Chapter 1 – THE JUMP

CROSS the hands over the breast here—so.

Straighten the legs a little more—so.

And call for the wagon to come and take her home.

Her mother will cry some and so will her sisters and brothers.

But all of the others got down and they are safe and this is the only one of the factory girls who wasn’t lucky in making the jump when the fire broke.

It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes.[1]

 

Of course I should not be cursing in front of the kids but that voicemail was the iceberg this particular Titanic did not need.

Hi Den, I just wanted to check again when you would be arriving so that I can book that room. I am going away for the weekend, so I will talk to you on Monday. I am so excited to see you again. Talk soon. The voicemail light winked ‘take that’.

I cursed Dirk anyway. We had been mates since we met on the leafy campus of the University of Pretoria twenty years ago, but more importantly on this particularly day, he was the only person I knew in Australia. I had hoped he would offer his couch or at least meet me at the airport, but only a handful of hours spent together over the last decade meant all I could ask for was the offer to book accommodation for my first couple of nights. Now this. If I did not want to start my new life on the street, I would have to jump to it.

The girls were playing with the DVDs on the computer. I could hear fragments of a song:

Vegemite, vegemite, I like vegemite …something, something, and sail ya’ all the way to Austray’ya.

Bugly was lying with his chin on his paws, pensive eyes tracking me. We only had one dog left to deal with as well. Cheeky was old and had to be put down a few months ago. The other little mongrel, never properly named, had been rescued from the street some time before and we never found the owner. A year or so earlier she had attacked Megan and bit her in the face. I instinctively laid the boot into the dog, and the next day found her curled up under the barbecue. Dead. Not quite what I had intended, but it was hard to explain, since it was also not the first time for me. So just the one dog left.

I couldn’t stop to think. I sorted through the detritus of my life – books, dusty files and ancient floppy disks. All that knowledge, learning and entertainment once eagerly perused had been reduced to boxes of hassles to be disposed of. An inauspicious start, but I backed-up the doubt to deal with the present.

I did, and so I found myself at Jan Smuts[2]. Airports are mostly happy places: new beginnings, holidays, reunions. Occasionally though, you would see despair if you looked behind the busy-ness; like when Moonyeen and I (the children stayed home) parted ways in the echoing departure hall and we both turned to look back – this wasn’t the movies, this was life happening at speed.

I shuffled through the long queue, feeling guilty that I had a return ticket but no intention of returning. Relief made a little vomit in my mouth when I slipped through the checkout point with my declaration that it was a business trip going unchallenged. We had the permanent residence visa for Australia, but abandoning the South African passport was still a bridge too far. Starting a new life on a lie, but … c’est la vie.

I boarded the Qantas flight bound for Sydney with a couple of suitcases, a laptop computer and bags of apprehension. And a printer – don’t ask. The flight was packed and we all eyed each other thinking the same thoughts, I’m sure. As every traveller soon discovers, you can carry little luggage but have lots of baggage. Like a thief I snuck out of the country of my birth. The guilt surrendered to a metallic-tasting fear when I remembered that this was a journey never meant to be. Getting on that plane was an act of mortal disobedience that did not bear thinking about. On the disobedience front I had form, so I found myself staring at the land of those long debates through the pretend-window of the Airbus.

The plane landed into the sunset over Botany Bay. I wish I could say it was spectacular, but that would have been unusual for my life. A smoggy dusk had settled over the Sydney Saturday. The upside-down symmetry of the 6/6/99 date escaped me at the time because I was apprehensive about finding a place to stay and getting started. At least it did not feel like a curse. Yet.

Before I left, I had made a phone reservation at a backpacker’s lodge, and upon arrival took a shuttle into to town. Not only did the driver overcharge me by $2.00; he dropped me a block away from the lodge. After 39 years, all I owned was contained in two suitcases, four carry bags a laptop computer and, of course, a printer. I had to schlep all at once to the lodge since because in Africa it would be gone in less time it took to read street sign, and I didn’t know different.

I watched the youthful inhabitants of Jolly Swagman[3] watch me. A middle-aged man, checking into a backpacker’s lodge loaded like a human Bedouin camel was hardly regular backpacking stuff but no-one blinked an eye or offered to help. Despite the frantic midnight calls to Sydney, or maybe because of it, there was no reservation for me. But they had a room available and I paid $40 to get a private room because I did not want to share a dorm with a bunch of 20-year old fart-factories subsisting on a beer- and-pizza diet. Although the odds of bumping into someone I knew were zero, $20 was a small price to manage the risk.

