She’d gone to amazing lengths to get hold of me at times. I hadn’t thought to ring her when the 7/7 bombings happened in London in July 2005, I was – thankfully – nowhere near the blasts, but – stuck on the other side of the world – my mother had no idea that I was all right. Nick, whom she was still with, was serving in the police force in Tasmania at the time. Somehow he managed to persuade a member of the Met to do him and my mum a favour. They looked me up on their records and sent a couple of cops round to my B&B in Dalston one morning.
They scared the living daylights out of me when they arrived banging on the doors.
‘Don’t worry mate, you haven’t done anything wrong,’ one of them said when I opened the door, looking petrified probably. ‘There are just a couple of people on the other side of the world who want to know you are alive.’
I had been tempted to make a joke and say that they’d almost given me a heart attack but I decided against it. They didn’t look like they were that pleased to have been given the job of checking up on me.
I contacted Mum and reassured her that I was OK. Again, I hadn’t even considered that somebody else might have been concerned about me. I didn’t think that way at that time. I was on my own and concerned only with my own survival. But now I’d changed.
After all the years of neglect and deception, it would be a chance to make it up to her and to put the record straight. I felt like I needed to do that.
The other obvious positive was that I’d get to have a decent holiday in the sun, something that I had been deprived of for years living in London and working mostly in the evenings. I still felt drained by the experience of switching to my new medication and knew that a few weeks in a nice environment would do me the power of good. My mother told me she was living on a little farm way out in the middle of nowhere, near a river. It sounded idyllic. Australia, or more specifically, the Australian landscape, had always occupied a special place in my heart. Reconnecting with it would be good for my soul.
The list of pros were long. The list of cons, however, was even longer. And at the top of the list was my biggest concern of alclass="underline" Bob. Who would look after him? How could I be sure he’d be there waiting for me when I got back? Did I actually want to be separated from my soulmate for weeks on end?
The answer to the first question presented itself almost immediately.
The moment I mentioned it Belle volunteered to look after him at her flat. I knew she was totally trustworthy and would take care of him. But I still wondered what the effect would be on him.
The other big concern was money. My mother might have been offering to pay for my fare, but I still wouldn’t be allowed into Australia without any money. I did some digging around and found that I’d need at least £500 in cash to gain admittance.
I spent a few days weighing up both sides of the argument but eventually decided I’d go. Why not? A change of scenery and some sunshine would do me good.
I had a lot to do. For a start I had to get a new passport, which wasn’t easy given the way my life had disintegrated in recent years. A social worker gave me a hand and helped me organise the necessary paperwork, including a birth certificate.
I then had to sort out the flights. The best deal by far was to fly with Air China to Beijing and then down to Melbourne. It was a much longer journey and involved a lengthy stop-off in Beijing. But it was way cheaper than anything else on the market. My mother had given me an email address by now. I sent her an email with all the details, including my new passport number. A few days later I got a confirmation email from the website through which my mother had booked the tickets. I was on my way.
All I had to do now was raise £500. Easy.
The flight I’d found was heading to Australia in the first week of December. So for the next few weeks, I worked every hour of the day in all weather. Bob came with me most days, although I left him at home when it was raining heavily. I knew he didn’t like it and I didn’t want to risk him catching a chill or getting ill before I went away. There was no way I’d be able to go to Australia knowing he was ill again.
I was soon saving up a bit of cash, which I kept in a little tea caddy I’d found. Slowly but surely it began to fill up. As my departure date loomed into view, I had enough to make the trip.
I headed to Heathrow with a heavy heart. I’d said goodbye to Bob at Belle’s flat. He’d not looked too concerned, but then he had no idea I was going to be away for the best part of six weeks. I knew he’d be safe with Belle but it still didn’t stop me fretting. I really had become a paranoid parent.
If I’d imagined the trip to Australia was going to be a nice, relaxing adventure I was sorely mistaken. The thirty-six hours or so it took me was an absolute nightmare.
It started quietly enough. The Air China flight to Beijing took eleven hours and was uneventful. I watched the in-flight movie and had a meal but I found it hard to sleep because I wasn’t feeling fantastic. It was partly because of my medication but partly also because of the damp London weather. Maybe I’d spent too many hours selling the Big Issue in the pouring rain. I had a horrendous cold and kept sneezing all the way through the flight. I got a few funny looks from the air stewardesses and some of my fellow passengers when I had a bad attack, but thought nothing of it until we landed in Beijing.
As we taxied towards the terminal, there was an announcement from the captain over the tannoy. It was in Chinese first but there was then an English translation. It basically said that we should stay in our seats until we were asked to leave the plane.
‘Odd,’ I thought.
The next thing I saw was two uniformed Chinese officials wearing facemasks. They were walking down the aisle – straight towards me. When they got to me, one of them produced a thermometer.
An air stewardess was standing there to translate. ‘These men are from the Chinese government. They need to take your temperature,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I said, sensing this wasn’t the time to argue.
I opened wide and sat there while one of the officials kept looking at his watch. After they’d muttered something in Chinese the air hostess said: ‘You need to go with these men to undergo some routine medical checks.’
It was 2008 and we were at the height of the swine flu scare. China, in particular, was being incredibly nervous about it. I’d watched a report on the news a few days earlier in which they’d talked about the way people were being turned away from China if there was the slightest hint of them being infected. A lot of people were being placed in quarantine and held there for days.
So I was a bit apprehensive as I walked off with them. I had visions of me being holed up in some Chinese isolation ward for a month.
They ran all sorts of tests on me, from blood tests to swabs. They probably found all sorts of interesting things – but they found no trace of swine flu, SARS or anything else contagious. After a couple of hours, a mildly apologetic official told me that I was free to go.
The only problem was that I now had to make my way back to my connecting flight and I was lost inside the humongous, hangar-like space that is Beijing airport.
I had about three hours to find my luggage and my connecting flight. It had been years since I’d spent any time in an airport terminal. I’d forgotten how big and soulless they were, and this one was especially so. I had to take a train from one part of Terminal 3 to another part.
After a few wrong turns I found my connecting flight less than an hour before it was due to take off.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I sank into my seat on the plane and slept like a log on the flight to Melbourne, mainly through exhaustion. But then at Melbourne I hit another snag.