Airmail, page 29
And it’s not like this is something that was sprung on us at the last minute. Nobody suddenly put a gun to our heads and said, ‘Choose, now. You’ve got five minutes to make up your mind.’ This is the culmination of a 35-year discussion of who we are and what we aspire to being. Ever since we first started talking seriously about a devolved parliament and voted for it in a referendum back in 1979 (although we didn’t actually get what we voted for till eighteen years later) we’ve been asking ourselves what it means to be Scottish in a modern world. What are our values? What do we stand for? What do we aspire to be? One of the reasons we’ve seen the literary flowering of the last thirty years – everything from Irvine Welsh to Iain Banks, from Ali Smith to Ian Rankin, from Liz Lochhead to Edwin Morgan – has been our urgent desire to find answers to these questions. We needed to uncover our identity to ourselves, never mind the rest of the world.
I have to say I am proud of the place we have come to. One of the reasons I left Scotland in the late 1970s was that it was misogynistic and homophobic. I was pretty sure that I couldn’t forge the kind of writing life I wanted for myself if I stayed. It’s not that I was daunted by the idea of fighting for feminism and for equal rights. I’ll take on anybody, as I suspect you know. But I looked around at my female friends and I saw the price they paid for fighting the good fight in terms of their own work and their own lives and I was too selfish to be willing to do that. You might say I took the easy way out. I would answer that by saying that my work speaks for itself.
But here’s the thing. This year, I moved back to live in Scotland. And the country I moved back to is in many respects a very different place from the one I left. Once the Scottish National Party has completed its change of leadership, of the four main parties in Scotland – the SNP, Scottish Labour, the Greens and the Tories – three will be led by women. Two, by people who do not self-identify as straight. That was unimaginable thirty years ago. Equal marriage is on the statute books and someone like me, uncompromising about my sexuality and my politics, can be a board member of a league football club.
Even more than that, this referendum wasn’t about narrow nationalism. I’m a proud Scot, but I’m an inclusive one. The diaspora, the ones who left for work or love or just wanderlust – they’re Scots, no question about that. But this referendum, this campaign, was not about ethnicity or heritage. It was about the Scottish people, and that means those who chose to live within our borders on 18 September. We’ve learned to embrace difference. It’s no coincidence that the demographic with the largest proportion of ‘yes’ voters was Scottish Asians. They believe, after listening to the experiences of friends and family in other parts of the UK, that being Asian in Scotland is preferable.
And still, we let ourselves be bribed by the Westminster politicians with their empty last-minute promises. They never came near us until it started to look as if we really were going to walk out the door to a complicated new future. And then they came running. It was that moment when you’re ready to walk out on somebody you don’t love any more and they fall down on their knees and beg for one last chance. Right then, they’d promise you anything. Diamonds from Tiffany. Christmas with your parents. Never forgetting another birthday or anniversary. Aye, right. And of course those promises came larded with another set of promises of the bad things that would happen if we kept on walking. You’ll lose your pensions. You’ll get kicked out of the EU. You’ll have no stable currency. Your welfare system will collapse. You’ll be sorry. Oh yes, we’ll make you sorry. You’ll never see the kids again . . .
And we let ourselves fall for both sets of promises. The bribes and the threats.
For many years now, we have adopted the song ‘Flower o’ Scotland’ as our unofficial anthem, roaring it out at international sporting occasions and when we’re overseas, plugging into that sentimentality that generally afflicts Scots far from home. It contains the lines ‘Those days are past now, and in the past they must remain, but we can still rise now and be the nation again.’ On 18 September we forfeited the right to that anthem.
And yet. And yet I am by nature an optimist. I don’t think this is the end of the road. I think it’s just another station along the way. I think they’ll let us down, the politicians with their promises. They’re already backtracking on when they can deliver what they offered us. They rely on us having short memories. But what they haven’t reckoned with is an entire nation that has never been so politically engaged and energised and determined never to suffer a democratic deficit again.
We may have missed this opportunity but we sure as hell won’t miss the next one.
Dear Jana Wendt,
When I was young, I loved you. 60 Minutes was hard-boiled current affairs, and you unveiled the truth like a magician whipping a satin cloth off an empty box. Your piercing eyes, your signature head tilt, that unforgettable, inescapable voice, which slowed down the more you knew you were right. You opened the world to me. And it was because of you that I missed a life-changing opportunity at the age of twelve.
It was 1987 and I lived with my mother and her new partner, who at the time let me call him my ‘fake dad’. We lived in the small beachside town of Brunswick Heads, on the northern coast of New South Wales. Population: hardly anyone. My mother and fake dad were a wild pair of hippies. Few Brunswick Heads locals will forget the time they rode their water trike down the main street to pick me up from school, big yellow plastic wheels clattering on the footpath. I know I’ll never forget it.
My fake dad drove a giant Kingswood, wrote seminal books about building mudbrick houses and always laughed with his mouth open. He carried a staff and used to trek into the forest to talk with the Goddess. You don’t meet many men who do that. They had a ball together and he’d make my mother laugh so hard I got to know her oh-my-God-I’m-about-to-pee-I-know-I’m-in-public-but-there’s-nothing-I-can-do-about-it face.