The room was as empty as Monday church. I felt as displaced as a nun in a strip joint, but there was no going back, even though I had a return ticket. I stared at the yellowing ceiling – somewhere in the distance the music boom-boomed, a woman laughed drunkenly and carefree, obviously surrounded by people. I rolled a few towels into a pillow and lay down. Is this a sign? My throat made a swallowing motion.

Now I could curse all I liked. But who to pick on?

The joint must have been scarier than I remember, because I rose at 7am despite jetlag and two hours later I was checked into Highfield Lodge – just around the corner in a quieter, tree-lined street in Potts Point. There was a one metre view into an adjacent wall, but the rooms had linen and the bathrooms were clean – probably because it was run by an efficient Swedish (or Swiss) woman.  It was expensive in Rand[4] terms but in dollar terms it was only $200 a week; about right for upmarket backpacker’s lodge I figured – but still more than I wanted to spend. Could afford to spend.

The Merc had been sold, and so had the Golf, and the house was on the market. I figured that after paying taxes (50%) and converting to dollars (divide by four) we would have a total net worth of about $40K. I was unemployed in the most expensive city in the world, and I was on a tight budget.

Later, I bought the newspaper with the peculiar headline: ‘1300’. It turned out that the previous day Tony Lockett had scored his 1300^th career goal in Australian Rules Football. It would be some time before I appreciated the sport, the magnitude of the achievement or the Australian obsession with sport. Besides, I was interested the classified ads, not other people’s achievements.

I thought that anything close to the city would be a dump, and that might not look good on a résumé. Led by third world instincts where white suburbs pimpled by glitzy malls ring-fenced dodgy downtowns, I assumed no self-respecting whitey would want to live in most of the accommodation that is on offer in Sydney. Alas, the late 90’s was a boom time for inner suburbs like Balmain and Concord, with sad little fibro tile homes and shoulder-to-shoulder cottages fetching half a million dollars. If only I knew…

Convenience is a luxury for the gainfully employed and those strapped for time; and since neither applied to me it was easy to sacrifice convenience for economy. When you take the decisions I have taken, time easily burdens; the unwanted freedom from a schedule allowed plenty of time to enrol in a master’s degree in second-guessing myself: How did I go from stable, secure family man with reasonably good prospects as a member of the educated white aristocracy in South Africa to the uncertainty of this transient state I found myself in? Was this my destiny? Was it whim? The smartest or the dumbest thing I have ever done? Were these questions even worth asking? Live the moment. Bloom where you are planted. There are any number of clichés to hang onto for courage.

***

I would have been fifteen or sixteen. The teacher wasn’t around for a particular class, and a few boys were mucking around in the corridors. There was a dare about who could jump from the top step to catch an overhead bar a few metres away. Everybody watched and waited to see who jumped first. Of course I jumped. The crack of my head on the concrete floor cleared the scene quicker than a bomb. It took me a while to pull myself together and a while longer for my friends to surface. Not quite the glory I had anticipated. I should have learned my lesson then, but if lessons were learned once or easily, the Bible would be a novella. Me, being me, I guess. Yet, never learning the lesson…

At every social occasion or family gathering, the topic of emigration would be served up along with the boerewors or beer. Over the preceding two decades the usual trickle of emigration had risen rapidly to flood levels amongst English speaking South Africans. Many had the second passport conveniently stashed in their abracadabra drawer and the history of African countries post liberation was compellingly predictable. Scenarios like these led people to coin the term ‘no brainer’. But for this peculiar tribe called Afrikaner, emigration was spelled treason.

With seconds and thirds and as dessert… ad nauseum; every question an implied dare: Should we apply for a visa? How many points do I need? Will I get a job? Did you hear about John? I hear St Ives is pretty nice place in Sydney. Everybody watched and waited.

In a pleasingly ironic twist, I later found that Australians have a name of disdain for people like that; they refer to them as ‘gunnas’: I am gunna (going to) do this I am gunna do that… Maybe sometimes the traits you hate most in other people are the ones you suffer from yourself. But I was gunna fight it, if it killed me.

Quarter of a century later, I still hadn’t figured it for bravery or arrogance. And I could add obstinacy and insolence into the mix, because I jumped anyway even after I had received the answer to my prayers. But before I jumped, I had one last stupid little thing to do – I pulled at the one loose thread in the fabric of my life with this stupid request: I asked God for a sign.

