Questions of Travel (18 page)
She was at work when the doorbell rang. Ravi knew he was going to be killed. Without hesitation, he slithered under his bed.
That evening, Freda asked why he hadn’t opened the door to her cleaner. “Were you out?”
Out
was discouraged if not exactly forbidden. Ravi usually bought cigarettes from the guard but had been known to walk to the shop on the main road. It was one of the tensions that thickened around his smoking. He hadn’t realized that Freda employed a cleaner; had not, in fact, given any thought whatsoever to the cleaning of the flat, such labor having always been accomplished by this or that woman in his orbit. He might have pointed out that Freda had neglected to warn him the cleaner was due, but found he had forgotten the words. He couldn’t remember how to say “I didn’t know.” Silently, he watched a scribble of irritation pass over her face.
Wherever Freda Hobson went, she made herself indispensable to a woman she had selected. Men admired her, at first. Very young, she had abstracted the pattern of her parents’ marriage—
the blade and the block
—and rolled it into a tube through which to view the world. She had collected twenty or thirty close female friends, whose birthdays were noted in a book. Freda neither quarreled nor abandoned, but with each new friend something would happen to make her feel tremendously let down. She asked herself again what a stranger could have said to Malini to lure her into his car. Her friend was prone to girlishness in the presence of fluently spoken men, a weakness explained, Freda supposed, by an early attachment to the unspeakable
père.
But how to account for Ravi? There was the obvious explanation, but Freda, having been careful to fall in love with a plain man, was unmoved by the other kind. Goldfish, too, are decorative. This business with the cleaner was the limit! The cleaner was erratic, and might not turn up for weeks; the day guard, a relative, offered far-fetched excuses that Freda neither rejected nor believed. As for Ravi, he hadn’t so much as washed a plate until she made it clear that he was to do so, and then he hadn’t known how to stack the machine. Freda had decorated the flat with pictures and carvings from home; she liked to keep a few of the beautiful, familiar things close. But a velvet rectangle stamped with the head of Nefertiti had blighted a wall, bestowed on Freda, like the cleaner, by her landlord. She had shut it away at once in a cupboard. Looking in from the threshold of Ravi’s room one day—it was observation rather than intrusion, since the boundary was respected—she saw that he had propped the velvety abomination beside his bed. What was really unfathomable, however, was his inability to act in his own interest. What he had seen had left him blank-eyed, but he refused counseling. He had the soul of a—but Freda was unable to think of anything at once passive, exasperating and in need of rescue. Some kind of endangered slug that secreted a mild irritant, perhaps?
After the incident with the cleaner, Ravi turned jumpy. Night noises unsettled him, but silence swelled. He had believed that he was indifferent to dying; that he might even welcome the ending of his life. Others had feared the same. He guessed that he had been watched at first, never left alone. The faces of strangers, dark ones and pale, had hung over him in the room with a window at either end. But when the cleaner rang the doorbell, it was protest that sent Ravi to hold his breath in the dust under his bed. Stubborn life had asserted itself. He remembered a childhood experiment, a flower placed in colored water that traveled up to stain white petals. He felt the red force that insisted in his veins.
The immediate media coverage of the killings had been extensive and sympathetic. There were brave editors, and those who remembered Malini’s father from the old days. The child was photogenic, and where human feeling might have slumped, it was propped up by the piquancy of the way the woman’s corpse had been displayed. But there were no developments, and the murder of obscure civilians was not exactly rare. As drama, the story was ill equipped to withstand the latest turn taken by the war. Talk of a cease-fire and international mediation had naturally led to an increase in slaughter. The Tigers were enjoying a string of military successes. Coverage of Malini and Hiran’s case, like hope of a swift resolution to the conflict, flickered and went out.
SHE PERSUADED MEERA BRYDEN
to commission a feature on Naples, pitching it as a neglected place. Thousands passed through on their way to Pompeii or the Amalfi Coast, but the city itself had slipped from the tourist beat. It was deemed too dangerous to visit or too dirty; pundits warned perennially of its collapse. Laura used words like
reveal, disclose, uncover.
Meera agreed at once, as Laura had known she would. Wanderlust, on which the
Wayfarer
fed, was only lust, after all, lustily excited by penetration and veils.
