Questions of Travel (26 page)
SHE WAS WALKING TO
work through weirdly hushed streets. No one was revving an engine or screeching away from a light. The newspaper uppermost in the stack in the takeaway place where Laura went in to buy a latte displayed a photograph that already looked iconic. She changed her order to a double espresso. The previous night, she had been getting ready for bed when the phone rang. Danni said, “Switch on the telly.” Laura spent most of the night in front of the set.
The plane came in, big-bodied and low, at the end of the street, the noise of its engines magnified by the unnatural calm. It was an everyday sight that had been altered forever. People looked up, then away, and tightened their hold on something: a steering wheel, a cup.
The boy was on the other side of the road and some way ahead of Laura. It was rare to see a kid that age walking alone to school these days. They were packed into people-movers by Yummy Mummies, or flocked, wheeled goslings, about a Boho Daddy’s bike. But the reason Laura noticed the child was something alert in the way he held himself. She thought, He’s not looking forward to school. There returned mornings when she had longed to stay at home, and had discovered that her stomach ached or her throat, and tears had gushed. And Hester, kindly and implacable above an apple and a cut lunch, would inquire most tenderly before concluding, “But if there is no reason…”
How could six-year-old Laura have found the words for her apprehension of a vast and pitiless trap? How awful school was, when you thought about it, each programmed year opening its jaws upon the other, and fastening about the growing girl. How reasonable of children to weep and wish to flee.
At the intersection, Laura glanced to her right, which was the way the boy with the red backpack had gone. But he had vanished, presumably into a side street and school.
DANNI WAS HAVING
A
few people around for Chrissie drinks.
Over the sparkling and dips, wounds inflicted by the federal election were still being probed: “I mean, can you
believe
it? Who are all these people who gave them a third term?” Laura escaped to the balcony. A girl with dappled hair and the native uniform of sprayed-on denim, halter top and four-inch heels said, “Hi, I’m Alice.”
They were obliged to stand close to each other—there wasn’t a whole heap of room on the balcony. The green globes of a staked tomato shone in the fading light. A second tub held veined silverbeet. Wild festoons of green that might have been a zucchini had spread from a trough to begin their overwhelming of the galvanized balustrade.
“I’d love to grow veggies,” confided Alice Merton. “Only Woolies is easier.” Then her perfect golden nose crinkled. “What’s that pong?”
It was the top note still emanating from the chicken poo recently applied by Laura. Enlightened, Alice exclaimed, “Did you do all this? I thought it was Danni!”
Alice’s lover squeezed onto the balcony to see what was going on. He was Danni’s editor, a big, pretty man. Afraid of losing Alice Merton, he seized her at once by the wrist. But the girl’s attention was on Laura. “Are you like totally committed to living here?”
The house at McMahons Point had blistered green shutters. Breaking from window boxes, plumbago intensified its blue against streaky ocher walls. Half the small garden was taken up with a lemon tree and a density of summer vegetables. On the other side of the path, a grape arbor was surmounted by an orange plush dog.
The man who opened the door had a face known to Laura, not as it appeared now, but when its perfection wasn’t only of the bone. Time hollowed: she was standing uniformed and slouched before painted Carlo Ferri, and Miss Garnault was explaining that the gallery had acquired the portrait ten years earlier, when it had won the Archibald—controversially, of course—for Hugo Drummond.
These days, dead Drummond’s lover had a third leg that ended in a chrome claw.
Carlo refused to have the operation that would give him a new hip, according to Alice Merton. Nor would he leave the house where Drummond had lived and died. She would move in herself, said Alice, for her parents were just down the road and she had known Carlo all her life, but—
But his brown hand slid into Laura’s.
At the foot of the stairs, he raised his stick. “Up and up.”
The second flight of stairs was little more than a ladder. She opened the door at the top and went out onto the roof.
The bridge, the boats, the boisterous light, the whole glam, prancing, knockout show.
Laura spared it barely a nod. She was taking in oleander, pomegranate, gardenias, everything terra-cotta-potted. Olive, rosemary, mock orange: the Mezzogiorno! Frangipani fallen pinkly upside down. She noted a tap and a retractable hose, a whippy bougainvillea. The logistical riddle was plain, the need for nutrients, mulch, water at one end of a stair, at the other a deficiency of cartilage about a joint. At the thought of the old man making his way up to the roof, Laura could almost hear the grind of bone on bone.
