Questions of Travel (22 page)

Laura, 2000

SHE HAD TIMED HER
return with care. With the seatbelt sign lit up, she craned to see the loose purple canopies among the right-angled turquoise of backyard pools.

In the taxi, Laura couldn’t keep from remarking on the trees. “Can’t say I look forward to the jacarandas, love,” returned the driver. “That’s when me melanomas start to itch.”

Six months later, what still struck Laura were the hats, the babies in sunglasses, the Factor 30 sunscreen, the little kids at the beach in neck-to-knee cossies. The familiar summer scents of frangipani and barbecued lamb persisted. Pineapples, ripening in bowls, still overwhelmed at dusk. But parks no longer held the remembered reek of coconut tanning lotion. The planet’s ills came home in six words: Australians were afraid of the sun.

Laura spent her first month in Sydney at her father’s house. Her anesthetizing stepmother had warned that workmen were attacking the dining room, that Donald Fraser, although retired, had never been busier with consultancies, that her mother, on an extended visit from Melbourne, was occupying Laura’s old bedroom, that there would be no one home at Christmas, which they were all spending with her sister in Portsea, that she couldn’t answer for the Rottweiler around strangers, and that Laura was welcome, of course.

Ravi, 2000–2001

THE FIRST TIME RAVI
stood on a headland above the Pacific, a jogger cried, “Geddout the fucken way, mate!” The command reached Ravi obscured by wind, the pounding of feet, the slap of waves. It had contained the word “mate” but had sounded hostile. While he was trying to work this out, he was elbowed in the chest by a man speeding past on the narrow track. The word
Aspire,
embroidered in gold, bounced on green satin buttocks. An old woman going the other way said, “That was a very rude man.” She walked on, swinging her arms.

Freda’s Sydney contact, an immigration lawyer called Angie Segal, had sent a friend to meet Ravi at the airport. Helen Guest spoke slowly and distinctly as she drove him to her flat. “Angie’s been held up in Port Hedland for three days. Do you understand?” She held up three fingers. “She’s processing asylum-seekers at the detention center there. In western Australia. She can’t afford to turn it down, it’s really well paid.”

Helen’s face, like her hair, was long and pale. Standing in her kitchen, she asked if Ravi was a vegetarian. Then she said, “That’s a relief. I hate picky eaters.”

She served him a bowl of spicy, delicious soup. When it was empty, she filled it again. There was bread on the table, butter, red apples on a white plate. Helen addressed Ravi as they ate, feeding him stray facts in clear-cut sentences. “We’re in Clovelly. It’s east of the city. From the front door, it’s a ten-minute walk to the beach. On Wednesday morning, I’ll drop you off at Angie’s office in the city. We were at school together. I’ve left a key beside your bed.”

When Helen had cleared the bowls away, she sat at the table drawing him a map. Her hair lay against her brown shirt in flat, shining bands. She asked if he was a Tamil. She also said, “Angie’s taking you on pro bono. Do you know what that means?” Ravi realized that she was kind, and that his need to get away from her was acute. Otherwise she might go on telling him things for the rest of the day.

Her map took him over tarmacked hills. Gardens held shoe flowers and oleander and flowering creepers known to him from home. There were pink blossoms and creamy ones underfoot—Helen had scattered the same scented flowers on her table. Touching one lightly, she said that she hoped they made Ravi feel at home. “They must grow in Sri Lanka?” Ravi nodded: “Temple flowers.” “In Australia,” said Helen, “they’re called frangipani.”

Everything bore the glaze of strangeness, the fast, baleful traffic, the pavements where the only rubbish was fallen blooms. What he saw on that first Australian afternoon had a bright outline setting it apart from everything that followed. Thirsty boats stood in the streets, each covered with a blue wave that had crisped and been reborn as tarpaulin. A wall bore the large painted hieroglyph <<+#>>, an algebra too far advanced to understand.

But the energetic smell of the sea was familiar. On the clifftop path, the wind stirred coldly in the roots of Ravi’s hair. It went away, returned and ran over his eyeballs. There was sunshine, and Ravi was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but he wouldn’t have said he was warm—logic had come loose, as in dreams. There was the dreaminess, too, of finding himself beside the Pacific. He tried to recall what he knew of it, other than its immensity. Names lifted from a blue page to float in his mind like wreckage: the Mariana Trench, the Bering Strait.