The old crowd around Theo was dispersing, allegiances shifting or falling away, careers and children claiming their due. The woman who had written about surfing had moved to Manchester and was marketing herself as a brand strategist, the letterpress printer had died. Bea had been promoted to working sixty-hour weeks. The guerrilla gardener had inherited a title and gone to live in a castle in Spain.
Theo had invented a new project. Laura had sparked it by telling him about the man who for decades had gone about Sydney chalking the word “Eternity” on its pavements. Now, once a week, Theo went out after dark to blazon the latest entry in his Chalk Anthology in the streets. Laura came out of a Tube station one afternoon and saw
he whistles his Jews into line.
She walked about Swiss Cottage, spotting fragments of Celan’s “Death Fugue” on walls, pavements, curbs—but she couldn’t find them all.
He chose his poems at random from those he knew by heart, said Theo, the anthology didn’t mean anything. He was trying to interest Lewis Bryden in it; they could go out together to chalk up the poems at night. The whole thing struck Laura as very
artskool:
hip, portentous, annoying. In the restaurant where she was having dinner with Bea, “He’s at least ten years too old to be carrying on like that,” she decided. Bea agreed; these two now permitted themselves that kind of acid judgment on Theo. Then Bea Morley set down her fork. It was one of those days when her soft yellow moustache was in evidence. She touched it, crying, “But how awful if he was sensible like us!”
Laura had come to dread what she had once so looked forward to, evenings alone with Theo. When she arrived, it was usual to find him slow and slurred. His stories looped, drifted, tripped over themselves, grew labyrinthine. There was an evening when he endlessly circled a momentous yet enigmatic memory of setting off alone on a journey. A whistle had sounded, and his mother, dressed in a short blue jacket with silver buttons, turned rigidly away. Laura’s thoughts wandered. When the fuddled account had trailed off, she asked whether Theo had finished his thesis. Suddenly lucid, focused, he snapped, “When did you start to pry?”
There was no longer even the fiction that Theo didn’t drink when he was alone; that was another thing that was now permitted. He told Laura that there were occasions when he was drunk for three or four days at a stretch. “
Pleasantly
drunk. You have no idea. The far side of great drunkenness is just amazingly
nice.
” But Bea said that on a weekend when Theo had gone with her to Berkshire, she had heard him in the bath. He was moaning softly, “Poor Theo. Poor Theo.” He came out at last, with pink cheeks and an empty bottle of gin.
The problem was no longer drunkenness—now it was being sober. When Bea invited a few friends to tea for Laura’s birthday, Theo didn’t show. Bea said grimly, “His short-term memory’s shot.” They waited and waited. There was no answer on Theo’s phone. At last, someone switched off the lights, and Bea came out of the dark carrying a cake stuck with candles; the pennant flames flew sideways. Laura picked up a knife.
One evening in Hampstead, Theo fell asleep halfway through a sentence. The night was cold; Laura didn’t like to leave him downstairs. She pushed and coaxed him up to his room at the top of the house—a journey both hazardous and dreary—where she covered him with a quilt and left him snoring. On the landing, she paused to recover and looked around. Mass-market prints covered the walls. There was the busty peasant from Naples, there was a half-naked female rising from a jungle pool, there was a Chinese girl with an angular blue face. But as Laura made her way down, the display was dominated by kitsch, reiterated weeping. The tearful, cherubic boys she had noticed on her first visit had proliferated. They had crept into the hall, they were creeping up the stairs.
In the days that followed, the memory of that late-night journey to and from Theo’s room continued to nag. All the doors Laura passed had been shut against her. But there was something else—something that eluded and disturbed.
What is wrong with this picture?
But she couldn’t work it out.
The puzzle slid away behind the mood that had prompted her question about Theo’s thesis. Laura was in the grip of nostalgia. It had begun in Naples; when she went back there for the
Wayfarer,
she had dreamed of Sydney every night. The drift of these dreams was forgotten when she woke. But a filtered residue remained, to do with sandstone walls, beach towels drying over balconies, the small, mean kind of cockroach, bus drivers in shorts.