A room clad in trellis and leaves wasn’t locked. A cupboard beneath the sink revealed practicalities, like secateurs. And a window the view, of course. Here, with the harbor rolling over at his feet, Hugo Drummond had produced the tortured monochromes of his late period, burning layers of color onto canvas with a blowtorch.
She tramped back down. The old house shuddered along its spine.
In the kitchen, Carlo Ferri waited behind an interrogative espresso.
“I think the murrayas could do with a tip-prune,” said Laura. “And a dose of Seasol all round couldn’t hurt.”
His eye was appreciative. “Nice big girl. Run up and down stairs with dung.”
Each contemplated this vision.
Friends said, “It’s the wrong side of the harbor! You can’t possibly!”
But Laura could.
ROBYN WAS SAYING, “…CALLED
Mao? It used to be a shoe-repair place?”
Laura shook her head.
“Oh yeah, I know where that is,” Crystal Bowles said. “They’ve got that funky Cultural Revolution decor. What’s the food like?”
From her desk in the e-zone, Crystal had spied Robyn Orr heading for the kitchen and had followed. Robyn was cool. And a manager. There had been a time when Crystal’s sister, Jade, had worked with Robyn. So when Crystal applied for the editorial traineeship in web publishing, Robyn had been really helpful.
“Who’d even think about calling a restaurant Hitler? Or Stalin? So how come Mao gets to be funky?” Robyn applied herself viciously to a coffee plunger. “Because the millions he murdered were only slopes, that’s why.”
Crystal explained patiently, “The name’s just a joke. Like the Mickey Mao T-shirt I got when Jade and I went to Hong Kong.” Because it never hurt to remind Robyn of the Jade connection. “It’s an ironic thing.”
“That’s such crap, Crystal. How come the Holocaust isn’t”—Robyn’s fingers inserted scare quotes—“ironic? Because,
a,
bad stuff that happens to white people isn’t funny, and
b,
after blackfellas, Chinese are who Australians hate most.”
“But there’s Chinese people working at Mao. I’ve seen them through the window.” Crystal thought, Aborigines! They’re
soooo
touchy about ethnicity. She felt quite compassionate as she pointed out, “Nowadays Mao is like a brand name?” Whereupon, having deposited her soggy Celestial Harmony teabag in the sink, directly beneath the sign that said DON’T BE EVIL. PUT YOUR GUNK IN THE BIN!!!, she sashayed away.
Slumped against the counter, Robyn said, “I had such a crap weekend, you wouldn’t believe. Ferdy and I came yea close to calling it a day.” Her teaspoon was beating against the rim of her mug. “The whole band thing’s never going to happen. Not in any financial way. Meanwhile, Ferdy’s happy spending his life stacking shelves at Woolies. I mean, I love the guy, but he just, I don’t know, it’s like he’s got no
drive.
”
Ferdinand Hello played bass in a band that refused to give interviews and performed wearing cartoon masks. His name was self-awarded. In Cambodia, a long time ago, he had had a different one, but all the people who remembered it were dead.
“I’m good at marketing, I could help him with his résumé,” said Robyn. Then, “Shit! I was supposed to be in a meeting five minutes ago.”
She went away thinking, I shouldn’t have lost it with Crystal. Even if she’s full of crap. Like the global management meeting to which Robyn was making her way. She’d seen the agenda. Post-9/11, Americans weren’t traveling. The profits from the U.S. office were down. You didn’t need to be a genius to figure out where that scenario was going.
But moral indignation was so not managerial, Robyn knew.
Laura took the ferry to the city, then a bus to the office. The train was fast, cheap, efficient. But who wouldn’t choose the ferry?
In the evening, she would realize that she couldn’t wait to get home. So the train would rush her across the bridge. She just about ran upstairs.
When she left Erskineville, Laura had donated the little she owned in the way of furniture and so on to Alice Merton’s student household. Robyn had driven her and a couple of suitcases over the bridge in her Charade. In McMahons Point, Laura’s room was the back one on the first floor; she stored her clothes there. It had a door to the bathroom, and a rubber tree in a glazed Chinese pot. And an embroidered white cover on a nun-like bed.
