She comes through the arrivals gate we’ve been watching for half an hour and her face lights up. Home for the first time in two and a half years. Hugging bearhug tight, our lives fill with sunshine whenever we’re back together.
Back to the seaside village that was her home for her first 23 years, back to the beaches and the summer that she’s been thinking of through the grey London winter that she really quite enjoys but by March can be getting wearing.
Inside an hour we’re down to Cheltenham beach. Your idea of the best beach in the world may be different from ours, but this is our favourite
To make it a month long stay she’s arranged to work remotely for the first two weeks. She finds a pattern that works, after a leisurely coffee and breakfast and sitting and talking, the two or three of us, for an hour or two, she logs on, and tackles the work that’s come in, then waits until the evening to log on so she can overlap with the rest of the office and clients in London and the Middle East. For two weeks we are vicariously experiencing her life in a PR firm. She loves it, she can get frustrated with it. She’s there for another three years at least since the firm sponsored her visa extension. A colleague said some recent Friday Well, that’s another week, just 40 more years to go.
One evening something leads the conversation back to Before You Were Here. I show her some old video clips: our wedding; Karren, when we were in the Beehive, deputised to be a visiting princess for the diplomatic protection squad. It’s a revelation. She’s seen plenty of photos she knows we were young once, but seeing us moving and talking and inhabiting this other world is fascinating to her, reveals new dimensions.
She will have her 27th birthday next month, I expect hers will go much more smoothly than mine did.
She logs off on the second Friday with great pleasure, free to party and visit. First thing in the morning we’re driving south, coffee in Putāruru which has taken the place of Tirau for that, because the Z station has the fastest damn charger in the North Island. Waiouru because more or less ditto. The Desert Road is suitably otherworldly and so are the turbines on the Te Ahu a Turanga – Manawatū Tararua Highway. On to Masterton to the home to see her Pa, aged 100. She’s delighted by a photo of him submerged in 100 balloons.
You might recall I’ve said it’s hard to have much of a conversation with him these days, she just regaled him for an hour with snapshots of her life and he smiled and appreciated his way through it all. She’s a great communicator.
On to Wellington to my sister Belinda and her daughters Mili and Ariella, who has come over from Melbourne to make the rendezvous, and they talk and talk and talk these cousins filling the space you can leave empty when you have just one child.
Visits with family and old friends and then back up State Highway One and through the Desert Road in glowing summer sun and a clear blue sky and she has programmed the music all the way down and all the way back, and she has a good beat for all of it.
Back to Auckland to see her old friends from bFM, from work, from flats, from school. Back to Dominion Road. Back to Ponsonby Road, taking stock of things, getting the feeling that coming back could feel good because there’s a common language they have, good people doing good things. A friend speaking of the big improvements says the city is about to get its braces off. She can see herself coming back to this, she can also perhaps more, see herself picking Sydney or Melbourne. We’d be delighted to have her that much nearer.
Friends come for drinks, everyone asks: How’s London, how’s the work, what are you doing, where are you living, do you miss this?
Ruth says it’s really a good thing in your twenties for a relationship to not last. It’s mostly too soon.
Everyone asks. When’s your flight? Are you going through Dubai? because it’s Sunday now, and only five days left, and a goddam war has begun.
How long might it last? How far might it reach? Will her 17 hour flight from Auckland to Dubai on Friday night be possible?
By night time we’re thinking, it’s too risky, best to go the other way, best to book now. Air NZ through Los Angeles. Done. By the morning the price of seats has already doubled.
Imagine flying into Dubai when it’s a war zone. Well of course you don’t want to imagine it at all. Now imagine it could be your daughter. I’m in the usual perspective of the unaffected and concerned bystander but this time I’m also the concerned person who stands to be directly affected. They had me at disaffected bystander but with this added dimension, I’m thinking with even more vehemence, Jesus you people, the harm you’re doing is already profound and it seems to be obvious to everyone but you that it very obviously stands to get much worse, and take your pick of human suffering and misery and economic disruption of a long-lasting and very substantial way and if you don’t believe me take a look at the crude oil prices and the stock markets.
Large worries, smaller ones, they all ask for your attention. In theory if the flight goes ahead and you don’t show up they can charge you a cancellation fee, so we’re waiting to see Emirates cancel the flight.
The day before she’s due to fly, they announce the cancellation. Good. Now we can direct our attention to a different worry. She’s flying into Los Angeles where irritatingly they don’t just let you transit, they actually process you into the USA and back out again. Needless to say, an astute person working in PR knows better than to write inflammatory stuff on her social media. If they ask to see, it’ll be fine. But they also require you to name your relatives. It would be an injustice, would it not, if the sins of the father were to be laid at her door?
Come Friday night, her Air NZ flight is scheduled to leave at the same hour as the cancelled Emirates one.
Imagine our surprise to find at the airport that EK 449 is also still scheduled to leave tonight. Some mistake, surely, on the display? No, turns out it was cancelled and then got reinstated so they can reposition a very costly non-airborne A380. I ask someone about it at the Emirates desk. She says in understatement it’s been quite the day.
Does your daughter want to fly on it, she asks. She’s already checked into the Air NZ flight, I tell her, and also there’s the whole airborne missiles and war zone thing. She gives an understanding nod.
But as the full Emirates cabin crew a little later stream past us in full uniform we’re imagining how much of a buzz it might be to have an A380 more or less to yourselves. I had seen only a dozen or so passengers checking in. That’s a lot of lounging room.
Because coverage here - at least the coverage I’ve seen - has been mostly limited to OMG this Kiwi couple paid 60k to get out of Dubai, we were not aware that in fact what had been going on as reported by, for example, ABC, was that repatriation flights so far had been achieved by back channel negotiations with Iran assuring safe passage. Even then, Karren says you only need someone down the chain of command to go rogue.
Also reported elsewhere: each of those flights out of Dubai was accompanied by a fighter jet. Again, quite the buzz, but man, do you really want to be flying that way?
Into the air she goes, a good hour or so after the last hugs and tears. Out across Waiheke and Colville, up and across the Pacific, 12 hours to LA. Her father will check in on FlightRadar at various points and watch them come in to land, and it’s a great relief an hour or so later to read that she has sailed through immigration without let or hindrance. A long wait in a quiet corner reading and then she’s on the next leg to London and back on the Overground and back to her home by Newington Green.
Meanwhile everything you see in the house that she was using gives you a pang.
Even though you love for her that she has this life, it will be hard until you drop back into the usual ways again: a swim at Cheltenham, a stroll into the village, a run, the two of you visiting, reading, watching TV, enjoying a peaceful life, waiting for her next Facetime call.
Her favourite of my favourites
I feel this about my daughter and she only lives in Wellington and, for reasons I cannot fathom or change, hasn't been in my life for many months. It feels like a death.
We hold them close while we can for they're not ours to keep, as Khalil Gibran noted 💔
I absolutely love it when you write about your daughter, David. Your love for her and Karren is boundless