Surprise So Nice We Did It Twice

The Morton family has never really been good at surprises.

To be surprised meant being the recipient of unscheduled bad news. To wit: a part on the car that none of us previously knew existed is broken by decree of the cosmos, like the long-lost cousin that appears on soap opera Neighbours (vale) when the script requires some extra drama. Or the cat develops diabetes, or you discover a history of 'narrow arteries' in the family on the back of one tragedy and another near miss or, worse, that you've been misusing the word calumny for close to 15 years without intervention.

As a family of easily startled woodland creatures, we took measures to avoid surprises. A rare trip into Brisbane was always preceded by at least an afternoon studying the street directory – younger readers, this was something like a book of spells and incantations that could deliver one to their desired location – and even modest purchases were researched for days on end. It was as if my Mum, older brother and much younger sister were constantly planning the most elaborately mundane heist where the reward was not jewels or bullion but life itself. We weren't trying to crack the safe at the Royal Brisbane Children's Hospital burns ward, we just wanted to make my brother's check-up appointment in time without ending up on the Story Bridge.

I try to be more spontaneous these days. Often have I over-corrected; been reckless and thoughtless, planned for nothing. This is one way to address the mental tinnitus of constant planning earlier in my life, though it is considered a net negative when you actually have to design and deliver a surprise.

When I received my four-year French residence permit at the end of November it opened up the possibility of actually leaving the EU for the first time since I arrived. My original plan was only to come to France for a year and, under those terms, coming home for Christmas felt silly. Also, I wanted to be cold at Christmas, not hot like normal. I’m always hot. If my plane crashed into a freezing South American mountain top like that team of Uruguayan footballers, I would still be hot. I’d be the first eaten for suggesting we open another window.

Be that as it may, I was now staying longer in France then I had dared dream and I also realised my sister was not able to make it home from the middle of bumblefuck-NT (a precise geographic term that requires no elucidation) for the holidays and Mum, bless her, couldn’t leave her home on account of the geriatric animals in her care. And then it snowed in Paris and cleared the last psychological hurdle preventing me from leaving my northern hemisphere bolthole.

If I had left and it had snowed in my absence I would have cried and spent the trip hating everyone left behind for enjoying my snow. Now, nature had soothed any preemptive jealousy and it seemed easier to make a dash back to Australia from Paris than it did for either my sister or mother to make it to the other across the frankly intolerable distances of the continent we call home. But why should I tell Mum that?, I schemed.

Because it would have been easier than trying to deceive the woman who, through her training with the Royal Military College for the Perpetually Suspicious at Duntroon, is quite incapable of being deceived.

All you have to do is act normal, I told myself.

But you’re not normal, I also told myself.

Keeping secrets is easy enough if you don’t care, somewhat more difficult when you’re obliquely invested and rather debilitating when you’re unsure if it is even the right call. Just who was this surprise for, anyway? Mum, or me? Wouldn’t it be better if she knew I was coming home and had something to look forward to? I received conflicting counsel from my friends and almost buckled several times in the weeks before my flight. We used to spend hours of admin to avoid surprises, now I was doing the same to ensure one.

I booked the flight home from Paris to Sydney to see my friend and my Fake Nephews and then, two days later, to Brisbane where I had arranged with my co-conspirator, actual former military officer and one woman working bee Helen T to collect me from the train station for the drive back to Boonah. A half-formed plan settled: she would head around to Mum’s house as usual on the Friday evening but leave me on the side of the road a few doors up the street. Once inside, I would phone Mum and ask after the fictitious parcel that had been sent and which had arrived. The dogs in the street started barking immediately and when Mum picked up she cheerily told me that Helen had just arrived and put me on the phone to say hello. Yes I know Helen just arrived, I thought. I lack the patience for true surprises but we'd come this far. When Mum agreed to go out front and check the mailbox we were able to finally spring the trap and it went like clockwork. She screamed so much I had to tell her to be quieter, lest the neighbours start to worry for her safety.

