl's younger brother Kevin, age thirty-three, is smack in the middle of what some would describe as an early mid-life crisis. He calls it an epiphany. He has just given up his highly paid consulting job, a flash apartment with fantastic views of Auckland Harbour, and his attractive lawyer girlfriend. Why? To move back in with his mother while he raises money, trains and organises a campaign to row across the Atlantic. He has spent years looking for himself and has decided the best chance of finding ‘him' is in the middle of the ocean. Kevin's days are spent downstairs on a rowing machine with sweat pouring over his headphones or madly coordinating significant details like who's going to pay for and build the boat. Meanwhile, he has still to find another person motivated to spend six weeks alone with him paddling across a very big body of water.

One day Raewyn takes the boys to an indoor play centre and I tag along with Kevin in his beat-up Toyota Starlet. We're going to check on the progress of the boat builders, a group of students north of Auckland.

‘Isn't it a bit dodgy to rely on people who are just learning to build a boat, Kev? The Atlantic is a bad place to have a breakdown.' He's getting used to the ribbing.

‘Very funny. They have a teacher helping them. They're doing an excellent job actually. You'll see.'

‘Have you brought your mum up here to see it?' Raewyn's not enthusiastic about the whole rowing business.

‘Not yet.'

‘Do you think she's warming to the idea of the race yet?'

‘What do you think? You hear her every day. “Kevin, why don't you get a normal job? You should settle down, get married and have kids, like Darryl has done.” No, she doesn't get it.'

‘You have to admit, it's sort of a mother's worst nightmare.'

‘Yeah, yeah.'

‘But if you're happy, she will be … Are you happy?'

‘I don't know. Let's talk about something else. What's the update on the baby?'

‘I saw the doctor yesterday and she says we have to have a C-section because Oliver's birth was so messy.'

‘What do you mean messy? All births seem pretty messy to me.'

‘Oh, they couldn't get him out and had to do a vertical cut in addition to the horizontal one. They call that a classical C-section. Apparently the risk of my womb rupturing if I try to have a vaginal delivery is ten times that of someone who has had a normal C-section.'

‘Do people rupture very often?'

‘I doubt it. But she said if it happens when I'm not in the hospital the baby would probably die and they would struggle to save me. It's sort of enough to put you off taking the risk.'

Because of the short timeframe and the last-minute decision to have a Caesarean, the surgery is booked in very quickly, for a Wednesday. With Darryl coming and going, flying in most Friday nights and back out again early Monday mornings, we decide that Kevin will be the stand-in at the birth if Darryl doesn't make it back in time. The Saturday before the scheduled delivery Darryl is in Auckland and all of us spend the day wandering around a museum of radio-controlled trains and boats. The thrill of the display must be too much for me because by the time we get back to Raewyn's house I'm in labour. By ten o'clock that night we're driving to the hospital.

‘Yes, the baby's on the way,' says the registrar after examining me. ‘The theatre's free. I suggest we head straight up there.'

Just past midnight we are delighted when the medical team easily pulls our baby boy, Ellis, out of me—without misplacing him in my abdominal cavity or requiring additional slicing and dicing. Apart from two curly toes, our other genetic anomaly, he's perfectly healthy.

***

‘We stopped off in New Zealand to have a baby,' I explain to the Air New Zealand steward, who is staring at me, her Julia Roberts ruby red lips hanging limply open. She has just commented on how cool I appear, flying alone from New Zealand to Australia with three little boys aged six, four and three weeks.

‘You're joking, eh?' she asks with that uniquely Kiwi sentence ender.

‘No, really, I'm not. But it's a bit of a long story …' I trail off, hoping that will be enough to send her sashaying back to the galley. Instead she leans closer into the seat beside me that Aidan has just vacated to disappear down the aisle towards Business Class.

As I begin explaining the story to this stranger, the oddness of our recent life hits me. Most people don't ‘stop off' in another country to have a baby. Or bring their newborn son directly to get his passport photo taken on the way home from the hospital. To accomplish this we had to prop up Ellis' wobbly head and make repeated attempts to snatch a photo when his inky eyes slid open, causing the middle-aged photographer to mutter under her breath, ‘Back in our day we didn't even take babies out of the house at this age, much less to another country.' As soon as Ellis' passport arrives in the mail, when he's just three weeks old, we're on our way to Melbourne.

‘Susan, Aidan, Oliver, Ellis! Hi guys!' Darryl, who's not generally demonstrative, is waving madly across the international arrivals terminal at us. ‘Hi, honey,' he says, giving me a long and particularly tender kiss. ‘How was the trip?'

‘Fine. The kids were really good. How are you?'

