Risky business

It started with the tram ride home from school. We used to get on and off along the way, over and over and over again so as to eventually coincide with the boys we admired from the Jesuit school further up the line. From afar. We never approached them nor they us. But we saw them. That was enough. For the time being.

This wasted a lot of time but cost us nothing. We had concession tickets that allowed for multiple journeys. These were neatly tucked into our blazer pockets snug behind the school crest and motto ‘holiness, wisdom, strength’, qualities we did not embody. We were about thirteen.

At some point, we developed a pattern of getting off and going to a fish and chip shop where we would pool whatever coins we had, tossing ten or twenty cents into a school beret (junior navy velour with the crest and motto on the front). Whatever amount we managed to scrape together, we spent on fried disks of potato, known as potato cakes in Melbourne, scallops in Sydney, unknown elsewhere, I imagine. With our warm parcel in hand, we’d scurry off to a back lane unseen by any but the seediest of locals to eat them. They were often so hot they burnt our tongues. Sometimes it was raining. We were always scared.

This was high-risk behaviour on two counts. To be seen eating in the street in school uniform was considered a sure sign of being on the slippery downward slope to the scrap heap of life. Though the lane was well away from their stomping ground, there was always the chance that some vigilant old girl (as in ex-pupil but also as in old) would spot us and phone the school to express her outrage and disappointment that standards had fallen so low. So, it was an act of derring-do. I’ve relished eating in the street ever since I left school. Smoking, too, when I still smoked.

But there were bigger risks involved than public disgrace (or the gaining of a certain kudos among non-risk averse classmates) in morning assembly.  Children had disappeared from a beach in broad daylight. A perfect summer’s day, a crowded beach. Three children. A girl not much younger than us and her younger sister and brother spirited away. They’ve never found them. So, we knew that could happen even in posh school uniform. If you hung out in dank lanes. If no one knew you were there. If you were where you shouldn’t be. There was always the risk that you might disappear.

There was more risky business ahead of me, but not for a while and not in Melbourne, which I always found menacing. No late-night walks through parks for me. No hitching to Sydney or Adelaide.  I was scared alone at home in my parents’ large house on the corner of two busy streets. I was not at ease in that house even during the day. Once when I went to answer the doorbell there was no one there. And later we were burgled. We came back from a trip to Sydney to find the front door open. The pitchfork my mother had been keeping under the bed – my father had been away, and she had been getting phone calls with no one on the end of the line – propped up against the bedroom door. The back door was open too. The police said we must have interrupted the burglars.

No, it took the anonymity of European cities and travel between them to reawaken my teenage taste for risk-taking. I packed plenty of risk into a trip to and from Norway and Denmark to visit friends I’d met in Crete. I was fleeing the humiliating end of a relationship but I hardly knew these people and they welcomed me to sleep on their sofas somewhat begrudgingly. At least I didn’t have to bed down in the railway station and then head back to London with my traveller tail between my legs (pun intended).

The Oslo friend insisted I vacate her tiny apartment during the day while she was at work. She hardly knew me, after all. It was early autumn but already very cold there. One day, when I was out wandering the icy streets, I saw a man I’d met in Athens the summer before. There too I’d been wandering through the city on my own. The man - let’s call him Yourgos. but that was not his name - and his friends had invited me to join them at a long taverna table in the Plaka. They’d finished lunch but the raki was flowing and the buses were on strike, so I sat with them and then went back to Yourgos’s flat by the beach where I let him ply me with more raki. He put his Walkman headphones on my head as I sat on the balcony in the hot sun. I’d never seen (or heard) a Walkman before. He had a small braid hanging down his back, spoke fluent English, was very handsome and had good taste in music. He lived most of the year in Bali, he told me. Afterwards, when the buses were running again, we went back into the centre of Athens so he could book a plane ticket to Denpasar.

And there he was sitting more than a year later at another table but this time in Oslo. I stopped and had a coffee with him. Afterall there had been no harm done, no hard feelings. Or not many and not much though my memory was hazy even later that same day in Athens. It could have been the heat and the raki but I’ve always wondered what else. I have a memory us slipping and sliding on a leather sofa and his sister coming into the room. Maybe she had been there all along. Maybe I wasn’t in any danger but of all the risks I’ve taken that one comes out almost on top. An afternoon spent with a complete stranger who could so easily have made me disappear as strangers sometimes do. But Yourgos was happy to see me in Oslo, recognised me before I recognised him, remembered my name but was oddly not at all surprised to run into me again.

I had taken a bus from London, two ferries and several trains to get to Oslo. My return journey was from Copenhagen, where I stayed a night or two with another friend, now very uneasy about his live-in girlfriend (never mentioned in Crete where we got together or Hydra, where we spent a couple of weeks), finding out how we had met or why I’d come to visit.  This time it was the Magic Bus to Amsterdam. There was a four-hour layover before the bus to London connected with ours. It was cold in Amsterdam too and there wasn’t even a café in the dismal bus station. A Dutch boy I had sat next to invited me back to his place, where he promised to cook soup. It sounded a lot more enticing than sitting on a bench in a freezing wind in the bus station, so I went with him. I think it might have been raining too. He had a bedsit room in a house with those Dutch lace curtains in the windows. It wasn’t far to walk, and he had an umbrella and was pretty normal-looking. Whatever that means.  He cooked the soup, which was delicious, and then walked me back to the bus station. When we got there, he started lecturing me on the dangers of going back to complete strangers’ flats in foreign cities. At night! He was fully in the role of ‘nice guy concerned for my safety’, the naïve Australian in big bad Europe. But I couldn’t help but feel that, unlike Yourgos, he actually might have wished me harm but had somehow resisted the temptation to act on the impulse.

