Geography (25 page)

‘Where's your flatmate?' Michael asked when he came around again the next night. ‘He never seems to be here.'

‘At his girlfriend's.'

‘I thought he was your boyfriend. I get some of the gossip over in Los Angeles, you know.'

‘He was a kind of boyfriend, but now he's just a good friend. Anyway, he's started seeing someone else.'

‘Are you jealous?'

‘Yes, actually.'

‘Have you been seeing anyone?' he asked.

‘Do I look like I could be dating anyone?' I gestured down.

The conversation was stilted and awkward. I didn't want to talk about these things with him. I did not want to tell Michael that I had had lovers but that things always ended because whenever they touched me I thought of him. I didn't tell him that I had known he was in town because I had dreamt he was here and then a friend had rung me up the very next morning to tell me. I didn't say that I dreamt of him often. That I always felt I knew where in the world he was, and whether he was with someone else. When people would tell me what he was up to, it would seem I had been right, that my dreams were prophetic. I didn't talk to anyone about any of this any more. I knew it was mad. I couldn't even see what it was I had found attractive in him. I treated him like some kind of altar upon which I was compelled to sacrifice myself.

‘I leave in two days.' He stroked my face. ‘I can't stop thinking about you. Please? Can you? Can we?' He dropped his face to my belly, kissing it gently all over. Undoing the drawstring of my pyjamas, kissing my scar in all its ugliness, tracing my bruising with his tongue. I was afraid.

‘The doctor said I should wait at least six weeks,' I whispered.

‘We can't wait. I'll be gone by then.' Michael moaned into my ear. Despite, or because of, the danger of unhealed wounds, of lost blood, of pain, I let him inside me. He moved cautiously at first, ‘Is this okay?' he murmured, ‘I'll take the weight with my arms,' and within a second I came. The intensity of my orgasm was frightening, it racked me, it hurt me, but I couldn't stop moving against him and had to bite my tongue to stop myself saying ‘I love you.' Even though I didn't, even though I didn't love him. I did not stop him when he seemed to forget I was ill and pushed into me too hard, bit me. In one place he drew blood and all over I could feel the bruises bloom.

Afterwards, as we lay together he stroked my hair. He was tense. There were a few silent minutes then he said, ‘You should know something. That woman I was seeing in Los Angeles last year. We broke up but then got together again three months ago. I'm serious about her.'

In old-fashioned novels I'd have had the vapours or maybe a seizure. Perhaps, like Mademoiselle Tourvel, I'd simply have lain down and died. But in the ungainly jargon of the nineties, it seemed I was having an anxiety attack. I struggled for air while my limbs twitched uncontrollably. I was a dying animal. I was road kill. Michael had never seen me like this before, and glanced anxiously at the door.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘My timing could have been better.' He tried to kiss me, but I was not there to be kissed. I was nowhere.

‘I'm sorry,' he said again, leaning down to touch my face before he left. But I moved slightly to avoid him—it wasn't hard—and then he was gone.

As awful as that night was, I had seen it coming. I had behaved out of habit. ‘Stage four,' I told Tony when I saw him next. ‘I know the hole is there. I'm thinking that soon now, I might be able walk around it.'

As I recovered I began to walk around the cliffs again each morning. No matter how I felt, the walk always sustained me. One morning as I stepped outside my flat I saw a little boy from one of the tourist buses run across the road in front of me and trip in front of an oncoming car. The jolt of adrenalin that surged through my body was electrifying and I moved faster than I ever had before, despite the surgery. I didn't feel any pain. Out of the corner of my eye—my peripheral vision seemed to have increased supernaturally—I saw the pavement full of coffee drinkers rise as if they were part of an action replay. Colours were intense.

I swooped on the boy, pulling him out of the way, half expecting him to push me away in angry fright, but he collapsed into my arms, sobbing in terror, and I carried him to the side of the road. Even though my doctors had said not to lift anything, even though I had been too weak to lift anything for months. The mother came running out of the café, yelling at him in her fear. I left them and walked down to the sea as the adrenalin flood ebbed away. For days I was jittery with the chemicals pumping through my system.

And finally it was chemicals that saved me. There were the ones the doctor gave me which at first made me sleepless and manic but, over the weeks, less anxious and more relaxed. Then there were the ones my body made when I swam and walked each day.

Bad chemistry, I used to think, had taken me to Michael and convinced me he was the one. Now it was chemistry that gave me the strength to loosen my grip, begin to let go.

Thirteen

We walk past hessian bags with pink jasmine falling out, past yellow and orange marigolds being weighed on scales and white tubular flowers that smell like gardenias. The flowers' fragrance is strong in this market, as is the smell of their rotting blooms. There is none of the order we saw outside Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka where lotuses were laid out in neat rows and frangipani arranged in the shape of bodhi leaves.

The humidity is bad enough outside; in here it is so dense we are moving through a hot fog. I yearn for rain; we are all yearning for rain. We are all of us rank with sweat, surrounded by flowers, by people pressing up against us, we hold our bags tightly to our side, avert our faces from the hands that are grabbing at our earrings. Everything tumbles, everywhere it is chaotic.

We get to the other side of the market, out into the open air, and Ruby beams at me, sweat beading on her forehead. ‘Unreal,' she says. ‘That was the best place we've been since we arrived in India.'

