Guilt Trip

Almost eight months in Australia and to my eternal shame I haven't phoned the relatives in Perth, not even a letter or a postcard, then my mother drops a very heavy hint that I need to ring them (something along the lines of "haven't you got their phone number?") so I finally got in touch this evening and we caught up on old times.

My great uncle Gordon will be seventy-nine next week and I know this because he's my Nana's brother and she would have been eighty on exactly the same day if she'd been alive.

His wife, Sonia will be seventy-seven. Sonia's real name is Zofiya (pronounced zoffya) because she's Polish, but she anglicised it to Sonia because the British couldn't say it and she wound up being called "Auntie Sausage" all the time (though ironically it rather suited her).

I was eight years old and growing up on a council estate when I first met Gordon. It was the sort of council estate where the dogs did white poo and the electricity meter always ran out halfway through Crossroads, which meant that (a) I genuninely thought dogs ate chalk and (b) I never did find out how Sandy Richardson came to be in a wheelchair.

Anyway, up rocks Gordon one summer wearing an Akubra hat and a suntan and my Nana greets him with a typical mince and onion dinner (with Angel Delight for afters) and I just sat looking at him thinking he was so different from us; wealthier certainly, but almost other-worldly with his brown leathery skin and funny twangy accent (half Cleethorpes, half Perth; an unlikely combination by any standard).

And then there was his son, Andrew, who'd been adopted into the family because Gordon and Sonia couldn't have their own children and who'd been whisked away from their semi-detached in Lymm to grow up without any relatives on the other side of the world. And their daughter Karen, plucked from the arms of a teenage mother in Salford and raised in this Australian house with a swimming pool in the shape of a guitar. They were all other-worldly; they came from Australia on a plane, you know, the place I'd tried to get to by digging in my Nana's back garden, the place at the end of the cables under the sea, the place where that funny didgeridoo noise played in the air just like the birds tweeted in Warrington, or so I thought.

Andrew was a dreadful show-off; older than me by six years and actually able to stand up on a skateboard and ride it all the way down to Sankey Brook in his fancy trainers while the other kids stood staring at him in their cheap black pumps. And Gordon did nothing to discourage him, didn't grab him by the arm and tell him to stop showing off like my mum would have done, just allowed him to be loud and obnoxious, the closest thing I'd ever seen to a real-life American.

After that first encounter with the rellies, I didn't see them again until 1996 when they met us from the plane as we landed into Australia for the first time. We'd been in transit for 37 hours since leaving Manchester airport and my feet had swollen so much that I couldn't get them back into my shoes, so I wasn't best pleased when I spotted them in the arrivals hall and realised they were filming us on their camcorder (well, Gordon was filming us, Sonia was outside having a fag). They took us back to their house and we slept all day and then were awake all night and in the morning they were raring to go.

Now, when I say raring to go, I'm talking about Gordon, not Sonia, as the two of them had very different energy levels, even back then.

Gordon's an outdoors sort. He and my Nana grew up by the sea and they both joined the services during the war. Gordon joined the navy, which is how he met Sonia (she was living in Gdinya). When they came to Australia he served with the navy here and even after he retired he used to take his boat out onto the Indian Ocean, though looking back I think it was more to keep him from getting under Sonia's feet, which were (and still are) almost permanently horizontal on the sofa.

Sonia's hobbies include smoking, smoking and watching television game shows, especially Wheel of Fortune. Sometimes she sits at the table writing airmail letters to England and Germany and Poland, though that's something of a risky business, since she often drifts off to sleep with a cigarette in her hand and only wakes up when her hair is sufficiently ablaze to have activated their smoke detectors, by which time, Gordon's up out of bed telling her off and she's swearing she wasn't asleep, just resting her eyes.

In the war, she was held by the Nazis in a concentration camp, or so she says, and I have to believe this because it'd be wrong of me not to, even though I'm suspicious that at least half of what she says is a work of fiction.

Still, there's the psychological evidence to back it up; the almost obsessive buying and hoarding of enormous gemstones (some bought at auction, others from the jeweller in Rockingham shopping mall; whole sets worth $25,000 a go), hoarding of food in the larder (six boxes of lamingtons at any one time, and she's an insulin-dependent diabetic), the chain-smoking (though that's a theme all over eastern Europe from what I've seen of it).

But then there's the other stuff, the things that impact directly on other people.

Within 24 hours of arriving at their house (where we had an en-suite), she'd removed all of the toiletries I'd brought from Britain and put them into her own bathroom. I mean, literally, she must have gone in there with a carrier bag because she took every last thing right down to a half-empty bottle of Pantene Pro-V, leaving just the toothpaste and the tampax, neither of which were any longer required.

To confirm my suspicion they hadn't spontaneously combusted, I'd got Darren to distract the pair of them while I sneaked into her bathroom and sure enough, there they were, though armed with the evidence, there was nothing I could do because to confront her was to admit I'd been sneaking about and that sort of made me just as bad.

And then there's the odd lying behaviour, which started off with small things like writing to me in Britain telling me we could drive their spare car but going back on this arrangement when we arrived, leaving us stranded an hour south of the city without enough money to hire one. And the time she insisted on Gordon taking Darren out for a beer, neither of them really wanting to go, and the minute they were gone she cornered me and accused me in quite aggressive terms of having broken the plastic winding mechanism on her vertical blinds (which I hadn't touched). Hardly hostess with the mostest, more loon on a broom.

