Questions of Travel (29 page)
RAVI TORE A STRIP
from the flatbread and used it to scoop up his stew. Abebe Issayas was demonstrating the technique to Jian and Irene and their husbands. Ravi knew the two Chinese women, both aides, from Banksia Gardens. The picnic was taking place around a woven mat in a park. Hana, Abebe’s sister, was present, along with her daughter, Tarik. There was another Ethiopian family as well, and a girl called Jodie who worked with Hana. Jian chewed and said, “Yum.” It sounded like a question. Irene and the Chinese husbands smiled when asked if the food was to their liking. They ate hardboiled eggs, and tore small corners from their bread. The children, who were plentiful, were eating corn chips. Actually, in the way of children meeting for the first time, they were establishing hierarchies. Now and then, one would turn with real interest to a bucket of KFC. Two were Australian, with round mouths and round eyes. They owed their presence there to Jian, who was doing a neighbor a kindness, but Ravi assumed a connection with Jodie. He would never see through the children’s freckled exteriors to Jian.
The flatbread was spongy and faintly sour, and reminded Ravi of a hopper. The lamb stew had a slippery texture, but its fieriness satisfied a need. Once a week, the Bangladeshi shop supplied him with curried goat in a foil container, and small green chilies in a ziplock bag. Eaten with cheese slices and bread, the chilies brought on mouth ulcers—but Ravi couldn’t do without them. Hana broke off a conversation with Jodie to pick up an enamel bowl. “This is
azifa.
It’s lentils cooked with mustard seeds. I made it specially.” Sitting up on her knees, she offered a large spoon. The children, facing each other on the limp grass, were intent on a game or a struggle to the death. The Chinese continued to smile.
Hana turned to Ravi. “How are you?” Like her brother, she was broad-backed and held herself very straight. Ravi and Hana had met when she turned up at Banksia Gardens one morning. She had been to a hospital for tests, there was good news, she had wanted to tell her brother in person and straight away. Beryl Doone was lying pure and triumphant in her own warm shit: when contaminating black hands approached, she was warding them off with howls. Glory Warren had tripped and cut her lip—Abebe could not be spared. Ravi made a cup of tea from his own store and carried it to Hana, waiting in the dining room. She looked up from a stack of André Rieu DVDs and announced, “I’m very hasty.” Ravi remembered something Malini used to say: that people confess only to failings of which they’re proud. He became one of Hana’s impulses. Abebe would call him on a Sunday, inviting him to a street festival or a day at the beach. In the background, Hana was audible: “Tell him two o’clock. No, better say quarter past.” What Australia took away, it tried to make up for with food fairs, free guided walks, concerts in parks. Hana said, “It’s a wonderful country.” She was at least ten years younger than her brother, could not have been more than thirty, but now began talking about Paris with the words
when I was young.
Hana told so many stories about Paris that Ravi assumed she had lived there for years. When he asked one day, she said, “Thirteen months.” Her daughter, aged seven, had shown Ravi a photograph of her father. Ravi was looking from the child’s eyes, which were shaped like leaves, to identical paper ones, when Hana turned from the kitchen bench with a pan of coffee. “Tarik, how many times must I tell you not to bother our guests?” The child had a flair for irritating her mother. It might have been clumsiness or an instinct for revenge. “Tarik, how many sleeps to your birthday?” asked Abebe. But he counted for nothing. Hana was the shadow her daughter had to escape, the sun to which the child was pulled. She wanted to watch TV but wasn’t allowed to while Ravi was present. This drove her to say, “Do you know I’m French?” What she meant was that her father had been a native of Lille. One day Hana would tell Ravi why she had chosen the name Tarik. “It means history. And a marvel.” But when she spoke to the child, it was like someone going through a house snapping off the lights.
At the picnic, the Paris story was about the time when Hana, disoriented from a long journey underground, emerged into daylight and walked the wrong way across a square. When she realized she needed directions, she approached a passerby. But her mother-in-law had said that in Hana’s mouth, the language of Racine sounded like someone scraping out a saucepan. Remembering this, Hana grew nervous about grammar and pronunciation, and asked the stranger the time instead. “You know what he told me? ‘Do you think I’m an information desk?’” All Hana’s stories were like that, testimony to French barbarism. Her husband’s director at the hospital had sacked her au pair after a week because the girl, a Canadian, had drunk milk instead of wine with her food.