But Laura preferred Drummond’s daybed in his studio on the roof. She kept an electric jug beside the sink, along with a bowl, two mugs, a corkscrew, equipment for coffee. Forks etc. She was welcome to cook downstairs: “You not be shy.” Carlo Ferri had said. But Laura preferred to tuck in to takeaway laksa or sushi or beer-battered fish on high: at a small slatted table beneath the frangipani when the weather was fine, by the window in the studio when it wasn’t.
Oh, Sydney, with your giant moon!
And prawns.
There was a quilt for cool nights. And Theo’s red rug on the paint-splattered floor.
Ferries passed, lit up like cakes. The bridge went on holding the two halves of the city apart. On Saturday evening, everywhere was oysters and mozzies on sandstone terraces. Screams of gaudy terror noosed the minarets at Luna Park.
Laura rose in opal dawns to hose, and maneuver shade cloth. On weekends, she deadheaded and pruned, topped up potting mix, measured fish emulsion into a watering can, hefted bales of pea straw, swept.
She photographed the plants from different angles, uploaded the images, carried her laptop along with seven gardenias and their shining leaves to Carlo.
On the ground floor, walls had been knocked through. Here Carlo cooked, watched TV, smoked. He greeted Laura with tiny cups on the brown and red oilcloth. An archway separated the kitchen from the living area. Under the bay window, a sofa served as his bed. There were actually records, and a player with an arm you moved out. A song as thick and syrupy as the coffee mingled with the smell of garlic, liniment and Camels. A lamp raised by a naked black female always shone, for at all times the shutters were closed.
The courtyard at the back was for the compost bin and a fruiting fig. There was a bench that got the morning sun and a bed of herbs. Here, as among the vegetables that flourished at the front, Carlo refused help and was to be observed kneeling on a mat before a perennial basil as if to pray.
Once a day, on his own two legs, he made the grim journey up and down the first flight of stairs. “The old guy, he not finish yet.” No matter what the weather was doing, morning found him creeping up and down green gullies and streets that followed the unreasonable contours of the bay.
“You think I marvelous for my age?” When Laura assented, he pounced. “I marvelous at all age. Always!”
Tracy Lacey was so happy for her friend. Although personally she’d always thought a harbor view was just that little bit obvious. For her bohemian soul, there was nowhere but a heritage terrace in Paddo. It was the simple things that mattered, as Tracy had always said. And that was where she and Gary had been fundamentally unsuited, that way he always judged and grasped. Still, water under the bed now, darl, Tracy was totally Zen that he’d repartnered with Bruce, no hard feelings—they just fell away when you had a good divorce lawyer. But the Melbourne scene was so up itself—people there carried on like it was Manhattan or something. Dream on! The vibe here was totally different, so laid-back, and Sydneysiders were really open to innovation. “You know I’m in charge of new media, darl?”
Laura congratulated. Then spoiled the effect by asking dreamily how long new media stayed new. “When does it become old media?”
Honestly, anyone less loyal would have just ignored Laura Fraser’s email. But there was something of a buzz around Hugo Drummond. At the gallery, they had been all ears when Tracy happened to mention where her friend was living. Torquil from Modern Australian had invited Tracy to lunch and told her that Carlo Ferri ignored all his letters. Drummond’s dealer got the same cold shoulder; there had been one falling-out too many in the eighties, when no one was buying Drummond and he blamed everyone else for it. Torquil had known him: “a terrifying old bastard.” Then he had died, and Carlo seemed to be under the impression that the art world was to blame for that, too. Torquil would love a retrospective to coincide with Drummond’s centenary, but who could say what Carlo Ferri had done with the late work? He was Neapolitan and excitable. Torquil, staring into his third pinot grigio, saw canvases slashed in unfathomable Latin frenzies, tossed out with empty flagons, carved up to fire pizza ovens. Long ago, when Drummond was still accepting commissions, a society hostess whose portrait he was painting had invited the pair to dinner in Double Bay. Carlo took offence at something her husband said about Italian opera. He refused the oysters and said he had to have spaghetti. When it came, he ate it with his fingers. The guests included a bishop, and a Dane who was very possibly titled. “Drummond told that story for years.”