Helen filmed the reunion, including the part where Mum clutched her chest and said: 'I don't have my bra on.' And the other part when, having welcomed me home, Mum asked semi-forlornly: 'What, so there is no parcel in the mailbox?'

Only me God damn it! And a suitcase filled with treasures, including two glass baubles purchased in Strasbourg at the Christmas markets for Helen which did not survive the flight despite what I considered to be competent buttressing and shielding in the packing. La vie est une chienne.

'Here you go,' I said, presenting the thousand shiny shards in the box to her, 'I got you a puzzle.'

Mum took it literally and glued them all together in a mosaic on a large cardboard bauble cut-out and managed to get a tiny sliver stuck in her finger for her troubles. Now Helen has an incredibly dangerous ornament for her tree.

Being home was nice.

The Queensland summer clouds, for one thing, are like the packing peanuts of my youth. I have been ensconced by them as long as I can remember and always find their presence comforting even if occasionally hazardous.

I've started getting my running pace back up to where it was before my meniscus tear at the very start of November. Progress was going well but few things are better for that kind of rehab than running 4km away from home and clocking one of those vicious storms roll in your direction.

I raced this one home, as lightning cracked across the sky to my left, and had made it within a kilometre of the house when the sky emptied and thunder burst through my noise-reducing headphones. Small mercy, I'd made it to the golf club on the edge of town and took shelter in a walkway there for half an hour. I texted Mum to tell her I was fine, just waiting it out. Later she would recall: 'I thought about coming to pick you up but then I realised there was no point, I'd only get wet'. I responded with logic, my least endearing quality: 'That doesn't mean there was no point to coming to get me,' I said, 'only that you didn't want to get wet'. She laughed, as she so often does when she loses a debate, and refused to say any more on the matter. For what it's worth, the distance from Paris to Boonah is about 16,600km which is approximately 16,599km further away than the golf club from my home in Boonah. But who's counting?

Fly as we might all around the world, there is no place like home to keep you grounded. We spent Christmas Day with Helen and her two boys and during a game of festive Celebrity Heads Mum, the poor thing, was given the name 'Rick Morton'. Not by me, and not with my approval, I might add. I knew she wouldn't get it, because what mother thinks of their own child as a celebrity? Especially if that child is not, in fact, a celebrity?

Still, I expected some mild progress before she started guessing 'Jesus' after learning the figure had no children. We eventually started giving her clues.

'You know this person,' Helen said.

'In fact, you've known them since they were quite young,' I said.

Mum guessed: 'William McInnes?'

For clarity, she has met William McInnes once in her life – although she did threaten to sit on his lap at a Rotary dinner where he and I were speaking, which is an above average zone of familiarity – and at the time he was in his late 50s.

The outrages continued.

At breakfast with Mum, Helen and my high school German teacher, Frau Keller handed over some assignment sheets she'd found in her archives from my Year 11 and 12 exams. For context, I did Year 12 German in Year 11 and first year university German in Year 12. Despite this, in among an A and a few A- results I immediately clocked a single B grade sitting in the papers.

'What the fuck I get a B for,' I said, unable to contain the shock. And then I collected myself and said: 'Oh my God I'm 38 and I still care.'

I'd always been like this. And being home, I was constantly met by the person I was before I left. It's largely the same person, of course, but even more of me is pre-set in the eyes of everyone who knows me and have known me for so long. Too easy, I thought, to slip back into old routines and habits; to go up town for 20 minutes and take two hours because you run into everyone you've ever met all on the same street. Oh for the anonymity of my adopted home in Paris!

At my old cafe haunt in town I ran into a regular, Rodney, who wears a hat the size of a satellite dish from which he picks up his many theories.

‘This lump on my back, it’s cancer,’ he told me. ‘I remember when they put it there.’

I smiled one of those sad smiles that you see on photos of people who carry great, subterranean shames. I knew better than to ask who ‘they’ were, of course, and allowed Rodney a small nod which indicated to him, at least, that I knew who ‘they’ were and that they were the same they to which he had just referred.

