The liminal spaces of leaving
'Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.'
- Mary Oliver, 'Wild Geese'
In the hot, still, heavy-with-humidity mornings of Australia’s Top End, the autumn of London feels a long way away, as if a lifetime ago. After the months spent churning over the decision to move, and the months after that of seemingly endless logistics and reams of paperwork to complete, I am no longer in London. A fact both startling and somewhat exhilarating; the unknown future beckons.
‘The subject of where we are from is mostly not a two-second answer. It is a long conversation, maybe an endless conversation.’
– Deborah Levy, Real Estate
When I’m asked what I’ll miss of London, I find it hard to answer and usually, in something akin to pure panic, blurt out something about the transport system. In reality, I’ll miss the tangible – the sight of the Shard from my bedroom window, the brick-lined Georgian squares, swims in the pools and ponds of the Heath – and the intangible.
I’ll miss the icy sharpness of a clear, blue February day. The change in the air as the leaves turn and autumn slinks in. The sense of belonging when walking through memory-laden streets. The thrill of choosing a tube carriage where the doors align with a station’s exit. The particular quality of sunlight as it streams through spring blossoms. The joy of walking home across one of London’s many bridges, filled with the love of an evening spent with friends. The cool, winter air against my face.
But it’s also something beyond all of that. I’ll miss how London makes me think, feel, and act. The new perspectives, the greater confidence, the life experience. How can I begin to articulate all the ways that London has contributed to me? The city is an organism that’s woven its way into my cells so that I will carry the experience of being a Londoner with me, always. As Joy Crookes sings – you’ll never take the London out of me.
And when they ask what I will miss, how can I convey that what I got from London when I arrived – bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, rose-tinted glasses wearing – is different to what it gave me when I left it. In the middle: change. London’s changed me and the city’s changed of its own volition. And it will keep changing and I will keep changing. And one day I will return and see things in a new light, but I will always remember that London was once a city I called home.
The last two months in London are lived in a state of flux. Wrapping up a job and then culling my belongings to squeeze into six boxes to ship, slowly, back to Australia. Cutting off inches and inches of hair. Two flights cancelled. Tinnies in the park. A week of waking before dawn, ready to pounce on the government flight announcement. Trips to the post office and charity shops. Sheltering from a sudden downpour in Brockwell with a friend made through the writing of this newsletter. A Pavlovian response to the Gmail notification chime. Hot and heavy tears of relief. Big life choices. Canal-side lunches and lingering, life-affirming hugs. Wetland wanders. Bawling with a friend outside Camden station, clinging onto each other so tightly that when a woman asks for spare change, she sees our faces and apologises for interrupting. A sitcom-finale style farewell with housemates that became like sisters, knowing it will be years before we see each other again in person, unfathomable following the living-on-top-of-each-other, small-flat-in-lockdown experience. Persistent bewilderment: a sense of walking pace by pace through the spaces of farewell, disconnected from the emotional reality of it; too grand, too all-encompassing, too devastating to process it in real time.
It’s rare to be in a situation as untethered as I am at this moment. Sometimes the freedom feels terrifying - so many unknowns, a great gulf of uncertainty at my feet, stretching out as far as the eye can see, as wide as the mind can imagine. But at other times it feels impossibly freeing. I’m not tied down to anything, anyone, any place. Where there are uncertainties there are also opportunities. The future feels daunting, but it also feels exciting. As Julia Jacklin sings – everything is changing.
My final full day in London as a Londoner. An incomprehensible fact.
I get the tube to Russell Square, visit the Brunswick Centre, and then walk a walk I could walk in my dreams – back to the flat I stayed in as an impressionable teen. The one that made me swoon over London. The one that made me want to live in London, to be a Londoner. I don’t even need to think about where to go, which turns to make, which street signs to look out for: my heart leads the way from station to terraced flat.
There are times when the repatriation process is intensely lonely. It’s wholly up to me to make the decision, to do the research, to book the flights. I bear the brunt of the stress when the Australian government derails these plans. It’s sleepless nights tossing and turning alone in bed. It’s the carrying of the luggage of a London life down three flights of stairs, onto the train, and on to the airport in the dead of the night. Then, quarantine: a necessarily isolating experience.
