Questions of Travel (4 page)

Tonight in the op shop, lights blazed scarily for no one. Drawing closer, Laura saw a big window peopled with frozen brides. They modeled beaded sheaths, dresses that frothed, skirts that belled, empire waists, sweetheart necklines, a bolero, a veil. A cream-embroidered caftan proclaimed that the seventies were over. Taffeta and lace, rayon and silk proliferated in a bank of dressing tables at the rear of the display.

At first, what fascinated and appalled was the approximation of life: the mannequins were spooky, multiple, sci-fi. But it was their setting that gradually pressed its claim. The brides posed among the varnished sideboards and satin-skirted standard lamps, tile-topped tables and brown corduroy armchairs of yesteryear. Smack in the middle, posing on a china cabinet that held an orange telephone and a lidless willow-patterned tureen, was a small plush dog of the breed that flourishes in the rear windows of cars. As Laura looked on, its head began to nod; a draught must have crept into the shop. There the little dog sat, assenting to the triumph of time and tawdriness over dreams—secondhand dreams it was true, somewhat threadbare, but impulses towards an ideal, all the same.

Ravi, 1980
s

HE HAD BECOME FRIENDS
with a boy named Mohan Dabrera. A mild rivalry served to intensify their awareness of each other. They sat next to each other in class and snorted at each other’s jokes. Now and then, overcome by comradely feeling, one or the other would kick or strike his friend.

Dabrera, a short boy with a large head, had a worldly air. His father, an importer of catering equipment, had contacts at the hotels that lined the beach. Dabrera liked to boast of their buffet lunches. But he was essentially harmless. He invited Ravi home one Sunday and let him listen to The Police on the Walkman bought for him by his father on a business trip abroad.

These Sunday afternoon visits soon became a fixture. In Dabrera’s bedroom, which stood at the end of a long, gloomy passage, the boys listened to music; a shelf held a collection of pre-recorded cassettes. Snacks were served to them, and cold glasses of Coke. The ceiling fan wheezed as it turned, while the boys practiced card tricks. Sometimes they played Mastermind. Mostly they talked, Ravi cradled in a tangerine beanbag, Dabrera reclining on his bed.

They were at that stage of adolescence which sets great store by purity, Dabrera shedding his ceremonial air to lose himself in fervent homilies on the theme. He revealed that he took a cold shower-bath three or four times a day. To do less was
caddish.
Where had he picked up the distinctive word? It studded the boys’ exchanges, for like all zealots they were much exercised by what they denounced. They would analyze anything that caught their attention: a classmate’s remark, a line in an advertising jingle. Then:
Caddish!
They would shout it, jubilant. Entire categories were damned, tourists for instance, a species Dabrera had studied at first hand, who went about with practically nothing on, and didn’t wash their feet at night before climbing into bed.

Carmel Mendis cried, “What will you do when you catch dengue fever and die?” But Ravi had discovered something thrilling: he could ignore his mother. He went on setting up his bed on the back veranda. When he woke at night, the moon returned his stare. He vowed to do stupendous things. But then he felt thoroughly disgusted with life. Because Priya often teased him, poking fun at his mannerisms and turns of phrase, he lost himself in an elaborate story that culminated when she begged for his forgiveness. He assured her that she had it. Then he had her hanged.

Sometimes, taking Marmite with him on her chain, he slipped out into the street. Feelings of wonder and tenderness for all living things would overcome him. There was also the great mystery of selfhood. It was amazing that he was he, Ravi Mendis, with all that he thought and felt accessible to him alone. How terrible that the intricate web of his consciousness could never be experienced by, say, the one-eyed man who called periodically at the house to buy old newspapers. Or for that matter by Sting. Ravi held out his hands: there, at those ten fingertips, he ended. The sea sighed as it stretched in its bed. Marmite licked his knee.

