Chapter Three

3


Mother of a country

Monday, August 15

The same Singapore Airlines 747B which had taxied out of Brisbane International in oppressive heat and humidity taxied into Heathrow in depressive sleet and frigidity. What a difference twenty four hours of business class excess makes. Doubly disorientated by the wintry conditions outside my window seat porthole and a brain sludge of wine, Cointreau and fitful sleep since our Singapore fuel stop, I lurched from the plane and caused a minor commotion at Carousel 3 when I attempted to enter England with the wrong bags. What odds someone else would have black Samsonite suitcases?

Customs took one look at me and strip searched my luggage. This was no great surprise. In a former life as a short back and sides, bespectacled pretty boy, I could have smuggled heroin, guns and tropical birds into any country you could name and Asian girls into careers they couldn’t. Then, at age thirty, I discovered advertising and knew the pretty boy image had to go. To pull focus from the face, I grew a lot of hair – a pencil line of it under my nose, a tuft of it under my bottom lip and a lot of it on my scalp. The effect would have been all a bit too “Fu Manchu does Woodstock” were it not for the spectacles, great round tortoiseshell things that went halfway down my nose. Still, I now looked sufficiently artsy and untrustworthy to be taken seriously in advertising – even more so after I met Gabriel and discovered tattoos. Nothing drastic for a man of my age – just the four Chinese symbols for Ai, Lu, Shou and He (love, prosperity, longevity and harmony), thick and blue and stacked down my right forearm like unfinished games of Hangman (there was also a golden teddy bear on my ass). The downside of all this was being taken for a Class A drugs courier.

HM Custom’s luggage groper, now intimately acquainted with my choice of underwear, begrudgingly gave up his frenzied frisk and waved me in to repack my bags; bags I had packed so lovingly prior to departure, bags that now looked like frothing epileptic clams.

‘That’s my job is it?’ I said, hands on hips over the mess.

‘Yes, sir, he said.

‘This is my reward for not smuggling any drugs into England?’

He lost interest and moved on to groping a new set of bags.

‘Doesn’t that seem the least bit strange to you?’ I called after him. ‘If you’d found even a trace of heroin in there, there’d be twenty guys out here repacking my bags like their lives depended on it!’

‘Let me get this straight,’ he said standing straight and eyeballing me. ‘Are you asking for a cavity search?’

I winced visibly. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m absolutely fine with the way things are.’

Out I trundled from Terminal 3 into the open air and a congested collections area of grey concrete and greyer skies as London surged in on me in all its incomparable Londonness: black London cabs and red double decker buses and hotel minivans and posh coaches bound for places like Hyde Park, Oxford Street and Piccadilly; all of them sucking in passengers like lint off a windowsill and moving briskly on.

I angle parked my trolley against a brick wall, sat cross-legged on cold asphalt and rolled my first gasper for sixteen hours, shivering in the early morning gloom, the desire to rip open a suitcase and don a jacket outweighed by the urgent need to top up my tar levels. While I smoked the first I rolled a second and called Gabriel on my mo-bile to let her know my plane had landed at the right altitude. I told her I loved her and couldn’t wait to see her. She told me same and I was immensely relieved. She said she wished she’d been there to meet me and I concurred. I chose not to remind her that she and five hours of high speed driving were not an ideal combination. I signed off with ‘See you this afternoon,’ and wished it were this morning.

It was ten shivering minutes, about thirty London cabs, ten minicabs, four London buses, nine coaches and the efficient hoovering of maybe three hundred people before I moved on again.

Persistent cold drizzle had set in by the time I collected my Avis rental car from an expansive yard adjacent to the terminal, my Avis car rental consultant trying harder than seemed necessary to inform me that England had indeed had a wonderful summer despite how it might appear outside and that the entire south east was currently in the grip of a record breaking drought and stridently enforced hose pipe ban. A proclamation delivered with such palpable pride, I had to wonder if telling England they had a drought was like telling an ugly person they were good looking.