I reach out to friends – rant and despair. I sometimes think – this might take more resilience than I have. But then friends offer up their shoulders to carry the burden; open their arms for the most comforting of hugs. Friends introduce me to groups of repatriating Aussies, and to friend’s sisters who’ve just been through quarantine. Send me song suggestions for the flight and a guide to pass the quarantine days. Message me in the dead of the night, send voice notes as I walk looping laps of suburbia. Their support wraps around me and carries me forward. As one friend notes, I’ve ‘got a whole army of people here helping’ me.
The train leaves from Waterloo and soon after I arrive at my Nan’s. In the days following, a wave of overwhelming grief hits: for London, for all the places I can no longer visit with ease, for all the friends who now live beyond the reach of a hug. As Laura Marling sings – I hope that we meet again someday.
Living on my Nan’s time, we eat dinner early and finish dinner early. I develop a new ritual: wash up, put my shoes back on, head out for an evening walk. The sky is low and slow here, hanging heavy across the squat bungalows. The streets are wider than London; there’s a different quality of space. Long autumn shadows streak across the ground. The air is crisp, cool, clear; the smell of wood smoke lifting through it.
There’s a peculiar and particular sense of finality that comes with the bureaucracy of folding up the edges of life in another country. The closing of bank accounts, the letting go of a mobile phone number, the ending of bills. No one speaks of these mundane acts of moving, so hidden away are they from the drama of packing, shipping, farewell dinners, and flying off into the future. Yet within their actions they speak of how settled I’ve been in London. Not in the same way as picnics and dinners with close friends can, yet there’s a lingering sentimentality to the life admin that I can’t quite process nor shake off. As with it all, the main process seems to be to surrender, taking it one step at a time: the mundanity, the bewilderment, and the heart-breaking grief.
In the gap between lives, I catch my breath, but the reality of the past year, eighteen months, four-and-a-bit years, also catches up with me, threatens to overwhelm. I swim in a sea of memory, watch as moments I haven’t thought of for months shimmer gently across the surface. Of sunset walks appreciating the skyline and commenting on how deeply London felt like home. Of Christmas dinners with friends, including a customary sprawl on the couch. Of long-held hugs. Of the clink of a cocktail-filled cheers.
The time comes, autumn begins to blaze.
I put my coat on, push my arms between the straps of my backpack, push my suitcase out the door.
I leave as the leaves turn.
‘In the mornings they woke to birds. The birds! The sound declared the day as belonging to a different country, even before you were fully awake, before your brain kicked into gear.’
– Jo Lennan, In the Time of Foxes
After a long, time-bending flight, suddenly – I’m back.
We’re escorted from airport to quarantine. The facility, euphemistically called the Centre for National Resilience, but also known as Manigurr-ma in the local Larrakia language, sits on the outskirts of Darwin. Originally built for FIFO (fly in, fly out) workers for the off-shore oil plant, it now houses jet-lagged repatriating Australians.
Quarantine as a palate cleanser, as a physical expression of a historical moment, as a chance to visit a new part of the Northern Territory. Quarantine as a chance to make the best of a strange situation, as a sigh of relief to be on home soil, as a deep end throw into the heat of an Australian summer.
I think of how my great-grandfather arrived in Australia over 100 years ago: slowly, by boat, the journey from London to Hobart taking two months across many seas, bypassing countries and continents. I wonder where he and his family lived when they arrived – a hostel, a boarding house, some other form of temporary accommodation?
In many ways, my current experience is not dissimilar. It’s a way of travelling and migrating that is very particular to its moment in time. I wonder – did his parents complete reams of paperwork like I’ve had to? Was he checked to see if he was bringing in any diseases to the country, as I’ve been checked? Was his health monitored throughout the journey, as mine has been?
I take solace in imagining our paths as running parallel to each other’s; surprising similarities despite the difference in time.
A storm rolls in. Dark grey clouds rumbling with the sound of the tropics preparing for the wet season. Fat drops of rain on hot tin roofs. The building creaking as rain pelts against the window. Trees dance in the bluster and then it turns. Blue sky evening and humidity once more sticking shirt to skin.
