Geography (17 page)

‘Let's keep driving,' I say. ‘Take me to Palm Springs. We could stay overnight. We don't have to be back till tomorrow.'

‘Stay overnight? I hadn't planned on that.'

‘Is it a problem?'

‘No,' he hesitated. ‘No. I just hadn't planned on it. Look, I think it will be difficult. To find somewhere to stay.'

We spent that night back in Venice. We talked about Mexico, again, but it was dawning on me that we were going nowhere. Michael seemed to have trouble organising himself to do anything at all. He could tell I was becoming annoyed and became solicitous, offering me chocolate biscuits, joints and cups of tea. He lit candles around the room before we went to bed. Despite, or perhaps to distract myself from, my frustration with him, I sucked his cock. It was silky to me. What it did to him, I liked that too. After he came he stroked my head, drew me into his arms. ‘You give the best head,' he said. ‘I love the way you suck me.' I was irritated all over again. This is not a skill I want to be remembered for. Perhaps Michael could tell he'd said the wrong thing, because he started to play a game we'd played together before, a game in which we tried to remember all the states of America.

‘Georgia,' he drawled, in mock Southern accent, ‘Alabama, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota,' seeing the map of America before him, ‘Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts.' He drew breath, ‘Thems is only some of the places I've travelled trying to find myself a better head job. I've been to Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Maine, Vermont, Hawaii, Nebraska, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida…' And before he could say Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska or the other two states I can never remember the names of, he'd gone hard and I'd gone down on him again.

The next morning we lay in bed late, kissing.

‘Why did Roberta leave you?' I asked.

‘Where did that come from?' He was holding me close, but his body had gone rigid.

‘You told me she met someone else. But why? Why was she looking?'

‘What do you mean why? Why does anyone? She was bored of me, I suppose.'

‘No, there's something else,' I said. ‘Something has happened to you.'

Michael was holding me, stroking my hair. ‘Well, actually, there was more to it than that. She kept miscarrying. She would get pregnant and then four weeks or so later she would lose it. Four times it happened. By the last time she was hating me.'

‘That is sad,' I said.

‘She was right to blame me,' said Michael, ‘as it turned out. She got pregnant to what's-his-face within weeks. Happy families.'

He lay on his back, looking blankly at the ceiling. ‘You needn't think about her, or worry about that time. It is you,' he paused, awkward. ‘It's you I love.'

A day later we were on the way to the airport. Once I knew Mexico wasn't going to happen I decided to go to New York and spend New Year's Eve with Finn.

‘My birthday is on the cusp between Sagittarius and Scorpio,' I say. ‘Which star sign should I read?'

Michael took the paper from me and read aloud from it when we next pulled up at the lights: ‘
Sagittarius, November 22—December 21, for the week December 27 to January 2, 1996. Next week things will have moved on.
Something will be over.
That's us.' He chucked the paper over his shoulder onto the back seat. I just sat and stared out the car window, like I had when I was here as a child. Ever since he'd said he loved me he'd been behaving more erratically than ever.

By the time we got to the airport he was tender again. Leant across and held my face.

‘Don't look so sad,' I said. ‘I'll be back in a few days. You're not saying goodbye forever.'

‘It was courageous of you to come and see me after so much time. You're a very brave woman.' He was being formal which I took to mean he was moved. And perhaps he was. But now I can see he was trying to work out how to say goodbye.

Nine

‘I want to understand this great love of yours,' says Ruby, ‘but frankly, even with all the exotic backdrops, I'm stumped.'

‘You have friends who have drug problems,' I say. ‘You know about addiction.'

‘Is it the same thing?' she asks, and I tell her it is.

‘If there is any sense to it, it is this,' I say. ‘I loved him
because
he was ambivalent for so many years.'

‘You know what Krishnamurti says?
When you get rid of attachment, there will be love.
' Ruby quotes at me. ‘He means real love. The opposite of what you're calling love.'

I sigh, trying not to be irritated when Ruby carries on like this, trying not to be defensive because she is looking at me the way all my friends looked at me. I don't blame people for not understanding. I don't understand myself. Ask a heroin user whose addiction has spiralled why that has happened. They can't explain. Ask a drinker—they don't know either. As for me, I could say: ‘My fathers left me.' In fact I do say that sometimes, but to be honest it rings hollow; it sounds like bargain-basement Freud. Or ‘I was molested,' but that's therapy talk, too. This I am clear about: it is no one else's fault. I
chose,
with a full heart, to give over seven years to the thought of him.

‘I can just tell you the facts,' I say. ‘I can only tell you what happened.'

We change the subject before things get too fraught. We are eating a meal in Munnar, a tea plantation town. Watery dhal and a curry that is meant to be palak paneer, but the green is wrong and the cheese is off. We have found one piece of chicken in our chicken marsala—the rest is gravy. Despite the promising picture of a bottle of Kingfisher beer on the door, it is an alcohol-free night. When I first travelled in countries where alcohol was hard to come by I simply gave up drinking for the duration of the trip. These days, I don't find that so easy.