Adseda, the other Ethiopian woman, said that she had once visited an uncle in Italy. It was plain that she had no wish to go there again. Ravi, who was sitting next to Irene’s husband, asked where he had lived in China. “Shanghai,” said Rong. That wasn’t true. Ningbo was one of the oldest cities in the country. In the war, the Japanese had bombed it with fleas that carried bubonic plague. But in Australia no one had heard of it. It was easier to say Shanghai, which was separated from Ningbo by only a few hundred kilometers. Then people could say, Oh, I’d love to go there! and Rong could look thrilled. It was defeat of a kind, but there are only so many fronts on which you can fight. A month after arriving in Sydney, Rong thought he had got to the end of the witticisms provoked by his name. Six years on, he knew that he never would. At the factory, some of his workmates called him Ron; they meant it as a kindness, to spare him embarrassment. Irene urged, encouraged by example. But Rong wouldn’t change his name.
Dessert was a pavlova made by Jian. It drew the children in. A tiny paper flag flew above the strawberries and kiwifruit because Abebe, Hana and Tarik had been granted Australian citizenship. A toast was drunk in Fanta and Coke. Awarded a blunt knife tied with green and yellow ribbons, Tarik contrived to sink her fingers as well as the blade into the cream. At once her gaze flew to her mother. She turned away and licked her fingers quickly. Although not pretty, the child was enchanting. Her expression, like her mother’s, could change quickly. Part mineral, part jewel, she was solid yet caught the light.
The pavlova had produced a brief, deep silence among the children. Now, with serious faces, they sang “Advance Australia Fair.” After the first verse, two of the Chinese boys branched into “God Save the Queen.” Their father remarked that there was no end to the rubbish they picked up at school. Across the park, a man shouted, “Turn it off!” The children went on chanting this, stamping their feet in rhythm, long after the pavlova was a ruin. Jodie and Hana had got on to the topic of the supermarket where they worked. Jodie horrified and amused everyone with her account of shoppers who handed her half-eaten bananas or chocolate bars to scan. She was a ham-faced girl with a mouth that invited kisses. Hana observed that what she hated most was cashing up at the end of a shift. “Counting all those dirty five-cent pieces.” At the start of the meal, she had used a strip of bread to pick up some stew and placed it in Jodie’s mouth. This was a
goorsha,
an act of friendship, she explained.
The talk of work seeped into the mood of the afternoon. People started to grumble about managers, conditions, the idiocies of co-workers; Monday threatened like a chill. A musical horn cruised out of a side street, and a van came to a stop on the other side of the park. “Ice cream!” whined a child, hopping up and down on the spot. “Daddy, kenivenicecream?”
Hana said, “You know what my daughter used to believe?” At which Tarik shrieked, “Mummy, no! Shut up!”
“I told her that when Mr. Whippy was playing that tune, it meant he had no more ice cream left.”
Everyone laughed. Tarik screamed, “I hate you, Mummy!”
On the train home from Belmore, Ravi’s mind slipped between two pictures. Hana’s long fingers moved among greasy coins; Tarik, turning her back on the company like an animal, cleaned herself with her tongue. At some point, Ravi realized that what had really drawn him was Hana’s hand at her friend’s plump lips. The gesture was both electrifying in its intimacy and contaminated by association with the coins.
For a long time, nothing had been left on the grass near Hazel’s gate. But now there was a model airplane in the power lines overhead. Ravi drew closer and saw that the plane had feathers. It was a gull, its white wings fused to the wires.
The sleep-out door clicked shut behind him, and the phone began to ring.