There came an afternoon in July when Dabrera’s feelings were tuned to an excruciating pitch. His face was strained, and his voice, habitually sonorous, disintegrated into childish piping as he swore Ravi to secrecy. Then he announced that their form teacher, Brother Francis, masturbated with the aid of a mango skin. Dabrera always avoided slang, preferring to say masturbation, penis, and so on; the formality lent his disapproval a redoubtable force. Swaying back and forth on his short legs, he refused to reveal how he had learned about the mango skin, saying only, “Trust me, our so-called reverend brothers are a filthy lot.” And—a scatter of fine spittle accompanying his climax—“It’s all just unspeakably
caddish.
”

Dabrera often required Ravi to accept his claims without question. But his loftiness grated this time. Perhaps Ravi had tired of his role as guest, with treats portioned out like deviled cashews—gratitude is rarely an emotion that keeps. Or perhaps it was just the irritability that spurted in him these days, causing him to take offence at the least little thing.

He said, “I don’t believe you.”

It was one of those suspended moments. It might have ended in a blow or—the vision that came to Ravi was at once precise and highly peculiar—a caress. But Dabrera only stood on tiptoe and fumbled along the top of his almirah. Then he held out a copy of
Playboy.
He had found it the previous week, he said, hidden in his father’s desk.

“Can’t you see?” Dabrera’s voice shot up the scale again. “It’s much worse than you think. No one—
no one
—is above caddishness. It’s all around. There’s nowhere safe.” He crossed the room. “Move over.” He settled himself into the beanbag and said, “Look at it, will you.”

Side by side, neither sitting nor exactly sprawling, they looked. Ravi turned the pages, sometimes quite fast. Now and then the movement brought his arm into contact with Dabrera’s shoulder. In the distance, or it might have been just outside the window, a crow cried, Ah-ah-ah.

Light was starting to fade, rubbed from the sky with a dirty eraser, when Ravi left. He walked down an avenue of crotons, away from the large, silent house. The only other person he had ever seen there was the gray-haired servant who brought them their nibbles and drinks. Dabrera was an only child, and Ravi had never met his parents. He had the impression that Mrs. Dabrera was sickly; the long, dim passage suggested hankies soaked in cologne. But now and then, an angry female voice rose behind “Roxanne.” The servant’s face was always frightened and exhausted. Ravi began to walk faster and, eventually, to run.

On and on he sped, and a piano hurled the notes of an arpeggio after him like stones. He passed a broad, dark banyan tree and a green where cricket was played. Still he fled, running past the rest house, running past people and open-fronted stalls.

He reached a street lined with souvenir shops and places where tourists went to eat. He dashed across, and into a lane. Here, after the brassy streetlights, shadows surged to meet him. Blinded, he ran into a pale shape.

Brother Ignatius said, “Always rushing to get on, Mendis.”

The shock of the collision caused the emotions of the afternoon to swarm up in Ravi. His thoughts flashed in all directions. Dabrera hissed,
They’re a filthy lot.
But why was Brother Ignatius on foot, where was his bicycle? Confusion and embarrassment mingled in Ravi and filled him with rage.

Mrs. Anrado’s guesthouse stood halfway down the lane. A group of foreigners came strolling out of the darkness, young people in bright, loose clothes, one girl with a temple flower in a wave of yellow hair. She was saying, “I don’t care if it’s Bali and Phuket. I just want to go somewhere cheap and with great food.”

On a great surge of courage, Ravi turned to Brother Ignatius. “Geography is destiny? You don’t know anything!” If he stopped for a second, he knew he would be lost. He shouted, “People like that—” But he didn’t know how to say what he meant.

“Pray for them, child. Going here and there, far from home.”

Now Ravi was close to tears. Again he yelled, “You don’t know anything!” Then he ran away.

At school it was easy enough to avoid Brother Ignatius. But what furtive purpose had taken him to a lane that led only to hippies and fields? Then anger would rescue Ravi from the swirl of shame and helplessness stirred by the memory, and he would conclude that the reverend brother was just a dirty fool.

As if by agreement, Dabrera and Ravi greeted each other in class with the flawless civility of mutual mistrust. By the middle of the week, Dabrera had been granted permission to exchange his desk for one on the far side of the room; a note from his mother claimed that the light from the window was weakening his eyes. In any case, there would have been no more afternoons at his house. In the north, Tamil guerrillas slaughtered fifteen Sinhalese soldiers in an ambush. Very soon the retaliations began, and Dabrera was missing when school resumed. His classmates learned that his mother was a Tamil. In Colombo, a mob had set her parents’ house on fire and hacked the old people to death. Dabrera’s mother would no longer let him leave the house. Ravi pictured him, a prisoner in a bedroom with The Police in his ears. When his jailer wasn’t screaming orders, she couldn’t stop crying. Ravi remembered the servant’s frightened face.