Laura put it down to the weather in Naples, a sultry dampness that recalled childhood and triggered her joyful Australian anticipation of rain. Arcs of purple bougainvillea, episcopal and disorderly, bore their share of responsibility, abetted by the port, the ferries, the ships that came and went.
But the reruns of home went on long after Naples and no longer confined themselves to dreams. With London concrete underfoot, the sole of Laura’s shoe remembered the knobbly sensation of treading on a gumnut. Waking, she was hoisted into consciousness by the cutlery clang of a gangway hitting the deck of a ferry. The sung litany of currawongs arrived to obscure piped pop songs in a mall. Strap-hanging in the Tube, Laura swayed: she was standing on the deck of a boat, adjusting her stance to the wash from the Heads.
A jacaranda-haunting went on for weeks. Aerial views, sunsets, the twist in
The Sixth Sense:
Laura had missed them. Her mind’s eye had drifted to jacarandas—the wild romance of the trees! They went unnoticed from one spring to the next, and then they were
all-at-once:
not a blossoming but an apparition. They purpled valleys, filled the funnel-shaped space between roofs, transfigured suburban hills. In rain light, their lilac was also blue. It was the color of nostalgia itself: elusive yet unmistakable, recollection and promise. Nostalgia floated jacarandas over London traffic, above the aisles in Sainsbury’s. In Kentish Town, three floors above the high street, Laura’s carpet was a pool of fallen blooms.
Time passed, and the jacarandas were replaced by a white-noise whisper. While Laura waited in a check-in queue or for the start of the inflight movie, when she plugged in her international adapter or converted her receipts into sterling, when she used Google for the first time or sent a fax for the last, while she backed up her files, while she waited, with a flute of champagne, for all the computers in the world to crash, she heard:
Australian summer. Australian summer.
The dead grass browned the paddocks. It pricked like the beginning of tears.
Nostalgia has its correctives. Laura reminded herself that if you chose differently they said you were up yourself. She remembered that you could spend two days on a train and step out into sameness. There were the fruit bats draped like licorice chewing gum over the power lines that had killed them. And who was she kidding about summer in Sydney? When it wasn’t pouring, it stifled with a thick yellow curtain. She called up several items along these lines, including a Fraser cousin who boasted of castrating sheep with his teeth.
The whisper turned insistent, grew intermittent, reverted to its old theme:
What are you doing here?
Laura bought pressure socks to guard against deep-vein thrombosis, she was upgraded on a flight to LA, an optometrist informed her that she neglected to blink. She went to the Screen on the Green with Theo, she had lunch with Meera, there was a weekend in Berkshire with Bea. Everything went on sort of as usual. The phone rang at night, and there was no one there.
RAVI RETURNED TO WORK,
traveling for an hour and a half each way by bus. Everyone—colleagues, students, the woman who served him in the canteen—treated him gently. Even the dogs lying about the campus seemed to turn a sympathetic gaze on him as he passed. Frog-Face avoided him and crouched at his desk—he looked as if someone had forgotten to inflate him. The professor kept an old manual Smith-Corona in his office, and could be observed squaring up to the machine as if to an opponent. The keys made a noise like quarrelling birds.
When the black square of the banyan threatened, Ravi would begin counting.
Zero, one, two, three, four…
Long ago, he had known a student who could recite pi to two hundred places. He considered emulating her or counting in primes. But with complexity came hesitation: the chink in the wall through which anything might slip. What was straightforward required no thought and provided the sturdiest defense.
Eight hundred and four, eight hundred and five, eight hundred and six…
He dropped a glass bowl. It came apart in five toothed pieces. Horrified—he imagined that everything in Freda’s flat cost the earth—Ravi gathered up the segments and dropped them in the bin. “Not like that!” cried Freda. “That glass could cut someone. Dispose of it thoughtfully!”
There was the rule that he had to go out onto the balcony to smoke. When he came back inside, Freda’s silence was a shirt that scratched. Once she tilted her chin and asked, “Is it super-sensible to expose yourself out there?” Her hands, beautiful even when she had forgotten her rings, were so satiny they looked polished. They moved, pushing something unwanted away.