‘I was in the shower and felt this almighty zap and realised they must have targeted me for asking too many questions during Covid,’ he continued. Then he sort of wrinkled his face a little bit and said, completely seriously: ‘But it’s hard to know when you’re just being paranoid instead of self-aware, sometimes’.

‘Oh for sure,’ I told him, ‘it’s a fine line.’ The line is not fine, obviously, and you’d need hiking gear and a packed lunch to cross from self-awareness to paranoia on a good day but I said none of this because this was an easy secret to keep. Rodney had been chasing the horizon of his own consciousness for long enough that he was coming back around on self-awareness, like Christopher Columbus assessing the arc of the ocean beyond his eye.

Columbus didn't 'discover' the world was round, by the way. That was a bunch of ancient Greeks. The Greeks really were on a tear there for a while as a society but after doing democracy and a few other bits and bobs they rested on their laurels – traditional wreaths of which they also invented – and spent the next two thousand years just lounging by the sea.

One big surprise down, I wasn't about to do the same thing. The day before I flew to Darwin to meet my sister – I'd planned my trip so that I could fly home via the NT capital and meet her and my nephew and five-month-old niece for a night – while booking an extra night for her so she could rest before making the six-hour drive back to the cattle station where she now lives.

Helen gave Mum the gift of her cat insulin injection skills by offering to look after the animals for two days so she could join us for two nights. Naturally, we would keep this a secret from my sister who was not expecting Nanny Mort at all. We booked her on the same flight as me, parking for the car at Brisbane airport and Mum went straight to her room to start packing. I've seen her pack for a trip two weeks in advance. I swear to God, put her in charge of Brisbane 2032. They'd be ready to host by 2028.

I have only ever been to Darwin once in my life and that was with Scott Morrison. Apart from circumstances, and the weather, I don't have anything in particular against Darwin. It's just that I don't understand how anyone at all can possibly live there. When we landed I sat with Mum inside the terminal for a bit until my sister was almost in the car park. At this point, I left Mum inside while I wandered out to get into position to surprise my sister. At my signal, Mum would wander out 50m behind me. Within seconds the air was clinging to me, sending me mad. Humidity, I've decided, is like a series of whispers. Except they're wet. They're like wet whispers in the ear, and on your body, and they make you second guess your senses. Is this even the air or are we all fish now, breathing underwater in the sky?

Thank God she arrived when she did, because I was battling. I remember watching some Attenborough doc about sea iguanas (?) that only have enough body heat in them to do a quick dive in the water to grab some food or whatever it is they do in there and if they don't get the timing right they lose all their energy and just straight up drown before they can make it back to shore. This is me in Darwin. My Darwin Theory of Natural Convection, if you will.

Anyway, we couldn't have pulled this one off more perfectly. My nephew, Hugh, was shy when he saw me walking down the concourse but you could tell her was excited by the way his little feet were swinging even as he hugged his Mum and looked away from me. Then, the telltale squeal of delight and, finally, the ride on the suitcase. All at my sister's suggestion to which I added, as I could see Mum getting closer, still unnoticed, behind me: 'Yeah, why don't you ride it up this way. To your Nanny?'

Cue reaction.

I last got to spend time with Hughie not long before I left for Europe, before his sister Rory was even born. He was cute then but now he had that spark of toddlerhood about him. His language is evolving and his character, too. I noticed that when he gets excited he'll plant soft little kisses on his mum's hand or leg. When I was reading him some new books before bedtime with his presents from France – and from nanny, his favourite, a crocodile torch – he was laughing and pointing at the pictures as we went but when he truly got excited he went quiet and, without fanfare, would lean forward and kiss my hand or my arm.

And Rory, who I met for the first time, is the delight of his tiny life. He smothers her with kisses often and, during the long drive from the middle of the Territory to Darwin on her own, my sister would ask him to comfort his sister if she started to get agitated.

