Homes

When I went travelling for months with only a backpack, something happened to the concept of home. It became an “other” place, far away, immediately nostalgia-wrapped. It was unattainable.

I was homesick. For the first weeks, desperately. In a bleak, high Thai hotel room, I lay awake through the night staring at the ceiling fan, my shocked body gathered around what felt like a huge empty space. I didn’t know how I’d get through it.

The way I, like, perhaps many other 18-year-old backpackers, got through was by obliterating the need for home. After a few months, I marvelled at how I had ever filled a whole room with stuff. What was it? What did I use it for? Would I ever want to own things again?

Yes, I would. I do. Home is important. Maybe that’s what holidays are for.

In August I travelled by train from London to Paris and from Paris to Berlin. The second part was a sleeper service, a cabin just for me and my partner, where we drank a celebratory beer and ate pistachio nuts. There was a foldable table, on which we laid out a picnic bought in a cramped French supermarket during our hour in Paris.  Olives, sausage, goats’ cheese, butter, bad baguette, red wine.

We fell asleep. Mine was relatively sound – perhaps I’m used to trains. His was disturbed. A long train journey through Germany, through the night, is a reminder of past journeys, taken by others.

The cabin was dark and close.

It was long after midnight, but someone was banging on the door, and shouting. We struggled up, confused about where we were, needing to find clothes in the dark. They didn’t want to wait, they banged and shouted – the words, to German-less us, incomprehensible.  It was probably the border, we would need passports, perhaps. We opened the door. A black-clothed policeman saw us and immediately apologised. I’m sorry, he said in English, go back to bed.

Travelling, other spaces become proxy homes. It wasn’t hard to imagine, trying to fall back asleep, what it would be like to be woken at home, forced to open the door.

The next night we spent in a tent, inside another tent. The two after than in a Berlin flat. Then there was a night in Milan, in the room left behind by a grown-up daughter, we guessed.

Then for seven nights we had a home again, though we had to seal the space against mosquitoes and chase wasps away from the window, where they would sleep in clusters each night in the warm space between glass and shutters. Those shutters opened out onto a view of Lake Trasimeno and the mountains on its southern shore. It looks like a painting, I kept saying, forgetting each time about how paintings and landscape made each other.

We left, reluctant but excited because the next stop was Rome.

And yet. In this, our last resting place, I couldn’t relax. The apartment, bang in the centre of the city, was loud with the echoing talk of a restaurant below and pungent with the scent of cat. The cats were grey and friendly, the restaurant benevolent. But the nights were too hot, the streets too crowded with tourists and empty of Romans (it was August, they had escaped).

I love Rome. But the Colosseum was bundled in scaffolding, the road that runs past it dug up and closed. The Trevi Fountain, somewhat monstrous at the best of times, was stifled in plastic and dry and yet, still, a trickle of tourists passed by on a specially-constructed walkway to take photos of it.

Morons, we thought. Yet we were tourists too.

Or maybe the problem wasn’t the city’s endless, in-your-face beauty, or the too-friendly waiters, or the warmth. I once thought that that backpacking trip, all those years ago, broke something which wouldn’t knit again. But maybe, weirdly, I was homesick.

We got back to London Heathrow after dark had fallen, caught the Tube to Finsbury Park. London’s faces, lined up in Tube carriages, are diverse like the faces of almost no other place. Its fashions are wild and various. Tube travellers read, listen to music, sunk in their own full worlds.

From the station, the 254 bus, which stops close to the end of our road, and runs bafflingly often. Outside the house, the sunflower grown from a seed had bloomed.*

While we were away, black mold had grown in the bathroom, but otherwise there were no disasters. We’d cleaned before leaving and the house had its particular home smell, which isn’t describable but contains the smell of rushes, and perhaps candlewax, something like rice and clean washing.

The sheets were cool, clean. Due to a piece of planning brilliance, only just coming into its own, the bank holiday weekend was all before us. We left in order to return.

 

*Today I came home to find that the sunflower had been killed, its flower cut off and its stem snapped. But it was splendid while it lasted.