I boarded the Amsterdam-London bus and took the only vacant seat next to, as chance would have it, a woman I knew to be a Melbourne counter-cultural celebrity, though I pretended not to know who she was. She had been, and maybe still was at that point, the lead singer of a women’s rock band called the Stilettos. We chatted away and I told her about my evening with the boy who cooked me soup and my unease when he started to warn me of the dangers of lone travel and accepting the comfort of strangers. She said I reminded her of her friend, an Australian writer famed for her novel all about risky business. There’s a chapter in the book called aqua profunda, deep water. I was hugely flattered to be likened to this writer, who had also gone to a school with a uniform and a school crest with a motto. Maybe the Melbourne celebrity could see a ghost of me in my school beret and blazer despite my bedraggled state.

I was only going as far as Canterbury because I was staying with friends, very welcoming friends, from Melbourne, who lived about ten miles into the Kent countryside. There was a bus service, but it obviously didn’t run at night and it was after midnight when we got to Canterbury. I tried to call my friends from the callbox, this was long before the days of mobile phones, but their phone was out of order or off the hook. This time there was no one inviting me back to their flat for soup or sex and drugs and rock and roll. I got out my sleeping bag and bedded down as best I could in the small, sheltered space between the ticket office and the concourse. I’d probably been there for little more than an hour when a cleaner came along and said it was more than her job was worth to let me sleep there and that I’d have to move to one of the wooden benches exposed to the elements. I shuffled off in my sleeping bag and huddled on the only bench that wasn’t actually wet from the rain that had been falling earlier. The cleaner finished up, glaring at me threateningly as she marched off.

The hours crawled by and despite being alone at night in a bus station, I don’t remember being afraid. Just tired and cold and bored. So, I was quite glad when a boy a little younger than me turned up and asked if I’d mind his joining me on the bench. He was chatty with a kind of camaraderie of the road. He didn’t seem to think anything of the fact that I was alone in a sleeping bag on a bench in a bus station. He also seemed to know the lie of the land much better than me, though I had been in Canterbury quite a few times. He knew places to go to keep warm, to shelter from the rain and not get moved on by heartless cleaners or security guards. He suggested we spend the remaining hours of darkness sleeping or, in my case, resting (I was now wary of these comforting strangers) in a skip outside a supermarket. It was filled with cardboard boxes and was warmer than the bus station bench. Warmer still, he informed me, would be the railway station waiting room which would be open for business at 7. We headed over there and toasted our bums on the heater until it was time to head back to the bus station where I could get the first bus to Upstreet where my friends lived.

There was a café and I bought my comrade a cup of tea and some toast. He had no money and I didn’t have much. He wanted nothing from me but my company. He hadn’t even expected me to buy him the tea and toast, assuming that I was not much better off than him, a homeless drifter. I wish I could remember his name, this boy who lived in the streets and knew how to manage without disappearing.

A few months after that risk-laden trip, I moved from Kent to London to mind the flat and cat of friends of my Kent friends. It was in Notting Hill and had leopard skin wallpaper and funky furniture but no central heating, only calor gas heaters and a paraffin stove.  The owners, my friends’ friends, had gone to India for a couple of months. I shared the flat with two women who both had proper jobs of sorts, one with a courier service, the other with the London boat show. I was working too, but casually, cleaning the houses of wealthy Londoners, people with staff but who were one or two short and hired me in for a morning or sometimes a whole day. My hours were flexible, so it fell to me to stay home and wait for delivery of a calor gas cylinder.

There was a bit of paraffin left but not much and it was cold. It was January. The cat, who might have provided a source of warmth was very wary of us only appearing for meals and running back up the stairs to her hidy hole as soon as she finished. The morning wore on and the paraffin stove flickered as the fuel ran out. And then the doorbell rang. I bounded down the stairs and flung the door open. It wasn’t the gas man.

At the door was a blond man who asked if my friends’ friends were home. I explained that they were in India, as I’d already done a couple of times to visitors who’d wandered up the hill from Portobello. This one told me he had just come back from Paris where he’d seen a painting by the woman of the house in an exhibition (she was a painter and her chap had been in Fellini’s Satyricon as a teenager. These people had considerable artistic credentials). I invited him in because I was cold, because he knew my friends’ friends and because he was drop-dead gorgeous.

I made us a cup of tea. Maybe the gas man came and Jess, as he told me his name was, helped me fit the cylinder and get it going. Maybe not but the room seemed warmer with him in it. We talked a lot that afternoon. As he was leaving, he took note of the phone number, ostensibly to call my friends’ friends when they got back from India.

After he’d gone, I saw that he’d left his tobacco, a full packet of Drum purchased in Paris and much cheaper and better than what was available in England. Golden Virginia was never a patch on the Douwe Egbert tobaccos.  He phoned that night and asked if he could come back and get it the next day. It was probably a rouse, but I was intrigued and beguiled.

When he came back the next day, he suggested we go for a drink. He took me to a pub and we drank pints of real ale. My experience of London up to that point had been trudging from cleaning job to cleaning job, too poor to even catch a bus, so the pub with its hanging baskets and convivial atmosphere dazzled me. When the pub closed, I invited him back. Despite my two flatmates sleeping in the same leopard-skin wall-papered room, he ended up sharing the sofa bed where I slept with me.

That was forty-three years ago to the day. He was a very risky business – still is -  but we’ve stayed together. Maybe because of living a little on the edge I stopped feeling the need to risk disappearing in strangers’ houses or in mean streets. A sheep in wolf’s clothing, a blessing in disguise. A not entirely comfortable stranger.