'I'd see this little hand reach over on the monitor into her car seat,' my sister said, 'and then I would hear Hughie go "it OK Rory".'

My niece has the sweetest face. She's in a phase where she only wants her mother, although Nanny Mort still demonstrated the magic touch. It was special to be able to show her I'm not just a face on the phone, and snatch moments with that same light-filled smile when she turns it on.

We had a night together and a full day on December 30 before my evening flight to Perth. My sister told us that Hughie woke up exactly three times during the night. The first time he cried out:'Uncle Ricky?' The second: 'Crocodile torch?' The third: 'Nanny?' All three present and accounted for. Strong priorities.

After a check-up at the clinic, we trotted off to Crocasaurus Cove in the city for the kids' mandatory education about the majesty and danger of Australian animals. Not that Hughie needs to be reminded. At first he didn't even want to touch the crocodile statues out front, or enter the dark passageway to get inside.

'Hoppy up, hoppy up,' he begged.

Natural fear gave way to awe as he studied the ancient beasts in their tanks.

I found myself pondering the abject futility of a place that makes the weather so unbearably hot only to fill the water with some of the deadliest creatures on the planet. Imagine if the reverse applied in, say, Norway where it's freezing for half the year and inside all the warmest places – inside every house – there was just a big bear. Or worse, maybe there was a bear but you couldn't be sure. And also the porridge was too cold or too hot.

Attached to each crocodile enclosure were signs that announced what each animal was in for. One had developed a taste for dogs along a popular beach in Darwin. Another, Leo, took 40 cattle from a grazier's property in a single year. A third had committed white-collar fraud. Kidding. You don't go to jail for that.

Later that afternoon, following a nap for the entire household, I packed my suitcase and prepared to leave. They were all staying on another night and, to avoid the mother of all meltdowns, I had to slip out of the house with my sister unnoticed. Mum nursed Rory and I said my secret goodbye to Hughie.

It felt like the worst kind of betrayal, leaving him like that. I said to my sister as we drove to the airport: 'Why do we love anything at all, it hurts so much.' She nodded. Only the bravest do. I'm not sure I have it in me.

In Perth for a night and a day, I caught up with a couple of mates and managed a fine (deep) sunburn on my arms and neck before flying out after 8pm on December 31 on the Dreamliner for the 17-hour direct hit to Paris, through God knows how many actual new year rollovers on the way. Only two weeks had passed since I left but I worried the city might already have forgotten me.

When I landed at Charles de Gaulle airport just on 6.37am on January 1 I turned my phone on and the first message I received was a missed call from Ella, the Swedish barista at the coffee shop I go to every morning in my neighbourhood in the 18th Arrondissement. Later, I receiced a photo of both her and the director of the cafe at a NYE party.

'We were just thinking how fun it would have been if you were here so decided to call and wish you a Happy New Year,' she said.

And it was cold. So properly, preciously cold.

Addenda

The Godfather, Part Me

There is simply too much to write about and I considered not doing an addenda to this already very long post as the things I want to write about – the more serious things, anyway – require more time and space than I have to give them right now. But there was simply no way I could overlook the fact that on my return to Australia I also became a Godfather for the first time, to my best friend's youngest son.

My own Mum was invited to Grafton for the service as well and we stayed in the mayor's house and I got a little drunk with godmother pictured above and locked myself out about 1am and had to bash on the door to wake Mum up to let me in.

Things were much more sensible when my parental duties kicked in, however. I can't tell all the stories from what might have been the funniest joint baptism in recent history as they are not all mine to tell but I do remember my five-year-old charge turning to me before the Church service began, pointing to the enormous statue of Jesus, and saying: 'That's scary. He has blood on his hands!' Another person overheard, I shall not name them, and leaned in to add: 'I'm sorry to break it to you bud, but that's kind of the point.'

After the service ended and having been told that we were 'in God's house' so that he might sit still during it – did not work, btw – my child found a steal grate leading to a drain by the side of the church and leaned down into it and yelled: 'God, are you home?'

No answer.

But he's got me.