‘I've been going crazy waiting for you to get here. I actually arrived at the airport about two hours ago.' This is peculiar conduct for my airport-hating husband. We both pride ourselves on getting to the airport as close as possible to departure without missing the flight.

‘Why were you here so early?'

‘I don't know but I just got tired of waiting at home. It felt like our Melbourne life couldn't really start until you were here.' These two months have been lonely for him, renting an unfurnished room in a flat, sleeping in a too-thin sleeping bag on the floor during this chilly spring in Melbourne. His roommate has been gruff and unfriendly. The bachelor life was not what he would have chosen, but he knows this moving arrangement has worked for me.

Now that I'm here it's time to get in gear for a new country and culture. Before arriving, I had thought moving to Australia from France would be as easy and natural for our family as throwing a couple of sausages on the barbeque is supposed to be for an Australian. After so many international moves—and so much hard work in France—this would be like coming home for us, a Californian and a Kiwi. And in some ways it is. But in some ways it isn't.

Part of the problem is France. Paris can bring a person to their knees, with joy or frustration, in less than five minutes. It did this to us repeatedly during our time there. The city seeps into the skin, is absorbed in the genes and no matter how hard you try to brush it off, like a stray hair on a cashmere sweater, it sticks. I knew an Australian family who left Paris after seven years to return to Canberra. Six months later they turned up back on the doorstep of the City of Lights with all of their belongings, almost against their will, claiming they couldn't live without it.

France is old and fascinating, full of excitement and adventure, unpredictable and romantic. Of course we found the fringe benefits of life in Paris unbeatable: architecture, history, museums, food, fashion and general French flair. Heaven, if you plan on living at the
Louvre
, wearing
Pierre Cardin
and lounging around the cool cafe
Les Deux Magots
with writers every day. But if you need to shop, drive, set up a telephone line, register your newborn baby or become a frequent flyer at a hospital, Paris is an absolute pain in the derrière. Parking spots exist in the imagination only, bureaucracy buries the average person, Parisians are icy and foreigners always feel foreign. It's akin to living with an intensely creative, interesting partner who loses their keys once a week and rarely picks up their dirty socks; thrilling for a while, but eventually annoying enough to send you combing nightclubs for good-looking accountants.

I know all of this about Paris, the pros and cons. Especially the cons. So it should be easy enough to leave behind. And yet, it's still an adjustment. Maybe we should have organised counselling upon arrival in Melbourne because if there's one thing Australia is not, it's France.

Australia is young, fresh, efficient, welcoming and uncomplicated. In the Aussie culture, friendliness and mateship are common—even towards foreigners—and society actually seems to be organised with human beings in mind. Then there's the outdoors: we had expected the sense of space to be noticeably different here in Australia, but it's physically overpowering, like stepping out of Disneyland with its painted sets and false streetscapes into the real world. In Melbourne the houses feel so large and rambling, parks unfenced and expansive; everything seems to spread out, relax and breathe more easily than in the tight, condensed environment of Paris. But it's leaving the city, driving just twenty kilometres in any direction into country Victoria, when the differences really hit us. The buildings simply disappear, gone, no train lines or trailing housing estates. Only gum trees and some scrubby bush. The roads, often dead-straight, appear to roll on indefinitely before bumping into the ocean. Initially I miss the beautiful, varied French countryside and its close connection to the rest of Europe. But Australia beats any place I've ever been for the impression of a vast, unbounded land.

Although Melbourne may not boast the romantic peaks of Paris, the living is definitely easy. In 2002, the year we immigrate, Melbourne is voted the world's ‘Most Liveable City' by
The Economist
magazine. Upon arriving, fed up with the fast-paced urban life, slightly manic with our three young children, and anxious for some family-friendly healthcare, we're both ready to put exciting behind us and enjoy efficient and uncomplicated for a while.

***

The standard greeting between residents of our building in Paris was a nod or a stiff
bonjour
in the corridor. Occasionally our kids would win a smile and a gentle pat on the head if someone was forced to share a ride in the lift with us. Ours was a courteous, mind-your-own-business kind of community, not prone to excessive friendliness. After years in that setting, we're overwhelmed by the warmth of our new Australian home.

The day after moving to our suburban Melbourne house I'm met at the door by our new next-door neighbour, a freshly baked lemon cake resting in her hands. This gesture was beyond imagining in Paris. A week later the same woman organises a coffee morning to introduce me to about ten women from the street. I am given advice about finding a doctor, where to buy a new couch and how to get my fouryear-old into kindergarten. Successfully enrolling Oliver here will be as complicated as getting into university is elsewhere.