My life journey was a perpetual oscillation, moving closer and further away from God, like the Moon on an elliptical journey around the earth; sometimes close enough to want to reach out and touch, or more usually a useless sliver of reflected light. I was familiar with the desperate conflict resolution method of daring God to reveal himself with a sign. Like most other people I had done this before; I am sure even atheists hedged their bets at least once before they committed to their belief. But I had never received an ‘answer’ – or at least never recognised the answer if given. In my heart of hearts I did not expect to get an answer. As usual. But the thread was there, and I pulled it. As usual.

Please God, give me a sign here, I asked as I opened the Bible randomly to a verse[5].

¹⁰ ‘Stay here in this land. If you do, I will build you up and not tear you down; I will plant you and not uproot you. For I am sorry about all the punishment I have had to bring upon you. ¹¹ Do not fear the king of Babylon anymore,’ says the LORD. ‘For I am with you and will save you and rescue you from his power. ¹² I will be merciful to you by making him kind, so he will let you stay here in your land.’

   ¹³ “But if you refuse to obey the LORD your God, and if you say, ‘We will not stay here; ¹⁴ instead, we will go to Egypt where we will be free from war, the call to arms, and hunger,’ ¹⁵ then hear the LORD’s message to the remnant of Judah. This is what the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: ‘If you are determined to go to Egypt and live there, ¹⁶ the very war and famine you fear will catch up to you, and you will die there. ¹⁷ That is the fate awaiting every one of you who insists on going to live in Egypt. Yes, you will die from war, famine, and disease. None of you will escape the disaster I will bring upon you there.’

My first reaction was; this is stupid. God does not work like this. I read it again:

Stay here in this land. If you do, I will build you up (…) If you are determined to go to Egypt and live there, ¹⁶ the very war and famine you fear will catch up to you, and you will die there.

Stay here in this land…

Stay here in this land…

… you will die there.

…you will die there.

… you will die there.

…you will die there.

A forty-year old man with enough papers to impress even a dictator with the local university on speed-dial who goes about his life asking for signs from a make-believe guy-in-the-sky is not very mature or educated, and maybe deserved a touch of cosmic black humour. I didn’t find it funny though, because I had wrestled with this for decades; and I am no spiritual pussy, by personality more inclined to be contrarian and take the minority position. To jump when no one dares.

I wasn’t really looking for an answer. Or at least I was looking for an answer that supported my decision, just the way I was taught. And besides, God doesn’t go around giving signs by leading you to random Bible verse, does he? He has never done it until now, why would it start now – when I am on the cusp of my greatest adventure?

My favourite author, Anonymous, (or was it Aesop?) once observed that we should be careful what we wish for, because it may come true. Never would I be able to say again that God does not grant my wishes; and I only had myself to blame for asking a stupid question. But what if it is not stupid? What if it were a command? What if God really was going to punish me? What if…

If you ask ‘what if’ long enough, it leads you to the one question almost every thinking person is eventually forced to ask and answer. What if there is a God, or the corollary, what if there is no God? I would be stupid to worry about this incident if there were no God to worry about, that’s what. Unfortunately for me, I had chosen to believe.

The answer to the God/ no God question is the fulcrum of everything. Not most things, everything, as I learned.

Avoiding this decision is a decision. Being ignorant of the question means you cannot take the fork on the road, but you are still a traveller. It is the great unavoidable fork identified in the Sermon on the Mount[6]. ¹³Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide, and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it. ¹⁴ or the gate is small, and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few are those who find it.

There are two gates, two ways, and two groups of people. A gate is the entrance point. The gateway question is whether you believe in a God or not. That is the primordial choice to exercise. Unless this choice is explicitly made, the default is the alternative option. “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters[7].”

Life stripped to the naked essential is this: Choose to believe there is no God and nothing really matters. Choose to believe there is a God and nothing else really matters. As much as you then want to kid yourself that there is meaning to be found in kindness, raising babies or watching a sunset; every act of kindness, every human achievement is utterly devoid of meaning. Everything, including you, me and the Pope are an accidental collage of atoms floating in a sea of material things. No purpose. No truth. No meaning.

As stupid and immature as it may have been to ask for a ‘sign’, it wasn’t the equivalent of someone making a bed for his imaginary friend to come and sleep in. I fear your laughter, but still wore Jeremiah’s curse like an invisible cloak, maybe never to be shed.