Afterwards, Ravi sent an email to Angie Segal. She wouldn’t read it until the following day, but to transform what had happened into sentences was to enter into the long adjustment to truth. He walked about the room. It had begun to rain, or he would have walked out into the dark. Hazel was away, visiting Robbo and Sooz. Ravi thought of Damo, who had tried to make him feel at home. He thought of Abebe Issayas, the steadfast apex of a triangle, the separate shimmering points of Hana and her child. But he had only just left the Issayases—anyway it was Sunday evening, when people withdrew from the world. Ravi had seen the lighted windows and the empty streets. The sleep-out, six meters long and four wide, was more space than he had ever had to himself. Within it, he was alone. He looked at Fair Play, sitting in the middle of his bed. She looked back, her beautiful eyes unblinking. She cared nothing for him, but he had forgotten to feed her. It was a measure of the arrogance of his species that when she threw up her muzzle and began to bay, he took it for solidarity and grief.
Ravi returned to his laptop. He had switched off his modem from a sense that he ought to keep his landline free, but saw his foolishness now. The critical phone call had already come through. He had already spoken to Priya, to Varunika, to Lal Fonseka. It was Varunika, home for a fortnight’s holiday, who had risen late, found the house silent and gone into her mother’s bedroom. While Ravi was at the picnic, they had been trying to call him. Priya had said, “She didn’t suffer,” and started to cry. Her husband, taking the receiver, imparted facts. Less than a month had passed since Carmel’s heart had been monitored. Lal Fonseka said this, and everything else, twice. The situation was made for him, a showcase for masculine calm, rich in sonorous phrases. It was clear to Ravi that for weeks his brother-in-law would go about saying
full check-up, all clear, cardiac arrest.
But it was Varunika he hated. By the time they had spoken, there had been nothing left to say. Her voice had thickened, then quavered—but she had been there, the discovery had fallen to her. It was a pattern Ravi recognized: the fortunate youngest, shielded and spoiled. Old injustices clawed at him, paramount among them this:
Varunika had got away with refusing to eat tripe.
When he sat in front of his laptop, Fair Play came and laid her head on his knee. Still he ignored her. This was powerful, unprecedented, baffling. Fair Play contemplated an age-old female dilemma: was the masterful man to be punished or followed to the ends of the earth? Ravi had remembered Nimal and decided to email him. But he went instead to the site dedicated to Malini and Hiran. Their faces, backlit and smiling, were shockingly specific. Years had passed since he had seen them. He was braced for the familiar spasm in his entrails, but it was his hands that danced. Malini’s name and year of birth constituted one of his online passwords, Hiran’s another; now his mother would make a third. It was a modern memorial, coded as bullet points or asterisks. The dead appeared and vanished, ghosts in the machine.
When his hands grew quiet at last, Ravi scrolled down the screen. Dozens—hundreds—of messages had been left on the site. Nimal had alerted him long ago to the phenomenon, had urged him to read the tributes. Ravi began to do so, when an electronic melody started to play. Rather than reading in a concentrated fashion, he was merely allowing his eyes to glide over words, and the music seemed only to accompany this activity; then he realized that it came from his mobile. To her partner’s annoyance, Angie Segal had checked her work emails on Sunday night.
THERE WAS A RECORD
playing, one of the treacly arias in which Carlo wallowed. Rain fell, heavy and warm. Sweaty with summer, languid with prawns and limoncello, Laura heard syllables felted by the roar of the downpipe, by a tenor’s protestations. She stirred herself to shout, “What?”
The depths of the sofa bellowed, “Beautiful titties!”
Inside the racket, everything was as hushed as the moment before music, hushed as the Lower North Shore on Sunday.
Laura considered, Ha-ha-ha!
Or: Gross! Get away from me, old person!
Cliff Ferrier reminded,
We could choose to be kind.
How truly disgusting limoncello was—a drink for old men and tourists.
Or did she mean old men and lovers?
Whatever the case, the limoncello was definitely siding with Cliff Ferrier.
So Laura undid a button.
