Kate Mathieson - Ways to Come Home

ALSO BY KATE MATHIESON

Tea and Travels: Tales of a Nomadic Life

Songs of Birds

First published in 2016 by Kate Mathieson

This edition published in 2017 by Impact Press

an imprint of Ventura Press

PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

www.impactpress.com.au

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Copyright Kate Mathieson 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

The Lost Hotels of Paris from REFUSING HEAVEN by Jack Gilbert, copyright 2005 by Jack Gilbert. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Author: Mathieson, Kate

Title: Ways to Come Home / by Kate Mathieson

Category: Memoir

ISBN: 978-1-925183-66-5 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-925183-95-5 (ebook)

Cover design: Working Type

Internal design: Brugel Images and Design

The paper in this book is FSC certified. FSC promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the worlds forests.

We need the tonic of wildness.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, life in the woods

PROLOGUE

A faded lithograph of a bridge. A smear of peach paint below. One long brush stroke. As if someone made a mistake. Because the rest of the place is as white as fake teeth. White walls. White ceilings.

There are no other pictures in Ward E.

People with pens carry them like scythes. They point them at the sky, emphasising their words, and joust at each other when they disagree. Mostly they scribble furiously and scrawl our stories across paper.

The pen people want to know Why? Why? Why? and everything is punctuated with this incessant ticking.

Secrets fall out.

When your world falls apart, you can run. Or bunker down, pull across the hatches and squat, hunched but standing, like Atlas. But sometimes, helplessly, you find yourself with nowhere to run and not enough strength to eat a spoonful of old oats floating in milk. And when that happens, when the scaffolding of your life begins to buckle well, then, sometimes

You find yourself here.

Where everything is upside down. Your bed, your dreams, your life. You wait by the phone.

But the person who put you here the one who calls herself your mother does not call.

OUTSIDE MY window a cherry blossom rubs against white shutters. A haze of violet wisteria, thick and round, wraps itself around a wooden gazebo in the park across the street. The smell of spring new jasmine wafts gently up to me while in the distance an indigo shroud builds. A sweet storm is coming.

Down below, Parisians stride along the cobbled street. To the boulangerie. To late lunches. To the mysterious places Parisians go. Across the road, a crepe maker takes a break from his hot skillet and lights a cigarette, his feet propped on a milk crate.

Do I have time for a quick walk by the Seine before the storm comes? Something tells me I dont as the crepe maker tosses his cigarette into the street and pops up the brown awnings of his shop before hes lost from view. Cafes close. Shutters are drawn. Outside tables are packed away.

Clouds gather. Spring rain lashes, leaving the hot roads steaming. Splatters across my window trying to find a way in. I finger the white envelope. Tickets for tonight. I am excited. Vivaldi. A quartet: two violins, a viola, and my favourite, the cello. Strings, someone once told me, strings have a way of getting inside us. Strings open the heart.

When the kettle clicks I pour a coffee, strong and black. For a while I listen to the rain on the roof, on the windows, sizzling on the roads below. Finally, I open the royal navy cover of my unlined, uncreased book. Blank cream pages stare at me.

Tomorrow, London. My bag is already packed. A few weeks later, Singapore. Hong Kong. Is this it? Am I finally going home?

I write in the middle of the first cream page:

I am always on the border. Moving leaving going to. On the edge of something.

ITS NOT my first time here.

Ive travelled across Europe the past few years, yet I keep returning to Paris. There is something about this city that calls me. Is it the delicious smell of lemons? Of blossoms? The way the light falls, veiling the entire city like a bride of the sun, mysterious and golden?

I first visited three years earlier with a friend, Adrian. He was a seasoned traveller and I was deposited in Europe for the first time.

We rose with the midday sun, strolled down alleyways without maps and ate our way through Paris. I had never eaten so much. While I showered in the small hotel bathroom, Adrian selected fresh baguettes and wheels of impossibly soft cheese that seemed to spill onto my bread and spread themselves. The takeaway coffee was perfect, strong and sweet, but strangely served in thin white cups (water cooler ones) that burnt through the plastic and scalded my fingertips.

We sauntered up and down the Seine, crunching over gravel. Cherry blossom petals scattered in the breeze, a flushed carpet for us to tread upon.

I awoke from a mid-afternoon nap to find Adrian standing in our hotel room with two strong lattes (double cupped) and an assortment of French patisserie bites. Morning delights.

A sense of freedom emerged. I could do anything today I could stay in bed if I wanted; drive to Berlin; take the overnight train through Switzerland. I could, I could, I could ...

Possibility became a drug. Bold and innocent, I felt it could lead me anywhere.

So I let it.

IN THE heat of that first European summer I found myself moving north to Edinburgh. Summer, strong and sunny, did not last for long. It burst in full bloom as I arrived, then retreated just as quickly. There was a sharp month of autumn when leaves turned crimson and shed into piles knee-deep. Winter quickly closed in. Grey clouds gathered, and snow began to fall.

I started a casual job at the local hospital, secretary to a professor of surgery. The days were enjoyably silent, patients slept and doctors prepped for operations. Mostly I typed, answered an occasional phone call. At times the only sounds I heard in hours were the whir of the kettle and the nurses soft shoes, whispering down the hallway.

The city slumbered all those months. The sky smudged through three simple transitions pitch night blackness; the silver translucence of dawn; and sometimes, for a few hours, the eerie light of ashy day.

As winter deepened, the city became a place of eternal night. Stars hung close to the earth. Snow fell, lightly at first, landing silently on the ground. Fresh layers of powder sat waiting each morning, white and new. Up at dawn, I made the first mark with giant snow boots that squeaked while the rest of the city slept.

Navigating the streets was an art form I had to learn quickly: avoid the sludgy snow with tyre marks. Take care of the black ice, hidden like secrets, treacherous and slippery. Many times I fell heavily, before learning to throw salt on the pavement to wear away the ice. Bruised elbows. Puffy knees. Jarred ankles.