I adored them. And yet, overall, I thought they were a pair of fuckwits. I guess it’s worth reminding you, Jana, that the child of a hippie tends to be the conservative one. I was the Saffy of this absolutely fabulous family. The Alex P Keaton. I’d just turned twelve and was becoming rebelliously straight-laced. They were putting flowers in each other’s hair and dancing to the crackling sound of the bonfire. They were having fun, loads of it, but they were more like my slightly retarded older friends than my parents.
Maybe that’s why I loved you so much, Jana. With your glamorous blow wave and I-dare-you-to-mention-my-glamorous-blow-wave stare.
You were the authority I felt lacking in my life. So how did you cost me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? Let me explain . . .
On that fateful, life-changing day I was in the lounge room doing something ’80s and my mother and fake dad burst in, giggling like schoolgirls, both dressed like Cyndi Lauper. They had an exciting announcement. We were all. Going. To. India. For three months!
They’d take me out of school – I wasn’t being taught anything useful, anyway – and we three would travel to India, land of ancient gods and timeless wisdom, of religious ecstasy and enlightenment, an unparalleled whirl of culture, sights, sounds and tastes. We’d get lost and find ourselves! Climb mountains, pray under waterfalls, paint elephants and dream of tigers!
I swivelled round in my chair, looked at their delighted faces and said, ‘No way. I’m not coming.’
They were aghast, turning from me to one another with open mouths over and over again, like carnival clowns. But here’s the thing. I’d recently seen a 60 Minutes report about white kids overseas being kidnapped from their hotels and sold for ransom. You showed some horrifying scenes, Jana, of filthy kidnapped children working in laundries, toiling away their lives, scrubbing concrete floors, or something. I don’t remember specifics, but I was convinced that it would happen to me. Frankly, I couldn’t see how my technicolour mother and fake dad would be able to prevent me from being stolen and sold to a laundry. No way, Bombay.
Of course, they tried to convince me that you were propagating sensationalist rubbish passed off as current affairs, that my fears were utterly ridiculous, and that I would be crazy to miss out on such adventure. I simply refused to believe them. That’s the unshakeable faith I had in your investigative journalism, Jana. I turned down the chance to expand my mind at a formative age, in the company of two of the most open minds and fearlessly carefree souls I’ve known. And to get out of school for three months.
I farewelled them and stayed in Brunswick Heads with the Livingstone family. Julie Livingstone was my best friend and, at the time, her family ran the town’s video store and TV repair shop. They were all pretty cool. Everything was going really well until halfway through my three-month stay, when every single member of the Livingstone family became a born-again Christian.
It started with Dad, then Mum. Then they made us all go to the church with them. The guy at the podium would invite anyone who wanted to accept Jesus Christ as their saviour to come on up. I was shocked when, one by one, the Livingstone kids got up and signed on. Little brother, then surfer brother, and finally Julie. Everyone around me was suddenly seeing the light and joining the gang, like in the video for Devo’s ‘Freedom of Choice’.
I remember after Julie came and sat back down, all moist in the face from her water-bath baptism thing, she was greeted with such celebration and praise. There was joyous adoration, gentle face touching and long, weird, loving looks from both her parents at the same time. And I guess I wanted that too. I missed my family, I missed my mother’s about-to-piss face, my fake dad’s open-mouthed laugh. I wanted the congratulations and adoration of everyone around me. But when I finally went up to get all reborn in the eyes of Jesus Christ my saviour, all I got was a ‘good on you’ shoulder shake. No weird, loving looks for me. No tears.
So I figured if I was going to bask in everyone’s beaming adoration, I’d have to impress them. I’d have to become a really good Christian. I wrote ‘God’ on my pencil case and crossed out ‘The Clash’. Everything I did had a Derwent rainbow around it – I even turned one of my other friends into a Jesus nerd. As the weeks went by, the Livingstones got more and more into it too, obsessive almost, especially about The Devil. I was truly terrified of being burned alive in that merciless place called Hell.
But things took a really weird turn when the Livingstones sought to spread their Christian spirit throughout the town. Mr Livingstone started to censor the movies people rented from his video store. He’d scrunch up the tape when it came to unholy scenes, to edit out the evil. People were outraged, slapping their copy of Highlander on the counter and complaining that half the movie was just static. He’d raise an eyebrow and purse his lips in judgement, with a serves-you-right-for-sucking-on-the-teat-of-Satan-through-your-choice-of-box-office-hit look. Brunswick Heads was in uproar – the video shop was all they had. When The Witches of Eastwick came out, everyone had to drive to Byron Bay to rent it.
The whole family was in on it – even the cool older brother had swapped his surfboard for the New Testament. I carried a copy around too, although I never read it. It was too difficult – the words were tiny, printed on Tally-Ho-paper-thin pages.
