Lessons in Letting Go Read online

  I chose the quietest, most deserted nightclub I could find. Dael wrinkled her nose at me and I tried to avoid making eye contact with her.

  ‘It’ll fill up soon, it’s just because we’re here so early.’ I hoped I was lying.

  Dael moved onto the dance floor and started jiggling to the music. She was the only one out there. I watched our handbags. I wasn’t cool and carefree anymore, I was back in high school, sitting on the sidelines trying to pretend I liked it. The jig was finally up. I lost sight of Dael and when she reappeared, she had two men in tow. They were carrying drinks for us.

  ‘They are French! This one is called . . . actually I don’t know. It’s too loud in here. I think that one—’ she pointed at the taller of the two ‘—is called Van Damme.’

  Van Damme grinned shyly.

  I smiled politely at the Frenchmen, waited for Dael to sip her drink and when she didn’t fall unconscious, I sipped mine as well.

  It turned out neither of them spoke perfect English and unless we were booking a single train ticket to Calais or needed to find the nearest école, my French was going to be useless. But they seemed sweet, so Van Damme and I spent a delightful twenty minutes yelling into each other’s ears and saying ‘Pardon?’ a lot which, thankfully, meant the same thing in both languages.

  Dael didn’t let the language barrier stop her at all and gabbled away happily to Van Damme’s friend, who had the more plausible name of Fab. He didn’t say anything in response, he just stood there grinning. Dael was wearing a pair of tight, low-cut white jeans and an equally tight, low-cut white top. If I was a man, I wouldn’t have cared what she was saying either.

  ‘We went white-water rafting yesterday and Corinne head-butted a Korean!’

  That was not strictly true. I didn’t head-butt him, I fell backwards in the raft and smashed my helmeted head into his face. He was very polite about it and there was no blood.

  ‘Then we went surfing and she cried!’ Dael was laughing.

  Okay. That was definitely not true. I got dumped by a wave, hit in the head with the surfboard and I inhaled a lot of salt water. I wasn’t crying, I was choking. Mostly. Thankfully, because it was so loud, neither of the Frenchmen was able to understand what Dael was saying.

  Van Damme and I moved to the back of the nightclub and found somewhere quiet where we could almost hear each other. It didn’t really help as neither of us had spontaneously learnt the other person’s language in the few metres we had covered. In the end, we amused ourselves by teaching each other the names of various diseases in our own languages. By pointing at imaginary dots all over my face and pretending to scratch at them, I found out that chicken pox is called varicelle, and by miming first my hands and then my legs falling off, I discovered leprosy is called lèpre. Van Damme told me the French word for herpes is herpes, you just had to say it like you were Pepe Le Pew. Thankfully he knew that off the top of his head and he didn’t attempt to act it out. Although yelling ‘Erpeez!’ in a crowded nightclub was probably not endearing him to anyone except me. Eventually, we ran out of illnesses we could successfully mime. I tried for measles, but it looked too much like chicken pox and Van Damme was getting frustrated because I couldn’t figure out what illness involved flapping like a bird. We were struggling for something else to talk about when his face lit up and he said, ‘Ahh! The French word for the seal—you know,’ he clapped the backs of his hands together and made a honking sound, ‘the animal of the sea, yes? The French word for that is phoque.’ It sounded exactly like ‘fuck’ and I laughed like a child. Apparently Van Damme and I shared the same infantile sense of humour.

  At the end of the night Dael and I exchanged phone numbers with our new French friends and promised to have dinner with them the next night. I would never do something like this in Australia. In fact, I would never do something like this anywhere. Normally I would have come up with a million reasons not to have dinner with two complete strangers with whom I had to mime to be understood. This was a mixture of Dael’s influence and a clear-cut case of the holiday crazies. Still, it was a lot more fun than sitting in my hotel room, consulting a list and deciding whether I would spend the next day visiting an agricultural museum or attending a lecture on the principles of Balinese shadow puppetry. And besides, Van Damme had the bluest eyes I had ever seen.