Like Malini, Freda Hobson was a slim woman. But her gestures, like her voice, were large. It seemed to Ravi that she occupied a great deal of space. He spent evenings in his room, avoiding her. Luckily, Dutch friends of hers owned a house in the Galle fort; she often spent weekends with them. Was it possible that she was avoiding Ravi? The small, enforced intimacies of shared space were oppressive. About to leave for her daily swim, Freda was fumbling in her basket when a pair of skimpy blue knickers fell out at Ravi’s feet. And although he was usually careful to emerge fully dressed from his room in the morning, he had once come out wearing only a sarong, having heard the front door slam. But Freda was still there. Ravi retreated to his room immediately, his cheekbones prickling. She appeared not to mind seeing him half naked. But she had minded about the knickers, Ravi could tell.
The idea of moving back into his old room grew compelling. Freda’s apartment now had the look of a trap—a clean, scientific trap, where experiments that involved cruelty and mice were conducted. Ravi returned to the lane that led to the rooming house. He saw himself walking steadily up the stairs, crossing the landing. But, “Could put a bomb,” said the manager sadly, and handed over a familiar suitcase. Why had Ravi imagined that his room would be waiting, just as he had last seen it with its rumpled bed? All day, he had pictured and feared the blue skirt with orange pockets draped over a hanger. Now the thought of it shut up in a suitcase was more than he could bear.
He had said nothing about his plan to move out, knowing that Freda would oppose it. At first, remembering her flow of favors and gifts to Malini, Ravi had decided that Freda relished the power that comes with a leash woven of debts. Later, when he felt sure that she disliked him, he saw her as a princess who kept her pea close.
He knew this because he felt the same way.
Freda Hobson was behind everything that had destroyed his life; he wallowed in the punishment of her proximity. Was there no limit to the harm that could come from two women talking with their heads close together? Ravi should have acted decisively, impressed the need for caution on Malini, he should have insisted and banned. What the situation had called for was a husband who thundered
I forbid,
someone mustachioed and unyielding. Not a fool who silently listened to plans for publishing the account of a boy whose torturers had driven rusty bicycle spokes into his eyes.
Freda came out of her room wearing tracksuit trousers and a loose T-shirt the color of wet cement. She had a headache, she said. The skin over her fine, high-bridged nose looked thin; the purple eyes had darkened in their sockets. Ravi saw the face that she would wear in her grave.
Now and then, at night or very early, he would hear her talking to herself. Remembering his son’s long, murmured monologues, Ravi wanted to inflict bloody, physical damage on Freda. This was always followed by a wash of guilt. It was simple kindness that had prompted her to take him in and offer him her help. You’re lucky to know her, he told himself. He was very super-lucky! He even knew that the two people he loved best in the world were dead.
Freda pressed her Discman on Ravi. His attachment to this gadget was ferocious and swift. As night deepened, he would lie on his bed listening to Freda’s music. She had a fondness for homemade themed compilations. His favorite was
Colors:
“Little Green,” “Baby’s in Black,” “Purple Haze” and so on. He played the CD over and over, turning up the volume. The last time he had listened to music in this intimate, flooding way was on those long-ago Saturdays with Dabrera. Ravi remembered—but it was more accurate to say that his body remembered—his occupation by music, a sensation that began as invasion and ended as release. Songs ran loose in the gulfs and caverns of his being. He listened again to “Red Right Hand.”
One evening, Freda’s PowerBook caught his eye. His aversion to the Internet, so definite just a few months earlier, suddenly seemed hazy and foolish. He missed Internet magic, he longed to be
carried away.
What were the hundred best songs of all time, what was the Brent-Salamin algorithm? Ravi could Ask Jeeves. A streetcam would show him Montevideo, he could look at close-ups of Miss World. He could join the Michael Jackson fan club, check the weather in Muscat, find a soul mate in Maine.
With a little shock, Ravi remembered Aimee. He had known every crevice of her, but now she was transparent and silvery. But that was an anachronism: memory, always old-fashioned, had called up an analogue ghost. Aimee was an up-to-date phantom, stored in code on a cyber-clipboard, readily retrievable. Ravi wouldn’t be the one to do it, however. He stroked the laptop. An Apple—his mouth filled with anticipatory saliva. The white plastic lid lifted. But the PowerBook was password protected.
