Something I wrote to my mum for her last birthday

I forced my brothers, sister, dad, wife, my Oma Tineke and Aunty Michelle to write stories for mum that I turned into a book, which we then gave her for her birthday in October last year. This one’s mine, about a trip Mum and I went on to Europe in 2008 to go to her sister’s wedding on the southern coast of Spain. After visiting London on our own and travelling through Spain with our other relatives, the two of us stopped in Helsinki before arriving back in Australia.

We were in Helsinki for only two days. You had organised a hotel for us to stay in, and I remember the airport being tiny. I could make out the tall and thin trees in rows and clumps (which I now know are called copses) along the side of the road into the city. The ambient light was very low, even if the sky seemed bright when I looked straight at it. We were only a few days away from being home. I was anxious to see Lauren, I had missed her 21st birthday, and for some reason I was also anxious to see Winston, who I imagine was very young in 2008. At one point, in the car with Peter, Freke, Oma Tineke, you and me, I was sitting at the front. Uncle Peter was driving, and even though I remember seeing very little of the Spanish countryside, it was too bright (I spent a lot of time whining to you that I didn’t have any sunglasses, even though you had taken me to what were probably more than ten different sunglass shops — in each town we stopped in), I still liked spending time up there in front of the big windscreen with Uncle Peter. After a long silence, he leant over to me and in a secretive voice said, “look Nick, did you see that?” “No,” I would have replied, “see what?” “NWs, running over the road, they’re everywhere.” NWs, I thought? What is he talking about? I’m NW, Nick Watts (this was before I was Nicholas and Jono was Jon), and I’m not running anywhere, and there is only one of me. After at least ten seconds, which in this context was eternity, he said, “yes, they’re everywhere. NWs. Native Winstons.” At the time this was Uncle Peter’s great eccentricity. Each time I’ve thought about Native Winstons since I laugh. I see in it how much I would have been talking about Winston, talking about Lauren too, a pet and a girlfriend I cared deeply for. We were on an adventure, admittedly one with a bunch of old people, but at the time perhaps it would have been better that Dan were the older brother and I were the apprentice — a lesson in mindfulness might have been necessary.

In Helsinki we went from the airport to our hotel, you would have carried all my bags. I wanted to do some shopping, I think, or get something to eat (I was always hungry). I wouldn’t have let us go to Maccas. I waited with you outside our hotel while you tried to get us a taxi. We stood there for ages. You would see a taxi every few minutes and try to hail it. I stood, likely leant, becoming irritated. If I could see, I thought, I would be able to hail one of these taxis properly. This is my perpetual frustration — if only I could do the things I need other people to do for me then I could do them to my satisfaction. More time passed. You kept trying to get a taxi. It got cold. We were in Finland, where it gets cold. I can’t remember what I said to you, something in agitation and displeasure, and you turned around and started crying. “No cabs will stop for me,” you replied, not angry, which you should have been, but very, very tired. I remember you said cabs instead of taxis, which is what I had been saying, and shifted the anger onto myself for being such an idiot for insisting upon a term I thought was more proper than the term which everyone, at the time, actually used. I tried to mop up the damage I had done. I suggested we go inside and do some research about Helsinki on the internet, I think I said that I wasn’t so hungry anyway. Back in the hotel I read that no Helsinki cabs could be hailed, you had to book them. I had made you stand in the cold, giving you disapproving looks, for maybe an hour, while you were hard at work on a task that I had thought you were somehow failing.

Nietszche tells us not to look for the beginning of things. There is no beginning but multiple beginnings, and if you retrace a route back to its origin you will be driving through time in reverse — a fraught activity that has little to do with driving forwards, i.e., actually living. This moment on the curb outside a hotel in Helsinki is one of my beginnings. I think about it probably once a week, without meaning to. I’ll be sitting in an Uber trying to ignore the reprehensible fools on NOVA or in the broadcaster’s chair at FBi trying to ignore another one of them and it will pop into my head. We spent that night in a wonderful department store, you found us a chemist to see if Finland would sell me Nurofen Plus. I remember walking down the aisle of a Finnish supermarket thinking that this was the most foreign place I had ever been. Almost all the products on the shelves were from brands I had never heard of. We ate some burgers at a strange little fast food place. Attendants at shops all had little flag pins on their shirts and blouses to signify which languages they spoke, I could sometimes see them if I managed to get close enough without looking like a total nutcase.