  Lying in bed mulling over everything that had happened since I’d arrived, I realised I had not mentioned Thomas, the Bastard Man or my miserable house full of stuff to anyone else, not even once. It hadn’t occurred to me to do so. I was enjoying being the kind of person who didn’t have baggage, the kind of person who just got on with life and enjoyed the moment. The best part was, I wasn’t pretending to be someone else. Freed from all of that, I really was a person who enjoyed life and making new friends and doing stupid things. Maybe when I got home I would be brave enough to throw out some of my crap. Maybe I could be this person all the time.

  Dael and I turned up to the restaurant early the next evening and toasted each other with champagne. This was going to be our last night together. Dael went back home tomorrow and I moved to Nusa Dua for one final night. Van Damme and Fab turned up and we did that European kissing-on-each-cheek thing that I always messed up by saying ‘Mwaaah!’ loudly into the ears of the person I was kissing. After I had finished deafening everyone we went to our table. The good thing about travelling with someone as effervescent as Dael is that you are never stuck for conversation. Without the Mojitos and the noise of the nightclub, Van Damme, Fab and I were all too shy to know what to say. If it had not been for Dael, we probably would have eaten in silence and then left.

  ‘So Van Damme . . . Van Damme?’ He was not paying any attention. Dael tapped him on the arm. ‘Van Damme?’

  ‘Me? My name is Jordan.’ Jordan laughed. ‘You think I am called Van Damme? Like the action man?’ He laughed again and pretended to karate chop a bread roll. He explained everything in rapid French to Fab and then we were all laughing and Dael was flicking her wrist and saying, ‘Who cares?’

  We ate and drank and Dael waved her fork around and chastised Jordan and Fab for not listening to the right music, not going to the right clubs and for living in the wrong part of France. Eventually she and Fab wandered out of the restaurant and down to the beach for a cigarette. Left on our own, Jordan and I were struggling, yet again, to find something to talk about. After a few minutes’ silence he asked what kind of music I listened to. I tried to think of a band or composer that he would know. Satie? No, I would sound like a wanker. Bruce Springsteen? No, I wouldn’t be able to cope if he disapproved. Belle and Sebastian? No, they just sounded French because of their names. Then I remembered the one French singer I knew apart from Maurice Chevalier.

  ‘Do you know Camille? I love her.’

  It wasn’t a lie. After hearing one of her songs on the radio I had immediately bought the album, even though she sang in French and I couldn’t understand a word of it. I listened to it over and over again and finally, when the curiosity became too great, I attempted to translate the lyrics. I used my old French textbooks and dictionaries from school (priding myself on the fact that I had not thrown them away) and I watched Amelie again just in case one of the characters happened to say something similar to the lyrics in any of the songs. When I was still left with gaping holes, I jumped online and found a translation website. I suspected that it was not really giving me the right answers when it translated ‘La jeune fille aux cheveux blancs’—a song title I was pretty sure meant ‘the young girl with white hair’—as ‘the rats are eating mess tarts’.

  Jordan’s eyes lit up when I mentioned her name.

  ‘She is my favourite!’

  That was the kind of luck I never hit upon. Jordan and I spent the rest of the night talking about Camille and writing down the names of bands that we thought the other one would like. We swapped email addresses and he suggested meeting up again the next night. I looked at him. He was beautiful. How far exactly was I willing to take th
is whole holiday crazies thing? Almost as quickly as the idea came to me, I dismissed it. He was not only cute, he was also a really genuine and sweet man. It seemed impolite to use him as a human dildo. Part of letting go is knowing when enough is enough.

  Before I went to bed that night Jordan sent me a text. ‘I had fun ma jolie australienne.’ I was happy to let go of a lot of things in Bali but I was keeping that message.

  The next morning Dael and I held each other for a long time and both of us had tears in our eyes when we said goodbye.

  ‘Please keep in touch.’ Dael wiped at her eyes. ‘And please get better underpants.’