Another awful thing was that Marmite settled down on the veranda, gave a mighty thump of her tail and died. Priya wrapped the old dog in a towel and placed her in her grave. She had once shrouded her dolls in handkerchiefs and buried them in the same spot under the mulberry, then as now rounding on Ravi when he tried to help.

Eventually, there came the news that the Dabreras had been granted asylum in Norway. Then someone else said Denmark—at any rate, somewhere where they could be certain of being cold.

Laura, 1980
s

AT THE END OF
her first year at art school, Laura looked carefully at all her work. Then she withdrew her enrollment. A few days later, in a video shop, she ran into one of her teachers—a lovely, sexy man!—and told him of her decision. Charlie McKenzie nodded. “Smart girl.” She ended the summer in his bed.

Self-conscious under his gaze, Laura drew a red quilt over her stomach, her heavy breasts. He went away from her on bare feet and returned with a book. “No need to hide.” Laura inspected the dimpled thighs and pear-shaped torso of Rembrandt’s Hendrickje and was not reassured.

Charlie was a squat-bodied man with a tiny, hooded penis scarcely larger than Laura’s thumb. But he was imaginative and unhurried. There was a dollop of Maori in his ancestral mix, making him a prize in certain quarters. At parties, Laura Fraser thrilled to the novel sensation of being envied.

Quite soon, there were other women. But Laura couldn’t learn to share. When she said so, Charlie remained a friend, now and then still meeting her in bed. She was restful, he once remarked. Laura would have wished for a gaudier assessment. By that time she was in her final year of English at university, yearning for irrevocable acts and large, sincere, nineteenth-century fictions.

On a blustery October morning, Hester sneezed. Six days later she was dead.

Laura left a message at the law firm where Cameron was a partner. He didn’t return her call. Donald Fraser had remarried the previous year. He and his wife, a brisk anesthetist, were doing something medical and crucial in Boston when Hester died. They sent a wreath. The card read,
A great innings!
That would be the anesthetist, thought Laura, she was from Melbourne.

With Charlie’s help, Laura packed up her great-aunt’s flat. A chest of drawers yielded a photograph album with matte black pages. Two sepia children posed in buttoned boots:
Hester and Ruth
said an inscription in an upright hand. The album couldn’t be given to the Salvos or thrown into a bin, but how many photos could Laura keep? The day passed in decisions that were betrayals. Charlie, returning to the room with a mug of instant in each hand, found Laura stricken. She had come upon a toffee tin containing every birthday card she had given Hester: “I missed 1984.” Charlie tried to console her, but like most people, Laura dispensed self-reproach in inverse proportion to the damage done.

Hester’s ancient transistor still lay beside her bed. A death notice, a funeral: these were formal, they had a shape. But what was to be done with the spreading sadness of a radio in a perforated leather case? Laura slipped the strap over her wrist and held the trannie to her ear. On winter afternoons Hester had sat like that, listening to the footy. She had spent two years in Ballarat as a girl and retained a lifelong fervor for Australian Rules. When the enemy had a free kick, she would cross her fingers and hiss maledictions. The twins had imitated and mocked, chanting, “Chewie on your boot! Chewie on your boot!” if ever they found Hester in a tricky maneuver such as the separation of whites from yolks.

One last relic pierced afresh: it was a charcoal portrait of Hester. Laura was responsible—how she hated it now. The drawing was as exact as a coffin: all that had escaped was everything vital. “It’s so lifelike!” Hester had exclaimed. But the lifelike is not life.

At her bridge club, Hester had flexed an old talent at discreet intervals; a blue bankbook revealed a surprising sum. She had left her father’s gold watch to a man in London with fourteen letters in his name; everything else went to Laura. The anesthetist would report, eventually, that her husband considered the will insulting.

And so, like a heroine, Laura came into an inheritance. There was only one thing to do. She set out to see the world.