Anyway, suffice it to say that we were very glad to leave Perth after two weeks (two weeks in which Gordon had accompanied us on unsolicited tours of the naval base and a deer park and a building site in the rain) and that the second time we visited Perth we booked ourselves into a city-centre hotel and didn't even ring to let them know we were in town until we were safely installed in our room.

When I rang tonight, Gordon answered the phone. We chatted for a while then he passed me onto Sonia. I braced myself.

Sonia "Hello Blossum, how are you?"

"Oh we're good. Enjoying Sydney, but the people are a bit..."

"Oh well you've got all those fucking chinks" she said in her dark Polish accent, "Chinks coming out of your ears in Sydney"

"Well, there's certainly lots of south-east Asians"

"I've never wanted to go to Sydney. We started off in Geelong in Victoria but the weather was so bad you know. Rain one minute, sun the next. The kids were babies and they were always getting bad chests, bronchitis, always at the quack"

"So that's why you went to Perth?"

"It was a spur of the moment thing. Australia was a spur of the moment thing altogether because your uncle Gordon worked with a man at Carrington works who got the ten pound passage for his family but in the end they couldn't go so he brought the tickets into work and Gordon said "okay, I'll have them". It was very fashionable to emigrate"

"And you flew? You didn't take the boat?"

"Oh no, we flew, but it was 1966 and we flew low because the plane didn't have much power. We went from London to Colombo then Singapore and Darwin and finally Melbourne. It took a few days to get here and a commonwealth car came to collect us at the airport"

"And my great gran Frances was here?"

"Yes, but I didn't get along with her, she was a bitch. She lived in New Zealand but the minute she heard we were coming she headed for Australia and in the end she followed us to Perth as well. I wish we'd never come"

"You do?"

"Every day for forty years I've wished it. I've said for ten years I will sell my jewellery and pay to go back to Lymm but we've done nothing about it and now Gordon's had heart surgery twice, I can't get the airlines to insure him, they want a doctor's note and I get this one that says all this shit about aneyurisms and cardiac this and cardiac that. So we're stuck here"

"But the weather's nice, it's good for you in your retirement" I protested, an image of Gordon and Sonia returning to live in Lymm coming into very sharp focus; Sonia standing on our front path smoking a cigarette and complaining she was fucking freezing cold so I'd let her inside, Gordon taking me on a drive round Dunham Massey to feed the deer and doing a field-trip detour round Davyhulme Sewerage works on the way home. And I don't even want to think about the chinese take-away in the village.

"It's too hot. We have no frends, nobody at all. Karen's made a hash of her life and now her daughter's gone the same way and it's all her fault, she doesn't visit us and if I give her my jewellery when I die, she'll sell it for a few bucks and blow the money. I better sell it and enjoy the cash myself if we can't go back to Europe"

"You could have a holiday, see something of Australia again"

"I've seen nothing of Australia in forty years here. When we had time off work and money for a holiday, we had to spend it on going to Europe to see the relatives. It was more expensive back in the 70's and 80's and there were four of us travelling. And the Polish relatives thought we were rich and they were holding out their hands so I always took them lots of things when I visited, but really they wanted money from me"

"And if you had your time again?"

"I'd never have come. You'd be a fool to come here, it's too different. Even the chocolate, even the Cadbury's chocolate, have you tasted that?"

"Oh yes"

"Well you can only get Lindt and that's all. And no Marks and Spencers, you go in Marks and Spencers, the big one near your mum's house - and you can sit down and have a sausage roll and someone will talk to you but not here. And you can buy clothes that will wash okay, better quality cotton, not all this stuff made in China, made by chinks. There's nothing on the telly, it's shit, everything's shit and I've had all shit for forty years now".

"It's funny" I said, "We thought you had it made. We looked at your swimming pool and your boat on the ocean and we thought you'd done well for yourselves"

"We did well for the kids" she said, "But they still turned out shit. Andrew's doing okay but we don't see much of him, Karen's spending her money in Bali right now when her house is falling down around her ears. Nobody visits us, you've been twice, your mum, your uncle"

"Yeah, they came last year didn't they?"

"They thought they could come for three weeks and sort it all out then they got here. Your uncle thought he could get a bus ticket to Ayers Rock and the Great Barrier Reef but then he hired a car and drove down south and realised it's bigger than he thought. He'd never opened an atlas in all his life and thought he could do all these things in three weeks on the local buses. You should have told him, why didn't you help him with planning the trip?"

"I would have done, but he stopped speaking to me four years ago"

"You're kidding"

"No. He didn't like the seating arrangements at our wedding reception, thought he could tell us who should be sitting on our top table, thought he could push us about, but we were 30 years old and we'd paid every penny ourselves so we weren't going to be bullied"

"He's probably sulking now" she said, cackling and smoking at the same time. "still wants his own way".

"Oh I don't even think about him anymore, I'm not interested, though the thing about getting a bus to Ayers Rock is just funny, I'm interested in the funny bits"

"You gotta drive a long way in Australia to get a change of scenery. People don't realise it's drive and drive and drive and still nothing to see. I tell you, you'd be a fool to leave Britain with all you have there. Australia is a great life but your children will grow up and leave and you'll be lonely like us, sending letters to Europe and getting video tapes of family weddings, I feel sad about it but what can I do?

Are you coming to visit us by the way? We'd like to see you"