Pancake Day
And how I found myself moving across the world for a man I barely knew
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Pancake Day is an oddly meaningful day for me. It’s the day on which I was born. A round-cheeked baby with a shock of white-blonde hair, I bore an unfortunate resemblance to Boris Johnson and was the second of four daughters. In the Catholic calendar, my arrival coincided with the feast day of our Lady of Lourdes, or the Virgin Mary to those not in the know—a religious association that I rebelled against with as much gumption as I could muster in my younger years. It was a relief, I suppose, that my parent’s pious inclination meant they gave me Lourdes as a middle name rather than pancake, but writing down my full name as a teenager was never not a source of huge embarrassment.
Pancake Day almost three decades later was a day that things changed forever. And now, each year that it rolls around, I’m reminded of a date with a boy I met on a boat that shifted the shape of life as I knew it.
I was living in London at the time, sharing a flat with three friends in a pretty part of Battersea. I worked for a well-known literary prize, heading up their social media. It was my dream job – a bookworm to my very bones, I spent much of my working day liaising with authors and publishers and reading to my heart’s content. That the role came about after kissing a very attractive man I met on a night-bus in Brixton one night - and some subsequent online stalking - is worth a brief mention, if only to pay homage to the fact that we really do never know where a drunken liaison may lead us.
For the five years I lived in London, my house, my housemates, the street on which I lived, the leafy lanes down which I jogged and the bars in which I drank were everything to me. That life existed elsewhere was beyond my realm of reckoning, and I genuinely thought that few things of interest happened outside the city in which I existed. I lived and breathed London, in all its potent, polluted glory.
I had visited Sydney twice before – once on my gap year; and then again two years later. I found the beaches enticing and loved the laidback lifestyle. In the years that had passed since my last trip down under, I had longed for a reason to return.
When my friend, let’s call her Sarah, moved to Australia for a year, I jumped at the chance to visit her and escape the dreary grey of London in February. I had known her for about a year through work, and – while not my closest friend – I was gutted when she decided to leave London. Soon after she arrived down under, she asked me to go and visit her. I had an inkling she wasn’t finding it as easy as she had hoped, and so I booked a flight for the following February, to coincide with my 29th birthday. A couple of weeks before I was due to fly, she messaged me, asking where I’d be staying while I was in Sydney. She said that of course I could crash on her sofa for a night or two of my three-week trip, but that she didn’t think she could ask her housemates for me to stay any longer than that. Had I been a more confrontational person, I might have pointed out that when she had asked me to visit her, and told me how much she was looking forward to having me to stay, I had assumed she meant I could crash with her. But I’m not and so I didn’t.
By a serendipitous stroke of luck, a couple of days later I bumped into my friend Lindsey at Clapham Junction train station while I was waiting for the train to work. It turned out she was going to be in Sydney at the same time as me – and when I explained what had happened with Sarah, she told me that I could stay in her hotel with her for the first couple of nights, and that we’d figure it out from there. I fired off a couple of messages to the two other people I knew in Sydney. Chris, a tall, sandy-haired half Croatian who I’d met cliff jumping on a hangover in Dubrovnik, and a guy named Dave, who’d I’d known for about seven years, but only actually hung out with a handful of times. He lived in Sydney, but was often in Europe for work, and our encounters were limited to a pancake breakfast at a café near Paddington, and a boozy night at the Churchill Arms in Notting Hill one bone-cold Tuesday in December. Our contact was sporadic – a text at birthdays and Christmas, random messages throughout the year checking in on each other. His reply was quick, ‘Sadly I leave two days after you arrive for a skiing trip in Geneva. Where are you staying? Have a two-bed apartment on the water in Rose Bay – happy to hand over the keys if you’d like to crash there?’ I text Lindsey to tell her the good news. That Dave also gave us unlimited access to the contents of his wine fridge was the cherry on top of the cake.
The date almost never happened. We were nearing the end of our trip and Lindsey and I had been at a surf festival for the day in Manly when we nearly missed the ferry home. After much pleading, we managed to convince the skippers to let us sneak past the closed barriers of the ferry, and found the last two spare seats on the upper deck. Slightly out of breath, skin sandy, and sun kissed and buttery from sunblock and salty from the sea, it was then that I locked eyes with him. His name was Ozzie, and he was from the north island of New Zealand. He was wearing board shorts that were still damp from the sea, a faded vest top and his skin was biscuit-brown. And when he rested his hand on my knee, his skin was rough like the gritty residue of sand after a day at the beach; but it felt good against my skin. There was a small mole on his left cheek and slivers of skin were visible under his thighs that were shadowed and swathed in Māori tattoos. The sides of the ferry were shaking in the night air, and as he held my gaze, a wolfish smile on his face, his eyes crinkled, and I tried to look away. Soon after docking in Circular Quay, under the pale light of the moon, we swapped numbers.