By the end of 2009 I was happily installed in Peter Curle's national monument, looking forward to Mikey joining me in the new year for his matric year, when Niels called and invited me to France for Christmas. They were renting a property near Antibes, in the south. Ten days with my brother and his family. I didn't need much convincing.
There was just the small matter of the passport.
I had carried a Danish passport my entire life, from birth. It was simply who I was — the son of a Dane, born in Johannesburg, Danish by blood and by document. Then at twenty-nine I went to renew it, and the Danish Embassy in Pretoria declined. Something called the twenty-two year rule, something about having acquired South African citizenship. It was complicated and it was, to my mind, deeply wrong — but there it was. My Danish passport was gone, and all I had in its place was what South Africans call the green mamba. The name tells you everything. The green mamba is a highly venomous snake that nobody wants to go near, and our passport at that time had roughly the same effect on foreign immigration officials.
Getting a Schengen visa on a South African passport in 2009 was not a simple exercise. It involved a formal letter of invitation from Niels (who had managed to keep his Danish passport), a trip to the French Embassy, a substantial quantity of paperwork, and the particular bureaucratic experience of proving to a series of unsmiling officials that you have sufficient funds, sufficient reasons to return home, and insufficient criminal intent. Eventually they relented and I got a Schengen Visa in my passport, and off I went.
Niels was living the French chapter of his life with characteristic enthusiasm. He and Carey had sold up in South Africa after the home invasion, bought an apartment in Copenhagen where the boys were already living, and were now travelling around France with the vague but appealing idea of buying a château and turning it into a guest house. It never came to fruition, but as a reason to spend time in the south of France it was hard to fault.
We ate well, drank better, and laughed a great deal. The discovery of the trip was oysters. French supermarkets at that time of year simply stacked wooden crates of fresh oysters in the aisles like they were tins of tomatoes, and you could buy them for almost nothing and take them home. It turned out I had a completely inexplicable talent for shucking them — I have no idea where that came from, possibly a previous life — and I was appointed shucker in chief for the duration. We also discovered that a small pour of champagne and a touch of Tabasco into the shell before you swallowed it was a taste sensation. In my opinion that is the finest way to eat oysters.
One day we drove up into the mountains and skied. That evening we came back down and swam in the Mediterranean. I had never skied and swum in the ocean on the same day before. I'm not sure it's something most people get to do, and I found it quietly magnificent.
New Year's Eve was James's doing. Niels's youngest had found a local place that served cocktails in glasses roughly the size of soup bowls on stems. I am not inexperienced with alcohol. I know how to handle myself. But somewhere around midnight I excused myself to find a bush, and discovered with some surprise that my legs had stopped working. Not dramatically — I didn't fall. I simply stood there in the darkness, perfectly lucid, with no downward communication whatsoever from the waist. I found this more amusing than alarming, which was probably the cocktails talking. I got it sorted, made it back to the table, and saw in 2010 with the family I loved.
I flew home the next day with a mild headache and something more important turning over in my mind.
The Schengen visa ordeal had clarified something I'd been half-avoiding for years. Travelling on the green mamba was no way to live. I needed a proper passport — ideally the Danish one I should never have lost in the first place, but if not that, then something. And it was on that flight home, somewhere over the Mediterranean, that I remembered the old British passport sitting in my gun safe in Johannesburg. My mother's. Issued in 1947, corner clipped when she married my father and became a Dane. Cancelled, technically. But still there.
I had carried it with me through every move, every upheaval, every fresh start, without quite knowing why.
As it turned out, there was a very good reason.
But that's the next chapter.