Tracy moistened her lips with peppermint tea and explained to Laura that she was part time at the gallery. Because Destiny was only three, although you’d never know it, everyone from the swimming coach to the piano teacher said she was so advanced for her age. That was when Tracy had known she’d made the right decision about her future, meeting Stew the very same week she moved back to Sydney. You had to believe in karma,
n’est-ce pas,
darl? Had she mentioned that Stew was a Buddhist? But not in that fundamentalist vegetarian way.
It was Saturday morning, and the two women were sitting under the frangipani on the roof. Laura was wondering, How could I have gone without this all those years? Just as, in London, Sydney had always come to her as a Sunday in summer, now when Laura thought of London everything seemed to have happened on a winter afternoon. She had been young, undoing her soiled apron after the lunch shift in a pub; the windows were steamy because she had just mopped the floor. Bea came into a dark room carrying flames that streamed sideways, a door opened to admit Theo and the scent of rain. The cold came off a marble pillar, and Laura, wearing a knitted scarf, hurried across a vast courtyard after her breath. A bundle of rags extended a mitten that she filled with cold coins. She saw the red sun.
She offered almond fingers.
“No sugar or carbs for me, darl. I’d bloat straight up to a size eight.” Tracy Lacey spoke mechanically because she was thinking she would rather die than endure the cultural wasteland of the North Shore. But she was like that, she required constant intellectual stimulation. It came with being vibrant and thin. Fat people’s thoughts moved sluggishly, it was to do with their high GI intake coating their brains with cholesterol. You only had to look at Laura Fraser, sitting there chewing poison, her eyes empty and content. She was actually going to eat another biscuit—amazing! And the hair! A friend less sensitive than Tracy would have handed over Fabrice’s card and urged—he was so worth it. You could tell straight off he was French. The way he had known, just by looking, that Tracy had arrived at that point on her journey when she needed streaks.
Through half-closed eyes, Laura was watching the tingle of light on the water. And fearing that she might be slipping, slipping into the Great Australian Smugness produced by the blandishments of climate and scenery, not to mention the world-class varietals you could pick up in any bottle shop these days. With the special fervency of the unbeliever, she prayed, Keep me from
It’s great for a while but.
She would email Bea that afternoon, vowed Laura, she would arrange to meet up in Hanoi or Split. The thought of travel summoned a Sicilian day when she had taken a long, dull bus trip to a gray town where it was raining. Laura had asked directions, persevered, peering out from the hood of her jacket to struggle with the conditional tense and the Sunday stupor of the streets. Opinion as to whether the famous site could be visited on a weekend wavered. A signpost led uphill, into a suburb of guard dogs and villas. Here more roads branched away, and there were no directions. The local bus, on which Laura had counted, didn’t run on Sunday. The rain stopped, September asserted itself, she grew hot. When she came, at last, to the ruins, the caretaker waved away her money. It was National Monument Day, there was no charge. And yet no one else had come for the silence, the damp Greek stones, the paths devastated by grass. When Laura eventually made her way back to the town, the cafes that hadn’t begun serving lunch when she passed them the first time were now closing. It was raining again. She had to run for the bus. Already she knew that it had been a day that redeemed the boredom and indulgence of tourism. What she had in mind was the hour spent alone with a horizon of poplars and a National Monument. But with time, every aspect of the day had come to seem integral and precious: hunger, the frowning baroque square, the uncertainty attending her ascent through the suburb, the bus filling up with students and immigrants returning to the city now that leisure was done.
The time! Where were the keys to the Range Rover? Destiny’s class in Free Expressive Movement had less than ten minutes to run. And in just half an hour, there was Italian for Under-Fives over in Leichhardt. “Mind you, it’s all dialect where we have the farmhouse. Stew wouldn’t buy anywhere that wasn’t authentic. But Destiny’s teacher says she’s so gifted, she’ll pick up Tuscan in a flash.” All the while peering and wondering as they descended. For there was not so much as a drawing by Drummond on view. A Whiteley on the landing, Molvigs along the stair, a row of Carl Plate collages to follow. And Tracy driven at last to inquire, for all the doors were shut.
No, there were no Drummonds in the house, said Laura. A Giacometti lithograph hung in the downstairs toilet off the laundry, but without Carlo, she didn’t feel she could take Tracy through. Every Saturday, Carlo Ferri’s cousin Rosalba carried him off to her house in Haberfield. He would return the next morning, bearing damp parcels from the fish markets at Pyrmont and the cousin’s own ravioli.