Kirsten Alexander

I arrived home in Melbourne yesterday afternoon. The heading is my itinerary, but a list of pit stops can only tell so much. It doesn’t say the 25-hour commute from Canada to Australia was better and worse than the trip there. Worse because I was aware, with still-fresh clarity, of what was about to hit me – and to the body it is an assault. Better because I was coming home to my family, and the trip had been perfect. Flawless, I say when my parents phone, as if I’d anticipated flaws. It does surprise me that, aside from the flying part, nothing went wrong in over a fortnight. Not one thing. The mountains won my undying adoration afresh every day, as did the staff, the other writers, the river, the deer. All things of wonder.

Coming home, I travelled by bus from Banff to Calgary Airport with two women from my writing course. I sat beside a window that squeaked like a rodent. I asked if they could hear the noise from their seats. The sun hit my eyes. Somehow they both knew to sit on the other side of the aisle. I moved, rearranged my bag, laptop, puffy jacket, then moved again. I worried their last impression of me would be that I am a fidget.

At Calgary airport, my suitcase was over the weight limit.

‘Take something out that weighs five kilograms,’ the check-in woman told me, looking past my head at the queue. ‘Something small and heavy. Put it in your carry-on bag.’

I tried to think about what might be small and heavy. ‘My pillow?’

She stared at me. ‘Pillows aren’t heavy.’

‘Mine is.’

‘Small and heavy,’ she said.

I was terrified to open my suitcase for fear I wouldn’t be able to close it again, no matter what I removed. It was so full the seams were in danger of ripping. I put my latex pillow, a bag of makeup, my manuscript and a book on the scale.

‘Liquids,’ she said.

I put the makeup bag back in the suitcase then sat on it to close it, struggling with the zip and making certain not to look at the people waiting in the queue. I thought about the insanity of moving things from one bag to another while still bringing the same amount of weight onto the plane. I didn’t tell the check-in woman I was thinking this.

My two writing friends waited patiently for me on the other side, watching. I apologised repeatedly. We said goodbye. They headed to the other side of Canada. I headed to the lounge. I had eight and a half hours of sitting and fussing and flying ahead of me before I even left the country.

Which brings me to airports. I understand why people dislike the design term ‘way finding’ but in airports it makes sense. I tried to find my way. In Vancouver the signs were helpful, expressive and clear. The staff who guided travellers through the labyrinth were chatty and upbeat. In Sydney the few signs on offer were short, arrogant and knowing. The staff, cool.

Or snappy. The first words I heard when I disembarked in Australia were from a flight attendant admonishing a passenger as I walked past them. ‘You were called to the desk. Everyone’s been waiting for you.’ I didn’t stop, but hoped the elderly woman who’d sat across the aisle from me Vancouver to Sydney explained to the snippy hostess that our plane had circled above the airport for an hour, waiting for permission to land. She couldn’t possibly have heard her name called down below. They shouldn’t have been calling her name at all.

As I walked from one Sydney terminal to another, I noticed there were no clocks. There were clocks in Canada. Surely telling people the time in an airport, when time is so relevant, wouldn’t be giving in too much?

I was irrationally annoyed at leaving a beautiful place for a series of loud, crowded, harshly lit buildings where I knew no-one. I was cross that I’d packed my watch, that my carry-on bag weighed a tonne, that this was how people are moved across the world. I thought about cattle being shipped in crowded crates from Australia to Indonesia. I thought about crowded refugee boats crossing the paths of those ships on their way to rejection in Australia. I watched people starving in Somalia on an airport television as loudspeakers announced our flight would be slightly delayed. I thought about the fact my dog is getting fat because we feed him too much. The large and small of the world swam around my sleep-deprived brain.

My time in Banff was flawless. I wrote. I listened. I walked by a wide, crystal-clear, gurgling river that lived the words poetry in motion. I saw mountains that changed colour and mood daily. I breathed cold alpine air. I met lovely, smart, warm people. I came home to lovely, smart, warm people.

Every time I travel, no matter how long the journey, I say three words repeatedly, and I know them to be the truth: happy and lucky and blessed.

Happy. Lucky. Blessed.

I heard the word ‘police’ three times on my birthday this year. I thought I was done with that.

