I met a woman outside an ’80s nightclub near St Paul's Cathedral. She was mousey haired with deep hazel eyes and a wonderfully strong chin.
“I feel like I’d grow a fab beard if I could,” she said in a thinker’s pose.
The English aren’t known for their jaws, I suggested.
“Same goes for wherever you’re from.”
“Ain't nothing wrong with my chin.”
There’s plenty wrong with my chin. It’s comically long, for one: suitable for beards, billboards and nothing much else.
It was the end of my first week in a new London job. A bunch of colleagues had commandeered this steely tub of neon lights and Billy Idol to sign off the week. I had ducked out for air and was immediately pulled into a conversation with this stranger about facial hair.
“You should grow a beard.” She took a drag and sprigged a boot against the wall, a la James Dean. “You’re Australian, right?” she prodded. “No, South African?”
“You only get three guesses.”
“Shit. OK....” She drummed her fingers. “New Zealand?”
“Well played.”
“I've got an ear for accents.”
It’s April, and ‘Outside London’ is bearable to be with for the first time in months.
“The thing is...” the ellipsis hung off her lips for a beat, “London’s a bit rubbish, and New Zealand seems like paradise or something. I don’t know, I’ve never been, but I want to.”
I have a hunch this is going somewhere.
“Why didja move here?”
Hunch confirmed.
*
I don’t have an answer sharp enough for a sound byte. You adopt your best “Nil Zild’ accent and rattle off a string of buzzwords about “opportunity” and “challenges” and “travel” and “history” and “money”. They’re illustrative, but lack an inscrutable personal touch that ties them all together.
I suspect the truth is less about the destination and more the point of origin. New Zealand is fraught with comfort. It’s like living in a small village, but that village is a sovereign state.
I can’t help but feel for many Kiwis, the rest of the world is something that happens on television. I craved the world in all its teeming glory. How could I call myself a journalist without having my core beliefs manhandled, broken, and reassembled on a global stage?
I wasn’t expecting that last part to happen so quickly.
Before that, I was living in Auckland, lauding over the lucrative online farming news racket. Livestock photos in the dozens were my preserve.
I resolved to move overseas at some nebulous point in the future, where I was flush with funds and could amscray out of Godzone guilt-free. Betty_the_cow.jpg would remain in my keep ’til then.
And then I lost my job. Betty and herd were moving to Dunedin without me, and I needed a Plan B.
That night, I took to my journal:
This rather speeds up my moving overseas, which could prove positive given the planet’s penchant for hustle-n-bustle. I’m not one for superstitions, but I feel like I’ve walked across a message someone's written in sand, it says “GET OUT”. That I shall, beach txt. That I shall.
Two months later, having hocked all my belongings on Trade Me, I was in the belly of the beast: the stinking, bullying bastard called London.
The intervening weeks were a wash of tourist trips and friends. I made small forays into the job market, and nothing much came of it. Nevermind, I thought. Patience is a virtue.
More like pride before the fall. I was treating this adventure like a glorified holiday, rather than the massive pan-hemispheric shift it was.
A stroke of luck came in late September. A boss from a previous journalistic life had landed a promotion at The Guardian. He mentioned to me about a raft of freelance shifts opening in its multimedia department. He encouraged me to submit my CV, but warned freelance work was fleeting.
An editor once told me I was an unattractive quantity for lacking British experience. The BBC told me I was “too American”
The whole UK journo scene is fleeting, almost unassailable to a Kiwi. One tale of woe held the industry was “dying”. It’s not, obviously, but is oversubscribed with young hacks trying to nail a break. An editor once told me I was an unattractive quantity for lacking British experience. The BBC told me I was “too American”. Both were difficult to parse: The UK isn’t calculus, and my best American accent belongs locked in a chest at the bottom of the ocean.
I was offered a few shifts at the Guardian, a gift I was grateful for, as my bank balance had begun its sharp descent.
In a frantic bid to stave off disaster, I began applying for jobs I had no interest in, but could ill afford to snob. “Unsuccessful application” emails piled into my inbox. I was unsuitable for making sandwiches, selling cellphones, or plucking pubic hair out of hotel bedsheets. Being rejected from a car wash by text message is a memory I want encased in bronze.