When she rose, something furtive skipped across Carlo’s face. But she stayed where she was, only stripping clothes from herself like petals. Knickers presented their usual awkwardness. When she had dealt with it, she posed and stroked. Beautiful titties! Laura closed her eyes and hummed along. She felt corny, self-conscious, astonishingly powerful. Sexy in a sub-porn, exciting kind of way. But as the tenor persisted, her thoughts strayed. She remembered a day in London when she had gone to a cafe to meet Bea. Laura arrived a little late, but there was no sign of Bea—only, sitting alone, a man with a large head of thin, fair hair. He looked up and raised a hand: it was Bea, of course. Recalling this, Laura combed her hair with her fingers. She peeped: on the sofa, a veined hand was at work. The aria ended, another began. He shivered, at last.
The performance inserted itself into Sunday, one with the raised lamp, the small, sticky cakes, one more aspect of the rose-red room. The afternoon would flounder, she or he would select their record from the stack, it would start.
Laura always left straight afterwards. They never touched each other, they never referred to what went on. But after some weeks, a letter came from her bank. The rent she transferred to Carlo’s account had been returned.
It became her habit, on a Sunday, to wear nothing under her clothes. Or, as the season cooled, only a confection of silk and lace, swiftly discarded.
She worked late. Everyone did, titles had been put on hold, schedules stretched, and still Ramsay was understaffed. Laura’s mind buzzed long after she came home.
Sleep was elusive. She was reeling it in. Then it gave a wriggle and was gone. She never went walking at night around here. The pavements were deserted, the walls high, there were surveillance cameras and intercoms. In Drummond’s lair on the roof, she switched on her laptop. There was an email from Theo’s sister—Gaby had attached photos of a child on his eighth birthday, a black-browed angel. He collected snow domes. Laura had sent him a fabulous one, emerald and orange fish hanging about the opera house, while iridescent flakes fell slowly over the bridge. The studio offered only brutal fluorescence, so Laura kept matches and candles to hand. Her face, candle-lit, was a visitation at the window. On both sides of the harbor, towers were fallen constellations. The tea light shone in Theo’s red star.
Laura Googled names. Sometimes an image turned up. A girl she had known at school, now a dispute resolution counselor, had disguised herself as her mother. The apple cheeks of a once longed-for boy had assumed the lackluster mask of middle age. Steve Kirkpatrick had vanished, leaving not even a death notice. There was a review of Charlie McKenzie’s latest show: the gallery was middling, Laura noted cattily, and the praise distinctly faint.
She remembered that only four or five years earlier, “the information superhighway” had been a fashionable term.
Information
encouraged thoughts of newsrooms and statisticians, of gravity and weight. But Laura’s experience of the Internet was of invisibility, exoticism, discontinuity: a lightness. She moved from site to site in an exhilarating patternless dance. One step led to another, performance and choreography the same. It was true that she usually set out soberly—tonight she had begun with an analysis of neocon strategy offered by the
New York Times.
So how come forty-three minutes later she was reading a blog about street fashion? Along the way, there had been a review of a Mexican film, an Oberlin sophomore’s blog about her yoga class, an advertisement for weight loss, an interview with Louise Bourgeois, a site where one click fed starving children while another conserved 11.4 acres of rainforest, a vituperative forum about global warming and a Japanese designer’s take on the uses of bamboo. Information abounded, but what triumphed was partial and individual. Glimpsed lives were addictive: Laura cruised the confessions of strangers, their aversions and apartments, the recipes they recommended, their responses to the news.
She Googled colleagues. There was a photo of Robyn Orr accepting an award on behalf of the budget travel agency where she had once worked. Quentin Husker had left no digital footprint, but Marion, his wife, dispensed interior design in Woollahra.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves of books are considered sophisticated, but the same effect can be achieved with wallpaper.
Marion’s personal style was influenced by India, where she loved to holiday with her family. What others called the Raj had provided her breakthrough concept: “The Greater Shopping.” Global fusion was timeless and now! Laura saw paisley throws, rosewood consoles, an antique Buddha coupled with a pith helmet on a brass tray.
The only living Paul Hinkel she could find taught economics at a college in Baltimore. But an online genealogy unearthed a dead one in The Hague. That’d be right, thought Laura, for whom tulips had a regimental air. First up to the dyke with his loud, heroic thoughts, the fool.
The lyrics of songs were an education. Ancient riddles dissolved. So it was not, after all,
She keeps a mohair champion in a pretty cabinet.