‘Places change you, don't they?' Ruby says. ‘We didn't go there together, but whenever you talk about going to Rajasthan fifteen years ago it sounds like it was just two years ago except that it is more crowded and polluted now. But when I saw the men in turbans and their shoes with curly toes I felt like I had walked into
Arabian Nights
, like you did. I loved it that people painted blue or red or green goats and elephants onto their whitewashed walls. Or if they were Brahmins their entire house was painted blue. There were whole villages of blue houses.'

‘It was in Rajasthan that I stood on the roof of my hotel in the fort wall of Jaisalmer,' I say, ‘watching tanks move slowly across the desert, throwing up dust, as they drove into Pakistan. That same night I watched a bank of sand roll across the desert towards the fort, forcing its way through the lattice stone work that lined our room. After the storm was over the sand lay on the bedspread in lattice patterns, like the most delicate embroidery.'

‘You think you can prepare yourself for somewhere if you have seen pictures, or documentaries or whatever, but nothing is the same as being in a place. Letting it get under your skin.' Ruby pauses. ‘I don't think this place will get under my skin, though.'

‘Nor mine. I actually thought I'd gone mad this afternoon, when the van dropped us at the Indo-Swiss Cattle Farm.' It was meant to be one of the area's highlights. We admired the calves, were impressed by the size of the bulls and stood, speechless, in front of a patch of garden called the Fodder Crop Museum, which was a series of tufts of different strains of grass labelled in Hindi and English.

‘Why is it,' Ruby asks, after we've sat in subdued silence for a while, ‘that I want to drink more when it's hot, like now. But I also want to drink more when it's really cold. There is nothing I like more than a swig of brandy after a day in the snow.'

‘I find that I like a drink in more moderate temperatures as well.'

We sit thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Let's go back to the room,' Ruby says to me, ‘I think there is something to drink there. In the mini bar.' Innocent words, welcome words, but ones I had used with Michael. That time I started a lie with a lie and the echo startles me, all these years later, even though I know Ruby is telling me the truth. Even though she and I aren't playing games.

‘Catherine, meet Anna,' said Finn. ‘Anna, meet Catherine.'

I was nervous. Finn was my special piece of family, my most loved person in the world and I wasn't sure what I thought about him living here, in New York, with a beautiful American–Italian woman. Anna was smart too. ‘I hope you don't mind me saying I'm nervous,' she said, when we met. ‘It's just I've heard so much about you.'

New York was a blur of the Calvin Klein ads that papered the boards around building sites in SoHo, or loomed storeys high on the side of buildings mid-town. The city was transforming into one giant billboard. In some ways I was in awe of the sweep of a campaign that bridged years and cities and buildings. Marky Mark had towered over Sunset Boulevard when I first went to Los Angeles, in 1993. On the last day of 1995 it was Kate Moss and heroin chic. The images were black and white, grainy. The city was being swamped by brand names. There were fewer coffee shops that weren't Starbucks, bookshops that weren't Barnes & Noble or Borders. I used to travel to escape what I knew; these days I felt I could find nothing else.

Back then, I had loved this global thing (and even this time I rushed to Baby Gap to buy clothes for Max) but now I saw clearly the erasure of difference; worse, I sensed the closing of escape routes from the sense of claustrophobia that had propelled me away from people and around the world.

Finn thought I was being romantic. ‘New York has always been like this,' he said. ‘Changing all the time. It's what makes it such a fantastic place to live. This is just a phase.'

‘Ah, the scientist speaking. Perpetual motion. But you've got to admit; you have to walk further now to find the grotty streets with the pawnbrokers' and the old gunshops with the fading Winchester signs. You've got bugger all chance of finding clothes shops that aren't Gap or French Connection.'

‘When have you ever bought a gun?' Finn laughed. ‘These guys aren't just going to stay in business so tourists like you can look at their cute run-down shops.'

‘Fuck you.'

‘No, I think you mean, fuck
you
.'

‘Clothes aren't Finn's strong point,' Anna intervened.

‘Don't forget Barney's.'

‘You're right,' I said, ‘As long as there is Barney's in New York all's right with the world.'

‘Tomorrow we'll go on a long walk,' Finn promised. ‘We'll go to Brooklyn. Plenty of authentic culture there to cheer you up. Speaking of authenticity, whatever happened to Mexico? I thought you and Michael were going to go down to Baja for a few days.'

‘Some work came up for him.'

‘For an academic? At Christmas time? That's weird.'

We spent New Year's Day walking down and across to Brooklyn. As we walked along the boardwalk looking back on Manhattan, I had a flash. ‘I remember being here,' I said to Finn, ‘with Mum. When I was four. You were just a fat baby, you probably don't remember.'

‘No, I don't remember that. But I do remember I had a fabulous figure as a baby.'

We wandered around the brownstones and several churches. ‘My family used to live around here,' Anna said. ‘That was our local church.' She pointed out a tiny stone church with a small white marble angel out the front—so lifelike it seemed as though she might take flight.

‘Bondi is more secular,' I tell her, ‘we have sculptures of mermaids around my suburb. Or we did, before they rusted.'

‘Speaking of where you live,' Finn said, ‘and of religion, are you barracking for the Sydney Swans yet?'