My Avis rental car was an Audi A5 station wagon (estate as they charmingly call them here) and it cost me twice as much as a standard wagon, such as a Ford Focus or Vauxhall. Well, I wasn’t skimping on the most important day of my life. In any case, the estimated five hour drive to North Yorkshire could easily balloon out into ten hours, twenty hours – three days even – with my sense of direction and map reading skills. Best my bum be nestled in a soft, forgiving bed of scented leather than some nasty hard fabric.

As if to validate my excess, I proceeded to get horribly lost before I’d even left the airport. For two increasingly stressful hours I drove round in circles, most of them velodrome-sized roundabouts with more exit options than a Karl Kevorkian pre-op, all of which carted me off in directions I’d never been before, deeper and deeper into Heathrow hell.

Four hours after my early morning touch down and in a rain slick, headlights-on murk, I parked the Audi in a small empty car park outside a large drab warehouse, skipped inside and handed in my paperwork. I took a seat in the waiting room and waited. And waited.

And waited.

I rolled a cigarette and smoked it outside, pacing and peering in through the windows. I went back inside, sat and waited some more.

‘Is there a problem?’ I finally asked at the counter.

‘No problem. Just the usual procedures. It can take quite a while if the right people aren’t here to sign everything off.’

I sat again and waited and discovered I was now jigging my legs in nervous anticipation.

Just when I concluded a respectable amount of time had passed for me to go outside for another cigarette, double doors marked ‘STAFF ONLY’ slammed open and two men flew out at speed. They weren’t running as such. More they were leaning back and laughing and going ‘Whoa!’ as they attempted to rein in what was running ahead of them: two large, very eager and very furry imports; one black and tan, the other beige. Kurt and Courtney had landed in England.

As if I was going to leave them in Australia. Flying a dog anywhere wasn’t cheap. But a dog is for life and if that life took you elsewhere, it took the dog along with it. I made an unbreakable pact with my dogs, a pact that cost me four thousand Australian to keep. They were the hardest part of the decision to come here. Nothing to do with the money, everything to do with sticking boxed dogs in cargo holds and hoping they survived the trip. Most do, my vet told me, but I worried myself sick anyway. That’s why I was scared of losing them. I was also worried about the climate here and how two quintessentially Queensland dogs would cope with a sudden and inexplicable lack of heat. Here and now as my two beloved furry friends bound up and I hugged their heads, the first hurdle had been cleared: they were safe, they were well, they were happy. If anything they looked fresher for their ordeal than I felt for mine.

And now that their continued involvement in this little saga has been confirmed I shall describe them to you: Despite quite different paths and parentage, Kurt and Courtney were of very similar size and weight. They were what anyone owning a St Bernard would call medium sized dogs and anyone owning a Pekinese would call huge. Kurt, the more scholarly of the two was a solid dog of essentially Alsatian configuration and Rottweiler colouring – splodges of orange about the eyes and nose, mostly black everywhere else. I would describe him as big boned. Others would call him fat. Courtney on the other hand was an essentially beige and very muscular beast with a white speckled face that didn’t know if it was a bull dog or a bull mastiff. While somewhat goofy, she was also far from stupid. Having stumbled into our midst a mere puppy, she had learnt all she knew from Kurt, not a bad thing at all. As dogs go, Kurt was a superb role model: calm, gentle, giving and worldly wise. Courtney had successfully taken aboard all these traits except the worldly wise bit. She was more Scrappy Doo than Scooby Doo.

Kurt and Courtney had been the sole reason it had taken six months to get out of Brisbane. It was called Quarantine, a mandatory six months period required for entry into England (a period they could thankfully serve at home). As they stepped outside onto English soil for the first time and shat on it, it was a huge relief to see them alive and untarnished. And it more than compensated for the last agonising hours lost and alone in Heathrow. Furry therapy. I was calmed, enlivened and ready for the road.

For Gabriel. And Family Hogg. Chicken mutilating residents of Skipton-le-Beans, North Yorkshire.