‘It’ll never feel like Christmas in Sydney’

The sunrise spreads across the slumbering Sydney Harbour, peeling the plum cloth of darkness from the bridge and chasing the shadows out towards Manly. You'd seen its likeness many times before, on postcards in the tourist shops, the ones you sent each week to your aunt when you first arrived. You saw it too on the portrait in your parents' sitting room, a present from your sister's first Christmas in Oz. But the pictures and the postcards do it little justice on a morning like this.

You park the van. It’s 5.53am in Sydney, 6.53pm the previous day in Dublin. But it’s 6.58pm in your parents’ house, where your mother set the clock five minutes fast so you wouldn’t be late for Mass of a Sunday morning.

It’s a Friday in mid December. Christmas is just around the corner, but you’d hardly know it. Maybe it’s the hot days and nights or the lack of decorations and festive music in the shops. It’ll never feel like Christmas here for you, not like it did at home, anyway. If Ireland can still be called home.

Tomorrow you’re flying back for the holidays, just like thousands of others undertaking the annual pilgrimage from all over the world. It’ll be your first Christmas in four years spent in the village, with its streets decked in coloured lights.

The shopping centre in the nearby town will be blaring out cheesy festive songs until your head pounds. The town square will have a colossal Christmas tree that some fool tries each year to mount. You were often that fool; they even had to call the fire brigade one time to get you down.

You smile at the memory but, like many others, you’re not sure how you’ll feel when you return to the place where you were out of work for a year before leaving. Things had begun to change there even before the tiger vanished. Dooley’s chicken factory and Buggy’s joinery had closed, and the site off the Dublin road where you worked had folded, leaving half-finished houses lurching over the village.

“The village is all different, and you’ll be flying into the fancy new terminal in Dublin Airport,” your mother said when last you spoke. But you’re worried that both you and the village will have changed so much that you’ll hardly recognise one another.

You remember when Horse Carthy came home from Australia one Christmas. Horse had been a big noise about the place, but when you met him he was sitting alone in the pub, swampin' pints of Guinness and listening to The Pogues. The pub wasn't empty, but you joined him for a few, and he spoke – with a twang – about how much better life was on the other side.

He talked about the weather, the wages and the friends he’d made. But when you asked why he was drinking alone he just shook his head and swallowed another mouthful. You knew then that it wasn’t only the clothes or the twang: Horse Carthy was a different person from the one who left. Home to him was no longer the village.

With that thought in mind you walk into the shed and say good morning to the lads. They say it’s going to be a warm one, might even hit the 40 – there’s talk of a noon finish and a barbie and beers.

“Make sure you put the sunscreen on, mate,” they say, and laugh about pasty skin charred red as you open your locker and look at the photograph inside, of yourself, Colin Clynch and Gerry Dooley, wearing Santa hats and drinking from buckets on a beach in Thailand.

Two years have drifted since you spoke to either. When last you heard, Gerry was working in the mines in western Canada, and Clynch had returned to the village and was trying to support a mother and baby on the minimum wage.

You put your jumper over the photo and think about that first Christmas the Tesco in the shopping centre opened all night. You were 12, and the lads stayed over and your mother brought you into town to get the last of her shopping. It was midnight, and the supermarket was empty except for the workers, and you chased each other between the aisles and out into the street like the town belonged only to you.

You close the locker and think about the couch, Taytos and Club Orange, the cold, Barry’s Tea, pork sausages and shovels of Guinness – the things you’d hardly touch if you were still there but sound exquisite right now. Like the nightclub with its sticky floors and the walk to Mass on a frosty Christmas morning.

You haven't been to church since you left, something your mother wouldn't be pleased about, but it would do more harm to tell her. Like it would if you told her about all the times you question if leaving was the right choice. Mostly on a Sunday when you wake with a mouth dry as a sandbox and a gut full of nostalgia, and roll over and play Christy Moore songs until your pain falls as tears.

Communal voice

Last Sunday was one of the worst, when the barmaid from Cork got up and sang

The Streets of New York

. On a barstool in the middle of a packed pub she stood, her voice rising like nothing you ever heard before. The whole place fell quiet, and you looked around, and everyone, each with their own reason for being there, was held upon her every note.

You couldn’t help but think of the old generations of Irish in New York and Boston and London, stories of the famine ships, the hungry ’30s, the black ’80s. Your father told you all about his time in London, and the pubs of Kilburn and Cricklewood, where they offered bacon and cabbage on a Sunday afternoon for the “Paddies”, who would eat and drink their fill before stumbling back to empty bedsits.

Often you heard their tales sung in the silly hours of the morning, after a match or at a wedding. But you never thought of them as anything more than laments to the generations who left Ireland when a one-way ticket really was one-way.

But it’s your generation now, the one that was promised so much more. For the first time you realise their words are yours. You are an “emigrant” just like them. And the horrible truth of it is that if you went back to live in Ireland you wouldn’t even have the stamps for the dole.

When the girl finished she bowed her head. Not a sinner stirred. You looked around your table, at your new friends from the four corners of Ireland. No one spoke, but you knew every one of you felt the same. All bound for years abroad, like the many others in the United States, Canada and England, clueless to when or if you’d ever return.

You scrub the last of the sunscreen into your face, take a long slug of water and tell the lads you’ll see them at lunch. “Catch ya Irish,” they say as you walk up the steps, thinking of those moments of a Sunday afternoon in Sydney, when you never loved nor hated Ireland so much, and never felt so near or so far from “home”.

Destination Australia, part 2 of the Irish Times guide to living overseas, is now on irishtimes.com