Geography (11 page)

Marion was gentle with me at first, holding my hand while I sobbed. ‘This shouldn't surprise you,' Marion said, smoothing my hair away from my face. ‘He has other lovers. You told me that yourself. You even thought he had someone else on the go last week when you were in Sydney.'

‘No one has ever made me feel the way he does,' I spoke slowly.

‘On edge, strung out, needy, horny? Darling, he's fucking with your head.'

‘But the sex…'

‘Good sex doesn't last. And you had to wait eight months for it, so no wonder it felt good. That's probably his tactic—keep several women on the go around the globe so no one twigs to how limited his repertoire is.'

‘Maybe I could get used to it,' I said. ‘Maybe I could handle this.'

‘Maybe you could. If you wanted to bend yourself out of shape.'

I felt better after Marion talked tough to me and made me a cup of tea. ‘I have to go out again,' Marion said. ‘Raff and I promised we'd meet friends for dinner. Do you want to come?'

‘I'll be fine,' I said. ‘I think I'd rather be alone.'

‘Okay, but promise me you won't phone him.'

‘I won't.'

I wasn't fine. When I was alone anxiety swamped me. I knew he was staying in St Kilda and I drove over there around midnight, pacing up and down the street trying to summon the courage to call or go in. I paced till two a.m., till only a mad woman would have thought it was okay to ring, and then phoned him from a call box across the road.

Michael came to the phone. ‘You've woken everyone up,' he said.

‘Can I come up?' I asked.

‘No,' he said. ‘I'll come down.'

We stood together in the street, not touching or talking, looking at each other. ‘You can't end things so casually,' I said finally. ‘This is important. We are important.'

‘I don't want to be pining for someone a long way away. I've been doing it with my wife. My ex-wife. I have no intention of doing it again.' He sounded formal and awkward like he was reciting something out of habit.

‘Then why have you kept in touch with me?' I asked. ‘Why have you kept things going as long as you have? You could have slept with anyone while you were here. Picked someone who didn't care about you.'

‘I do like you. More than like you. I like you more than anyone I have met for a long time.'

I was silent.

‘Are you satisfied now?' he said.

‘No.'

Michael shrugged his shoulders in frustration. ‘I'm going back to bed,' he turned and walked up the stairs.

Six

We board the boat at Alappuzha, once known as Alleppey. The boat is thatched, with a covered terrace on the roof, a small living room underneath and a bedroom no bigger than a double bed. Our captain is called Hari and we have a cook who calls himself JD. They have nowhere to sleep, or eat.

‘Hari and JD can eat with us,' I say.

‘They won't,' Ruby says. ‘We're the wrong caste, they won't want to.' These are the things I forget about India of course, when I romanticise it in my dreams. ‘This is
God of Small Things
territory,' Ruby goes on. ‘Have you read it? It's all about caste. Caste and love.'

I haven't read it, but I've noticed that everyone we meet tells us what caste they are, along with their names and occupations. And the resentment towards Muslims is overt. As in Sri Lanka, politics are everywhere.

We travelled down tiny waterways at Poovar, in a small wooden boat. We could spread out our arms and touch coconut palms with our fingertips. We floated within inches of an egret perched on a palm trunk that had been twisted by sunlight till it was slung like a hammock over the water.

In contrast, this canal feels like the Keralan equivalent of the Princes Highway—wide and dirty grey-green, with factories and car ads on either side. We are floating through a state where pollution is destroying the waterways and poverty is increasing exponentially. I try to stop worrying about these things and enjoy the fact that manicured rice paddies have come into view and the pace of the boat is smooth and slow. I point out the small villages to Ruby as we pass them, but then we see the villagers washing and bathing in the river and have a shameful sense of invading their privacy.

‘I feel like a Memsahib, perched up here on the roof in my cane chair,' Ruby announces. ‘And I'm hot. Perhaps that is why I'm finding this so depressing.'

It
is
hot up here on the roof of this floating palace. Ruby looks to me like a wilting flower. ‘Would you like me to fan you with some kind of frond?' I ask.

‘Yes, please. And let's play the game where the historical relic is you rather than the locals. Question one: did you see the first man walk on the moon?'

I did, of course, like almost everyone my age. I was in prep school, five years old. We were all lined up to watch the landing on the TV. I can still remember the eeriness of the flickering images. The crackle and staccato of the sound. The grey surface of the moon. The slow, heavy way that the astronauts moved.

I tell Ruby that at that time, back in '69, the milk used to be delivered to our house by a man with a horse and cart. ‘I would hear it coming—you know Clydesdales? The horses with enormous feet? Clip-clop, clip-clop,' I rap my knuckles on the side of the bamboo chair, ‘I would hear them coming down the street. You'd have to shake the bottle to get the cream on the top all through the milk. On winter mornings there would be frosts, on the car windscreen, on the lawn, making it crunchy to walk on.' The frosts don't happen so much now. Now it is hotter in summer and milder in winter. It makes Melbourne feel different from the city I was born in.