Presently, he came to a cemetery set, in shallow terraces, on the side of a hill. Ravi went in and, forsaking the path, climbed the grassy tracks between the graves. At the summit, it was one long seaward rush of marble and flowering weeds. What Ravi knew of cemeteries was a composure that might on occasion pass for majesty. The dead lay flat under its weight. Here whited sepulchers set the light bouncing. An air of recklessness prevailed: at any moment these stolid monuments might rise and hurl themselves over the cliff, choosing obliteration over endurance and sham. The Pacific yawned—there was all the time in the world. It shuddered in its blue skin.

Ravi wandered around, noting the variousness of the memorials, the mausoleums and headstones with their stark or elaborate inscriptions, the mottled or snowy marble, the shining granite, the angels, crosses, photographs, railings, the colored china bouquets. Each element had been chosen, he supposed, to accord with the preferences and personalities of those they enshrined. But what was overwhelming wasn’t individual at all but the common outrage of death.

Angie Segal had round black eyes like a bird, and a bird’s darting quickness. She looked through Freda’s dossier, asked questions, keyed Ravi’s answers into a laptop. He would come to associate the sound of the keyboard with her voice, that quick clicking chatter. She crossed to a filing cabinet, from which she drew a form. There was a landline on the desk and a mobile beside it. One or the other rang frequently. Angie, too, seemed to vibrate and trill. She asked, “Did you have trouble getting your travel documents?” She looked up from her screen because Ravi didn’t answer at once. He was remembering the smell of paint on a concrete stair.

The morning passed. Angie fed them both sweets from a tin. She would read back what Ravi had said, then press him for more. “Your application will stand or fall on credibility. That’s where details count.” Ravi stared across the street at an identically gray building with slits for eyes. There was so much he could say: an exercise book opened at a capital-letter promise, we fed our son
anamalu
plantains, she had a blue skirt with orange pockets—Ravi’s brain held nothing but details of the wrong kind, details that proved nothing. Angie Segal shook her head over Frog-Face’s letter. “It’s useless without a signature. You could have typed it yourself.”

When they took a break, she walked Ravi down the street to a bank. He examined this new currency with interest, the colorful plastic notes, the heavy coins. When he came out, Angie was waiting with two rolls from which there protruded lettuce and flaps of ham. She produced her mobile, called a number, nibbled her knuckles. Sitting across her desk from Ravi, she had said, “Most asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka are young Tamil men. The department understands that. I’m not saying they’re sympathetic, I’m saying their imagination’s limited. A Sinhalese like you, it’s not an everyday scenario.” Then she offered Ravi another mint.

Now he heard, “Hazel, hi, it’s Angie. Yeah, he’s here. Oh, I forgot—hang on.” She lowered the phone and asked, “Are you okay with dogs?” Then she said, “No worries, he’s good.” She bit herself some more.

The following day, Angie collected Ravi and his suitcase, and drove them across the city. Her car held a great mess of juice bottles, wrappers, parking tickets, ballpoints, grease-stained paper bags. “Air-con’s bust,” said Angie. “Sorry ’bout that.” When they stopped at a light, she fumbled for a newspaper and fanned herself. “Now it’ll stay muggy for months.” These remarks were mysterious to Ravi, whose notion of weather was inseparable from this dense and vaporous warmth.

A taxi cut in front of the car. Angie said, “Don’t you love a dickhead?” Ravi didn’t immediately realize that these events were cause and effect. He had been marveling afresh at how little the Australian traffic wove about. Like Helen, Angie drove in a straight line and was at once irritated when someone swerved.

Halted by the traffic, she said, “Would you believe there’s a Sri Lankan guy at Port Hedland with the same name as you? His wife’s a Tamil. They’ve been in detention a while.” Then she said that Hazel Costigan, to whose house she was driving Ravi, had worked at the DHS. “She used to be in Admin with Mum. Before the cuts.” All this, too, was obscure, but after Helen, Ravi was grateful for talk that didn’t automatically instruct.

Angie had given Ravi a street directory when they set out and told him to navigate. “I’m Castle Hill born and raised. Wouldn’t have a clue south of Parramatta Road.” Signs often prevented them from turning right at intersections. Angie sighed and tossed chocolate-coated peanuts into her mouth. Ravi consulted the map for alternatives, and quite soon they had arrived at the address in Hurlstone Park. At the sound of the gate, a dog began to bark.