To Long Island

I went to Long Island, a place connected in my mind with The Great Gatsby, without my ever being sure that’s where the novel is set.

Before leaving, I planned and wrote notes, using the internet in my rented apartment, knowing the roaming charges would be high and that my phone would likely run out of battery anyway (it did).

It was clear the journey would be long. If I’d known how long I might not have set out; and so, sometimes, it is better not to know.

First was a walk to the Subway, and a circuitous route to Queens on the F-train, travelling into Manhattan in order to get out of it again. At Forest Hills, I changed stations, and caught the Long Island Railroad, destination: Babylon.

On the platform, eating muesli I’d made and packed earlier, I thought about missions, and the pull of the sea. I’ve found myself on so many station platforms, down so many unfamiliar streets, trying to get somewhere, only because I’ve decided to. The act of deciding, and then making it happen, is powerful. I’ve done this across cities, even whole countries. I don’t know why, except that it is a search for something, even if that thing is only the feeling of having searched and completed a search.

On the plane to America for this trip I watched three films, chosen quite randomly, but with oddly overlapping themes: love, and its preculsion because one of the two people involved is married; travel, usually to Europe, in search of something. The one that I’ve thought about most since is Summertime, in which Katherine Hepburn plays an American woman in search of something in Venice.

Hepburn is a strange actress who I’ve never quite got: beautiful, in a skull-beneath-the-skin kind of way; abrasive; fascinating and unwatchable by turns. In Summertime, she does one thing brilliantly, which is to portray the hopeful, receptive loneliness of someone open to all life’s possibilities, but unable deeply to encounter them. She’s alone in Venice and, we get the sense, slightly too old or too odd to fit in with any specific ‘scene’. The city’s beauty charms her, and she flings herself at it like an exuberant bird, and bounces off stunned, and still outside.

I know this feeling so well – of being overwhelmed by an emotion, in unfamiliar places, that is partly made of happiness, and partly of a kind of despair at being unable to share it.

The Long Island trains are buffed steel and bullet-like, painted with the slogan We Serve With Pride. After the hot and boring subway, the view was refreshing, but not really pretty – an endless urban sprawl, almost unchanging for an hour. We arrived in Babylon and waited in a huge car park as buses arrived and left, sometimes dropping off passengers but resolutely never picking any up. There were no timetables, no signs. As the group of obvious beach-goers grew, we started exchanging smiles, a few words of encouragement. We waited the best part of an hour.

I’d finished one book, an account of a massacre in Angola by the journalist Lara Pawson, and was feeling discomforted and sad. I would have liked to go for a walk, but the bus would come any moment, wouldn’t it? Pawson’s writing is very detailed, like a film. After you put the book down you notice more: the stickiness or dustiness of tarmac, the hues and pores of peoples’ skin.

The S-47 arrived, at last, and someone gave me his old ticket because, after all that planning, I didn’t have change. On plastic blue seats, and with thick plastic windows fractured in places to a matrix of internal edges, glancing with light, we trundled through suburbia.

my neighbour and I remarked to each other, This is nice. But we really only meant, nicer than waiting.

I would start a new book on the beach, David Copperfield, as inconcruous a read in affluent America as Pawson’s recreation of 1970s and modern-day Luanda had been. The gray flats of Great Yarmouth in my head, and the pale sand reflecting the sun around me.

After twenty minutes on the bus and without warning, the highway turned into a bridge across the sea – nothing on either side but water, the openness extraordinary after hemmed-in New York and the bottled-up trains, and the bus and the Babylon car park. We dipped onto land, and then off again, another bridge, out to Robert Moses State Park, which I only found out later is also called Fire Island.

The bus turned, stopped, let us out to wander into the dunes, drop our bags and city shoes in the sand, strip. Three hours of travel made entirely worth it by five minutes in the sea.

No pictures, as my phone by that time had died. No way to text friends, and tell them about how the waves broke over me, or the shadows of the gulls, or the taste of the cherries I brought and which were warm from the sun. Just the excess of feeling to store, to recall, to try and describe in sentences that formed and fell away for the three hour journey home.