Ruby smiles when I talk to her of the frost; I smile too. The thought of cold weather is deeply pleasurable.

I tell her that when I was in grade one the system changed from imperial to metric. I had only been doing maths for one year the old way, but that was enough to make it stick and I've been confused ever since. It was, I say, an in-between time; but when I think about it, every moment is an in-between time, every moment stands poised between the past and the future.

We stop further along the canal to look at a Catholic church, St Mary's. It has frescos that are hundreds of years old. They are vivid with colour, unrestrained in the violence and drama with which they portray key biblical moments. I love that about this place, the way the chaos of Hinduism influences Christianity, so that floating down the river you might see a small Ganesa shrine and, a bit further along, a Jesus shrine. Both icons surrounded by incense and laden with necklaces of flower and pieces of fabric.

It is only when we slip out of the river into Lake Vembanad that we see how beautiful this place really is. The lime factories that have lined the river shore and spread a ghostly white over buildings and trees fade into the horizon. There are pretty pink flowers everywhere, though later that evening Hari tells us these flowers are caused by pollution and their leaves are choking the lake.

As dusk descends the twilight blurs everything so I feel like I'm in Kashmir again, unable to distinguish between water and sky. Ruby sits, mesmerised. Wailing floats across the water. ‘Is that sound coming from the mosques?' I ask the gnarled and grumpy Hari.

Hari looks offended. ‘Not Muslims. Hindus chanting. Perhaps some Christians singing their hymns. Not Muslims.'

Ruby and I smile at each other when he says this and I wonder whether we are smiling at the same thing: our craving to find the perfect moment; the absurdity of expecting it.

Two weeks after Michael left Australia in the summer of '94, I woke to the news that LA had been hit by earthquake just hours after he'd got off the plane. The front page of the paper had a photo of freeways collapsed on each other like a pack of cards. And the news that most of the major roads downtown were closed. Dozens were presumed dead and thousands injured, thousands homeless.

‘Are you okay?' I faxed Michael immediately, forgetting my promise to Marion, and to myself, that I wouldn't contact him again. He faxed me straight back.

‘Have you ever touched concrete that undulates like fabric, stood on floors that rolled like surf beneath you? But that isn't the worst of it. It is the aftershocks that hit every few minutes or so which are the most distressing. There have been hundreds of them since the main quake and it is only twelve hours in. They leave you chasing your coffee as it slides around the table, afraid to stand, convinced you're crazy, convinced the building is going to crumble around you. Nothing is solid.'

I was a long way away again, Michael felt safe. He kept faxing, he was romantic, he was sweet to me. I forgot the rumours about other girls in Sydney, and forgot about wandering St Kilda in the middle of the night. Remembered only that when I was with him I bled, the moon was full, fires broke out and now it seemed the earth moved underfoot: all these things I read as signs.

One day Marion found a fax Michael had sent me and she confronted me. ‘Are you two back in touch?'

‘I was worried because of the quake.'

‘Just don't wake up one morning to find five years have gone by and you're still hooked. He's not real, Catherine.
You don't know him.
Nothing is more alluring than a man you make up in your head.'

‘Of course he's real.'

‘No he's not. He's drama and chaos. He's Los Angeles. He's good sex.' Marion stared at me in exasperation. ‘You don't get it, do you? With real boyfriends you
do things
. You hang out
after
you have sex. You talk about stuff. All you've done with this guy is fuck, get a postcard or sit by the phone in a range of exotic locations. It is not a relationship.'

‘You pathologise everything,' I was upset. ‘This is what all that therapy has done to you. This is what this decade has done to us. No one would ever love anyone if they went around being
sensible
about things. What I feel for Michael, what he feels for me, it's…It's
romantic
. This is what romance
is
.'

‘Catherine,' Marion hesitated. She seemed nervous. ‘Speaking of pathology, do you think this has anything to do with…' I knew what she was getting at. ‘It can skew people's antennae pretty badly. And Michael…I think he's got a nose for damage.'

‘Jesus, Marion, everyone's got their seedy stories. It's so fucking nineties the way everyone excavates some minor event and turns themselves into victims. What happened to me wasn't abuse with a capital A, it's not a big deal.'

‘I don't have a story like that,' Marion looked upset. ‘I think the whole word should be in capitals: A. B. U. S. E. It's a huge fucking deal to have your best friend's father grope you every time you babysit. It's not about sex; it's about having to keep secrets, and feeling like you have to play up to it, and no one noticing because everyone thinks it's normal these days for teenage girls to be sexually precocious. It's awful. Really awful.'