Not
Cheap wine and a teenage goat,
not
I’m a pool hall ace with every breath you take.
But oh, how Laura yearned for Bryan Ferry to go on singing,
Analogue. Analogue.
She had thought it wonderfully modern, a love song to technology.
Google was ravenous: Laura fed it hour after hour. Her laptop kept up the noisy breathing of a drugged child.
There came an afternoon when, at the end of yet another day of cant and emails, Laura was fed up. It was not quite four. But she left work and walked all the way up to Circular Quay, looking into windows, scraping off the office like something stuck to her shoe. She went into a shop and bought a single, expensive chocolate. She bought red gerberas from a stall. Wind sliced her cheekbones on the deck of the ferry, but inside was stagnant with office workers. As her destination loomed, Laura saw that a group of Asian men were setting up lines and rods on the wharf. One settled himself beside a tartan thermos, another snapped open a plastic box. The passengers in their severe city clothes began to disembark. No one looked at the fishermen, and they appeared not to notice the stream of commuters. Laura had the impression of living through something remembered or imagined: a scene in a film, tense with meaning and possibility, or an incident in a dream. A straggler from the fishing party came hurrying down to the water, wearing tracksuit pants and sneakers, swinging an old TAA bag—the crowd parted before him as for a messenger. He was younger than the other fishermen; Laura tried to smile at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eye. A large yellow car, unnaturally luminous in the gathering dusk, was parked at the bottom of the street, a battered old Kingswood with one dull pink door. Around here, if you had the misfortune to have to park in the street, you made up for it with a RAV4 or a Subaru. Where had the fishermen come from? Laura wondered, and drawing closer, read their license plate:
Peril.
It made her smile all the way up the hill.
From her roof, the wharf was invisible. But when Laura woke that night, she thought she could see the spangle of the fishermen’s lights. There was the smell of food, she thought, a wafting of spices. She was sure she could hear the men, their talk as alien and appealing as birdsong. Far away, but clearly, Theo was laughing. The harbor was an alchemist: a radio blared, a baby cried, and Theo’s wild hoot erupted. In spring, when the ascending whistle of koels rang through Sydney, Laura could have sworn he was laughing at her. The light in his star fell across arms pimpled with goose bumps. The past had come strolling over her grave.
Close at hand, the darkness shrilled and frightened. Laura located her phone. Its face shone, it was a live thing in her hand. The number had been withheld. There would be only the familiar, faintly echoing silence if she answered. She switched off the phone. Once, startled from sleep, she had shouted, “Cameron, what do you want to
say?
” Her caller broke the connection.
Laura made herself a mug of lemongrass and ginger tea. Despite the florist’s wire, her gerberas were heavy-headed—she had known they would droop. But after work she often craved flowers, or a yellow pear in a twist of violet paper, something pretty to salvage from the day. She wondered again how her brother had got hold of her phone number. When giving it to their father, she had asked him not to pass it on. But Donald Fraser was of the generation that relies on address books. His was easily found beside the cordless phone in the hall. Cameron was devious by nature and training. Laura pictured him pocketing the book, turning to L behind a locked lavatory door. She had seen her brother only twice since returning to Sydney—he was a stranger, in fact, as opaque to her as the young fisherman hurrying down to the wharf.
When she tilted her mug, a scene from the afternoon rose from the dregs. She was walking away from Ramsay, and there were three apprentices, two young men and a girl in buff overalls, on the far side of the street. A child walked with them—or so it had seemed. But now Laura wasn’t sure; he had walked a few steps behind. She had seen him before, she recognized the red pack and the shock of black hair. A voice accused silently:
You should have gone over and spoken to him.
The presence of the girl had misdirected. It had caused Laura to believe, somewhere deep in the brain where such links persist, that the child was with the trio. Actually, she had barely noticed any of them—they were heading in a direction she was intent on leaving. The frustrations of the day, the memory of Quentin Husker prefacing yet another idiocy with “Let’s just run this up the flagpole,” had crowded the scene from her mind. Now it came to her as a bungled occasion, attended by urgency and regret.