I put my mask on, making sure I have my door key with me, and step outside. Temperature check: still too hot. Retreat to the air-conditioned interior again. I’m not used to it – this heat, the full force of it, the wet stickiness of it, this close-to-the-equator latitude slicing open the day so that the air hangs and hangs and hangs.
Pink tinged clouds hanging painterly in the sky, their sheen deepening as the minutes tick over. The nurse told us when we arrived – ‘good sunrises, good sunsets.’ The variety of them delights – an endless stretch of sky, unseen in years of London living. Suddenly, it strikes me – there’s no wail of sirens, there are no city sounds. Instead, there’s the gentle murmur of other occupants in nearby cabins.
On our second full day in quarantine, it’s announced that arrivals into NSW will no longer need to quarantine from the 1st November. The news is discussed in a triangle between balconies, an informal tri-state meeting consisting of eye rolls and frustrated exasperations. ‘Quarantine is a thing of the past,’ the new Premier declares. The physicality of hearing the news while we’re unable to step onto our balcony steps, meant to reapply our masks between sips of tea on the balcony, is incongruous and jarring.
‘Coming back to the place you know: particular trees, the same grass, the ground you have known all your life – this is in the air. This is in the cloud. This is what the eyes follow, long after there is anything to see.’
– Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Grassling
The hallowed space of the morning quickly becomes my favourite time of the day. I sit on the balcony as parakeets chirrup, cockatoos screech, insects sing, and skinks scramble over rocks. It’s quiet, but for the birdsong. Warm but not stifling, not yet. The sky starts soft and cool before strengthening and lifting to a vibrant, all-encompassing blue. My British Grandad would always say that the sky felt bigger, broader, further away in Australia. I watch as the sun rises, pouring warm yellow-orange light onto the corrugated steel walls of the cabins opposite, and find myself agreeing. This big space between ground and sky in which my heart has room to soar.
Reality hits and what little novelty there was wears off when the army and police begin to patrol and monitor us throughout the day. Balconies begin to empty, everyone finding it too depressing, too prison-like to remain outside.
Being here is already a tough situation, now made tougher. Kids cry out in the heat of the afternoon. Frustrated rants fill the group chat. Someone notes that only the members of our group can truly understand what we’ve each been through – lockdowns in London, the stress of trying to get tickets and filling out the required paperwork to repatriate, the subsequent quarantine. There’s a sense of solidarity mixed in with empathy.
Once again comes the reminder – no matter how much it can feel like it: we are not alone.
Most evenings, I take the rubbish out at sunset, all the better to enjoy the vantage point from The Bin, a small but necessary joy. One evening, after a call with a friend back in London, I venture out a couple of hours later. I look up – the sky an inky black. Except there, to the west, is a bright light.
I stop in the middle of the path and watch to see it move, thinking it’s a plane travelling by. It remains steadfast and bright and then, only then, do I realise that I’m looking at a star. I’m in awe as I turn around and spot more. They’re the first I’ve seen in almost five years. Here, under the Top End sky, they are bright, sharp, and illuminating.
My breath catches in my throat as I slowly make my way up the path and back inside to my room, my mundane quarantine evening cut through with a slice of the extraordinary.
In my final months in London, I find myself writing the names of streets and places I want to visit just once more in lists on my phone. I want to soak up everything. I want to capture each detail of London and commit it to memory, cram as much as I can into the rapidly narrowing space of my final days. As if by doing so I’ll have made the absolute most of London; that is to say, that I’ll be ready to leave.
Yet when the time comes, I find that I am not. And that is when I realise: I never will be.
But I do it all the same.
For I have come to understand that I will always want one more lap of Victoria Park, one more film at the BFI, one more wine at Caravan.
One more picnic in Battersea Park, one more ramble through Peckham Rye, one more takeaway from Shanghai Surprise.
I will always want one more walk across the Thames, one more tube journey to London Bridge, and one more walk down Bermondsey High Street, past restaurants with their windows flung open, all the way back home.
‘There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.’
– The Naked City, 1948