  When she left, I felt at a loss. I pulled out my phone and looked at the message from Jordan again. I nearly called him. Nearly. And then I packed my bags and moved down to Nusa Dua to spend one final day completely by myself, eating, sleeping and working on my tan. I would be fine on my own.

  My favourite Camille song is called ‘Pour que l’Amour me Quitte’. I had translated this myself as ‘Until the Love Leaves Me’, which Jordan had told me was more or less correct. I was so excited to find someone else who loved Camille’s music (and more importantly, knew what she was singing) that I had grilled him relentlessly on all the words and phrases in all the songs that I had not been able to decipher. I doubt translators at the United Nations worked as hard as he did that night. There were only two words in ‘Pour que l’Amour me Quitte’ that I had not been able to figure out: pagayer and décrocher.

  ‘Well, the first means this,’ and Jordan had mimed paddling. ‘So, in the song, she is doing this away from her broken heart. Yes? And the second, décrocher, this is harder for me.’ He frowned and his blue eyes swept across the restaurant and out to the beach.

  ‘It has many meanings, but in this song, it means “letting go”.’

  Even the French were telling me it was time.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The cold blast of Melbourne’s mid-autumnal air whistled past my ears as I stood outside Tullamarine airport, suitcase in hand, looking for a taxi. I thought that arriving back home would be miserable—the end of a holiday usually is—but not this time. This time I wanted to jump out of the cab at every shop I knew and run inside calling out, ‘I’m home! And guess what? I’ve got my shit together!’

  I’d been a pile of self-absorption for too long. Now that I’d burnt away all the bad bits, I was ready to start anew. Even walking into my overstuffed apartment couldn’t depress me; I knew what kind of person I could be if everything went and I liked that girl. I wanted to give her room to breathe.

  I didn’t waste any time. As soon as I’d unpacked and called Adam to tell him I was home, I opened my wardrobe and pulled out the first box I laid my hands on. This time, I asked myself questions as I went, calling to mind how good I felt in Bali. Did my stash of novelty socks make me feel adventurous and spontaneous? No. Out they went. Did the fluorescent pink blush I wore in the mid-eighties say anything about the person that I wanted to become? Definitely not. Out. What did the street directory from my first car say about me? It said I was a hoarder. Burn it. I was an archaeologist excavating my own life, determined to dig myself out of the rubble. Within a week I had cleared out half of my wardrobe and it was neither painful nor arduous. It was liberating.

  I stood back and surveyed my handiwork. Even though I had achieved so much, I was a little disappointed by what I saw; a lot of stuff had still gone back into boxes. I had a feeling that I probably wasn’t being as brutal as I could be. Still, I’d thrown away more than I ever had in the past. It was a monumental start.

  As I was going through a pile of photographs, the phone rang.

  ‘Hey, it’s Jonathan.’

  Did I know a Jonathan?

  ‘From Canberra. We met at that pub?’

  ‘Oh! Yes. Right.’

  What? I vaguely remembered meeting him at some party or other. He worked for the government or the United Nations or Today Tonight, I couldn’t remember which. Obviously I’d thought enough of our conversation to give him my number because here he was now, cheerfully babbling away on the other end of the phone.

  ‘I checked with the UN, and if you still want to go to Jordan and tour the refugee camps, I can arrange it for you.’

  My eyebrows shot up so high, they hit the back of my neck. Clearly he thought he had rung Angelina Jolie. Had I really said I wanted to go to the Middle East and visit refugees? I cast my mind back about four months. Oh dear. Now I remembered. We had talked about asylum seekers in Australia and I had mentioned that it would be interesting to see what the conditions were like for these people in other countries. Jonathan had said that if I wanted, he could probably arrange for me to take a tour. I’d smiled enthusiastically and said that would be great. I never thought he would follow through, I was just being polite.

  I looked around my flat uselessly, like I was expecting someone to leap out from behind the couch, take the phone from my hand and do the dirty work of letting this guy down on my behalf. When no one magically appeared, I scrunched up my face and murmured, ‘Oh. Really? That’s . . . great.’