After sleeping at our hotel we spent what is, as a memory, one of my favourite days of my whole life. We went to a market of handcrafted goods, I bought Lauren some earrings that I had thought after seeing them on display were made of silver and wood, they looked so beautiful, and I think I asked you for the 40 euros to buy them, which I felt like was an incredible amount of money. The woman who made them slipped the earrings into a bag and I gave them to Lauren when I got home. It wasn’t for years later, after my eyesight had improved a lot, that I realised they were completely silver. We had a peppery vegetable soup on the docks of a small harbour, outside a little tent that sold it. We walked to some shops in the city centre. We went to the airport and got on a plane to Tokyo.

It was just you and me walking around an faraway city together. After having started our trip as just the two of us in London and then Barcelona, I remember being excited to join up with the group of travellers in Madrid and journey to La Herradura in a car. You are relaxed and flexible, and a part of me likes structured activity. And then not long into the more regimented life of the grey nomad I realised that I much preferred travelling as just you and me. You were my friend. I didn’t have to explain myself and modulate my speech depending on who I was talking to. I remember thinking not long after we got home that travelling is about who is next to you, not where you are, and then realising how uncharacteristically sentimental that sounded, and trying to forget about it.

When, after a journey through southern Spain and a week-long wedding festival, we parted with Uncle Peter and Aunty Freke and Oma Tineke in the early hours of the morning in Malaga, and took an excruciatingly long flight in a tiny aeroplane to Helsinki, I had a second chance to hang out with you. And even though I am me, or was me in 2008, and made you cry when trying to hail a cab in a city that doesn’t permit hailing, we still spent the following day together as friends.

I find memory and remembering, in almost any context, destabilising and unknown. I have lost a lot of memories, from long periods of inactivity, when I have been especially sick, or when I first began to have trouble seeing. A lack of vision is an immediate impediment to functional living, but it also impairs your ability to make memories and hold on to them, I receive so much less information about the world and about people, it’s hard to go back and recreate scenes or events when I can’t see where I am or who I was with. Even though the time we went to Europe was my very first overseas trip, I struggle to remember so much of it. I could see so little back then. Everything was bright and harsh and chaotic.

But a lack of memory isn’t the real problem. I don’t know whether your memories of me align with my memories of you. I sometimes think before I come and visit when I’m in the passenger seat of the car trip to Bulli whether something I do will spark a memory in you of me that I have completely forgotten. And so many of your memories of me will be of stupid things I’ve said and done in the past, some of which I remember and regret, and many of which I am convinced I wouldn’t have even known were negative or hurtful at the time, and can’t remember them because they don’t stand out in difference. I haven’t ever mentioned to you that this day in Helsinki was so significant to me, I was afraid that it wasn’t to you, that you remember it differently, I was likely very annoying.

This is my third attempt at a piece of writing. The first was an long and winding story about prayer and mathematics that wasn’t at all good. The second was very conceptual. This one is unfortunately all about me. You have said before that you like your children, so I hope I can get away with it. As I went I must have thought, in an unconscious way, that writing about myself was writing about you. You make up the margins around my life. In French literary theory that is a big deal. In almost everything I do, in the way I configure who I am, in the way I see memories of the past and go about daily life in the present, I try to be a better person, to know what it is to be a good person. The model of what this looks like most often is you. Someone who has shown me infinite hospitality and someone who is my dearest friend.

I think, in walking around Helsinki, I felt at rest. At least, this is the memory I have built. It’s only very rarely after remembering the image of you crying on the side of the street at night that I go on to remember the day that followed it. You taught me something out there in the cold that I have made a part of myself. The patience and forgiveness and love you have shown me will live in me forever.