Ravi had only to tell Freda what he wanted; she was in the next room. But it would be conceding a little victory to admit that he had changed his mind.
A ring-bound folder held printouts of reports from several NGOs, the relevant passages highlighted in sickly green. Four students shot at close range. Six farmers hacked to death. Eleven bodies in a trench. It went on and on. The catalogue had a cheerful, rollicking quality.
Eight maids a-milking,
sang Ravi silently,
seven swans a-swimming.
He hadn’t thought of that song in years; now it bounced about his skull. He wondered if the folder had been left on the table for him to read. Freda Hobson clung to a belief in accurate accountancy. Her terminology, like Malini’s, was juridical, circling around the fetishes of witnesses, evidence, proof.
Carmel Mendis rang. A letter had come from Roshi de Mel’s father, Aloysius. An acquaintance in Vancouver, a man who had been a colonel in the Sri Lankan army, had told Aloysius that the police had orders
from high up
to do nothing about Malini and Hiran’s case. The old tortoise gave it as his own opinion that Ravi should
let bygones be bygones.
Ravi lost his temper. Did Aloysius de Mel imagine that murder was a move in a squabble, something the magnanimous overlooked?
Freda said, “We absolutely need that letter. Don’t you see? It’s vital, actually. Tell your mother to send it to you at once.”
Tell
not
ask.
But Aloysius had instructed Carmel to destroy the letter—he didn’t want any trouble, he had a sister in Sri Lanka—and she had torn it into tiny blue flakes.
Not for the first time, detectives asked Ravi if his wife had made enemies. It was not unknown, they suggested, for those who worked on behalf of women to attract a man intent on revenge. Officers had arrived at the NGO with no warning and a court order, and taken away files and the computer Malini had used. Ravi remembered stories that had hung over their bed in light, smothering folds: sons set on fire, daughters raped with broken bottles, brothers who had gone to a police station and never returned. What did he think? inquired Freda with light scorn. That the NGO would just have handed over material that put lives at risk? She had sent a letter to every English-language newspaper asking why, if the murders were the result of a purely private vendetta, no arrests had been made. She stood silhouetted against the window, her profile dark, faultless, frightening. Ravi realized, She is the queen of spades.
Freda closed her hand softly around a moth, carried it to the balcony, released it. If he had been forced to describe his life, Ravi would have groped for a word that meant something like “dismantled.” When she came back into the room, dusting her hands, Freda spoke of trauma. Ravi learned that, being traumatized, he couldn’t
get on with
his life. She suggested, yet again, that he “talk to someone.” There were people who could help, trained professionals. “When you’re ready, of course. You must take all the time you need. But they do say talking is the most wonderful release.”
Even as Freda urged, her eyes were Hiran’s, imploring forgiveness for this or that small crime. At intervals, advice about seeking help burst from her as if independently of her will. The first time, Ravi had thought, Who helped
them?
He would never realize that he had said this aloud. Now, looking at Freda’s face, the close-grained skin, he remembered the pimples that had blighted his adolescence. Everyone had advised, Don’t squeeze! Whenever Ravi had yielded to temptation, the little rush of pus and blood produced self-disgust. But it also brought relief.
Around this time, Ravi stopped washing. At first, he had relished the novelty of hot water on tap; had stood for ten minutes twice a day under the regulated cloudburst of the shower. Then he stopped. It wasn’t a decision, merely a ceasing. He brushed his teeth, disliking staleness in his mouth, and soaped his hands when they felt sticky or were visibly grimed. Not wishing to draw undue attention to himself, he shaved every few days. But he no longer washed his body or his hair.
He bought a tin of baby powder with which he sprinkled his armpits and groin. His scalp itched for a while, but quite soon the discomfort went away. He continued to enjoy the fresh scent of his clothes, laundered in the washing machine. When it had completed its cycle, the machine played a tune. The flat offered various fleeting, electronic sounds, suggestive of a different kind of life. There was the ringtone of Freda’s mobile, a DVD protested its ejection, emails announced their arrival. The microwave went
ping.