The first mention was my fault. A colleague asked me what I’d done for my previous birthday after I mumbled something about this one being an improvement. I replied that last year I’d spent the morning in a police station in Barcelona, the afternoon in a castle, and the early evening at the airport, moving from one snaking line to another with hundreds of other people stranded by industrial strikes. Dave and I and our two boys, Liam and Milo, were at Barcelona Airport for five hours that night, begging to be put on any flight out of Europe, preferably the same one.

The airport was crowded with people who’d lost all notion of being part of a community. They were fighting for themselves and their families. Liam and Milo showed more grace, goodwill and fortitude than most of the adults around them. By nine o’clock they’d had nothing to eat since we couldn’t leave the queues. When we finally did take a break to get them some food, Liam made a cardboard frog from a drink coaster. Milo giggled and found joy in eating junky food from a small container. We were put on a flight to Hong Kong leaving the next morning.

We ate my birthday dinner at a Barcelona airport hotel at around ten-thirty at night. I don’t eat meat so they struggled to find any food for me. From memory, I ate salad.

I recall that I’d waited for self-pity to show up, like an unwelcome but inevitable guest. Turned out, I didn’t feel sorry for myself at all. I think I felt someone should, so I did mention at several key moments that it was my birthday. There was too much peripheral noise and action for it to register though. And whenever it did, there was a distraction – a surly airline worker, other people’s conversations, a purple hotel chair. Our flight debacle came at the end of a few weeks’ travel, some of which had been fraught, all overwhelming, so perhaps we were full and could feel no more.

I had cried at the Las Ramblas police station in the morning, partly because I’d braced myself to come face to face with a typical Spanish cop, someone tough, burly, corrupt and jaded. Someone swarthy who’d call me a liar and a fool and shame me in front of my children. These police meet a lot of dumb tourists who’ve been robbed. I knew that must be tiresome. The policeman we met wasn’t like this at all. He was charming.

I told him I’d been robbed. I hadn’t. My two beautiful rings had not been taken from a cafe table as I’d looked the other way while applying sunscreen. They had slipped from the lap of my sundress as I stood up on a beach in Sitges. I was tired, and my partner and I were punch drunk from a dreadful argument, and I could barely walk without fear my knees would buckle beneath me. This, of course, passed. But that afternoon my rings dropped onto the sand, then we packed up and left, ate a lunch that was greasy and flyblown but allowed us to meet an intriguing American couple who had fled to Europe to escape dramas back home, explored the narrow stone streets, and caught the train back to our Eixample apartment. By the time I realised my rings were gone, we’d left Sitges far behind.

The policeman was enormously sympathetic. He was slender and neat and graceful. He held my hand and told me I would need to grieve for my lost belongings. He showed us a keychain he’d bought from Tiffany’s when he visited New York and said he would be devastated if something were to happen to it. He leaned across the desk, locked his brown eyes on mine and said it was good I was crying, it was healthy, and that he worried terribly about people who held themselves so tightly they could not release their pain. He asked Dave several times if he was sure about the amount he’d nominated as the value of the rings. He seemed to think it was not enough. I loved him for that.

The second time I heard ‘police’ was when a colleague asked if I’d called 000 lately. He and I had done that inadvertently when I asked for his help sending a fax through our monstrously complicated photocopy machine. This machine can do all sorts of things but is reluctant to. It exudes arrogance, and I was in too much of a rush to try and win its favours so I asked the highly skilled head of our IT team to help me. He has a better relationship with machines than I do but dislikes faxes and pressed the 0 button enough times in frustration that rather than sending a fax we called the police. We both found this riotously funny, even a week later.

The third time I heard the word ‘police’ was on my car radio. I was driving home from work in the dark in thumping, heavy rain. Lighting split the sky repeatedly. The roads were crowded and the red, white and yellow car lights  sparkled like stars in the wet. There was a story on the news about how a woman had killed her two-year-old son that day. She has accidentally put her foot on the accelerator rather than the brake and slammed into the veranda of the family home where he son was sitting with his grandfather, awaiting her return from her outing. I turned the radio off partway through the coverage of the story and drove home in silence.

Stand up and put your hand in front of your eyes to shield yourself from the Mediterranean sun. Push the wrong button. Put your foot down on the wrong pedal. Become one day older. Life is small moments of enormous import.