My lack of planning had come to a head. I had simply run out of money in one hell of an unfriendly city.
I was politely asked to leave my flat. A friend took me in, despite my feeling little more than a social pariah.
I became a master at fixing cheap eats: my diet consisted of £0.30 packets of noodles from Sainsburys, and a cheese roll if I felt devilish.
I managed to talk my into a job at a charity call centre in scenic Brixton. It had one of the most arduous selection processes known to humankind. Popes are selected with less scrutiny.
My days were spent hounding job sites and uploading my CV to anywhere and everywhere.
I managed to talk my way into a job at a charity call centre in scenic Brixton. It had one of the most arduous selection processes known to humankind. Popes are selected with less scrutiny. Its pay was meagre, and the nature of the work felt cruel and manipulative. I was declined “sitting rights” until I managed to claw a “gift” out of some pensioner from Hull. I spent many a shift standing.
London’s face pulled itself into a growl, and I was beat.
The weeks began to sag. My parents were restless over my mental health, though I suspect the lack of news was more troubling. I severed communication with most people, unwilling to pester them with my embarrassment.
Some nameless afternoon, I found myself in the cafeteria of the British Library, a shuffle down from King’s Cross Station. It houses troves of historic documents, including copies of the Magna Carta dated from the 13th century. As with any depressive episode, interest in healthy activities plummeted. My journal remained empty for weeks. But amid this most London of venues, I found scope to purge:
London, you're breaking my heart, and not in a good way. I know you're not going to put on a snakeskin jacket and sing ‘Love Me Tender’ a la Nicholas Cage in that David Lynch movie. You're going to keep riding roughshod until I tap out screaming “Alright! Fine! I'll go back home! Like a coward, I'll come crawling back, forever that guy who Just Couldn't Deal With It.”
That teeming hub of people and streets and tubes and markets and faces had worn me down to a nub. I confronted each disaster in step: Jobless, homeless, penniless. Agonisingly lonely. Journalists are supposed to have moxey, pizazz, and an unspeakable cockiness. Some journo I turned out to be.
I went down to the lobby and twirled around with my arms open wide. “All right,” I said flopping them down at the sides. “We’re done here. Go to hell, London, and tell them MJO sent you.”
There must be a German word for the airlessness one feels after telling someone – or something – to go to hell. There was no shame in returning home, I thought. Or maybe there was. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted the noise in my head to pipe down.
It sounds so much like my phone, too.
Wait, that is my phone.
It was Such-n-Such from Such-n-Such Recruitment. She had, inexplicably, found my CV on some job website. While I'm unconvinced Googling job descriptions is a foolproof vetting system, I was excited to hear her voice.
A contract, she said, had arrived on her desk from an organisation hiring someone with “digital savvy”. (Man, I hate job descriptions.) Yes, God yes, was I interested in interviewing for whatever this job was. In fact, I was so interested, I quit the call centre the next day and treated myself to two cheese rolls.
If you’re skating on thin ice, you might as well tap dance, wrote Bryce Courtenay. And so it was that I tap danced my way through the job interview, fuelled by desperation, and finished in gainful employment. “Gotcha,” London smirked. No kidding, I thought.
*
She jutted that incredible jaw as if to say, “Are you going to answer me?”
The dome of St Paul’s looked like the Capitol building in Washington DC, marking our dialogue as something close to House of Cards. If only I could turn to a camera like Francis Underwood and say: “This one wants to know, and I would too if I were her.”
Perhaps there isn’t a perfect answer. But if there is, I suspect its identity will stay concealed for some time. Only with the benefit of distance will Future Me diagnose the underlying foibles of London Me.
But that isn’t the kind of response you can give a woman outside a bar, you weirdo.
I shrugged. “It’s London. It’ll break your heart like nothing else. But it’ll find a way to mend it too.”
Images by Doug Wheller.
This content was brought to you with funding support from New Zealand on Air.
