It means I am likely to be bundled off to the kennels for an indeterminate period, possibly for ever. It’s nothing short of a dagger in the heart and speaks to the double standard I have to live by: he can spear off across an ocean without me, whereas I have to be here — at his beck and call — whenever he’s home.
I don’t want to lay blame here but one of the culprits in this conspiracy against me has been Susan Kurosawa, the high priestess of travel writing for The Australian. For more than 30 years she’s been putting ideas into The Boss’s head and I’m relieved that she’s finally retiring.
The Boss says she quietly signed off a week ago without any fuss and he was a little taken aback, as if he expected her to go on for ever. At some point over too many weekends, I would see his spectacles slipping down his nose as he devoured her despatches. He was physically present, but his mind was in the jungle outside Ubud, or a windswept lodge in the Scottish Highlands, or a luxury camp on the Okavango delta.
If I exhibited impatience, he might mutter the line he claims was boldly painted on a wall on the rail track coming in to London’s Paddington station, when he was there in the 1970s: “Far away is close at hand, in images of elsewhere.”
He was enjoying the obligatory working holiday at the time and commuting into Paddington each day, so the dramatic graffiti, painted in huge white letters on a grey wall, stuck in his mind. It turns out it stuck in many more minds than his — and the truth of who wrote it and what it meant didn’t fully surface until decades later.
It turned out that it wasn’t written by a single lonely poet but was actually a devious meshing of two distinct literary sources, painted by two brothers, Dave and Geoff Hall.
The first phrase, “Far away is close at hand,” came from a Robert Graves poem written in 1923; the second phrase, “in images of elsewhere”, came from an article, on Greek tragedy by classicist Ruth Padel.
The original wall was sadly demolished for redevelopment in the 1980s, but the line had such a haunting hold on the public imagination that it was repainted from scratch in the 1990s, before modern railway security made a repeat impossible.
The Boss has viewed Susan as the custodian of that evocative trackside message, bringing the far away close enough to touch — and occasionally prompting him to go out and find it.
He calls it inspiration; I call it abandonment of duties. While he was off pursuing those fleeting images, someone had to stay behind so he felt welcome and fawned over when he came home. He would return reeking of strange airport lounges and duty-free soap, offering me a patronising pat on the head as if to say “Good boy for staying put.”
Now that Susan has retired, I am nursing the optimistic hope that, without her weekly travel pages to ignite his wanderlust, perhaps the suitcase will gather dust in the shed. Perhaps he’ll find that “elsewhere” is right here, down by the sandbar on the river with a stick in his hand. Woof!
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