I have chosen as you have chosen. I don’t know who is right. Now wasn’t the time to contemplate the existence of God. I had shit to get done, a plane to catch. Australia was waiting for me. Against the wishes of my tribe, the wishes of my family and the wishes of God. I knew. God knew. I know God knew. I was always going to jump. As usual.

My father-in-law did not speak to us for two years after we announced our decision. Others said their goodbyes with the clear intention of permanent separation. A brother-in-law said ‘enjoy the rest of your life’ – because that was the end of our acquaintance. Almost everyone disapproved. And the few who didn’t, never followed. But I believed everyone was wrong.

Everyone could be right of course, but at least my head hadn’t hit the concrete yet, so I found myself hunting cheap accommodation is Sydney a bit more than a month later. Hoping for a job. Wishing for a future. I couldn’t hear God laughing. And I hoped like hell there was a fire escape…

 

EPISTLES FROM AUS

From: Dennis Price     

To: Moonyeen Price

[<People of the Cross>]

Hi babe,

Nice to hear your voice last night. Pity it was so short. As promised – the email to share some experiences and thoughts. 

I am drawn back to Kings X again and again. (Remember, we stayed there for one night when we came on our LSD[8] trip?) It is one of the cheapest places to get food and Internet access (because of the big backpacking community) and a strange way, our first few days there has effectively made that the place of my first home in Australia. And making Big Treks seems to be in the Afrikaner blood anyway, so I did not mind.

Kings Cross oozes sex. (Don’t worry, strictly observationalJ.) It is the main red light district of Sydney and it is an understatement to say it is an interesting place. I tried to find the place where we saw that prostitute who thought Matt was such a cutey, but I did not recognise the street in the day time. It isn’t a very long street, and the main strip stretches from the Coca-Cola billboard at the one end for only about 4 city blocks north.

Weird men in weather-beaten tuxedos exhort you to come into their sex parlours, prostitutes smile at you with that peculiar, drugged half-smile. Sometimes they talk but I have never been close enough to hear what they say. Loud music bleeds from the clubs. Pimps or customers and the occasional cop trawl the main street. Even a simple country bumpkin can just sense that there is a lot of drug dealing that happens there. I suspect that actual shoppers are quite rare and few of them are Sydneysiders.

Hobos and Homo’s. Transients and Transsexuals. Pros and Cons. Kings Cross has it all. But the best of all – it has no pretensions of being anything else – it is the crotch of Sydney, and defiantly proud of it. The irony of its name long forgotten and lost on most locals.

On my way to ‘the Cross’ I would stop at other points of interest and circular Quay and the Opera House was a favourite. The Opera House is beautiful from afar but does not bear close scrutiny. The tiles, which cover the famous roof, are positively disappointing and rung some symbolic alarm bells which does not bode well for my adventure in Australia. It is one of delicious ironies of life that it later transpired that the leading force behind the establishment of the opera house was later banned from the country for being in possession of pornography. Another dream dashed on the shores of this arid land.

In the first few weeks I have started noticing the major cultural changes and nuances in behaviour and beliefs. I think I can spot the difference between a tourist and a local, so I think I am starting to settle in.

Sydney is big and it is not easy to keep direction. It has 14 streets named ‘Bent’ street (I counted). Visitors will queue up to buy their train tickets from the ticket booth whilst ignoring the machines. I suspect that it gives them a chance to confirm that they are heading in the right direction. Makes you think about the future of Internet shopping, does it not?

            I am a bit tired. I had chicken and salad for dinner. (Again) It is the cheapest thing in Coles and I can’t buy too much.

I haven’t heard about any of the applications I sent in, but hopefully soon. I don’t have a lot of faith in the recruiters – they all seem to be backpackers from England, so it is not easy to relate. I know that you can smell desperation, so I am trying to play it cool. It is a fine line between being keen and being annoying.

Miss you all. Love to the kids. And let me know if you got a home for Bugly.

That’s about it for now. Time’s up at the internet cafe, so gotta go.

Love you.

 

[1] Anna Imroth: Carl Sandburg (1878–1967).  Chicago Poems.  1916.

[2] Renamed Johannesburg International, and then in 2006 Oliver Tambo Airport

[3] A back packers lodge in Sydney

[4] South African unit of currency at the time (mid 90s): 4 Rand = approx 1 AU$

[5] Jeremiah 42:10-17 New Living Translation

[6] Matthew 7:13-14

[7] Mathew 12:30

[8] South Africans commonly referred to the initial entry into Australia as the Look See Decide (LSD) trip.