This dog, Fair Play, a beagle-whippet cross passed off by the pet shop as a spaniel, had once belonged to Robbo, Hazel’s second. The puppy was named by his girlfriend, Sooz, for a horse on which Robbo won
a shitload of money
and for the first year of her life was greatly indulged, dressed in fairy wings at Christmas, encouraged to occupy couches and growl as she pleased. Then Bettany was born, and Fair Play was banished to the shed. Naturally she chewed woodwork, ruined petunias, charged the usurper. Sooz was all for taking her out Dural way and letting her go, but Hazel intervened.

Fair Play rushed Ravi, barking extravagantly while sizing him up. All that first day, she growled each time he ventured into the yard. That was where she lived, for it was the kind of house where there were always visitors and grandchildren, some with allergies, all of whom Fair Play resented. For Bettany she reserved an implacable hatred, surging forward in ominous silence whenever the lumpish child appeared—which luckily was seldom, for Robbo and his family had moved to the Sunshine Coast, where the birth of a sister had presented Bettany with a fresh set of complexes.

Hazel Costigan lived in a small house on a big block, the opposite of how they now came. The sleep-out in the yard had seen a parade of occupants, and Fair Play had ruled them all. On Ravi’s first night, she scratched at his door. She kept this up until he opened it, whereupon she sprang onto his bed and curled up. In summer, she preferred to spend the night outdoors, where small lives offered themselves up for extinction. But this was a test.

Fair Play was a beauty: satiny black coat, narrow waist, a hunter’s muscled thighs. All day she danced through the pumpkin vine, chasing skinks. She wore her long ears turned inside out when hunting, so that two pink roses adorned her head. In this guise she had the look of a cheetah or a bat. There was always something to investigate or kill, leaf shadows thrown by the overgrown shrubs, doves in the sweet long grass. Sometimes Fair Play’s mind turned to geology: she kept a small collection of stones down the side of the shed. Sometimes Kev, Hazel’s fourth, dropped in with Lefty, his big blond Labrador. Fair Play, who detested all other dogs, loved Lefty. Devotion required her to tug with all her strength at his cheek. There was also standing under Lefty’s belly, reaching out her muzzle and sinking her teeth into his neck. Lefty, a romantic, was tolerant of these coquettish maneuvers and only occasionally sat on her head.

When they remembered, the boys urged Hazel to open up the back: bifolds, a deck. The view, they said, nodding from the kitchen door at sunsets lolling above the river. But Hazel liked the dim kitchen where her mother had cooked, and the sunroom with its row of windows like a train. When they were first married, Len had put in new kitchen cabinets and an indoor toilet. As the boys grew, a second shower had gone into the laundry, which Hazel still called the washhouse, and that was quite enough of renos for her, thanks.

There had always been someone living in the sleep-out: Hazel’s uncle Vic, who had never been the same after the Japs, then Len’s dad, later one or another of the boys. It was Damo, Hazel’s youngest, left alone at home with her, who had suggested foreigners. He was different, Damo, he went out into the world and brought back urgent ideas that he handed his mother like thorny bouquets. There were migrants who needed a place while they found their feet, said Damo, there were overseas students being ripped off in unheated rooms.

After Hazel had been made redundant, the boys said, Mum, you have to charge more than utilities. It was none of their business, replied Hazel, and pushed her gray fringe from her red face. She had her redundancy package. And, lately, her chairs.

Throughout her grown life, Hazel had renewed old chairs, collecting them from the side of the road and heaving them into the back of her station wagon. She stripped, sanded, cut foam to size, tacked piping into place. Her father had been an upholsterer, and Hazel couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known about grip clamps and webbing. All the chairs in the house were her remodelings. Fair Play had a throne, out of the wind on the back patio, a cozy Victorian affair with maroon velvet cushions and flokati-covered wings.

Hazel passed on her creations to neighbors who needed seating for a veranda. She gave them to the boys when they had places of their own. They were not always welcome gifts. “What’s wrong with a nice neutral?” asked Sooz, striking to the heart of things, for Hazel salvaged her materials and favored boldness. All the old bedspreads and tablecloths and curtains in the street found their way to her. “And it’s such a wog suburb,” said Sooz. This was provoked by an armchair upholstered in an embossed lime and turquoise fabric that had once covered the Katzoulises’ bed. The back of the chair was a Sacred Heart tapestry: Mrs. D’Agostino specialized in them. “Do you realize Indians bought that place two doors down?” warned Sooz. Sure enough, next thing there were three kitchen chairs flaunting scenes from Bollywood, and Hazel cutting up a vinyl shopping bag for a fourth.