We cross the road from the market to one of the temple complexes. It is so vast it is more like a town than a temple. I see one of the temple elephants chained up in a doorway. He is very old. He has large round white symbols painted around his eyes and orange circles on his sides. I hold out a coin and he delicately picks it off my palm with his trunk. Then he places his trunk, thick as a man's thigh, on my head with a delicate thud.

‘I love that elephant,' I say. ‘I
love
it. Is it bad luck to go for a second blessing?'

‘It's greedy,' Ruby says. ‘Let other people have their blessings. What was your wish?'

‘That it rain.' I say. Then it happens. We hear a noise above us. It grows steadily louder and louder and we realise it is the sound of rain. We race outside into the deluge. The weather has finally broken and the physical relief is enormous. We burst out laughing and hug each other.

‘It's a miracle,' Ruby says. ‘You are a
goddess
.'

I have never encountered such rain; you cannot see more than two inches in front of you. The streets of Madurai flood within minutes.

The city's twelve temples, some forty-six metres high, all centuries old, have sheets of water running down their sides. There are hundreds of thousands of sculptures and I think of them now, the gods and goddesses and animal kings being cleansed by the waterfall. The flower sellers in the courtyard are soaked, their necklaces of flowers destroyed. People wade through the muck. Kids dance around in the rain holding hands. The betchak drivers careen past touting for fares, but it is clear they will be stopped in their tracks before long.

‘It is chaos,' says Ruby. ‘We can't walk. We can't get anywhere.'

We run into the tailor market, where rows of tailors sew bolts of bright coloured cloth into trousers and shirts. They are watched over by large stone Ganesas and Kalis, both garlanded with bright flowers and blackened with age and the butter that pilgrims rub into the stone. This market was once a temple. It sits lower than the street, so now water is gushing into it and the traders are hesitating, trying to decide whether to pack up or keep going. We stand with water up to our ankles, looking at packets of bindis, rows of coloured bangles and trays of gold earrings.

The woman behind the counter nods at me, then to Kali behind me. ‘You want a child,' she says. ‘You should pray to her. I will pray for you as well. Perhaps it's not too late.'

I'm taken aback, I'm not sure if Ruby has heard us. Either way, she distracts us both. ‘How much are these?' says Ruby, who is fingering rows of glass bangles in dark reds and blues and gold. ‘How do I put them on?'

‘You must push, very hard,' the old woman takes Ruby's arm and, without asking, rubs it with oil. ‘Hold your hand like this,' she demonstrates, holding her own hand in a beak, then takes Ruby's hand and squeezes it so her thumb is tight against the palm. ‘Now it must be hurting,' she says and she forces the bangles in lots of four over Ruby's knuckles and onto her arm.

Ruby's forearm, it seems to be made of glass, it is so delicate. ‘How do I get them off?' she asks.

‘When their time is up they will break and fall. To hurry them along is very bad luck. You will have these bangles on your arm for some years now.' She smiles at Ruby, Ruby smiles back.

We hesitate, look again at the downpour. ‘Madam must also be having some bangles,' says the stall owner who, like us, is now shin deep in water. She grabs my wrist. ‘Madam wants me to pray for her doesn't she? Otherwise she will have no children.' I pull away, grimacing.

‘Let's run to that café next door.' Ruby points three doors down, her arm tinkling as she moves.

We run. It is hard to see where we are going but we make it to the café. ‘That crone freaked me out,' I say when we get inside.

‘Yes, she does have a touch of evil.' Then we both laugh like small children who have escaped from an imaginary witch. Ruby shakes herself off and I can hear the sound of her bangles as she moves. ‘She isn't all bad luck,' I say. ‘It's like you're wearing a cat bell. I'll always know where you are.'

‘Meow,' she says, stretching, theatrically feline. ‘I am your pussycat.' She licks her arm, the one without bangles on it, from the inside of her wrist along the blue vein to that soft place behind her elbow.

I would like to pretend I never saw Michael again but that is not how it happened. I didn't contact him for six months or so after he left that last time, but he kept writing little notes to me, some of them apologetic, some conversational, and one day I answered. I can't even remember why. The number of emails that passed between us went up to three and four a day.

‘I'm a bit old for it, I know, but think I might be having some kind of mid-life crisis,' he wrote. ‘You are one of the few people I can talk to about things.'

We emailed each other as he drove up the west coast of the States. That was something I had always dreamed we would do together, and I suppose we did, in the end. Him driving, breaking down literally, breaking down metaphorically. Me typing, imagining it all in my head. But this time the endless writing to each other felt different. I would circle an idea, a thought, pacing around my apartment, my computer, before I caught the moment where the right words came to me. It was as if this circling and waiting, this learning when to strike, helped me understand not just the movement of ideas and language, but of life and how to move on with it. I understood that I had been circling Michael too long and it made me feel freer to be his friend.

It was a time of storms. In the winter the whole of northeast America had been brought to a halt by ice storms. Beautiful at first, dangerous at last; three thousand miles of power lines were crumpled and crushed by the layers of ice that had built up slowly over several days until the pylons, and much of Canada, had been beaten to their knees. That summer California was assaulted as well. ‘It is raining,' Michael wrote. ‘It is flooding. I'm stuck outside of Big Sur with nowhere to stay. I have found a bar to hide in, but it looks as if I'll be sleeping in the car tonight. The road is collapsing. Sometimes I think I am collapsing too. I feel as if I am drowning.'