Meanwhile, as Jack Nicholson led Brunswick Heads to Beelzebub, my mother and fake dad were writing to me about their utterly wild time in India. They gazed at the Himalayas from slow trains, they danced with hundreds of strangers in the back streets of ancient cities, they got high with secretly decadent swamis . . . They even got married, in an extravagant Indian wedding, which I did not attend, because I was busy being frightened of life, convinced that they were on a one way trip to Hell.
I remember the first vision of my returning mother, getting off the plane in Coolangatta. She was wearing a sari, her eyes were glittering and charcoal, she wore thick bands and filigrees of silver on her skin, and she literally had bells on. When she walked around Brunswick Heads again for the first time, I remember her saying, ‘Australia is so boring. There’s no life on the street – nothing.’
I made them come to church with me, to see if I could perhaps prevent the fires of doom consuming their souls. It was like taking two cats to a mouse convention – they went straight in for the kill, tearing apart the logic and completely humiliating me. I felt distant, disconnected. I no longer knew who I was or what I believed in.
The more tales they told, the more I understood what I had missed. The penny dropped, and so did the New Testament, with a thud on the floor. As the Christian wore off, I wish they’d forced me to go to India.
What I’d probably needed most was a baptism by fire, not by tap water. And I realised that if there are two kinds of crazy – my parents on the one hand and the Livingstones the other – it was clear which set of nutters was more attractive. So even though it probably wasn’t appropriate for my mother to replace my bible with a pop-up Kama Sutra, and I winced with embarrassment when she insisted on wearing her ankle bells to the supermarket, I knew I belonged beside her. In a tutu and a cowboy hat.
But none of this was your fault, Jana. You’d just inadvertently tapped into my young fears, my kneejerk conservative streak. Like with the Ghostbusters video from the Livingstones’ store, I chose not to see the whole picture, in case some of it was disturbing, or challenged what I thought about the world. But I’m sure you approached life with those penetrating eyes open. When you filed that story, you probably whipped off the shoulder pads and slipped into a sari. You probably returned to 60 Minutes smelling of cloves and patchouli. For all I know, you did bongs under the table with Negus during the ad breaks. And, when the opportunity came, you didn’t shy from hosting A Current Affair.
From that point on I tried to live my life without fear. So I left home and moved to Sydney with my best friend to go to Newtown Performing Arts High. And sure, I became a bit of a fuckwit, but hey, life is for the living and it’s actually more fun if you do it wearing bells.
Dear Missed Opportunity,
Where were you? I kept my eyes peeled for you at every turn. I asked everyone where you were. Everyone said you’d be right along, so how did I miss you after that?
You see, the ‘Missed’ part I’m familiar with: people, buses, home. I know it so well I sometimes think ‘Missed’ will pursue me to the gallows. The chair that will forever be empty. The cause of an overpriced cab. The prick in my innards when I’m far away from where I like to hang my hat. So, along with the many footballs I’ve never managed to kick, the points of reasoning I somehow couldn’t quite make click – not to mention the toilet bowls overshot when being violently sick – I don’t see how I’d have passed ‘Missed’ by.
‘Opportunity’, too, is not unknown. I learnt to read when I was three. By taking the bargain of a biscuit for each word I could spell the universe fell open on my knee. Because of it, in the night I am never alone. When in need, not without recourse. When wallflowering at parties I think, Hell is other people, and give thanks for the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. Look where I’m standing now – Bali – reading this letter aloud. Twenty-six letters and their permutations did that. If learning to read isn’t the greatest example of ‘Opportunity’ snapped at, I cannot imagine what is.
Even so, I’m still left here wracking my brain for the opportunity I missed. The ‘what I might’s or ‘could have’s if I’d chosen elseways or managed to pick up my bus-catching pace. Which leads me to conclude that I may not believe in you or, rather, that life just opens in time as it does. We already carry every version of ourselves within, and they all chose the same road to checkmate. So many slips and falls and fortuities have led to where I’ve ended up. What tragedies I’ve escaped I don’t care to know, while successes forgone are not worth their salt. I think, dear missed opportunity, you’re like those cab fares I cannot afford; and why should I bother regretting them when the bus I’m on is travelling the same road?
I imagine writing this letter to a woman called Miss Giri-giri. In Japanese, giri-giri means ‘really close call’ or ‘just made it’. The expressions ‘by the skin of your teeth’, ‘a sticky situation’ and ‘just barely’ also describe the meaning of giri-giri. In short, it is a last-minute attitude. The power of the last minute, I call it. As a last-minute person, there were missed opportunities through my life.
A confession to Miss Giri-giri.
Dear Miss Giri-giri,
I hope this letter finds you well. And I do hope that you have time to read this letter, because I know that you are always busy. I know that there are so many things you have to handle at a time. I remember you always describe yourself as a giant octopus with eight tentacles. But the main problem with those eight tentacles is most of the time they are too busy to procrastinate.
Well, this time I am writing to you because I just finished my PhD dissertation. I just sent the final draft to a professional proofreader and editor and am waiting for the final comments from my supervisors before I officially submit the dissertation. What I need to do now is to take a break and look back at the journey of the last four years. A journey that I want to share with you.