  How was I going to get out of this? I didn’t want to go traipsing around dangerous, desert-riddled parts of the world. If I said that out loud, however, he might think I was heartless. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t care what I said. He’d probably only made one phone call.

  ‘Yeah, I put a lot of work into it and rang a lot of people. They need to know quickly though. So, you still want to go?’

  I broke out in a sweat.

  ‘Sure, of course!’

  About seven years ago I had parachuted out of a helicopter because a friend had called me a coward when I’d said I didn’t want to. Now I was agreeing to go to a Middle Eastern country that bordered Iraq—on my own—because I didn’t want someone I had met once to think I was insincere. Obviously I had a lot more problems than just hoarding.

  I hung up the phone and calmed myself down. This should be easy to sort out; I had a couple of weeks up my sleeve, that was enough time in which to come up with a plausible excuse. Perhaps I could say that I couldn’t afford to go—although I didn’t want him to think that I was poor. Or I could say that I was busy—although I didn’t want him to think that I believed myself more important than refugees. Or perhaps I could say that my mother was sick—although I was too superstitious to say that in case it came true.

  When he rang back a week later I still didn’t have a good lie prepared, so I half-heartedly mumbled my way through a conversation about dates of arrival and departure. Then I started getting emails from a woman at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, asking me to explain the purpose of my trip, what I wanted to achieve, who I wanted to see. She was very businesslike and very intelligent and about to be seconded to the most-recently bombed part of Pakistan. Now I had to say yes so that I didn’t appear flaky. The trouble was, I was flaky; I had a drawer full of bookmarks from Sunday School that I didn’t dare throw out in case Jesus saw me do it.

  In the end I agreed to go to Jordan because I was too gutless to say no. Perhaps it would be good for me. After all, I had come home from Bali promising myself to embrace adventure and on top of that, the spooky coincidence of meeting a man called Jordan in Bali and now being presented with the opportunity to travel to a country of the same name felt like kismet.

  Feeling as if I was falling from a great height, I cancelled the show I was supposed to be doing in Perth and booked the flights. I got myself a visa for Jordan, I booked into a tiny hotel somewhere in the suburbs of Amman—the kind of thing a suicide bomber wouldn’t consider a worthwhile target—and updated my will. I also applied for life insurance and travel insurance and wrote my blood type on the top left-hand corner of my passport, the inside of my wallet and my driver’s licence. I had to work hard to stop myself from writing it on the waistband of all my underpants as well.

  Four weeks later, I was standing in line in Queen Alia International Airport some time aft
er midnight (sober this time), wearily holding out my passport and visa and hoping I was in the right country. Thanks to the vagaries of using air miles to book a round-the-world ticket, my trip had taken forty hours. I was beyond discombobulated. At around the thirty-hour mark I had started to hallucinate. I am positive that I watched a kitten eat a tarantula on the in-flight entertainment system. I can remember thinking that it seemed odd that a kitten would be out in the desert like that, on its own, eating giant spiders. It was unnerving. It was like watching a six-year-old girl in a party dress gnaw on a raw leg of lamb.

  As with Bali, arriving at night meant that I couldn’t get my bearings. As the taxi driver headed for Amman, I squinted out the window. Apart from the highway we were driving along, it was almost completely dark. At least the road signs were in Arabic, reassuring me that I was in the right country. Or near it.

  My hopefully terrorist-proof hideaway was sequestered in a middle-class residential area and we arrived at it via a bamboozling array of one-way streets, winding up and down hills past large houses, apartment blocks and what appeared to be a wooded park, locked behind a high barbed-wire fence. When we arrived I saw an unadorned, cream-coloured three-storey building. I unloaded my bags, climbed the two steps to the entrance and proceeded through the metal detector in the doorway. There was no separate place for my luggage to pass, so I dragged it through the detector as well. I set off the alarm. I stood just inside the lobby, waiting for someone to come over and search me. Instead, the tired-looking night clerk impatiently beckoned me towards him. I looked doubtfully at the metal detector, moved inside and checked in.